Yeah, so this amazing new device will, like, revolutionize the way we all look at things and stuff. Because you can touch it, things will be way better. Our lives just got a ton better. This revolutionary device will revolutionize the way we look at news and movies. Oh, and it will also change the way cities are structured.

So, in case you haven’t heard, Apple took their iPod touch, made it 5x bigger, and are now marketing it as the iPad (or “Tablet”). Where does that leave us? A portable device that’s not portable and really fucking difficult to use. The reason laptops have keyboards and pointing devices is because people don’t like on-screen keyboards. They suck. It’s necessary on small and mobile devices like the iPod touch, but on a bigger level it’s not…which why laptops exist.

So before you follow the marketing hype and buy your new $500 tablet, ask yourself “What the fuck am I thinking?! I already have an iPod, and I already have a laptop. Those swindling asslickers don’t need more of my money!”

That’s right, the iPad is a shitty in between piece of shit which is shitty and smells like shit. It’s not quite a laptop, and it doesn’t quite fit in your pocket. Stay away!! Don’t be a dweeb!

Maybe it’s my lack of Mac know-how, or maybe my total disdain for the damn things, but the Mac Mini we have in our office is a stubborn little shit. No matter how hard we try, it won’t start up Sphinx at boot, nor will it run cron-jobs. I guess I don’t blame the Mini as much as OS itself.

OS tries to be user friendly by providing a UI for things that you’d normally need a command line for in a unix system. The problem is that they implemented it in such a way that the command line doesn’t work for things there are a UI for in many cases. Either that or I’m going insane, but either way a linux dork should be able to figure out how to get something as simple as cron jobs and boot programs running, but alas, no luck.

We originally got it because it would be our personal server for testing and running linux programs (like Sphinx search!) but it turns out it’s kind of a pain. I do love the OS interface when I’m using it, but most of the time I’m on it through remote SSH.

Well, I could live with just starting Sphinx manually every time it boots, but today MySQL just decided to quit randomly without warning. Now, this Mini is just for development, there are no actual sites running on it, so no REAL harm, but damn. The fact that it isn’t running anything on it should be reason enough for it to not suck.

I’d like if Apple would make an interface through OS for startup/crons instead of making you edit some backwoods-hick xml file hidden under some obscure camel-cased directory.

Aside from the Mac only running SSH and the GUI reliably, it does everything we want it to except for everything. It looks cool though. My advice is to never get a Mac, at least not until they can program stable kernels and not, like a pack of rabid wild apes, use launchd with its xml-jedi-mind-trickery. Who’s idea was that? And since when did cron stop doing everything we’ve ever wanted?