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9:47:40
no-defun-allowed
Oh, by the way, beach, the people at the store said the CPU replacement process would take "two to six weeks". I'm not sure if it's any shorter, since you're probably closer to the US and have a half-competent mail system.
9:53:38
beach
I'll check with my supplier about that. I definitely can't be without the computer that long.
9:58:48
beach
I think I might just tell my supplier to order a new processor, and when he gets it, to replace the existing one. It's an affordable way to test the hypothesis that the processor is the problem.
10:08:05
no-defun-allowed
Well, it is slower and has a tendency to get very hot. MacBooks don't have very good ventilation.
10:09:14
no-defun-allowed
Yes, schools around here really like Apple devices. Funny that, given Apple does a lot of tax evasion.
10:11:42
beach
If I were in charge of a nation like Australia, I would establish a national organization for FLOSS and recommend that administration, schools, etc. use standard PC hardware with the software from the organization.
10:12:45
no-defun-allowed
Indeed, I'd rather use open standards, since it is much harder to maintain a monopoly on those.
10:14:10
no-defun-allowed
Yup. My laptop was a similar price to my desktop, despite the latter being more powerful (relative to form factors, of course the desktop will be faster). The laptop is also second hand, too.
10:14:33
no-defun-allowed
Fortunately for the government, the families usually have to put up with the price.
10:17:55
no-defun-allowed
I remember an essay that proposed this is a very potent form of advertising: teaching students a specific product or tool instead of how to use a family of tools will make it likely they will not move from that tool.
10:21:14
Shinmera
The best part is the hardware of the macbooks was already outdated by the time we bought it
10:21:34
Shinmera
And with Apple making their OS worse as time went on, the laptops got unbearably slow too
10:23:10
no-defun-allowed
I must make one petty complaint though: the Caps Lock key does not have enough support underneath it, if you map it to C- to prevent Emacs pinky.
10:25:17
no-defun-allowed
The key doesn't get pressed uniformly, and sometimes the key mechanism will not press the internal switch. (This is on an early 2015 Air model, but I tried on a later keyboard where there is almost no travel, and it still feels wonky.)
10:27:14
no-defun-allowed
Embedding a space cadet keyboard into a laptop might be a viable idea, and would be an excuse to use a 21:9 screen in a laptop too. I digress though, you can get crappy Wintel laptop keyboards too.
14:02:26
splittist
When did space bars become so large? That's where the Control Meta Super Hyper ... modifiers should be.
14:58:13
jcowan
Apple offers schools at all levels incredibly cheap deals, expecting to lock students into Macs for the rest of their lives.
15:06:57
jcowan
The Arc REPL is implemented by reading Arc forms with the Racket reader, compiling them into Racket, calling Racket's eval. In turn, Racket's eval compiles its argument into Racket bytecode, which is executed by the Racket VM, which has a JIT.
16:52:51
Shinmera
jcowan: At my school the laptop was still more expensive than buying a non-mac retail price with better hardware specs
16:55:25
frgo
At my school we had a Commodore PET2001. I later owned an Atari ST1040 which I upgraded to 4 MB of RAM by soldering a PCB myself and then put in a SPECTRE Mac Emulator. On that environment I write my Diploma thesis document ...
16:56:17
Shinmera
We had a thing where we "only" had to pay half or whatever, but it was still expensive
16:56:20
jcowan
Ah, okay. I was talking about situations where the school owns the computer and issues it in turn to many students.
16:56:58
jcowan
Apple sells 10,000 Macs, or whatever, to a whole university or school district and then discounts even more deeply.