xfce

Asus has an Eee with a 9" screen running at 1024x600, which was the only thing stopping me from getting one and running either Ubuntu and xfce or maybe even OS x.

But as it turns out, even though some are being unboxed now, the Eee launches on May 12 and the Atom version is rumored to launch in June. I'm too damn impatient.

But there's been another competitor, HP's Mini-Note 2133, and reviews love it. Did I mention is has a 1280x768 screen? And is only slightly larger?

How slightly? I made papercraft versions of each machine given their dimensions so I could look at them next to each other and found the small difference in volume to not matter. Little did I know, someone already took pictures of the Eee and Mini-note side by side.

Unboxings of the Mini-note are popping up, the only other information I've seen on this now-shipping machine is one very unhappy user.

Given the Mini-note's larger resolution display and the fact that it is available now, I'm probably going to snatch that up. Why Asus would go with a lower resolution screen is beyond me.

Apple announced today new Mac Pro's:

Apple® today introduced the new Mac® Pro with eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor*. The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, powerful new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage to offer the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists. The standard 8-core configuration starts at just $2,799.

...

Every Mac Pro comes standard with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The Mac Pro includes a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, and supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3-D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.

Time to eBay my MacBook Pro tonight and pick up one of these. It will make photo work much much faster. I thought about getting a single 2.8 GHz quad-core CPU and just popping in a second one myself since Apple tends to charge through the nose for components, but apparently, the pricing on the CPUs is quite competitive. Factor in the Mac Pro-specific heatsink I'd need to track down and it isn't actually worth it. (But I'll certainly be doing the RAM upgrades myself.)

I remember when I had a dual Pentium Pro tower and all my friends had CPUs that were much faster, but they were single processor machines. But under load, mine was fine and their mouse pointer's position would refresh every half a second. Since then I've been using laptops for portability, but thanks to my iPhone, I've got the web and email in a much smaller (though often not as convenient) form factor. Since I'm starting to do more photography and dealing with many gigabytes of RAW photos, the horsepower would be a welcome addition.

Besides, if I find I really need a portable computer, and not just a phone, I can run XFCE and Ubuntu on an EEE.

eeeXubuntu is a custom version of the Xubuntu 7.10 Live CD with fully-integrated hardware support, including native wireless drivers, functioning Ethernet support, tweaks for low-resolution desktop environments, and other miscellaneous fixes. Wherever possible, these changes are incorporated using custom .deb packages rather than spewing assorted files all over post-install.

I love XFCE.