So, Fireball's computer is acting up. Can't play videos. Research reveals that it can maybe play them with acceleration turned off, which leads to the discovery that the BIOS is not assigning an interrupt to the video card.
Nor, apparently, can it. There is not a BIOS setting for this, so don't tell me to enable it.
Update BIOS; no change.
Well, the machine has onboard video. So Windows runs it... In 640x480, 16-color, and whenever it's using this video, it is GLACIALLY slow. Even in the installer, which said it had approximately 7 minutes left for close to 20 minutes. There's no excuse for this; it's just a framebuffer. But someone, somewhere, wrote some clever code that is trying to outsmart the hardware and bypass the spec, so it's unusable.
In about two or three hours, I will be privileged to be allowed to try to run the drivers for that video card, assuming I got the right drivers; there's no documentation for the motherboard, but I have some indirect evidence of what kind of hardware it is. Since, even after the install, Windows will be glacially, unusably, slow, running that 6MB executable and installing drivers may take an hour.
It might, or might not, begin to fix anything.
Why am I reloading the machine? Well, the previous install seemed to go okay, but then it wouldn't run the third-party firewall I normally use. The install before that worked okay for a while, but while trying to get it to use the onboard video instead of the add-in card, I ended up with a system which immediately reset the machine even in "safe mode".
This is, as it happens, about par for the course. If Windows goes wrong, your option (singular) is to completely reinstall. There is no way to get at anything; boot-time configuration is handled entirely by binaries which are reacting in undocumented ways to configuration data stored in a giant binary database. There's nothing you can look at.
Why is Windows glacially slow talking to VGA hardware in plain framebuffer mode? No one can say. It could be for any reason or none.
That people put up with this is convincing evidence that Microsoft has a functional monopoly. That they have to put up with this, rather than getting anything close to the ease and convenience that everyone else offers, is evidence that they are continuing to abuse it.
At this point, I can't even recommend Windows for gaming. It just isn't worth the hassle.
Quick summary: NetBSD-current loads and runs beautifully on the Intel-based Mac mini.
To do this, you need Boot Camp from Apple. In my case, my goal was a single-boot NetBSD-only system. If you follow these instructions, you will wipe out your Mac OS installation, including all your data.
Step 1: Install Boot Camp. You have to have a fairly recent version of OS X; the 10.4.5 install disks I had handy didn't work, but 10.4.8 did. That's a 400MB update used to run a single program.
Step 2: Run the Boot Camp Assisstant. Doesn't matter much how you partition the disk if you're going to turn it all into NetBSD. Does matter if you plan to dual-boot.
Step 3. Reboot, and put in a -current CD. You can't tell Boot Camp to use that CD directly, because it will only work with a recognized Windows XP install CD. However, when the machine is rebooting, you can hold down option and the machine will ask you which disk to boot from. Pick the CD. (Boot Camp will call it "Windows", which is a sign that they really haven't thought about other applications yet.)
Step 4: Run the installer. In my case, I jumped out to /bin/sh before starting the real install, and manually updated the fdisk table, removing the Apple HFS and FAT filesystems (but not partition 1, which holds the Boot Camp magic cookies), and creating a new partition, using the remainder of the disk, for NetBSD. (Type 169, which is the default.) Once that's done, the standard NetBSD installer just works.
If you just follow the prompts, you should end up with a serviceable machine which has at least booted and will let you log in. Here's what might be problematic:
1. The msk0 ethernet device may behave abysmally, producing cripplingly bad performance.
2. The default X server can't drive the Intel built-in graphics hardware as anything but a generic framebuffer.
3. No SMP support.
Building a kernel with SMP, and uncommenting the acpi device in the kernel config file, resolved problems 1 and 3 for me. I didn't uncomment any of the "at acpi" devices, just the acpi root device; this was apparently enough to correct the ethernet and SMP problems.
To get X working, you need the X.org server. I used the xorg packages in pkgsrc: xorg-server, xorg-clients. Of course, this omits xterm, and won't run because there's no fonts. The fonts are in pkgsrc/fonts, not pkgsrc/x11, even though the server won't run without them.
That's where I'm at now. Ethernet working, wireless working. Haven't done any testing with firewire or bluetooth.
You can get cheaper PC hardware, but I've seen nothing even close to comparable for small and quiet. If you are sick of the sounds of computer fans, this is your best bet ever.
This looks like it's gonna be a fun one. Will we get the madness and intensity of another Source Lending? The incoherence and babbling lunacy of Complex Capital? Only time will tell.
So let's start at the top. I get a lot of faxes. A lot. Many, many, of them are mortgage ads sent by "lead generators". The idea is that, just as it's totally legal to hire a hit man, or at least legal to hire someone who promises you will inherit money even though he doesn't say exactly how he will kill your parents, it is obviously totally legal to hire someone to "generate leads" for your business, by sending unsolicited faxes, even though you are not yourself sending the solicited faxes. The analogy is perhaps not entirely precise, but the legal effects are rather similar, which is to say, you might be able to get a judge to laugh openly at your stupidity.
So, this company called "Mortgage Services" sends faxes. That's probably not a real name; rather, it's a name specifically intended to make it impossible to identify them, serve them with paperwork, or anything. (If you have an idle moment, try calling one of these places and trying to get real identification. They will hang up on you if you push it, but they will never give any kind of actual company identification. If you talk real pretty, you might get them to admit that the "loan officer" is not at their company, but that they are rather a marketing firm only.)
When you call the response number for the fax, you are directed to a "loan officer"; that's the guy at the mortgage company buying the leads. What that means is that the ads are being sent on his company's behalf. The way the TCPA works, that's the company you have a case against. You could in theory probably sue the fax broadcaster too, but there's no point; companies like that (such as the famous fax.com) simply dissolve in the night, leaving no contact information, while the people who ran them take a little money out of their offshore bank accounts to start a new company doing exactly the same thing. It'll keep happening until the market dries up; that is to say, until the local mortgage companies stop paying for "leads" generated through theft, conversion, and tresspass to chattel. (Don't the legalese words make it sound cool?)
Last April, I called "Mortgage Services" and gave them my name and city and some information about the size of house loan I might be looking for. (I did not, as a matter of happenstance, get around to mentioning that I am not gonna get a mortgage from the sorts of companies that send junk faxes; Northern Lights Mortgage, whom I sued for this a while back has since been busted for predatory lending, and it seems commonplace in the "mortgage brokers who send faxes" part of the industry.) I was directed to a man who was identified as "Jeff" at a company he called "Integris Mortgage, in Coon Rapids". I got their corporate web site and such, and explained to them that junk faxing is illegal and I planned to sue.
Well, stuff happened, and I didn't actually get around to suing. My mistake. They've since sent me a lot more faxes. A bit over a week ago, I called one of the six most recent faxes I had from "Mortgage Services" (now using a new 800 number), and got directed to... Jeremy at Integris Mortgage, in Coon Rapids. Same story. He doesn't care about illegal, he wants me to call the fly-by-night scam operation whose real corporate name is a closely-guarded secret. I explained about liability. He ignored me.
So I got another one. And I called back. This time, Jeremy saved time and hung up on me.
I called their office, and confirmed that there's only one Integris Mortgage in Coon Rapids. Yes, they send faxes; the receptionist assured me that this was not illegal, and tried to convince me that it was not Jeremy, but some guy at Mortgage Services, who hung up on me. Uh-huh.
So we have all the elements in place. They know they're faxing, they get told that they can and will get sued, they keep faxing. The complete lack of surprise about the "I saw your fax" stuff makes it clear that they were already aware that faxing was happening. In terms of the TCPA, that's willful and knowing even if they didn't know about the law; the law cares whether you understood what you were doing, not whether you were aware that it's been illegal for fifteen years. They don't think anything can happen to them.
I am expecting lots of fun from these bozos. They'll deny that it was illegal, they'll try to claim I asked for the information, they'll blame the third party. They will probably try to avoid actually identifying that company. They'll accuse me of all sorts of things; they'll talk about how I'm in it for money (heh), and when that blows up, maybe we'll get another "it's a lark!" defense. They will try to claim we don't have enough evidence, but they won't provide any evidence to the contrary. What with them being junk faxers, I think it's pretty much a given that they'll lie about it, and whine about how hard it is to make a living stealing people's houses. (Of course, they'll deny being predatory lenders. So do all the predatory lenders.)
As a side note, if you're in the MN area, and you've gotten faxes from these people, you might find it interesting to give them a call. So far, every fax I've gotten in 2006 that said "Mortgage Services", and that I've called back, has gotten me to Integris. I have no reason to believe anyone else uses that particular blaster; there are a number of mortgage fax blasters, so I'm guessing the other mortgage brokers use other blasters.
Anyway, fun ensues.