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Earlier today, I was talking with a friend about the differences between the Nvidia Geforce and Quadro lines of video cards.  In reality, there’s very little difference, aside from the drivers.  For example, my Quadro 570M is almost hardware-identical to a Geforce 8600M GT.  Likewise, my friend’s Geforce 8800GT contains the same core and specifications as a Quadro FX 3700.  Such similar hardware, however, had a large price gap.  The FX 3700 is an $800 video card, around four times the price of the 8800GT, meaning you’re essentially paying $600 for the Quadro drivers.  This got me thinking about another piece of software whose real price is often discussed, OS X.  I decided to do a little price up.

I looked at two notebooks, the Apple Macbook Pro and Dell XPS M1530.  Both laptops shared the following specs:

• 15″ WXGA+ LED Backlit Display
• Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
• 2GB DDR2-667
• 256MB Geforce 8600M GT
• 250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
• Slot-loading DVD Burner
• 802.11n and Bluetooth

The only real difference was that the Macbook came with OS X and the XPS was configured with Vista Ultimate.  The final total was $1644 for the Dell and $2049 for the Apple, making the MBP $405 more expensive.  While the Macbook Pro is often touted as being extremely well engineered and using only the best hardware available, $400 is a bit of a premium, especially when you consider that the price of Vista is included in the Dell.

Whenever I work out of the San Francisco office, I have to tunnel back to my workstation in Palo Alto in order to do any development.  The way I do this is with an SSH Tunnel.  While I used to just fire it up manually, the other day I hacked up some shell scripts to automatically connect and start up my most used apps on the remote machine, and I thought I’d share them here.

First, on the local machine:

/usr/local/bin/tunnel:

#!/bin/sh
$IPADDR=0.0.0.0 # IP Address of the remote machine
$LOGON=usrname # Your username on the remote machine
$STARTUP=/usr/local/bin/startup
ssh -X $IPADDR -l $LOGON $STARTUP

and, on the remote machine:

/usr/local/bin/startup:

#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal &
nautilus &
firefox &
pidgin &
xchat &

Essentially, a list of programs to start up. Don’t forget the & on each line, or else they won’t all start at the same time.

Make sure that both files are executable (chmod +x), then you can add a launcher to /usr/local/bin/tunnel and you’re good to go.

It’s a pretty simple trick, but it saves me several seconds each time I connect to the network.  Also, as there’s no terminal needed to keep the ssh session open, I don’t accidentally lose my session.