What about RealMyst? I thought it was supposed to use the same 3D engine that Mudpie was going to use, and RealMyst was basically a stepping-stone project on the way to Uru. RealMyst has been ported to the Mac, so if the aforementioned is true then I don't see porting Uru to be that big of a deal...
Right now the way it works is if you have to cancel your contract with your cellular provider, you're out around $200 (sometimes more, sometimes less, if you're reeeeally lucky you may be able to dodge it). Once your contract runs out, however, you can switch and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. However, once the number portability deadline rolls around in November, there may be some sort of fee for changing your number to another provider, but there's no way of knowing how much they'll charge, or if they even will charge. I would doubt that the provider you switch to will charge you, though - it's just another chance for them to lock you into a contract for a year or two.
Also, keep in mind that quite often fun toys like this are relegated to the Japanese market. I'm not saying they won't introduce the phone in the US, just that it may be unlikely. I'll bet anything Sony (and MS/Nintendo) are watching Nokia's N-Gage experiment very closely to see how well it does...
I now have a sudden urge to fight any green-suited Hyrulians, scantily-clad purple-sknned woman with chain swords and Elvis impersonators with a nunchuck.
Seriously though, this is just sick. Not only that, but personally the whole "GTA made me do it!" just feels like a lame excuse. I've played through and beat GTA3, and I have absolutely no urge to run out with a sniper rifle. Nor do any of my friends who have played it.
I know that three out of four cell phones we've bought in the past year has specifically stated that they are GPS aware, and I'm pretty sure the fourth one does as well. The trick is that the phone isn't a full GPS reciever - it can't neccessarily calculate position itself, it can just send the information it gets to the cell towers which actually perform the needed calculations, combine it with other methods of locating a cell phone, and come up with a highly accurate guess of where you are. I forget what the address is, but there's some company's web page that has information on the exact process used.
Or you could just turn off the location awareness in your phones menu system. Then it won't report your location at all unless you dial 911, rather then degrading your cell signal significantly in a rather futile attempt to disable that.
Oh, and pretty much every phone made in the several years is GPS-aware, so if you didn't put on your tin-foil hat yet, it's a bit late...;)
...Apple's Darwin *is* open source... if you could somehow hack the Darwin kernel to recognize and boot on that hardware, then it should be able to work.
The problem is, that would probably take a serious amount of work, not to mention the possible legal snares with Apple - I don't know what the terming of the APSL is, but it may not allow such modifications. But I don't see it as being an impossible task.
First of all, any Mac OS X application that can print can export to PDF. This isn't anything that has to be supported by the application; it's a button that's in the print dialog that every application uses. Since Mac OS X's entire display system uses PDF internally, it's a breeze to do. Very fast, also.
Secondly, I just tried downloading the HTML version of the FreeBSD handbook and dragging it on top of TextEdit, which is a very basic word processor/text editor, uses all standard Cocoa APIs and controls, etc. The operating system must handle HTML conversion natively, because it opened it up with formatting and everything.
Third, OpenOffice works just fine on a Mac - it just doesn't use native (Aqua) controls and widgets. It appears as an X11 app. There are several X11 servers that can blend your X11 apps seamlessly with your Mac desktop, so you can have X11 apps and Aqua apps open at the same time; it just doesn't look/act like a Mac app.
Hmm. I've had the exact opposite experience - all of the Macs I own survive brief brownouts perfectly, whereas it's my PC that barfs, shuts down, and (once) ruins hard drives.
Hmm. You don't download much of anything gaming related these days, do you?
Seriously, pretty much everything I've downloaded gaming related since I built my PC two years ago has been from third-party sources. Nobody wants to foot the bill for bandwidth; all of the first-party sources either just *don't exist* or are *way* too freaking slow. The closest I might have come to a 1st party paying for decent bandwidth is that Gigex service, but again I think that's P2P.
At any rate, 3dgamers.com seems to have the best service... they have a P2P client that's not riddled with spyware and doesn't force you to run it in the background when you start up, and I get wicked fast speeds from it. It seems to be the best service out of all of them.
I haven't heard much on this download/expansion pack/whatever the hell it is, but chances are that iD's Graeme Devine, who does most of the Mac work on the Quake 3 ports, may become involved. Give him a week or three to update his plan and maybe we'll get a version of it.
I'm not trying to be a hard-ass here - but do you have any sources for that? A link would be great, but a pointer to the DVD commentary, some magazine or something like that would be appreciated. I'm just interested to read up on any other tidbits of any information that there may be wherever you found that one.:)
Well, the twist with Rendezvous and iChat is that you can sit down, open your laptop, have your Mac automatically connect to the nearest wireless network and automatically discover ever other iChat client on the network. No IP addresses, no entry of nicknames; it automatically discovers everybody else on the local network. Not only that, but it's rediculously easy to do the same thing yourself, or anything you like using it; Apple's libraries are supposed to be top notch from what I hear. I'm rather surprised nobody's written an iChat client for Windows/*NIX yet, as it should be trivial to use Apple's code and write a small program that would handle this.
None of this is incredibly new or even groundbreaking in itself. The main feature is that it's so simple and easy to use that you can put it together in combinations that nobody would have even thought of putting them together, or that they wouldn't have put in the effort to get it to work. I have a Epson inkjet that I share from one computer to my main one. I was impressed to click the checkbox on the sharing computer in the other room, sit down in front of my main computer and begin printing without ever touching a configuration setting anywhere in the OS. Like I said, nothing groundbreaking, but it makes everything that much easier to use, and gives me one less thing to worry about. Which I appreciate.:)/rant
Slashdot has worked fine for me - the only trick is that instead of using Slashdot's Palm interface, I've created a new account and set it to always display in light mode. That way I can browse through comments and post and what not if I'm bored.
How the heck is that going to work? If somebody hacks through your bank account using your account information, how do they distinguish between legitmate uses by you and by the hacker? Heck, even if somebody doesn't hack into your account, how do they distinguish between you and a possible hacker?
Fact of the matter is, nothing is secure in this world. Things can be made secure enough so that there's a major deterrence to hack into it, but there's always a way. I don't just mean pure Internet hacking - there's social engineering, TEMPEST-style hacking, any number of ways that you could hack into a system other then through the Internet. Of course, the system in question not being on the Internet is a major deterrence itself.
Anyway, enough rambling on my part. Need to get ready to go.:)
Just as a note, the writers of the first Animatrix episode were Andy and Larry Wachowski. This story has always been part of the Matrix universe - if you look around on the Matrix website you can find some online comics that tell the story of the one droid who was trying to defend himself, and they are also co-written by the Wachowskis. This is a pretty integral part of The Matrix's world, and I wouldn't be surprised if the second and third movies delved into this a bit more.
Seems pretty nice. The best part is, you don't have to pay a dime until you get to the printing/filing part, so you can try it out and see if it suits you. No DRM/platform hassles that I can see; it works in Safari, Chimera and Internet Explorer on my Mac OS X box. The basic version is only $20 (+ $15 for your state forms), which seems to be worth the hassle of puzziling over the IRS's forms and all the different classifications you could possibly fall under (I'm in a slightly odd situation though, so the 1040EZ may wind up being a cheaper choice if there's nothing funky you have to do...) Here's the link if people are interested: http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/welcome/perm/banner 11/welcome.htm.
Yeah, but that might be something related to Chimera itself, not anything that Safari would take advantage of. Remember, the two browsers aren't anything like each other, so just because something works, doesn't work, or acts one way in one browser doesn't mean it will work anything like it in another.
Apparently your cellphone is from the last stone-age. Every cell phone I've seen in the past two years or so has predictive text input, so when you're tapping out a message you only have to press each number once and it guesses the most frequently used word. Then you push a button to go down the list if the word it guessed isn't the one you wanted (which is rather rare, all things considered). It works very well, and takes most of the pain of typing on your phone out.
But as far as taking what you're talking about literally, seems to me you're thinking about either a Danger Hiptop or a Palm smartphone such as a Handspring Treo. I happen to have the Treo 300, which works with Sprint, and it's quite the gadget - not sure if I could live without it now. Best thing about Sprint? Unlimited Vision (Sprint's faster-then-dialup data services) for $10/mo. If you buy a Hiptop (aka Sidekick) from T-Mobile, you get unlimited data for the first year, but after that you have to pay their standard rates for data, which pretty much blow - $10 for 10MB, and that's assuming you don't go over. Both of these devices have input methods better then your standard touchtone keypad, and both have gotten decent reviews, so if you want something smarter then your typical cell-phone, I'd check them out.
I used to get pissed, but then I realized how dull movies would be if they took 30min sitting there trying to hack into something with a boring command-line. I've started to just accept them for what they are - a shortcut representing the real act of hacking (the ability to hack into anything in 30secs), and a way to keep the audience interested in what they're doing (the fancy, prettied up Director-based GUIs).
Just think of how much more pissed you'd be if they showed something much closer to actual hacking but didn't quite get it right. I'd bet half the doinks we have around here would be up in arms.;)
What? They're only releasing half the shorts online. Based on seeing this, I *do* want to buy the DVD. Indeed, I'm sure many people here feel the same way.::pokes around the Matrix site looking for a release date::
Two questions... You say you connect via Bluetooth to the internet when you're at home. Why do you bother when you're at home and have access to a "real" computer? And out of insane curiosity, what kind of range do you get?
At any rate, I'm not picking up one of these until a carrier besides Sprint has unlimited data for cheap. Until then, I'm sticking with my Treo 300. Did I mention it has a real IP address too?;)
Slashdot Mirror
What about RealMyst? I thought it was supposed to use the same 3D engine that Mudpie was going to use, and RealMyst was basically a stepping-stone project on the way to Uru. RealMyst has been ported to the Mac, so if the aforementioned is true then I don't see porting Uru to be that big of a deal...
:)
Or I could just be full of shit. Either way.
*trundles off to locate his RealMyst disc*
Right now the way it works is if you have to cancel your contract with your cellular provider, you're out around $200 (sometimes more, sometimes less, if you're reeeeally lucky you may be able to dodge it). Once your contract runs out, however, you can switch and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. However, once the number portability deadline rolls around in November, there may be some sort of fee for changing your number to another provider, but there's no way of knowing how much they'll charge, or if they even will charge. I would doubt that the provider you switch to will charge you, though - it's just another chance for them to lock you into a contract for a year or two.
Also, keep in mind that quite often fun toys like this are relegated to the Japanese market. I'm not saying they won't introduce the phone in the US, just that it may be unlikely. I'll bet anything Sony (and MS/Nintendo) are watching Nokia's N-Gage experiment very closely to see how well it does...
I now have a sudden urge to fight any green-suited Hyrulians, scantily-clad purple-sknned woman with chain swords and Elvis impersonators with a nunchuck.
Seriously though, this is just sick. Not only that, but personally the whole "GTA made me do it!" just feels like a lame excuse. I've played through and beat GTA3, and I have absolutely no urge to run out with a sniper rifle. Nor do any of my friends who have played it.
I know that three out of four cell phones we've bought in the past year has specifically stated that they are GPS aware, and I'm pretty sure the fourth one does as well. The trick is that the phone isn't a full GPS reciever - it can't neccessarily calculate position itself, it can just send the information it gets to the cell towers which actually perform the needed calculations, combine it with other methods of locating a cell phone, and come up with a highly accurate guess of where you are. I forget what the address is, but there's some company's web page that has information on the exact process used.
Or you could just turn off the location awareness in your phones menu system. Then it won't report your location at all unless you dial 911, rather then degrading your cell signal significantly in a rather futile attempt to disable that.
;)
Oh, and pretty much every phone made in the several years is GPS-aware, so if you didn't put on your tin-foil hat yet, it's a bit late...
...Apple's Darwin *is* open source... if you could somehow hack the Darwin kernel to recognize and boot on that hardware, then it should be able to work.
The problem is, that would probably take a serious amount of work, not to mention the possible legal snares with Apple - I don't know what the terming of the APSL is, but it may not allow such modifications. But I don't see it as being an impossible task.
Three things:
First of all, any Mac OS X application that can print can export to PDF. This isn't anything that has to be supported by the application; it's a button that's in the print dialog that every application uses. Since Mac OS X's entire display system uses PDF internally, it's a breeze to do. Very fast, also.
Secondly, I just tried downloading the HTML version of the FreeBSD handbook and dragging it on top of TextEdit, which is a very basic word processor/text editor, uses all standard Cocoa APIs and controls, etc. The operating system must handle HTML conversion natively, because it opened it up with formatting and everything.
Third, OpenOffice works just fine on a Mac - it just doesn't use native (Aqua) controls and widgets. It appears as an X11 app. There are several X11 servers that can blend your X11 apps seamlessly with your Mac desktop, so you can have X11 apps and Aqua apps open at the same time; it just doesn't look/act like a Mac app.
Hmm. I've had the exact opposite experience - all of the Macs I own survive brief brownouts perfectly, whereas it's my PC that barfs, shuts down, and (once) ruins hard drives.
Just my two cents.
Hmm. You don't download much of anything gaming related these days, do you?
Seriously, pretty much everything I've downloaded gaming related since I built my PC two years ago has been from third-party sources. Nobody wants to foot the bill for bandwidth; all of the first-party sources either just *don't exist* or are *way* too freaking slow. The closest I might have come to a 1st party paying for decent bandwidth is that Gigex service, but again I think that's P2P.
At any rate, 3dgamers.com seems to have the best service... they have a P2P client that's not riddled with spyware and doesn't force you to run it in the background when you start up, and I get wicked fast speeds from it. It seems to be the best service out of all of them.
Just my 0.02 cents.
I haven't heard much on this download/expansion pack/whatever the hell it is, but chances are that iD's Graeme Devine, who does most of the Mac work on the Quake 3 ports, may become involved. Give him a week or three to update his plan and maybe we'll get a version of it.
I'm not trying to be a hard-ass here - but do you have any sources for that? A link would be great, but a pointer to the DVD commentary, some magazine or something like that would be appreciated. I'm just interested to read up on any other tidbits of any information that there may be wherever you found that one. :)
Well, the twist with Rendezvous and iChat is that you can sit down, open your laptop, have your Mac automatically connect to the nearest wireless network and automatically discover ever other iChat client on the network. No IP addresses, no entry of nicknames; it automatically discovers everybody else on the local network. Not only that, but it's rediculously easy to do the same thing yourself, or anything you like using it; Apple's libraries are supposed to be top notch from what I hear. I'm rather surprised nobody's written an iChat client for Windows/*NIX yet, as it should be trivial to use Apple's code and write a small program that would handle this.
:) /rant
None of this is incredibly new or even groundbreaking in itself. The main feature is that it's so simple and easy to use that you can put it together in combinations that nobody would have even thought of putting them together, or that they wouldn't have put in the effort to get it to work. I have a Epson inkjet that I share from one computer to my main one. I was impressed to click the checkbox on the sharing computer in the other room, sit down in front of my main computer and begin printing without ever touching a configuration setting anywhere in the OS. Like I said, nothing groundbreaking, but it makes everything that much easier to use, and gives me one less thing to worry about. Which I appreciate.
Slashdot has worked fine for me - the only trick is that instead of using Slashdot's Palm interface, I've created a new account and set it to always display in light mode. That way I can browse through comments and post and what not if I'm bored.
:)
Just some advice from another Treo 300 owner.
How the heck is that going to work? If somebody hacks through your bank account using your account information, how do they distinguish between legitmate uses by you and by the hacker? Heck, even if somebody doesn't hack into your account, how do they distinguish between you and a possible hacker?
:)
Fact of the matter is, nothing is secure in this world. Things can be made secure enough so that there's a major deterrence to hack into it, but there's always a way. I don't just mean pure Internet hacking - there's social engineering, TEMPEST-style hacking, any number of ways that you could hack into a system other then through the Internet. Of course, the system in question not being on the Internet is a major deterrence itself.
Anyway, enough rambling on my part. Need to get ready to go.
Which means that, ultimately, I'm putting in 180% of my total effort.
Jesus Christ, I need a raise.
Jeez, how amazing considering it's directed by the same person who did Ninja Scroll. ;)
Just as a note, the writers of the first Animatrix episode were Andy and Larry Wachowski. This story has always been part of the Matrix universe - if you look around on the Matrix website you can find some online comics that tell the story of the one droid who was trying to defend himself, and they are also co-written by the Wachowskis. This is a pretty integral part of The Matrix's world, and I wouldn't be surprised if the second and third movies delved into this a bit more.
Seems pretty nice. The best part is, you don't have to pay a dime until you get to the printing/filing part, so you can try it out and see if it suits you. No DRM/platform hassles that I can see; it works in Safari, Chimera and Internet Explorer on my Mac OS X box. The basic version is only $20 (+ $15 for your state forms), which seems to be worth the hassle of puzziling over the IRS's forms and all the different classifications you could possibly fall under (I'm in a slightly odd situation though, so the 1040EZ may wind up being a cheaper choice if there's nothing funky you have to do...) Here's the link if people are interested: http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/welcome/perm/banner 11/welcome.htm.
Yeah, but that might be something related to Chimera itself, not anything that Safari would take advantage of. Remember, the two browsers aren't anything like each other, so just because something works, doesn't work, or acts one way in one browser doesn't mean it will work anything like it in another.
Apparently your cellphone is from the last stone-age. Every cell phone I've seen in the past two years or so has predictive text input, so when you're tapping out a message you only have to press each number once and it guesses the most frequently used word. Then you push a button to go down the list if the word it guessed isn't the one you wanted (which is rather rare, all things considered). It works very well, and takes most of the pain of typing on your phone out.
But as far as taking what you're talking about literally, seems to me you're thinking about either a Danger Hiptop or a Palm smartphone such as a Handspring Treo. I happen to have the Treo 300, which works with Sprint, and it's quite the gadget - not sure if I could live without it now. Best thing about Sprint? Unlimited Vision (Sprint's faster-then-dialup data services) for $10/mo. If you buy a Hiptop (aka Sidekick) from T-Mobile, you get unlimited data for the first year, but after that you have to pay their standard rates for data, which pretty much blow - $10 for 10MB, and that's assuming you don't go over. Both of these devices have input methods better then your standard touchtone keypad, and both have gotten decent reviews, so if you want something smarter then your typical cell-phone, I'd check them out.
I used to get pissed, but then I realized how dull movies would be if they took 30min sitting there trying to hack into something with a boring command-line. I've started to just accept them for what they are - a shortcut representing the real act of hacking (the ability to hack into anything in 30secs), and a way to keep the audience interested in what they're doing (the fancy, prettied up Director-based GUIs).
;)
Just think of how much more pissed you'd be if they showed something much closer to actual hacking but didn't quite get it right. I'd bet half the doinks we have around here would be up in arms.
Or maybe they'll stumble accross the cure for cancer while trying to improve peanut butter.
Hey, you never know.
In the karma-whoring off-chance anybody doesn't pick up the reference, check out this switch-ad parody.
What? They're only releasing half the shorts online. Based on seeing this, I *do* want to buy the DVD. Indeed, I'm sure many people here feel the same way. ::pokes around the Matrix site looking for a release date::
Two questions... You say you connect via Bluetooth to the internet when you're at home. Why do you bother when you're at home and have access to a "real" computer? And out of insane curiosity, what kind of range do you get?
;)
At any rate, I'm not picking up one of these until a carrier besides Sprint has unlimited data for cheap. Until then, I'm sticking with my Treo 300. Did I mention it has a real IP address too?