And when in this thread did I suggest that retina-scanning ATM's are a good idea?
If you could manufacture a hand-held retina scanner for less that a couple hundred bucks, it would take the place of all those "make the clerk write the birthday on your drivers license on the face of your check before accepting it" nonsense. You simply program the register to not accept credit or check payments without a retina scan, which the check-out clerk then has to do.
Likewise, it would be a fantastic tool for law enforcement officers and bar bouncers, who would never again have to worry about being handed a fake ID.
So enough allready with the eyeball-stealing sci-fi crap.
An unatended retina scanner would be a stupid idea because it would not even need a real eye. A picture of one could me made sufficient to fool the scanner. I'm talking about a better means for people to confirm the identity of the person standing in front of them, and none of the nonsense you folks have regurgitated from your days of playing Shadowrun (or whatever crappy tech fantasy) has done anything to indicate why that would not be a good idea.
I'm not talking about using your retina as your ATM card.
I'm talking about human being using hand-heled retina scanners for identification purposes. A cop pulls you over, he can know 100% for sure who you are with a quick snapshot of the back of your eyeball.
Is everyone really buying into that Big Brother Crap
Yes. Yes they are.
Sometimes whack-job paranoia is not a bad thing, though. It compels the government to be slightly more forthright about putting their cards on the table, lest the average Joe Moderate start to listen to the voices shouting in the wilderness. (God, I love mixing metaphors.)
Some see RealID as the proverbial "bad idea whose time has come," but personally I think biometrics are a much better way to go.
Stealing an ID or driver's license of somebody who looks a little bit like you is trivial. Stealing somebody's retina pattern is beyond the skills of the typical street thug.
In fact, I am sure that I am wierd but anytime I get a song in my head that I dont want in there I just need to hum or listen to Talking Head's 'Psycho Killer'.
I go with Particle Man by They Might Be Giants. It can take over anything.
Even if you watch/game on the projector an average of a whopping 5 hours a day, that still gets you well over a year of use. Most people go a good two or three years on a bulb.
And even if you figure it as $1800 plus $300/year over the next few years, it's still a pretty good deal for a massive high-def screen.
Screens have a low "spouse acceptance factor." For one thing, the more you darken the room, the better the image looks. I have all my media room walls painted dark blue, with navy blue drapes hanging on either side of the screen. It makes a huge difference. It's not for everybody.
On the other hand, you will not get bigger than about 60" for the money using other methods (which sound huge, but a 60" widescreen is actually only slightly taller than a 36" standard-def 4:3 TV set.)
For frame of reference, my 119" screen is 104" wide by 58" tall, and watching movies on it is actually a nicer experience than most of the theaters nearby where I live.
The bulb life is 2000 hours. They say bulbs can sometimes stretch to 3000 in eco mode, but there's an increasing risk of the bulb exploding and damaging the projector the farther past 2000 you go. They cost in the ballpark of $300, depending on where you look.
www.projectorcentral.com is stuffed with info about projectors, including reviews, side-by-side comparisons, and posts by actual users.
Another great site for more mini-specific stuff is www.htmini.com (they also have links to just about every damn blog out there that has anything to do with the mini. Follow some of those links and you will see posts from me whining and nitpicking about downsides as well as cheering about upsides regarding the stuff I bought.)
That's good to know. I'm stuck at 10.3.9 until M-Audio gets a new driver out for the Sonica USB sound card.
The Panasonic is one of two fairly recent "low cost" (hah!) LCD projectors which stack of very well against the DLP competition.
Most of the downsides of LCD, such as the infamous "screen door" effect, are eliminated. Also, unlike most of the projectors sold to be used with computers, this one is native 1280x720 widescreen, so high-def images look great on it. I got mine for $1800.
(I'm told it scales 1080i to 720p really, really well... but since the mini is already doing that before the signal even gets there, I couldn't tell you whether it does or not.)
Another one I'm told is good is the Zenith, but I selected the Panasonic because it's 2x zoom lens allows me to put the projector much farther back in the room, several feet behind the furniture, so the miniscule fan noise is even further removed without the need to build a "hush box."
Also, having HDMI input allows me to send the Mac's native DVI signal to it for a pure digital 1:1 pixel signal all the way to the LCD itself.
Wanting a little more gaming variety that WoW, I also plugged my X-Box into the component inputs on the projector, and it also looks pretty good. (Plus, it gives me another way to watch DVDs when I'm tying up the mini with DVD rips, AVI-DVD encoding, etc... Gotta get all those Doctor Who episodes as they hit the newsgroups, dontcha know...)
Like you, I have the $599 1.42 GHz model. I popped 1 GB of RAM into it, and dropped the old 256 MB stick into a game machine which I was prepping for sale.
In spite of claims to the contrary (Elgato insists you need a dual-G5 for high-def playback) I am able to watch both 720p and 1080i broadcasts without frame-dropping so long as three conditions are meet:
1. I'm not tieing up the CPU or Firewire channel with other applications. (That includes recording to the local internal drive, and using a USB digital soundcard instead of a Firewire one.)
2. It's a solid signal.
3. (Very important), I'm watching through the EyeTV software.
If I export these files into pretty much any format while preserving the high resolution, both VLC and the Quicktime player utterly choke on trying to display them. Generally, I compress things down to DVD resolution if I'm going to keep them at all.
I'm hooking the mini to a Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector, and the results are breathtaking.
While Apple's DVD Player is far from the best in the universe (mostly good, except for disapointing deinterlacing filters), the plus side is that I've archived my entire movie collection on external FireWire hard drives. Not only can I cue any of them up with my remote, but I can watch DVD films with no layer change pause halfway through the movie.
I had all kinds of problem when I was daisy-chaining the EyeTV along with the external drives, but as soon as I put them all on a good-quality powered hub, my problems in that area were gone.
In addition to being a spiffy HD PVR and an okay DVD player, the mini serves as a World of Warcraft game machine for me. The fact that I must play at a slightly lower detail levels than my old über game PC had is more than made up for by the fact that I'm playing on a 117" screen.:)
Oh... and it hosts my band's web site in the background while doing all this. (That will have to change if my band ever becomes popular enough to get more than a couple dozen hits a month.)
Except the parent to my post, which I was responding to, was basically acknowledging that the first three days are not fun.
He seemed to think it was perfectly understandable that somebody would find the game boring for three days, and leave without realizing what a gem it turned out to be.
My reply was that if it takes more than three days to find it "not boring", then it is a boring game.
There's no industry standard job description for an "imp," and most of the 13 men and women on the team come from what Hewitt calls "unorthodox backgrounds." But he explains some of...
Wait, wait. Back the fuck up.
Thirteen? Thirteen people? That's it?
Considering any MMORPG is considered a huge flop unless they get at least 100,000 players, how much can 13 people possibly impact game play for the overwhelming majority of players?
13 People ammounts to a rounding error. There are zero live performers to interact with in this game. All hype, no story. Moving on.
I already own a high-def PVR solution which doesn't respect broadcast flags (EyeTV 500 from Elgato), but I'm very happy for the rest of you, who will probably buy something very much like it sometime in the next few years... it was starting to look like all non-early adopters were going to end up missing the boat.
(Oh, and I'm obviously pleased with the ruling on basic principle.)
This is a television-related story on Slashdot, so a post by some asshat bragging about not owning a TV should be arriving in 5... 4...
From what I've seen, the pre-teen crowd might be not going to this movie, which could hurt its success.
Why, because it's PG-13?
Dude, when I saw "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" in the theater, some dumbass parents in the row ahead of me actually brought their 5-year old daughter along. (That experiment lasted about four minutes. The kid actually got through the opening flashback without bursting into tears, but the living room knife-fight was a little too much for the little moppet.)
The problem with the first two prequels was not the digital actors. The problem was the real ones.
Jar-jar may have grated on a lot of people, but at least it wasn't a dull, wooden performance by a performer who's obvioulsy capable of far better work.
Portman, Jackson, Neeson, McGregor, Stamp, and yes even Christiansen... all have proven in other films that they are perfectly capable actors, yet Lucas seems to have a unique ability as a director to take these extremely talented people and suck all signs of life and soul out of their performances. It's really quite remarkable.
I feel something... a presense I haven't felt since...
Best MST3K moment in the entire run of the Star Wars movies.
Re-watching Star Wars on video with a crowd of friends, it got to that part and a friend of mine chimed in during the pregnant pause just after Vader says:
Yes, but if you are not exchanging word docs or avi files or whatever with Windows users, then there's really no need for AntiVirus software at this point for the typical home Mac user right now.
Even if you do want to scan a file for Windows virii, you can do so with any of dozens of free web-based utilities. Hell, send it to yourself in a Yahoo or Hotmail e-mail account, and there you have it.
Why would anybody bother trying to write an AntiVirus program for Tiger?
1. No virus for Tiger exists yet (or, indeed, for any flavor of OS X), so there's nothing put in your code blacklist.
2. Most Mac users (myself included) generally don't buy AntiVirus software, so you will only be able to sell it to a relatively small fraction of a relatively small market.
The Empire Strikes Back is regarded by many as his best film, and it's the one in which he was least directly involved. (Totally different director, two other writers helping with the script.)
For Menace, he was the only writer and only director. For Clones, he had a little help with the screenplay, but still directed it himself.
Slashdot Mirror
And when in this thread did I suggest that retina-scanning ATM's are a good idea?
If you could manufacture a hand-held retina scanner for less that a couple hundred bucks, it would take the place of all those "make the clerk write the birthday on your drivers license on the face of your check before accepting it" nonsense. You simply program the register to not accept credit or check payments without a retina scan, which the check-out clerk then has to do.
Likewise, it would be a fantastic tool for law enforcement officers and bar bouncers, who would never again have to worry about being handed a fake ID.
So enough allready with the eyeball-stealing sci-fi crap.
An unatended retina scanner would be a stupid idea because it would not even need a real eye. A picture of one could me made sufficient to fool the scanner. I'm talking about a better means for people to confirm the identity of the person standing in front of them, and none of the nonsense you folks have regurgitated from your days of playing Shadowrun (or whatever crappy tech fantasy) has done anything to indicate why that would not be a good idea.
I'm not talking about using your retina as your ATM card.
I'm talking about human being using hand-heled retina scanners for identification purposes. A cop pulls you over, he can know 100% for sure who you are with a quick snapshot of the back of your eyeball.
Is the concept really that hard to understand?
And you don't think holding up somebody else's eyeball to a retina scanner would look a tiny bit suspicious?
Actually, I would suggest that removing someones eyeball from their skull could quite reasonably be within the typical street thug's skill-set...
And then insert said eye into your own socket?
Not unless street thugs have both surgical skills and a very high pain tollerance.
Is everyone really buying into that Big Brother Crap
Yes. Yes they are.
Sometimes whack-job paranoia is not a bad thing, though. It compels the government to be slightly more forthright about putting their cards on the table, lest the average Joe Moderate start to listen to the voices shouting in the wilderness. (God, I love mixing metaphors.)
Some see RealID as the proverbial "bad idea whose time has come," but personally I think biometrics are a much better way to go.
Stealing an ID or driver's license of somebody who looks a little bit like you is trivial. Stealing somebody's retina pattern is beyond the skills of the typical street thug.
So, I guess this means red is the new blue.
They will be thrilled to hear the news in Milan and Paris.
THX-1138 had its moments.
I guess.
Now all I need to do it figure out how to get the damn A-Team theme song out of my head.
GodDAMNit!
I'm sailing away setanopencourseforthevirginsea...
In fact, I am sure that I am wierd but anytime I get a song in my head that I dont want in there I just need to hum or listen to Talking Head's 'Psycho Killer'.
I go with Particle Man by They Might Be Giants. It can take over anything.
Heh. 83 days if you never work or sleep.
Even if you watch/game on the projector an average of a whopping 5 hours a day, that still gets you well over a year of use. Most people go a good two or three years on a bulb.
And even if you figure it as $1800 plus $300/year over the next few years, it's still a pretty good deal for a massive high-def screen.
Screens have a low "spouse acceptance factor." For one thing, the more you darken the room, the better the image looks. I have all my media room walls painted dark blue, with navy blue drapes hanging on either side of the screen. It makes a huge difference. It's not for everybody.
On the other hand, you will not get bigger than about 60" for the money using other methods (which sound huge, but a 60" widescreen is actually only slightly taller than a 36" standard-def 4:3 TV set.)
For frame of reference, my 119" screen is 104" wide by 58" tall, and watching movies on it is actually a nicer experience than most of the theaters nearby where I live.
The bulb life is 2000 hours. They say bulbs can sometimes stretch to 3000 in eco mode, but there's an increasing risk of the bulb exploding and damaging the projector the farther past 2000 you go. They cost in the ballpark of $300, depending on where you look.
www.projectorcentral.com is stuffed with info about projectors, including reviews, side-by-side comparisons, and posts by actual users.
Another great site for more mini-specific stuff is www.htmini.com (they also have links to just about every damn blog out there that has anything to do with the mini. Follow some of those links and you will see posts from me whining and nitpicking about downsides as well as cheering about upsides regarding the stuff I bought.)
That's good to know. I'm stuck at 10.3.9 until M-Audio gets a new driver out for the Sonica USB sound card.
The Panasonic is one of two fairly recent "low cost" (hah!) LCD projectors which stack of very well against the DLP competition.
Most of the downsides of LCD, such as the infamous "screen door" effect, are eliminated. Also, unlike most of the projectors sold to be used with computers, this one is native 1280x720 widescreen, so high-def images look great on it. I got mine for $1800.
(I'm told it scales 1080i to 720p really, really well... but since the mini is already doing that before the signal even gets there, I couldn't tell you whether it does or not.)
Another one I'm told is good is the Zenith, but I selected the Panasonic because it's 2x zoom lens allows me to put the projector much farther back in the room, several feet behind the furniture, so the miniscule fan noise is even further removed without the need to build a "hush box."
Also, having HDMI input allows me to send the Mac's native DVI signal to it for a pure digital 1:1 pixel signal all the way to the LCD itself.
Wanting a little more gaming variety that WoW, I also plugged my X-Box into the component inputs on the projector, and it also looks pretty good. (Plus, it gives me another way to watch DVDs when I'm tying up the mini with DVD rips, AVI-DVD encoding, etc... Gotta get all those Doctor Who episodes as they hit the newsgroups, dontcha know...)
Like you, I have the $599 1.42 GHz model. I popped 1 GB of RAM into it, and dropped the old 256 MB stick into a game machine which I was prepping for sale.
:)
In spite of claims to the contrary (Elgato insists you need a dual-G5 for high-def playback) I am able to watch both 720p and 1080i broadcasts without frame-dropping so long as three conditions are meet:
1. I'm not tieing up the CPU or Firewire channel with other applications. (That includes recording to the local internal drive, and using a USB digital soundcard instead of a Firewire one.)
2. It's a solid signal.
3. (Very important), I'm watching through the EyeTV software.
If I export these files into pretty much any format while preserving the high resolution, both VLC and the Quicktime player utterly choke on trying to display them. Generally, I compress things down to DVD resolution if I'm going to keep them at all.
I'm hooking the mini to a Panasonic PT-AE700U LCD projector, and the results are breathtaking.
While Apple's DVD Player is far from the best in the universe (mostly good, except for disapointing deinterlacing filters), the plus side is that I've archived my entire movie collection on external FireWire hard drives. Not only can I cue any of them up with my remote, but I can watch DVD films with no layer change pause halfway through the movie.
I had all kinds of problem when I was daisy-chaining the EyeTV along with the external drives, but as soon as I put them all on a good-quality powered hub, my problems in that area were gone.
In addition to being a spiffy HD PVR and an okay DVD player, the mini serves as a World of Warcraft game machine for me. The fact that I must play at a slightly lower detail levels than my old über game PC had is more than made up for by the fact that I'm playing on a 117" screen.
Oh... and it hosts my band's web site in the background while doing all this. (That will have to change if my band ever becomes popular enough to get more than a couple dozen hits a month.)
Except the parent to my post, which I was responding to, was basically acknowledging that the first three days are not fun.
He seemed to think it was perfectly understandable that somebody would find the game boring for three days, and leave without realizing what a gem it turned out to be.
My reply was that if it takes more than three days to find it "not boring", then it is a boring game.
The first post states that is game is boring, etc. after they played the game for a WHOLE three days.
I've never played it, but if you are telling me it takes three days of playing to get to the good part, that sounds to me like a very boring game.
I mean, even The Ring of the Nibelung let you hear Brunhilde belting out the famous Die Walkure theme by the beginning of the second opera.
I think I'll stick with WoW, thanks.
From the article:
There's no industry standard job description for an "imp," and most of the 13 men and women on the team come from what Hewitt calls "unorthodox backgrounds." But he explains some of...
Wait, wait. Back the fuck up.
Thirteen? Thirteen people? That's it?
Considering any MMORPG is considered a huge flop unless they get at least 100,000 players, how much can 13 people possibly impact game play for the overwhelming majority of players?
13 People ammounts to a rounding error. There are zero live performers to interact with in this game. All hype, no story. Moving on.
I already own a high-def PVR solution which doesn't respect broadcast flags (EyeTV 500 from Elgato), but I'm very happy for the rest of you, who will probably buy something very much like it sometime in the next few years... it was starting to look like all non-early adopters were going to end up missing the boat.
(Oh, and I'm obviously pleased with the ruling on basic principle.)
This is a television-related story on Slashdot, so a post by some asshat bragging about not owning a TV should be arriving in 5... 4...
From what I've seen, the pre-teen crowd might be not going to this movie, which could hurt its success.
Why, because it's PG-13?
Dude, when I saw "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" in the theater, some dumbass parents in the row ahead of me actually brought their 5-year old daughter along. (That experiment lasted about four minutes. The kid actually got through the opening flashback without bursting into tears, but the living room knife-fight was a little too much for the little moppet.)
Something new? How about this:
The problem with the first two prequels was not the digital actors. The problem was the real ones.
Jar-jar may have grated on a lot of people, but at least it wasn't a dull, wooden performance by a performer who's obvioulsy capable of far better work.
Portman, Jackson, Neeson, McGregor, Stamp, and yes even Christiansen... all have proven in other films that they are perfectly capable actors, yet Lucas seems to have a unique ability as a director to take these extremely talented people and suck all signs of life and soul out of their performances. It's really quite remarkable.
I feel something... a presense I haven't felt since...
Best MST3K moment in the entire run of the Star Wars movies.
Re-watching Star Wars on video with a crowd of friends, it got to that part and a friend of mine chimed in during the pregnant pause just after Vader says:
"a presense I haven't felt sense..."
"... Line?"
Comedy gold.
Yes, but if you are not exchanging word docs or avi files or whatever with Windows users, then there's really no need for AntiVirus software at this point for the typical home Mac user right now.
Even if you do want to scan a file for Windows virii, you can do so with any of dozens of free web-based utilities. Hell, send it to yourself in a Yahoo or Hotmail e-mail account, and there you have it.
Geek jargon 101:
All nouns can be verbed.
No need to thank me, I was happy to clue you in.
Why would anybody bother trying to write an AntiVirus program for Tiger?
1. No virus for Tiger exists yet (or, indeed, for any flavor of OS X), so there's nothing put in your code blacklist.
2. Most Mac users (myself included) generally don't buy AntiVirus software, so you will only be able to sell it to a relatively small fraction of a relatively small market.
but I'd consider it for a "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?".
Isn't it a little early in the morning to be breaking out the Patty LaVelle?
Now I'm going to have the goddamn "Hey sistah, soul sistah..." riff stuck in my head until at least lunchtime.
Actually, that's backwards.
The Empire Strikes Back is regarded by many as his best film, and it's the one in which he was least directly involved. (Totally different director, two other writers helping with the script.)
For Menace, he was the only writer and only director. For Clones, he had a little help with the screenplay, but still directed it himself.