I'm a bit (pleasantly) surprised to hear that you're having a good experience with WoW on the Mac Mini... I would have guessed that the mini (particularly the video card)
The funny thing is, video card isn't even the bottleneck for WoW. It's the hard drive swap space.
In order to make WoW playable on the mini, it is essential that you up the RAM to 1 GB. Even at 512 MB, it pages out to the hard drive too much.
Now, a little HD swapping is less of a crushing problem on most computers, but the mini sports a high-latency 4200 RPM laptop drive. Any time the game needs to use swap space due to lack of memory, it becomes choppy and slow.
However, once you have enough memory installed, and dial down the video options to make the demands a little more modest, the game is smooth as silk on a 1280x720 widescreen.
You sometimes get a little stuttering in places like Ironforge, but I've seen that happen to brand-new Athlon towers with the latest and greatest video cards installed, so I would dismiss that as a network/server performance issue more than anything else.
The puny 32 MB ATI card actually seems to handle the video of WoW better than the el-cheapo 64 MB nVidia card they put in the G5 iMac. Also, the 1.42 GHz G4 runs the game with no problems at all.
(Heck, I've even played it in coffee shops on my iBook, and that's an even slower machine than the mini.)
Bottom line is that WoW was well-designed to work on any system which meets their box specs.
Choose 20 people you know. Don't just choose randomly, but select 20 people who you consider to be relatively smart and aware. Ask them the following question:
Who's face is on the $10 bill?
If you are very, very lucky, one out of those 20 will know. They might slowly itemize all the others while they are thinking about it... "let's see... Jackson's on the 20, Lincoln's on the five..." as a way to demonstrate they are not a total moron, but in the end, almost none of them will be able to answer this amazingly simple question about a denomination of currency which they probably look directly at several times a week.
In fact, many of you reading this post are already probably straining your memory to conjure up the image and the name.
There's no shame in it. People focus their attention on details based on a desire to get through life with maximum efficiency, not maximum accuracy. You probably never felt it was all that important to remember who's on the ten.
(To relieve your stress, just in case you don't have one in your wallet at the moment, it's Alexander Hamilton.)
Those are among the reasons why I opted for the mini. Not wanting to bother with the gyrations needed to get Linux up and running on the X-Box was another. When i was 25, I considered that kind of stuff to be fun. Now, at 35, I want things to "just work," and have been cheerfully enjoying the poisoned Kool-Ade which Steve Jobs has provided me.
In the end, I did hook up the X-Box as well, via component inputs... just so I can fire up DOAX now and then.
However, HD playback is unacceptable with current OS X software and DVD image quality (using Apple's DVD decoder) is not up to par.
Unfortunately, Shimpi overlooked the EyeTV 500, with which I've been enjoying perfect HDTV playback and recording.
The secret is that the file is not compressed or encoded in any way. The pure, unadulterated MPEG stream is simply passed along.
Also, I must disagree with the analysis of the Apple DVD player. Anamorphic DVD's look fan-fucking-tastic on my 119" projection screen via the mini and OS X's "Apple DVD Player." Some cheaply-made disks (such as a few of my anime disks) do experience a little bit of combing during playback, but I can always whip out VLC on those occasions, and run a deinterlace filter on them.
May I ask what combination of software and hardware add-ons you went with for your home theatre?
Yes you may. Like I said, I'll be posting a detailed review to modmini.com in the very near future, but here's the basics:
Extra hardware: EyeTV 500 (High-def tuner w/ the usual PVR functions)
M-Audio Sonica (NOT recommended! I will be replacing this with a better USB or Firewire sound very card soon.)
Keyspan IR remote control (I use the sensor only. The remote itself is a flimsy piece of crap. I programmed all the buttons into my amplifier's "universal" keys and moved on.)
Sony amp w/ Dolby 5.1, Dolby 7.1, and DTS decoding.
B&W speakers
Extra software:
VLC (I still use the Apple DVD Player for 99% of actual DVD's, but for most other media files VLC roxors my soxors. Also, free is good. We like free.)
Mac the Ripper (A great tool for archiving DVD's on your HD... while it's at it, the region codes, ads, animated menus, and FBI warnings can all be stripped out, too.)
Matinee (A simple little DVD image kiosk. The author humbly asks for a ten buck shareware fee to encourage development.)
World of Warcraft. Very not free. Be warned, playing WoW on a 119" screen in first person mode could make you motion sick in no time flat. Scroll out to 3rd-person view if you start turning green.
Since you've got a lot of other PC (and/or Mac) hardware lying around anyway, maybe the way for you to go would be to link it to a system on your "backbone" via Firewire cable. There's a lot of IP-via-Firewire solutions out there, and while Firewire 400 might be a little sluggish compared to Gig Ethernet, it's still quite a bit faster than the 10/100 card, and plenty fast enough for streaming video.
However, if you are sharing video files all over your network, I would not advocate using any living-room computer for the server.
Build a big, fast, noisy beast of a server with a nice RAID for storage, plug it in somewhere like your basement cellar, and leave it there.
Then the mini can play large video files off it by mounting the storage drive and selecting films using something like Matinee.
The only downside to this method is if you want to rip DVD's on occasion. You would either need to rip them over the network or else go down to the cellar, plug in a keyboard, monitor and mouse, and sit down at it to rip them at the server.
1. Low price 2. Low noise 3. Small size 4. DVI Out 5. Built-in Firewire, USB2 6. Airport/Bluetooth available
By the time you add the HD tuner, USB audio, and lots of memory, it's no longer a budget-box system, but it still works out to less bucks for the bang of the big Microsoft HTPC solutions, and looks really nice in the living-room cabinet.
Not a lot of great solutions (yet) for HDTV broadcasts on a hacked X-Box, but for my Mac mini, I found that the EyeTV 500 does the trick.
Uncompressed HDTV tuner which sends the signal via FireWire to the Mac. In spite of what the box specs say, it handles 1080i in full screen mode with no problem at all.
I recently built a new computer-based home theater system, and in researching my options I found that a hacked X-Box or a Mac mini both present superior solutions to anything officially in the "HTPC" market. (IMHO, YMMV, yeah yeah yeah.)
I chose to go with the Mac mini solution, and will be submitting a review of the pros and cons of going the route I went (warts and all) in the near future over at modmini.com
Because the best stories happen in a galaxy far, far away.
I used to think so, until the prequels and special editions came out.
Turns out that two great stories, one okay story, one lame story, and one really really awful story happened in a Galaxy far, far away... and once the really great two were revised to be how they were "originally intended", they turned out to be a little less impressive than we thought.
Han shot second. Your childhood memories are a lie.
Many of those who don't believe in the immortal soul (or are not as confident in that belief as they claim) can only cope with mortality by "living on" through their progeny.
Therefore, even if real sex stopped being the most fun way to climax, people would still have children.
No, RotS, will be the only good prequel. I saw the commerical and went... HOLY SHIT! The movie is going be awsome.
Previews for "Attack of the Clones" looked impressive too, but what did we get?
A flying-car chase which didn't even measure up to the unimpressive ones we already saw in "The 5th Element" and "Minority Report"
R2D2 hovercrafting while C3PO is being tossed around like a rag doll in a really lame Charlie Chaplin homage
Anikan blubbering about sand to set up the creepiest pick-up line in motion pictures since the "you've got a purdy mouth" scene in Deliverance
Obi-wan getting his taint handed to him by some generic schmuck who's not only Boba Fett's dad, but just to make sure it's the most inbred storyline ever, the source material for the cloned stormtroopers.
Some kind of cheezy gladiator scene which I don't remember much about other than Natalie Portman's bare mid-rift.... actually, that scene was pretty good...
Then a bunch of jedi standing in a circle getting shot at, and the Ultimate Jedi Master Yoda bouncing around like a pathetic rubber spider on a string, utterly failing to land a single blow on Palpatine's latest flunky.
Lame fights, lame effects, lame acting, piss-poor cinematography. Awful in nearly every way.
If Revenge of the Sith merely manages to avoid being the worst movie of our young new Century, it will have succeeded in being an improvement, but I'm not going to make the assumption that it will, simply based on a handful 2-second clips.
Nope. Most theaters in the US seat between about 50 and about 200 people, depending on the screen size, and it's all general-admission seating. Crowds in US theaters are simply not big enough to be a serious safety problem.
I could see where it would be an issue if Argentina theaters show films in a massive stadium arrangement of some kind.
After seeing footage of the band Rush playing a concert in a soccer stadium in Rio, I have this image in my head of most noteworthy events throughout South America being in gargantuan forums by North American standards, so forgive me if my perception does not match the reality.
"And where the ---- did all those ----ing Autobots come from all the sudden!? When the alarm goes off, you got two minutes before they respond. Okay, maybe a patrol might happen to pass by at that particular moment, but they were waitin' for us man! Dinobots and all! I think we've got a rat in the house."
But then the main battle scene would be done as nothing but sound against a black screen, and most of the rest of the movie would be shots of Autobots refusing to talk to him.
If a warning light appears on the dashboard, the car owner will bring his car into the shop. If a warning dialog box appears, the user would never consider bringing the computer to a repair person, and they would certainly never pay for support.
That's because a car is a $10,000 - $40,000 piece of machinery which can kill you if it is not quite working perfectly. If a car owner follows the maintenence schedule correctly, most cars will work almost flawlessly for ten years or more.
A persional computer is a $300 - $2,000 gadget which can't do much more harm than losing some data, and is famous for being unreliable even when proper care and attention is given to maintenance. Furthermore, it's a piece of home electronics, and it is therefore (perhaps unfairly) held up against the expectations of trouble-free reliability we have for our TV sets and home stereo systems.
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I am a professional satellite installer.
You install satellites?
You must be very tall.
I'm a bit (pleasantly) surprised to hear that you're having a good experience with WoW on the Mac Mini... I would have guessed that the mini (particularly the video card)
The funny thing is, video card isn't even the bottleneck for WoW. It's the hard drive swap space.
In order to make WoW playable on the mini, it is essential that you up the RAM to 1 GB. Even at 512 MB, it pages out to the hard drive too much.
Now, a little HD swapping is less of a crushing problem on most computers, but the mini sports a high-latency 4200 RPM laptop drive. Any time the game needs to use swap space due to lack of memory, it becomes choppy and slow.
However, once you have enough memory installed, and dial down the video options to make the demands a little more modest, the game is smooth as silk on a 1280x720 widescreen.
You sometimes get a little stuttering in places like Ironforge, but I've seen that happen to brand-new Athlon towers with the latest and greatest video cards installed, so I would dismiss that as a network/server performance issue more than anything else.
The puny 32 MB ATI card actually seems to handle the video of WoW better than the el-cheapo 64 MB nVidia card they put in the G5 iMac. Also, the 1.42 GHz G4 runs the game with no problems at all.
(Heck, I've even played it in coffee shops on my iBook, and that's an even slower machine than the mini.)
Bottom line is that WoW was well-designed to work on any system which meets their box specs.
Interesting to note that you can dress up anything with a pair breasts and it becomes sexy
Spoken like somebody who obviously hasn't seen my Halloween pictures from last year!
He's been re-using that line ever since releasing "Howard the Duck."
A simple experiment you can try at home:
Choose 20 people you know. Don't just choose randomly, but select 20 people who you consider to be relatively smart and aware. Ask them the following question:
Who's face is on the $10 bill?
If you are very, very lucky, one out of those 20 will know. They might slowly itemize all the others while they are thinking about it... "let's see... Jackson's on the 20, Lincoln's on the five..." as a way to demonstrate they are not a total moron, but in the end, almost none of them will be able to answer this amazingly simple question about a denomination of currency which they probably look directly at several times a week.
In fact, many of you reading this post are already probably straining your memory to conjure up the image and the name.
There's no shame in it. People focus their attention on details based on a desire to get through life with maximum efficiency, not maximum accuracy. You probably never felt it was all that important to remember who's on the ten.
(To relieve your stress, just in case you don't have one in your wallet at the moment, it's Alexander Hamilton.)
Loonie and Toonie.
They both _deffinately_ feel like they're worth something.
Sure, they feel like they are worth something, but the truth is that they are only worth one or two Canadian dollars.
(I keed, I keed!)
Count me as one of the people who thought there was nothing wrong with the "Ike" silver dollar.
Those are among the reasons why I opted for the mini. Not wanting to bother with the gyrations needed to get Linux up and running on the X-Box was another. When i was 25, I considered that kind of stuff to be fun. Now, at 35, I want things to "just work," and have been cheerfully enjoying the poisoned Kool-Ade which Steve Jobs has provided me.
In the end, I did hook up the X-Box as well, via component inputs... just so I can fire up DOAX now and then.
However, HD playback is unacceptable with current OS X software and DVD image quality (using Apple's DVD decoder) is not up to par.
Unfortunately, Shimpi overlooked the EyeTV 500, with which I've been enjoying perfect HDTV playback and recording.
The secret is that the file is not compressed or encoded in any way. The pure, unadulterated MPEG stream is simply passed along.
Also, I must disagree with the analysis of the Apple DVD player. Anamorphic DVD's look fan-fucking-tastic on my 119" projection screen via the mini and OS X's "Apple DVD Player." Some cheaply-made disks (such as a few of my anime disks) do experience a little bit of combing during playback, but I can always whip out VLC on those occasions, and run a deinterlace filter on them.
Watching live broadcasts? That's quite different than playing back recorded material, it doesn't require the CPU to do any decompression.
Both. In fact, I'm about to go watch the high-def recording of "Tru Calling" I just made earlier this evening.
Eliza Dushku in high definition video..... rrrrrrrrrr....
("r"s don't roll as well when you just type them, do they?)
May I ask what combination of software and hardware add-ons you went with for your home theatre?
Yes you may. Like I said, I'll be posting a detailed review to modmini.com in the very near future, but here's the basics:
Extra hardware:
EyeTV 500 (High-def tuner w/ the usual PVR functions)
M-Audio Sonica (NOT recommended! I will be replacing this with a better USB or Firewire sound very card soon.)
Keyspan IR remote control (I use the sensor only. The remote itself is a flimsy piece of crap. I programmed all the buttons into my amplifier's "universal" keys and moved on.)
250 GB external drive.
Panasonic PT-AE700U 1280x720 wide-screen projector.
Sony amp w/ Dolby 5.1, Dolby 7.1, and DTS decoding.
B&W speakers
Extra software:
VLC (I still use the Apple DVD Player for 99% of actual DVD's, but for most other media files VLC roxors my soxors. Also, free is good. We like free.)
Mac the Ripper (A great tool for archiving DVD's on your HD... while it's at it, the region codes, ads, animated menus, and FBI warnings can all be stripped out, too.)
Matinee (A simple little DVD image kiosk. The author humbly asks for a ten buck shareware fee to encourage development.)
World of Warcraft. Very not free. Be warned, playing WoW on a 119" screen in first person mode could make you motion sick in no time flat. Scroll out to 3rd-person view if you start turning green.
Since you've got a lot of other PC (and/or Mac) hardware lying around anyway, maybe the way for you to go would be to link it to a system on your "backbone" via Firewire cable. There's a lot of IP-via-Firewire solutions out there, and while Firewire 400 might be a little sluggish compared to Gig Ethernet, it's still quite a bit faster than the 10/100 card, and plenty fast enough for streaming video.
However, if you are sharing video files all over your network, I would not advocate using any living-room computer for the server.
Build a big, fast, noisy beast of a server with a nice RAID for storage, plug it in somewhere like your basement cellar, and leave it there.
Then the mini can play large video files off it by mounting the storage drive and selecting films using something like Matinee.
The only downside to this method is if you want to rip DVD's on occasion. You would either need to rip them over the network or else go down to the cellar, plug in a keyboard, monitor and mouse, and sit down at it to rip them at the server.
Oh, and I almost forgot:
7. Low power consumption
(The mini uses about 1/7 the electricity of a typical AMD tower on average.)
What are its advantages?
1. Low price
2. Low noise
3. Small size
4. DVI Out
5. Built-in Firewire, USB2
6. Airport/Bluetooth available
By the time you add the HD tuner, USB audio, and lots of memory, it's no longer a budget-box system, but it still works out to less bucks for the bang of the big Microsoft HTPC solutions, and looks really nice in the living-room cabinet.
Not a lot of great solutions (yet) for HDTV broadcasts on a hacked X-Box, but for my Mac mini, I found that the EyeTV 500 does the trick.
Uncompressed HDTV tuner which sends the signal via FireWire to the Mac. In spite of what the box specs say, it handles 1080i in full screen mode with no problem at all.
I recently built a new computer-based home theater system, and in researching my options I found that a hacked X-Box or a Mac mini both present superior solutions to anything officially in the "HTPC" market. (IMHO, YMMV, yeah yeah yeah.)
I chose to go with the Mac mini solution, and will be submitting a review of the pros and cons of going the route I went (warts and all) in the near future over at modmini.com
Because the best stories happen in a galaxy far, far away.
I used to think so, until the prequels and special editions came out.
Turns out that two great stories, one okay story, one lame story, and one really really awful story happened in a Galaxy far, far away... and once the really great two were revised to be how they were "originally intended", they turned out to be a little less impressive than we thought.
Han shot second. Your childhood memories are a lie.
Many of those who don't believe in the immortal soul (or are not as confident in that belief as they claim) can only cope with mortality by "living on" through their progeny.
Therefore, even if real sex stopped being the most fun way to climax, people would still have children.
It's not impossible! I used to bulls-eye womp rats with my T-16 back home, and they couldn't have been much more that two meters wide...
Oh wait! I mean... (sigh) I'll go sleep on the couch.
Zing!
Posts like yours are the reason I still read Slashdot. Well done.
No, RotS, will be the only good prequel. I saw the commerical and went... HOLY SHIT! The movie is going be awsome.
... actually, that scene was pretty good...
Previews for "Attack of the Clones" looked impressive too, but what did we get?
A flying-car chase which didn't even measure up to the unimpressive ones we already saw in "The 5th Element" and "Minority Report"
R2D2 hovercrafting while C3PO is being tossed around like a rag doll in a really lame Charlie Chaplin homage
Anikan blubbering about sand to set up the creepiest pick-up line in motion pictures since the "you've got a purdy mouth" scene in Deliverance
Obi-wan getting his taint handed to him by some generic schmuck who's not only Boba Fett's dad, but just to make sure it's the most inbred storyline ever, the source material for the cloned stormtroopers.
Some kind of cheezy gladiator scene which I don't remember much about other than Natalie Portman's bare mid-rift.
Then a bunch of jedi standing in a circle getting shot at, and the Ultimate Jedi Master Yoda bouncing around like a pathetic rubber spider on a string, utterly failing to land a single blow on Palpatine's latest flunky.
Lame fights, lame effects, lame acting, piss-poor cinematography. Awful in nearly every way.
If Revenge of the Sith merely manages to avoid being the worst movie of our young new Century, it will have succeeded in being an improvement, but I'm not going to make the assumption that it will, simply based on a handful 2-second clips.
Nope. Most theaters in the US seat between about 50 and about 200 people, depending on the screen size, and it's all general-admission seating. Crowds in US theaters are simply not big enough to be a serious safety problem.
I could see where it would be an issue if Argentina theaters show films in a massive stadium arrangement of some kind.
After seeing footage of the band Rush playing a concert in a soccer stadium in Rio, I have this image in my head of most noteworthy events throughout South America being in gargantuan forums by North American standards, so forgive me if my perception does not match the reality.
Where did you get those pictures, and how much will it cost to have the negatives destroyed? :P
"And where the ---- did all those ----ing Autobots come from all the sudden!? When the alarm goes off, you got two minutes before they respond. Okay, maybe a patrol might happen to pass by at that particular moment, but they were waitin' for us man! Dinobots and all! I think we've got a rat in the house."
They should get Micheal Moore to direct it
But then the main battle scene would be done as nothing but sound against a black screen, and most of the rest of the movie would be shots of Autobots refusing to talk to him.
If a warning light appears on the dashboard, the car owner will bring his car into the shop. If a warning dialog box appears, the user would never consider bringing the computer to a repair person, and they would certainly never pay for support.
That's because a car is a $10,000 - $40,000 piece of machinery which can kill you if it is not quite working perfectly. If a car owner follows the maintenence schedule correctly, most cars will work almost flawlessly for ten years or more.
A persional computer is a $300 - $2,000 gadget which can't do much more harm than losing some data, and is famous for being unreliable even when proper care and attention is given to maintenance. Furthermore, it's a piece of home electronics, and it is therefore (perhaps unfairly) held up against the expectations of trouble-free reliability we have for our TV sets and home stereo systems.