iDVD will not output the DVD image in any format at all, as far as I can tell. You can only burn the DVD but, of course, the iBook doesn't have a burner.
iDVD '05 (or whatever it's called) will support saving a DVD image. iDVD Features
I've never used this software, but here is a web page that explains how to do the same thing with iDVD 2.0-4.0 Burning iDVD to 3rd party drives
It sounds like what you actually want is Final Cut Express, which was going for $99 with the purchase of any new Mac a while ago. I think it's $299 now.
I agree with you that Velocity is the way to go for Java web applications. We use Velocity instead of JSP for the web presentation layer.
Velocity also excels at being a general purpose templating language - sure, JSP Expression Language gives you some of what Velocity does, but you can use Velocity to process any text, anywhere in a Java application.
I highly recommend Clans, which is a strategy game for 2-4 players that takes about 30 minutes to play.
It's fast moving, the game has a clear ending, all players are in the game until the end, and best of all, you don't let the other players know what your color is, so part of the fun is trying to figure out what everyone else is.
One thing to consider is safety - any late model BMW, Mercedes, Saab, Volvo, or Audi is going to be much safer in an accident than most 10 year old cars. Also, the sportier cars will handle a lot better, which means you are less likely to get in an accident.
Not trying to disparage your choice of transportation, especially if you don't drive much, but there are certainly some good reasons to choose to drive a nice European car if you have the money.
I forgot one obvious place to look - have you profiled your database connections? Make sure that all of the content tables are properly indexed, and that your db servers have enough ram.
If you are looking at a rewrite of the proprietary CMS, it's probably not that cost effective if you are only paying 20k/server (one time or yearly?) + maybe a 3k/year maintenance/service cost. Figure you will need to hire at least two, possibly up to 4 developers to write the new CMS, including importing all of the existing content, user information, preferences, history, etc. Even then, you'll be responsible for any upgrades you need. Have you asked the vendor about the performance problem? You're probably paying them on a maintenance and support contract already.
Another area to consider is limiting the number of dynamic elements on the page to allow the front page to be cached. Not letting users personalize the page will let you scale a lot better - just publish a static version of the front page every minute to a URL, and serve that up to all of the users.
If you do personalize, instead of building the whole page on the fly from the database/CMS, try and figure out a strategy to cache as much of the page as possible in memory, and then add the personalized elements.
Can you serve the streaming media off of another server, without the CMS? Store the URL to the streaming media in the CMS, and then have the page build the links to point to the other server.
I don't think moving to PHP is going to solve your problem, especially if you keep the same level of dynamic page building. You'd be better off looking at caching solutions, like other posters have suggested.
Have you ever heard of the Aztec, Maya, or Incan empires?
I don't know who or what was contemporary with the Roman empire at that point in time, but there certainly were organized societies even in your world of "savages"
I don't think it's got the advanced scheduling capability of Outlook (yet?) but you can share calendars by publishing them to a WebDAV server. You can get a free, open source WebDAV server with either mod_dav for Apache, or with the Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.x releases.
It seems like configuration is always a problem of finding the right balance between presenting too many options to the user, and not presenting enough. Mozilla's approach is to make an easy to use Preferences control panel available, and by including about:config for use by power users.
For more fun option management, check out Preferential
Velocity makes a nice alternative to JSP for the View layer. You can plug it into Struts and use it in place of JSP, or you can embed Velocity into JSP with the Velocity JSP tag.
There's a pretty good user's guide on the Velocity web site if you want to take a look through it.
O'Reilly is publishing a book on these Amazon Hacks in August, to go with Mac OS X Hacks, Linux Server Hacks, Google Hacks, and Tivo Hacks (upcoming).
It's mentioned in the article, but this is slashdot....
I think the best way would be to find out who edited your favorite techno thrillers, and send targeted packages to them. Some of the authors may thank the editors in the acknowledgements, and you could try emailing some of the other authors (don't ask the authors to read your manuscript though, they probably don't have time). Same goes for agents.
Depending on how much you already know, try reading Getting Your Book Published for Dummies or Cory Doctorow's book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science-Fiction (even though you aren't writing strictly sci fi, the general principles are the same). Most of the "serious" writing books I read weren't as good as either of those two, but hey, I'm either a dummy or an idiot when it comes to writing I guess:)
I actually thought you were looking for novel writing software - I'd be interested in that topic as well, I've tried out a few, but they don't seem to fit my needs as well as two open text editors (one for notes, one for writing).
You cleverly copy-and-pasted that out of the linked above article. As anyone knows, comparing polygon counts is basically useless when it comes to video game systems. The only real way to compare them is to look at cross-platform games.
I own all three, and GameCube has much, much better graphics than PS2 for pretty much all of the games. XBox has the best graphics (Panzer Dragoon Orta is beautiful), but GameCube is right up there with it.
I don't know anybody else who has PS2 and GameCube and thinks that the PS2 has better graphics. I don't think that the PS2 even supports 480p, but I could be wrong about that.
I also recommend The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias. Both are excellent for people who have money, but don't want to spend a ton of time worrying about it.
I read one of Suze Orman's books, and it was really sort of a basket case type of book, that probably won't apply to a young person who has a steady job and manageable debt. Part of her advice was to cash in the old coin jar to get a head start. Another part was about how to recover financially from a divorce. Good to read for advice, but maybe not applicable.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad can be summarized up as work for yourself, not a company, invest in sweetheart real estate deals, and don't put money into mutual funds, just private companies.
I didn't like Your Money or Your Life, but that's probably because it was dated and a dull read. I didn't finish that one.
One easy bit of financial advice - borrow these books from the library, and save some cash!
Realistically, what most slashdotters probably need to know about are:
* How to pay off your credit card debt (if you have any) * How to save up enough money for a down payment * Buy a new car, lease a car, or buy used? * Paying off student loans * Basic tax information (itemize or take the standard deduction) * How much money do you need to buy your first house? * How do I invest the money I've put into 401k, IRA, or Roth IRA? What are the differences between these plans?
Kuro5hin ran a series of articles on personal finance that were pretty good.
This is more or less nonsense. Obviously, not every city is for every one.
But I've lived in Silicon Valley and Austin, and Austin has a lot more to do than Silicon Valley. There is *nothing* to do at night in the valley without driving 50 miles to San Francisco. The only real advantage of the Valley is that Yosemite is 4 hours away, Big Sur is 2 or 3, and San Francisco is an hour away.
Austin has more outdoor activities, better bars, more live music, and much friendlier, more interesting people.
Why would you pay $1149 for the Workgroup Server 8550/200 when you could buy a brand new Powermac dual G4 tower for 1600 dollars?
You can get nice, used Blue and White G3 systems from ebay for about 300-500 dollars, and those will run OS X and modern software, especially after a RAM upgrade.
3400c/240 Refurbished 16/3GB/CD $949
This is for a crappy old powerbook with 16 megs of ram and 3 gigs of hard drive space. You can get a brand new iBook 700 mhz G3 with OS X 10.2 for $999 from Apple!
And oddly enough, the reason air and water are cleaner today than they were 20 years ago is because of environmental regulations from the EPA and state agencies.
Which parts did you find funny and why? Or don't you have any real criticism? I flipped through a few of those faq questions, and he even included the conservative view point for most of them. It's not completely balanced, sure, but the facts seem accurate on the ones I checked. Especially the car salesman:)
I heard on the radio that five dockworkers were killed so far this year, due to safety problems. One was crushed when a container was dropped on him.
The union of workers were locked out by the union of port owners because the owners felt that the union was initiating a slowdown to protest the technology changes for the clerks - the union maintains that the slowdown was for only safety concerns.
The dockworker's union sounded like it did have some very very time-consuming safety rules for doing anything, though, so to get anything done quickly, they need to cut corners on safety.
Do you work for yourself, or do you work for "the man"? I'm not a big union fan, but your employer is already profiting from your skills, that's why they hired you.
Whether or not the union takes a cut of your salary is irrelevant - you would end up working for (say) 50,000 - 2,000 = 48,000 dollars either way, as your employer would most likely keep the extra in profit. I think some of the possible advantages (health insurance, life insurance, and defined benefits for members) should be discussed.
Well, I've got the engineering degree and all, but I also studied a decent amount of economics. Trust me on this - at the high end of economic modeling, there is a lot of math and complex systems analysis - more than many EE problems. Most any investment bank will have a number of different models they put to work analyzing data and spitting out competing answers. They know all about feedback and what they think various input does to the complex systems underneath the world economy.
Unfortunately, your proposal takes much of the liquidity out of the real estate, stock, options, and commodities markets. Much like Ralph Nader's proposal to tax every share purchase a small fraction of a penny (i.e if there are 6 billion shares traded a day, and we tax each share 0.1 cent, we can make 6 million bucks a day for the gov't).
The US relies on "short-term market manipulation" to set a fair price for equities in the market.
As it is, you pay less capital gains on stocks you hold for a year and sell to the feds. If you lose money, you can take a deduction of your ordinary income - but only if you didn't repurchase the stock in the next thirty days.
There are some economists and market watchers who feel that capital gains shouldn't be taxed at all, which is an entirely different argument. As a general rule of thumb, the less taxes on capital gains, the better the market performs - one of the legacies of Reaganomics.
Fort Stockton isn't exactly the hippest place on the planet. I think it's 200 miles from San Antonio, and 200 miles from El Paso on I-10 in the middle of the extremely flat desert. It's a town of 10,000, and I have no idea what the local industry is beyond sketchy motels, dairy queens, and gas stations.
Although they do have the country's fourth largest vineyards, St. Genevieve (sp?) for some cheap plonk (6 bucks a liter)
Slashdot Mirror
iDVD '05 (or whatever it's called) will support saving a DVD image. iDVD Features
I've never used this software, but here is a web page that explains how to do the same thing with iDVD 2.0-4.0 Burning iDVD to 3rd party drives
It sounds like what you actually want is Final Cut Express, which was going for $99 with the purchase of any new Mac a while ago. I think it's $299 now.
I agree with you that Velocity is the way to go for Java web applications. We use Velocity instead of JSP for the web presentation layer.
Velocity also excels at being a general purpose templating language - sure, JSP Expression Language gives you some of what Velocity does, but you can use Velocity to process any text, anywhere in a Java application.
I highly recommend Clans, which is a strategy game for 2-4 players that takes about 30 minutes to play.
It's fast moving, the game has a clear ending, all players are in the game until the end, and best of all, you don't let the other players know what your color is, so part of the fun is trying to figure out what everyone else is.
You can buy it from Fun Again Games
One thing to consider is safety - any late model BMW, Mercedes, Saab, Volvo, or Audi is going to be much safer in an accident than most 10 year old cars. Also, the sportier cars will handle a lot better, which means you are less likely to get in an accident.
Not trying to disparage your choice of transportation, especially if you don't drive much, but there are certainly some good reasons to choose to drive a nice European car if you have the money.
I forgot one obvious place to look - have you profiled your database connections? Make sure that all of the content tables are properly indexed, and that your db servers have enough ram.
If you are looking at a rewrite of the proprietary CMS, it's probably not that cost effective if you are only paying 20k/server (one time or yearly?) + maybe a 3k/year maintenance/service cost. Figure you will need to hire at least two, possibly up to 4 developers to write the new CMS, including importing all of the existing content, user information, preferences, history, etc. Even then, you'll be responsible for any upgrades you need. Have you asked the vendor about the performance problem? You're probably paying them on a maintenance and support contract already.
Another area to consider is limiting the number of dynamic elements on the page to allow the front page to be cached. Not letting users personalize the page will let you scale a lot better - just publish a static version of the front page every minute to a URL, and serve that up to all of the users.
If you do personalize, instead of building the whole page on the fly from the database/CMS, try and figure out a strategy to cache as much of the page as possible in memory, and then add the personalized elements.
Can you serve the streaming media off of another server, without the CMS? Store the URL to the streaming media in the CMS, and then have the page build the links to point to the other server.
I don't think moving to PHP is going to solve your problem, especially if you keep the same level of dynamic page building. You'd be better off looking at caching solutions, like other posters have suggested.
Have you ever heard of the Aztec, Maya, or Incan empires?
I don't know who or what was contemporary with the Roman empire at that point in time, but there certainly were organized societies even in your world of "savages"
There is a Mozilla Calendar project at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/.
I don't think it's got the advanced scheduling capability of Outlook (yet?) but you can share calendars by publishing them to a WebDAV server. You can get a free, open source WebDAV server with either mod_dav for Apache, or with the Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.x releases.
It seems like configuration is always a problem of finding the right balance between presenting too many options to the user, and not presenting enough. Mozilla's approach is to make an easy to use Preferences control panel available, and by including about:config for use by power users.
For more fun option management, check out Preferential
Velocity makes a nice alternative to JSP for the View layer. You can plug it into Struts and use it in place of JSP, or you can embed Velocity into JSP with the Velocity JSP tag.
There's a pretty good user's guide on the Velocity web site if you want to take a look through it.
It's mentioned in the article, but this is slashdot....
Amazon Hacks
I think the best way would be to find out who edited your favorite techno thrillers, and send targeted packages to them. Some of the authors may thank the editors in the acknowledgements, and you could try emailing some of the other authors (don't ask the authors to read your manuscript though, they probably don't have time). Same goes for agents.
:)
Depending on how much you already know, try reading Getting Your Book Published for Dummies or Cory Doctorow's book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science-Fiction (even though you aren't writing strictly sci fi, the general principles are the same). Most of the "serious" writing books I read weren't as good as either of those two, but hey, I'm either a dummy or an idiot when it comes to writing I guess
I actually thought you were looking for novel writing software - I'd be interested in that topic as well, I've tried out a few, but they don't seem to fit my needs as well as two open text editors (one for notes, one for writing).
You cleverly copy-and-pasted that out of the linked above article. As anyone knows, comparing polygon counts is basically useless when it comes to video game systems. The only real way to compare them is to look at cross-platform games.
I own all three, and GameCube has much, much better graphics than PS2 for pretty much all of the games. XBox has the best graphics (Panzer Dragoon Orta is beautiful), but GameCube is right up there with it.
I don't know anybody else who has PS2 and GameCube and thinks that the PS2 has better graphics. I don't think that the PS2 even supports 480p, but I could be wrong about that.
I also recommend The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias. Both are excellent for people who have money, but don't want to spend a ton of time worrying about it.
I read one of Suze Orman's books, and it was really sort of a basket case type of book, that probably won't apply to a young person who has a steady job and manageable debt. Part of her advice was to cash in the old coin jar to get a head start. Another part was about how to recover financially from a divorce. Good to read for advice, but maybe not applicable.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad can be summarized up as work for yourself, not a company, invest in sweetheart real estate deals, and don't put money into mutual funds, just private companies.
I didn't like Your Money or Your Life, but that's probably because it was dated and a dull read. I didn't finish that one.
One easy bit of financial advice - borrow these books from the library, and save some cash!
Realistically, what most slashdotters probably need to know about are:
* How to pay off your credit card debt (if you have any)
* How to save up enough money for a down payment
* Buy a new car, lease a car, or buy used?
* Paying off student loans
* Basic tax information (itemize or take the standard deduction)
* How much money do you need to buy your first house?
* How do I invest the money I've put into 401k, IRA, or Roth IRA? What are the differences between these plans?
Kuro5hin ran a series of articles on personal finance that were pretty good.
This is more or less nonsense. Obviously, not every city is for every one.
But I've lived in Silicon Valley and Austin, and Austin has a lot more to do than Silicon Valley. There is *nothing* to do at night in the valley without driving 50 miles to San Francisco. The only real advantage of the Valley is that Yosemite is 4 hours away, Big Sur is 2 or 3, and San Francisco is an hour away.
Austin has more outdoor activities, better bars, more live music, and much friendlier, more interesting people.
Good grief, have you ever even been to texas? Houston is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the country.
Parametric, they are the software company who makes Pro/E.
You can get nice, used Blue and White G3 systems from ebay for about 300-500 dollars, and those will run OS X and modern software, especially after a RAM upgrade.
3400c/240 Refurbished 16/3GB/CD $949
This is for a crappy old powerbook with 16 megs of ram and 3 gigs of hard drive space. You can get a brand new iBook 700 mhz G3 with OS X 10.2 for $999 from Apple!
And oddly enough, the reason air and water are cleaner today than they were 20 years ago is because of environmental regulations from the EPA and state agencies.
Which parts did you find funny and why? Or don't you have any real criticism? I flipped through a few of those faq questions, and he even included the conservative view point for most of them. It's not completely balanced, sure, but the facts seem accurate on the ones I checked. Especially the car salesman :)
I heard on the radio that five dockworkers were killed so far this year, due to safety problems. One was crushed when a container was dropped on him.
The union of workers were locked out by the union of port owners because the owners felt that the union was initiating a slowdown to protest the technology changes for the clerks - the union maintains that the slowdown was for only safety concerns.
The dockworker's union sounded like it did have some very very time-consuming safety rules for doing anything, though, so to get anything done quickly, they need to cut corners on safety.
I don't think there is an easy answer here.
Do you work for yourself, or do you work for "the man"? I'm not a big union fan, but your employer is already profiting from your skills, that's why they hired you.
Whether or not the union takes a cut of your salary is irrelevant - you would end up working for (say) 50,000 - 2,000 = 48,000 dollars either way, as your employer would most likely keep the extra in profit. I think some of the possible advantages (health insurance, life insurance, and defined benefits for members) should be discussed.
Well, I've got the engineering degree and all, but I also studied a decent amount of economics. Trust me on this - at the high end of economic modeling, there is a lot of math and complex systems analysis - more than many EE problems. Most any investment bank will have a number of different models they put to work analyzing data and spitting out competing answers. They know all about feedback and what they think various input does to the complex systems underneath the world economy.
Unfortunately, your proposal takes much of the liquidity out of the real estate, stock, options, and commodities markets. Much like Ralph Nader's proposal to tax every share purchase a small fraction of a penny (i.e if there are 6 billion shares traded a day, and we tax each share 0.1 cent, we can make 6 million bucks a day for the gov't).
The US relies on "short-term market manipulation" to set a fair price for equities in the market.
As it is, you pay less capital gains on stocks you hold for a year and sell to the feds. If you lose money, you can take a deduction of your ordinary income - but only if you didn't repurchase the stock in the next thirty days.
There are some economists and market watchers who feel that capital gains shouldn't be taxed at all, which is an entirely different argument. As a general rule of thumb, the less taxes on capital gains, the better the market performs - one of the legacies of Reaganomics.
Fort Stockton isn't exactly the hippest place on the planet. I think it's 200 miles from San Antonio, and 200 miles from El Paso on I-10 in the middle of the extremely flat desert. It's a town of 10,000, and I have no idea what the local industry is beyond sketchy motels, dairy queens, and gas stations.
Although they do have the country's fourth largest vineyards, St. Genevieve (sp?) for some cheap plonk (6 bucks a liter)