But Disney has an Ace up their sleeve. They will retain the sequel rights to all the Pixar movies made under the current contract. So they can churn out straight-to-video sequels to Toy Story at will.
And this is why Disney probably won't be able to make a deal with Pixar. Disney has never dealt with a company that can consistantly come up with new and interesting characters. The Disney way is to re-hash successful characters. The Pixar way is to create new. Disney can not understand this way of business.
While Disney could re-hash direct to video Toy Story movies, Pixar will continue to turn out interesting new characters and stories, and make a killing at the box office and through home sales. Pixar operates more under the original 17 year copyright law, while Disney operates under the current copyright law.
Honestly, all there is to the design is a PNG image with alpha transparency and a fixed background image. I have seen much more impressive designs that are compliant.
From the site:
Remember: as you look this demo over, there is no Javascript here, nor are any PNGs being used, nor do I employ any proprietary extensions to CSS or any other language.
Linux however is still IMHO better as a server platform because it enables you to cut out all the crap that goes with the OSX gui. Its much easier to set-up , configure and run in headless operation. Its easier to patch and keep up to date. OSX can be more expensive to keep running if you manage to get yourself into the upgrade cycle.
Under OS X 10.3 Server this is no longer true. In fact, Apple has a whole manual dedicated to commandline administration. Using the systemsetup command allows you to change almost anything. And if you want that GUI goodness, you run Server Admin or Workgroup Manager on an OS X Client somewhere to configure the machines.
At the login screen, you can enter:
>console
to turn off all the GUI crap on the server.
And a quick:
root# softwareupdate -i -a
at the command-line will update the machine.
You can even do a headless install of OS X server if you are so inclined, and you can automate the install if you need to configure more than one machine.
Back to the topic... I installed Ubuntu on an old AMD K6-400 with 256MB of ram, and was quite surprised at the performance. It took a while for applications to start (Firefox took a minute or two), but once started it was usable.
So let me get this right, did Apple now invent LCD all-in-one computers? You do know that they where around prior to even the original iMac (see Sun Voyager for an example)?
I'd like to break away on my own (and cash out that yummy 403b my current employer's been generously contributing to for the last 5 years), but I'm unsure just how to become a sysadmin for hire.
It's usually a bad idea to withdraw from your 403b. You're better off transfering it to another retirement plan so you don't get hit with more taxes.
Maybe it is because the USA really did not need any more reasons to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He still holds the distinction of being the only ruler ever, to use chemical weapons against his own citizens.
How soon we forget Hitler.
Granted it was in gas chambers and not as a weapon.
For the first time an animation company has come along that can create new and interesting characters and movies, without have to rehash old characters or make sequels. Eisner is hoping to lord over Pixar all the characters from Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc. in the hope that Pixar will come back to Disney. It must drive Eisner nuts that Pixar doesn't need their old characters or movies!
(BTW, I noticed Disney released another Lion King movie this past week.... It's time to stop beating a dead horse (or lion) and make some new stuff!)
Unfortunately, these iMac's never turn off the screen. They cool by convection, with the heat of the monitor tube causing the air in the iMac to rise bringing in cool air underneath. You can set it to turn off the screen, but this will only blank it, not shut it down.
You'll either want an older iMac (tray loading, not slot loading) or a G4 cube.
For fully automated restores, add Apple Remote Desktop to Netrestore in full automation mode. From one machine you select which ones you want to restore and set their startup disk to netboot the NetRestore image and restart the machines. NetRestore will image the machine, set the startup disk back to the hard drive and restart the machine. It can also name the machine if you want. DHCP makes configurations a little easier too.
One thing we've done is partitioned the hard drive into two partitions, a 15-20GB boot partition and the rest a temp. Students are told to save their iMovie projects and other things too large for their server account (which we limit to 300MB) onto this Temp drive. We can then re-image at will and not worry about trampling over any student files.
If the clients are all OS X there is a pretty good chance there are some OS X servers in the building. Turn on the Quicktime server and install Quicktime Broadcaster on a client machine. Plug the camera into the client and you can broadcast through out the school.
If your content is on VHS tape use a media converter to send the content to Quicktime Broadcaster (or edit it into Quicktime and put it on the server).
2. Group policies. Being able to lock down every little setting and creating a uniform "expierience" at every workstation from a central management console is crucial.
Workgroup Manager under OS X Server serves the same purpose. Manages users, computers, and groups, allowing you to control everything based on either the computer, the group, or the user.
. Cost. Windows on X86 is a cheap platform. We pay $40.00 per copy of windows and $60.00 per copy of MS office. I like OS X, but at Academic pricing it is still $99.00.
I've been pissed for years about the moronic school IT bureaucrats blowing my tax money on Macs. Even if they get them free, they still have to spend money to admin them. You teach kids all this Mac stuff, then they get in the real world and it's 98% Windows and their Mac skills were a waste of time.
I administer approximately 700 macs among 7 buildings. During my work week, the actual time spent on problems with the macs is less than 8 hours. If a machine is acting funky and cannot be fixed in 15 minutes, it is restored over the network. Every user (2350 students and teachers) have their own user accounts. Hardware issues are practically nonexistent (most of the time it's a hard drive failure). I do not have any virus or spyware problems. At the HS the business lap is running thin-clients through the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project. The ltsp server mounts their home directories from the OS X server and authenticates over LDAP on the OS X server.
And when we start talking about the real world, what version of Windows should we have? According to this News.com only 62% of companies ($50 million or more) have moved to XP and 80% of companies still have Win95 or Win98. If people do not have problems going from 95/98 to XP, they will not have problems going from OS X and XP.
1. Administration. Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory, hard-drive-based backup of network storage, web caching and filtering, and the like, we're having to jump through hoops to get our Macs to work with these new systems.
Active Directory support
Panther also includes enhanced support for Active Directory, so you can more easily integrate Macs into a managed Windows network. Your network administrator can use the same password authentication system that Windows people use, and can mount your network based home directory as a share point from a Windows server, if that's how your network is set up.
2. Administration again. We've implemented RIS of all PC machines that can PXE boot, which is most of the ones on campus. If a machine is acting funky, we just PXE boot and walk away, and two hours later, all of the OS components and applications are restored to their original state -- the hard drive has been wiped clean and redone. Macs just can't do this. Every time a Mac is acting funky, we need to spend several hours of our valuable IT time redoing it and reinstalling apps. We can't afford that.
It requires an OS X Server, but Netrestore lets you hold down the N key while you turn on the machine and it will automatically restore the machine. Even without an OS X server you can put off of the Panther CD and restore the machine from an image hosted on a web server or AFP server. All at no cost.
3. Cost. Macs cost a lot. The machines that are getting delivered tomorrow are Dell Dimension 4600s with 2.8 GHz processors, 512 MB of dual-channel RAM, 80 GB hard drives, and 17" Dell UltraSharp flat panels. We got them for $800 a pop. You just can't compare a $900 eMac to that kind of value.
eMacs are $650 for educational institutions. For $1,056 you can get a Superdrive equipped machine with 512MB of RAM and 160GB HD.
The studios would be expected to pay for a machine to encode its discs and a licensing fee to use Cinea's anti-piracy technology.
"So you are a small indie studio with that incredible good movie (just picked up all prizes in the european festivals).
Sorry, if you can't pay a few megabucks for the license & machines and some more kilobucks for making a few thousand individual watermarked DVDs, then the academy award is not for you.
Only if they make it a requirement that you must distribute your movie to the academy members with this encryption. What's to stop a small indie studio of just distributing a regular DVD? Especially if the movie has already been released on DVD?
That's Moore's claim. However, his original version was that Disney killed the film because Jeb Bush would try to take away Disney's tax breaks on DisneyWorld in Florida... that's nice, but no such tax breaks exist for them to lose.
From the Seattle Times: For example, in Osceola County, Fla., Walt Disney World receives the farming break on 1,600 acres of pasture, timber and nurseries where it grows plants for its theme parks. The land, worth $194 million, is taxed as if it were worth $12.3 million, according to the county land records office. Disney spokeswoman Jacquee Polack said the company keeps a buffer of undeveloped land around the park, but she acknowledged some of this property will be developed.
But this probably wasn't what Moore was thinking about...:-)
It seems like the best way to do it (and cheapest) would be to call from your computer over the internet to a computer in the city you wanted to call to, which would then hook up to the regular phone line via a modem. I was looking for something like this, but haven't found anything on freshmeat, etc. (Any links out there?)
Look at Asterisk for the server side of things and at least one IP phone (the Grandstream BudgeTone series are around 70-80). Put a X100P FX0 to give the Asterisk server access to an outside line.
I've setup a Linux box and Asterisk along with a couple Grandstream IP phones. The quality was as good as a landline phone, and we'll probably be rolling out a test next year sometime, putting phones in all the classrooms (we're a public school). One card in the server to get us an outside line and we're set....
As soon as wireless VOIP phones come down in price, I'll be running my own wireless service for myself. I plan on setting up an Asterix server at home plugged into my landline. I can then use my VOIP phone anywhere in the world to call!
My favorte "history" book is Micaehl Crichton's Timeline. Has some good quantum physics (very well dumbed down) in it too to give the book some sense of realism to the technology in it.
But whatever you do, DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE! The book is sooo much better, and not the old chestnut that the book is always better than the movie. Timeline the movie blows.
If you think you were hacked than assume you were hacked. Boot up the machine in Firewire target mode, mount the drive on another mac, and copy over your Users folder.
Re-boot your machine and install from scratch and then re-install you applications. You can then copy the Users folder back over and create your users. OS X should set the permissions correctly on the folders in Users if you use the same usernames (IIRC). It's the only way to be sure...
I recently finished putting together a digital picture frame. I bought an old IBM thinkpad from eBay ($10) and a power adapter (another $10 from eBay).
This is a 486 with 2 MB of ram and only a floppy drive. A DOS boot disk boots the machine, sets up a ramdisk, copies the pictures to the ramdisk, and then runs a slideshow with pictures from the ramdisk. Totally silent and heat issues are non-existant.
I haven't had time, but I'm just going to make up a couple of disks with different categories of pictures. A nature disk, family disk, etc. I just have to reboot the machine when I want to a different category. I resize all the pictures to 640X480 (resolution of the screen) so they are pretty small (50k) and I can fit quite a few on a floppy.
My next project will be to wire a timer into the display switch that detects movement. Once movement is detected it switches on the display for a preset time. That way I don't have to worry about the screen being on for the 16 hours a day I'm at work or asleep.
My biggest complaint is that I didn't do my research on the laptop. The passive matrix screen really blows.
The governor estimates a business tax increase of $64 million by eliminating the distinction between canned software sold at retail (subject to sales tax), custom software (subject to service occupation tax on the value of tangible personal property transferred with the software) and software licensed or leased by the developer (currently not taxed).
The relevant section is that software licensed or leased by the developer will now be taxed. Since Microsoft essentially leases their software under the Software Assurance plan, that means there will now be an extra tax burden on companies using Microsoft products. Microsoft will make sure that doesn't happen, because that will just be one more reason to switch to an OSS solution.
Christ, I should've looked into a camera that burns cds. Didn't realize they existed, and I bought a Canon A70 last week. Damn. I'll reckon I should sell it and buy a Sony Mavica. Thanks, ivanandre.
We have two of the Sony Mavica CD-350 and have had nothing but problems with them. They are very fragile when it comes to vibration, and haven't had good luck on pulling the pictures off.
I vote for the iPod and media reader. For a portable computer I use a HP Jornada 720. It has a built in modem or I use a wireless card in the PC Card slot. It also has a CF slot.
Pick somewhere that the cost of living is low, say North or South Dakota, start your own outsourcing firm and start contracting with companies. According to this salary calculator, a $60,000 salary in San Francisco is equivilant to $23,778 in Fargo, ND. I'm sure a lot of companies might prefer to outsource an employee at $30,000 vs. someone in a different culture/language/timezone. In fact, your outsourcing firm could be based anywhere, and your employees could be anywhere, as long as they have fast connection.
P.S. San Francisco to Columbus Ohio, that $60,000 is equivilant to $41,000.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is why Disney probably won't be able to make a deal with Pixar. Disney has never dealt with a company that can consistantly come up with new and interesting characters. The Disney way is to re-hash successful characters. The Pixar way is to create new. Disney can not understand this way of business.
While Disney could re-hash direct to video Toy Story movies, Pixar will continue to turn out interesting new characters and stories, and make a killing at the box office and through home sales. Pixar operates more under the original 17 year copyright law, while Disney operates under the current copyright law.
From the site:
Anyway, CSS Zen Garden is fantastic!
Under OS X 10.3 Server this is no longer true. In fact, Apple has a whole manual dedicated to commandline administration. Using the systemsetup command allows you to change almost anything. And if you want that GUI goodness, you run Server Admin or Workgroup Manager on an OS X Client somewhere to configure the machines.
At the login screen, you can enter: >console to turn off all the GUI crap on the server.
And a quick: root# softwareupdate -i -a at the command-line will update the machine.
You can even do a headless install of OS X server if you are so inclined, and you can automate the install if you need to configure more than one machine.
Back to the topic... I installed Ubuntu on an old AMD K6-400 with 256MB of ram, and was quite surprised at the performance. It took a while for applications to start (Firefox took a minute or two), but once started it was usable.
While the Sun SPARCstation Voyager did come out in 1994, it was only three years later that Apple released the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. At least the Mac was competitively priced at $7,499 versus the $13,995 of the Voyager... :-)
It's usually a bad idea to withdraw from your 403b. You're better off transfering it to another retirement plan so you don't get hit with more taxes.
I think you would have to distribute your content for free, and make up the costs through licensing of products and product placement.
How soon we forget Hitler. Granted it was in gas chambers and not as a weapon.
For the first time an animation company has come along that can create new and interesting characters and movies, without have to rehash old characters or make sequels. Eisner is hoping to lord over Pixar all the characters from Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc. in the hope that Pixar will come back to Disney. It must drive Eisner nuts that Pixar doesn't need their old characters or movies!
(BTW, I noticed Disney released another Lion King movie this past week.... It's time to stop beating a dead horse (or lion) and make some new stuff!)
You'll either want an older iMac (tray loading, not slot loading) or a G4 cube.
For fully automated restores, add Apple Remote Desktop to Netrestore in full automation mode. From one machine you select which ones you want to restore and set their startup disk to netboot the NetRestore image and restart the machines. NetRestore will image the machine, set the startup disk back to the hard drive and restart the machine. It can also name the machine if you want. DHCP makes configurations a little easier too.
One thing we've done is partitioned the hard drive into two partitions, a 15-20GB boot partition and the rest a temp. Students are told to save their iMovie projects and other things too large for their server account (which we limit to 300MB) onto this Temp drive. We can then re-image at will and not worry about trampling over any student files.
If the clients are all OS X there is a pretty good chance there are some OS X servers in the building. Turn on the Quicktime server and install Quicktime Broadcaster on a client machine. Plug the camera into the client and you can broadcast through out the school.
If your content is on VHS tape use a media converter to send the content to Quicktime Broadcaster (or edit it into Quicktime and put it on the server).
Workgroup Manager under OS X Server serves the same purpose. Manages users, computers, and groups, allowing you to control everything based on either the computer, the group, or the user.
Academic pricing for OS X is $69.00.
I administer approximately 700 macs among 7 buildings. During my work week, the actual time spent on problems with the macs is less than 8 hours. If a machine is acting funky and cannot be fixed in 15 minutes, it is restored over the network. Every user (2350 students and teachers) have their own user accounts. Hardware issues are practically nonexistent (most of the time it's a hard drive failure). I do not have any virus or spyware problems. At the HS the business lap is running thin-clients through the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project. The ltsp server mounts their home directories from the OS X server and authenticates over LDAP on the OS X server.
And when we start talking about the real world, what version of Windows should we have? According to this News.com only 62% of companies ($50 million or more) have moved to XP and 80% of companies still have Win95 or Win98. If people do not have problems going from 95/98 to XP, they will not have problems going from OS X and XP.
eMacs are $650 for schools. And you save certain costs such as antivirus software and ghosting software.
From Apple.com:
Active Directory support
Panther also includes enhanced support for Active Directory, so you can more easily integrate Macs into a managed Windows network. Your network administrator can use the same password authentication system that Windows people use, and can mount your network based home directory as a share point from a Windows server, if that's how your network is set up.
It requires an OS X Server, but Netrestore lets you hold down the N key while you turn on the machine and it will automatically restore the machine. Even without an OS X server you can put off of the Panther CD and restore the machine from an image hosted on a web server or AFP server. All at no cost.
eMacs are $650 for educational institutions. For $1,056 you can get a Superdrive equipped machine with 512MB of RAM and 160GB HD.
Only if they make it a requirement that you must distribute your movie to the academy members with this encryption. What's to stop a small indie studio of just distributing a regular DVD? Especially if the movie has already been released on DVD?
From the Seattle Times: For example, in Osceola County, Fla., Walt Disney World receives the farming break on 1,600 acres of pasture, timber and nurseries where it grows plants for its theme parks. The land, worth $194 million, is taxed as if it were worth $12.3 million, according to the county land records office. Disney spokeswoman Jacquee Polack said the company keeps a buffer of undeveloped land around the park, but she acknowledged some of this property will be developed.
But this probably wasn't what Moore was thinking about... :-)
Look at Asterisk for the server side of things and at least one IP phone (the Grandstream BudgeTone series are around 70-80). Put a X100P FX0 to give the Asterisk server access to an outside line.
I've setup a Linux box and Asterisk along with a couple Grandstream IP phones. The quality was as good as a landline phone, and we'll probably be rolling out a test next year sometime, putting phones in all the classrooms (we're a public school). One card in the server to get us an outside line and we're set....
As soon as wireless VOIP phones come down in price, I'll be running my own wireless service for myself. I plan on setting up an Asterix server at home plugged into my landline. I can then use my VOIP phone anywhere in the world to call!
Being able to cheaply setup VOIP using your existing landline at home will decimate cell service as soon as more WIFI hotspots get out. IDT is already looking at this as a replacement for cell services.
But whatever you do, DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE! The book is sooo much better, and not the old chestnut that the book is always better than the movie. Timeline the movie blows.
If you think you were hacked than assume you were hacked. Boot up the machine in Firewire target mode, mount the drive on another mac, and copy over your Users folder.
Re-boot your machine and install from scratch and then re-install you applications. You can then copy the Users folder back over and create your users. OS X should set the permissions correctly on the folders in Users if you use the same usernames (IIRC). It's the only way to be sure...
I recently finished putting together a digital picture frame. I bought an old IBM thinkpad from eBay ($10) and a power adapter (another $10 from eBay).
This is a 486 with 2 MB of ram and only a floppy drive. A DOS boot disk boots the machine, sets up a ramdisk, copies the pictures to the ramdisk, and then runs a slideshow with pictures from the ramdisk. Totally silent and heat issues are non-existant.
I haven't had time, but I'm just going to make up a couple of disks with different categories of pictures. A nature disk, family disk, etc. I just have to reboot the machine when I want to a different category. I resize all the pictures to 640X480 (resolution of the screen) so they are pretty small (50k) and I can fit quite a few on a floppy.
My next project will be to wire a timer into the display switch that detects movement. Once movement is detected it switches on the display for a preset time. That way I don't have to worry about the screen being on for the 16 hours a day I'm at work or asleep.
My biggest complaint is that I didn't do my research on the laptop. The passive matrix screen really blows.
The relevant section is that software licensed or leased by the developer will now be taxed. Since Microsoft essentially leases their software under the Software Assurance plan, that means there will now be an extra tax burden on companies using Microsoft products. Microsoft will make sure that doesn't happen, because that will just be one more reason to switch to an OSS solution.
We have two of the Sony Mavica CD-350 and have had nothing but problems with them. They are very fragile when it comes to vibration, and haven't had good luck on pulling the pictures off.
I vote for the iPod and media reader. For a portable computer I use a HP Jornada 720. It has a built in modem or I use a wireless card in the PC Card slot. It also has a CF slot.
Pick somewhere that the cost of living is low, say North or South Dakota, start your own outsourcing firm and start contracting with companies. According to this salary calculator, a $60,000 salary in San Francisco is equivilant to $23,778 in Fargo, ND. I'm sure a lot of companies might prefer to outsource an employee at $30,000 vs. someone in a different culture/language/timezone. In fact, your outsourcing firm could be based anywhere, and your employees could be anywhere, as long as they have fast connection.
P.S. San Francisco to Columbus Ohio, that $60,000 is equivilant to $41,000.