I'm guilty of this from time to time. The last time, I was lost and needed to do some quick Googling. I pulled into a neighborhood, fired up iStumbler on the iBook, found a house with an open access point, got my directions and then went on my merry way.
I think that's the spirit of open WiFi. When I was in college (graduated in May '04) I purposely left my access point open so the other poor students in my neighborhood could use our connection. We never had a problem with leeching.
However, now that I'm out in the real world with a job and my own house there's a little more at stake. I mean, what would happen if some dude parked in my driveway and started downloading kiddie porn while I was at work? The ISP could shut down my connection and inform the authorities. I guess if it came down to it I could prove that the dude's MAC address didn't match any of my Macs' MAC addresses, but good luck explaning that to the police.
So I've somewhat unwillingly decided to password protect my access point. Bleh. But at least it has a clever name.
I read some interesting conspiracy theories on a board somewhere shortly after the keynote.
This theorist postulated that the root of the switch is not a result of speed deficiencies or cloudy roadmaps from IBM, but rather based on the lack of hardware-level copy protection in the PowerPC. The poster noted that the Pentium has several levels of hardware DRM and that the content providers (record and movie companies) were demanding more secure DRM.
Any truth to this? Have y'all heard anything? If it turns out to be true, I'll be buying one of the very last dual G5s...
Instead of all this malarkey, why not go to Wal*Mart and pick up a window air conditioner? I saw a 5000 BTU air conditioner for $78 this weekend. It's probably about as efficient (500 watts) as running that fan all the time and the extra load on the freezer...
Users in the forums of several Mac rumors sites have pontificated that this switch may have been prompted by the hardware DRM already integrated into the Intel chips. Since more and more of Apple's revenue comes from content (iTunes music store, future video store, etc) one has to wonder if the movie studios and record labels demanded the DRM.
Initially I'd thought that this change would've killed my desire for a new Mac to replace my five-year-old G4. But, after thinking about it a bit, it seems like it might be a good idea to pick up one of the last fast DRM-less dual G5s once they get nice and cheap.
Yeah, they definitely don't work on QuickTime on even relatively new iBooks.
I dumped one of the 1080p ones into iMovie HD on a 1 GHz 12" iBook with 512MB of RAM. It worked fine. I used the 16:9 widescreen DV format. Granted, it lost a some detail, but it still looked beautiful at full screen (and at least it played).
It took about 15 minutes to convert the H.264 into a format that iMovie could use. Also, it was the first time that I've ever heard this iBook's fan come on.:)
Yeah, a G4/500 should work fine. I have a G4 Dual 450 (purchased in July 2000) that I've upgraded a bit over the years and it runs 10.3 beautifully. I've added more RAM, a faster hard drive, a SuperDrive and a video card.
The video card made the biggest difference since it supports Quartz Extreme and freed the processors from dealing with all the eye candy. If you're still using the original Rage 128, look on eBay for a 32MB Mac RADEON. I got mine for ~$35.
There's been sort of an underground movement here at UTA where I work. The chalkings are quite good with lots of detail. From what I've heard the university hasn't been getting too annoyed 'cause there's no permanent damage.
You'll have to take a screenshot since the maps are made up of a bunch of separate images. It ain't too hard, 'specially if you can set your monitor to something like 1600x1200...it'll scale to fill the whole screen.
Wow, it would've been great if they could've vectorized it. That way the maps would print at your printer's max DPI--not all pixilated at 72 PPI. Still, it's a damn sight better than all the other ones.
My sister just went off to college and needed a laptop. I told her that I'd buy one for her, under one condition: it would be an Mac. Initially she was a bit hesitant, having only used Windows PCs her whole life. But I'm 1000 miles away and didn't want to have to deal with spyware/adware/virus/trojan/Windows problems over the phone.
There was a short learning curve (about a week) while got used to it, but now she loves it. There have been no problems in six months. Like me, she now gets frustrated when she has to use a PC. It's funny. The day it arrived, she sounded like an Apple commercial. Her exact words were, "I was on the internet in one click!"
We just got my mom a new Dell, but only because the MiniMac wasn't available at the time....boo hiss.
I manage the tech/training for student publications at a university. Our server is an Apple Xserve supplied by OIT. It works great but we do not let them back it up because it is prohibitively expensive.
Our solution was to buy a couple 160GB FireWire LaCie hard drives. They have heavy-duty aluminum cases and USB2, FireWire and FireWire 800 interfaces. I use CMS Products' freeBounceBack Backup Express software to automatically syncronize the files on the server to the files on the hard disks.
It works great. It mounts the server's drive and updates only the files that have changed. We have two drives and alternate backing them up so there is always one off site (my house...ha) in case the building burns down.
I concur. I bought a dual-processor Mac about four years ago...the twin G4's really aren't that fast (450 MHz each)--but, working together, the machine is still plenty fast and responsive for everything I need to do. I've used a single-processor 933 MHz G4 and it felt sorta pokey in comparison.
I work at a university and our traffic seems to have remained about the same. The students tell me that most everything is blocked in the dorms, tho, so I'm not sure if we had much of a problem here anyway. But, yeah, here are some numbers.:)
All the Bluetooth stuff is in Applications --> Utilities. The one you want is Bluetooth File Exchange. Don't be prepared for blistering speed--I get 7 KB/sec...
I have a Sony Ericsson T610 camera phone with T-Mobile service and a D-Link Bluetooth dongle. I can transfer whatever I want (MIDI ringtones, pictures, wallpaper, whatever) to and from the phone for free. Of course, I get charged if I take a picture and beam it to someone else through T-Mobile--but it's just as easy to move it to my Mac and email it.
Apple includes a very good Bluetooth utility for browsing and transferring files on the phone. And iSync automatically syncs my address book with the contacts in the phone. Awesome.
Maybe not the firmware, but I recently did a reinstall on my G4 and was using an older version of iTunes again. The first time I went to the Music Store (to snag one of the weekly free downloads) it told me that my current version of iTunes was too old and that I'd have to update it.
Never mind that this same version of iTunes had worked flawlessly at the store just a few months prior...
Understood...mine too. But I have a cell phone and use it for most of my local and long-distance calls. I do have a landline but only 'cause DSL's the only option in my apt complex.
But, let's face it. Cell phone quality isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when you're talking to another cell phone user. And I have a 2.5 Mbit connection sitting here idle most of the time. Why don't more people exploit that? I mean, I'm already paying $50 a month for it. Why add another bill?
Am I just being stupid and missing something obvious? Couldn't you just use something like iChat AV, MSN, Yahoo IM, or AIM? iChat has nice voice/video conferencing built in, and it's free and totally unmetered aside from a monthly DSL bill, of course. The next version that will ship with OS X 10.4 will be even better.
I am going to buy webcams for my family for Christmas so we can all get online and talk to each other and save the long-distance charges.
Chicago is the font Apple uses on the iPod (but not on the iPod Mini). Back in the day it was the font for all the Mac's menus and dialog boxes, later replaced by Charcoal and--today--Lucida Grande, IIRC. Here is a scan of my iPod's screen so you can see Chicago in all its glory.
There's more info about Apple's fonts on Wikipedia, but for some reason Slashdot won't let me link to it. Here's the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_fonts
I hooked up a Sony MiniDV camcorder to my Sony DVD player with RCA jacks and it wouldn't let me record anything, so there's a good chance that this thing won't either.
I had everything running through my Harman/Kardon receiver and the camcorder would record broadcast or cable TV just fine....but it balked immediately when I switched the video input to the DVD player. Macrovision?
I got a different one using Safari on OS X 10.3.4.
"Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must have Windows 98/SE, ME, 2000 or XP, which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.
We do not anticipate supporting Mac or Linux in the near future."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guilty of this from time to time. The last time, I was lost and needed to do some quick Googling. I pulled into a neighborhood, fired up iStumbler on the iBook, found a house with an open access point, got my directions and then went on my merry way.
I think that's the spirit of open WiFi. When I was in college (graduated in May '04) I purposely left my access point open so the other poor students in my neighborhood could use our connection. We never had a problem with leeching.
However, now that I'm out in the real world with a job and my own house there's a little more at stake. I mean, what would happen if some dude parked in my driveway and started downloading kiddie porn while I was at work? The ISP could shut down my connection and inform the authorities. I guess if it came down to it I could prove that the dude's MAC address didn't match any of my Macs' MAC addresses, but good luck explaning that to the police.
So I've somewhat unwillingly decided to password protect my access point. Bleh. But at least it has a clever name.
I read some interesting conspiracy theories on a board somewhere shortly after the keynote.
This theorist postulated that the root of the switch is not a result of speed deficiencies or cloudy roadmaps from IBM, but rather based on the lack of hardware-level copy protection in the PowerPC. The poster noted that the Pentium has several levels of hardware DRM and that the content providers (record and movie companies) were demanding more secure DRM.
Any truth to this? Have y'all heard anything? If it turns out to be true, I'll be buying one of the very last dual G5s...
Maybe they ordered more since I'm down here in Texas, but the Wal*Mart I went to in Ft. Worth had about 50 of 'em.
Instead of all this malarkey, why not go to Wal*Mart and pick up a window air conditioner? I saw a 5000 BTU air conditioner for $78 this weekend. It's probably about as efficient (500 watts) as running that fan all the time and the extra load on the freezer...
Users in the forums of several Mac rumors sites have pontificated that this switch may have been prompted by the hardware DRM already integrated into the Intel chips. Since more and more of Apple's revenue comes from content (iTunes music store, future video store, etc) one has to wonder if the movie studios and record labels demanded the DRM.
Initially I'd thought that this change would've killed my desire for a new Mac to replace my five-year-old G4. But, after thinking about it a bit, it seems like it might be a good idea to pick up one of the last fast DRM-less dual G5s once they get nice and cheap.
What do y'all think?
Yeah, they definitely don't work on QuickTime on even relatively new iBooks.
:)
I dumped one of the 1080p ones into iMovie HD on a 1 GHz 12" iBook with 512MB of RAM. It worked fine. I used the 16:9 widescreen DV format. Granted, it lost a some detail, but it still looked beautiful at full screen (and at least it played).
It took about 15 minutes to convert the H.264 into a format that iMovie could use. Also, it was the first time that I've ever heard this iBook's fan come on.
Yeah, a G4/500 should work fine. I have a G4 Dual 450 (purchased in July 2000) that I've upgraded a bit over the years and it runs 10.3 beautifully. I've added more RAM, a faster hard drive, a SuperDrive and a video card.
The video card made the biggest difference since it supports Quartz Extreme and freed the processors from dealing with all the eye candy. If you're still using the original Rage 128, look on eBay for a 32MB Mac RADEON. I got mine for ~$35.
Then you can use any MIDI ringtone you'd like, as well as transfer images out of the phone without paying a per-image charge.
I have a Sony Ericsson T610 and it's great.
Fight the man!
There's been sort of an underground movement here at UTA where I work. The chalkings are quite good with lots of detail. From what I've heard the university hasn't been getting too annoyed 'cause there's no permanent damage.
Check these out:
Mario and Bubble Bobble
Uh uh. 'Cause in your example there would be three less cars on the road.
You'll have to take a screenshot since the maps are made up of a bunch of separate images. It ain't too hard, 'specially if you can set your monitor to something like 1600x1200...it'll scale to fill the whole screen.
Wow, it would've been great if they could've vectorized it. That way the maps would print at your printer's max DPI--not all pixilated at 72 PPI. Still, it's a damn sight better than all the other ones.
Wow, didn't know that....cool.
My sister just went off to college and needed a laptop. I told her that I'd buy one for her, under one condition: it would be an Mac. Initially she was a bit hesitant, having only used Windows PCs her whole life. But I'm 1000 miles away and didn't want to have to deal with spyware/adware/virus/trojan/Windows problems over the phone.
There was a short learning curve (about a week) while got used to it, but now she loves it. There have been no problems in six months. Like me, she now gets frustrated when she has to use a PC. It's funny. The day it arrived, she sounded like an Apple commercial. Her exact words were, "I was on the internet in one click!"
We just got my mom a new Dell, but only because the MiniMac wasn't available at the time....boo hiss.
I manage the tech/training for student publications at a university. Our server is an Apple Xserve supplied by OIT. It works great but we do not let them back it up because it is prohibitively expensive.
Our solution was to buy a couple 160GB FireWire LaCie hard drives. They have heavy-duty aluminum cases and USB2, FireWire and FireWire 800 interfaces. I use CMS Products' free BounceBack Backup Express software to automatically syncronize the files on the server to the files on the hard disks.
It works great. It mounts the server's drive and updates only the files that have changed. We have two drives and alternate backing them up so there is always one off site (my house...ha) in case the building burns down.
I concur. I bought a dual-processor Mac about four years ago...the twin G4's really aren't that fast (450 MHz each)--but, working together, the machine is still plenty fast and responsive for everything I need to do. I've used a single-processor 933 MHz G4 and it felt sorta pokey in comparison.
I work at a university and our traffic seems to have remained about the same. The students tell me that most everything is blocked in the dorms, tho, so I'm not sure if we had much of a problem here anyway. But, yeah, here are some numbers. :)
All the Bluetooth stuff is in Applications --> Utilities. The one you want is Bluetooth File Exchange. Don't be prepared for blistering speed--I get 7 KB/sec...
I have a Sony Ericsson T610 camera phone with T-Mobile service and a D-Link Bluetooth dongle. I can transfer whatever I want (MIDI ringtones, pictures, wallpaper, whatever) to and from the phone for free. Of course, I get charged if I take a picture and beam it to someone else through T-Mobile--but it's just as easy to move it to my Mac and email it.
Apple includes a very good Bluetooth utility for browsing and transferring files on the phone. And iSync automatically syncs my address book with the contacts in the phone. Awesome.
Maybe not the firmware, but I recently did a reinstall on my G4 and was using an older version of iTunes again. The first time I went to the Music Store (to snag one of the weekly free downloads) it told me that my current version of iTunes was too old and that I'd have to update it.
Never mind that this same version of iTunes had worked flawlessly at the store just a few months prior...
Understood...mine too. But I have a cell phone and use it for most of my local and long-distance calls. I do have a landline but only 'cause DSL's the only option in my apt complex.
But, let's face it. Cell phone quality isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when you're talking to another cell phone user. And I have a 2.5 Mbit connection sitting here idle most of the time. Why don't more people exploit that? I mean, I'm already paying $50 a month for it. Why add another bill?
Am I just being stupid and missing something obvious? Couldn't you just use something like iChat AV, MSN, Yahoo IM, or AIM? iChat has nice voice/video conferencing built in, and it's free and totally unmetered aside from a monthly DSL bill, of course. The next version that will ship with OS X 10.4 will be even better.
I am going to buy webcams for my family for Christmas so we can all get online and talk to each other and save the long-distance charges.
Chicago is the font Apple uses on the iPod (but not on the iPod Mini). Back in the day it was the font for all the Mac's menus and dialog boxes, later replaced by Charcoal and--today--Lucida Grande, IIRC. Here is a scan of my iPod's screen so you can see Chicago in all its glory.
There's more info about Apple's fonts on Wikipedia, but for some reason Slashdot won't let me link to it. Here's the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_fonts
I hooked up a Sony MiniDV camcorder to my Sony DVD player with RCA jacks and it wouldn't let me record anything, so there's a good chance that this thing won't either.
I had everything running through my Harman/Kardon receiver and the camcorder would record broadcast or cable TV just fine....but it balked immediately when I switched the video input to the DVD player. Macrovision?
I got a different one using Safari on OS X 10.3.4.
"Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must have Windows 98/SE, ME, 2000 or XP, which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.
We do not anticipate supporting Mac or Linux in the near future."