Looks ambitious, and is a great context for adapting Macbeth.
That said, Macbeth is my most favorite of the Bard's plays, and also the play of his that I've acted in 3 productions of... I know the material rather well, you could say.
One of the charms of The Scottish Play is its inherent level of accessibility to just about anyone. The Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll (well, witchy, at any rate) factor. The core characters are tragically flawed at a very base level -- human nature: pride, jealousy, lust, ambition, greed and trust. If acted and directed well, the language acts as less of a barrier for entry to this play than many of Shakespeare's works.
Judging by the creative direction choices made in the *cough* "trailer*, production sketches, etc. -- it seems that they're purposefully trying to make it as 1337 and "insider" as possible. Problem is, they really don't seem to get the 1337 part. So, you have a bit of a catch-22. The viewer has to be both 1) very familiar with Macbeth to get the in-joke and 2) a 31337 h4x0r to get the context. Or completely fucked up.
The short of it: if the same creative team is responsible for the production as was responsible for the most abhorrent piece of flash drivel I've seen in a year, I'd sooner volunteer for a full upper GI exploratory than sit through 2 hours of that kind of pain.
I know it isn't specifically what you asked for, but you can buy a:
Solar powered 12V trickle charger (about $40) to run into the bike's battery, then get a auto/air adapter for the powerbook($80), and a lighter/accessory outlet (about $5, with cable at Radio Shack or your local auto parts store) if you need one. This way, the alternator is feeing the charging usually, and the solar panel is 'topping off' the bike's battery, whether or not the bike is running -- handy to have for a trip around the world, even without the laptop, I'd imagine.
Have you considered hooking a solar panel up to the laptop for charging and cutting the bike out of the equation completely? Not as reliable, and doesn't solve the 'I ran out of juice at night' problem, but worth a thought as you're undoubtedly going to be putting massive stress on the bike's battery and alternator. Googling for "laptop solar cell" will bring dependable results.
Try telling that to the scores of Mac users that have since cancelled preorders of the retail box.
Bioware said specifically up until less than a month before the launch that the Win, Mac and Linux clients would be in the same box, when development of the Mac and Linux-side clients had ceased months before in order to rush the Win version out the door.
That's not inexperience. That's a flat-out lie. Here we are, almost a year later, and there's still no Mac client, although it's reportedly in beta. Without the DM toolset. And I'm assuming that it's going to be priced as a "premium" game ($60ish).
I have to say, I've got multiple PCs capable of running NWN under either Win or Linux, and I haven't bought the game out of general principle. When there's a forthcoming Mac version, I hold out in order to support the porters. It's that simple. I put my money where my mouth is.
My mouth is saying that NWN without the toolset isn't worth the "premium" pricepoint, a year late. And I doubt that I'm alone.
FWIW, that $60ish is probably going into Shadowbane instead of NWN now, as it really is going to ship hybrid at launch -- I can play with both my Mac-owning friends, *and* those unfortunate enough to be on a Wintel box.
However, after just having seen the first part of the Children series tonite, I have to say it was amazingly well done.
The acting, direction and effects were much more subtle -- it seemed much more epic. Something about the previous series felt small, low budget, and made-for-TV.
And there was the overly theatrical lighting, bad CG matte paintings and painfully bad acting.
This one was just miles and miles better -- in a class of its own.
Someone asked me the other day what was the best virus protection tool for MacOS X as they were planning an upgrade.
I scratched my head for a minute, did some checking on Symantic & McAfee's sites and realized that the Mac platform (OS X & 9 both included) hasn't seen a virus since 1997 -- the last of those autostart beasties (which still occasionally pop up on service bureau Zips).
The relative lack of critters, and just basic common sense keep virii off my Macs.
My Wintel boxes, however, have to live with the 20% system overhead bloat that is Norton Antivirus, coupled with Spybot S&D running at launch.
If you really want to get where you're going instead of rotting in airports and suffering canceled flights, use either a real, live travel agent -- or someone like Travelocity/Expedia.
I've had very, very bad luck with flights from Priceline/Orbitz/Hotwire.
Basically, with the auction/super-duper-discount flights I've had the following problems:
* Flight departure time changes drastically multiple times before the day of flight. Sometimes you get a notification email. Sometimes you don't (always confirm your flight the morning of). Sometimes you get shifted between flights.
* Sometimes up to 3 connections that take you on ridiculous routes and quintuple your travel time ( Jacksonville to Raliegh to DC to Miami?)
* No way in hell you'll sit together if it's a full flight.
* The usual delays, bad food, getting bumped, canceled flights, etc that you can expect even paying full price.
Bottom line: it's your freakin' honeymoon. You want to be minimizing your chances for catastrophe, not adding to 'em.
You really don't want it to be in your fault if you spend half of your trip stuck in Atlanta because you saved $20 a head on tickets. Start the marriage off with a bang, that would.:)
It's awful to the point of nausea. Controls are abhorrent.
The only cool thing was that 2 people could play on the same console -- but they were stuck in the same screen area ala Gauntlet.
Which is pretty much what this genre of games is, really.
Blue wizard needs food BADLY!
Here's to hoping that Blizzard doesn't pull a Bungie to those of us who have preordered their games on the Mac for the past 8 years. It would suck, as Blizzard is one of the only compaines that releases first-run, top shelf games on the Mac platform. If not a synchronized launch, then within a month or two of release.
Nothing chaps the ass of a Mac fan more than seeing 2 and 3 year old games fetching $55 a pop once (if) they're finally released. Witness the whole Bungie/Halo debacle, or Neverwinter Nights.
My DirecTV reciever, my VCR, my Linksys Router, my networked HP Laserjet, and other things don't need any of my attention. They work without me having to reset them. Do they have problems? No, but even when something happens, just turning it off and on and that always fixes it.
"No, but even when something happens?"
C'mon man -- my RCA DirectTV box crashes (often), my Siemens speedtouch router crashes (once a month or so), my Philips DVD player crashes (quite a lot, actually).
All require a hard reset in order to resume even basic functionality.
You can't say that it's progress to get to the point where you've got to get a freaking remote control for the *power strip* behind your electronics.
The point of all this is -- you're doing 90 on the Interstate and your car crashes -- figuratively, and then literally.
Or your fridge crashes and you wake up to the smell of those fishsticks that you wedged behind the burritos.
Embedded systems just aren't there yet. Sure, you can make the case that the toaster is just as prone to the lever sticking and burning your bread. But you've got twice the chance (if not more) for "critical failure" when you compound systems failure on top of mechanical woes.
I, personally, won't be getting a car that relies *that* heavily on a GUI and an OS any time soon. I like tempting fate as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't even rely on my *own* code for a system where lives are on the line (potentially).
I set the routers (a $70 siemens DSL router on one side, netgear higher-end DSLmodem/router combo on the other) to purposefully forward the rendezvous packets (which I got by sniffing and some guessing) between the two networks. In my mind, it's sorta a bridge and sorta port redirecting and sorta a tunnel (blocks of static IPs on each end, a hard router handling the basic net traffic, ipfw and services config running on Macs at different locations set to explicitly receive packets on those ports from each other and rebroadcast).
After installing 10.2.3 and the cups security patches, it broke my old configurations, I'll set it back up this evening (hopefully!) and document every little tweak I did to the cupsd, hostconfig,/etc/services, ipfw, a few other config files and the routers themselves.
The basic cups layer works by connecting two hosts via cupsd client and server config file hacks (over TCP), and that provides the "red" names in the Print Center list when you're remote. That's got nothing directly to do with rendezvous per se...
The printers show up a second time in black, via rendezvous broadcast of shared printers via the tunnel/bridge/travesty.
I know it's sketchy to do this stuff. That's why it's not on all the time. But it's not just theoretically possible. With a moderate pain in the ass, too much time on your hands, reckless abandon with config files you probably shouldn't even be touching (racoon comes to mind) and a disregard for using ports and forwarding/actions properly, you can get it working too.
Not saying you should, mind you. As a matter of fact, you probably shouldn't, because it's not at all polite to your neighbors if you get it working, and just about every softwareupdate of note will break it, and you've got more than a small chance of hosing your machine and/or feeling the wrath of your ISP.
But it is possible.
Imagine down the road if you could have a "bridge networks" checkbok in your sharing panel. Peer-to-peer between two hosts who then rebroadcast rendezvous info to their local segments.
I think that'd be damned cool, personally, and if done properly it wouldn't cause an inordinate amount of traffic, either. Definitely less than my almost-always-on stream of KEXP:-)
Remember the old Apple remote access?
Machine on LAN "A" dials into machine on LAN "B" -- suddenly everyone's machine, and all Appletalk printers show up in the chooser if sharing and Appletalk were on, and you could get DHCP info and utilize that machine's net connection. Over a simple ARA/PPP link between the networks.
Same principle. Apple is building Rendezvous to be a sort of Appletalk easy-config broadcast for TCP. A little bit of ingenuity and some super cool stuff will result.
YES... there's a lot of cross-pinging traffic going on between my 'nets, and pretty constant.
Not enough to notice a performance hit when it's enabled (I enable everything via SSH, a script that swaps config files, and a remote reboot when needed), but enough traffic that I'm concerned about sticking out like a sore thumb to one of my ISPs, and I'd prefer to be a decent web citizen the majority of the time anyhow.
I have a machine at my office with cups printing and some creative routing and net config file hacks to act as a bridge with my machine at home via "allowed hosts" over a pair of DSL connections from different providers.
I managed upon this "magic" combination purely by accident -- trying to get a non-supported Postscript color copier to work via cups from home. I got a lot more out of my day's tinkering than I bargained for.
Now all printers show up in print center (even ones not CUPS enabled or shared). Neat bit of trivia: remote printers at the office show up in red at home in the print center list when activated this way.
I basically set my office up as a neighborhood on my WAN, and all office servers show up in the server dialog now "automagically"
mod_rendezvous also shows up under safari from both locations with.local links working properly manually typed anywhere.
Play with the config files for cups, your network config, and your built-in router and firewall a bit and you may be pleasantly surprised what you find.
If enough people are interested in how I accomplished this, I'll dig through my config files and document the accident.
I think your stance is a little too black-and-white. Embedding commercials in the program doesn't just mean product placement -- although Apple was hugely placed in shows like the X-Files (good guy, Mac, bad guy Win) and Seinfeld and that hasn't affected the syndication value in the least.
If the commercials are irrevocably embedded into the program, they can't be removed and replaced during syndication.
There are other ways of embedding commercials in the program. Witness watching syndicated reruns of Star Trek: TNG on TNN.
Ticker bar at the bottom, occasional popups. At first, the image was squished vertically -- totally unwatchable by any standard. Now the image isn't squashed anymore, and they're honing the amount of "acceptable" space that the ads and ticker can take up.
I've also noticed some strange time dillation effects and cuts that seem somewhat shorter and awkward -- presumably to make more time for standard commercials.
After watching a single Friday night TNG marathon (usually 5-6 episodes in a row, although not sequential -- another gripe for another day) I've stopped really noticing the ticker at all. Although the ticker these days is more for self-promoting of shows and the like. Perhaps they've had a hard time selling space?
The only thing that really bugs me still is that there's obviously either some lossy video compression at work, or a subtle squishing of the screen taking place as whenever you see a distant starfield, you can see stars do bad scan-line shimmering. Also, I'm not sure that their source tapes/DV are of the best quality, as the color is pretty far off on older episodes.
I'm not saying that tickers and pop-ups are a good thing. But it's at least possible to overlook or get used to them after a while, and still enjoy the show.
Trying to get my WET11 configured via HTTP on the Mac didn't work, no matter how I tried. Incidentally, it wasn't mine originally, it was a friend's who spent a weekend trying to configure it via the Mac to work with his Playstation 2.
After he couldn't get it working I told him I'd buy it off him if I could get it working here. And then I wasted the better part of a day before I fired up the Win box in frustration.
That was following those instructions you referenced, among other failed attempts.
I even called Linksys support about it and they offered me an RMA after lots of head-scratching.
See, it's got to be assigned an IP before you can get into it via http. That's the rub. It's also got to generate a hex key via the WinSetup wizard if you want to utilize encryption, then in my case I had to retype that hex key into the iMac's connection sharing password field. And it also needs to join the particular WLAN you're on (user-selected) in order to configure it wirelessly -- although I was doing it wired as the PC is on my wired segment.
The Win setup program has a wizard that dredges the network to find the bridge and configures it before it's a member of the subnet.
There may have been another way of doing it, but I'll be damned if it was documented. And I tried a lot of different ways to get it configured, including port scanning my LAN to find if it had picked up a DHCP address (which it handn't).
There are no Mac-configuration instructions in the user's guide (it's a PDF), but there is this lovely snippet:
Chapter 6: Using the Wireless Ethernet Bridge Web-based Utility
Overview
The Bridge is designed to function properly after configuration using the Setup Wizard [ed: Wintel Only].
So, yeah, it technically works with the Mac. But only after you've run the Setup Wizard to get the thing 'live' on your network, and you can't get encryption on without the wizard generating the hex key for your password -- unless you can do that in your head;-)
Maybe the prefs were hosed in my unit as it shipped, but that's my experience.
1. It is not only possible, but likely to sort to an album by Genre --> Artist --> Album and have the list sorted in ways other than by track number.
So whether you have track numbers in your file names or not doesn't matter a damn. If you want to sort alphabetically, sort by track name. If you want to sort numerically, sort by track numbers. All you have to do is click the column header.
For example, if you had all your "Punk" songs sorted alphabetially by clicking on the song name column, then decided you wanted to listen to an entire album, the album would not automatically resort to track number -- it keeps the track name alpha sort between views. Seriously. Try it.
File name, song name. Same thing if iTunes has ripped the track. But as a *FILE* read over the network via SMB or whatever, it makes a bit of a difference, no? The check box is to add the track number to the file name, not append it to the beginning of the ID3 Title tag.
I've got a botched copy of Sgt. Pepper's that the significant other burned out of iTunes to prove it. And she's a pretty bright girl. Mistakes happen. What I'm trying to accomplish is to keep people from having to think too damned hard to make iTunes/the jukebox do what they want it to do.
2. Net-based streamers (ie TiVo, siMP3, etc.) will have an *easier* time of keeping everything in order if you take the time to make an extra mouse click in the prefs. That's what this thread is about, no? Above in the thread, it's been mentioned already how poor TiVo's organization and UI are for video. Do you really think that it's going to bring your collection in (even *if* playlists, ID3 tags and albums are honored) sorted how you'd like all by itself? I'd place money on an alphabetical sort being the default.
3. When you take these things out of the realm of being "your" music collection on the computer, and stick it in the rack with your audio/video components it becomes just as much a community-use item as your CD keepcase/flipbook. It's an appliance at that point. It should be as intuitive as possible for people who *don't* know what they're doing to be able to play an entire album in the proper order.
I'm just offering some constructive (IMO) advice related to the topic of the thread. Take it or leave it, but I'm willing to wager that someone may find it helpful.
4. For what it's worth, when I'm burning my own CDs, I like having the track numbers in the source file names. I prefer using Toast or Jam to burn my CDs, and Toast won't let you sort by ID3 track number tag when it comes time to burn a CD using it. But having the track number in the filename is damned handy for me.
See, I use iTunes as my central media library at both the office and home. I'm not always the one using it, and not all views by artist and album show up in the proper order.
For example, if you sort by:
Genre -- > Artist -- > Album
And song name was the sort in your previous view, it shows up in Alpha order, unless you add track numbers. G'head and try it. I'll wait here.
It also reburns in alpha order (which I found out as the fiancee burned Sgt. Pepper's that way accidentally for a road trip).
I don't know about you, but I think it's blasphemous to listen to Dark Side of the Moon in alpha order.
I noticed this press release a few days ago, as well. Been doing some research since then.
You'll need a TiVo Series 2 to make this work. No word on whether 3rd party TiVo 2s will be supported (like the Sony unit).
Most everything below is an educated guess, so take with a grain of salt.
I'm assuming after looking at the unit's connectivity that you'll need to get a TiVo USB->Ethernet adapter. No word as to whether other parties' USB->Ethernet or USB->802.11x adapters will work as of yet.
I've already got a Linksys WET11 hooked up to my Playstation 2 network adapter, bridging to my wireless LAN (iMac with connection sharing on via Airport card), so adding a cheap hub at my receiver isn't a big deal on my end.
If you go this route, you'll need a Wintel box, or at the very least Virtual PC to properly configure the bridge (for the first time -- its http admin works on the Mac after initial setup) -- even though Linksys claims otherwise. Also, if you turn on encryption, keep in mind that you need to set up the Mac side to use the long-ass hex version of the password you pick (ie $AA2E43323B2300000) or the WET11 won't be able to get on. At the very least, lock your access point down to specific hardware addresses.
As far as bandwidth concerns -- let's see -- MP3s ripped at 192k -- vs the 11 megabit bandwidth on 802.11b. I'm not seeing a problem here. Hell, a direct uncompressed dump to AIFF or WAV from a CD will only come in at 150k/second (ie 1x CD-ROM). That's 1.5 megabits of bandwidth -- for uncompressed audio.
Back to the info -- this functionality seems to be part of a forthcoming firware upgrade for the series 2 models (which are currently shipping and on sale -- $199 for a 40 meg unit, $399 for an 80 with rebate).
It also seems that they're hinting that LAN functionality is going to be part of a new 'tiered' pricing structure -- the veiled hint being "part of our premium service".
At any rate, I'm in on this the moment it's available. I bought a Sony 200-CD jukebox about 5 years ago, and it's skipping horribly now and cleaning hasn't helped. I'm giddy at the thought of dropping it and just getting a 120-gig drive to take its place.
Here's to hoping that TiVo's media center (or whatever they call it) UI is decent, and it supports iTunes playlists and iTunes browsing by artist, album and genre.
I'd pay an extra $5 or so a month for that.
One last hint:
When ripping to iTunes, make sure your prefs are set to add track numbers to the filenames, otherwise your albums will play back in alpha order.
It's absolutely not the least of the announcements today.
As a person weaned in the service bureaus of the late-80s/early-90s, I can say that every decent presentation app produced in the last 10 years has been EOLed because of Powerpoint's ubiquity.
Aldus/Adobe Persuasion, anyone? That was one hell of an app. And -- get this -- you could have real, multiple master pages in the same presentation. Harvard Graphics had that feature as well.
"What," you say "presentations can have more than one master... in the same file???"
I'm not talking having a slide master, a title master, etc. I'm talking as many different title templates as you'd like in the same file.
Persuasion supported alpha channels too (through Mac PICT format), and a million other things that were never developed into powerpoint because they haven't needed to, and apparently, no one's complained. Yeah, PPT has transparency. Through freakin' GIFs. Hardly a substitute.
Powerpoint is so bad in its handling of master slides and typography, not to mention its abhorrent handling (mangling) of graphic formats other than WMF and BMP that I chose to personally design every presentation I've made since Persuasion was dropped in Macromedia Director. That's a pretty big hammer to solve that particular problem.
The point to this diatribe is, that I damned near cried when I saw Keynote unveiled.
- NICE looking templates - Uncluttered, friendly interface - Eye candy galore - PPT, SWF and Photoshop compatibility out of the box, layers included
I challenge you to find *ANYONE* who enjoys working in Powerpoint. Most users outright loathe it, but there's nothing else on the market now that approaches its (limited) functionality and is compatible with newer PPT file formats.
I've been playing around with Safari -- super fast, very clean on most sites. A little flaky with header redirects, but hey -- it's a beta.
After poking around in the preferences, I noticed you can turn Rendzevous bookmarks on -- meaning you'll automatically discover web services running on your LAN. And bookmark 'em. Cool enough by itself.
I then clicked on the "About Rendezvous" button underneath, and found the page has been updated with a tantalizing little treat (in addition to pledges of support from game and printer developers):
TiVo
"TiVo's upcoming premium service package will use Rendezvous technology to automatically discover Macintosh computers within the home network and determine which services they provide, allowing customers to listen to their shared music or view their shared photos on their TV," said Jim Barton, Co-founder and CTO for TiVo. "We are excited about working with Apple on other ways Rendezvous can help TiVo Series2 DVRs connect to a Mac to deliver future services."
Yep. You'll be able to serve your iTunes collection to your TiVo. I'm assuming with playlists and all.
It sounds more like she wants to model, illustrate and animate rather than code to me.
On both the Mac and Wintel sides, Cinema4D is a fairly inexpensive, very powerful and very user friendly 3D modeling/rendering/animation suite. Probably the easiest to pick up that I've found personally.
It's sold modularly now, so you just purchase the functionality that you need, and a free demo is available to gague your wife's interest.
I've been using it for several years now personally over Lightwave/Maya/etc. The interface of Cinema is rather similar to the more "standard" packages on the market, and skills cross over rather well.
Of note is that in order to use, well, any 3D modeling/rendering packages it's best to have at least an overview of the way vector-based drawing works -- ie beziers and the like.
Not only does Adobe Illustrator give you those fundamentals, it works very nicely with any modelling package. Macromedia Freehand is also pretty interchangable in that regard, however the Postscript isn't as clean for complex work.
Word has it that the Dec 2002 Dev package includes support for parallel builds... meaning that you can utilize mutliple processors during build time.
I personally haven't verified this as I don't have a wind tunnel to test on, but word on the street is that it shows pretty huge gains during compiles.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks ambitious, and is a great context for adapting Macbeth.
That said, Macbeth is my most favorite of the Bard's plays, and also the play of his that I've acted in 3 productions of... I know the material rather well, you could say.
One of the charms of The Scottish Play is its inherent level of accessibility to just about anyone. The Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll (well, witchy, at any rate) factor. The core characters are tragically flawed at a very base level -- human nature: pride, jealousy, lust, ambition, greed and trust. If acted and directed well, the language acts as less of a barrier for entry to this play than many of Shakespeare's works.
Judging by the creative direction choices made in the *cough* "trailer*, production sketches, etc. -- it seems that they're purposefully trying to make it as 1337 and "insider" as possible. Problem is, they really don't seem to get the 1337 part. So, you have a bit of a catch-22. The viewer has to be both 1) very familiar with Macbeth to get the in-joke and 2) a 31337 h4x0r to get the context. Or completely fucked up.
The short of it: if the same creative team is responsible for the production as was responsible for the most abhorrent piece of flash drivel I've seen in a year, I'd sooner volunteer for a full upper GI exploratory than sit through 2 hours of that kind of pain.
That's not to say that tech and Shakespeare can't mate well. Apple has a feature about another version of Macbeth done in the same spirit -- but much less... well... full of itself?
Definitely worth a look if the fusion of tech and theatre intrigues you.
I know it isn't specifically what you asked for, but you can buy a:
Solar powered 12V trickle charger (about $40) to run into the bike's battery, then get a auto/air adapter for the powerbook($80), and a lighter/accessory outlet (about $5, with cable at Radio Shack or your local auto parts store) if you need one. This way, the alternator is feeing the charging usually, and the solar panel is 'topping off' the bike's battery, whether or not the bike is running -- handy to have for a trip around the world, even without the laptop, I'd imagine.
Have you considered hooking a solar panel up to the laptop for charging and cutting the bike out of the equation completely? Not as reliable, and doesn't solve the 'I ran out of juice at night' problem, but worth a thought as you're undoubtedly going to be putting massive stress on the bike's battery and alternator. Googling for "laptop solar cell" will bring dependable results.
Best of luck, sounds fun.
Try telling that to the scores of Mac users that have since cancelled preorders of the retail box.
Bioware said specifically up until less than a month before the launch that the Win, Mac and Linux clients would be in the same box, when development of the Mac and Linux-side clients had ceased months before in order to rush the Win version out the door.
That's not inexperience. That's a flat-out lie. Here we are, almost a year later, and there's still no Mac client, although it's reportedly in beta. Without the DM toolset. And I'm assuming that it's going to be priced as a "premium" game ($60ish).
I have to say, I've got multiple PCs capable of running NWN under either Win or Linux, and I haven't bought the game out of general principle. When there's a forthcoming Mac version, I hold out in order to support the porters. It's that simple. I put my money where my mouth is.
My mouth is saying that NWN without the toolset isn't worth the "premium" pricepoint, a year late. And I doubt that I'm alone.
FWIW, that $60ish is probably going into Shadowbane instead of NWN now, as it really is going to ship hybrid at launch -- I can play with both my Mac-owning friends, *and* those unfortunate enough to be on a Wintel box.
Where's that (+1: Getting Closer Every Day) button?
I have to agree with you there.
However, after just having seen the first part of the Children series tonite, I have to say it was amazingly well done.
The acting, direction and effects were much more subtle -- it seemed much more epic. Something about the previous series felt small, low budget, and made-for-TV.
And there was the overly theatrical lighting, bad CG matte paintings and painfully bad acting.
This one was just miles and miles better -- in a class of its own.
And the 20-ish Alia. ROWR!!!
Someone asked me the other day what was the best virus protection tool for MacOS X as they were planning an upgrade.
I scratched my head for a minute, did some checking on Symantic & McAfee's sites and realized that the Mac platform (OS X & 9 both included) hasn't seen a virus since 1997 -- the last of those autostart beasties (which still occasionally pop up on service bureau Zips).
The relative lack of critters, and just basic common sense keep virii off my Macs.
My Wintel boxes, however, have to live with the 20% system overhead bloat that is Norton Antivirus, coupled with Spybot S&D running at launch.
Found a solution.
e /p rogressive/thematrix/us/med/animatrixlgfinal_dl.mo v
Apparently Quicktime Player itself will piece the thing together, even if the server drops the connection repeatedly.
From within Quicktime Player, go to File --> Open URL in New Player
They cut and paste:
http://progressive.stream.aol.com/wb/gl/wbonlin
Worked like a charm. Full speed ahead.
Looks like a variation on the /. effect.
Navigating the site is nice & easy, and what I get from the download is at full bandwidth (150k/dsl).
However, I get 5-10% complete with the download and it just terminates.
Safari, IE, even curl.
Can someone get a mirror up?
If you really want to get where you're going instead of rotting in airports and suffering canceled flights, use either a real, live travel agent -- or someone like Travelocity/Expedia.
:)
I've had very, very bad luck with flights from Priceline/Orbitz/Hotwire.
Basically, with the auction/super-duper-discount flights I've had the following problems:
* Flight departure time changes drastically multiple times before the day of flight. Sometimes you get a notification email. Sometimes you don't (always confirm your flight the morning of). Sometimes you get shifted between flights.
* Sometimes up to 3 connections that take you on ridiculous routes and quintuple your travel time ( Jacksonville to Raliegh to DC to Miami?)
* No way in hell you'll sit together if it's a full flight.
* The usual delays, bad food, getting bumped, canceled flights, etc that you can expect even paying full price.
Bottom line: it's your freakin' honeymoon. You want to be minimizing your chances for catastrophe, not adding to 'em.
You really don't want it to be in your fault if you spend half of your trip stuck in Atlanta because you saved $20 a head on tickets. Start the marriage off with a bang, that would.
I played Diablo on the Playstation.
Still got a copy.
It's awful to the point of nausea. Controls are abhorrent.
The only cool thing was that 2 people could play on the same console -- but they were stuck in the same screen area ala Gauntlet.
Which is pretty much what this genre of games is, really.
Blue wizard needs food BADLY!
Here's to hoping that Blizzard doesn't pull a Bungie to those of us who have preordered their games on the Mac for the past 8 years. It would suck, as Blizzard is one of the only compaines that releases first-run, top shelf games on the Mac platform. If not a synchronized launch, then within a month or two of release.
Nothing chaps the ass of a Mac fan more than seeing 2 and 3 year old games fetching $55 a pop once (if) they're finally released. Witness the whole Bungie/Halo debacle, or Neverwinter Nights.
"No, but even when something happens?"
C'mon man -- my RCA DirectTV box crashes (often), my Siemens speedtouch router crashes (once a month or so), my Philips DVD player crashes (quite a lot, actually).
All require a hard reset in order to resume even basic functionality.
You can't say that it's progress to get to the point where you've got to get a freaking remote control for the *power strip* behind your electronics.
The point of all this is -- you're doing 90 on the Interstate and your car crashes -- figuratively, and then literally.
Or your fridge crashes and you wake up to the smell of those fishsticks that you wedged behind the burritos.
Embedded systems just aren't there yet. Sure, you can make the case that the toaster is just as prone to the lever sticking and burning your bread. But you've got twice the chance (if not more) for "critical failure" when you compound systems failure on top of mechanical woes.
I, personally, won't be getting a car that relies *that* heavily on a GUI and an OS any time soon. I like tempting fate as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't even rely on my *own* code for a system where lives are on the line (potentially).
I set the routers (a $70 siemens DSL router on one side, netgear higher-end DSLmodem/router combo on the other) to purposefully forward the rendezvous packets (which I got by sniffing and some guessing) between the two networks. In my mind, it's sorta a bridge and sorta port redirecting and sorta a tunnel (blocks of static IPs on each end, a hard router handling the basic net traffic, ipfw and services config running on Macs at different locations set to explicitly receive packets on those ports from each other and rebroadcast).
/etc/services, ipfw, a few other config files and the routers themselves.
:-)
After installing 10.2.3 and the cups security patches, it broke my old configurations, I'll set it back up this evening (hopefully!) and document every little tweak I did to the cupsd, hostconfig,
The basic cups layer works by connecting two hosts via cupsd client and server config file hacks (over TCP), and that provides the "red" names in the Print Center list when you're remote. That's got nothing directly to do with rendezvous per se...
The printers show up a second time in black, via rendezvous broadcast of shared printers via the tunnel/bridge/travesty.
I know it's sketchy to do this stuff. That's why it's not on all the time. But it's not just theoretically possible. With a moderate pain in the ass, too much time on your hands, reckless abandon with config files you probably shouldn't even be touching (racoon comes to mind) and a disregard for using ports and forwarding/actions properly, you can get it working too.
Not saying you should, mind you. As a matter of fact, you probably shouldn't, because it's not at all polite to your neighbors if you get it working, and just about every softwareupdate of note will break it, and you've got more than a small chance of hosing your machine and/or feeling the wrath of your ISP.
But it is possible.
Imagine down the road if you could have a "bridge networks" checkbok in your sharing panel. Peer-to-peer between two hosts who then rebroadcast rendezvous info to their local segments.
I think that'd be damned cool, personally, and if done properly it wouldn't cause an inordinate amount of traffic, either. Definitely less than my almost-always-on stream of KEXP
Remember the old Apple remote access?
Machine on LAN "A" dials into machine on LAN "B" -- suddenly everyone's machine, and all Appletalk printers show up in the chooser if sharing and Appletalk were on, and you could get DHCP info and utilize that machine's net connection. Over a simple ARA/PPP link between the networks.
Same principle. Apple is building Rendezvous to be a sort of Appletalk easy-config broadcast for TCP. A little bit of ingenuity and some super cool stuff will result.
One clarification:
YES... there's a lot of cross-pinging traffic going on between my 'nets, and pretty constant.
Not enough to notice a performance hit when it's enabled (I enable everything via SSH, a script that swaps config files, and a remote reboot when needed), but enough traffic that I'm concerned about sticking out like a sore thumb to one of my ISPs, and I'd prefer to be a decent web citizen the majority of the time anyhow.
Not entirely true.
.local links working properly manually typed anywhere.
An example:
I have a machine at my office with cups printing and some creative routing and net config file hacks to act as a bridge with my machine at home via "allowed hosts" over a pair of DSL connections from different providers.
I managed upon this "magic" combination purely by accident -- trying to get a non-supported Postscript color copier to work via cups from home. I got a lot more out of my day's tinkering than I bargained for.
Now all printers show up in print center (even ones not CUPS enabled or shared). Neat bit of trivia: remote printers at the office show up in red at home in the print center list when activated this way.
I basically set my office up as a neighborhood on my WAN, and all office servers show up in the server dialog now "automagically"
mod_rendezvous also shows up under safari from both locations with
Play with the config files for cups, your network config, and your built-in router and firewall a bit and you may be pleasantly surprised what you find.
If enough people are interested in how I accomplished this, I'll dig through my config files and document the accident.
I agree that this product and its ilk don't belong under the Hardware heading.
I also think a "Case Mods" heading might be a little too narrow.
Perhaps a "Hot Rod" category might be the ticket. Lump water cooling, mods, overclocking, light kits and all that type of stuff into it.
There are other ways of embedding commercials in the program. Witness watching syndicated reruns of Star Trek: TNG on TNN.
Ticker bar at the bottom, occasional popups. At first, the image was squished vertically -- totally unwatchable by any standard. Now the image isn't squashed anymore, and they're honing the amount of "acceptable" space that the ads and ticker can take up.
I've also noticed some strange time dillation effects and cuts that seem somewhat shorter and awkward -- presumably to make more time for standard commercials.
After watching a single Friday night TNG marathon (usually 5-6 episodes in a row, although not sequential -- another gripe for another day) I've stopped really noticing the ticker at all. Although the ticker these days is more for self-promoting of shows and the like. Perhaps they've had a hard time selling space?
The only thing that really bugs me still is that there's obviously either some lossy video compression at work, or a subtle squishing of the screen taking place as whenever you see a distant starfield, you can see stars do bad scan-line shimmering. Also, I'm not sure that their source tapes/DV are of the best quality, as the color is pretty far off on older episodes.
I'm not saying that tickers and pop-ups are a good thing. But it's at least possible to overlook or get used to them after a while, and still enjoy the show.
After he couldn't get it working I told him I'd buy it off him if I could get it working here. And then I wasted the better part of a day before I fired up the Win box in frustration.
That was following those instructions you referenced, among other failed attempts.
I even called Linksys support about it and they offered me an RMA after lots of head-scratching.
See, it's got to be assigned an IP before you can get into it via http. That's the rub. It's also got to generate a hex key via the WinSetup wizard if you want to utilize encryption, then in my case I had to retype that hex key into the iMac's connection sharing password field. And it also needs to join the particular WLAN you're on (user-selected) in order to configure it wirelessly -- although I was doing it wired as the PC is on my wired segment.
The Win setup program has a wizard that dredges the network to find the bridge and configures it before it's a member of the subnet.
There may have been another way of doing it, but I'll be damned if it was documented. And I tried a lot of different ways to get it configured, including port scanning my LAN to find if it had picked up a DHCP address (which it handn't).
There are no Mac-configuration instructions in the user's guide (it's a PDF), but there is this lovely snippet:
So, yeah, it technically works with the Mac. But only after you've run the Setup Wizard to get the thing 'live' on your network, and you can't get encryption on without the wizard generating the hex key for your password -- unless you can do that in your head
Maybe the prefs were hosed in my unit as it shipped, but that's my experience.
1. It is not only possible, but likely to sort to an album by Genre --> Artist --> Album and have the list sorted in ways other than by track number.
For example, if you had all your "Punk" songs sorted alphabetially by clicking on the song name column, then decided you wanted to listen to an entire album, the album would not automatically resort to track number -- it keeps the track name alpha sort between views. Seriously. Try it.
File name, song name. Same thing if iTunes has ripped the track. But as a *FILE* read over the network via SMB or whatever, it makes a bit of a difference, no? The check box is to add the track number to the file name, not append it to the beginning of the ID3 Title tag.
I've got a botched copy of Sgt. Pepper's that the significant other burned out of iTunes to prove it. And she's a pretty bright girl. Mistakes happen. What I'm trying to accomplish is to keep people from having to think too damned hard to make iTunes/the jukebox do what they want it to do.
2. Net-based streamers (ie TiVo, siMP3, etc.) will have an *easier* time of keeping everything in order if you take the time to make an extra mouse click in the prefs. That's what this thread is about, no? Above in the thread, it's been mentioned already how poor TiVo's organization and UI are for video. Do you really think that it's going to bring your collection in (even *if* playlists, ID3 tags and albums are honored) sorted how you'd like all by itself? I'd place money on an alphabetical sort being the default.
3. When you take these things out of the realm of being "your" music collection on the computer, and stick it in the rack with your audio/video components it becomes just as much a community-use item as your CD keepcase/flipbook. It's an appliance at that point. It should be as intuitive as possible for people who *don't* know what they're doing to be able to play an entire album in the proper order.
I'm just offering some constructive (IMO) advice related to the topic of the thread. Take it or leave it, but I'm willing to wager that someone may find it helpful.
4. For what it's worth, when I'm burning my own CDs, I like having the track numbers in the source file names. I prefer using Toast or Jam to burn my CDs, and Toast won't let you sort by ID3 track number tag when it comes time to burn a CD using it. But having the track number in the filename is damned handy for me.
I'll bite.
See, I use iTunes as my central media library at both the office and home. I'm not always the one using it, and not all views by artist and album show up in the proper order.
For example, if you sort by:
Genre -- > Artist -- > Album
And song name was the sort in your previous view, it shows up in Alpha order, unless you add track numbers. G'head and try it. I'll wait here.
It also reburns in alpha order (which I found out as the fiancee burned Sgt. Pepper's that way accidentally for a road trip).
I don't know about you, but I think it's blasphemous to listen to Dark Side of the Moon in alpha order.
Adding track numbers is *helpful*.
Here ya go.
Works as advertised. Way, way, way cool stuff.
But I would still want it to be wireless.
I noticed this press release a few days ago, as well. Been doing some research since then.
You'll need a TiVo Series 2 to make this work. No word on whether 3rd party TiVo 2s will be supported (like the Sony unit).
Most everything below is an educated guess, so take with a grain of salt.
I'm assuming after looking at the unit's connectivity that you'll need to get a TiVo USB->Ethernet adapter. No word as to whether other parties' USB->Ethernet or USB->802.11x adapters will work as of yet.
I've already got a Linksys WET11 hooked up to my Playstation 2 network adapter, bridging to my wireless LAN (iMac with connection sharing on via Airport card), so adding a cheap hub at my receiver isn't a big deal on my end.
If you go this route, you'll need a Wintel box, or at the very least Virtual PC to properly configure the bridge (for the first time -- its http admin works on the Mac after initial setup) -- even though Linksys claims otherwise. Also, if you turn on encryption, keep in mind that you need to set up the Mac side to use the long-ass hex version of the password you pick (ie $AA2E43323B2300000) or the WET11 won't be able to get on. At the very least, lock your access point down to specific hardware addresses.
As far as bandwidth concerns -- let's see -- MP3s ripped at 192k -- vs the 11 megabit bandwidth on 802.11b. I'm not seeing a problem here. Hell, a direct uncompressed dump to AIFF or WAV from a CD will only come in at 150k/second (ie 1x CD-ROM). That's 1.5 megabits of bandwidth -- for uncompressed audio.
Back to the info -- this functionality seems to be part of a forthcoming firware upgrade for the series 2 models (which are currently shipping and on sale -- $199 for a 40 meg unit, $399 for an 80 with rebate).
It also seems that they're hinting that LAN functionality is going to be part of a new 'tiered' pricing structure -- the veiled hint being "part of our premium service".
At any rate, I'm in on this the moment it's available. I bought a Sony 200-CD jukebox about 5 years ago, and it's skipping horribly now and cleaning hasn't helped. I'm giddy at the thought of dropping it and just getting a 120-gig drive to take its place.
Here's to hoping that TiVo's media center (or whatever they call it) UI is decent, and it supports iTunes playlists and iTunes browsing by artist, album and genre.
I'd pay an extra $5 or so a month for that.
One last hint:
When ripping to iTunes, make sure your prefs are set to add track numbers to the filenames, otherwise your albums will play back in alpha order.
--dr00gy
It's absolutely not the least of the announcements today.
As a person weaned in the service bureaus of the late-80s/early-90s, I can say that every decent presentation app produced in the last 10 years has been EOLed because of Powerpoint's ubiquity.
Aldus/Adobe Persuasion, anyone? That was one hell of an app. And -- get this -- you could have real, multiple master pages in the same presentation. Harvard Graphics had that feature as well.
"What," you say "presentations can have more than one master... in the same file???"
I'm not talking having a slide master, a title master, etc. I'm talking as many different title templates as you'd like in the same file.
Persuasion supported alpha channels too (through Mac PICT format), and a million other things that were never developed into powerpoint because they haven't needed to, and apparently, no one's complained. Yeah, PPT has transparency. Through freakin' GIFs. Hardly a substitute.
Powerpoint is so bad in its handling of master slides and typography, not to mention its abhorrent handling (mangling) of graphic formats other than WMF and BMP that I chose to personally design every presentation I've made since Persuasion was dropped in Macromedia Director. That's a pretty big hammer to solve that particular problem.
The point to this diatribe is, that I damned near cried when I saw Keynote unveiled.
- NICE looking templates
- Uncluttered, friendly interface
- Eye candy galore
- PPT, SWF and Photoshop compatibility out of the box, layers included
I challenge you to find *ANYONE* who enjoys working in Powerpoint. Most users outright loathe it, but there's nothing else on the market now that approaches its (limited) functionality and is compatible with newer PPT file formats.
Powerpoint is a hell of a chink in MS's armor.
This is more than a shot across the bow.
After poking around in the preferences, I noticed you can turn Rendzevous bookmarks on -- meaning you'll automatically discover web services running on your LAN. And bookmark 'em. Cool enough by itself.
I then clicked on the "About Rendezvous" button underneath, and found the page has been updated with a tantalizing little treat (in addition to pledges of support from game and printer developers):
Yep. You'll be able to serve your iTunes collection to your TiVo. I'm assuming with playlists and all.
Happy speculating...
It sounds more like she wants to model, illustrate and animate rather than code to me.
On both the Mac and Wintel sides, Cinema4D is a fairly inexpensive, very powerful and very user friendly 3D modeling/rendering/animation suite. Probably the easiest to pick up that I've found personally.
It's sold modularly now, so you just purchase the functionality that you need, and a free demo is available to gague your wife's interest.
I've been using it for several years now personally over Lightwave/Maya/etc. The interface of Cinema is rather similar to the more "standard" packages on the market, and skills cross over rather well.
Of note is that in order to use, well, any 3D modeling/rendering packages it's best to have at least an overview of the way vector-based drawing works -- ie beziers and the like.
Not only does Adobe Illustrator give you those fundamentals, it works very nicely with any modelling package. Macromedia Freehand is also pretty interchangable in that regard, however the Postscript isn't as clean for complex work.
Word has it that the Dec 2002 Dev package includes support for parallel builds... meaning that you can utilize mutliple processors during build time.
I personally haven't verified this as I don't have a wind tunnel to test on, but word on the street is that it shows pretty huge gains during compiles.