You can go to your/Applications/Utilities/Console.app and take a look at your crash logs. This will tell you what software is taking down the system if you don't feel like committing to a full nuke & pave (although, to achieve a pristine system you really really really should).
If ATI drivers are coming up and erroring out, they got loaded in there somehow, which means that you have other cobwebs in there deep.
If a modern Mac is kernel panicking EVER, you've got a serious issue under the hood.
1. You have bad memory
2. You have a f-ed up or non-Intel compatible device driver or kernel extension/prefpane loaded
3. Your OS install is corrupt
I've seen this a ton of times when experienced Mac users get their hands on their new toy. They install their old versions of DiVX, APE, Adobe Bridge, scanner drivers, Quicktime extensions old HP all in one 3 gig "printer drivers" or just do something rash like copying over their entire/Library/ folder (which would result in PPC drivers and kexts from your old Mac getting shoehorned into the clean system).
Friends don't let friends transplant their cobwebs between machines.
Back up your users folder (and ONLY your users folder), nuke & pave, and use the migration assistant to move the old account over to the clean system. Don't copy them by hand.
Then get the absolute latest drivers for your devices (only get Intel/Universal compiled drivers, prefpanes and kexts) and do NOT install Adobe Bridge CS2.
Do this, and unless you've got crap RAM, you'll have a clean system that doesn't flake out on you.
I actually saw a few prototype HDR plasma screens at Siggraph this year.
They were being pushed by some proprietary software that seemed to playback OpenEXR files in real time, but they certainly were some purty images.
One thing I noticed is that HDR on highlights makes some hotspots unbearable to look at on the screens currently (ie sun flares, etc), which is accurate, but not particularly comfortable for viewing content.
Another thing I noticed is that the prototypes seemed to be mods of off-the-shelf equipment being driven over DVI.
(which Disney apparently feels so compelled to justify that it set up a Web site to promote them). Actually, the site appears to have been set up by ILM & Lucas digital to help bolster their rep and visibility leading into awards time.
Say what you want about some of the effects, but the Davey Jones stuff, water effects and some of the matchmoving (the beached Pearl) were among the most impressive effects shots ever put on screen, and ILM deserves the right to brag a little. Their thunder has been stolen the past 10 years or so while having their A-teams working on the Star Wars prequels. Weta and Imageworks one-upped the masters at just about every turn.
The story may have sucked, but I don't think anyone can dispute that ILM's back on their game.
Disclaimer: I do this stuff for a living, so take comments as viewed from the inside.
I actually enjoyed NWN2 more than any CRPG I've played since Knights of the Old Republic, but that's not to say it doesn't have a lot of rough patches.
The storyline and shipping campaign are absolutely massive and detailed, there are tons of side quests, the story is really interesting once you get to Neverwinter, your actions have a pretty huge cumulative effect on the world so there's high replay value... I hit about 100 hours of playtime to finish the game, and I had an absolute blast once I decided the good heavily outweighed the bad.
I really, really dug having a stronghold of my own to build and outfit, and the portion of the game where you fight off a giant siege was one of the best gaming moments I can remember. Wish the siege was a bit longer, honestly, because it was so fun.
At times, you'll have up to 10 separate party members at a time, which is really cool. And there are some battles that are hard enough under the 'strict' ruleset (friendly fire, etc) that you'll want to save really often.
Now the bad: the graphics engine is a slug even on the latest & greatest hardware -- almost unplayable at high detail if you're dealing with Vista overhead and beta nVidia drivers, but with all of the bells & whistles turned down it's acceptable.
Party AI is pretty idiotic, but you can set each of your characters to "puppet mode" so that Quara doesn't dump 5 delay blast fireballs in the middle of the party before you can find the spacebar.
The game's buggy... really buggy. There are specific circumstances that require you go on Bioware's forums and grab variable setting console commands to finish quests, or you're just stuck in a couple places depending on the path you take through the game.
Even with all the roughness, the game is a jewel. If you don't have patience for working around buggy stuff, wait a few months for the patches to stabilize a bit. It's really worth it... I'd almost call it Baldur's Gate 3 based on the depth of the game and the writing.
Just wish I coulda nailed the Tiefling instead of ending up with the annoying creepy stalker druid chick.
Don't let the icon fool you. The "power" button is a "deep sleep" button in disguise.
You have to click three more times to find the true shut down or restart, and if you forget you've got to wait around 90 seconds for the machine to hibernate and resume. Before you can actually shut down or restart properly.
Don't get me started about some of the other UI choices made in just the start menu. The limited programs scrolling area, for example, takes a nasty interface and makes it utterly unusable for someone who has more than MS Office loaded.
Hollow eye candy that makes the machine run like a slug, and to add insult to injury it's eye candy with horrid usability that takes upwards of 40% of my processing power and frame rate compared to XP SP2.
Easy to do this without getting sneaky with the lookup tables, if you're on a halfway decent webhost with a "catchall" box for non-assigned boxes@yourdomain.
I just use the actual domain name I gave the email address to as the username, with a catchall account: evite_com@mydomain.com amazon_com@mydomain.com etc. Combined with the usual methods in your catchall box (graylisting, spamassasin, etc), it works incredibly well, and gives you a reasonably good idea who's selling your info so you can stop patronizing them.
You've got to not only make it unprofitable for the spammers, but you've got to let them know WHY you're making it unprofitable. Make sure when you find a domain that sells your crap (evite is my example) that you let them (webmaster@, abuse@ info@ etc) know in no uncertain terms that you know they've done it and you're going to be vocal at every opportunity about their practices.
Enough of that type of message comes in, and it'll make it up to the top of the ladder at some point.
This might be the classiest thing I've ever heard of MS doing. No in-joke, no sarcasm, here's your non-pretentious cake, you deserved it.
It's how the rest of the world works. Healthy businesses acknowledge competition and inspiration. Their workers even go out for drinks with rivals now and again. $giantcorporateentity != $employee and all that.
I'm not exactly heralding the coming of a kinder, gentler MS that consistently behaves like a grownup, but baby steps like this are the beginnings of a change in corporate culture and should be encouraged.
Props to the IE 7 team, you guys showed some serious class and also delivered a great upgrade (minus a few bizarre interface choices) recently.
Now who do I have to send a cake to to get my menus back in IE without hitting alt?
I've noticed that Rosetta, while impressively speedy for dynamic translation, has the tendency to eat up huge gobs of ram and force my system to start paging like mad if I have too many "power" apps being translated at once.
You might consider closing out some of your non-Intel native apps (Flash, Photoshop, After Effects all are massive resource hogs under Rosetta) before closing out native ones (Firefox/iTunes).
Hopefully come the middle of 2007, we'll see a nice boost in performance once we start working completely with native apps.
I can confirm that a bare metal install of Vista on several 2GB RAM test machines that I have tie up 780mb of RAM without a single app open other than the task manager.
Vista will not be ending up on any of my renderfarm machines for that very reason.
Sounds pretty simple to me. Yahoo's codemonkeys have found something that's flagging their toolbar as an exception to the rule, or there's something buried in the IE 7 IDE that they're accessing.
What this means is that it's possible for *any* toolbar/malware to survive the IE 7 reset once their coders know the holes that yahoo's utilizing, so I expect that in a year, the IE 7 reset, just won't work.
Three out of four legitimate copies of Windows on boxes I've got (1 vendor supplied , 2 OEM copies of XP, serial number stickers on the cases & all) tell me that they might be counterfeit and have locked me out of security updates. $160 each, please. Twice the price of a bloody OEM copy, for the record.
If anything, based on my personal experience, the problem is probably significantly larger than has been reported. This is NOT a non-issue.
In addition, it seems like I can't even unplug my Wacom tablet anymore, much less swap RAM or a video card, without Windows alerting me that the environment has changed dramatically since activation, and I've got 3 days to run through online activation again before I'm completely locked out of my machine.
WGA and the new "strictness" surrounding activation have become absolutely draconian, and they don't work.
Apple remote desktop allows for scheduling command line tasks over the entire enterprise.
Including queuing tasks for laptops and the like that are not currently online.
At my previous place of employment, managing about 70 non-admin and 10 or so admin capable OS X boxes, my workflow went like this:
- Set software update to automatically download software on each machine daily
(alternately, if you have OS X server, simply allow the server to cache all of the relevant updates and don't worry about this step -- it's mostly there to manage bandwidth spikes) - Set a scheduled job for Friday afternoons to run softwareupdate from the commandline via ARD. - Leave the ARD console up and it'll catch laptops during the beginning of the following week that weren't around when the command was issued.
The workgroup management features of the latest ARD are *amazingly robust* and I'd recommend anyone to just go and play with it. Coupled with netboot for major OS upgrades and the VNC like features, it cut the amount of time needed to maintain the entire company to virtually nothing.
Be aware that most high quality renderers aren't multithreaded through an entire render job though.
Case in point: a Maya mental ray render uses a single thread for translation, displacement map triangulation and subsurface scattering map processing before the render itself begins. Most dynamics calculations are also single-threaded.
So, on a dual core station rendering a scene fitting the above description taking 5 minutes, I see about 2 1/2 minutes only utilize one core. Once final gather/radiosity/rendering proper begins, it'll saturate a quad CPU easily though. However, that's a ton of wasted cycles.
There are ways you can optimize stuff like this (two staggered render clients per machine, rendering smaller passes at a time vs the entire composite), but you start running into network bandwidth and hard drive speed limitations pretty fast. For my stuff, I get better price/performance (on a limited budget) with dual core workstations than quad core right now just because I can't afford the infrastructure to saturate all the cores efficiently.
Disclaimer: these are based on my experiences with my meager 6 box Win/Linux render farm running over gigabit copper (my macs reboot into Windows occasionally to join the fun too). If you've got capital for gobs of ram, fiber channel and enough raids to have, say, 5 render processes consistently saturating an 8 processor box without hitting network or storage walls, scaling up to eight cores per machine would be mighty advantageous. If that's the case, are you hiring?
The short of it is that it can work on the local drive or on an external firewire/USB drive.
They haven't released details of what the space/backup length tradeoffs are yet, but I'd imagine that it starts culling the oldest versions of files as space becomes an issue and you can probably specify what percentage of your startup drive you want to use if you don't have an external.
Yeah, there have been various CVS style tools and Retrospect-alikes over the years, but this is one damned elegant interface. Even with the cheesy warp field graphics.
It might be serviceable for a 4gb library -- where it's actually possible to remember each and every track on the unit and where they are relationally to each other, but let's try this scenario.
I've got a 60gb iPod, I'm driving 200 miles on the Interstate at night and decide I want to listen to Nick Cave.
Unfortunately, Nick Cave isn't in any of my 5 top-of-mind lists.
My only option at this point is to preview 3200ish of the 6700ish songs (alphabetically!) to get to the track I'm trying to find. So is it under N for Nick? B for Bad Seeds? R for Red Right Hand? 07 for the track number? If I'm gonna hit that damned next button a couple *thousand* times, I'd at least like to know the ballpark I'm looking for. Sucks to be me if it's under "R" for Red. Or (*shudder*) X for "X-Files Soundtrack."
It'll probably take the entire 200 miles' drive to find it.
The fastest solution to the problem is to plug in an iTrip or an aux cable and find the track on the iPod itself (buried in the glove box), and there's something seriously wrong with that equation when the iPod has a perfectly elegant interface built in and accessible by third parties, and the thing is designed to hold every piece of music you've ever owned.
True story, btw.
I guess I just see this whole digital hub thing as a way for me to carry every piece of music I've ever bought or ripped in my pocket and find anything I'm in the mood for pretty much instantly, and I personally think that even the iTrip is a more serviceable (not to mention, far cheaper and portable) solution. Yeah, it sucks when you're on a long trip and stations start to bleed, or if you happen to live in a major metro and there isn't a clear frequency to be had without FCC violating hacks (boosting the power, etc), having it shut off during the 10 minute intro to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" etc.... but I can at least find what I'm looking for when I'm in the mood for it.
I stand by my opinion that if you pay the $99 plus $200ish labor to have the BMW/MINI adapter installed that you're getting royally ripped off. You can get a much more elegant headunit or an Icelink for that price. Installed.
Most of the cars coming out of BMW plants over the last several years have had supposed iPod "integration" -- including my Mini.
For a collaboration between two companies known for their design elegance, the BMW iPod dock is an abomination.
Basically, it fools your car into thinking that the iPod is a 6-disc CD changer, and yes, the stereo controls on the steering wheel do control it. Sort of.
You have to create 6 playlists called BMW1,BMW2 or MINI1,MINI2 etc and you're basically limited to using only those playlists unless you want to go through your entire 60gb library in alphabetical order. The model I own doesn't show text on the head-unit either, although I've been told that newer ones do this.
Top it off with the fact that the 'dock' is just a cable floating loose in the glove box allowing your 'pod to bounce around all over the place and you've got basically a hack that reduces your iPod to a stack of MP3 CDs because you can't find anything and the interface is completely crippled. Seriously, why would you create an iPod dock and then rob every trace of iPod-ness from the user experience?
I loathed this solution so much that I went back to the dealer and had an Aux jack installed in the glove box and just ran a cable down to my cupholder through the console.
Here's hoping that Apple comes up with a truly elegant solution.
I maintain a fleet of about 40 iBook/Macbooks at an ad agency.
I'll tell you right now that the palm rests on the iBook G3s went from white to yellow to black very quickly if the laptop was under any serious use. iBook G4s tended to be a little less prone to the discoloration (they had a more greyish palmrest), but it was still a problem. TiBooks went from gray to black when the finish inevitably disintegrated (I challenge anyone to find a vintage TiBook that doesn't look liike it's been run over by a truck today. Horrible case and material choices on that one.
Usually, you'd see the discoloration start at about the six month mark with them, if the laptops were under heavy use.
Black laptops have the exact same problems as well, it's just harder to see and less offensive looking. Hand oil/dirt gets into the plastic and use wears away at the plastic. It happens on any laptop.
Take a look at the shiny spot on the spacebar on just about any keyboard that's received any use if you don't believe me. The plastic & matte finish is worn away.
My advice for people who were concerned about the looks:
- Nail polish remover takes away the yellow, but doesn't magically regenerate the worn plastic - Use an external mouse and keyboard if you're working on the thing for more than a few hours a day and save the trackpad and built in keyboard for when you're on the go. Not only to keep it pretty, but to be kind to your wrists ergonomically.
Honestly we maintain the iBook fleet because they're built to be practically indestructible and they're at a throwaway price point.
On the flip side, as long as I remember to take off my metal watch, Aluminum powerbooks/macbook pros tend to still look amazing after a few years. I just sold my two year old 12" G4 to upgrade to a Macbook Pro and it looked as good as the day I bought it once I applied a little windex to the case.
I'm also glad to see that the issue is put to rest acceptably for all.
There have been a couple of unforeseen effects that all the media attention has had, though... up until the incident, my main was level 60, alliance on Shadow Moon -- the server and faction that Oz was recruiting from.
I have the feeling that a ton of people have created characters on that particular server to speak both for and against the issue at hand.
Since then, the queues have been so long on that particular server, that my wife and I have both leveled up characters on another server as we couldn't get on Shadow Moon often or reliably enough to maintain pvp rank or participate in guild events.
Here's to hoping that the new hardware upgrades will alleviate some of the queue issues so I can see how different things are back home.
Slashdot Mirror
I almost forgot.
/Applications/Utilities/Console.app and take a look at your crash logs. This will tell you what software is taking down the system if you don't feel like committing to a full nuke & pave (although, to achieve a pristine system you really really really should).
You can go to your
If ATI drivers are coming up and erroring out, they got loaded in there somehow, which means that you have other cobwebs in there deep.
Best of luck,
droog
If a modern Mac is kernel panicking EVER, you've got a serious issue under the hood.
/Library/ folder (which would result in PPC drivers and kexts from your old Mac getting shoehorned into the clean system).
1. You have bad memory
2. You have a f-ed up or non-Intel compatible device driver or kernel extension/prefpane loaded
3. Your OS install is corrupt
I've seen this a ton of times when experienced Mac users get their hands on their new toy. They install their old versions of DiVX, APE, Adobe Bridge, scanner drivers, Quicktime extensions old HP all in one 3 gig "printer drivers" or just do something rash like copying over their entire
Friends don't let friends transplant their cobwebs between machines.
Back up your users folder (and ONLY your users folder), nuke & pave, and use the migration assistant to move the old account over to the clean system. Don't copy them by hand.
Then get the absolute latest drivers for your devices (only get Intel/Universal compiled drivers, prefpanes and kexts) and do NOT install Adobe Bridge CS2.
Do this, and unless you've got crap RAM, you'll have a clean system that doesn't flake out on you.
I actually saw a few prototype HDR plasma screens at Siggraph this year.
They were being pushed by some proprietary software that seemed to playback OpenEXR files in real time, but they certainly were some purty images.
One thing I noticed is that HDR on highlights makes some hotspots unbearable to look at on the screens currently (ie sun flares, etc), which is accurate, but not particularly comfortable for viewing content.
Another thing I noticed is that the prototypes seemed to be mods of off-the-shelf equipment being driven over DVI.
I've run into this problem with RC1, and occasionally standard XP machines wouldn't connect to Win update.
My solution? Change the MTU on the router to 1492. Problem solved.
--droog
Say what you want about some of the effects, but the Davey Jones stuff, water effects and some of the matchmoving (the beached Pearl) were among the most impressive effects shots ever put on screen, and ILM deserves the right to brag a little. Their thunder has been stolen the past 10 years or so while having their A-teams working on the Star Wars prequels. Weta and Imageworks one-upped the masters at just about every turn.
The story may have sucked, but I don't think anyone can dispute that ILM's back on their game.
Disclaimer: I do this stuff for a living, so take comments as viewed from the inside.
I actually enjoyed NWN2 more than any CRPG I've played since Knights of the Old Republic, but that's not to say it doesn't have a lot of rough patches.
The storyline and shipping campaign are absolutely massive and detailed, there are tons of side quests, the story is really interesting once you get to Neverwinter, your actions have a pretty huge cumulative effect on the world so there's high replay value... I hit about 100 hours of playtime to finish the game, and I had an absolute blast once I decided the good heavily outweighed the bad.
I really, really dug having a stronghold of my own to build and outfit, and the portion of the game where you fight off a giant siege was one of the best gaming moments I can remember. Wish the siege was a bit longer, honestly, because it was so fun.
At times, you'll have up to 10 separate party members at a time, which is really cool. And there are some battles that are hard enough under the 'strict' ruleset (friendly fire, etc) that you'll want to save really often.
Now the bad: the graphics engine is a slug even on the latest & greatest hardware -- almost unplayable at high detail if you're dealing with Vista overhead and beta nVidia drivers, but with all of the bells & whistles turned down it's acceptable.
Party AI is pretty idiotic, but you can set each of your characters to "puppet mode" so that Quara doesn't dump 5 delay blast fireballs in the middle of the party before you can find the spacebar.
The game's buggy... really buggy. There are specific circumstances that require you go on Bioware's forums and grab variable setting console commands to finish quests, or you're just stuck in a couple places depending on the path you take through the game.
Even with all the roughness, the game is a jewel. If you don't have patience for working around buggy stuff, wait a few months for the patches to stabilize a bit. It's really worth it... I'd almost call it Baldur's Gate 3 based on the depth of the game and the writing.
Just wish I coulda nailed the Tiefling instead of ending up with the annoying creepy stalker druid chick.
Don't let the icon fool you. The "power" button is a "deep sleep" button in disguise.
You have to click three more times to find the true shut down or restart, and if you forget you've got to wait around 90 seconds for the machine to hibernate and resume. Before you can actually shut down or restart properly.
Don't get me started about some of the other UI choices made in just the start menu. The limited programs scrolling area, for example, takes a nasty interface and makes it utterly unusable for someone who has more than MS Office loaded.
Hollow eye candy that makes the machine run like a slug, and to add insult to injury it's eye candy with horrid usability that takes upwards of 40% of my processing power and frame rate compared to XP SP2.
Easy to do this without getting sneaky with the lookup tables, if you're on a halfway decent webhost with a "catchall" box for non-assigned boxes@yourdomain.
I just use the actual domain name I gave the email address to as the username, with a catchall account: evite_com@mydomain.com amazon_com@mydomain.com etc. Combined with the usual methods in your catchall box (graylisting, spamassasin, etc), it works incredibly well, and gives you a reasonably good idea who's selling your info so you can stop patronizing them.
You've got to not only make it unprofitable for the spammers, but you've got to let them know WHY you're making it unprofitable. Make sure when you find a domain that sells your crap (evite is my example) that you let them (webmaster@, abuse@ info@ etc) know in no uncertain terms that you know they've done it and you're going to be vocal at every opportunity about their practices.
Enough of that type of message comes in, and it'll make it up to the top of the ladder at some point.
This might be the classiest thing I've ever heard of MS doing. No in-joke, no sarcasm, here's your non-pretentious cake, you deserved it.
It's how the rest of the world works. Healthy businesses acknowledge competition and inspiration. Their workers even go out for drinks with rivals now and again. $giantcorporateentity != $employee and all that.
I'm not exactly heralding the coming of a kinder, gentler MS that consistently behaves like a grownup, but baby steps like this are the beginnings of a change in corporate culture and should be encouraged.
Props to the IE 7 team, you guys showed some serious class and also delivered a great upgrade (minus a few bizarre interface choices) recently.
Now who do I have to send a cake to to get my menus back in IE without hitting alt?
I kid!
(mostly)
I've noticed that Rosetta, while impressively speedy for dynamic translation, has the tendency to eat up huge gobs of ram and force my system to start paging like mad if I have too many "power" apps being translated at once.
You might consider closing out some of your non-Intel native apps (Flash, Photoshop, After Effects all are massive resource hogs under Rosetta) before closing out native ones (Firefox/iTunes).
Hopefully come the middle of 2007, we'll see a nice boost in performance once we start working completely with native apps.
Actually, I got a copy of the 3rd edition rules that says they can.
Oh noes! Fear ward!
I can confirm that a bare metal install of Vista on several 2GB RAM test machines that I have tie up 780mb of RAM without a single app open other than the task manager.
Vista will not be ending up on any of my renderfarm machines for that very reason.
Sounds pretty simple to me. Yahoo's codemonkeys have found something that's flagging their toolbar as an exception to the rule, or there's something buried in the IE 7 IDE that they're accessing.
What this means is that it's possible for *any* toolbar/malware to survive the IE 7 reset once their coders know the holes that yahoo's utilizing, so I expect that in a year, the IE 7 reset, just won't work.
Three out of four legitimate copies of Windows on boxes I've got (1 vendor supplied , 2 OEM copies of XP, serial number stickers on the cases & all) tell me that they might be counterfeit and have locked me out of security updates. $160 each, please. Twice the price of a bloody OEM copy, for the record.
If anything, based on my personal experience, the problem is probably significantly larger than has been reported. This is NOT a non-issue.
In addition, it seems like I can't even unplug my Wacom tablet anymore, much less swap RAM or a video card, without Windows alerting me that the environment has changed dramatically since activation, and I've got 3 days to run through online activation again before I'm completely locked out of my machine.
WGA and the new "strictness" surrounding activation have become absolutely draconian, and they don't work.
Apple remote desktop allows for scheduling command line tasks over the entire enterprise.
Including queuing tasks for laptops and the like that are not currently online.
At my previous place of employment, managing about 70 non-admin and 10 or so admin capable OS X boxes, my workflow went like this:
- Set software update to automatically download software on each machine daily
(alternately, if you have OS X server, simply allow the server to cache all of the relevant updates and don't worry about this step -- it's mostly there to manage bandwidth spikes)
- Set a scheduled job for Friday afternoons to run softwareupdate from the commandline via ARD.
- Leave the ARD console up and it'll catch laptops during the beginning of the following week that weren't around when the command was issued.
The workgroup management features of the latest ARD are *amazingly robust* and I'd recommend anyone to just go and play with it. Coupled with netboot for major OS upgrades and the VNC like features, it cut the amount of time needed to maintain the entire company to virtually nothing.
Actually, in iTunes 7, there's a nice little menu to copy your purchased files off of the iPod. There are also new menus to back up your library.
Most of the new features that weren't eye candy had to do with backup and safeguarding of your DRM'ed purchases, and IMO it's a welcome step.
I immediately thought the same thing.
Be aware that most high quality renderers aren't multithreaded through an entire render job though.
Case in point: a Maya mental ray render uses a single thread for translation, displacement map triangulation and subsurface scattering map processing before the render itself begins. Most dynamics calculations are also single-threaded.
So, on a dual core station rendering a scene fitting the above description taking 5 minutes, I see about 2 1/2 minutes only utilize one core. Once final gather/radiosity/rendering proper begins, it'll saturate a quad CPU easily though. However, that's a ton of wasted cycles.
There are ways you can optimize stuff like this (two staggered render clients per machine, rendering smaller passes at a time vs the entire composite), but you start running into network bandwidth and hard drive speed limitations pretty fast. For my stuff, I get better price/performance (on a limited budget) with dual core workstations than quad core right now just because I can't afford the infrastructure to saturate all the cores efficiently.
Disclaimer: these are based on my experiences with my meager 6 box Win/Linux render farm running over gigabit copper (my macs reboot into Windows occasionally to join the fun too). If you've got capital for gobs of ram, fiber channel and enough raids to have, say, 5 render processes consistently saturating an 8 processor box without hitting network or storage walls, scaling up to eight cores per machine would be mighty advantageous. If that's the case, are you hiring?
There's a slick little demo and documentation on Time Machine that'll answer a few of your questions at:
t ml
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.h
The short of it is that it can work on the local drive or on an external firewire/USB drive.
They haven't released details of what the space/backup length tradeoffs are yet, but I'd imagine that it starts culling the oldest versions of files as space becomes an issue and you can probably specify what percentage of your startup drive you want to use if you don't have an external.
Yeah, there have been various CVS style tools and Retrospect-alikes over the years, but this is one damned elegant interface. Even with the cheesy warp field graphics.
I beg to differ.
Orlando Bloom is even more plywoodtastic than Keanu.
It might be serviceable for a 4gb library -- where it's actually possible to remember each and every track on the unit and where they are relationally to each other, but let's try this scenario.
I've got a 60gb iPod, I'm driving 200 miles on the Interstate at night and decide I want to listen to Nick Cave.
Unfortunately, Nick Cave isn't in any of my 5 top-of-mind lists.
My only option at this point is to preview 3200ish of the 6700ish songs (alphabetically!) to get to the track I'm trying to find. So is it under N for Nick? B for Bad Seeds? R for Red Right Hand? 07 for the track number? If I'm gonna hit that damned next button a couple *thousand* times, I'd at least like to know the ballpark I'm looking for. Sucks to be me if it's under "R" for Red. Or (*shudder*) X for "X-Files Soundtrack."
It'll probably take the entire 200 miles' drive to find it.
The fastest solution to the problem is to plug in an iTrip or an aux cable and find the track on the iPod itself (buried in the glove box), and there's something seriously wrong with that equation when the iPod has a perfectly elegant interface built in and accessible by third parties, and the thing is designed to hold every piece of music you've ever owned.
True story, btw.
I guess I just see this whole digital hub thing as a way for me to carry every piece of music I've ever bought or ripped in my pocket and find anything I'm in the mood for pretty much instantly, and I personally think that even the iTrip is a more serviceable (not to mention, far cheaper and portable) solution. Yeah, it sucks when you're on a long trip and stations start to bleed, or if you happen to live in a major metro and there isn't a clear frequency to be had without FCC violating hacks (boosting the power, etc), having it shut off during the 10 minute intro to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" etc.... but I can at least find what I'm looking for when I'm in the mood for it.
I stand by my opinion that if you pay the $99 plus $200ish labor to have the BMW/MINI adapter installed that you're getting royally ripped off. You can get a much more elegant headunit or an Icelink for that price. Installed.
Most of the cars coming out of BMW plants over the last several years have had supposed iPod "integration" -- including my Mini.
For a collaboration between two companies known for their design elegance, the BMW iPod dock is an abomination.
Basically, it fools your car into thinking that the iPod is a 6-disc CD changer, and yes, the stereo controls on the steering wheel do control it. Sort of.
You have to create 6 playlists called BMW1,BMW2 or MINI1,MINI2 etc and you're basically limited to using only those playlists unless you want to go through your entire 60gb library in alphabetical order. The model I own doesn't show text on the head-unit either, although I've been told that newer ones do this.
Top it off with the fact that the 'dock' is just a cable floating loose in the glove box allowing your 'pod to bounce around all over the place and you've got basically a hack that reduces your iPod to a stack of MP3 CDs because you can't find anything and the interface is completely crippled. Seriously, why would you create an iPod dock and then rob every trace of iPod-ness from the user experience?
I loathed this solution so much that I went back to the dealer and had an Aux jack installed in the glove box and just ran a cable down to my cupholder through the console.
Here's hoping that Apple comes up with a truly elegant solution.
There are several keyboards out there on the market that have a built-in laptop style trackpad and they're pretty cheap.
I've bought a few for small office server closet type situations in the past and they work fairly well.
Instead of looking in the mice section at Newegg/ajump/whoever, look in the keyboard section instead.
I maintain a fleet of about 40 iBook/Macbooks at an ad agency.
I'll tell you right now that the palm rests on the iBook G3s went from white to yellow to black very quickly if the laptop was under any serious use. iBook G4s tended to be a little less prone to the discoloration (they had a more greyish palmrest), but it was still a problem. TiBooks went from gray to black when the finish inevitably disintegrated (I challenge anyone to find a vintage TiBook that doesn't look liike it's been run over by a truck today. Horrible case and material choices on that one.
Usually, you'd see the discoloration start at about the six month mark with them, if the laptops were under heavy use.
Black laptops have the exact same problems as well, it's just harder to see and less offensive looking. Hand oil/dirt gets into the plastic and use wears away at the plastic. It happens on any laptop.
Take a look at the shiny spot on the spacebar on just about any keyboard that's received any use if you don't believe me. The plastic & matte finish is worn away.
My advice for people who were concerned about the looks:
- Nail polish remover takes away the yellow, but doesn't magically regenerate the worn plastic
- Use an external mouse and keyboard if you're working on the thing for more than a few hours a day and save the trackpad and built in keyboard for when you're on the go. Not only to keep it pretty, but to be kind to your wrists ergonomically.
Honestly we maintain the iBook fleet because they're built to be practically indestructible and they're at a throwaway price point.
On the flip side, as long as I remember to take off my metal watch, Aluminum powerbooks/macbook pros tend to still look amazing after a few years. I just sold my two year old 12" G4 to upgrade to a Macbook Pro and it looked as good as the day I bought it once I applied a little windex to the case.
Blackrazor, although he's guildless now -- kicked for missing too many raids :D
That's what I get for rolling a rogue at launch!
I'm also glad to see that the issue is put to rest acceptably for all.
There have been a couple of unforeseen effects that all the media attention has had, though... up until the incident, my main was level 60, alliance on Shadow Moon -- the server and faction that Oz was recruiting from.
I have the feeling that a ton of people have created characters on that particular server to speak both for and against the issue at hand.
Since then, the queues have been so long on that particular server, that my wife and I have both leveled up characters on another server as we couldn't get on Shadow Moon often or reliably enough to maintain pvp rank or participate in guild events.
Here's to hoping that the new hardware upgrades will alleviate some of the queue issues so I can see how different things are back home.