Rundown on various offspring of Godzilla in different realities & continuities:
The cute, annoying, pudgy son-o-G in the earlier movies was called Minya. I'm not sure where the name Minilla popped up -- I've heard it before, but never seen it in any of the subs or heard it in the dubs. Then again, more recent dubs have done strange stuff like change the names of Mothra's little twin hotties (The Cosmos), so I just may be out of the loop.
The little fat guy was in Godzilla's Revenge AKA All Monsters Attack (Worse than GINO, avoid at all costs), Son of Godzilla, and used as a greatest hits bit of stock footage in a couple others which are also best forgotten.
Godzooky was the often forgotten American cartoon version of son-o-G circa '79. Think Scooby Doo meets Jaques Cousteau with a big green Scrappy Doo. Completely fucking terrifying to recall now, but I loved it when I was 4. I so wanted a remote control that would call big G to do my bidding. I still want Mothra's little twin hotties, though, but I digress.
Perhaps Minilla is the Americanized name for the baby G that we saw in G vs Space G and vs Destroyah? I think his official name was Godzilla Jr in those, although he graduated and became full blown Godzilla in G2K.
A fairly nice perspective on the big green guy's varied histories is here. Another is here but takes itself a lot more seriously.
As the IT director for a mid-sized agency, you hit on the number one problem we had dragging everyone kicking and screaming onto X.
Our solution?
We physically deleted every single legacy font on every single machine we had and upgraded to all OpenType fonts (the new Adobe Font Folio is available in both T1 and OTF formats) and Suitcase.
The coolest thing is that all of the Opentype fonts are named "pro" or "std" -- so instead of having 12 conflicting Helveticas on our systems, we now know the "good" one is called "Helvetica STD" in the lists.
All fonts in our library with a creation date prior to 1998 are banned -- you know, like the AGaramond/Futura/etc. direct fom old type on call CDs?
If we run into a situation where a non-supported font is necessary, I either:
1. Buy a new copy (forcing art directors to get legit with their fonts is a biggie)
2. Take the old font (usually Share or Freeware in this case) into Fontographer (or whatever) and create a new, clean suitcase with a non-conflicting name and ID -- usually saved in OpenType format.
The biggest problem with all of those old font libraries that have been passed from freelancer to agency to service bureau and back again is that they're all corrupt, mixed and matched. 10, 12 point screen font from Adobe, 14 point from Emigre, Book printer version from Agfa, Bold from Adobe, Bold Italic from Lino.
Next time you've got a flaky font issue, get info on the printer and screen fonts and pay attention to the copyrights and creation dates. You'll wonder how they ever worked at all.
OS 9 was far more accomodating than X is in that respect, but it's forced a housecleaning here -- for the better.
I'd say, on record, to anyone that listens that chucking Classic and starting over on our fonts solved 85% of my daily support calls.
On a final note... uh... Pagemaker? WTF?
Ditch Classic. Go with Indesign (good Pagemaker import) or Quark (evil fucking company, but necessary in our offices), but the sooner you cut the umbilical cord, the sooner the pain will be over.
Perhaps they're putting the chip in a mini PC system that doesn't support a conventional fan?
I've assembled many Shuttle-based systems like that (for myself and clients), and each of them have a pretty nifty heatpipe and ventilation fan -- but no room whatsoever to install the massive fan that ships with Intel chips these days.
So, I've got a stack of 'em in the closet. Up to about 25 at last count, give or take.
I've personally had Intel warranty replace a defective 2.4 P4 -- it took several hours on hold and I had to speak with Intel directly, and not my distributor -- but they replaced it knowing it was in this type of system and their fan wasn't in use.
Last I checked,.obj (from the old Wavefront days) and.ma (maya ascii files) were both open formats. Those *were* both of SGI's biggest 3D formats. The trick being that Alias (Wavefront) was sold off from SGI last week.
Hell, they're even (as someone pointed out above) human readable.
From the point of view of someone in the industry (I do FX work for indie films), here's my perspective... some of it's off-topic.
- VRML sucks for anything except crude realtime flythrus. High-end 3D work these days deals with nurbs & subdivision surfaces. No support in VRML, huge file sizes, and while it's an open format, every vendor's interpretation of the data leaves something to be desired. More on this below.
- DXF. Hello? We've *had* a standard 3D interchange format since autocad came out. Doesn't suck as bad as VRML, but still sucks for many of the same reasons. But it's a way to fairly cleanly exchange poly data between programs. Polys are the basis of sub-d surfaces. I already use.obj and.dxf for the role that this new format (created by industry outsiders, no less) is hoping to fill.
- Filmbox format: (.fbx) does a hell of a job moving professional-grade models and textures back and forth between high-end packages. Interpretation doesn't vary as widely on the host platform, but there's still one catch: textures & shading.
Until there's a "standard" rendering engine that absolutely everyone uses, a unified 3D format is still only getting half the picture. Every major package has a different way that shaders are written, different channels available in said shaders, different lighting models, etc.
Don't even get me started about feature parity.
Hell, on a given project, depending on my needs I may use a combination of Renderman, Mental Ray, Hardware texturing, and even the Maya renderer. It all boils down to what gets the job done fast enough and pretty enough.
Getting subdivision surfaces and nurbs geometry ONLY to interchange cleanly between packages is only half the job, and that in itself is a monumental task.
What happens when you start adding textures / shaders / lighting / HDRI lighting models into the mix. Is the file format supposed to handle these cleanly as well?
Take raytracing out of the mix... play a DX9 game side by side on nVidia and ATI cards... guess what? They look different.
This is all pointless if you click *render* on two different packages and end up with different results (which, oddly enough I use to my advantage with Maya's choices of built-in renderers now). Unfortunately it's the nature of the beast, and not likely to ever change until high end 3D packages stop adding features (hair, cloth, dynamics, HDRI lighting, sub-d's, sub-surface scattering, volume caustics) with different or missing implementations on competing packages.
An exercise: Maya supports volume caustics via mental ray custom coded shaders attached to Maya lights and volume objects . The light coming through my stained glass window scene is absolutely perfect now. So I'm going to export the 'stage' into Max using this new holy grail format. What, Max doesn't support volume caustics? Not physical or shader representations? Well, all Max can do is put up a helpful error message (or nothing, knowing discreet... I digress) and ignore that data.
And now we're effectively back where we were at in the beginning. A whole lot of 3D file formats (plus 1) that are *mostly* interchangeable.
Have you considered the use of Macromedia Director?
Director has a pile of extensions to allow it to receive input from external apps -- serial port, X-10, etc. It's also much more suited to presentation work than, say, HTML or Powerpoint.
Just use an X-10 contact receiver to your existing doorbell, wire up your Mac/PC/Linux box with a reveiver and software and set your system's macros to emulate keypresses or launch the presentation from a black screen.
The guys above who said just rig an old keyboard's key to start / restart a presentation on a keypress have a great idea as well -- not as elegant, but way cheaper and easier.
K, now I've got a droplet on my desktop that does it courtesy of Photoshop, which I created with visual feedback, assuring me that I got it right?
Oh, and I can drag an entire folder of images on top of it with a single click.
(Aside: does Gimp do droplets yet?)
So...
a) What was your point, exactly? I can make a droplet for the shell script as well (Mac guy here) -- but the Photoshop route is, well, more intuitive for people who have to, well, process graphics and stuff.
b) In the GUI I wouldn't have to worry about typing it correctly the first time, I'd just *do* the stuff in Photoshop and save the recorded action as a droplet.
Not a slag on Imagemagick. IM on shared web hosts has helped me do some crazy shit. But to say that a CLI app or shell script is superior to editing graphics visually with feedback is just plain nuts.
Yeah, that dude's gone off the deep end. For the record, it's a $1500 power cable.
The lifelike timing and pace the Clairvoyant brings to music will startle some listeners. This AC cord dramatically improves the immediacy of a transient's inception, allowing for an incredible expanse of harmonic information and musical envelopment to follow. With the Clairvoyant handling AC, music leapt out of the speakers and created a see-through window into the recording that held me rapt throughout the review period. This AC cord takes music from zero to sixty, quiet to loud, and hard to soft faster than any power product I've encountered.
Not all audiophiles are that whacked out. I'm one of those guys that can tell if your speaker wires are out of phase, and I've had a hell of a hard time going to the movies lately because of the blotchy "domino" copy protection.
Then again, I've spent a bit of time as a musician and an effects artist and I've trained my eyes and ears to pick up on that sort of thing. Sometimes you can ignore annoyances fairly well (speakers out of phase as an example), sometimes you just can't stop paying attention to 'em (blotchy copy protection -- once you've seen it once, you see em every 120 frames or so for the rest of the film).
- XP *loves* to bridge all of your networking connections, and it treats firewire as one. Don't let it. Delete the bridging node if it's in your Net Connections panel.
- Use the Internet Connection Sharing wizard, and set it to share your ethernet over the 1394 connection (firewire in the civilized world).
- On the Mac, go to your network control panel (prefpane, whatever), Show --> Network Port Configurations
- Add a New --> Built-in Firewire connection
- Set it up for DHCP and you should be good to go. You might also disable your built in ethernet, airport and dialup ports for this configuration if you want an easier time debugging the connection.
The connection works great between my Shuttle box and my Powerbooks. Close to gigabit speeds for local filesharing, speeds you'd expect for 'Net sharing.
Once the price of gigabit hubs comes down, however, I'll probably never use this connection type again. If my rendering farm gets big enough to require that type of constant bandwidth, I'll probably go gigE or fiber.
Maya was ported from the SGI platform -- so originally many features were coded to support the 3-button mouse.
To this day, the Win and Mac ports still rely on the middle mouse button. (ob one-button-Mac jokes commence...)
Any workstation I've worked on, I've been able to map the scroll-wheel-click to middle mouse button features -- no matter the platform.
An aside: Maya has hands-down the best interface I've ever seen for controlling a 3D camera in a window. It relies on the alt-key and all three mouse buttons that you gesture-click. Very, very fast precise and intuitive.
I'd be interested to try something like that with the new MS mice that scroll up down and sideways./aside
My current favorite Maya/Comfy scroll click mice (many don't feel good) of late are the Logitech MX series and the Click! series corded opticals (for a few reasons -- ie corded vs. wireless for single-pixel precision, more Mac-like weight, clicker 'feels' right as a MMSB).
The beginner's camera is (and has been for years) the Pentax K-1000. It's pretty much the defacto standard for students and beginning photographers.
It's been discontinued recently -- but you can pick 'em up at photo, pawn shops or ebay very reasonably.
You won't find a better or more sturdy camera for a beginner (I did photography professionally for quite a while, so I have *some* knowledge in this realm.)
Failing that, go Nikon over Minolta and Canon (in that order).
Dub scripts are always edited to match the mouth movements of the animation. Dubbed vocal inflection isalways ruined by attempts to make the words fit the mouth movements. Subtitles are not subject to these limitations.
Always is a pretty harsh term. Sometimes the dubbing house gets stuff right. Like, say, Cowboy Bebop? Big O? (pretty much the same US voice cast).
I'll have to agree that for the vast majority of anime, I've always preferred subbed vs. dubbed versions. Something about Bebop... I actually preferred the dubbed version over subtitles. The characters' voices seemed better matched to me -- and the acting was good enough to make me cry like a baby during the final episode.
I have a theory: the more anime becomes mainstream in the US (ever look at the anime aisle in Best Buy?), the more likely we are to have good dubs vs. the Speed Racer / Pokemon dreck. Meaning that the dub houses are going to spend time and energy getting them right.
But, you have to admit, if it's going to be shown on a network -- you've got your 99% chance of it *needing* to be dubbed. Cartoon Network, especially. You're dealing with a) kids and b) people who rent Crouching Tiger and take it back because they've gotta read and c) people who treat the material a little more seriously.
Granted, it's unsupported and a bit hush-hush that it can be done, but it worked perfectly.
All it took was manually moving the files over to the appropriate directories on the first expansion -- a good thing, as I really had no urge to wait another 18 months for MacPlay to get around to porting the exp. pack.
Here's to hoping that the new mods aren't coded into the client....
Gotta say, I've used Ghost and found it to be the most reliable and versatile imaging/backup/rollout utility that I've found.
The coolest part of it:
If you're rolling out, say, 50 machines, you can boot off a floppy and then pull the image off the network. Ghost will handle reformatting/partitioning the disk for you. In this case, make sure you don't pre-register any of your software (duh)...
You have to make sure that the machines that you're backing up from/to have similar (if not identical) hardware in terms of motherboard/cards/most peripherals or ghost will freak out (for ovbious, driver-related reasons). It handles copying to different sized HDs/partitions well, although it'll complain about the drive serial numbers not matching and give you a short little copyright monologue before you can continue.
You can leave Ghost running in the background, constantly updating a mirror drive image of the machine in question (or on a schedule) -- that way it's an hour or so to reinstall if the drive crashes, etc.
It's saved me lots of hours deploying new boxes/OSes on existing boxes.
Actually, make that two. BBEdit is the greatest text editor I've ever used. It's been enough to get several coders & HTML jockeys I know to switch to the Mac.
Homesite's OK... but I'm spoiled on the Mac being able to switch between docs and apps without each app having its own background (dual monitors, anyone?).
BBEdit + Expose + a free mouse button = extra hours a week gained from not having to fight the interface or shuffle windows.
Actually, the LMtools aren't really a big deal (the licensing scheme for Maya).
You receive a key via email and save it (if you're reasonably intelligent)... it installs into either a node-locked or network license server for floating licenses.
It's completely text-based. If people lose their key or misplace it, it's really their problem. It's even plaintext, something like:
And then it checksums the feature against the host id.
Easy enough? Print it out. Save it as an email. For all purposes, it's a serial number. Saved in a aw.dat or key.txt file.
At any rate, I've been a Mac Lightwave user... no joke about being second class citizens. I wrote a twelve page tutorial a couple years back on getting the Mac Screamernet client to work (probably still on the lightwave forum). At all. It's a joke. That's part of the reason I've switched to Maya... the others are the interface, and the unified model/animate/render environment. Lightwave's got some cool stuff... but once you start playing with expressions and MEL, you'll be hooked on Maya. Built in Mental Ray is icing. Best image quality I've seen (surpassing Renderman).
As of Maya 5, for Maya Complete, there's total feature parity across platforms. If you save a.ma file (maya ascii) you may need to run a utility to fix the linebreaks in the file (mac2win/win2mac commandline stuff). We're still waiting for Unlimited on the Mac (Unlimited is available for Linux). I'm not horribly upset because there's better cloth and hair plugins available (syflex and shave/haircut). The fluid dynamics are really amazing, however, and I miss those quite a bit.
You can render over a network on mixed Mac/Linux/Win nodes as long as you have a third party utility, and all your floating point stuff (dynamics, fluids, hair) are baked.
So, all told, I'm a really big fan. The guys at ILM/Pixar have it right. Maya is a platform (almost an OS) that you build your workflow around, and it's more customizable and deeper than anything I've experienced.
Try the PLE. The guys having trouble with the licensing probably aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. It's easy, doesn't eat up much overhead, and you can have floating licenses available to banks of machines if you'd like.
If you'd like more info you can contact me at i n f o [at] t r e y h a r r e l l . c o m
I'm fairly experienced with Maya for Linux (it runs on Red Hat only, and each version of Maya is only qualified for a single version of Red Hat with very strict dynamic library version rules).
In short, it's an absolute bitch to configure and get running properly, and it assumes and (in some cases) requires that you have high end hardware. How many students do you know who just happen to have a Wildcat collecting dust in their Linux box? Own one of the two sound cards that's qualified for it?
Regardless, the difficulty in support for the Linux version is probably the reason it's not available -- not to mention the demand (major studios are starting to migrate to Linux, but unless you're your own support department, Maya for Linux is way more trouble than it's worth for an artist). Also, you'll note that Alias doesn't sell the Linux or SGI versions boxed from their website like the Win/Mac versions.
That's because they assume you'll be purchasing from a local dealer with a support contract that can iron out the headaches for you, and sell you the hardware as well with the OS pre-configured and optimized.
To reiterate: even for someone who's used to getting down and dirty with the kernel and dependancies, it's a very scary prospect to get this beast working.
The Maya PLE is fairly limited -- watermarked images, a non-commercial-Maya-compatible file format (so you can't just use PLE for modeling seats, for example), resolution caps and a few others.
Again, the 'don't get me wrong' caviat: it's awesome that Alias is allowing students and people trying to get into the CG/VFX fields a chance to be honest while learning the software. A lot of us (myself included) used *cough* other means to learn the products back in the day, then bought in (or had our companies buy in) once we were proficient enough to make the investment pay.
The cost of high end 3D packages and all the accouterments (Photoshop, Final Cut, After Effects, Shake, plug ins etc) is fairly staggering for your average college student (even for some of us in the field), and modeling/texturing/animating a single model can take a month or more when you're just learning -- so a save-disabled demo isn't good enough.
The PLE fills that niche very well -- just don't count on moving any of your masterpieces from the PLE to the full version of Maya once you're making enough cash to buy in.
I do have to say, as a CG pro, Maya is an absolutely amazing piece of engineering. Once you've finished fighting the rather odd interface and learn Alias' annoying method for creating nurbs and subdivision surfaces, there's no turning back.
Granted, ten other people will say the same things about Lightwave, SoftImage and Max, and two or three will say the same thing about Blender. YMMV, but it's an amazing piece of work under the hood.
Now the obligatory rant: we want Maya Unlimited for the Mac! -- other products do hair and cloth (much) better... but the built-in fluid dynamics in Maya 5 are absolutely amazing... and very, very, very fast.
Have you considered just stuffing and archiving your old iTunes, then if it gets replaced without your consent restoring the archive?
It's a Mac, y'know.
The limits on iTunes sharing aren't really all that bad, though. You can still have up to 5 LAN users connected to your library.
If that's not enough, perhaps you should look at the SliMP3 server software. It's meant for controlling the (awesome) SliMP3 device, but can also stream whatever you like to whatever address you like via a web-based interface.
1. Reboot from the OS X install CD. Go to the file menu once the installer starts. You can reset your password there.
2. Load up the netinfo manager and you can do the same thing if you're actually forgetting your root password and not the admin password. Just authenticate and reset the password.
But I just don't know if I'd trust my mom to run a secure Mandrake box if she can't even do Windows fucking Update.
That's the problem at hand. In order for a computer system to be easy enough for the general populous to use, you HAVE to be able to double-click an attachment to figure out what it is and use it.
If you think it's hard for your Mom to run windows update, wait until she has to: $: chmod 755 ~/downloads/afunscreensaver.pif cd downloads $:./afunscreensaver.pif
in order to see what the hell an attachment is?
It's at once on the *nix and Mac side a blessing and a curse. You realize that my father asked me to install Virtual PC on his G4 so he could see.exe and.scr attachments?!?!?!?
The point:
Lack of Windows Update (MCSE know it alls) first, bad MS security second is responsible for the RPC worms that have been wreaking havok / making us 'computer guys' money off of RPCs and slammers.
SoBig is a bit of another beast. Part just idiotic users (HOW many times have we told you...), Part social engineering (mostly associates of people in your associates' address books), part piss-poor framework for user privileges, another part misinformed, idiotic users.
If the Mac or Linux were as popular today as Win was, we'd be seeing the similar problems, I'd wager. You can only protect the average user from themselves so far before the system isn't easy enough to use. Have you ever tried to get a casual user to understand that it's a good thing that you have revoked their win privileges and their limited logon can't even install that cool santa's workshop screensaver? If that screensaver was the same draw to Linux or Mac converts (and the payload would execute), you'd still have the same problem, I'd wager. Only then the users would be used to typing in their root passwords before installing anything -- which could then be keylogged and sent back to the source so they could REALLY compromise the system.
It's a scary thought. Yeah, MS security is piss-poor. Yeah, windows is a secure as your average sieve.
But even if it isn't -- we're fighting human nature here. It's not holes in MS security that's the inherent problem. It's the users launching the payload in this case. So what if you've conditioned them that they have to enter an admin/root password to install it first.
Make no mistake, though. The last several scares have converted a LOT of MS-only shops to Mac or *nix only in my experience. I'm gutting 48 PIII boxes on Monday, and replacing them with shiny G5s with Simple Finders.
I suffer from both sinus headaches and cluster headaches (which used to be classified as a type of migraine, but are no longer -- think all the pain of a day-long migraine compressed into 45 minutes and you get the idea).
Usually my cluster headaches are sinus or lifestyle-triggered: dehydration, strong perfume, aerosol household cleaners, lack of sleep among others are biggies.
I've noticed (non-scientific) that changes in pressure and sudden changes in weather bring on my sinus headaches. Pollen and humidity have a lot to do with this -- I'm a Florida native and when I travel elsewhere that's drier or less allergen prone, my sinus headaches are fewer and much, much less severe.
At any rate, I've been living with the sinus headaches most of my life, and the cluster headaches for about 10 years now (I'm 28).
The major problem with cluster headaches is that they come on fast and they leave fast -- usually about an hour and a half from 'warning signs' to 'resolution'. Once the headache actually hits, I'm pretty much incapacitated for about 45 minutes -- crippling pain, and nausea if it's a really bad one. It's also too short for most types of pain medication to take effect in time.
I've found precisely two medications that work:
1. 4-in-1 brand nose spray (over the counter). Very addictive, so be careful. Seriously. Google for reasons you shouldn't use stuff like Contac (like the parent) or nose sprays regularly. I've found that if I notice a cluster coming on early enough (not nearly often enough) that the clusters can be dulled -- sometimes they don't peak if I catch them early enough. I classify this as a preventative.
2. Immitrex (prescription). Absolute godsend for my cluster headaches and my fiancee's migraines (she gets them very rarely, but we're both prescribed). Side effects can't be described as pleasant. I'm not sure I can describe them besides saying: I feel unpleasantly odd for about two hours, but it's a hell of a lot *more* pleasant than the cluster/migraine. The side effects are such that I will only take these when I'm having a major attack -- but I'm very glad I've got them because even after ten years I still get attacks that leave me clenched up sweating in a fetal position for an hour or so.
Best of luck figuring out your headaches. I've been trying to for 10 years. I'll go six months having them twice a day and then go another six months without a single one.
I've pretty much realized that I'm stuck with mine for the rest of my life and I cope with them. Meditation helps (shortens the duration, makes coping with the pain easier), eating healthy seems to help, getting a good amount of sleep seems to help -- but nothing's a 100% cure.
If you *have* been diagnosed with clinical migraine, ask about Immitrex. It's expensive, and can be a bit unpleasant feeling -- but if you could have a pill that would cut the duration of your headaches down to 20 minutes (vs many hours) would you? Most true migraine sufferers I know would gladly make that tradeoff.
In my case, it was an employee of the credit union which I used to bank at. They ordered a duplicate ATM card in my name, and picked it up from my mailbox while I was at work (about five years ago).
While they had the card, they would place fake deposits (empty envelopes) in affiliated credit union ATMs (all CUs in this area share ATM facilities) -- giving as much credit as the 'deposit' was listed as having available for withdrawal immediately -- and the credit union would be none the wiser for almost a week until the deposit slip made it into their hands.
I actually noticed what had happened before the credit union did. I noticed that my available balance was WAY higher than it should have been, but my daily withdrawal limit had been reached.
It took several months, a police report, several meetings with the bank and an indefinite fraud alert on all my credit reports to clear things up. The police began working with the bank. The bank gave me some clues to the effect that they believed it was an internal job -- but I was never able to find out the results of the investigation.
All that said, I make it policy to:
1. Only have vital mail shipped to a *secure* location. This means a locked mailbox, a P.O. box, or at the very least mailed to your work address, where you routinely are during delivery hours.
2. Bitch and moan until I'm blue in the face if I'm anywhere that prints the full number on credit card receipts. If you complain loud enough, even the corner Starbucks will make a call to their merchant account provider and have their unit reprogrammed.
3. I flat-out refuse to give out my Social to anyone, save employers or the government. No-brainer here. Potentially messy when renting an apartment, however.
4. I refuse to allow my ID card to be swiped for verification purposes (my state has a magstrip on licenses with all sorts of personal data), and I also refuse to give out any personal information to sales clerks.
They'll complain like hell at Radio Shack or the local liquor store ('I'm sorry, those are the rules') -- but after they start losing sales because you refuse to comply, they'll soften their corporate stance considerably.
5. I *read* all my bank and card statements, and I know within $10 or so how much I have available in every account. If things look weird, I investigate.
The short of it: identity theft, however big or small can happen to anyone. My practice is to apply some common sense to minimize my exposure -- but, let's face it -- it's easier for a disgruntled waiter to copy down your credit card number than for someone to outright steal your identity.
Be smart. You patch your systems religiously (if you don't and you're on/. you really need to work on your reading comprehension skills). Apply some of that same caution to your identity and personal accounts.
Sacrifice a little convenience (paying cash for dinner) for a little piece of mind, but don't go too overboard. Just be AWARE.
1. At boot time (any time you power cycle the unit) you tell it the address of the server you want to use. This way you can boot up once off 'your' collection, next time off a roommate's collection.
2. You set up a central music share and set that to be your centralized music library. As long as you use stuff like WinAMP or iTunes to sort and add tags to your music, you can keep your collections and playlists separate, while pooling all your music. That's what my fiancee and I did after our second CD jukebox in 5 years died [hate...Sony...components...].
We got a 80 gig drive, plopped in into my iMac file server, ripped every single CD either of us owned (192+ VBR streams, depending on the type of music -- if it had heavy subs or really high dynamic range, we'd rip as 320kpbs), stuck the originals in storage and got a SliMP3. Best damned $300 (including the drive) I've spent in a very long time.
Another common question I've gotten about the thing is whether CDs will play 'seamless' across tracks. Happily I answer 'yes' -- you can listen to your favorite Pink Floyd (or whatever) without the slightest pop between tracks to drag you from the Pigs on the Wing.
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Uh, so the answer is... a metric fuckload faster?
Rundown on various offspring of Godzilla in different realities & continuities:
The cute, annoying, pudgy son-o-G in the earlier movies was called Minya. I'm not sure where the name Minilla popped up -- I've heard it before, but never seen it in any of the subs or heard it in the dubs. Then again, more recent dubs have done strange stuff like change the names of Mothra's little twin hotties (The Cosmos), so I just may be out of the loop.
The little fat guy was in Godzilla's Revenge AKA All Monsters Attack (Worse than GINO, avoid at all costs), Son of Godzilla, and used as a greatest hits bit of stock footage in a couple others which are also best forgotten.
Godzooky was the often forgotten American cartoon version of son-o-G circa '79. Think Scooby Doo meets Jaques Cousteau with a big green Scrappy Doo. Completely fucking terrifying to recall now, but I loved it when I was 4. I so wanted a remote control that would call big G to do my bidding. I still want Mothra's little twin hotties, though, but I digress.
Perhaps Minilla is the Americanized name for the baby G that we saw in G vs Space G and vs Destroyah? I think his official name was Godzilla Jr in those, although he graduated and became full blown Godzilla in G2K.
A fairly nice perspective on the big green guy's varied histories is here. Another is here but takes itself a lot more seriously.
As the IT director for a mid-sized agency, you hit on the number one problem we had dragging everyone kicking and screaming onto X.
Our solution?
We physically deleted every single legacy font on every single machine we had and upgraded to all OpenType fonts (the new Adobe Font Folio is available in both T1 and OTF formats) and Suitcase.
The coolest thing is that all of the Opentype fonts are named "pro" or "std" -- so instead of having 12 conflicting Helveticas on our systems, we now know the "good" one is called "Helvetica STD" in the lists.
All fonts in our library with a creation date prior to 1998 are banned -- you know, like the AGaramond/Futura/etc. direct fom old type on call CDs?
If we run into a situation where a non-supported font is necessary, I either:
1. Buy a new copy (forcing art directors to get legit with their fonts is a biggie)
2. Take the old font (usually Share or Freeware in this case) into Fontographer (or whatever) and create a new, clean suitcase with a non-conflicting name and ID -- usually saved in OpenType format.
The biggest problem with all of those old font libraries that have been passed from freelancer to agency to service bureau and back again is that they're all corrupt, mixed and matched. 10, 12 point screen font from Adobe, 14 point from Emigre, Book printer version from Agfa, Bold from Adobe, Bold Italic from Lino.
Next time you've got a flaky font issue, get info on the printer and screen fonts and pay attention to the copyrights and creation dates. You'll wonder how they ever worked at all.
OS 9 was far more accomodating than X is in that respect, but it's forced a housecleaning here -- for the better.
I'd say, on record, to anyone that listens that chucking Classic and starting over on our fonts solved 85% of my daily support calls.
On a final note... uh... Pagemaker? WTF?
Ditch Classic. Go with Indesign (good Pagemaker import) or Quark (evil fucking company, but necessary in our offices), but the sooner you cut the umbilical cord, the sooner the pain will be over.
Perhaps they're putting the chip in a mini PC system that doesn't support a conventional fan?
I've assembled many Shuttle-based systems like that (for myself and clients), and each of them have a pretty nifty heatpipe and ventilation fan -- but no room whatsoever to install the massive fan that ships with Intel chips these days.
So, I've got a stack of 'em in the closet. Up to about 25 at last count, give or take.
I've personally had Intel warranty replace a defective 2.4 P4 -- it took several hours on hold and I had to speak with Intel directly, and not my distributor -- but they replaced it knowing it was in this type of system and their fan wasn't in use.
Last I checked, .obj (from the old Wavefront days) and .ma (maya ascii files) were both open formats. Those *were* both of SGI's biggest 3D formats. The trick being that Alias (Wavefront) was sold off from SGI last week.
.obj and .dxf for the role that this new format (created by industry outsiders, no less) is hoping to fill.
Hell, they're even (as someone pointed out above) human readable.
From the point of view of someone in the industry (I do FX work for indie films), here's my perspective... some of it's off-topic.
- VRML sucks for anything except crude realtime flythrus. High-end 3D work these days deals with nurbs & subdivision surfaces. No support in VRML, huge file sizes, and while it's an open format, every vendor's interpretation of the data leaves something to be desired. More on this below.
- DXF. Hello? We've *had* a standard 3D interchange format since autocad came out. Doesn't suck as bad as VRML, but still sucks for many of the same reasons. But it's a way to fairly cleanly exchange poly data between programs. Polys are the basis of sub-d surfaces. I already use
- Filmbox format: (.fbx) does a hell of a job moving professional-grade models and textures back and forth between high-end packages. Interpretation doesn't vary as widely on the host platform, but there's still one catch: textures & shading.
Until there's a "standard" rendering engine that absolutely everyone uses, a unified 3D format is still only getting half the picture. Every major package has a different way that shaders are written, different channels available in said shaders, different lighting models, etc.
Don't even get me started about feature parity.
Hell, on a given project, depending on my needs I may use a combination of Renderman, Mental Ray, Hardware texturing, and even the Maya renderer. It all boils down to what gets the job done fast enough and pretty enough.
Getting subdivision surfaces and nurbs geometry ONLY to interchange cleanly between packages is only half the job, and that in itself is a monumental task.
What happens when you start adding textures / shaders / lighting / HDRI lighting models into the mix. Is the file format supposed to handle these cleanly as well?
Take raytracing out of the mix... play a DX9 game side by side on nVidia and ATI cards... guess what? They look different.
This is all pointless if you click *render* on two different packages and end up with different results (which, oddly enough I use to my advantage with Maya's choices of built-in renderers now). Unfortunately it's the nature of the beast, and not likely to ever change until high end 3D packages stop adding features (hair, cloth, dynamics, HDRI lighting, sub-d's, sub-surface scattering, volume caustics) with different or missing implementations on competing packages.
An exercise: Maya supports volume caustics via mental ray custom coded shaders attached to Maya lights and volume objects . The light coming through my stained glass window scene is absolutely perfect now. So I'm going to export the 'stage' into Max using this new holy grail format. What, Max doesn't support volume caustics? Not physical or shader representations? Well, all Max can do is put up a helpful error message (or nothing, knowing discreet... I digress) and ignore that data.
And now we're effectively back where we were at in the beginning. A whole lot of 3D file formats (plus 1) that are *mostly* interchangeable.
Is that when you've got your gat turned all sideways at your ho?
Have you considered the use of Macromedia Director?
Director has a pile of extensions to allow it to receive input from external apps -- serial port, X-10, etc. It's also much more suited to presentation work than, say, HTML or Powerpoint.
Just use an X-10 contact receiver to your existing doorbell, wire up your Mac/PC/Linux box with a reveiver and software and set your system's macros to emulate keypresses or launch the presentation from a black screen.
The guys above who said just rig an old keyboard's key to start / restart a presentation on a keypress have a great idea as well -- not as elegant, but way cheaper and easier.
K, now I've got a droplet on my desktop that does it courtesy of Photoshop, which I created with visual feedback, assuring me that I got it right?
Oh, and I can drag an entire folder of images on top of it with a single click.
(Aside: does Gimp do droplets yet?)
So...
a) What was your point, exactly? I can make a droplet for the shell script as well (Mac guy here) -- but the Photoshop route is, well, more intuitive for people who have to, well, process graphics and stuff.
b) In the GUI I wouldn't have to worry about typing it correctly the first time, I'd just *do* the stuff in Photoshop and save the recorded action as a droplet.
Not a slag on Imagemagick. IM on shared web hosts has helped me do some crazy shit. But to say that a CLI app or shell script is superior to editing graphics visually with feedback is just plain nuts.
Not all audiophiles are that whacked out. I'm one of those guys that can tell if your speaker wires are out of phase, and I've had a hell of a hard time going to the movies lately because of the blotchy "domino" copy protection.
Then again, I've spent a bit of time as a musician and an effects artist and I've trained my eyes and ears to pick up on that sort of thing. Sometimes you can ignore annoyances fairly well (speakers out of phase as an example), sometimes you just can't stop paying attention to 'em (blotchy copy protection -- once you've seen it once, you see em every 120 frames or so for the rest of the film).
I've had a setup similar to what the poster's looking for for quite some time now
The basics (under Panther, similar under Jaguar):
- XP *loves* to bridge all of your networking connections, and it treats firewire as one. Don't let it. Delete the bridging node if it's in your Net Connections panel.
- Use the Internet Connection Sharing wizard, and set it to share your ethernet over the 1394 connection (firewire in the civilized world).
- On the Mac, go to your network control panel (prefpane, whatever), Show --> Network Port Configurations
- Add a New --> Built-in Firewire connection
- Set it up for DHCP and you should be good to go. You might also disable your built in ethernet, airport and dialup ports for this configuration if you want an easier time debugging the connection.
The connection works great between my Shuttle box and my Powerbooks. Close to gigabit speeds for local filesharing, speeds you'd expect for 'Net sharing.
Once the price of gigabit hubs comes down, however, I'll probably never use this connection type again. If my rendering farm gets big enough to require that type of constant bandwidth, I'll probably go gigE or fiber.
Maya was ported from the SGI platform -- so originally many features were coded to support the 3-button mouse.
/aside
To this day, the Win and Mac ports still rely on the middle mouse button. (ob one-button-Mac jokes commence...)
Any workstation I've worked on, I've been able to map the scroll-wheel-click to middle mouse button features -- no matter the platform.
An aside: Maya has hands-down the best interface I've ever seen for controlling a 3D camera in a window. It relies on the alt-key and all three mouse buttons that you gesture-click. Very, very fast precise and intuitive.
I'd be interested to try something like that with the new MS mice that scroll up down and sideways.
My current favorite Maya/Comfy scroll click mice (many don't feel good) of late are the Logitech MX series and the Click! series corded opticals (for a few reasons -- ie corded vs. wireless for single-pixel precision, more Mac-like weight, clicker 'feels' right as a MMSB).
Hope this helps
The beginner's camera is (and has been for years) the Pentax K-1000. It's pretty much the defacto standard for students and beginning photographers.
It's been discontinued recently -- but you can pick 'em up at photo, pawn shops or ebay very reasonably.
You won't find a better or more sturdy camera for a beginner (I did photography professionally for quite a while, so I have *some* knowledge in this realm.)
Failing that, go Nikon over Minolta and Canon (in that order).
Always is a pretty harsh term. Sometimes the dubbing house gets stuff right. Like, say, Cowboy Bebop? Big O? (pretty much the same US voice cast).
I'll have to agree that for the vast majority of anime, I've always preferred subbed vs. dubbed versions. Something about Bebop... I actually preferred the dubbed version over subtitles. The characters' voices seemed better matched to me -- and the acting was good enough to make me cry like a baby during the final episode.
I have a theory: the more anime becomes mainstream in the US (ever look at the anime aisle in Best Buy?), the more likely we are to have good dubs vs. the Speed Racer / Pokemon dreck. Meaning that the dub houses are going to spend time and energy getting them right.
But, you have to admit, if it's going to be shown on a network -- you've got your 99% chance of it *needing* to be dubbed. Cartoon Network, especially. You're dealing with a) kids and b) people who rent Crouching Tiger and take it back because they've gotta read and c) people who treat the material a little more seriously.
We're part of group C, but the minority.
It is changing, though. Slowly.
Can the PC/Linux expansion be installed on the Mac like Shadows of Undrentide?
Granted, it's unsupported and a bit hush-hush that it can be done, but it worked perfectly.
All it took was manually moving the files over to the appropriate directories on the first expansion -- a good thing, as I really had no urge to wait another 18 months for MacPlay to get around to porting the exp. pack.
Here's to hoping that the new mods aren't coded into the client....
Give me Deekin (now!) or give me death!
Gotta say, I've used Ghost and found it to be the most reliable and versatile imaging/backup/rollout utility that I've found.
The coolest part of it:
If you're rolling out, say, 50 machines, you can boot off a floppy and then pull the image off the network. Ghost will handle reformatting/partitioning the disk for you. In this case, make sure you don't pre-register any of your software (duh)...
You have to make sure that the machines that you're backing up from/to have similar (if not identical) hardware in terms of motherboard/cards/most peripherals or ghost will freak out (for ovbious, driver-related reasons). It handles copying to different sized HDs/partitions well, although it'll complain about the drive serial numbers not matching and give you a short little copyright monologue before you can continue.
You can leave Ghost running in the background, constantly updating a mirror drive image of the machine in question (or on a schedule) -- that way it's an hour or so to reinstall if the drive crashes, etc.
It's saved me lots of hours deploying new boxes/OSes on existing boxes.
Actually, make that two. BBEdit is the greatest text editor I've ever used. It's been enough to get several coders & HTML jockeys I know to switch to the Mac.
Homesite's OK... but I'm spoiled on the Mac being able to switch between docs and apps without each app having its own background (dual monitors, anyone?).
BBEdit + Expose + a free mouse button = extra hours a week gained from not having to fight the interface or shuffle windows.
Actually, the LMtools aren't really a big deal (the licensing scheme for Maya).
... it installs into either a node-locked or network license server for floating licenses.
.ma file (maya ascii) you may need to run a utility to fix the linebreaks in the file (mac2win/win2mac commandline stuff). We're still waiting for Unlimited on the Mac (Unlimited is available for Linux). I'm not horribly upset because there's better cloth and hair plugins available (syflex and shave/haircut). The fluid dynamics are really amazing, however, and I miss those quite a bit.
You receive a key via email and save it (if you're reasonably intelligent)
It's completely text-based. If people lose their key or misplace it, it's really their problem. It's even plaintext, something like:
FEATURE Maya Unlimited HostID AABBCCDDEEFF Checksum 1234567890
And then it checksums the feature against the host id.
Easy enough? Print it out. Save it as an email. For all purposes, it's a serial number. Saved in a aw.dat or key.txt file.
At any rate, I've been a Mac Lightwave user... no joke about being second class citizens. I wrote a twelve page tutorial a couple years back on getting the Mac Screamernet client to work (probably still on the lightwave forum). At all. It's a joke. That's part of the reason I've switched to Maya... the others are the interface, and the unified model/animate/render environment. Lightwave's got some cool stuff... but once you start playing with expressions and MEL, you'll be hooked on Maya. Built in Mental Ray is icing. Best image quality I've seen (surpassing Renderman).
As of Maya 5, for Maya Complete, there's total feature parity across platforms. If you save a
You can render over a network on mixed Mac/Linux/Win nodes as long as you have a third party utility, and all your floating point stuff (dynamics, fluids, hair) are baked.
So, all told, I'm a really big fan. The guys at ILM/Pixar have it right. Maya is a platform (almost an OS) that you build your workflow around, and it's more customizable and deeper than anything I've experienced.
Try the PLE. The guys having trouble with the licensing probably aren't the sharpest tools in the shed. It's easy, doesn't eat up much overhead, and you can have floating licenses available to banks of machines if you'd like.
If you'd like more info you can contact me at i n f o [at] t r e y h a r r e l l . c o m
I'm fairly experienced with Maya for Linux (it runs on Red Hat only, and each version of Maya is only qualified for a single version of Red Hat with very strict dynamic library version rules).
In short, it's an absolute bitch to configure and get running properly, and it assumes and (in some cases) requires that you have high end hardware. How many students do you know who just happen to have a Wildcat collecting dust in their Linux box? Own one of the two sound cards that's qualified for it?
Regardless, the difficulty in support for the Linux version is probably the reason it's not available -- not to mention the demand (major studios are starting to migrate to Linux, but unless you're your own support department, Maya for Linux is way more trouble than it's worth for an artist). Also, you'll note that Alias doesn't sell the Linux or SGI versions boxed from their website like the Win/Mac versions.
That's because they assume you'll be purchasing from a local dealer with a support contract that can iron out the headaches for you, and sell you the hardware as well with the OS pre-configured and optimized.
To reiterate: even for someone who's used to getting down and dirty with the kernel and dependancies, it's a very scary prospect to get this beast working.
The Maya PLE is fairly limited -- watermarked images, a non-commercial-Maya-compatible file format (so you can't just use PLE for modeling seats, for example), resolution caps and a few others.
Again, the 'don't get me wrong' caviat: it's awesome that Alias is allowing students and people trying to get into the CG/VFX fields a chance to be honest while learning the software. A lot of us (myself included) used *cough* other means to learn the products back in the day, then bought in (or had our companies buy in) once we were proficient enough to make the investment pay.
The cost of high end 3D packages and all the accouterments (Photoshop, Final Cut, After Effects, Shake, plug ins etc) is fairly staggering for your average college student (even for some of us in the field), and modeling/texturing/animating a single model can take a month or more when you're just learning -- so a save-disabled demo isn't good enough.
The PLE fills that niche very well -- just don't count on moving any of your masterpieces from the PLE to the full version of Maya once you're making enough cash to buy in.
I do have to say, as a CG pro, Maya is an absolutely amazing piece of engineering. Once you've finished fighting the rather odd interface and learn Alias' annoying method for creating nurbs and subdivision surfaces, there's no turning back.
Granted, ten other people will say the same things about Lightwave, SoftImage and Max, and two or three will say the same thing about Blender. YMMV, but it's an amazing piece of work under the hood.
Now the obligatory rant: we want Maya Unlimited for the Mac! -- other products do hair and cloth (much) better... but the built-in fluid dynamics in Maya 5 are absolutely amazing... and very, very, very fast.
Have you considered just stuffing and archiving your old iTunes, then if it gets replaced without your consent restoring the archive?
It's a Mac, y'know.
The limits on iTunes sharing aren't really all that bad, though. You can still have up to 5 LAN users connected to your library.
If that's not enough, perhaps you should look at the SliMP3 server software. It's meant for controlling the (awesome) SliMP3 device, but can also stream whatever you like to whatever address you like via a web-based interface.
Either:
1. Reboot from the OS X install CD. Go to the file menu once the installer starts. You can reset your password there.
2. Load up the netinfo manager and you can do the same thing if you're actually forgetting your root password and not the admin password. Just authenticate and reset the password.
--T
That's the problem at hand. In order for a computer system to be easy enough for the general populous to use, you HAVE to be able to double-click an attachment to figure out what it is and use it.
If you think it's hard for your Mom to run windows update, wait until she has to: ./afunscreensaver.pif
.exe and .scr attachments?!?!?!?
$: chmod 755 ~/downloads/afunscreensaver.pif
cd downloads
$:
in order to see what the hell an attachment is?
It's at once on the *nix and Mac side a blessing and a curse. You realize that my father asked me to install Virtual PC on his G4 so he could see
The point:
Lack of Windows Update (MCSE know it alls) first, bad MS security second is responsible for the RPC worms that have been wreaking havok / making us 'computer guys' money off of RPCs and slammers.
SoBig is a bit of another beast. Part just idiotic users (HOW many times have we told you...), Part social engineering (mostly associates of people in your associates' address books), part piss-poor framework for user privileges, another part misinformed, idiotic users.
If the Mac or Linux were as popular today as Win was, we'd be seeing the similar problems, I'd wager. You can only protect the average user from themselves so far before the system isn't easy enough to use. Have you ever tried to get a casual user to understand that it's a good thing that you have revoked their win privileges and their limited logon can't even install that cool santa's workshop screensaver? If that screensaver was the same draw to Linux or Mac converts (and the payload would execute), you'd still have the same problem, I'd wager. Only then the users would be used to typing in their root passwords before installing anything -- which could then be keylogged and sent back to the source so they could REALLY compromise the system.
It's a scary thought. Yeah, MS security is piss-poor. Yeah, windows is a secure as your average sieve.
But even if it isn't -- we're fighting human nature here. It's not holes in MS security that's the inherent problem. It's the users launching the payload in this case. So what if you've conditioned them that they have to enter an admin/root password to install it first.
Make no mistake, though. The last several scares have converted a LOT of MS-only shops to Mac or *nix only in my experience. I'm gutting 48 PIII boxes on Monday, and replacing them with shiny G5s with Simple Finders.
I suffer from both sinus headaches and cluster headaches (which used to be classified as a type of migraine, but are no longer -- think all the pain of a day-long migraine compressed into 45 minutes and you get the idea).
Usually my cluster headaches are sinus or lifestyle-triggered: dehydration, strong perfume, aerosol household cleaners, lack of sleep among others are biggies.
I've noticed (non-scientific) that changes in pressure and sudden changes in weather bring on my sinus headaches. Pollen and humidity have a lot to do with this -- I'm a Florida native and when I travel elsewhere that's drier or less allergen prone, my sinus headaches are fewer and much, much less severe.
At any rate, I've been living with the sinus headaches most of my life, and the cluster headaches for about 10 years now (I'm 28).
The major problem with cluster headaches is that they come on fast and they leave fast -- usually about an hour and a half from 'warning signs' to 'resolution'. Once the headache actually hits, I'm pretty much incapacitated for about 45 minutes -- crippling pain, and nausea if it's a really bad one. It's also too short for most types of pain medication to take effect in time.
I've found precisely two medications that work:
1. 4-in-1 brand nose spray (over the counter). Very addictive, so be careful. Seriously. Google for reasons you shouldn't use stuff like Contac (like the parent) or nose sprays regularly. I've found that if I notice a cluster coming on early enough (not nearly often enough) that the clusters can be dulled -- sometimes they don't peak if I catch them early enough. I classify this as a preventative.
2. Immitrex (prescription). Absolute godsend for my cluster headaches and my fiancee's migraines (she gets them very rarely, but we're both prescribed). Side effects can't be described as pleasant. I'm not sure I can describe them besides saying: I feel unpleasantly odd for about two hours, but it's a hell of a lot *more* pleasant than the cluster/migraine. The side effects are such that I will only take these when I'm having a major attack -- but I'm very glad I've got them because even after ten years I still get attacks that leave me clenched up sweating in a fetal position for an hour or so.
Best of luck figuring out your headaches. I've been trying to for 10 years. I'll go six months having them twice a day and then go another six months without a single one.
I've pretty much realized that I'm stuck with mine for the rest of my life and I cope with them. Meditation helps (shortens the duration, makes coping with the pain easier), eating healthy seems to help, getting a good amount of sleep seems to help -- but nothing's a 100% cure.
If you *have* been diagnosed with clinical migraine, ask about Immitrex. It's expensive, and can be a bit unpleasant feeling -- but if you could have a pill that would cut the duration of your headaches down to 20 minutes (vs many hours) would you? Most true migraine sufferers I know would gladly make that tradeoff.
I've been the victim of identity theft, myself.
/. you really need to work on your reading comprehension skills). Apply some of that same caution to your identity and personal accounts.
In my case, it was an employee of the credit union which I used to bank at. They ordered a duplicate ATM card in my name, and picked it up from my mailbox while I was at work (about five years ago).
While they had the card, they would place fake deposits (empty envelopes) in affiliated credit union ATMs (all CUs in this area share ATM facilities) -- giving as much credit as the 'deposit' was listed as having available for withdrawal immediately -- and the credit union would be none the wiser for almost a week until the deposit slip made it into their hands.
I actually noticed what had happened before the credit union did. I noticed that my available balance was WAY higher than it should have been, but my daily withdrawal limit had been reached.
It took several months, a police report, several meetings with the bank and an indefinite fraud alert on all my credit reports to clear things up. The police began working with the bank. The bank gave me some clues to the effect that they believed it was an internal job -- but I was never able to find out the results of the investigation.
All that said, I make it policy to:
1. Only have vital mail shipped to a *secure* location. This means a locked mailbox, a P.O. box, or at the very least mailed to your work address, where you routinely are during delivery hours.
2. Bitch and moan until I'm blue in the face if I'm anywhere that prints the full number on credit card receipts. If you complain loud enough, even the corner Starbucks will make a call to their merchant account provider and have their unit reprogrammed.
3. I flat-out refuse to give out my Social to anyone, save employers or the government. No-brainer here. Potentially messy when renting an apartment, however.
4. I refuse to allow my ID card to be swiped for verification purposes (my state has a magstrip on licenses with all sorts of personal data), and I also refuse to give out any personal information to sales clerks.
They'll complain like hell at Radio Shack or the local liquor store ('I'm sorry, those are the rules') -- but after they start losing sales because you refuse to comply, they'll soften their corporate stance considerably.
5. I *read* all my bank and card statements, and I know within $10 or so how much I have available in every account. If things look weird, I investigate.
The short of it: identity theft, however big or small can happen to anyone. My practice is to apply some common sense to minimize my exposure -- but, let's face it -- it's easier for a disgruntled waiter to copy down your credit card number than for someone to outright steal your identity.
Be smart. You patch your systems religiously (if you don't and you're on
Sacrifice a little convenience (paying cash for dinner) for a little piece of mind, but don't go too overboard. Just be AWARE.
Well, there's two real solutions to this problem.
1. At boot time (any time you power cycle the unit) you tell it the address of the server you want to use. This way you can boot up once off 'your' collection, next time off a roommate's collection.
2. You set up a central music share and set that to be your centralized music library. As long as you use stuff like WinAMP or iTunes to sort and add tags to your music, you can keep your collections and playlists separate, while pooling all your music. That's what my fiancee and I did after our second CD jukebox in 5 years died [hate...Sony...components...].
We got a 80 gig drive, plopped in into my iMac file server, ripped every single CD either of us owned (192+ VBR streams, depending on the type of music -- if it had heavy subs or really high dynamic range, we'd rip as 320kpbs), stuck the originals in storage and got a SliMP3. Best damned $300 (including the drive) I've spent in a very long time.
Another common question I've gotten about the thing is whether CDs will play 'seamless' across tracks. Happily I answer 'yes' -- you can listen to your favorite Pink Floyd (or whatever) without the slightest pop between tracks to drag you from the Pigs on the Wing.