The SliMP3 can decode any of those formats on the fly -- it can also stream most net radio stations as well (pretty cool having KEXP Live as a playlist).
The only one I've seen any significant degradation using is the AAC codec.
Assuming that all your stuff is ripped at a decent quality (192 or equivalent), I doubt you'll notice a difference. Everything transcodes in real-time using LAME.
It's really a cost-effective solution, and super elegant.
I have to admit, I'm a head-over-heels lover of my SliMP3s.
The reasons you should be too:
It's platform independent, but is also really tightly integrated into your itunes/musicmatch/winamp playlists. A single server, whatever your religion, can saturate the network before the server gets bogged down. This said, I recommend a Mac server, just because iTunes is amazing, and I really don't like having to deal with Linux config when I'm not being paid to.
$200/unit, and all the playlists on your network can be streamed from one location. At 10/100 speeds, it'd take about 15-20 of the things to saturate your network, if they were all running at the same time.
All of your libraries and playlists will be shared and distributed thruout the house. Doesn't matter if you're going to a boom box with a ghetto-wired cassete adaptor. Run cat5 to the room (cheap), and choose the most suited amplification method, from powered speakers, to a MacGyvered boom box, to a proper receiver.
The company is super cool, comes out with feature updates constantly, and the server software is open source, should you choose to use the built-in Perl powered httpd server versus just using a remote.
I'm not an employee of Slim Devices, just an insanely happy customer. That's a whole lot of elegance in a small, inexpensive package.
And it plays a mean game of Tetris, gives my weather report, and does a/. ticker every 15 minutes on each unit, just because I can.
What's your beef with Adobe, anyhow? Hell, you've got stock?!?!?
(throwing away previously modded points in this thread, simply because I don't get it)
As far as huge software companies go, they're pretty benign in my view.
And they make some absolutely excellent software. Again, my view, but I'm sure I can get someone around here to corroborate.
Photoshop is the best piece of software out there for image manipulation. Bar none.
Gimp may be nice, but it's not as easy to use and it doesn't have anywhere near the polish as its older brother.
Same goes for After Effects/Film Gimp.
PDF is wonderful. PDF is open.
Try making your living as an artist, animator or effects guy using all open-source tools. It's possible, but way more trouble than it's worth.
That's why I *buy* Adobe software, and that's why I run on a Mac platform as well. I'm fully capable of configuring and tweaking whatever linux distro is currently in vogue, and screwing with XFree so that windows don't lock (as) randomly. I just choose not to because my time is worth money, and honestly I get more work done faster in the more polished solution. Period.
I mean, did John Warnock piss in your cornflakes or something?
The reason I bought it...
on
Mac OS X Hints
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I bought the book primarily because I use Rob's Site constantly and he's had a very plain policy on no advertising to put any of his editorial into doubt on the site.
The guy has a full-time job, he's got one of the best resources on the web to help with under-the-hood OS X action, and he's got principals I happen to dig. He also busts his ass on the site.
I bought my copy of the book to support him, period. I've got several more on order now to give as gifts to friends who are making the transition (art director and photographer types) who could use a guided tour under the hood of OS X that doesn't make them feel like morons or *cough* 'Dummies'. Let's face it -- the dummies, missing manual and like books are made for grandma. I'm trying to show these guys all the cool new stuff you can do once you peek under the hood to get them excited about the change instead of dreading it.
Just the simple fact that his site has a way to re-enable Sendmail within a day or so of a patch that cripples it is enough for me -- I've gotten my money's worth out of the osascript stuff already as well.
I'll happily spring for the Panther/Smeagol (dual personality?) version once it's released as well. It's the least I can do.
A beige G3 (used ~$250) or an iMac (used between ~$350-$600) will work extremely well, and that's the setup I'm running here. Plop a $120 120 gig drive in the beasty and at least 128 megs of RAM an you're loaded for bear.
As a bonus, the iMac is plugged in on a shelf in the closet then connected over Airport, the monitor's set to power off after 5 minutes. Hard drive spins down after 1 hour of inactivity (seems to work best for me... the 5 second spin-up isn't usually noticable, and that should help extend the life of el cheapo drive)
That machine works as my home office's HTTP/FTP/Firewall/Router/POP/SMTP box/MP3 Repository/sliMP3 server/render farm manager. It's got plenty enough horsepower to even do a decent amount of real-time GDlib/Imagemagick work on some of my PHP/SQL development sites, and almost real-time PDF generation on-the-fly. It's also got various cronnable tasks running for logging and workstation maintenance.
As long as you're using the machine as a server and not interacting with Aqua (G3-class machines without Quartz extreme have some serious overhead when using Aqua), you've got more than enough power for what you're asking.
I've also got a shuttle box (SB51G) that's the most sound piece of Wintel hardware I've ever owned -- dirt cheap, super fast and it has AGP (IE testing, Maya and gaming is all Win's good for for me, anyhow -- I might as well have AGP). Reasonably cheap to put together ($250ish barebones) and Red Hat and Mandrake run very well on it if you're stuck on the Intel/AMD side of the fence.
I'm a scavenger and recycler myself when it comes to home servers. Web & file sharing services really don't require that much horsepower -- and OS X is *way* more elegant to administer than most Linux distros I've experienced.
But if you're looking at the Shuttle boxes and convinced to go that route, they're mighty sound, even if they aren't mini ITX. I believe they're technically micro-ATX./semantics
Back around 1995, I actually had a girlfriend who ran over her Powerbook 5200 (in the case). It was actually her company's powerbook. The 'book still worked fine, however the LCD was cracked and became a rather trippy lava light.
I was fresh away from being an Apple tech for a local VAR, so I had a friend or two at the SOS-APPL line at the time. I called up the support line, explained the situation, and the girl on the line said that it wasn't covered under warranty, however there were a few things I could say "on record" that would qualify the machine for a recall, since it was still under warranty.
Airborne box showed up on Monday, came back on Thursday. Brand new chassis, screen, and a bag of lifesavers to "sweeten my day" after the "accident"
Since then, the support techs (who were actually Kodak employees at the time, not sure who they contract with now) have been amazingly helpful about really small stuff. Blown pixels, crackling modems, even a scratch on a factory refurb TiBook.
Yeah, I'm a Mac nazi. But it's not without reason. They've earned my loyalty time and again. The OS, the support, and the sexy ass hardware. Tough show to beat.
Contrast that with Dell, who won't even speak to you if your name isn't attached to the 12 serial numbers attached to the machine, and refuses an RMA on a faulty Motherboard for a consumer machine because I admitted that I installed RAM in it myself.
Well, looks like the market's cornered on the Dunes, Enders, Stephensons, Hyperions and Hitchhikers (must-reads, but also entries into *very* long series that will dominate your reading until you're done with them).
Anything early and non-biographical by Vonnegut is a good choice. He's written about 12 autobiographies at last count, and paying to get the same stories about his life over and over again gets a bit tedious. That said, Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle just can't be beat.
In our current socio-political situation, there's quite a few books that are more than a little relevant: 1984, Brave New World, Catch-22...
So the books above plus Ringworld give you/. 101 summer reading, and they're all really fast reads.
An idea: why not branch out a bit? it pays to have some knowledge of other cultures and non-tech related things. Get a little more well-rounded!
James Clavell's Asian Saga is amazing (they were derided as mass-market page turners back in the day -- maybe correct, but the man can tell a great story). They work better if you read them in chronological order by when the story is set (ie, start with Shogun, then Tai-Pan) instead of the order they were released in. They're hella page turners, and I'd have to say that 4 of the 6 in the series were amazing... passing on Whirlwind and Gaijin wouldn't hurt you much -- if you can even find Whirlwind -- it's been out of print a long time. Added bonus: you'll be able to speak a bit of pidgin Japanese by the end of the first two.
Considered brushing up on some Shakespeare? Most people loathe it because they're introduced in a rather hostile environment in school. Check out Macbeth or Othello. Awesome insight into human nature.
My fiancee introduced me to Paul Auster's books. Breathtaking writing.
Driving Mr. Albert (Michael Paternini) is a travelogue detailing a cross-country trip with Einstein's brain in his trunk. Amazing stuff that goes in the truth is stranger than fiction file.
My personal favorite book that I've read in a year or so, I gave to my fiancee as a gift -- Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress. It's set during the chinese cultural revolution and is a modern-day fable. Simple, sweet, and a hell of a punch line at the end;-) I actually forced myself to read it in small chunks instead of in one sitting because I enjoyed it so much and didn't want it to end.
If none of these float your boat, get your hands on a banned book list.
I'm not saying that everything on it is worth reading - but words put together in such a fashion that they can create public outcry deserve a look, at least while our first amendment is still in effect.
It's true that many hosts limit base users to about 250 megs -- some even as low as 100 megs (hell, my IMAP box hits that if I don't purge in a week).
That said, I've been extremely happy with Pair Networks, who has continually upped our max space over the years I've been- and most of my clients -- have been -- with them. Ridiculously high uptime, for what it's worth.
$30 for 600 megs ('webmaster' account)really doesn't suck.
Give them (and their co-lo/Quickserve) plans a look.
No, I don't work for them -- but I am one really happy customer.
By the time Quark finally releases QuarkXPress for Mac OS X, Apple will have released the 64-bit Mac OS X on the PPC970.
Q: How long will it take for Quark to make QuarkXPress' code 64-bit ready?
A: Never.
Parent may seem like a joke, but as a long-time Quark customer, I can assure anyone who asks that this is sadly very true.
I've never witnessed another software company that has so much contempt for their customers.
I'd addend that statement by adding:
A: Never. And we don't care if you don't like it, because you've got no choice.
Quark's had a very myopic view of their stranglehold on the Mac publishing platform. They're banking that old-school art directors who have learned Xpress won't jump ship because of the learning curve of a new program.
That's why Quark has invested ridiculous amounts of time and effort (although their coding is outsourced to India now) shoehorning (extremely, horribly sucky) web publishing features into Xpress. Those same art directors would gladly stay in the same environment they're comfortable with publishing for the Web, when they should have been concentrating on PDF workflow, or a print box that doesn't take 14 clicks to print every single time you go to a printer that doesn't have a Quark native-PPD.
With Quark, you pay full upgrade prices for bugfixes, and a complete and utter lack of new features. As a bonus, you usually get printing bugs so bad that your service bureau will refuse to accept the new version's files until the second or third maintenance patch.
As a consultant for several small-to-mid sized ad agencies, I can say that as of right now:
- We're just beginning to transition the smaller shops over to OS X because of Quark's holdout
- The art directors are being actively encouraged to use Indesign *or* Quark for their day-to-day work
- Those art directors are seeing that Indesign is *much* more elegant, and Adobe is actively listening to their customers. Plus it's got a consistent interface, and it's stable. And...
- It's getting increasingly about PDF workflow from comp to film (or even placement, in the case of many publications).
As of Indesign 3 (and hopefully feature parity with Xpress and a good Xpress 5 translator) I'll recommend they drop Quark all together, except for working with legacy files. Granted, that's a year or two out. But I very seriously doubt we'll be up to even Xpress 6.0.1 by then.
Call me a bastard, but after the treatment I've received by Quark for the last 11 years as a multiple-site-license customer, I'll be very happy to see them go under. There's another game in town now, and the chains are eroding.
Quark still wins out today for useability, but I'm confident as of the next rev of Indesign that the game will be over. And good for Adobe.
Quark's made their bed, and I have a feeling that they're so blind that they won't even notice going out of business.
If you want a mouser get a female.
if you want a friend get a male.
I can personally attest to this. Something about female cats makes them much less 'social' (in my experience) but much more prone to hunt -- well -- anything. Snakes, lizards, mice, rats, bugs, miniblinds...
My male cats, on the other hand, have been very friendly (almost to the point of being puppy-ish) but can't be bothered to hunt
A poster above mentioned to keep them only slightly fed -- I'm gonna have to disagree with this one. I personally leave 2-3 days' worth of dry food out at all times. They can eat if they want to, or not. I *don't* give them canned food, however -- that's the fastest way to get a fat, finicky (food-wise) cat.
Female cats hunt and kill for the sport of it -- not necessarily to eat (although they like bugs quite a bit). They also have the tendency to bring you home trophies and leave them places that you're most likely to find them (doormats, pillows, shoes).
I suppose you don't have a landline or have cable running in your market?
Legal monopolies, and in the cases of Bellsouth and Comcast (YMMV), there's not a humble or self-correcting thing about 'em. Debatably, things have gotten worse in those industries, and I'd wager it's worse in the overwhelming majority of markets in the States. Much, much smaller scale than MS's near-*global* stranglehold, but it's parallel nonetheless.
Some industries *don't* self-correct after monopoly breakups (Bell Di/Trivesiture comes to mind immediately), abuses or an overwhelming amount of pissed off customers.
The software industry may be on an alternate track than old-school industry as well.
Try setting the TCP Firewire connection on the PC to be on a different subnet than the ethernet (ie 192.168.1.xxx vs 192.168.100.xxx). That way you don't need to deal with connection bridging, etc -- the Mac's Internet sharing should handle the port forwarding properly if you enable it for the Firewire connection (should be en1 or en2).
You can also go in and hack around in the IPFW config (if youre so inclined), or use something like BrickHouse to edit the built-in firewall and port forwarding.
Basically with this, firewire would be its own subnet that would be bridged over to your Ethernet connection on the Mac so stuff like SMB will still work.
My best advice is *not* to let the windows networking wizard do a thing -- edit everything manually, and join the workgroup from your system control panel.
IP Over Firewire has been really useful for me in a couple of situations -- most notably when I've needed to run backups of my main Macs. For day-to-day use, I stick to 10/100 though -- it's cheaper to implement, and I can crimp my own cables on a whim.
I've got a Shuttle barebones based Wintel system with built-in firewire and a pair of massive drives that I use for a rendering station/backup server -- and let me tell you -- backing up 130 gigs worth of DV footage/uncompressed TIFFs (insert pr0n joke here) over Firewire is one hell of a lot quicker than waiting for the same over 100mbps Ethernet. XP is slightly flaky when it comes to IP over firewire (no, i *don't* want those connections bridged!) but once you get it running it's a little more stable than your average house of cards.
I know a lot of photographers who swear by Target Disk mode as well -- they carry their powerbooks as preview stations and Big Honkin Memory Cards (using Firewire-connected pro cameras) and once they get back to their main machine to retouch, they just go into target mode and stuff dumps *fast*. Now if only I could get a kodak camera back to interface with my iPod......
All things being equal, I've been tempted to convert everything I've got over to firewire from the stock ethernet jacks -- but I honestly have better uses for a firewire port most of the time (DVD-R, DVcam, DVDeck, DV-to-component box, iPod), and I really prefer to rely on my router for connection sharing instead of the Mac.
I've had a many-year-long relationship with Pair Networks, and am a huge fan with several hosting accounts.
Pair's one of the oldest and most respected hosting companies out there. They've got ridiculous amounts of bandwidth, and are very generous with hosting allowances.
For example, you can add as many domains under a single $30/mo "Webmaster" account as you'd like for an additional $1 apiece, and their $30/mo account has a 600mb allowance.
Their servers are running FreeBSD, and they allow shell access and custom binaries (custom-compiled PHP, for instance) on their Advanced and higher accounts.
Then again, $30 ain't too bad to pay to have a really nice MPEG4 codec at my disposal (and Sorenson, for that matter), in addition to having one of the best media swiss army knives in existence for conversion between formats.
Any D-Link or Linksys router will support PPPoE and get you online just fine.
From their Enternet bias, it's safe to assume that they support OS 9 only as well, as there's not (and there's no need for) Enternet under OS X -- which has built-in PPPoE drivers. This is a good thing. Enternet is one of the crashiest hackjobs that I've every installed back with Bellsouth DSL until I got my router functioning.
If they try to do something idiotic like locking the device to a particular MAC address, I know for certain that the $35 D-Link DI-604 does MAC address spoofing on the Internet side as well.
I guess that's exactly the point that's been funding the Recording Industry (in the USA sense) and the Film Industry (same).
They're targeting the lowest common denomonator.
Full stop.
The Lowest Common Denomonator is the reason that _Friends_ = Must See TV.
And the droves believe it.
It's all marketing.
Here's to hoping that another country with even a touch of taste becomes the talk of the town for some time more extended than a single film or song (all they're generally allowed).
Perhaps at that point they'll learn to market against the behemoth, and we'll get something decent (art even!) to show for it.
To market takes pandering to the lowest common denomonator.
This is pretty analogous to that one day a year that your main local library calls up every TV station and newspaper in town, and gets the cops to raid some unsuspecting person and make them spend the night in jail for overdue books.
Not sure if this is still going on anywhere, but my local library system was pretty notorious for using these kind of tactics as a sort of negative-reinforcement PR a few years back.
I call it a shakedown.
At any rate, it looks like the RIAA is taking a page from ol' George W.'s book. War by PR.
Doesn't matter if they win or loose. They got their money's worth the moment the media picked up on the story.
* A 20-GB iPod - 10 GB of music (legal, I might add) - All three MacOS 10.2 disk images - The synchronized/Library/Receipts folder with my up-to-date software update files - A MacOS 9.2.2 disk image - An OS 9 bootable system folder with all stock cdevs/extensions, plus Toast's latest CD-R drivers. This'll probably change to an OS X folder in the next month or so. - A copy of Norton Utilities - A copy of Roxio Toast - A copy of ResEdit - Non-gimped PHP, Apache, GDLib, Freetype and mySQL packages (from Marc Liyanage, www.entropy.ch) - Backups of my dialup fallback connection config files - Various Free/Shareware files
* A leatherman
* A paper clip
* A smug look on my face when I say "Sorry, I'm a Mac guy"
No problem I can't fix in under an hour. Win troubleshooting, on the other hand, takes ridiculous amounts of time. You said you were on holiday -- right?
The first thing I did when we got our new dish installed was to make Absolutely Goddamn Certain that Fox News didn't come up by accident while flipping channels. Bias is bad enough -- being a fucking cheerleader is a little more than one toke over the line, so to speak.
Of course, two weeks later, I came to the conclusion that I can't watch American news coverage of the war at all without wanting to hurl heavy objects at the TV set.
I've purchased Shadowbane for the Mac, it took 18 hours (consistently) to get their website to register my key, and low and behold the game sucks. Hard. Really hard, actually.
Regardless, they got my $50ish, and BioWare/MacPlay didn't and won't.
Of course, at this point, Ubisoft won't get a penny out of my in the future either.
Here's to hoping Babbage's honors their refund policy on MMORPGs...
Macromedia Director (or Revolution, or Hypercard) seem to be a natural for an introductory taste to programming... at least they were for me.
My "real" first taste of programming was BASIC, with the old K-power magazines and my Atari 400/Apple II+. Those were the days.
At any rate, my entry into building actual applications came with Director 1.0, many years later.
It gives a timeline that anyone can animate and assign rudimentary interactivity to -- building presentations, programs, and even specialized applications -- without any programming needed, but also allows for Lingo scripting (as a next step) -- which you can achieve pretty much anything with.
Lingo is very close to BASIC, but the syntax comes closer to C/Javascript/PHP, and it's getting more object-oriented with every revision.
The bottom line is that *anyone* can build an application or presentation with any of these tools that work, without programming.
But *with* programming, you can add bells, whistles and functions that wouldn't be possible working in the timeline alone.
From there, kids can (if they have aptitude) make the jump to C or scripting languages once they can understand more complicated syntax.
Just my thoughts, but if someone tried to teach Perl or VBScript to an 8-year-old, I think it'd be an uphill battle.
A battle I'd pay to see, because I think it'd be much funnier than anything that's broadcast on TV these days, at any rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh.
/. once every 2 hours (via a cron task) and then execute a CURL task to create the ticker based on the cache every 15 minutes or so.
I cache BBC and
It's not much pain to be a nice guy...
The SliMP3 can decode any of those formats on the fly -- it can also stream most net radio stations as well (pretty cool having KEXP Live as a playlist).
The only one I've seen any significant degradation using is the AAC codec.
Assuming that all your stuff is ripped at a decent quality (192 or equivalent), I doubt you'll notice a difference. Everything transcodes in real-time using LAME.
It's really a cost-effective solution, and super elegant.
I have to admit, I'm a head-over-heels lover of my SliMP3s.
/. ticker every 15 minutes on each unit, just because I can.
The reasons you should be too:
It's platform independent, but is also really tightly integrated into your itunes/musicmatch/winamp playlists. A single server, whatever your religion, can saturate the network before the server gets bogged down. This said, I recommend a Mac server, just because iTunes is amazing, and I really don't like having to deal with Linux config when I'm not being paid to.
$200/unit, and all the playlists on your network can be streamed from one location. At 10/100 speeds, it'd take about 15-20 of the things to saturate your network, if they were all running at the same time.
All of your libraries and playlists will be shared and distributed thruout the house. Doesn't matter if you're going to a boom box with a ghetto-wired cassete adaptor. Run cat5 to the room (cheap), and choose the most suited amplification method, from powered speakers, to a MacGyvered boom box, to a proper receiver.
The company is super cool, comes out with feature updates constantly, and the server software is open source, should you choose to use the built-in Perl powered httpd server versus just using a remote.
I'm not an employee of Slim Devices, just an insanely happy customer. That's a whole lot of elegance in a small, inexpensive package.
And it plays a mean game of Tetris, gives my weather report, and does a
What's your beef with Adobe, anyhow? Hell, you've got stock?!?!?
(throwing away previously modded points in this thread, simply because I don't get it)
As far as huge software companies go, they're pretty benign in my view.
And they make some absolutely excellent software. Again, my view, but I'm sure I can get someone around here to corroborate.
Photoshop is the best piece of software out there for image manipulation. Bar none.
Gimp may be nice, but it's not as easy to use and it doesn't have anywhere near the polish as its older brother.
Same goes for After Effects/Film Gimp.
PDF is wonderful. PDF is open.
Try making your living as an artist, animator or effects guy using all open-source tools. It's possible, but way more trouble than it's worth.
That's why I *buy* Adobe software, and that's why I run on a Mac platform as well. I'm fully capable of configuring and tweaking whatever linux distro is currently in vogue, and screwing with XFree so that windows don't lock (as) randomly. I just choose not to because my time is worth money, and honestly I get more work done faster in the more polished solution. Period.
I mean, did John Warnock piss in your cornflakes or something?
I bought the book primarily because I use Rob's Site constantly and he's had a very plain policy on no advertising to put any of his editorial into doubt on the site.
The guy has a full-time job, he's got one of the best resources on the web to help with under-the-hood OS X action, and he's got principals I happen to dig. He also busts his ass on the site.
I bought my copy of the book to support him, period. I've got several more on order now to give as gifts to friends who are making the transition (art director and photographer types) who could use a guided tour under the hood of OS X that doesn't make them feel like morons or *cough* 'Dummies'. Let's face it -- the dummies, missing manual and like books are made for grandma. I'm trying to show these guys all the cool new stuff you can do once you peek under the hood to get them excited about the change instead of dreading it.
Just the simple fact that his site has a way to re-enable Sendmail within a day or so of a patch that cripples it is enough for me -- I've gotten my money's worth out of the osascript stuff already as well.
I'll happily spring for the Panther/Smeagol (dual personality?) version once it's released as well. It's the least I can do.
A beige G3 (used ~$250) or an iMac (used between ~$350-$600) will work extremely well, and that's the setup I'm running here. Plop a $120 120 gig drive in the beasty and at least 128 megs of RAM an you're loaded for bear.
/semantics
As a bonus, the iMac is plugged in on a shelf in the closet then connected over Airport, the monitor's set to power off after 5 minutes. Hard drive spins down after 1 hour of inactivity (seems to work best for me... the 5 second spin-up isn't usually noticable, and that should help extend the life of el cheapo drive)
That machine works as my home office's HTTP/FTP/Firewall/Router/POP/SMTP box/MP3 Repository/sliMP3 server/render farm manager. It's got plenty enough horsepower to even do a decent amount of real-time GDlib/Imagemagick work on some of my PHP/SQL development sites, and almost real-time PDF generation on-the-fly. It's also got various cronnable tasks running for logging and workstation maintenance.
As long as you're using the machine as a server and not interacting with Aqua (G3-class machines without Quartz extreme have some serious overhead when using Aqua), you've got more than enough power for what you're asking.
I've also got a shuttle box (SB51G) that's the most sound piece of Wintel hardware I've ever owned -- dirt cheap, super fast and it has AGP (IE testing, Maya and gaming is all Win's good for for me, anyhow -- I might as well have AGP). Reasonably cheap to put together ($250ish barebones) and Red Hat and Mandrake run very well on it if you're stuck on the Intel/AMD side of the fence.
I'm a scavenger and recycler myself when it comes to home servers. Web & file sharing services really don't require that much horsepower -- and OS X is *way* more elegant to administer than most Linux distros I've experienced.
But if you're looking at the Shuttle boxes and convinced to go that route, they're mighty sound, even if they aren't mini ITX. I believe they're technically micro-ATX.
Back around 1995, I actually had a girlfriend who ran over her Powerbook 5200 (in the case). It was actually her company's powerbook. The 'book still worked fine, however the LCD was cracked and became a rather trippy lava light.
I was fresh away from being an Apple tech for a local VAR, so I had a friend or two at the SOS-APPL line at the time. I called up the support line, explained the situation, and the girl on the line said that it wasn't covered under warranty, however there were a few things I could say "on record" that would qualify the machine for a recall, since it was still under warranty.
Airborne box showed up on Monday, came back on Thursday. Brand new chassis, screen, and a bag of lifesavers to "sweeten my day" after the "accident"
Since then, the support techs (who were actually Kodak employees at the time, not sure who they contract with now) have been amazingly helpful about really small stuff. Blown pixels, crackling modems, even a scratch on a factory refurb TiBook.
Yeah, I'm a Mac nazi. But it's not without reason. They've earned my loyalty time and again. The OS, the support, and the sexy ass hardware. Tough show to beat.
Contrast that with Dell, who won't even speak to you if your name isn't attached to the 12 serial numbers attached to the machine, and refuses an RMA on a faulty Motherboard for a consumer machine because I admitted that I installed RAM in it myself.
Just sayin'
Well, looks like the market's cornered on the Dunes, Enders, Stephensons, Hyperions and Hitchhikers (must-reads, but also entries into *very* long series that will dominate your reading until you're done with them).
/. 101 summer reading, and they're all really fast reads.
;-) I actually forced myself to read it in small chunks instead of in one sitting because I enjoyed it so much and didn't want it to end.
Anything early and non-biographical by Vonnegut is a good choice. He's written about 12 autobiographies at last count, and paying to get the same stories about his life over and over again gets a bit tedious. That said, Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle just can't be beat.
In our current socio-political situation, there's quite a few books that are more than a little relevant: 1984, Brave New World, Catch-22...
So the books above plus Ringworld give you
An idea: why not branch out a bit? it pays to have some knowledge of other cultures and non-tech related things. Get a little more well-rounded!
James Clavell's Asian Saga is amazing (they were derided as mass-market page turners back in the day -- maybe correct, but the man can tell a great story). They work better if you read them in chronological order by when the story is set (ie, start with Shogun, then Tai-Pan) instead of the order they were released in. They're hella page turners, and I'd have to say that 4 of the 6 in the series were amazing... passing on Whirlwind and Gaijin wouldn't hurt you much -- if you can even find Whirlwind -- it's been out of print a long time. Added bonus: you'll be able to speak a bit of pidgin Japanese by the end of the first two.
Considered brushing up on some Shakespeare? Most people loathe it because they're introduced in a rather hostile environment in school. Check out Macbeth or Othello. Awesome insight into human nature.
My fiancee introduced me to Paul Auster's books. Breathtaking writing.
Driving Mr. Albert (Michael Paternini) is a travelogue detailing a cross-country trip with Einstein's brain in his trunk. Amazing stuff that goes in the truth is stranger than fiction file.
My personal favorite book that I've read in a year or so, I gave to my fiancee as a gift -- Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress. It's set during the chinese cultural revolution and is a modern-day fable. Simple, sweet, and a hell of a punch line at the end
If none of these float your boat, get your hands on a banned book list.
I'm not saying that everything on it is worth reading - but words put together in such a fashion that they can create public outcry deserve a look, at least while our first amendment is still in effect.
It's true that many hosts limit base users to about 250 megs -- some even as low as 100 megs (hell, my IMAP box hits that if I don't purge in a week).
That said, I've been extremely happy with Pair Networks, who has continually upped our max space over the years I've been- and most of my clients -- have been -- with them. Ridiculously high uptime, for what it's worth.
$30 for 600 megs ('webmaster' account)really doesn't suck.
Give them (and their co-lo/Quickserve) plans a look.
No, I don't work for them -- but I am one really happy customer.
Parent may seem like a joke, but as a long-time Quark customer, I can assure anyone who asks that this is sadly very true.
I've never witnessed another software company that has so much contempt for their customers.
I'd addend that statement by adding:
A: Never. And we don't care if you don't like it, because you've got no choice.
Quark's had a very myopic view of their stranglehold on the Mac publishing platform. They're banking that old-school art directors who have learned Xpress won't jump ship because of the learning curve of a new program.
That's why Quark has invested ridiculous amounts of time and effort (although their coding is outsourced to India now) shoehorning (extremely, horribly sucky) web publishing features into Xpress. Those same art directors would gladly stay in the same environment they're comfortable with publishing for the Web, when they should have been concentrating on PDF workflow, or a print box that doesn't take 14 clicks to print every single time you go to a printer that doesn't have a Quark native-PPD.
With Quark, you pay full upgrade prices for bugfixes, and a complete and utter lack of new features. As a bonus, you usually get printing bugs so bad that your service bureau will refuse to accept the new version's files until the second or third maintenance patch.
As a consultant for several small-to-mid sized ad agencies, I can say that as of right now:
- We're just beginning to transition the smaller shops over to OS X because of Quark's holdout
- The art directors are being actively encouraged to use Indesign *or* Quark for their day-to-day work
- Those art directors are seeing that Indesign is *much* more elegant, and Adobe is actively listening to their customers. Plus it's got a consistent interface, and it's stable. And...
- It's getting increasingly about PDF workflow from comp to film (or even placement, in the case of many publications).
As of Indesign 3 (and hopefully feature parity with Xpress and a good Xpress 5 translator) I'll recommend they drop Quark all together, except for working with legacy files. Granted, that's a year or two out. But I very seriously doubt we'll be up to even Xpress 6.0.1 by then.
Call me a bastard, but after the treatment I've received by Quark for the last 11 years as a multiple-site-license customer, I'll be very happy to see them go under. There's another game in town now, and the chains are eroding.
Quark still wins out today for useability, but I'm confident as of the next rev of Indesign that the game will be over. And good for Adobe.
Quark's made their bed, and I have a feeling that they're so blind that they won't even notice going out of business.
I can personally attest to this. Something about female cats makes them much less 'social' (in my experience) but much more prone to hunt -- well -- anything. Snakes, lizards, mice, rats, bugs, miniblinds...
My male cats, on the other hand, have been very friendly (almost to the point of being puppy-ish) but can't be bothered to hunt
A poster above mentioned to keep them only slightly fed -- I'm gonna have to disagree with this one. I personally leave 2-3 days' worth of dry food out at all times. They can eat if they want to, or not. I *don't* give them canned food, however -- that's the fastest way to get a fat, finicky (food-wise) cat.
Female cats hunt and kill for the sport of it -- not necessarily to eat (although they like bugs quite a bit). They also have the tendency to bring you home trophies and leave them places that you're most likely to find them (doormats, pillows, shoes).
That's how they show affection...
I suppose you don't have a landline or have cable running in your market?
Legal monopolies, and in the cases of Bellsouth and Comcast (YMMV), there's not a humble or self-correcting thing about 'em. Debatably, things have gotten worse in those industries, and I'd wager it's worse in the overwhelming majority of markets in the States. Much, much smaller scale than MS's near-*global* stranglehold, but it's parallel nonetheless.
Some industries *don't* self-correct after monopoly breakups (Bell Di/Trivesiture comes to mind immediately), abuses or an overwhelming amount of pissed off customers.
The software industry may be on an alternate track than old-school industry as well.
Try setting the TCP Firewire connection on the PC to be on a different subnet than the ethernet (ie 192.168.1.xxx vs 192.168.100.xxx). That way you don't need to deal with connection bridging, etc -- the Mac's Internet sharing should handle the port forwarding properly if you enable it for the Firewire connection (should be en1 or en2).
You can also go in and hack around in the IPFW config (if youre so inclined), or use something like BrickHouse to edit the built-in firewall and port forwarding.
Basically with this, firewire would be its own subnet that would be bridged over to your Ethernet connection on the Mac so stuff like SMB will still work.
My best advice is *not* to let the windows networking wizard do a thing -- edit everything manually, and join the workgroup from your system control panel.
Best of luck.
IP Over Firewire has been really useful for me in a couple of situations -- most notably when I've needed to run backups of my main Macs. For day-to-day use, I stick to 10/100 though -- it's cheaper to implement, and I can crimp my own cables on a whim.
I've got a Shuttle barebones based Wintel system with built-in firewire and a pair of massive drives that I use for a rendering station/backup server -- and let me tell you -- backing up 130 gigs worth of DV footage/uncompressed TIFFs (insert pr0n joke here) over Firewire is one hell of a lot quicker than waiting for the same over 100mbps Ethernet. XP is slightly flaky when it comes to IP over firewire (no, i *don't* want those connections bridged!) but once you get it running it's a little more stable than your average house of cards.
I know a lot of photographers who swear by Target Disk mode as well -- they carry their powerbooks as preview stations and Big Honkin Memory Cards (using Firewire-connected pro cameras) and once they get back to their main machine to retouch, they just go into target mode and stuff dumps *fast*. Now if only I could get a kodak camera back to interface with my iPod......
All things being equal, I've been tempted to convert everything I've got over to firewire from the stock ethernet jacks -- but I honestly have better uses for a firewire port most of the time (DVD-R, DVcam, DVDeck, DV-to-component box, iPod), and I really prefer to rely on my router for connection sharing instead of the Mac.
I've had a many-year-long relationship with Pair Networks, and am a huge fan with several hosting accounts.
Pair's one of the oldest and most respected hosting companies out there. They've got ridiculous amounts of bandwidth, and are very generous with hosting allowances.
For example, you can add as many domains under a single $30/mo "Webmaster" account as you'd like for an additional $1 apiece, and their $30/mo account has a 600mb allowance.
Their servers are running FreeBSD, and they allow shell access and custom binaries (custom-compiled PHP, for instance) on their Advanced and higher accounts.
Can't recommend them highly enough.
For example.
Then again, $30 ain't too bad to pay to have a really nice MPEG4 codec at my disposal (and Sorenson, for that matter), in addition to having one of the best media swiss army knives in existence for conversion between formats.
Any D-Link or Linksys router will support PPPoE and get you online just fine.
From their Enternet bias, it's safe to assume that they support OS 9 only as well, as there's not (and there's no need for) Enternet under OS X -- which has built-in PPPoE drivers. This is a good thing. Enternet is one of the crashiest hackjobs that I've every installed back with Bellsouth DSL until I got my router functioning.
If they try to do something idiotic like locking the device to a particular MAC address, I know for certain that the $35 D-Link DI-604 does MAC address spoofing on the Internet side as well.
Sheesh, confusing a Ford with a GM... People have been lynched for less...
Speaking as one born and raised in the South, I have to agree with this sentiment -- scary as it may be.
I guess that's exactly the point that's been funding the Recording Industry (in the USA sense) and the Film Industry (same).
They're targeting the lowest common denomonator.
Full stop.
The Lowest Common Denomonator is the reason that _Friends_ = Must See TV.
And the droves believe it.
It's all marketing.
Here's to hoping that another country with even a touch of taste becomes the talk of the town for some time more extended than a single film or song (all they're generally allowed).
Perhaps at that point they'll learn to market against the behemoth, and we'll get something decent (art even!) to show for it.
To market takes pandering to the lowest common denomonator.
Oops. I've started again.
This is pretty analogous to that one day a year that your main local library calls up every TV station and newspaper in town, and gets the cops to raid some unsuspecting person and make them spend the night in jail for overdue books.
Not sure if this is still going on anywhere, but my local library system was pretty notorious for using these kind of tactics as a sort of negative-reinforcement PR a few years back.
I call it a shakedown.
At any rate, it looks like the RIAA is taking a page from ol' George W.'s book. War by PR.
Doesn't matter if they win or loose. They got their money's worth the moment the media picked up on the story.
--dr00gy
In my "tech kit" I've got:
/Library/Receipts folder with my up-to-date software update files
* A 20-GB iPod
- 10 GB of music (legal, I might add)
- All three MacOS 10.2 disk images
- The synchronized
- A MacOS 9.2.2 disk image
- An OS 9 bootable system folder with all stock cdevs/extensions, plus Toast's latest CD-R drivers. This'll probably change to an OS X folder in the next month or so.
- A copy of Norton Utilities
- A copy of Roxio Toast
- A copy of ResEdit
- Non-gimped PHP, Apache, GDLib, Freetype and mySQL packages (from Marc Liyanage, www.entropy.ch)
- Backups of my dialup fallback connection config files
- Various Free/Shareware files
* A leatherman
* A paper clip
* A smug look on my face when I say "Sorry, I'm a Mac guy"
No problem I can't fix in under an hour. Win troubleshooting, on the other hand, takes ridiculous amounts of time. You said you were on holiday -- right?
I moved last month.
The first thing I did when we got our new dish installed was to make Absolutely Goddamn Certain that Fox News didn't come up by accident while flipping channels. Bias is bad enough -- being a fucking cheerleader is a little more than one toke over the line, so to speak.
Of course, two weeks later, I came to the conclusion that I can't watch American news coverage of the war at all without wanting to hurl heavy objects at the TV set.
YMMV.
I've purchased Shadowbane for the Mac, it took 18 hours (consistently) to get their website to register my key, and low and behold the game sucks. Hard. Really hard, actually.
Regardless, they got my $50ish, and BioWare/MacPlay didn't and won't.
Of course, at this point, Ubisoft won't get a penny out of my in the future either.
Here's to hoping Babbage's honors their refund policy on MMORPGs...
Macromedia Director (or Revolution, or Hypercard) seem to be a natural for an introductory taste to programming... at least they were for me.
My "real" first taste of programming was BASIC, with the old K-power magazines and my Atari 400/Apple II+. Those were the days.
At any rate, my entry into building actual applications came with Director 1.0, many years later.
It gives a timeline that anyone can animate and assign rudimentary interactivity to -- building presentations, programs, and even specialized applications -- without any programming needed, but also allows for Lingo scripting (as a next step) -- which you can achieve pretty much anything with.
Lingo is very close to BASIC, but the syntax comes closer to C/Javascript/PHP, and it's getting more object-oriented with every revision.
The bottom line is that *anyone* can build an application or presentation with any of these tools that work, without programming.
But *with* programming, you can add bells, whistles and functions that wouldn't be possible working in the timeline alone.
From there, kids can (if they have aptitude) make the jump to C or scripting languages once they can understand more complicated syntax.
Just my thoughts, but if someone tried to teach Perl or VBScript to an 8-year-old, I think it'd be an uphill battle.
A battle I'd pay to see, because I think it'd be much funnier than anything that's broadcast on TV these days, at any rate.
God, I miss LOGO.
--dr00gy
Fear is the mind killer, eh?