This is reminding me of a temp gig as a graphic designer in a London property firm. It's probably not that far out there, but it was just a few years ago, in 2001. For such recent history, it wasn't pretty.
The cosy little nest of Macs that was the design department wasn't hooked up to the rest of the (PC) network, because the rest of the network was Token Ring and the Macs had some kind of new-fangled networking plug that Wasn't Token Ring. Besides, there was some kind of non-Mac-friendly software to run email, calendaring or some kind of stuff that wasn't my problem as a temp.
Every Mac therefore had a PC next to it for these crucial office tasks. Of course, we often needed to get data from the PCs to the Macs and back again. The Macs weren't remotely networked, to each other, to the PC-based Token Ring network, or to the internet.
So, Mac-PC or Mac-Mac data transfer was purely sneakernet. This happened by putting a PC-formatted Zip disk into a Zip drive connected to the PC, copying files onto it, ejecting it, putting it into the Zip drive connected to the Mac, then copying files off it. When a Zip disk or drive failed (click-of-death how I miss thee) a working drive got passed around the office to move files about.
Of course, nothing a cheap hub and some ethernet cables wouldn't have fixed. But it worked! Why fix it?
Is there any chance that the default 120GB drive is also using perpendicular recording technology? This review certainly implies that the whole Seagate 5400.3 range uses perpendicular recording. If it is, would it see an increase in speed over longditudinal drives as well?
Well, maybe. Check out amazon.com's computer section. Right now, six of their top ten bestselling desktops (inc. the top 4) and four of their top ten bestselling notebooks (inc. the top two) are from Apple. Not sure why. Are the rebates hard to find from other retailers? But yeah, if this carried across the whole (non-corporate) market, yes, Macs will rule.
Oh, and no, the prices won't fall. Apple will stick to the top-tier chips for most of their machines. You can see from the latest MacBook Pro, similar to an Acer notebook, that the prices will be just a little bit higher than the equivalent PC spec machine. It usually evens out in build quality/looks/little features, but they will not compete with a no-name on price.
Now a days, we explain it through digital computers. Before that was electrical systems. Before that mechcanical systems, I would imagine fluid systems, etc.
We seem to always use our most modern technology as an analogy for things that are still a little outside our grasp (such as the brain). In 20 years we may be describing the brain in terms of nano-tech.
Point taken. But hey, this is a hangout for tech heads, and analogies are built on existing knowledge. Maybe we'll be describing the brain in terms of nanotech on Nano/.
Re:If they want to be innovative and supportive...
on
Sun Wants to Make Linux 3D
·
· Score: 3, Informative
BoingBoing mentions a way to get a spyware-free RealPlayer through the BBC:
How to get spyware-free RealPlayer through the BBC
An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it."
Link (Thanks, Anonymous Reader!)
Noooooo! Australia and the US share the same layout, but the UK (ISO) one is different. There's an extra key above the tab, the grave that should be there is shifted down, next to a reduced-size shift key. On the right, the return key is taller and thinner in a slight L-shape, not just long and rectangular, and the backslash is shifted down and left to make room.
The pound (ie. UK currency) is above the 3 instead of # (which in the US is called pound - duh), and the big one is that keys like tab, page up/down and all the modifier keys have symbols instead of written names. Great for international use, but it means that almost nobody here in the UK (at least at this company) knows which one the "option" key is.
It's that one with "alt" written on it next to the command key. The command key is the one with the apple on it.
Wow, that had to be an excruciatingly tedious experience.
Oh yeah. I did some POVRAY command-line 3D on a Mac LC with a math coprocessor card, and it was a dog. The tiny animation I set up (stupidly complex - a transparent bubble rising in front of two mirrors that reflected into one another) was about 200px square and took about 10 minutes to render a frame. I remember one Friday horror film where I used to head back upstairs in each ad break, comment back the last line of code, uncomment the next line, start it going...
And since then, this guy has his own movie, and I'm working in a room without windows. He wins.
The BBC is funded by the TV license fee, a compulsory payment if you possess TV receiving equipment in the UK. A lot of people don't like it, but to me the alternative (a neutered BBC) is far worse.
There's a really, really nice way to avoid visual advertising temporarily. Visit a foreign country. If you can't read them, the ads just don't get into your headspace.
For TV ad-free, you could move to the UK. For all the bitching about the license fee, the BBC does provide the world's last great multi-channel ad-free TV. If the BBC gets sold off, the world will be worse off for it.
That's good to know - it's a dog on the Mac too. And I thought it was just slower on the Mac because Adobe were moving their development primarily to Windows and porting back.
By the way, under Mac OS X, you can disable plug-ins by clicking checkboxes in the Application's Get Info dialog/inspector. Only hassle is, there are inter-dependencies, so you can bring up a heap of "plug-in X failed to initialize" dialogs by disabling the wrong one.
And at least Acrobat 6 Professional does actually have handy new features: its separation preview and preflight have both saved me before going to print.
Re:What about water conservation??
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And of course, there are places like Mount Nebo, just outside Brisbane (Australia) which don't have town water connected. Rain water/tanker delivered only. So you have to do all of the above and buy huge water storage tanks. Not everyone even in the first world has what to most of us are "basic" amenities.
(Also I wish Apple would be more consistent with this. The iCal Info windoid vanishes when iCal isn't active, as it should. The Safari Download windoid always hangs around.)
Actually, they are consistent. The Safari Download "windoid" is really a window, as you can see from the full size title bar. Unlike windoids, windows do (and should) stay visible when the application isn't in the foreground.
Unless Im going around the world - in which case wtf do I need an iPod for? am I going to be understimulated or something? I can survive a few days with only a day and a half of non stop tunes.
Actually, if you're travelling long distance without a laptop, a big iPod would be great.
You get to listen to your own music + play games on long lonely flights/bus trips/etc.
You get to carry anything digital, music or otherwise, that you'd like to share with anyone you meet on the road
You can keep a digital backup of any crucial address/travel/phone number details
If you get a Belkin digital media reader, you can offload all your photos from your digital camera to the iPod
Well, I liked most of #2 - the action and effects scenes were great, but everything outside of the matrix lagged badly. Same lag problem for #3, and since it's set mostly outside of the matrix, it stank. What I want to do is get hold of both on DVD and re-edit them into one good film. There should be just about enough.
The plan: nuke Zion entirely from both films. Leave enough of the on-board ship footage to make sense. Kill the worst of the bad acting/dialogue. Distribute instructions with Final Cut Pro project files for anyone with the program and the discs to regenerate the new edit. Enjoy if possible.
Yes, both PAL and NTSC are interlaced. And yeah, if you get a component connection with higher-end gear you can extract a true progressive scan picture. I didn't want to go right into the guts of the issue, but the basics are, PAL's 2:2 pulldown means that you can pause at any time and see a true frame of the film on almost any player and TV.
There's true progressive (coming soon with HD) and there's as close-as-you-can-get with interlaced equipment. That's what you get automatically with PAL. Thanks for the correction, though.
If you have the choice, or can wait, and you're in a PAL country, get the PAL release. It's got a better picture. Film is shot at 24 fps. PAL goes at 25 fps, and NTSC at 30 - so for PAL, they speed the film up by 4%, and NTSC they perform a pulldown, using the interlaced 60 fields per second to produce an interlaced 30 fps picture.
PAL and NTSC are about the same datarate, so you get fewer pixels (720x576 vs 720x480) in NTSC. Since you really don't need 30 fps for a 24 fps source, NTSC is wasted. And there's no such thing as a "Progressive Scan" DVD player in PAL, because *every* DVD that was sourced from film is automatically progressively scanned (one frame = one frame).
So buy the PAL if you can. And if you're in the US, consider buying the PAL release of older films (or new worldwide simultaneous releases) if your TV can handle it. Oh, and consider the Australian (region 4) release over the Europe (region 2) release as the region 2 release is more often censored - though sometimes the opposite can be true.
PAL DVDs will play back in NTSC only if TV can display a PAL signal or the player can convert one. In the US, it's probably going to be the player or nothing, but you'll have better luck with cheapo no-name or very expensive name brand players.
Depends on which language keyboard you have. The US/Australian Mac keyboards generally have the modifier keys and some specials spelled out on the keys, but the ISO and various European keyboards do not. Tab/Ctrl/Shift etc. have no words written on them. The only word written on the option key is "alt", which is one reason I keep having to explain which key is option and which is command.
"Yeah, the command key is the apple key."
So, the person who has scroll lock written on their F14 key is probably in the US or in Australia, and the person who doesn't is in the UK. Otherwise, Apple just changed the design of their keyboard at some point.
That 80GB drive is 5.25" wide, and the teeny weeny ones are 3.5" or smaller, like the iPod. You wouldn't want to lug the big one (and its power supply) around with you in your pocket, but I've had a 3.5" Firewire drive kicking around in my bag for months without noticing it.
Plus, Firewire is faster and doesn't need external power for small drives. Very handy sneakernet, and you can boot a Mac with it in an emergency.
So in a way, you could make an argument that it's better for linux to remain small on the desktop. That way, we can largely avoid the viruses, worms, spyware, etc that come with large numbers of STUPID users that will execute/fall for them. Any other perspectives?
Well, people who fall for these things aren't necessarily stupid, they're just not very computer-literate. A lot of banner ads these days aim to trick these naive users.
YOU HAVE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE CLICK HERE!
My perspective on the whole thing is not to run with the herd. Linux and Mac OS X aren't targeted by virus writers or malware because the markets just aren't big enough. Let Windows be the crap magnet.
No, video sucks. 25 fps for PAL, 30 fps NTSC, they both suck because they are interlaced. The distinctive look of film mostly comes from the non-interlaced (progressive) nature of the image. You get a purer, less distracting shot.
There's far more to it than that (grain, stock etc.) but a lot of people do like the film look, and spend a lot of money on plug-ins to make interlaced video look like it's actually film. And hey, I shoot Progressive Scan home video on my old Canon camcorder. See pics from the video on my URL in this comment's header.
Slashdot Mirror
This is reminding me of a temp gig as a graphic designer in a London property firm. It's probably not that far out there, but it was just a few years ago, in 2001. For such recent history, it wasn't pretty.
The cosy little nest of Macs that was the design department wasn't hooked up to the rest of the (PC) network, because the rest of the network was Token Ring and the Macs had some kind of new-fangled networking plug that Wasn't Token Ring. Besides, there was some kind of non-Mac-friendly software to run email, calendaring or some kind of stuff that wasn't my problem as a temp.
Every Mac therefore had a PC next to it for these crucial office tasks. Of course, we often needed to get data from the PCs to the Macs and back again. The Macs weren't remotely networked, to each other, to the PC-based Token Ring network, or to the internet.
So, Mac-PC or Mac-Mac data transfer was purely sneakernet. This happened by putting a PC-formatted Zip disk into a Zip drive connected to the PC, copying files onto it, ejecting it, putting it into the Zip drive connected to the Mac, then copying files off it. When a Zip disk or drive failed (click-of-death how I miss thee) a working drive got passed around the office to move files about.
Of course, nothing a cheap hub and some ethernet cables wouldn't have fixed. But it worked! Why fix it?
Is there any chance that the default 120GB drive is also using perpendicular recording technology? This review certainly implies that the whole Seagate 5400.3 range uses perpendicular recording. If it is, would it see an increase in speed over longditudinal drives as well?
Well, maybe. Check out amazon.com's computer section. Right now, six of their top ten bestselling desktops (inc. the top 4) and four of their top ten bestselling notebooks (inc. the top two) are from Apple. Not sure why. Are the rebates hard to find from other retailers? But yeah, if this carried across the whole (non-corporate) market, yes, Macs will rule.
Oh, and no, the prices won't fall. Apple will stick to the top-tier chips for most of their machines. You can see from the latest MacBook Pro, similar to an Acer notebook, that the prices will be just a little bit higher than the equivalent PC spec machine. It usually evens out in build quality/looks/little features, but they will not compete with a no-name on price.
Its always been like this.
Now a days, we explain it through digital computers. Before that was electrical systems. Before that mechcanical systems, I would imagine fluid systems, etc.
We seem to always use our most modern technology as an analogy for things that are still a little outside our grasp (such as the brain). In 20 years we may be describing the brain in terms of nano-tech.
Point taken. But hey, this is a hangout for tech heads, and analogies are built on existing knowledge. Maybe we'll be describing the brain in terms of nanotech on Nano/.
Noooooo! Australia and the US share the same layout, but the UK (ISO) one is different. There's an extra key above the tab, the grave that should be there is shifted down, next to a reduced-size shift key. On the right, the return key is taller and thinner in a slight L-shape, not just long and rectangular, and the backslash is shifted down and left to make room.
The pound (ie. UK currency) is above the 3 instead of # (which in the US is called pound - duh), and the big one is that keys like tab, page up/down and all the modifier keys have symbols instead of written names. Great for international use, but it means that almost nobody here in the UK (at least at this company) knows which one the "option" key is.
It's that one with "alt" written on it next to the command key. The command key is the one with the apple on it.
Wow, that had to be an excruciatingly tedious experience.
Oh yeah. I did some POVRAY command-line 3D on a Mac LC with a math coprocessor card, and it was a dog. The tiny animation I set up (stupidly complex - a transparent bubble rising in front of two mirrors that reflected into one another) was about 200px square and took about 10 minutes to render a frame. I remember one Friday horror film where I used to head back upstairs in each ad break, comment back the last line of code, uncomment the next line, start it going...
And since then, this guy has his own movie, and I'm working in a room without windows. He wins.
The BBC is funded by the TV license fee, a compulsory payment if you possess TV receiving equipment in the UK. A lot of people don't like it, but to me the alternative (a neutered BBC) is far worse.
There's a really, really nice way to avoid visual advertising temporarily. Visit a foreign country. If you can't read them, the ads just don't get into your headspace.
For TV ad-free, you could move to the UK. For all the bitching about the license fee, the BBC does provide the world's last great multi-channel ad-free TV. If the BBC gets sold off, the world will be worse off for it.
That's good to know - it's a dog on the Mac too. And I thought it was just slower on the Mac because Adobe were moving their development primarily to Windows and porting back.
By the way, under Mac OS X, you can disable plug-ins by clicking checkboxes in the Application's Get Info dialog/inspector. Only hassle is, there are inter-dependencies, so you can bring up a heap of "plug-in X failed to initialize" dialogs by disabling the wrong one.
And at least Acrobat 6 Professional does actually have handy new features: its separation preview and preflight have both saved me before going to print.
And of course, there are places like Mount Nebo, just outside Brisbane (Australia) which don't have town water connected. Rain water/tanker delivered only. So you have to do all of the above and buy huge water storage tanks. Not everyone even in the first world has what to most of us are "basic" amenities.
But yeah, the anti-virus companies named it.
Actually, they are consistent. The Safari Download "windoid" is really a window, as you can see from the full size title bar. Unlike windoids, windows do (and should) stay visible when the application isn't in the foreground.
Actually, if you're travelling long distance without a laptop, a big iPod would be great.
- You get to listen to your own music + play games on long lonely flights/bus trips/etc.
- You get to carry anything digital, music or otherwise, that you'd like to share with anyone you meet on the road
- You can keep a digital backup of any crucial address/travel/phone number details
- If you get a Belkin digital media reader, you can offload all your photos from your digital camera to the iPod
Only downside: you'll need a charger.Well, when *I* were a lad, my parents spent about AU$100 on a 16KB expansion module (new total: 64KB) for my Apple II clone.
And we used to live in paper bag in t' middle o' road.
Well, I liked most of #2 - the action and effects scenes were great, but everything outside of the matrix lagged badly. Same lag problem for #3, and since it's set mostly outside of the matrix, it stank. What I want to do is get hold of both on DVD and re-edit them into one good film. There should be just about enough.
The plan: nuke Zion entirely from both films. Leave enough of the on-board ship footage to make sense. Kill the worst of the bad acting/dialogue. Distribute instructions with Final Cut Pro project files for anyone with the program and the discs to regenerate the new edit. Enjoy if possible.
Yes, both PAL and NTSC are interlaced. And yeah, if you get a component connection with higher-end gear you can extract a true progressive scan picture. I didn't want to go right into the guts of the issue, but the basics are, PAL's 2:2 pulldown means that you can pause at any time and see a true frame of the film on almost any player and TV.
There's true progressive (coming soon with HD) and there's as close-as-you-can-get with interlaced equipment. That's what you get automatically with PAL. Thanks for the correction, though.
If you have the choice, or can wait, and you're in a PAL country, get the PAL release. It's got a better picture. Film is shot at 24 fps. PAL goes at 25 fps, and NTSC at 30 - so for PAL, they speed the film up by 4%, and NTSC they perform a pulldown, using the interlaced 60 fields per second to produce an interlaced 30 fps picture. PAL and NTSC are about the same datarate, so you get fewer pixels (720x576 vs 720x480) in NTSC. Since you really don't need 30 fps for a 24 fps source, NTSC is wasted. And there's no such thing as a "Progressive Scan" DVD player in PAL, because *every* DVD that was sourced from film is automatically progressively scanned (one frame = one frame). So buy the PAL if you can. And if you're in the US, consider buying the PAL release of older films (or new worldwide simultaneous releases) if your TV can handle it. Oh, and consider the Australian (region 4) release over the Europe (region 2) release as the region 2 release is more often censored - though sometimes the opposite can be true.
PAL DVDs will play back in NTSC only if TV can display a PAL signal or the player can convert one. In the US, it's probably going to be the player or nothing, but you'll have better luck with cheapo no-name or very expensive name brand players.
Just in case all the descriptions aren't quite enough, people might want to check out this demo page at Apple to see Expose in action.
Depends on which language keyboard you have. The US/Australian Mac keyboards generally have the modifier keys and some specials spelled out on the keys, but the ISO and various European keyboards do not. Tab/Ctrl/Shift etc. have no words written on them. The only word written on the option key is "alt", which is one reason I keep having to explain which key is option and which is command.
"Yeah, the command key is the apple key."
So, the person who has scroll lock written on their F14 key is probably in the US or in Australia, and the person who doesn't is in the UK. Otherwise, Apple just changed the design of their keyboard at some point.
Confirmation, anyone?
I don't remember the Gauntlet voice ever saying that. I do remember it saying (definitely in all caps):
"RED WIZARD IS ABOUT TO DIE"
"BLUE VALKYRIE IS ABOUT TO DIE"
"GREEN ELF IS ABOUT TO DIE"
But maybe I'm not very good at Gauntlet.
That 80GB drive is 5.25" wide, and the teeny weeny ones are 3.5" or smaller, like the iPod. You wouldn't want to lug the big one (and its power supply) around with you in your pocket, but I've had a 3.5" Firewire drive kicking around in my bag for months without noticing it.
Plus, Firewire is faster and doesn't need external power for small drives. Very handy sneakernet, and you can boot a Mac with it in an emergency.
So in a way, you could make an argument that it's better for linux to remain small on the desktop. That way, we can largely avoid the viruses, worms, spyware, etc that come with large numbers of STUPID users that will execute/fall for them. Any other perspectives?
Well, people who fall for these things aren't necessarily stupid, they're just not very computer-literate. A lot of banner ads these days aim to trick these naive users.
YOU HAVE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE CLICK HERE!
My perspective on the whole thing is not to run with the herd. Linux and Mac OS X aren't targeted by virus writers or malware because the markets just aren't big enough. Let Windows be the crap magnet.
No, video sucks. 25 fps for PAL, 30 fps NTSC, they both suck because they are interlaced. The distinctive look of film mostly comes from the non-interlaced (progressive) nature of the image. You get a purer, less distracting shot.
There's far more to it than that (grain, stock etc.) but a lot of people do like the film look, and spend a lot of money on plug-ins to make interlaced video look like it's actually film. And hey, I shoot Progressive Scan home video on my old Canon camcorder. See pics from the video on my URL in this comment's header.