We provide xpdf and (Sun's build of) gpdf on our Solaris machines here. On the SPARCs we (and Sun) also provide Acroread and the plugin. I'm more worried about problems in the plugin since that's more likely to get weird stuff loaded. I was about to update it on the SPARCs anyway.
Of course Adobe still refuses to provide acroread for x86 Solaris. Though they do on the SPARC and I am about 100% sure the same source code would work there as well (everything else does...). In fact, why would it be different from any other UNIX/X11 version?
So why can't we get it? Because they refuse to provide it, not on any technical grounds, but just because. They just won't do it because... because they're jerks? I guess. So if the security problem's in their implementation, I'll just remove it from the SPARCs and make all our Solaris machines the same.
I live in Indiana, and I don't know anyone who wanted DST, or has warmed up to it in the short time we've had it in most of the state. (Right, most. Some counties had it before, just as some counties are in Eastern or Central time. Most were with Indy in year-round EST (GMT-5) before. Most changed to Eastern Time (EST/EDT), some didn't. The curse of being adjacent to states with different timezones.) Fact is, it's dark when I commute during the winter and light in the summer either way. Most people I know have the lights on in their office whenever they're there regardless of whether the sun is out or not, and many do the same at home.
I'm sure people who actually spend leisure time outside might care, but they aren't using more or less electricity to do it, are they? The idea that "more daylight" would mean less electric power consumption due to lighting is foolish. The two things don't seem to be related in modern, urban life.
According to the report on the $8.6 million more spent on residential electricity in the state (as reported in the Indianapolis Star), they think there was some saving in lighting but that heat and air conditioning more than made up for it. That makes some sense too- the cost of AC in an office building has got to be lower per person than everyone going home and turning on their own. Heck, I stay late at work for the climate control sometimes, so that's no surprise to me.
But energy savings wasn't the compelling reason for Indiana to go on DST according to the governor. The reason given was business: companies dealing with other companies were supposedly having problems because no one knows what time it is in Indiana. I don't get that either. That's even lamer than not getting up earlier if you want to. And now Chicago's in a different timezone than us (the middle of the state- some of that corner is with them) year 'round, which seems like more of a business problem than their only being in our timezone half the year. Being in the same timezone as NYC seems less useful. Anyone in a non-US timezone isn't going to guess which one we're in anyway.
I agree on the original Gameboy- the screens often develop vertical lines where (I think) the connection between the screen and the machine has a problem. I haven't looked into it, I believe it's from the pressure of the cartridge being inserted and jarring the innards little by little over time. I haven't seen it on later Gameboys- just the original.
I like the Lynx too, but depending on the cartridge and whether you have the larger or smaller machine, the cartridges can be quite difficult to remove. The machine is heavy too, and I find the larger one pretty awkward.
I don't have a Game.com. One of the few holes in my console collection.:-)
I've seen that before in Commodore 64 binaries, particularly something from Electronic Arts... "Worms" (not the one that came later, the automata game), I think, was one I remember, but it's been twenty years, so I could be mistaken.
Of course, if you look at a copy of it now, that stuff might've been removed to make it load faster. After twenty years, maybe I can deny knowing how that could've happened too.
There's a checkbox in Preferences for it, but I couldn't get QuickTime Player to display CC out of recorded video from my ReplayTVs/DVARchive (which plays fine CCs on my TV), but, yeah, it's supposed to work. Haven't revisited it since immediately after the QT upgrade.
It'd be nice if the iPod would do that too- nicer if it did it automatically when muted or headphoneless. There they could just use a subtitle track if the video had it, I guess, but OTA video from the big networks is mostly CCed, so might as well use it if it's there.
'Cause it'd mess up his graphs.:-) There are some other machines that could've been included too- this isn't a huge domain to survey. But the leaving off the TurboExpress- when including the Nomad!- is unforgivable in any case.
I mention this because the Nomad is to the Genesis as the TurboExpress is to the TurboGrafx- only NEC got there a lot (lot) sooner. Also, the Nomad gets very little love, seems to me. I sure like mine, though the Ms. Pac thing stinks.
I'd like to see Apple offer an upgrade from a 4- to an 8-processor machine too. I'm not taxing my quad at the moment, but it'd be nice to have official acknowledgment of this upgrade path. (Yeah, we could DIY, but a lot of people would feel better modding a high-end machine in an official way.)
Even with Apple 30" displays being $1800 ($1600 higher ed) new (Dell's is cheaper now too- didn't used to be), I doubt I'd add a second one- my desk isn't big enough! I highly recommend the 30" though. It's even nicer than you'd think.
That's an estimate, but it's in the ballpark. Having six machines running in parallel for a lot of that time made it possible, and also started a cycle of taping instead of watching. Ironically, now that everyone else is watching everything delayed thanks to Tivo, I try to watch at least one show the same night it's on, if not when it's actually broadcast. And I don't keep nearly as much now that shows are available on DVD, so I'm accumulating a lot less.
Yes, I do use DVRs and was an early adopter, but I chew through disk space pretty darn fast. (And my primary Replay has never really worked right with that 250GB drive anyway.) Removable media is really the way to go if you want to record in anything like real-time (I cannot wait long for re-encoding or file transfers) and not bump against the ceiling all the time.
It took years to figure out how to store tapes (XVHS12s from Bags Unlimited on 10 shelf wiretech units gives about 500 tapes in one place that's still accessible). I'm still not as happy storing DVDs, but I'd better figure it out soon.:-)
Also ironically, I never really bought pre-recorded tapes (I have maybe a dozen now). This is all stuff I recorded myself. Until Guinness gets back to me, I'll just have to keep saying I've probably taped more TV than anyone...
Much as I like DVD, neither a Blu-Ray nor an HD-DVD player has got me excited enough to get on board. What I'm waiting for is a good HD recorder on some removable format. That'll be enough to get me into the fray. Without it, I can sit back and wait. I was hoping someone would get one out this year.
I have personally recorded more TV than about anyone (my tape library is something like 20k volumes- I've been at it a while). Come up with a good HD recorder and I'll buy several of them. I doubt I'm the only one.
How's it compare to my Replays? The ReplayTV works pretty well for most things, but some channels and shows make it go nuts. Their algorithm also fails more now that commercial breaks are longer.:-(
Indiana, one of the few holdouts of DST has decided to start using it. They claim it's an energy saving issue and a business issue, and I'm not buying it.
I'm sitting in a building full of offices. It is fantastically sunny today, but with few exceptions (myself being one), the are lit by electric lights. (Flourescents give me a headache, so I work by natural light as much as possible.)
It matters not what time it is, or even if these people work a night shift instead of a day shift, the lights will be on when they're there, and, maybe, off when they're not.
Observation tells me the same is true of most any business in an urban environment. Stores and restaurants are lighted based on occupancy, not time of day.
Same thing's mostly true in homes. More electrical stuff is on when people are home and awake than when they aren't and time of day or amount of sunlight has little or nothing to do with it.
In any case, changing from not using DST to using it can only (theoretically) make a difference in energy consumption for the part of the year that's different from current practice. If we switch to match Eastern time, that'd make us different in the summer, if we go Central (the preferred choice, I hear), we'd be different in the winter.
If the winter part of DST is made shorter (and we go Central, as they're suggesting), we will save less energy than the amount we're supposed to be saving by switching to DST. Therefore, if energy savings is the reason, it's a bad idea.
Not that I believe in the energy argument anyway, but less of however much is still less.
The main reason some people want to get Indiana on DST is the "problem" of explaining what time it is here to businesses in other states. Guess what? Some of them are going to be in different timezones no matter what you do. If you really want to sync with people somewhere else, change your work hours.
No one I talk to elsewhere really cares what time it is here, they just want to know when we're available for communication. They're going to put it on their calendars in their local time anyway.
The other argument for DST is not one the lawmakers have been pushing (because they only want to talk about theoretically saving money) is the social one. That is, that people want to do things outdoors, outside of work, when the sun is up.
That would make sense except that it doesn't. Civil twilight starts tonight (July 21) at 8:44 pm. It would be the same if we were on CDT. It would be 9:44 pm(!) if we were on EDT. So it's OK now, right?
OK, so how about winter? On Christmas day, civil twilight starts at 5:57 pm (current time or EST). If we switch to CST, it'll be 4:57 pm(!). Is that better? Really?
I used civil twilight rather than sunset because we're talking about people being outdoors. Sunset is about 30 minutes earlier.
I've been tracking Art of Illusion (http://www.artofillusion.org/) for some time, and I like it more and more. It's Maya-ish, and provides impressive modelling, animating, and rendering. It's much more capable than you'd guess at first glance, and it can be extended in many ways with Beanshell scripts.
It's in Java and it's open source and free. The Mac front end is reasonably Macified, and the documentation and tutorials are pretty good. Give it a spin.
No kidding. Better yet, get some old ones that have Commercial Advance. TiVo people only think they skip commercials. Ninety-something percent of the time I don't see them at all. It's nice to just set down the remote and watch stuff commercial free.
(I am not an official University mouthpiece, so this isn't official, but it's not a secret either.)
We've got some SPARCs in labs now running Solaris. We'll be fielding some PCs running UNIX for the fall. I don't know whether these will replace or augment the SPARCs. They'll be the same Dells they're upgrading the MS Window machines to.
Some people are still muttering about dual-booting them, but I'd rather we keep them straight UNIX. We're evaluating Linux vs. Solaris x86 right now, but so far Linux is way ahead because we need accelerated OpenGL support for the coursework they want to do.
Nearly all our instructional-related non-workstation UNIX machines are SPARCs running Solaris. I've been telling folks we should be doing more of that with x86 machines too, but there's not been much motion there yet.
(Historically that's been because SPARCs could have a lot more memory than PCs, but that's less true all the time.)
But DivX is all about DRM. Why support DivX if you don't like DRM? I know they've got non-DRMed stuff, but isn't DivX VOD and DivX-certified players the bulk of their revenue stream?
I'll argue that the movie-watching market is very different from the music-listening market. I certainly don't do the two things the same way at all.
I have no interest in watching movies on a handheld device. Zero. Some people have some (the people who use DVD players in cars and such), but a videophile and long-time Sony customer such as myself really doesn't want that.
Portable music, on the other hand, is a great idea. The Walkman has been the joggers best friend (and biggest distraction) for decades.
I have very little interest in watching movies on a computer. Outside of pirates and people who live in really tiny spaces, I've never seen the point. My 40" CRT HD television (a Sony, natch) blows the doors off any display I've got or could afford for my computers. Besides, they've got work to do.
I play music in the backgound when I work- at a computer- so iTunes is great. I don't watch movies in the background. I want it to get my full attention.
I listen to songs many more times than I watch the average movie. I have a large video collection (if you count things I've taped from television, almost certainly larger than that of anyone reading this), and I'm glad to have it, but I don't need to carry it around with me and would get little benefit from doing so.
So what would an iTunes-like movie store do for me? If I could get things I couldn't get elsewhere, that'd be nice. If I could get hidef content, that'd be a feature. If it were significantly cheaper than alternative delivery methods, I could go for that.
But do I much care that things would be delivered more quickly? Not really. Getting a DVD in the mail only takes a couple of days now. I'm sure my cable company could VOD me stuff if I were the impatient sort.
The iTunes store gives away a single every week, and I've bought an album or two (though not from ITMS, yet) because of it. That's a Good Thing, but I don't see it happening with movies.
I just don't think the upside is as big as it is with music. I spend a lot more on movies than I do on music (and I don't steal either one), but I doubt I'd use this as much as I use ITMS or iTunes- and I don't even have an iPod!
I grepped for the manufacturer code 027616 in the UPCs of my collection to come up with a list and then checked that against the titles. That was easier and probably right.
Took me longer than it should've, but I got it. What I'm wondering is why people are sharing answers. This is a contest people!:-)
Beyond that, they might be spoilers to people who got started late. I didn't really read anything until I was done, so now I can appreciate how far wrong some folks are...
Steve Jobs could have done likewise if he had spent less time thinking about the correct shade of black for his magnesium cube and instead made something affordable in a plastic case.
I'm told the metal case of the NeXT let it be used in places where other machines weren't. That and being made in the US made it favorite for some US government organizations, I hear.
NeXTs were perfectly affordable next to similar machines of the day- trouble is, no one was using similar machines! They cost more than diskless machines (which is what UNIX folks were used to), and more than headless machines, but if you compare similar machines, they weren't out of line in the late '80s to early '90s.
Look up how much a 300 or 600MB hard drive cost in 1989, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
They tried to use Sun's hardware. Early documentation shows that some of the stuff was compiled there and could still be cross-compiled there. (I no doubt have this stuff at home somewhere if I could find it. I ran the Purdue NeXT Archives and did evangelism for NeXT in the early days.)
Truth is, the Sun workstations of the day weren't up to the task. They were mostly diskless 68020s (Sun 3/50s and 3/60s were the fashion of the day). You could run a NeXT diskless (you'd have to be able to to compete with Sun), but they always recommended one for swap at least. And the earliest machines were '030s- quickly supplanted, and mostly replaced in motherboard swaps, with '040s. Suns didn't have removeable media of any kind either (no, not even CD-ROMs or floppies), whereas NeXT had re-writeable optical disks.
Other less critical things too. The average Sun was an 1152 x 900 black and white (no gray) display. NeXTs used 4 shades of gray and a faster graphics architecture, which gave their GUI a distinctive look (ripped off quite a bit by MS Windows 95, actually). Ditto sound hardware.
NeXT's hardware was necessary to bootstrap the project. They probably could've quit earlier, but in the late '80s, they really needed something no one was providing. Compare a NeXTcube to a Sun 3/60. Seriously, that's what you need to be looking at. They were contemporary machines, and the Suns were very, very popular.
I don't know if you've actually used a NeXT lately, but they're actually pretty responsive workstations even now, which is mindboggling in these days of gigahertz processors. The hardware was tight, and they still look like a million bucks. I use NeXTs (later models, admittedly) even now. Wouldn't bother with a Sun 3.
No, I don't use my NeXTs much anymore- but I did migrate to a bunch of Macs. As you said, the software was the killer app.
ab
Just Need Enough Memory
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I run OS X on several machines. The one I'm using now is the slowest I really use (a 400MHz G3), and it's fine with 512MB of memory. With 128MB it's slow. More didn't make much difference for common stuff.
In fact, it's deceptively responsive. I use a G4 733 at home, and sometimes forget how slow this thing is- until I do a big compile or something.:-)
For ordinary GUI stuff, it's OK, but some programs that aren't really OS Xish (like Mozilla) sometimes have noticeable screen updates.
A single good reason? Same reason I bought one last year: lots and lots of disk space for video. I'd rather have a box to put drives in than stack them up next to my iMac/iBook.
I'm surely not the only one with a DVD-R Mac that's cutting video, am I?
What happened? I'll tell you what happened. The idea of "finishing" games was strike one. Video game rental and piracy were two and three. They made fewer people buy games, which made people make games less worth buying.
The problem with video games nowadays is that the lifespans are short (and designed to stay that way). They only really plan on sales for a short time (same thing with movies betting everything on opening weekend box office, but I digress).
Because of this, games are designed around the idea of being disposable. Instead of making a really innovative game that might take a while to find its audience, or a really elaborate/cool/addictive game that a customer could play for months without tiring of, the fast track games that take less time to develop so they can get more "product" out there more quickly and less time to "finish" so players need to buy more.
They only plan on selling a few copies in a relatively short amount of time. In their mind, number of titles is the sure thing to boost sales, not quality of the games.
I really wanted to compare sales of the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube in my example, but I used the 2600 and Xbox because they were in the title of the article.
Dreamcast sales are likely through the roof since the price cut, and GameCubes are pretty thoroughly sold out.
The Jaguar's got a 64 bit bus. That makes it 64-bit in my (and Atari's) view. The custom chips work on 64-bit words too as I recall. (I'm a licensed Jaguar developer but never got a product to market.)
There's a 68k in there, but people are too hung up on it. The real magic is in the other chips. They just put in a 68k because everyone knows how to program it.
It's the same exact one- I had to rub your noseprints off it when it showed up.:-)
I didn't have a console when I was a kid. Some would say I'm overcompensating now.
I run into kids in stores all the time drooling over stuff they can't get permission or funding to get and tell them that when they grow up they can buy all the games they want. They stop and think about it. If their parents are within earshot, they laugh...
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We provide xpdf and (Sun's build of) gpdf on our Solaris machines here. On the SPARCs we (and Sun) also provide Acroread and the plugin. I'm more worried about problems in the plugin since that's more likely to get weird stuff loaded. I was about to update it on the SPARCs anyway.
Of course Adobe still refuses to provide acroread for x86 Solaris. Though they do on the SPARC and I am about 100% sure the same source code would work there as well (everything else does...). In fact, why would it be different from any other UNIX/X11 version?
So why can't we get it? Because they refuse to provide it, not on any technical grounds, but just because. They just won't do it because... because they're jerks? I guess. So if the security problem's in their implementation, I'll just remove it from the SPARCs and make all our Solaris machines the same.
I live in Indiana, and I don't know anyone who wanted DST, or has warmed up to it in the short time we've had it in most of the state. (Right, most. Some counties had it before, just as some counties are in Eastern or Central time. Most were with Indy in year-round EST (GMT-5) before. Most changed to Eastern Time (EST/EDT), some didn't. The curse of being adjacent to states with different timezones.) Fact is, it's dark when I commute during the winter and light in the summer either way. Most people I know have the lights on in their office whenever they're there regardless of whether the sun is out or not, and many do the same at home.
I'm sure people who actually spend leisure time outside might care, but they aren't using more or less electricity to do it, are they? The idea that "more daylight" would mean less electric power consumption due to lighting is foolish. The two things don't seem to be related in modern, urban life.
According to the report on the $8.6 million more spent on residential electricity in the state (as reported in the Indianapolis Star), they think there was some saving in lighting but that heat and air conditioning more than made up for it. That makes some sense too- the cost of AC in an office building has got to be lower per person than everyone going home and turning on their own. Heck, I stay late at work for the climate control sometimes, so that's no surprise to me.
But energy savings wasn't the compelling reason for Indiana to go on DST according to the governor. The reason given was business: companies dealing with other companies were supposedly having problems because no one knows what time it is in Indiana. I don't get that either. That's even lamer than not getting up earlier if you want to. And now Chicago's in a different timezone than us (the middle of the state- some of that corner is with them) year 'round, which seems like more of a business problem than their only being in our timezone half the year. Being in the same timezone as NYC seems less useful. Anyone in a non-US timezone isn't going to guess which one we're in anyway.
I agree on the original Gameboy- the screens often develop vertical lines where (I think) the connection between the screen and the machine has a problem. I haven't looked into it, I believe it's from the pressure of the cartridge being inserted and jarring the innards little by little over time. I haven't seen it on later Gameboys- just the original.
:-)
I like the Lynx too, but depending on the cartridge and whether you have the larger or smaller machine, the cartridges can be quite difficult to remove. The machine is heavy too, and I find the larger one pretty awkward.
I don't have a Game.com. One of the few holes in my console collection.
I've seen that before in Commodore 64 binaries, particularly something from Electronic Arts... "Worms" (not the one that came later, the automata game), I think, was one I remember, but it's been twenty years, so I could be mistaken.
Of course, if you look at a copy of it now, that stuff might've been removed to make it load faster. After twenty years, maybe I can deny knowing how that could've happened too.
There's a checkbox in Preferences for it, but I couldn't get QuickTime Player to display CC out of recorded video from my ReplayTVs/DVARchive (which plays fine CCs on my TV), but, yeah, it's supposed to work. Haven't revisited it since immediately after the QT upgrade.
It'd be nice if the iPod would do that too- nicer if it did it automatically when muted or headphoneless. There they could just use a subtitle track if the video had it, I guess, but OTA video from the big networks is mostly CCed, so might as well use it if it's there.
ab
'Cause it'd mess up his graphs. :-) There are some other machines that could've been included too- this isn't a huge domain to survey. But the leaving off the TurboExpress- when including the Nomad!- is unforgivable in any case.
I mention this because the Nomad is to the Genesis as the TurboExpress is to the TurboGrafx- only NEC got there a lot (lot) sooner. Also, the Nomad gets very little love, seems to me. I sure like mine, though the Ms. Pac thing stinks.
ab
I'd like to see Apple offer an upgrade from a 4- to an 8-processor machine too. I'm not taxing my quad at the moment, but it'd be nice to have official acknowledgment of this upgrade path. (Yeah, we could DIY, but a lot of people would feel better modding a high-end machine in an official way.)
Even with Apple 30" displays being $1800 ($1600 higher ed) new (Dell's is cheaper now too- didn't used to be), I doubt I'd add a second one- my desk isn't big enough! I highly recommend the 30" though. It's even nicer than you'd think.
ab
That's an estimate, but it's in the ballpark. Having six machines running in parallel for a lot of that time made it possible, and also started a cycle of taping instead of watching. Ironically, now that everyone else is watching everything delayed thanks to Tivo, I try to watch at least one show the same night it's on, if not when it's actually broadcast. And I don't keep nearly as much now that shows are available on DVD, so I'm accumulating a lot less.
:-)
Yes, I do use DVRs and was an early adopter, but I chew through disk space pretty darn fast. (And my primary Replay has never really worked right with that 250GB drive anyway.) Removable media is really the way to go if you want to record in anything like real-time (I cannot wait long for re-encoding or file transfers) and not bump against the ceiling all the time.
It took years to figure out how to store tapes (XVHS12s from Bags Unlimited on 10 shelf wiretech units gives about 500 tapes in one place that's still accessible). I'm still not as happy storing DVDs, but I'd better figure it out soon.
Also ironically, I never really bought pre-recorded tapes (I have maybe a dozen now). This is all stuff I recorded myself. Until Guinness gets back to me, I'll just have to keep saying I've probably taped more TV than anyone...
Much as I like DVD, neither a Blu-Ray nor an HD-DVD player has got me excited enough to get on board. What I'm waiting for is a good HD recorder on some removable format. That'll be enough to get me into the fray. Without it, I can sit back and wait. I was hoping someone would get one out this year.
I have personally recorded more TV than about anyone (my tape library is something like 20k volumes- I've been at it a while). Come up with a good HD recorder and I'll buy several of them. I doubt I'm the only one.
ab
How's it compare to my Replays? The ReplayTV works pretty well for most things, but some channels and shows make it go nuts. Their algorithm also fails more now that commercial breaks are longer. :-(
Indiana, one of the few holdouts of DST has decided to start using it. They claim it's an energy saving issue and a business issue, and I'm not buying it.
I'm sitting in a building full of offices. It is fantastically sunny today, but with few exceptions (myself being one), the are lit by electric lights. (Flourescents give me a headache, so I work by natural light as much as possible.)
It matters not what time it is, or even if these people work a night shift instead of a day shift, the lights will be on when they're there, and, maybe, off when they're not.
Observation tells me the same is true of most any business in an urban environment. Stores and restaurants are lighted based on occupancy, not time of day.
Same thing's mostly true in homes. More electrical stuff is on when people are home and awake than when they aren't and time of day or amount of sunlight has little or nothing to do with it.
In any case, changing from not using DST to using it can only (theoretically) make a difference in energy consumption for the part of the year that's different from current practice. If we switch to match Eastern time, that'd make us different in the summer, if we go Central (the preferred choice, I hear), we'd be different in the winter.
If the winter part of DST is made shorter (and we go Central, as they're suggesting), we will save less energy than the amount we're supposed to be saving by switching to DST. Therefore, if energy savings is the reason, it's a bad idea.
Not that I believe in the energy argument anyway, but less of however much is still less.
The main reason some people want to get Indiana on DST is the "problem" of explaining what time it is here to businesses in other states. Guess what? Some of them are going to be in different timezones no matter what you do. If you really want to sync with people somewhere else, change your work hours.
No one I talk to elsewhere really cares what time it is here, they just want to know when we're available for communication. They're going to put it on their calendars in their local time anyway.
The other argument for DST is not one the lawmakers have been pushing (because they only want to talk about theoretically saving money) is the social one. That is, that people want to do things outdoors, outside of work, when the sun is up.
That would make sense except that it doesn't. Civil twilight starts tonight (July 21) at 8:44 pm. It would be the same if we were on CDT. It would be 9:44 pm(!) if we were on EDT. So it's OK now, right?
OK, so how about winter? On Christmas day, civil twilight starts at 5:57 pm (current time or EST). If we switch to CST, it'll be 4:57 pm(!). Is that better? Really?
I used civil twilight rather than sunset because we're talking about people being outdoors. Sunset is about 30 minutes earlier.
I've been tracking Art of Illusion (http://www.artofillusion.org/) for some time, and I like it more and more. It's Maya-ish, and provides impressive modelling, animating, and rendering. It's much more capable than you'd guess at first glance, and it can be extended in many ways with Beanshell scripts.
It's in Java and it's open source and free. The Mac front end is reasonably Macified, and the documentation and tutorials are pretty good. Give it a spin.
ab
No kidding. Better yet, get some old ones that have Commercial Advance. TiVo people only think they skip commercials. Ninety-something percent of the time I don't see them at all. It's nice to just set down the remote and watch stuff commercial free.
(I am not an official University mouthpiece, so this isn't official, but it's not a secret either.)
We've got some SPARCs in labs now running Solaris. We'll be fielding some PCs running UNIX for the fall. I don't know whether these will replace or augment the SPARCs. They'll be the same Dells they're upgrading the MS Window machines to.
Some people are still muttering about dual-booting them, but I'd rather we keep them straight UNIX. We're evaluating Linux vs. Solaris x86 right now, but so far Linux is way ahead because we need accelerated OpenGL support for the coursework they want to do.
Nearly all our instructional-related non-workstation UNIX machines are SPARCs running Solaris. I've been telling folks we should be doing more of that with x86 machines too, but there's not been much motion there yet.
(Historically that's been because SPARCs could have a lot more memory than PCs, but that's less true all the time.)
ab
But DivX is all about DRM. Why support DivX if you don't like DRM? I know they've got non-DRMed stuff, but isn't DivX VOD and DivX-certified players the bulk of their revenue stream?
I'll argue that the movie-watching market is very different from the music-listening market. I certainly don't do the two things the same way at all.
I have no interest in watching movies on a handheld device. Zero. Some people have some (the people who use DVD players in cars and such), but a videophile and long-time Sony customer such as myself really doesn't want that.
Portable music, on the other hand, is a great idea. The Walkman has been the joggers best friend (and biggest distraction) for decades.
I have very little interest in watching movies on a computer. Outside of pirates and people who live in really tiny spaces, I've never seen the point. My 40" CRT HD television (a Sony, natch) blows the doors off any display I've got or could afford for my computers. Besides, they've got work to do.
I play music in the backgound when I work- at a computer- so iTunes is great. I don't watch movies in the background. I want it to get my full attention.
I listen to songs many more times than I watch the average movie. I have a large video collection (if you count things I've taped from television, almost certainly larger than that of anyone reading this), and I'm glad to have it, but I don't need to carry it around with me and would get little benefit from doing so.
So what would an iTunes-like movie store do for me? If I could get things I couldn't get elsewhere, that'd be nice. If I could get hidef content, that'd be a feature. If it were significantly cheaper than alternative delivery methods, I could go for that.
But do I much care that things would be delivered more quickly? Not really. Getting a DVD in the mail only takes a couple of days now. I'm sure my cable company could VOD me stuff if I were the impatient sort.
The iTunes store gives away a single every week, and I've bought an album or two (though not from ITMS, yet) because of it. That's a Good Thing, but I don't see it happening with movies.
I just don't think the upside is as big as it is with music. I spend a lot more on movies than I do on music (and I don't steal either one), but I doubt I'd use this as much as I use ITMS or iTunes- and I don't even have an iPod!
ab
I grepped for the manufacturer code 027616 in the UPCs of my collection to come up with a list and then checked that against the titles. That was easier and probably right.
Took me longer than it should've, but I got it. What I'm wondering is why people are sharing answers. This is a contest people! :-)
Beyond that, they might be spoilers to people who got started late. I didn't really read anything until I was done, so now I can appreciate how far wrong some folks are...
ab
I'm told the metal case of the NeXT let it be used in places where other machines weren't. That and being made in the US made it favorite for some US government organizations, I hear.
NeXTs were perfectly affordable next to similar machines of the day- trouble is, no one was using similar machines! They cost more than diskless machines (which is what UNIX folks were used to), and more than headless machines, but if you compare similar machines, they weren't out of line in the late '80s to early '90s.
Look up how much a 300 or 600MB hard drive cost in 1989, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
They tried to use Sun's hardware. Early documentation shows that some of the stuff was compiled there and could still be cross-compiled there. (I no doubt have this stuff at home somewhere if I could find it. I ran the Purdue NeXT Archives and did evangelism for NeXT in the early days.)
Truth is, the Sun workstations of the day weren't up to the task. They were mostly diskless 68020s (Sun 3/50s and 3/60s were the fashion of the day). You could run a NeXT diskless (you'd have to be able to to compete with Sun), but they always recommended one for swap at least. And the earliest machines were '030s- quickly supplanted, and mostly replaced in motherboard swaps, with '040s. Suns didn't have removeable media of any kind either (no, not even CD-ROMs or floppies), whereas NeXT had re-writeable optical disks.
Other less critical things too. The average Sun was an 1152 x 900 black and white (no gray) display. NeXTs used 4 shades of gray and a faster graphics architecture, which gave their GUI a distinctive look (ripped off quite a bit by MS Windows 95, actually). Ditto sound hardware.
NeXT's hardware was necessary to bootstrap the project. They probably could've quit earlier, but in the late '80s, they really needed something no one was providing. Compare a NeXTcube to a Sun 3/60. Seriously, that's what you need to be looking at. They were contemporary machines, and the Suns were very, very popular.
I don't know if you've actually used a NeXT lately, but they're actually pretty responsive workstations even now, which is mindboggling in these days of gigahertz processors. The hardware was tight, and they still look like a million bucks. I use NeXTs (later models, admittedly) even now. Wouldn't bother with a Sun 3.
No, I don't use my NeXTs much anymore- but I did migrate to a bunch of Macs. As you said, the software was the killer app.
ab
I run OS X on several machines. The one I'm using now is the slowest I really use (a 400MHz G3), and it's fine with 512MB of memory. With 128MB it's slow. More didn't make much difference for common stuff.
:-)
In fact, it's deceptively responsive. I use a G4 733 at home, and sometimes forget how slow this thing is- until I do a big compile or something.
For ordinary GUI stuff, it's OK, but some programs that aren't really OS Xish (like Mozilla) sometimes have noticeable screen updates.
ab
A single good reason? Same reason I bought one last year: lots and lots of disk space for video. I'd rather have a box to put drives in than stack them up next to my iMac/iBook.
I'm surely not the only one with a DVD-R Mac that's cutting video, am I?
ab
What happened? I'll tell you what happened. The idea of "finishing" games was strike one. Video game rental and piracy were two and three. They made fewer people buy games, which made people make games less worth buying.
The problem with video games nowadays is that the lifespans are short (and designed to stay that way). They only really plan on sales for a short time (same thing with movies betting everything on opening weekend box office, but I digress).
Because of this, games are designed around the idea of being disposable. Instead of making a really innovative game that might take a while to find its audience, or a really elaborate/cool/addictive game that a customer could play for months without tiring of, the fast track games that take less time to develop so they can get more "product" out there more quickly and less time to "finish" so players need to buy more.
They only plan on selling a few copies in a relatively short amount of time. In their mind, number of titles is the sure thing to boost sales, not quality of the games.
ab
I really wanted to compare sales of the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube in my example, but I used the 2600 and Xbox because they were in the title of the article.
Dreamcast sales are likely through the roof since the price cut, and GameCubes are pretty thoroughly sold out.
ab
The Jaguar's got a 64 bit bus. That makes it 64-bit in my (and Atari's) view. The custom chips work on 64-bit words too as I recall. (I'm a licensed Jaguar developer but never got a product to market.)
There's a 68k in there, but people are too hung up on it. The real magic is in the other chips. They just put in a 68k because everyone knows how to program it.
ab
It's the same exact one- I had to rub your noseprints off it when it showed up. :-)
I didn't have a console when I was a kid. Some would say I'm overcompensating now.
I run into kids in stores all the time drooling over stuff they can't get permission or funding to get and tell them that when they grow up they can buy all the games they want. They stop and think about it. If their parents are within earshot, they laugh...
ab