I wish that Apple would have gone with an established app, rather than add another to the ever-growing list of choices.
On the Mac, right now it appears that there's several options: Neo Office (a Mac specific flavor of OO, it appears), the MS Office Suite(s), Abiword, Appleworks, and now Pages. There's probably a lot more than that, but that's what I'm aware of off the top of my head.
Not to mention the lyriad of choices you get if you want to go back in the Macs history (I didn't jump ship till OSX, but there's lots of options available for older versions of Macs, which will still run fine on the shiny new G5's). Oh! And of course if you add X11 into the picture, you also get all of the choices that Linux offers (KOffice, OO, etc.)
I'm all one for choice, but Apple needs a clear winner for it to gain corporate acceptance. Most corporate offices will balk at such statements as Pages imported our Word test files with only minimal changes in page layout (from the review). A lot of users also want an app. that they can work on their documents from work on (whether taking documents into work from home, or from work to home). Since most offices use MS Office (a small but growing number use OO), such statements as "almost perfect import/export" will also sway them to choose MS Office over this.
It's only v1 still, so there's lots of potential for changes down the road. I personally would like them to make Pages native format 100% compatible with either OO or MS Office. then you could take advantage of whatever features Pages offered you, but you'd also be guaranteed that you can continue to work on that document at another PC, much less deliver it to your boss/teacher/what-have-you without having to worry about formatting, compatability, fonts, and so on.
iLife 05 looks very promising (I'm particularly looking forward to Garageband 05), but I'm still a bit confused on why Apple has chosen Pages, and a proprietary format, versus a more open format.
how many people decide to ask Slashdot these tpyes of questions, rather than do any research themselves.
Not that there won't be some good replies to this question, but who do you want controlling your financial decisions? Yourself, based on research, and personal needs/wants, or a bunch of nameless people who really have no incentive to give you accurate and unbiased information?
Again, I'm not saying that there won't be any good responses or anything, but it seems that these "what should I do" questions come up an awful lot, for a geek-based forum, and people tend to take the responses as gospel, rather than verifying the information, or doing any research themselves.
The article yesterday about possibly moving to China, and wondering about censorship was a great one! Where else are you going to easily find out that kind of information from people, but these "what should I buy", and "what's best for me" questions... Go to Google, search previous discussions here, go to pricewatch and do some comparisons, and go to your local CompUSA, or Applestore, and try one yourself.
This site I'm hosting is run by some guys who live in a country, and this countries leaders are constantly spouting off about how people from my country deserve to die.
This presents a clear action to me: Change your countries politics and attitude towards me and my fellow Americans, and we can do business. Otherwise, you're on your own. I refuse to do business with terrorists (when you constantly call for the blood of Americans, you are acting as a terrorist acts, inciting hatred and fear).
Another possible reason is that they just didn't want to deal with the potential of being investigated by Big Bro' for hosting content of "an axis of evil"?
Don't like it? Go to their competitors! It's that simple. They made a decision which they can obviously live with, and it's none of our business why they made it when you get right down to it.
I don't even know why this is on Slashdot. Our country imposes trade embargos all the time. Why, when one business, or individual decides to do what's right, instead of just taking money and turn the other cheek, does this become a headline?
Either way... Their business, and their decision. Move on...
To encode video in real time to the hard drive, you would need a faster machine, and/or a video card with hardware encoding capabilties.
But if you're ripping down video and not encoding it (ie, compressing it), then the machine just has to be able to keep up with, or buffer the stream.
I've been considering a Mini for a possible PVR to replace my aging x86-based PVR, and between researching that, as well as how I could rip HDTV streams down from my digital cable, I discovered that with Macs, it's expremely easy to rip down HDTV if the receiver has a firewire port (which they're all required to have these days, I believe). Basically, you just connect the receiver to your Mac via Firewire, get the neccesary programs, and voila! You're ripping high definition video.
As someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, playback's where you need the CPU horsepower! When ripping the video, your Mac's just basically streaming it straight to the hard drive, so there's little actual work going on, CPU-wise. But playing it back's very CPU intensive.
Interestingly enough, I downloaded a 1080 clip off emule last weekend because I wanted to see what high def video looked like on my 21" monitors. I boosted the resolution up to 1920x1440 so it'd fit, and played the video back on both my PC, and my Mac. Surprisingly, the PC was noticably smoother than the Mac.
For the record, the pc's a 3ghz, w/1gb and an ATI 9600 video card. The Mac's a dual 2ghz. box with 512mb, and the mac version of the 9600.
I'm guessing that 1gb or more of memory in the Mac would bring it up to, if not faster than the speed of the PC. Macs just really need that memory in order to perform it seems.
I don't have any links handy (and I'm getting ready to crash for the night, so I'm extra lazy), but you can find more info fairly easily by going to the macosxhints site.
The EyeTV site also has some good information, and you can search the archives of Slashdot here for additional EyeTV related info.
This isn't a problem for me at the moment, as I don't have a HD-capable TV at the moment, but I'm definately considering whether the Mini is the best PVR for someone with foreseeable HDTV upgrade plans in their future
I'm curious... Were these guys running a pay service (ala, "Pay me money, and you can download my warez"), or was it a public p2p ring?
Sounds like a private/pay system, which is how you get busted. If however, it was a public system, this could be a bad thing for technology as a whole!
I and others have posted about the problems before... There's nothing new here.
OS4's now years behind schedule.
You've been able to buy motherboards for awhile. In fact those that purchased early were promised the OS and a T-Shirt if I recall. As of now, nothing's shipped other than a beta release of the OS for these early adopters. In fact, just the OS4 motherboard and a G3 CPU is more expensive than an entire Mac Mini system, and is inferior in about every way.
Any hype they've managed to build for the new Amiga has long since faded away, as have their missed dealines. Anyone remember the "Amiga Anywhere" promo blitz? Partnerships with Microsoft... Going to put an amiga on every machine, etc. Never happened.
I am a former Amiga user, and was really interested in the new Amiga when it was first announced (3 years ago? Memory's kinda faded, as has the Amigas allure). I've long since wrote them off though...
As I pointed out the other day, the Mac Mini would make an excellent Amiga OS4 box, but Amiga won't license the OS to run on non-Amiga hardware, so you're either stuck paying way too much for an underpowered machine, or you move on to a "real OS", and write off the Amiga as a dead-end, as most of the computing world has already done. Why Amiga, who need as many users as they can get these days, refuse to license their OS for other PPC hardware is beyond me.
Their excuse is to prevent piracy, which was a problem for Amiga in its heyday, but come on... Paranoia is no excuse for a bad business plan. And really, what is there to pirate? I don't see a ton of companies getting ready to shove Amiga warez down our throat. There's probably what? 2 dozen titles at the most currently shipping for Amiga?? That's probably about one title per user when you get right down to it.
In short, I think we'll see a BeOS come-back long before an Amiga come-back.
Sorry, but I subscribe to the "music's in your blood" theory of being a musician. You've gotta have the passion and the drive to get it out, as well as the desire to explore your creativity. At least that's the way I think.
When people pay several thousand dollars to have a computer tell them what kinda of music they should be making, they're no longer musicians in my book. At this point, they become money grubbing attention whores, incapable of original thought or expresion.
While the real musicians are out honing their craft, and improving themselves, these "plastic musicians" are out trying to find a shortcut to easy street via techniques as this.
The only bright spot for real musicians these days is the fact that as the Net and other technologies become more prevelant, there's many more options for the average listener (the one's who think that if it's not on the radio, then it's not real music). In fact I think that the growing success of podcasting, and shoutcasting is a direct result of people finally getting fed up with the crap that radio forces upon us! Once people realize that they too can easily "dial in" something other than the next Jessica Simpson lipsync'd hit, then this industry will slowly die away.
As proof of this, scan Shoutcast sometime, or hook up with some podcast feeds. You'll soon notice that there's hardly any cookie-cutter pop music being played on them.
No offence, but your problem seems to be much more a user issue, than a computer one.
I'm a fairly recent Mac convert (who still works with x86 boxes), but the Mac has done nothing but continue to impress me with both its speed, and with it's depth (Most of the time, if you're still finding new capabilities with an app after 6 months of usage, it's indicative of a poorly designed GUI. With the Mac, there's just so damn many features/capabilities that they're often not evident to the casual user).
The file copying example you refer to could be many things, from software conflicts, to physical issues with the memory. There's just so many variables, it's not really answerable without more details (not that I'm trying to troubleshoot it... Just pointing out that your complaint can be applied just about any PC, dependant upon circumstances.). My guess is that your slow Mac may be running less than the optimal amount of memory (OSX is much more "memory hungy" than any MS OS).
I know that in my case. my Mac often copies small to medium sized files (less than 40mb) so quickly, I'll have to re-verify that the copy actually took place. And this is on a dual 2ghz Mac, with 512mb ram (which really needs to be upped to 2.5gb ASAP - Speed should increase quite a bit just getting it up to 1gb, as right now I've got a lot of disk swappin' going on).
I'm also unsure as to your Mac experience from your posting, but daily use of my Mac continues to improve my efficiency. You seem to be growing more frustrated with your Mac experience (which begs the question of why you're using it - Toss it my way if you'd like, and I'll put it good use!), whereas increased usage continually reassures me that my Mac was money well spent (and believe you me, it took me awhile to finaly take the plunge and buy me a Mac).
It's all been said before, but features which make the Mac great are many: Fast (contrary to your experiences), well thought out GUI and features, it's incredably easy to get to grips with just about any Mac program, and once you're ready, most apps offer a small ton of features which increases their value/longetivity even further.
Then of course, we have its Unix capabilities, Applescript, built in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java, and all the dev tools one could ask for. All capable of system programming.
Then there's those programs which which make the Mac stand out so much over its competition: Delicious Monsters Library, the very impressive Platypus, and of course the "can't do without" Quicksilver.
I won't turn into a gloating "Mac Fanboy" here, but the Mac is a power users dream. Its power and efficiency continues to amaze me. I only hope that the MacMini allows "John Q. Public" to experience the joy that is OSX first-hand.
Of course, that's assuming that Amiga gets over their "Our OS can only be ran on our hardware" mentality.
I've been a vocal critic of Amiga for going this route, ever since it was announced, but here's yet another example of why their plan is dumb: You can now buy a complete PPC machine (sans mouse, keyboard, and monitor) for less than you can buy an Amiga OS 4 board!
Yes... They'd have to get their OS to boot on the machines, but as a growing number of Linux distributions prove, it's not too hard to do.
I think, after seeing this machines price, and the price of the (yet unreleased, other than in alpha/beta form) Amiga board/CPU combo, that there must only be one or two nails left before the Amigas coffin is finally sealed shut.
It gives all of us who have to put up with lousy, uncaring drivers, who are chatting away on their cell phones, a little pleasure in knowing that eventually there may be fewer selfish, uncaring drivers on cell phones.
Seriously, what is up with the cell phone craze anyway? It's almost like people are scared to be alone with their thoughts anymore.
You all know the types... As soon as they're outside a building, their cell phone's in their hand. You see them talking in cars as they swerve in and out of lanes. You see them talking in the movie theaters, in line at the store...
It's almost like people have to validate their existence now through talking on the phone. It
s sad really... And very annoying to many of us who have to put up with the selfish behavior of the average cell phone addict.
And as far as the kids go... Drudge has a link to an article on this subject, and the article is accompanied by a child talking on a cell phone with a Winnie the Pooh cover.
If studies such as these are accurate, cell phone manufacturers should have the same kind of accountability as cigarette manufacturers did, with regards to targeting kids.
In fact, I'm almost surprised we haven't seen Joe Camel brought back to hawk brightly colored, kid-oriented phones.
I've had a Windows-based PVR for a couple of years now, and while I'd love to check out MythTV, I'm unable due to them not supporting any of the ATI All-In-Wonder cards. I run an ATI 8500DV for my PVR currently.
I'm a big Linux supporter, but it is frustrating that there's still problems with drivers for popular hardware, as the lack of AIW support illustrates. Blame's really pointless at this point also. The hardware companies are losing potential sales by not (fully) supporting Linux yet, much less porting drivers, and/or releasing specs for older product, and Linux is losing potential users due to pre-existing hardware setups.
I'm surprised hardware support hasn't kicked in more than it has yet, really... The AIW's have been around, in version or another, for quite some time now, and evidently the entire line's not supported yet. Things are starting to get better, but the 8500's been out a long time now. At the rate driver progress is advancing, I have a better chance of running a BeOS clone before using my 8500DV with MythTV. 8(
I actually considered purchasing a Hauppage 350 when my PVR box went down last month (lost a drive), but it's easier to justify spending much less on the ultra-cool MediaMVP and sticking with Windows than buying a rather expensing dedicated mpeg encoder just to try out some of the Linux solutions. With the MediaMVP, I can relocate my PVR box entirly out of the living room, and dedicate a headless box to recording, and playback somewhere. The biggest (and only) drawback I can come up with doing this is not being able to have Mame and other games on my PVR box. Perhaps with bluetooth control's though, one could even achieve that with the MVP.
For that matter, I'm seriously considering spending a little more down the road, and getting a completely silent, PPC-based box, with HD capabilities. My only concern is how the DRM will impact this when the FCC's broadcast biut kicks in this summer.
Then they'll here me cursing out the fact that their company sucks, as I sit on hold waiting for their attempt at customer service!
Seriously, I worked in a call center... Some calls are listened to by internal (and sometimes external) Q(uality) A(ssurance) staff. If most call centers are like ours (and I may be biased, but I think most are worse than we were), very few calls are listened too, when compared to the total # of calls taken.
There's simply far more calls than staff. Think about it... If you have 500 people taking calls all day, then you would need 250 people listening to calls all day, just to catch half of them.
Add to this the time needed to re-listen to certain parts, the time needed to grade the calls, outline pro's and cons, and then the time to actually meet with the phone rep to discuss their performance....
It just ain't going to happen. I would say 2% of all calls are listened to, at a maximum. The real # is probably far fewer. And of those listening, most will skip through hold times to again get back to the "meat" of the call (the customer/rep interaction).
I always thought it would be way fun to be able to insert a downloadable sim, who would act as somewhat of a virus, and murder other sims.
My GF's hooked on the Sims (and now Sim2), and even she thought it'd be kinda neat to download an innocent looking Sim, only to have them turn out to be a serial killer who begins killing off your other Sims at some point in time. Sort of a simulated "whodunnit" murder mystery.
If not supporting Micro$oft and increasing their stranglehold on development and innovation makes us communists, what does it make those who support Micro$soft's dictatorship?
I think there's a name for those who consolidate power under themselves, and who keep the citizens in place through threats and violence (or in MS's case, through threats and lawsuits). Can you say "Totalitarianism"?
I agree with others sentiments... Gates seems to be as out of the loop on what consumers want out of their PC's, as Bush, who is totally out of the loop as far as how his actions make him and the USA appear to others.
I think ol' Billy Gates needs to get back to his roots and fast! MS's recent blatherings about IE not needing any updates until 2006/2007, as well as their Longhorn/Roadmap fiasco clearly show that they're no longer the leaders they once were. Instead, they're now riding the ever-decreasing wave of profit that their past performance has provided them with. Eventually this wave will die out (it'd last longer if they gave up on their XBox aspirations!), and then we'll see how Micro$oft can handle 21st century computing.
After Tiger comes out, and Apple rolls out their $500 computer (if rumors are true), there'll (hopefully/expectantly) be an ever increasing flow of fed up Windows users migrating to Linux and OSX. Firefox has proven that non-MS software is a good thing to the unwashed masses, and they're now starting to reconsider that Windows investment. Hopefully by the time Longhorn hits the streets, the business world will be waking up to cheaper, more reliable options as well (beyond just using Linux on their servers).
Dunno 'bout you, but I'm going to start stockin' up on canned food and shotgun shells.
Law & Order episode comes to mind
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Robots in Medicine
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Anyone remember the episode wherein a teenage hacker hacks into a medial facility and changes their medical software so that people are given overdoses of insulin?
In the episode, the hacker was a teenager who was under the impression that the medical facility had blinded his father, and made the changes as a form of revenge.
In the real life version, I'm going to guess that we'll have people threatening to do something similar unless they're paid off.
Not that I'm against such changes. I just lost my Grandmother to a similar situation (someone gave her the wrong medicine as near as we can tell at this point), so any technology that can eliminate such errors, or help to reduce them, is welcomed by me and my family. I just think the Law & Order episode illustrates that no automated system's 100% foolproof. We still have to protect them from the script kiddies and such, but this is a huge step towards eliminating human errors, at least.
Whenever I hear of stuff like this these days, I have to wonder whether ideas such as these are still feasible with todays "There's a terrorist behind every door" mentality. Certainly these projects are possible, but who's going to fund, let alone protect such things to the point where it becomes the standard, vs. some niche technology?
Large, seemingly hard-to-protect items such as these would have "terrorist target" written all over it.
Back in the early nineties, there was talk about providing broadband via a series of unmanned drones which would circle above . Can you imagine such a plan now? People would be worried, and arguably justified in thinking that terrorists would be trying to sabotage them, bringing them down upon the homes below. It's weird that this was a serious idea not too long ago. It really illustrates how the world has changed since 9/11.
It also makes me wonder about the likelihood of technologies such as the legendary "Space Elevator" idea. It sounds great in theory, but how do you protect such visible targets from some Osama and the other fags?
And if you're on the "The terrorists are more the work of big media and politicians, than they are reality" side of the fence, I'm sure that you can envision the years of delays and bickering which would probably kill such a project as this before it gets off the ground. Much less the funding that would be neccesary (paltry when compared to say... a war around the globe, but awfully hard to push through as easily), and the patent suits which would follow.
I'm not trying to be a pessimist here, but I think the world will have to change a lot from it's current state before projects such as these are feasible. Projects such as this won't be a possibility until the world can learn to trust one another again and work (he cringes as he types the hated words) as a team. Right now meaningful (and neccesary!) reseach and projects are being stifled by distrust, politics, fear, and money.
what are you going to block? 1060nm infrared lasers? green lasers? red? block everything available and you blind the pilots as effectivly as poking their eyes out.
Ok... Makes sense.
So how about this: Little cameras mounted on a set of goggles/glasses, which feed their output back into the inside of the goggles.
This would effectively bypass any damage from a laser, since the laser would just appear as a light, in the "projected" video.
It'd be similar to a set of VR goggles, but instead of computer generated objects, the user would just see the cameras image as if he/she weren't wearing the goggles. With wrap arround-style of goggles, you could probably even simulate periphreal (sp?) vision as well.
Ok.. It's just an idea, but it seems that something like this should be fairly do-able with todays technology.
I really don't understand why people take the time to diseminate what's being pushed in Spam emails...
It's still Spam.
It's still annoying as hell
It's still as prolific as ever
And it's still (arguably) illegal and unwanted.
And really, wouldn't it be a much nicer world if peoples efforts were aimed at locating and physically beating the spammers instead of opening each of their emails and analyzing it's content? 8)=
"...which claim that the good old US accounts for almost 42% of spam mails sent out this year, and they chalk it up to lack of security on most desktop computers."
So is this saying that there's a larger percentage of users in the USA than elsewhere, thus we are responsible for more unprotected PC's, just based on having more users?
Or is it saying that American users tend to be ignorant on security, and PC-education, as opposed to the rest of the world?
Intel screwed itself out of a market, clear and simple.
When AMD began offering cheaper, but equally capable CPU's (Thunderbirds, Celerons), Intel chuckled about how they ran much hotter than their Intel counterparts. All the while AMD was eating up the low-end PC market.
When AMD began telling the world about their 64-bit plans, Intel chuckled about how the world wasn't ready for 64-bit. Additionally, they pushed their way-overpriced 32-bit Xeon's whenever anyone brought up 64-bit server CPU's.
When AMD began talking Opterons, Intel talked about their outrageously overpriced, and seldom utilized Itanium technology.
And when 64-bit AMD chips began to outsell Intel chips, Intel dragged their feet on adding 64bit extensions to their own chips.
Intels attitude seemed to be one that dooms nations, individuals, and companies: They were too arrogant and complacent!
They knew that they were the CPU kings of the world. They knew that the same company that had stolen the low-end PC market could never threaten their corporate market. They knew that 64bit CPU's were not needed yet, and they knew that they could basically put out what they want, when they wanted to, and that people would beat a path to their door, simply for the Intel brand name.
And now they know they were wrong.
Face it... Nations fall when they ignore the barbarians at the gate. People fall when they think they're more important than they are, and companies fall when they ignore the competition, and their target markets needs.
Intel wasn't developing what people wanted, they were developing what they thought people needed. There's a huge difference there. When creating art, you can do things your way. When manufacturing product, you do so to create what the market wants. Intel got it backwards, and their current state shows what happens when you do: Roadmaps tore up, lackluster sales, and a company that's now trying to re-invent itself, just to stay competitive in a market that it once owned.
Intel screwed up! It is the 21st century's IBM in a way, and as IBM had to do in its day, Intel must now change in order to stay alive in this industry it created.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish that Apple would have gone with an established app, rather than add another to the ever-growing list of choices.
On the Mac, right now it appears that there's several options: Neo Office (a Mac specific flavor of OO, it appears), the MS Office Suite(s), Abiword, Appleworks, and now Pages. There's probably a lot more than that, but that's what I'm aware of off the top of my head.
Not to mention the lyriad of choices you get if you want to go back in the Macs history (I didn't jump ship till OSX, but there's lots of options available for older versions of Macs, which will still run fine on the shiny new G5's). Oh! And of course if you add X11 into the picture, you also get all of the choices that Linux offers (KOffice, OO, etc.)
I'm all one for choice, but Apple needs a clear winner for it to gain corporate acceptance. Most corporate offices will balk at such statements as Pages imported our Word test files with only minimal changes in page layout (from the review). A lot of users also want an app. that they can work on their documents from work on (whether taking documents into work from home, or from work to home). Since most offices use MS Office (a small but growing number use OO), such statements as "almost perfect import/export" will also sway them to choose MS Office over this.
It's only v1 still, so there's lots of potential for changes down the road. I personally would like them to make Pages native format 100% compatible with either OO or MS Office. then you could take advantage of whatever features Pages offered you, but you'd also be guaranteed that you can continue to work on that document at another PC, much less deliver it to your boss/teacher/what-have-you without having to worry about formatting, compatability, fonts, and so on.
iLife 05 looks very promising (I'm particularly looking forward to Garageband 05), but I'm still a bit confused on why Apple has chosen Pages, and a proprietary format, versus a more open format.
how many people decide to ask Slashdot these tpyes of questions, rather than do any research themselves.
Not that there won't be some good replies to this question, but who do you want controlling your financial decisions? Yourself, based on research, and personal needs/wants, or a bunch of nameless people who really have no incentive to give you accurate and unbiased information?
Again, I'm not saying that there won't be any good responses or anything, but it seems that these "what should I do" questions come up an awful lot, for a geek-based forum, and people tend to take the responses as gospel, rather than verifying the information, or doing any research themselves.
The article yesterday about possibly moving to China, and wondering about censorship was a great one! Where else are you going to easily find out that kind of information from people, but these "what should I buy", and "what's best for me" questions... Go to Google, search previous discussions here, go to pricewatch and do some comparisons, and go to your local CompUSA, or Applestore, and try one yourself.
Only you can determine what's best for you.
Lessee... I'm an American, hosting a site.
This site I'm hosting is run by some guys who live in a country, and this countries leaders are constantly spouting off about how people from my country deserve to die.
This presents a clear action to me: Change your countries politics and attitude towards me and my fellow Americans, and we can do business. Otherwise, you're on your own. I refuse to do business with terrorists (when you constantly call for the blood of Americans, you are acting as a terrorist acts, inciting hatred and fear).
Another possible reason is that they just didn't want to deal with the potential of being investigated by Big Bro' for hosting content of "an axis of evil"?
Don't like it? Go to their competitors! It's that simple. They made a decision which they can obviously live with, and it's none of our business why they made it when you get right down to it.
I don't even know why this is on Slashdot. Our country imposes trade embargos all the time. Why, when one business, or individual decides to do what's right, instead of just taking money and turn the other cheek, does this become a headline?
Either way... Their business, and their decision. Move on...
It depends...
To encode video in real time to the hard drive, you would need a faster machine, and/or a video card with hardware encoding capabilties.
But if you're ripping down video and not encoding it (ie, compressing it), then the machine just has to be able to keep up with, or buffer the stream.
I've been considering a Mini for a possible PVR to replace my aging x86-based PVR, and between researching that, as well as how I could rip HDTV streams down from my digital cable, I discovered that with Macs, it's expremely easy to rip down HDTV if the receiver has a firewire port (which they're all required to have these days, I believe). Basically, you just connect the receiver to your Mac via Firewire, get the neccesary programs, and voila! You're ripping high definition video.
As someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, playback's where you need the CPU horsepower! When ripping the video, your Mac's just basically streaming it straight to the hard drive, so there's little actual work going on, CPU-wise. But playing it back's very CPU intensive.
Interestingly enough, I downloaded a 1080 clip off emule last weekend because I wanted to see what high def video looked like on my 21" monitors. I boosted the resolution up to 1920x1440 so it'd fit, and played the video back on both my PC, and my Mac. Surprisingly, the PC was noticably smoother than the Mac.
For the record, the pc's a 3ghz, w/1gb and an ATI 9600 video card. The Mac's a dual 2ghz. box with 512mb, and the mac version of the 9600.
I'm guessing that 1gb or more of memory in the Mac would bring it up to, if not faster than the speed of the PC. Macs just really need that memory in order to perform it seems.
I don't have any links handy (and I'm getting ready to crash for the night, so I'm extra lazy), but you can find more info fairly easily by going to the macosxhints site.
The EyeTV site also has some good information, and you can search the archives of Slashdot here for additional EyeTV related info.
This isn't a problem for me at the moment, as I don't have a HD-capable TV at the moment, but I'm definately considering whether the Mini is the best PVR for someone with foreseeable HDTV upgrade plans in their future
I'm curious... Were these guys running a pay service (ala, "Pay me money, and you can download my warez"), or was it a public p2p ring?
Sounds like a private/pay system, which is how you get busted. If however, it was a public system, this could be a bad thing for technology as a whole!
I and others have posted about the problems before... There's nothing new here.
OS4's now years behind schedule.
You've been able to buy motherboards for awhile. In fact those that purchased early were promised the OS and a T-Shirt if I recall. As of now, nothing's shipped other than a beta release of the OS for these early adopters. In fact, just the OS4 motherboard and a G3 CPU is more expensive than an entire Mac Mini system, and is inferior in about every way.
Any hype they've managed to build for the new Amiga has long since faded away, as have their missed dealines. Anyone remember the "Amiga Anywhere" promo blitz? Partnerships with Microsoft... Going to put an amiga on every machine, etc. Never happened.
I am a former Amiga user, and was really interested in the new Amiga when it was first announced (3 years ago? Memory's kinda faded, as has the Amigas allure). I've long since wrote them off though...
As I pointed out the other day, the Mac Mini would make an excellent Amiga OS4 box, but Amiga won't license the OS to run on non-Amiga hardware, so you're either stuck paying way too much for an underpowered machine, or you move on to a "real OS", and write off the Amiga as a dead-end, as most of the computing world has already done. Why Amiga, who need as many users as they can get these days, refuse to license their OS for other PPC hardware is beyond me.
Their excuse is to prevent piracy, which was a problem for Amiga in its heyday, but come on... Paranoia is no excuse for a bad business plan. And really, what is there to pirate? I don't see a ton of companies getting ready to shove Amiga warez down our throat. There's probably what? 2 dozen titles at the most currently shipping for Amiga?? That's probably about one title per user when you get right down to it.
In short, I think we'll see a BeOS come-back long before an Amiga come-back.
Sorry, but I subscribe to the "music's in your blood" theory of being a musician. You've gotta have the passion and the drive to get it out, as well as the desire to explore your creativity. At least that's the way I think.
When people pay several thousand dollars to have a computer tell them what kinda of music they should be making, they're no longer musicians in my book. At this point, they become money grubbing attention whores, incapable of original thought or expresion.
While the real musicians are out honing their craft, and improving themselves, these "plastic musicians" are out trying to find a shortcut to easy street via techniques as this.
The only bright spot for real musicians these days is the fact that as the Net and other technologies become more prevelant, there's many more options for the average listener (the one's who think that if it's not on the radio, then it's not real music). In fact I think that the growing success of podcasting, and shoutcasting is a direct result of people finally getting fed up with the crap that radio forces upon us! Once people realize that they too can easily "dial in" something other than the next Jessica Simpson lipsync'd hit, then this industry will slowly die away.
As proof of this, scan Shoutcast sometime, or hook up with some podcast feeds. You'll soon notice that there's hardly any cookie-cutter pop music being played on them.
No offence, but your problem seems to be much more a user issue, than a computer one.
I'm a fairly recent Mac convert (who still works with x86 boxes), but the Mac has done nothing but continue to impress me with both its speed, and with it's depth (Most of the time, if you're still finding new capabilities with an app after 6 months of usage, it's indicative of a poorly designed GUI. With the Mac, there's just so damn many features/capabilities that they're often not evident to the casual user).
The file copying example you refer to could be many things, from software conflicts, to physical issues with the memory. There's just so many variables, it's not really answerable without more details (not that I'm trying to troubleshoot it... Just pointing out that your complaint can be applied just about any PC, dependant upon circumstances.). My guess is that your slow Mac may be running less than the optimal amount of memory (OSX is much more "memory hungy" than any MS OS).
I know that in my case. my Mac often copies small to medium sized files (less than 40mb) so quickly, I'll have to re-verify that the copy actually took place. And this is on a dual 2ghz Mac, with 512mb ram (which really needs to be upped to 2.5gb ASAP - Speed should increase quite a bit just getting it up to 1gb, as right now I've got a lot of disk swappin' going on).
I'm also unsure as to your Mac experience from your posting, but daily use of my Mac continues to improve my efficiency. You seem to be growing more frustrated with your Mac experience (which begs the question of why you're using it - Toss it my way if you'd like, and I'll put it good use!), whereas increased usage continually reassures me that my Mac was money well spent (and believe you me, it took me awhile to finaly take the plunge and buy me a Mac).
It's all been said before, but features which make the Mac great are many: Fast (contrary to your experiences), well thought out GUI and features, it's incredably easy to get to grips with just about any Mac program, and once you're ready, most apps offer a small ton of features which increases their value/longetivity even further.
Then of course, we have its Unix capabilities, Applescript, built in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java, and all the dev tools one could ask for. All capable of system programming.
Then there's those programs which which make the Mac stand out so much over its competition: Delicious Monsters Library, the very impressive Platypus, and of course the "can't do without" Quicksilver.
I won't turn into a gloating "Mac Fanboy" here, but the Mac is a power users dream. Its power and efficiency continues to amaze me. I only hope that the MacMini allows "John Q. Public" to experience the joy that is OSX first-hand.
Of course, that's assuming that Amiga gets over their "Our OS can only be ran on our hardware" mentality.
I've been a vocal critic of Amiga for going this route, ever since it was announced, but here's yet another example of why their plan is dumb: You can now buy a complete PPC machine (sans mouse, keyboard, and monitor) for less than you can buy an Amiga OS 4 board!
Yes... They'd have to get their OS to boot on the machines, but as a growing number of Linux distributions prove, it's not too hard to do.
I think, after seeing this machines price, and the price of the (yet unreleased, other than in alpha/beta form) Amiga board/CPU combo, that there must only be one or two nails left before the Amigas coffin is finally sealed shut.
It gives all of us who have to put up with lousy, uncaring drivers, who are chatting away on their cell phones, a little pleasure in knowing that eventually there may be fewer selfish, uncaring drivers on cell phones.
Seriously, what is up with the cell phone craze anyway? It's almost like people are scared to be alone with their thoughts anymore.
You all know the types... As soon as they're outside a building, their cell phone's in their hand. You see them talking in cars as they swerve in and out of lanes. You see them talking in the movie theaters, in line at the store...
It's almost like people have to validate their existence now through talking on the phone. It s sad really... And very annoying to many of us who have to put up with the selfish behavior of the average cell phone addict.
And as far as the kids go... Drudge has a link to an article on this subject, and the article is accompanied by a child talking on a cell phone with a Winnie the Pooh cover.
If studies such as these are accurate, cell phone manufacturers should have the same kind of accountability as cigarette manufacturers did, with regards to targeting kids.
In fact, I'm almost surprised we haven't seen Joe Camel brought back to hawk brightly colored, kid-oriented phones.
I've had a Windows-based PVR for a couple of years now, and while I'd love to check out MythTV, I'm unable due to them not supporting any of the ATI All-In-Wonder cards. I run an ATI 8500DV for my PVR currently.
I'm a big Linux supporter, but it is frustrating that there's still problems with drivers for popular hardware, as the lack of AIW support illustrates. Blame's really pointless at this point also. The hardware companies are losing potential sales by not (fully) supporting Linux yet, much less porting drivers, and/or releasing specs for older product, and Linux is losing potential users due to pre-existing hardware setups.
I'm surprised hardware support hasn't kicked in more than it has yet, really... The AIW's have been around, in version or another, for quite some time now, and evidently the entire line's not supported yet. Things are starting to get better, but the 8500's been out a long time now. At the rate driver progress is advancing, I have a better chance of running a BeOS clone before using my 8500DV with MythTV. 8(
I actually considered purchasing a Hauppage 350 when my PVR box went down last month (lost a drive), but it's easier to justify spending much less on the ultra-cool MediaMVP and sticking with Windows than buying a rather expensing dedicated mpeg encoder just to try out some of the Linux solutions. With the MediaMVP, I can relocate my PVR box entirly out of the living room, and dedicate a headless box to recording, and playback somewhere. The biggest (and only) drawback I can come up with doing this is not being able to have Mame and other games on my PVR box. Perhaps with bluetooth control's though, one could even achieve that with the MVP.
For that matter, I'm seriously considering spending a little more down the road, and getting a completely silent, PPC-based box, with HD capabilities. My only concern is how the DRM will impact this when the FCC's broadcast biut kicks in this summer.
Then they'll here me cursing out the fact that their company sucks, as I sit on hold waiting for their attempt at customer service!
Seriously, I worked in a call center... Some calls are listened to by internal (and sometimes external) Q(uality) A(ssurance) staff. If most call centers are like ours (and I may be biased, but I think most are worse than we were), very few calls are listened too, when compared to the total # of calls taken.
There's simply far more calls than staff. Think about it... If you have 500 people taking calls all day, then you would need 250 people listening to calls all day, just to catch half of them.
Add to this the time needed to re-listen to certain parts, the time needed to grade the calls, outline pro's and cons, and then the time to actually meet with the phone rep to discuss their performance....
It just ain't going to happen. I would say 2% of all calls are listened to, at a maximum. The real # is probably far fewer. And of those listening, most will skip through hold times to again get back to the "meat" of the call (the customer/rep interaction).
I always thought it would be way fun to be able to insert a downloadable sim, who would act as somewhat of a virus, and murder other sims.
My GF's hooked on the Sims (and now Sim2), and even she thought it'd be kinda neat to download an innocent looking Sim, only to have them turn out to be a serial killer who begins killing off your other Sims at some point in time. Sort of a simulated "whodunnit" murder mystery.
If not supporting Micro$oft and increasing their stranglehold on development and innovation makes us communists, what does it make those who support Micro$soft's dictatorship?
I think there's a name for those who consolidate power under themselves, and who keep the citizens in place through threats and violence (or in MS's case, through threats and lawsuits). Can you say "Totalitarianism"?
I agree with others sentiments... Gates seems to be as out of the loop on what consumers want out of their PC's, as Bush, who is totally out of the loop as far as how his actions make him and the USA appear to others.
I think ol' Billy Gates needs to get back to his roots and fast! MS's recent blatherings about IE not needing any updates until 2006/2007, as well as their Longhorn/Roadmap fiasco clearly show that they're no longer the leaders they once were. Instead, they're now riding the ever-decreasing wave of profit that their past performance has provided them with. Eventually this wave will die out (it'd last longer if they gave up on their XBox aspirations!), and then we'll see how Micro$oft can handle 21st century computing.
After Tiger comes out, and Apple rolls out their $500 computer (if rumors are true), there'll (hopefully/expectantly) be an ever increasing flow of fed up Windows users migrating to Linux and OSX. Firefox has proven that non-MS software is a good thing to the unwashed masses, and they're now starting to reconsider that Windows investment. Hopefully by the time Longhorn hits the streets, the business world will be waking up to cheaper, more reliable options as well (beyond just using Linux on their servers).
We've got Bush getting re-elected (and nutcases putting up webpages about it), biblical-sized disasters occuring, and now someone made a sensible decision in a case involving the RIAA???
Dunno 'bout you, but I'm going to start stockin' up on canned food and shotgun shells.
Anyone remember the episode wherein a teenage hacker hacks into a medial facility and changes their medical software so that people are given overdoses of insulin?
In the episode, the hacker was a teenager who was under the impression that the medical facility had blinded his father, and made the changes as a form of revenge.
In the real life version, I'm going to guess that we'll have people threatening to do something similar unless they're paid off.
Not that I'm against such changes. I just lost my Grandmother to a similar situation (someone gave her the wrong medicine as near as we can tell at this point), so any technology that can eliminate such errors, or help to reduce them, is welcomed by me and my family. I just think the Law & Order episode illustrates that no automated system's 100% foolproof. We still have to protect them from the script kiddies and such, but this is a huge step towards eliminating human errors, at least.
Whenever I hear of stuff like this these days, I have to wonder whether ideas such as these are still feasible with todays "There's a terrorist behind every door" mentality. Certainly these projects are possible, but who's going to fund, let alone protect such things to the point where it becomes the standard, vs. some niche technology?
Large, seemingly hard-to-protect items such as these would have "terrorist target" written all over it.
Back in the early nineties, there was talk about providing broadband via a series of unmanned drones which would circle above . Can you imagine such a plan now? People would be worried, and arguably justified in thinking that terrorists would be trying to sabotage them, bringing them down upon the homes below. It's weird that this was a serious idea not too long ago. It really illustrates how the world has changed since 9/11.
It also makes me wonder about the likelihood of technologies such as the legendary "Space Elevator" idea. It sounds great in theory, but how do you protect such visible targets from some Osama and the other fags?
And if you're on the "The terrorists are more the work of big media and politicians, than they are reality" side of the fence, I'm sure that you can envision the years of delays and bickering which would probably kill such a project as this before it gets off the ground. Much less the funding that would be neccesary (paltry when compared to say... a war around the globe, but awfully hard to push through as easily), and the patent suits which would follow.
I'm not trying to be a pessimist here, but I think the world will have to change a lot from it's current state before projects such as these are feasible. Projects such as this won't be a possibility until the world can learn to trust one another again and work (he cringes as he types the hated words) as a team. Right now meaningful (and neccesary!) reseach and projects are being stifled by distrust, politics, fear, and money.
what are you going to block? 1060nm infrared lasers? green lasers? red? block everything available and you blind the pilots as effectivly as poking their eyes out.
Ok... Makes sense.
So how about this: Little cameras mounted on a set of goggles/glasses, which feed their output back into the inside of the goggles.
This would effectively bypass any damage from a laser, since the laser would just appear as a light, in the "projected" video.
It'd be similar to a set of VR goggles, but instead of computer generated objects, the user would just see the cameras image as if he/she weren't wearing the goggles. With wrap arround-style of goggles, you could probably even simulate periphreal (sp?) vision as well.
Ok.. It's just an idea, but it seems that something like this should be fairly do-able with todays technology.
use a laser-reflective material for the cockpits?
This has been a growing problem recently (this isn't the first time it's happened), so I would hope that someone's already working on such a concept.
If not for the cockpit glass, then a pair of laser-protected goggles for the pilots?
I really don't understand why people take the time to diseminate what's being pushed in Spam emails...
It's still Spam.
It's still annoying as hell
It's still as prolific as ever
And it's still (arguably) illegal and unwanted.
And really, wouldn't it be a much nicer world if peoples efforts were aimed at locating and physically beating the spammers instead of opening each of their emails and analyzing it's content? 8)=
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
But you seem to need instructions on how to post messages related to the topic at hand. I mean... Dude, what are you on?
You can't just open and close your posts with a relevant phrase, and fill the middle of your msg. with non-related helpdesk questions....
Get a clue, and post your questions on a relevant site, or thread.
It's not like we read the stories...
Just look at the comments people leave. It's pretty obvious that the average Slashdotters attention span is about that of a -Oh look a bunny!
It's called "OS X".
I find this quote particularly interesting:
"...which claim that the good old US accounts for almost 42% of spam mails sent out this year, and they chalk it up to lack of security on most desktop computers."
So is this saying that there's a larger percentage of users in the USA than elsewhere, thus we are responsible for more unprotected PC's, just based on having more users?
Or is it saying that American users tend to be ignorant on security, and PC-education, as opposed to the rest of the world?
Intel screwed itself out of a market, clear and simple.
When AMD began offering cheaper, but equally capable CPU's (Thunderbirds, Celerons), Intel chuckled about how they ran much hotter than their Intel counterparts. All the while AMD was eating up the low-end PC market.
When AMD began telling the world about their 64-bit plans, Intel chuckled about how the world wasn't ready for 64-bit. Additionally, they pushed their way-overpriced 32-bit Xeon's whenever anyone brought up 64-bit server CPU's.
When AMD began talking Opterons, Intel talked about their outrageously overpriced, and seldom utilized Itanium technology.
And when 64-bit AMD chips began to outsell Intel chips, Intel dragged their feet on adding 64bit extensions to their own chips.
Intels attitude seemed to be one that dooms nations, individuals, and companies: They were too arrogant and complacent!
They knew that they were the CPU kings of the world. They knew that the same company that had stolen the low-end PC market could never threaten their corporate market. They knew that 64bit CPU's were not needed yet, and they knew that they could basically put out what they want, when they wanted to, and that people would beat a path to their door, simply for the Intel brand name.
And now they know they were wrong.
Face it... Nations fall when they ignore the barbarians at the gate. People fall when they think they're more important than they are, and companies fall when they ignore the competition, and their target markets needs.
Intel wasn't developing what people wanted, they were developing what they thought people needed. There's a huge difference there. When creating art, you can do things your way. When manufacturing product, you do so to create what the market wants. Intel got it backwards, and their current state shows what happens when you do: Roadmaps tore up, lackluster sales, and a company that's now trying to re-invent itself, just to stay competitive in a market that it once owned.
Intel screwed up! It is the 21st century's IBM in a way, and as IBM had to do in its day, Intel must now change in order to stay alive in this industry it created.