SGI can still be used with Pixar's Renderman software. The artist tools at least. The server portion of the software only runs on Linux, Mac and Windows although no one would really run it on the last of those three..
We're a 100% Apple shop running Final Cut Pro 4 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5 and I assure you we need that power.
We upgraded from a DP 450 G4 box (which was no slouch itself) to a DP 2.0GHz G5 recently and we've more than quadrupled our productivity when it comes to big renders, mpeg2 encodes and multiplexing.
I don't know of anyone in our business using x86 for video editing. None seriously anyway.
I know a couple of shops who use x86 boxes as cheap horsepower in render farms - but ultimately controlled by a Mac at the nose end.
We use our DP G4 as a Quake III server for company LAN matches when it's not encoding mpeg2 on a job. I know Q3A isn't exactly a taxing game on today's graphics cards (none of our client machines even break sweat) but you can't beat it for gameplay.
They didn't plan for an 18 month replacement cycle - you're taking an extreme and calling it the norm. Sure, some people's iPods have died in 18 months, some in 18 days. Some are still going after 3 years or more.
The same is true of any manufactured product.
The design of the iPod from the outset was a sealed unit with no doors or latches, even for the battery. You think it's a bad design, Apple thinks it's good. I'm personally on the fence about it (and proprietary batteries in general).
I would imagine that far more iPods would be broken if it had a door/latch/hinge on the back so you could remove the battery and it wouldn't look as good, and it would have to be slightly bigger and less sleek. Image does matter to a lot of people.
I think the point is that sometimes you do get a bad Apple in the batch (heh, no pun intended) but that's no reason to call the whole design flawed. I think Apple were tardy in the release of a battery replacement service for a device that has a non-servicable one, but that has been corrected now.
Apple isn't perfect, but it tries hard to create good products that people will enjoy using.
The biggest gripe I have with them is the design of their laptop power brick - specifically where the thin DC lead comes out of the brick; it's a weak point in the design and breaks easily. I used my friend's power brick to charge my iBook yesterday and I see they've added a cable boot there for extra strength - probably in response to customer feedback and complaints (new power bricks are 70). Their 'saucer' power supplies for the clamshell iBook's had a similar problem, so it took them a few revisions to get it right.
Except that the "Apple cable" doesn't work at all - because Apple don't make RCA to 3.5mm cables, hence did not set the price of whatever it was you saw in the shop.
The iPod does have a micro-contolled charging system - all devices that use Lithium Ion batteries do. The iPod will stop charging the battery when it is full ans switch to maintenence charge.
The damage comes from frequent short cycles since the battery itself is limited to a limited number of charge cycles (not imposed on you by some counter that ticks down, due to the way the battery works). The battery can also be conditioned into a lower capacity state with frequent short cycles, so the pmu thinks the battery is full when it isn't.
The days of non-intelligent chargers are long gone.
I saw the full 6 or 7 minute video that the clips from the trailers were taken from and it's very good indeed.
It goes from the launch, including that Ron Howard-esque impossible Apollo 13 helicopter shot, to the journey, entry in Martian atmosphere, landing, rover deployment and then shows it wandering around sampling rocks and soil.
The video was given to the school I was working in by someone from Nasa who gave a presentation about the MER missions. He also showed a great false colour map of the potential landing area showing land heights - it looks like an ocean shore with a mountain range and rivers, more evidence to support the idea that Mars once had liquid water (or some fluid) on the surface with active precipitation.
I think the problem will stem when Sharman networks changes the protocol slightly for "security" or "usability enhancement" to shut out the K++ client, much like the IM providers do to keep all the decent 3rd party clients guessing.
No doubt it will be reverse engineered again, but it will be harder to distribute and publicise that fix without a central website. It will still get out though - word of mouth will spread it.
I think I'll stick to the iTMS (well, when it's finally available for the UK).
The train companies are not entirely to blame for those accidents.
If you want someone to blame, pick the Conservative government of the time that sold off the railway network to the highest bidder at a massively undervalued price.
So began the culture of profits before safety that dogged Railtrack. Enormous profits earned from buying the network at such a low price and then selling shares should have been sunk back into improving the railways. Of course, as expected, they gave it all away to shareholders and executives as dividends.
They cut maintenance, farmed out lucrative service contracts that put the emphasis on "keep it working, dont bother improving" and not spending any money on safety systems that could have prevented the accidents you listed above (things like ATC and other systems) because they were "too expensive".
Railtrack and the Tory government are the reason people have died in preventable crashes. I'm not saying the rail operators (Midland Mainline, GNER, Virgin etc) are blameless. but it's not all their fault by a long shot.
NiMH batteries don't respond as well to partial charges and incompete charge cycles.
The typical usage of an iPod would suggest that its battery would often begin charging when not cmpletely flat, and disconnected before it's full, especially if you connect it to the firewire bus frequently for song updates and so on rather than connecting it to the power brick and leaving it to charge up fully on its own.
Sure you could leave it charging on the firewire bus, but what if you want to shut your computer off or (like a friend of mine) assume that the iPod will charge when the Mac is asleep.
OS X has been using prebinding since the invention of the wheel. It was manually initiated in 10.1, automatic in 10.2 (when you installed new apps or system updates) and it seems to be even more automatic in 10.3 - it checks when you open an app to see if it can update the prebindings to make it launch faster next time.
It just stops MM from connecting to the iPod - you can still use MM if you want, or reinstall it to restore the iPod connectiveity (which then breaks the connection with iTunes but you can't have it both ways).
Also, iTunes warns you that this will happen at the install.
It's a far cry from deleting software without asking you.
Much like the original cut of Bladerunner with the narration by Harrison Ford dubbed on and that horrible, horrible ending - both forced on Ridley Scott by the studo because they thought audiences wpuldn't "get" the story, and that they wouldn't like it if it didn't have a happy ending.
Scott's director's cut, released later, is the film as he intended it and it's much better.
I'm not surprised in the least - the voltage and current supplied by the firewire bus are completely different from that of the USB bus (can the usb bus provide enough power to drive a hard disk or disk drive?)
The USB bus can provide 5v at 500mA - that's 2.5 watts. The iPod states it is rated for "8-30v, max 1.0A") which gives us a power range anywhere between 8x1 = 8 watts or 30x1 = 30 watts). The firewire bus supplies 18 volts, as does the iPod's plug in power supply.
Oh, and if you're using 12mbs usb to fill your iPod then you really do need to get a firewire card. Yuo state you have USB 2.0 - due to the stupid naming scheme that has been adopted for this I don't know if that means you have the 480mbs or the "full speed" 12Mbs verion. The iPod is compatible with hight speed USB2 - 480Mbs.
I filled my iPod to near -capacity (15 gigs) in about 5 minutes via the firewire bus on my iBook. It should take about the same time with "high speed" USB2 on a Windows machine.
Do I realy need to put a smiley face or a pseudo-html (/funny) tag at the end of my post?
Is my sig not pro-apple enough for people to realise this is a parody of the Mac troll who posts the same thing in every Mac thread?
Is that why/. has an "It's funny, laugh" icon for stories? I guess without the laugh track telling people what's funny nowadays jokes are lost on people.
Nice on the slight there. I hope to be a big kid too someday.
I understand the concerns, but ragging on Apple for a comment from a pretty anti-mac slanted article by the author who says someone at Apple told him they weren't going to fix 10.2 isn't really a good idea either.
I tend to wait until an official statement about it is released by a company - usually more than a couple of days after the bugs are found and someone at Apple (we don't know who) "confirms" that 10.2 won't be patched.
Apple should release end-of-life roadmap documentation, but that doesn't seem to have affected your use of Jag at work so far. If you were that worried about the lack of EOL info you wouldn't have used Jag in the first place - and if you're an all-Mac place that really would be difficult.
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SGI can still be used with Pixar's Renderman software. The artist tools at least. The server portion of the software only runs on Linux, Mac and Windows although no one would really run it on the last of those three..
We're a 100% Apple shop running Final Cut Pro 4 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5 and I assure you we need that power.
We upgraded from a DP 450 G4 box (which was no slouch itself) to a DP 2.0GHz G5 recently and we've more than quadrupled our productivity when it comes to big renders, mpeg2 encodes and multiplexing.
I don't know of anyone in our business using x86 for video editing. None seriously anyway.
I know a couple of shops who use x86 boxes as cheap horsepower in render farms - but ultimately controlled by a Mac at the nose end.
We use our DP G4 as a Quake III server for company LAN matches when it's not encoding mpeg2 on a job. I know Q3A isn't exactly a taxing game on today's graphics cards (none of our client machines even break sweat) but you can't beat it for gameplay.
Then change that 3 to a 2. They are awfully close on the keyboard.
They didn't plan for an 18 month replacement cycle - you're taking an extreme and calling it the norm. Sure, some people's iPods have died in 18 months, some in 18 days. Some are still going after 3 years or more.
The same is true of any manufactured product.
The design of the iPod from the outset was a sealed unit with no doors or latches, even for the battery. You think it's a bad design, Apple thinks it's good. I'm personally on the fence about it (and proprietary batteries in general).
I would imagine that far more iPods would be broken if it had a door/latch/hinge on the back so you could remove the battery and it wouldn't look as good, and it would have to be slightly bigger and less sleek. Image does matter to a lot of people.
I think the point is that sometimes you do get a bad Apple in the batch (heh, no pun intended) but that's no reason to call the whole design flawed. I think Apple were tardy in the release of a battery replacement service for a device that has a non-servicable one, but that has been corrected now.
Apple isn't perfect, but it tries hard to create good products that people will enjoy using.
The biggest gripe I have with them is the design of their laptop power brick - specifically where the thin DC lead comes out of the brick; it's a weak point in the design and breaks easily. I used my friend's power brick to charge my iBook yesterday and I see they've added a cable boot there for extra strength - probably in response to customer feedback and complaints (new power bricks are 70). Their 'saucer' power supplies for the clamshell iBook's had a similar problem, so it took them a few revisions to get it right.
Except that the "Apple cable" doesn't work at all - because Apple don't make RCA to 3.5mm cables, hence did not set the price of whatever it was you saw in the shop.
The iPod does have a micro-contolled charging system - all devices that use Lithium Ion batteries do. The iPod will stop charging the battery when it is full ans switch to maintenence charge.
The damage comes from frequent short cycles since the battery itself is limited to a limited number of charge cycles (not imposed on you by some counter that ticks down, due to the way the battery works). The battery can also be conditioned into a lower capacity state with frequent short cycles, so the pmu thinks the battery is full when it isn't.
The days of non-intelligent chargers are long gone.
This is the video I saw. It is, indeed, awesome, especially with the music cues.
I saw the full 6 or 7 minute video that the clips from the trailers were taken from and it's very good indeed.
It goes from the launch, including that Ron Howard-esque impossible Apollo 13 helicopter shot, to the journey, entry in Martian atmosphere, landing, rover deployment and then shows it wandering around sampling rocks and soil.
The video was given to the school I was working in by someone from Nasa who gave a presentation about the MER missions. He also showed a great false colour map of the potential landing area showing land heights - it looks like an ocean shore with a mountain range and rivers, more evidence to support the idea that Mars once had liquid water (or some fluid) on the surface with active precipitation.
I think the problem will stem when Sharman networks changes the protocol slightly for "security" or "usability enhancement" to shut out the K++ client, much like the IM providers do to keep all the decent 3rd party clients guessing.
No doubt it will be reverse engineered again, but it will be harder to distribute and publicise that fix without a central website. It will still get out though - word of mouth will spread it.
I think I'll stick to the iTMS (well, when it's finally available for the UK).
Yeah, and that software they use is so good, you can even rotate the 2D image around and see what is hidden behind objects in the foreground!
The train companies are not entirely to blame for those accidents.
If you want someone to blame, pick the Conservative government of the time that sold off the railway network to the highest bidder at a massively undervalued price.
So began the culture of profits before safety that dogged Railtrack. Enormous profits earned from buying the network at such a low price and then selling shares should have been sunk back into improving the railways. Of course, as expected, they gave it all away to shareholders and executives as dividends.
They cut maintenance, farmed out lucrative service contracts that put the emphasis on "keep it working, dont bother improving" and not spending any money on safety systems that could have prevented the accidents you listed above (things like ATC and other systems) because they were "too expensive".
Railtrack and the Tory government are the reason people have died in preventable crashes. I'm not saying the rail operators (Midland Mainline, GNER, Virgin etc) are blameless. but it's not all their fault by a long shot.
You, I surmise, know nothing about Li-Ion batteries.
Aside from that, the battery inside the iPod is made by Sony, not by Apple.
I suppose if the HD in there fails you'll blame that on Apple's "bad design" too?
NiMH batteries don't respond as well to partial charges and incompete charge cycles.
The typical usage of an iPod would suggest that its battery would often begin charging when not cmpletely flat, and disconnected before it's full, especially if you connect it to the firewire bus frequently for song updates and so on rather than connecting it to the power brick and leaving it to charge up fully on its own.
Sure you could leave it charging on the firewire bus, but what if you want to shut your computer off or (like a friend of mine) assume that the iPod will charge when the Mac is asleep.
OS X has been using prebinding since the invention of the wheel. It was manually initiated in 10.1, automatic in 10.2 (when you installed new apps or system updates) and it seems to be even more automatic in 10.3 - it checks when you open an app to see if it can update the prebindings to make it launch faster next time.
I'm sure I read it when I installed it.
It mentioned that installing "would break dependencies of portable music players on their current software" or something like that.
I wasn't paying much attention since I only installed it so my sister could stream my music on her PC - I use my iPod with my iBook.
On what planet does iTunes delete MusicMatch?
It just stops MM from connecting to the iPod - you can still use MM if you want, or reinstall it to restore the iPod connectiveity (which then breaks the connection with iTunes but you can't have it both ways).
Also, iTunes warns you that this will happen at the install.
It's a far cry from deleting software without asking you.
No, you're right, I didn't - "about 5 minutes" = "in no time at all".
I couldn't tell you exactly how long it took - just that it was a hell of a lot faster than a transfer that took 2 full charges of the battery.
I've also just checked my iTunes library - 10 gigs, so 2/3 capacity on the iPod.
Much like the original cut of Bladerunner with the narration by Harrison Ford dubbed on and that horrible, horrible ending - both forced on Ridley Scott by the studo because they thought audiences wpuldn't "get" the story, and that they wouldn't like it if it didn't have a happy ending.
Scott's director's cut, released later, is the film as he intended it and it's much better.
...Dark City was a good film.
Mod parent up, up, up.
I'm not surprised in the least - the voltage and current supplied by the firewire bus are completely different from that of the USB bus (can the usb bus provide enough power to drive a hard disk or disk drive?)
The USB bus can provide 5v at 500mA - that's 2.5 watts. The iPod states it is rated for "8-30v, max 1.0A") which gives us a power range anywhere between 8x1 = 8 watts or 30x1 = 30 watts). The firewire bus supplies 18 volts, as does the iPod's plug in power supply.
Oh, and if you're using 12mbs usb to fill your iPod then you really do need to get a firewire card. Yuo state you have USB 2.0 - due to the stupid naming scheme that has been adopted for this I don't know if that means you have the 480mbs or the "full speed" 12Mbs verion. The iPod is compatible with hight speed USB2 - 480Mbs.
I filled my iPod to near -capacity (15 gigs) in about 5 minutes via the firewire bus on my iBook. It should take about the same time with "high speed" USB2 on a Windows machine.
Dear me! What is moderation coming to?
/. has an "It's funny, laugh" icon for stories? I guess without the laugh track telling people what's funny nowadays jokes are lost on people.
Do I realy need to put a smiley face or a pseudo-html (/funny) tag at the end of my post?
Is my sig not pro-apple enough for people to realise this is a parody of the Mac troll who posts the same thing in every Mac thread?
Is that why
However, they do have trouble copying a 17Mb file from one folder to another, even with all that bandwidth.
Apparently, the server admin has an old Pentium Pro on a 56k modem that can serve multi-gigabyte files much more quickly.
...walking-to-the-store-and-buying-a-two-button-mo use-and-plugging-the-fucker-in.app
If you run this software there is a small fee - usually about $10.
Nice on the slight there. I hope to be a big kid too someday.
I understand the concerns, but ragging on Apple for a comment from a pretty anti-mac slanted article by the author who says someone at Apple told him they weren't going to fix 10.2 isn't really a good idea either.
I tend to wait until an official statement about it is released by a company - usually more than a couple of days after the bugs are found and someone at Apple (we don't know who) "confirms" that 10.2 won't be patched.
Apple should release end-of-life roadmap documentation, but that doesn't seem to have affected your use of Jag at work so far. If you were that worried about the lack of EOL info you wouldn't have used Jag in the first place - and if you're an all-Mac place that really would be difficult.
The security patch Apple just released fixed a problem with 10.3.
10.2 is not vulnerable to this. Repeat, not vulnerable.
Apple, as good as they are, can not patch a hole that doesn't need to be patched.