The problem is that the Mac Mini hard drive sucks ass - it's slow, only 40G, and the small form factor means upgrades are expensive.
This is what Firewire exists for. The size of the Mac mini is meaningless -- just plug in one or more Firewire-based external hard drives, and you're all set. And if you have more than one, Mac OS X allows you to do software RAID with them right out of the box.
Is there such firewire-raid-hubs on the market now?
You can get Firewire hubs, but they don't have any hardware RAID built into them. I was referring more to using the software RAID that is built into every copy of Mac OS X.
But who knows? Perhaps a firewire-based hardware RAID enclosure does exist somewhere. One where you could add in standard EIDE drives would be interesting (although I imagine somewhat expensive).
I'm more interested in a tower-style system since there'd be more room for larger drives.
This is where firewire-based drives come in. On a 400Mbit bus, you can easily add large amounts of external storage. Add in a firewire hub, and you can easily create your own firewire-based RAID array.
There is always network storage devices as well, which would be a natural for storing large amounts of music (which you could then easily share between machines).
If there are two things that characterize gaming on Mac OS X, it's that typically the games come out later on OSX than on Windows, and that there isn't the sheer mass of games available as there is on Windows. Still, that is a long way from "no" games -- typically all the best games from the Windows world make their way to the Mac OS X world in short order.
Well, as it is the pictures are estimated to have been taken between 2 and 3 years ago, with the girl now being roughly 12 years old. Girls in this age range are just entering puberty, and are undergoing bodily changes.
As such, I'd think that age-enhancing the face would probably be in order. As the result is just a model of what the victim might currently look like, and isn't an actual photograph, one might argue that a certain amount of anonymity is retained.
An interesting question arises though. How did they know that it was all the same scene? What if the kid was abducted, or moved around?
As someone in the Toronto area who has been following this case these past few days, I don't think they knew absolutely for certain, but from statements I've seen they did appear to have some evidence to show these photos were taken in proximity to each other (maybe the victim was wearing the same clothes in all of them? Maybe the originating website claimed they were all taken together and had dates associated with them? I don't know, and the police aren't saying).
One interesting (amd very, very sad) tidbit in the new today is that the Toronto Police have been tracking the unknown female victim for three years now. The photos they're released are from 2001, but apparantly there are more recent photos of the same girl (who is now presumed to be 12 years old).
The Toronto Police Force needs to be seriously congratulated for taking on this case. While they seem to have reason to believe that the girl is from either the eastern half of Canada or the north eastern US, they really have no idea if Toronto is involved at all. The girl might not be from Toronto, may never have been to Toronto, and yet the Toronto Police have taken the front line in investigating this case, and have no intention of stopping until someone has found this litle girl. The Officers driving this case need to be commended -- it would be very easy for a police force to just say "not our jurisdiction" and leave it at that, and use the departments funding on other cases.
But even after three years with no breaks, these Officers haven't given up, and are finding new and innovative ways to collect evidence. And they appear to be determined to drive this case until it closes. And for that, I salute them.
I hope they find this little girl and get her to somewhere safe, and find a way to mitigate the damage to her psyche. Then I hope they find the people who did this to her.
- With appropriate antivirus and anti-spyare installed, Windows works well. Finding the "appropriate" software is easy, and installing it is easy too (double click setup.exe, answer yes, hit ok, click finish, and after a possible reboot, you're done).
Driving my car is quite a bit safer with seat belts too, but I didn't have to go out and spend a few hundred more dollars after buying my car to get them. This level of necessary protection came built-in.
Besides which, as I've pointed out elsewhere, unless you have a protected computer from which to download the latest signatures, any boxed product you install is virtually guaranteed to be out-of-date as soon as it leaves the store. It's always the latest viruses which are the ones you have to protect yourself from. When was the last time you saw a computer with the Stoner virus on it, after all? Anti-virus and anti-spyware software is going to be 3 - 6 months out of date when you buy it, requiring a connection to the Internet to get the latest updates.
And if you don't want to pay, you can always download freee anti-virus and anti-spyware packages off the Internet -- again, requiring a connection to the Internet in the first place. And then another connection to update their signatures (as very few free providers repackage their software every time they have a signature update).
- If you throw in XP SP2, then pop ups are pretty much gone.
"Pretty much" doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me. And again, if you don't have SP2 pre-installed, you'll once again need an Internet connection to download it.
- I already know how to use Windoze
Translation: you're stuck in your ways, and have no intention of ever changing them.
- I can config Windows via menus and GUI programs and not via obscure config files in who know how many different directories, with little help fom the built-in environment.
A valid complaint against older Linux distros, but no so valid with the latest distros. And completely invalid when comparing to Mac OS X as the article author does.
And besides which, Windows has more than its share of cconfigurations over the years which require you to manually edit the Windows Registry. I'd rather work with a property file in Linux than fiddle around with the easily breakable Windows Registry.
- There's a TON of games for Windows, certainly all the ones I care about are available for Windows
This is probably the only valid point you have to make. Congratulations! You've beat the guy who scored 0!
- Windows runs games on the first try
I can't say I've ever had a problem with a Mac OS X game. They just work, out of the box.
- Windows is much easier to program in (or maybe it is that I already know how to do it?)
Definately the latter. Ever program in Objective-C/Cocoa (or Objective-C/GNUStep)? No? Then you have no idea what you're talking about.
- Getting hardware that will work with Windows is effortless
Pardon me a moment while I LAUGH MY ASS OFF.
I recently spent the better part of TWO WEEKS getting a new LinkSys 802.11g PC Card adapter working in my brothers Windows-based ThinkPad. First time through, the driver installation program crashed for no reason, leaving some of its files (and some registry entries) littering the system. There was no uninstall routine configured at this point, so I tried re-installing the drivers. The installation program complained that the driver was already installed, and that I should run the uninstall routine first. You know, the uninstaller which wasn't installed in the first place.
So, with help from a Microsoft Knowledge Base article, I had to find all of the installe
Someone would be stupid enough not to install their anti-virus protection and anti=spyware protection on a computer before connecting it to the net?
And if your antivirus and anti-spamware signatures are a few months old, you need to connect to the Internet to get the signature updates, at which point your system is going to get flooded with all of the NEW viruses and spamware that have been making the rounds in recent months.
If you buy a PC and a boxed anti-virus (and anti-spyware) package, on average the signatures included in those packages is going to be roughly 6 months old. Sure, you're going to be able to ensure you don't propogate the Stoner virus, but it isn't going to help you against, say, W32.Dopbot. If you want protection against that, you're going to have to get the latest virus signatures -- from over the Internet.
(Unless, of course, you also happen to have a Mac, Linux, *BSD, OS/2, or other non-Windows box from which you can download the signatures -- if the package in question permits you to do so over the web or FTP, that is).
Let's put the results aside for a moment (the show has had some serious issues), and take a look at what could have been.
Enterprise started off with two things going for it: a decent premise, and a good cast. What Star Trek fan isn't interested in how the Federation was started? Or how the war with the Klingons started? How about the formation of the Neutral Zone with the Romulans? Or how about the evolution of technology from rougghly what we know today, to what was available in ST:TOS?
Unfortunately, all of this was an opportunity that was wasted and squandered. Sure, they tried a few episodes dealing with the evolution of technology, but all of them were of the sort where the episode started with "Hey, we need X", and by the end, they had X (for all X in "Phasers", Transporters", etc.)
Part of that was just bad writing, and bad story planning. But then there was the introduction of time travel, which was completely unnecessary, and made the whole thing completely unbelievable. Whomever came up with the "Temporal Cold War" should be summarily fired...out of a canon. Into a pool of sharks. With laser beams on their heads.
Then there is the ship. I'm sure it would make a fine set for any number of sci-fi shows, but not for a Star Trek series that is supposed to take place before TOS. The interiour should look like that of a modern day battleship, and not filled with zinc plates and chrome. Yes, it would have been hard to make the series believable by not having any display terminals (TOS didn't have them, but here in the 2000's we do, so it would be somewhat difficult not to have them), but they should have taken a cue from a modern military warship for interiour design. It would have made the show more believable, and would have added some "grit" for the writers to work with.
The big year-long story arc with the Xindi (sp?) didn't help either. It was hard to just tune into an episode here and there, particularily towardds the end. I was in the middle of nowhere during the first four months of 2004, where TV wasn't really available, and the one time I did get a chance to see part of an episode I couldn't get into it because I had no idea what was going on. I missed the whole resolution of the story arc as well, making the whole season a total write-off for me. I can only imagine what the casual Star Trek watcher would think trying to watch just a few episodes here and there.
I feel bad for the cast, who are now going to be out of jobs after such a short run (but not too bad -- it isn't as if people in the tech industry don't know what it's like to be without a job...:P). There was some good potential for this series, but the people in charge completely munged it. Let's hope they find themselves jobless for a while so they can ponder their grand failure.
I'd imagine marketing people prefer things that actually need some marketing to sell, as opposed to Coke, whose commercials serve no purpose anymore except to annoy people at movie theaters (does anyone ever see those commercials and think "oh, maybe that Coke stuff is good, I should try it sometime..."?)
Advertising isn't just about gaining new customers. When it comes to consumables, it's often about getting existing customers to buy/partake more often.
How many times have you seen an advertisement for your favorite beverage and thought "Hey, I could use one of those right about now"? Maybe you haven't even needed to think about it -- perhaps the last time you partook in your favorite beverage was 5 minutes after seeing such an ad.
How many of those theatre-goers suddenly decide to get a drink from the concessions after seeing such an ad? Or think "Hey, I should pick up some Coke on the way home"?
It's for these sorts of people that Coke keeps its advertising up, and not because there are particularily that many new potential customers out there (although there is always the factor of convincing young people of brand loyalty at an early age...).
There are lots of reasons to advertise that go beyond trying to get new customers. Keeping your existing customers loyal and encouraging them to buy more of your products (particularily consumables) being a big motivation.
NextStep/Cocoa, on the other hand, actually stores the object graph into a "freeze-dried" file in Interface Builder (the famous NIB files), serializing all the objects and bringing them up in a flash when the application runs.
One of the interesting off-shoots from this system of having an archived interface is that the end-user can easily change the GUIs of their Cocoa applications without any programming simply by loading those NIB files into Interface Builder. Want to move the order of buttons in Safari around? No problem. Want to add a scrollbar and a font selection button to Stickies? Easy. The NIB files (the 'N' still stands for "NeXT") make interface hacking a breeze. You don't need access to the source code, as in the case of Cocoa applications, there is no source code for the standard GUI elements (that is, unlike most other GUI design tools, Interface Builder doesn't generate code based on what you've designed, but simply archives the live objects you've laid out inside of it to the NIB file, serializing their state information).
The one drawback to this system is that the NIB file spec isn't open. GNUstep uses a similar system with a different format because of this, which IMO is unfortunate. Still, your average user can become a UI hacker quite easily, making it very easy to customize Cocoa apps, making it one damn slick system.
I have to agree. I'm currently making Dominoes as an online board game.
Good information all around. I just wanted to pipe up that Dominoes is another excellent starter game system to implement. There are so many different games you can play with Dominoes, and for the most part the logic is pretty simple (a simple greedy algorithm should make for a half-decent computer opponent. Perhaps not the perfect opponent, but more than enough for a beginning programmer).
So if cards and dice don't do it for you for one reason or another, try dominoes.
Ignore everything you've read here about graphics and sound libraries, existing game code, existing game libraries, and (for now), choice of languages. If you've never done any programming before and intend to use this as a vehicle to start programming, read this first. Clear your mind, and ignore the details for now.
More important than anything else you can ask right now is to find out what you're trying to achieve. Saying "I want to write a game" isn't specific enough, as humanity has invented tens of thousands of games over the years using all sorts of different mechanisms (cards, dice, boards, pieces, pots, beans, joysticks, vector graphics, role playing, puzzles...). So first, figure out what you want to write.
Next, take the game you want to write, and stick it on a mental shelf. Everyone would love to write Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as their first game, but it isn't going to happen.
My first piece of advice: don't try to create a new game for your first project. Take something you already know, and know well, and implement it first. Try to pick something that has finite states that are easily describable, and then work from there. Preferably something that has mechanical rules and won;t require too much "artificial intelligence" on the part of the computer (ie: you may know Chess really well, and it has a finite number of pieces, the logic required to decide how to have the computer move is exceedingly complex. Companies like IBM have spent millions trying to perfect such algorithms).
Two classes of games which are typically excellent candidates for first projects are card and dice games. Both are fairly easy to program, as they involve numbers, and have a finite number of possibilities (ie: 52 cards, 6 sides per die). When selecting a game to implement, find something you enjoy, but preferably something that again, won't require an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence. Blackjack is an excellent candidate (many Universities use this as a first year programming assignment anyhow, so you'd be getting a leg-up on others if you plan on persuing Computer Science in higher education), as the compter can act as the dealer, and has very specific rules it always follows (requiring no AI at all). Don't worry about how many times the game has already been done -- your goal is to learn programming, and not to create the next Halo 2.
Once you've selected a good candidate game, you need to code the game mechanics before you code anything else. So again -- forget everything anyone here has told you about graphics and sound libraries, or even languages. You won't need these until later.
Continuing with Blackjack as an example, here are some of the things you need ot think about first:
How will the computer store the information about a card (and again, don't think about the graphics for the card at this point -- right now you need a way for the computer to be able to tell the difference between a 3 and a Queen, a Diamond and a Club)?
How will you group cards together? (For the hands, the cards remaining in the desk, etc.)?
How will you perform actions on the cards such as shuffling?
What are the win states? What are the lose states? What are the draw states (if any)?
What are the rules the computer has to play by?
What options should the user have at each junction (ie: draw, hold, split, double)? When is each approperiate?
If you can get all of this down in code, you'll be off to an excellent start. From here, you can graft whatever user interface you want atop the "game engine" you've just created. And you'll find you'lll learn a lot about the basics of programming (variables, arrays, functions, objects, random numbers, sorting, comparisons, etc.)
You'll probably want to be able to test things out as you go along, which will require a minimal user interface. To start, you'll probably want to use just text to represent everything (ie: "10 Hearts", "A Spades", etc.).
Welcome to the club. I actually downloaded the first ~150MB from the web site directly as I was getting about 3x the speed.
Always wanting to be a good net citizen, however, and seeing as how I'm about to go to bed anyhow, I decided to switch over to BitTorrent, and share that 150MB downloaded thus far with the rest of the world. Right now I only see 2 peers, but at least I'm getting about 15KB/s (and serving out ~20KB/s).
Considering that I am currently getting 1.5KB/s, I think you should -all- start downloading.:)
And when you're done, leave your trackers running. And start downloading the PowerPC version too -- currently there is only one peer, from which I'm getting only ~15KB/s from, with an estimated 9.5 hours to go:P.
Firewire and USB external DVD writers are not supported natively by iDVD and you have to use a third party "patch" to get it to work. Doesn't seem very useful there.
They don't work with iDVD 04, but the Mac mini ships with iDVD 05 which does support external writers (and even if you find one that it won't work with directly, iDVD 05 can now create a disk image which you can then burn using whatever software you want).
My wife and I also have Sony T610s. Man are they sweet... Have you by chance grabbed a copy of Romeo? It's an application that allows you to control the machine from your phone via bluetooth. This is great for Powerpoint/Keynote if you have to use them, as well as iTunes and mouse control.
I've downloaded Sailing Clicker, which does the same thing, but haven't installed it just yet. It's limited to a maximum number of clicks without registration, so maybe I'll check out Romeo as well.
I've been waiting for my copy of iWork to ship, as I want to test these with Keynote 2 (I don't have Keynote 1). For now for remote control work I just use my Apple Bluetooth Mouse (which has the same range, if not all of the same abilities).
Real does not work that well on OS X if running from a non-admin account.
I'd suggest that you have an installation or permissions problem if you're running into these problems. Here on my local OS X box I'm having no such trouble.
I have RP10 installed into/Applications, and just did a fast user switch over a a "managed" account (ie: non-Admin, with various restrictions as to what they can run), and was able to click on a RealVideo link from within Firefox and the player loaded and started playing the video correctly without any issues.
I much prefer Quicktime, but RealPlayer 10 runs just fine on OS X, admin account or otherwise.
Quicktime might be the best compromise. It's cross-platform, has reasonable file sizes, reasonable quality, etc.
I'm a big QuickTime fan. It's probably the best container format out there.
But that's the problem -- it's a container format, and not a Codec.
I think what the requester needs is a good cross-platform container format and Codec, in which case MP4 (which is based on QuickTime's container format) is probably the best bet for cross-platform access.
Or, as much as I hate to say it, Real format. I'm not a Real fan, but their player does run natively on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and can be made to run on OS/2 systems if you're so inclined.
I wonder whether that means that my Treo 650 smartphone can connect to a shoutcast (MP3 stream) server over the Net (it can), connect to the Mini over its BT (maybe) and let the Mini play the shoutcast stream through its headphones (cool). Sound likely?
It's hard to say. Bluetooth is supposed to be able to transfer at up to 721Kbps, but when transferring data to and from my mobile phone I only tend to get roughly 5KB/s transfer rate. This could be due to the phone itself limiting the transfer rate for some reason I suppose. Unfortunately, I don't have nay other Bluetooth enabled gear (other than the mouse) to do any tests with to see if I can get closer to the maximum throughput of Bluetooth with my PowerBook.
Still, according to the specs this should be possible -- although you could always just use iTunes on the mini to connect to your Shoutcast stream (iTunes can connect to MP3 data streams coming off the Internet), or get some Bluetooth headphones and stream directly to them without going through the mini at all.
What can you actually do with the Mini Bluetooth connection?
The Bluetooth support on the Mac mini is completely programmable. As such, you can do anything with it that Bluetooth supports.
Some of the Bluetooth support that is built into OS X includes:
Bluetooth file transfer and browsing,
Bluetooth audio device support (eg: Bluetooth headsets),
Bluetooth networking (eg: creating a TCP/IP network within Bluetooth),
Bluetooth printing,
Bluetooth mouse and keyboard support,
Synchronization of Address Book and Calendar with Bluetooth enabled PDAs and cell phones,
Bluetooth serial support,
Bluetooth dial-in modems (via a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone),
Bluetooth SMS messaging via a cell phone,
Bluetooth dialing of a bluetooth-enabled cell phone,
Any other function or device somone wishes to develop.
I have Bluetooth enabled on my PowerBook, and use it with a Bluetooth mouse and my Sony Ericsson T610 cell phone. The mouse works like any other wirelsss mouse (but doesn't need a dongle), and I have the phone set-up for file transfer with the PowerBook, GPRS internet connectivity for instant, on-the-road Internet connectivity, sending and receiving SMS messages from the PowerBook, dialling phone numbers, and synchronization of my address book and calendar between the phone and the PowerBook/.Mac. I haven't installed Sailing Clicker just yet (which allows you to use your bluetooth-enabled cell phone as a remote control for the Mac), but have it sitting in my Downloads directory waiting for some free time to play with it.
In short, there is a lot of cool stuff you can do with Bluetooth -- if you have suitable Bluetooth-enabled devices.
WEP is insecure. record break-in times to WiFi networks "secured" using WEP is well under half an hour; stock tools can do it in several hours to a day. WPA is hardly iron-clad, but it's orders of magnitude better than the fatally flawed WEP. one should not rely on WEP for security of any kind.
That's good advice -- but not always practical.
First off, WEP is still better than absolutely nothing. It does prevent the uneducated and unexperienced from snooping in on you -- they have to have a bit of knowledge and put in some effort to see what you're doing.
The big problem with WPA is that not all wireless devices support it. I'm in a nasty catch-22 at the moment on my WiFi network in that I've been contracted to do some development with and against a Palm Tungsten C, which is WiFi enabled, but which has absolutely no WPA support. My base station and other portables support WPA just fine, but I'm stuck with WEP because one device manufacturer for a device I absolutely need has decided not to bother with WPA support.
If I had extra money just laying around with nothing much to do, I'd consider buying another base station to be hooked into my network (heavily firewalled off from the rest of my network) to provide only WEP access, and switch everything else back to WPA. But unfortunately I'm stuck with what I have at the moment, and have to rely on SSH and other encrypted protocols as much as possible to ensure my networks security, as WEP alone, while better than absolutely nothing, isn't enough.
Before I go, an open rant: Palm, take your head out of the sand and realize that we T|C users need WPA protection, just like everyone else.
Also, I'd wonder about any colo facility located in a former bank vault. It sounds cool, but it doesn't strike me as a very cost-effective place to put a data center.
It would also be a complete bitch to run cables into it.
Some years ago I worked for an ISP that had taken over part of an old medical office building that had been renovated (somewhat). There was this one great room with an opening in one inner wall where there used to be a window which we used as the server room.
Everything was great until the day when the VP of Technology decided we should run some cable through the wall, and took a screwdriver and tried to hammer it through the wall. Clang -- he hit solid metal, and couldn't get through. As it turned out, the room used to be an X-ray chamber, and had 1/4" of lead from floor to ceiling in each and every wall.
On the bright side, it was nice to know our server room would have probably survived a distant nuclear blast;).
Here's my suggestion. Get an older system which has a motherboard which accepts the memory you have -- preferrably one with lots of slots. Install as much RAM into it as you can, along with a NIC.
Install Linux or FreeBSD on it (if it has a hard drive -- if not put together a bootable diskette), and create a big RAM disk -- as big as you can. Set-up either NFS or Samba to allow network access to the RAM drive.
And if you're going to use it for storing anything other than/tmp, put the system on a UPS. Nothing worse than losing a whole disks worth of data due to a minor brownout.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what Firewire exists for. The size of the Mac mini is meaningless -- just plug in one or more Firewire-based external hard drives, and you're all set. And if you have more than one, Mac OS X allows you to do software RAID with them right out of the box.
Yaz.
You can get Firewire hubs, but they don't have any hardware RAID built into them. I was referring more to using the software RAID that is built into every copy of Mac OS X.
But who knows? Perhaps a firewire-based hardware RAID enclosure does exist somewhere. One where you could add in standard EIDE drives would be interesting (although I imagine somewhat expensive).
Yaz.
This is where firewire-based drives come in. On a 400Mbit bus, you can easily add large amounts of external storage. Add in a firewire hub, and you can easily create your own firewire-based RAID array.
There is always network storage devices as well, which would be a natural for storing large amounts of music (which you could then easily share between machines).
Yaz.
Actually, my local Best Buy does carry some Mac software titles. Heck, even the Best Buy (Canada) website has a Macintosh software section (a quick search of the US webstore likewise brings up some Apple software titles).
No need to appologise for your ignorance. Now if you had said that the Mac has fewer games, I'd have to grant you that. But to say there are no games? How about Halo? Or how about Rise of Nations? Or what about Unreal Tournement 2004? Age of Empires II? Age of Mythology? Civilization III? Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic? And let's not forget Doom 3 (currently available for pre-order). And a whole lot more.
If there are two things that characterize gaming on Mac OS X, it's that typically the games come out later on OSX than on Windows, and that there isn't the sheer mass of games available as there is on Windows. Still, that is a long way from "no" games -- typically all the best games from the Windows world make their way to the Mac OS X world in short order.
Yaz.
Well, as it is the pictures are estimated to have been taken between 2 and 3 years ago, with the girl now being roughly 12 years old. Girls in this age range are just entering puberty, and are undergoing bodily changes.
As such, I'd think that age-enhancing the face would probably be in order. As the result is just a model of what the victim might currently look like, and isn't an actual photograph, one might argue that a certain amount of anonymity is retained.
Yaz.
As someone in the Toronto area who has been following this case these past few days, I don't think they knew absolutely for certain, but from statements I've seen they did appear to have some evidence to show these photos were taken in proximity to each other (maybe the victim was wearing the same clothes in all of them? Maybe the originating website claimed they were all taken together and had dates associated with them? I don't know, and the police aren't saying).
One interesting (amd very, very sad) tidbit in the new today is that the Toronto Police have been tracking the unknown female victim for three years now. The photos they're released are from 2001, but apparantly there are more recent photos of the same girl (who is now presumed to be 12 years old).
The Toronto Police Force needs to be seriously congratulated for taking on this case. While they seem to have reason to believe that the girl is from either the eastern half of Canada or the north eastern US, they really have no idea if Toronto is involved at all. The girl might not be from Toronto, may never have been to Toronto, and yet the Toronto Police have taken the front line in investigating this case, and have no intention of stopping until someone has found this litle girl. The Officers driving this case need to be commended -- it would be very easy for a police force to just say "not our jurisdiction" and leave it at that, and use the departments funding on other cases.
But even after three years with no breaks, these Officers haven't given up, and are finding new and innovative ways to collect evidence. And they appear to be determined to drive this case until it closes. And for that, I salute them.
I hope they find this little girl and get her to somewhere safe, and find a way to mitigate the damage to her psyche. Then I hope they find the people who did this to her.
Yaz.
Driving my car is quite a bit safer with seat belts too, but I didn't have to go out and spend a few hundred more dollars after buying my car to get them. This level of necessary protection came built-in.
Besides which, as I've pointed out elsewhere, unless you have a protected computer from which to download the latest signatures, any boxed product you install is virtually guaranteed to be out-of-date as soon as it leaves the store. It's always the latest viruses which are the ones you have to protect yourself from. When was the last time you saw a computer with the Stoner virus on it, after all? Anti-virus and anti-spyware software is going to be 3 - 6 months out of date when you buy it, requiring a connection to the Internet to get the latest updates.
And if you don't want to pay, you can always download freee anti-virus and anti-spyware packages off the Internet -- again, requiring a connection to the Internet in the first place. And then another connection to update their signatures (as very few free providers repackage their software every time they have a signature update).
"Pretty much" doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to me. And again, if you don't have SP2 pre-installed, you'll once again need an Internet connection to download it.
Translation: you're stuck in your ways, and have no intention of ever changing them.
A valid complaint against older Linux distros, but no so valid with the latest distros. And completely invalid when comparing to Mac OS X as the article author does.
And besides which, Windows has more than its share of cconfigurations over the years which require you to manually edit the Windows Registry. I'd rather work with a property file in Linux than fiddle around with the easily breakable Windows Registry.
This is probably the only valid point you have to make. Congratulations! You've beat the guy who scored 0!
I can't say I've ever had a problem with a Mac OS X game. They just work, out of the box.
Definately the latter. Ever program in Objective-C/Cocoa (or Objective-C/GNUStep)? No? Then you have no idea what you're talking about.
Pardon me a moment while I LAUGH MY ASS OFF.
I recently spent the better part of TWO WEEKS getting a new LinkSys 802.11g PC Card adapter working in my brothers Windows-based ThinkPad. First time through, the driver installation program crashed for no reason, leaving some of its files (and some registry entries) littering the system. There was no uninstall routine configured at this point, so I tried re-installing the drivers. The installation program complained that the driver was already installed, and that I should run the uninstall routine first. You know, the uninstaller which wasn't installed in the first place.
So, with help from a Microsoft Knowledge Base article, I had to find all of the installe
And if your antivirus and anti-spamware signatures are a few months old, you need to connect to the Internet to get the signature updates, at which point your system is going to get flooded with all of the NEW viruses and spamware that have been making the rounds in recent months.
If you buy a PC and a boxed anti-virus (and anti-spyware) package, on average the signatures included in those packages is going to be roughly 6 months old. Sure, you're going to be able to ensure you don't propogate the Stoner virus, but it isn't going to help you against, say, W32.Dopbot. If you want protection against that, you're going to have to get the latest virus signatures -- from over the Internet.
(Unless, of course, you also happen to have a Mac, Linux, *BSD, OS/2, or other non-Windows box from which you can download the signatures -- if the package in question permits you to do so over the web or FTP, that is).
Yaz.
Let's put the results aside for a moment (the show has had some serious issues), and take a look at what could have been.
Enterprise started off with two things going for it: a decent premise, and a good cast. What Star Trek fan isn't interested in how the Federation was started? Or how the war with the Klingons started? How about the formation of the Neutral Zone with the Romulans? Or how about the evolution of technology from rougghly what we know today, to what was available in ST:TOS?
Unfortunately, all of this was an opportunity that was wasted and squandered. Sure, they tried a few episodes dealing with the evolution of technology, but all of them were of the sort where the episode started with "Hey, we need X", and by the end, they had X (for all X in "Phasers", Transporters", etc.)
Part of that was just bad writing, and bad story planning. But then there was the introduction of time travel, which was completely unnecessary, and made the whole thing completely unbelievable. Whomever came up with the "Temporal Cold War" should be summarily fired...out of a canon. Into a pool of sharks. With laser beams on their heads.
Then there is the ship. I'm sure it would make a fine set for any number of sci-fi shows, but not for a Star Trek series that is supposed to take place before TOS. The interiour should look like that of a modern day battleship, and not filled with zinc plates and chrome. Yes, it would have been hard to make the series believable by not having any display terminals (TOS didn't have them, but here in the 2000's we do, so it would be somewhat difficult not to have them), but they should have taken a cue from a modern military warship for interiour design. It would have made the show more believable, and would have added some "grit" for the writers to work with.
The big year-long story arc with the Xindi (sp?) didn't help either. It was hard to just tune into an episode here and there, particularily towardds the end. I was in the middle of nowhere during the first four months of 2004, where TV wasn't really available, and the one time I did get a chance to see part of an episode I couldn't get into it because I had no idea what was going on. I missed the whole resolution of the story arc as well, making the whole season a total write-off for me. I can only imagine what the casual Star Trek watcher would think trying to watch just a few episodes here and there.
I feel bad for the cast, who are now going to be out of jobs after such a short run (but not too bad -- it isn't as if people in the tech industry don't know what it's like to be without a job...:P). There was some good potential for this series, but the people in charge completely munged it. Let's hope they find themselves jobless for a while so they can ponder their grand failure.
Yaz.
Advertising isn't just about gaining new customers. When it comes to consumables, it's often about getting existing customers to buy/partake more often.
How many times have you seen an advertisement for your favorite beverage and thought "Hey, I could use one of those right about now"? Maybe you haven't even needed to think about it -- perhaps the last time you partook in your favorite beverage was 5 minutes after seeing such an ad.
How many of those theatre-goers suddenly decide to get a drink from the concessions after seeing such an ad? Or think "Hey, I should pick up some Coke on the way home"?
It's for these sorts of people that Coke keeps its advertising up, and not because there are particularily that many new potential customers out there (although there is always the factor of convincing young people of brand loyalty at an early age...).
There are lots of reasons to advertise that go beyond trying to get new customers. Keeping your existing customers loyal and encouraging them to buy more of your products (particularily consumables) being a big motivation.
Yaz.
One of the interesting off-shoots from this system of having an archived interface is that the end-user can easily change the GUIs of their Cocoa applications without any programming simply by loading those NIB files into Interface Builder. Want to move the order of buttons in Safari around? No problem. Want to add a scrollbar and a font selection button to Stickies? Easy. The NIB files (the 'N' still stands for "NeXT") make interface hacking a breeze. You don't need access to the source code, as in the case of Cocoa applications, there is no source code for the standard GUI elements (that is, unlike most other GUI design tools, Interface Builder doesn't generate code based on what you've designed, but simply archives the live objects you've laid out inside of it to the NIB file, serializing their state information).
The one drawback to this system is that the NIB file spec isn't open. GNUstep uses a similar system with a different format because of this, which IMO is unfortunate. Still, your average user can become a UI hacker quite easily, making it very easy to customize Cocoa apps, making it one damn slick system.
Yaz.
Good information all around. I just wanted to pipe up that Dominoes is another excellent starter game system to implement. There are so many different games you can play with Dominoes, and for the most part the logic is pretty simple (a simple greedy algorithm should make for a half-decent computer opponent. Perhaps not the perfect opponent, but more than enough for a beginning programmer).
So if cards and dice don't do it for you for one reason or another, try dominoes.
Yaz.
Ignore everything you've read here about graphics and sound libraries, existing game code, existing game libraries, and (for now), choice of languages. If you've never done any programming before and intend to use this as a vehicle to start programming, read this first. Clear your mind, and ignore the details for now.
More important than anything else you can ask right now is to find out what you're trying to achieve. Saying "I want to write a game" isn't specific enough, as humanity has invented tens of thousands of games over the years using all sorts of different mechanisms (cards, dice, boards, pieces, pots, beans, joysticks, vector graphics, role playing, puzzles...). So first, figure out what you want to write.
Next, take the game you want to write, and stick it on a mental shelf. Everyone would love to write Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as their first game, but it isn't going to happen.
My first piece of advice: don't try to create a new game for your first project. Take something you already know, and know well, and implement it first. Try to pick something that has finite states that are easily describable, and then work from there. Preferably something that has mechanical rules and won;t require too much "artificial intelligence" on the part of the computer (ie: you may know Chess really well, and it has a finite number of pieces, the logic required to decide how to have the computer move is exceedingly complex. Companies like IBM have spent millions trying to perfect such algorithms).
Two classes of games which are typically excellent candidates for first projects are card and dice games. Both are fairly easy to program, as they involve numbers, and have a finite number of possibilities (ie: 52 cards, 6 sides per die). When selecting a game to implement, find something you enjoy, but preferably something that again, won't require an M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence. Blackjack is an excellent candidate (many Universities use this as a first year programming assignment anyhow, so you'd be getting a leg-up on others if you plan on persuing Computer Science in higher education), as the compter can act as the dealer, and has very specific rules it always follows (requiring no AI at all). Don't worry about how many times the game has already been done -- your goal is to learn programming, and not to create the next Halo 2.
Once you've selected a good candidate game, you need to code the game mechanics before you code anything else. So again -- forget everything anyone here has told you about graphics and sound libraries, or even languages. You won't need these until later.
Continuing with Blackjack as an example, here are some of the things you need ot think about first:
If you can get all of this down in code, you'll be off to an excellent start. From here, you can graft whatever user interface you want atop the "game engine" you've just created. And you'll find you'lll learn a lot about the basics of programming (variables, arrays, functions, objects, random numbers, sorting, comparisons, etc.)
You'll probably want to be able to test things out as you go along, which will require a minimal user interface. To start, you'll probably want to use just text to represent everything (ie: "10 Hearts", "A Spades", etc.).
Welcome to the club. I actually downloaded the first ~150MB from the web site directly as I was getting about 3x the speed.
Always wanting to be a good net citizen, however, and seeing as how I'm about to go to bed anyhow, I decided to switch over to BitTorrent, and share that 150MB downloaded thus far with the rest of the world. Right now I only see 2 peers, but at least I'm getting about 15KB/s (and serving out ~20KB/s).
Yaz.
And when you're done, leave your trackers running. And start downloading the PowerPC version too -- currently there is only one peer, from which I'm getting only ~15KB/s from, with an estimated 9.5 hours to go :P.
Yaz.
They don't work with iDVD 04, but the Mac mini ships with iDVD 05 which does support external writers (and even if you find one that it won't work with directly, iDVD 05 can now create a disk image which you can then burn using whatever software you want).
Yaz.
I've downloaded Sailing Clicker, which does the same thing, but haven't installed it just yet. It's limited to a maximum number of clicks without registration, so maybe I'll check out Romeo as well.
I've been waiting for my copy of iWork to ship, as I want to test these with Keynote 2 (I don't have Keynote 1). For now for remote control work I just use my Apple Bluetooth Mouse (which has the same range, if not all of the same abilities).
But giving it a try is high on my to-do list! :).
Yaz.
I'd suggest that you have an installation or permissions problem if you're running into these problems. Here on my local OS X box I'm having no such trouble.
I have RP10 installed into /Applications, and just did a fast user switch over a a "managed" account (ie: non-Admin, with various restrictions as to what they can run), and was able to click on a RealVideo link from within Firefox and the player loaded and started playing the video correctly without any issues.
I much prefer Quicktime, but RealPlayer 10 runs just fine on OS X, admin account or otherwise.
Yaz.
I'm a big QuickTime fan. It's probably the best container format out there.
But that's the problem -- it's a container format, and not a Codec.
I think what the requester needs is a good cross-platform container format and Codec, in which case MP4 (which is based on QuickTime's container format) is probably the best bet for cross-platform access.
Or, as much as I hate to say it, Real format. I'm not a Real fan, but their player does run natively on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and can be made to run on OS/2 systems if you're so inclined.
Yaz.
It's hard to say. Bluetooth is supposed to be able to transfer at up to 721Kbps, but when transferring data to and from my mobile phone I only tend to get roughly 5KB/s transfer rate. This could be due to the phone itself limiting the transfer rate for some reason I suppose. Unfortunately, I don't have nay other Bluetooth enabled gear (other than the mouse) to do any tests with to see if I can get closer to the maximum throughput of Bluetooth with my PowerBook.
Still, according to the specs this should be possible -- although you could always just use iTunes on the mini to connect to your Shoutcast stream (iTunes can connect to MP3 data streams coming off the Internet), or get some Bluetooth headphones and stream directly to them without going through the mini at all.
Yaz.
The Bluetooth support on the Mac mini is completely programmable. As such, you can do anything with it that Bluetooth supports.
Some of the Bluetooth support that is built into OS X includes:
I have Bluetooth enabled on my PowerBook, and use it with a Bluetooth mouse and my Sony Ericsson T610 cell phone. The mouse works like any other wirelsss mouse (but doesn't need a dongle), and I have the phone set-up for file transfer with the PowerBook, GPRS internet connectivity for instant, on-the-road Internet connectivity, sending and receiving SMS messages from the PowerBook, dialling phone numbers, and synchronization of my address book and calendar between the phone and the PowerBook/.Mac. I haven't installed Sailing Clicker just yet (which allows you to use your bluetooth-enabled cell phone as a remote control for the Mac), but have it sitting in my Downloads directory waiting for some free time to play with it.
In short, there is a lot of cool stuff you can do with Bluetooth -- if you have suitable Bluetooth-enabled devices.
Yaz.
That's good advice -- but not always practical.
First off, WEP is still better than absolutely nothing. It does prevent the uneducated and unexperienced from snooping in on you -- they have to have a bit of knowledge and put in some effort to see what you're doing.
The big problem with WPA is that not all wireless devices support it. I'm in a nasty catch-22 at the moment on my WiFi network in that I've been contracted to do some development with and against a Palm Tungsten C, which is WiFi enabled, but which has absolutely no WPA support. My base station and other portables support WPA just fine, but I'm stuck with WEP because one device manufacturer for a device I absolutely need has decided not to bother with WPA support.
If I had extra money just laying around with nothing much to do, I'd consider buying another base station to be hooked into my network (heavily firewalled off from the rest of my network) to provide only WEP access, and switch everything else back to WPA. But unfortunately I'm stuck with what I have at the moment, and have to rely on SSH and other encrypted protocols as much as possible to ensure my networks security, as WEP alone, while better than absolutely nothing, isn't enough.
Before I go, an open rant: Palm, take your head out of the sand and realize that we T|C users need WPA protection, just like everyone else.
Yaz.
It would also be a complete bitch to run cables into it.
Some years ago I worked for an ISP that had taken over part of an old medical office building that had been renovated (somewhat). There was this one great room with an opening in one inner wall where there used to be a window which we used as the server room.
Everything was great until the day when the VP of Technology decided we should run some cable through the wall, and took a screwdriver and tried to hammer it through the wall. Clang -- he hit solid metal, and couldn't get through. As it turned out, the room used to be an X-ray chamber, and had 1/4" of lead from floor to ceiling in each and every wall.
On the bright side, it was nice to know our server room would have probably survived a distant nuclear blast ;).
Yaz.
Here's my suggestion. Get an older system which has a motherboard which accepts the memory you have -- preferrably one with lots of slots. Install as much RAM into it as you can, along with a NIC.
Install Linux or FreeBSD on it (if it has a hard drive -- if not put together a bootable diskette), and create a big RAM disk -- as big as you can. Set-up either NFS or Samba to allow network access to the RAM drive.
And if you're going to use it for storing anything other than /tmp, put the system on a UPS. Nothing worse than losing a whole disks worth of data due to a minor brownout.
Yaz.
It's not just the same comment over and over again, it was also a story last week.
I guess some PC users are just jealous :).
Yaz.