Maybe eventually somebody will figure out how to hack it to play divx, but out of the box, it definitely doesn't. A simple look at the AppleTV product page would tell you that. The submitter apparently doesn't know how to read.
welcome to today. it's not really a "hack" per se. but i can get divx to play in itunes. and if it plays in itunes it should play on apple tv. it requires quicktime pro. open the divx file in quicktime. then in the save dialog box you can click the "save as reference movie" box. take the reference movie file and drop it into itunes. it plays in itunes just fine. tried it already. the downside is that i can't find any way to change the metadata on it. so right now everything "imported" this way will be listed in the movies section even if it's a tv show or music video. i have an appletv on the way here, so i guess we'll see if it works properly through there. but i suspect it will.
> Just wait till they go to cashless floors and someone engineers a jackpot for themselves.
That would be a neat trick to do with the end-user UI of a slot machine. Physical security is a pretty important first step.
unless i'm misunderstanding you, slot machines already work this way. you can play a slot machine with cash, or you can use a bar-coded receipt from other slot machines. i've sat down and played a few slot machines with no cash and, even after winning some money, stood up and walked away with my winnings without any additional cash. at some point i did have to put cash into the system (the first slot machine) but you can interact with slot machines, execute transactions (plays) and be paid all without cash.
Older Macs don't run more recent versions of Mac OSX very well. I've experienced this first hand. Even a 3 year old Mac can have difficulty running OSX 10.4 consistently well. A 3 or 4 year old PC can handle XP with no problems at all. Vista is the exception. But then Macs had similar problems when OSX was released.
really? well, i guess i better tell my pismo g3/400Mhz, my brother's iBook g3/500 and my titanium powerbook g4/1Ghz to just up and quite working. i'm not sure they realized that they weren't supposed to be working properly.
Well, many people don't like change, thus they stick with Macs because that's what they've always used. The other justifications usually come from the fact that they either just tend to listen to the marketing hype, or because they feel a need to try and justify the more expensive purchase.
what a wonederfully condescending post. first off, why do people who don't work in graphic arts care what graphic artists do with their computers? if it has no relevence to you, then why even argue the point. most of the people i know in graphic and visual arts have been using macs for a long time. much longer than any perceived "hype" of recent os x macs.
has it occurred to anyone that graphic designers prefer using macs and that they might actually have good reasons to use the hardware that they do? i have a windows box that sits on the floor next to my mac. i use it once every couple months to double-check a website design or somesuch other little thing. when i switch to an intel-based mac, i suppose i'll bootcamp into windows for those occassions and not much else.
nobody questions the choices of people in other fields to standardize on particular platforms or apps, but for some reason people really enjoy debating the graphic artists/mac connection. why do people feel the need to question a professional's choice of tools. do you also debate why certain mechanics use snap-on versus milwaukee tools or why one doctor might use a different brand of stethoscope than another? i don't see how anybody in graphic arts has to justify their hardware choices to anybody.
the argument seems to generally stem from the "macs are too expensive" crowd. well, when you bill by the hour, having a computer that works perfectly 99% of the time counteracts that argument. i bought a quad core g5 with 4.5 Gb of RAM, a terabyte internal RAID0 setup and 2 24" monitors. how long did it take me to pay off that rig with work? about a week and a half. why would i, or should i switch to save a few bucks when i already know what i'm using works perfectly for my needs. it's not expensive in the world view, only when you compare it to crap pcs.
seriously, keep your "ooh shiny" and "hype from apple tv ads" and "designers are too dumb to use windows" comments to yourself. it's incredibly insulting. i could choose to learn any platform and could probably get my work done on windows or linux, but why should i? to satisfy the curiousity of some random slashdot posters? or perhaps so i could save $800 on a box and hope that i can transfer all my files, get app crossgrades and generally get up to speed with a different plaform in the 8 hours it would take me to justify the cost savings. anything over 8 hours and i'm losing money. i'd rather just make an educated decision to use macs for my own reasons. but thanks for caring.
well, they could pump up the contrast of their key to eliminate the very low green value in the subject whereas it would probably introduct edge artifacts if they were do pump the contrast of a red key enough to automatically key out skin and any value of red in clothes (which is very common). plus, don't most rgb devices (perhaps even the telecines) have less red photosensors than green and blue? i know bayer sensors on digital cameras are biased in some particular directions.
it's an interesting point. i would think that there are objects that go completely black on a subject especially now that so much work is being done on video rather than on film. an issue might be that there is no room for error. pulling mattes now will leave some fuzzy space that gets blasted over with the suppress pass. i still think there would be areas that are unresolvable and that the black key would be harder to pull against something like black fluffy hair (not that they're perfect on green or blue either). still, the material would be great to coat the insides of cameras and also to make shrouds for shooting large reflective objects so as not to be seen.
I expect a very practical use for this material, if it is not too expensive, will be as a wall coating to replace green screens in filmmaking. It would allow lighting the subjects without worry about any light spill onto the background, and maybe allow better keying for special effects. You would just replace all pixel values that equal zero with your own background data, instead of keying on that narrow-band green which is, after all, still green.
except that would be color keying much harder because black naturally exists on objects like people and clothes. the reason things are shot again chroma green and blue is because they're not as commonly occurring in the objects that they're trying to photograph and extract. the reason the green and blue are a very specific color is to make keying easier by isolating that color in one channel of rgb. that way it's much easier to determine the differential information. keying against black is practically useless unfortunately. you'd have to go in and rotoscope everything that is black (like hair or eyeglass frames or belt, etc) or a value of black back in to the image. plus, on set they don't worry about light spilling onto the screen because they're usually much more brightly lit than the subject to keep a consistent tone throughout. presumeably, the reason they use blue and green is to allow for photography of subjects that are in the other color range (ie, guy with green shirt on bluescreen, guy with blueshirt on greenscreen). nobody keys against chroma red because obviously everyone's skin would cause them to be semi-transparent.
if you're talking about the key color spilling into the subject (like in between hair and such) than that's a different issue. that's why when you do a telecine, you'll do what's called a "suppress pass" which desaturated all of the key's color. that way you can comp the original footage minus the key color back into the comp to kill the color spill without having to hand-draw it into each frame.
i'm sure it could be used for some pretty interesting techniques in photography and film but color keying isn't likely to be one of them.
my apologies. i might have been commenting on flip rather than flip3d. i didn't see a 3d virtual desktop representation in my very limited experience. i was referring to the "windows stacked at a top 3/4 angle" feature that vista has and advertises as a "wow" feature.
i'm not getting bent out of shape. i was asking a question. if flip3d is only an application switcher then what's the point of being able to scroll through the open windows? however you want to define it, flip3d is obviously supposed to give you direct access to a window (not app) other than your current live one. vista seems to already have a separate app switcher that works similarly to the one in os x (or vice versa). it seems you're defending the lack of useability for flip3d by simply redefining what its purpose is. why would an app switcher need all active windows to be available through the scroll wheel of the mouse? that's a window switcher, not an app switcher.
isn't alt-tab an application switcher? from what i saw of vista in costco it has an app switcher that looks almost exactly like the one in os x (i'm not saying they copied it exactly since i don't know when windows included an app switcher). the flip3d thing to me really seems to serve no purpose at all. what exactly is it supposed to do if it's not supposed to serve the same function of expose?
to me it seemed like a pretty useless version of expose where you can really only distinguish the first 3 windows from one another. the rest of them were basically there just for dress. also, it had a limited horizon so you could easily go beyond the window limit of flip3d (which basically defeats the whole purpose). what good is it to gather a representation of open windows if they're not all going to be in view in one shot? why should i go into flip3d and the be forced to scroll to get to the window i want? seems like i could find the actual window in about the same time.
also, expose has a nice feature of grouping windows on one app together. is that was alt-tab is supposed to do?
seriously, i don't know. i don't use windows nearly at all.
but can't you just delete the playlist and recreate it and burn it again? i don't really know since i've never wanted more than 2 copies of any playlist i've created. not sure why i'd want more than ten copies. even if i really did want more than ten copies, i'd probably just dupe the cd itself rather than burn each one individually from itunes.
Actually, this isn't completely true. A year or two ago (possibly more) Apple changed the number of computers you could authorize at one time and the number of burns you could make of a given group of songs. Since they can't legally [IANAL] change the rights of music you have already purchased, you may have Fairplay music with two different sets of 'rights'.
i don't think you're right on that. i have some itunes store music that was bought before the change to the drm terms of service that gave you 5 activations. i believe ALL music bought through the itunes stores was retroactively updated to the new rule of 5 activations, unlimited burns and unlimited ipods (those last two were already there). i don't believe the activation information is kept on the music files themselves, but the itunes applications. i wonder if they can change the rights of the music to be less restrictive.
I've been hating Apple for months now! I can't understand how everyone else can't despise how ubiquitous the ipod has become. I'm prepared to personally stoke the fires of hatred for Apple.
i hate hydrogen! damn you hydrogen for your ubiquity. i've officially become a argon fanboi!
Maybe they aren't trying to make windows look bad, but it seems odd that a company like Apple, that had access to all of the betas and should have had the RTM for the last three months, didn't have this fixed prior to product launch. New PCs are shipping with Vista now, so a not unsizable chunk of people are going to run in to this problem.
you're joking right? microsoft's own zune player and software didn't even work with vista until the final retail release version! it hardly seems like everything was completely sorted out early on.
Or he tried to plug a firewire drive in. Every one I've tried blackscreens the mac instantly (identical to a bluescreen only it's black).
huh? i have 3 firewire drives right here attached to my powermac (one firewire ipod, a fw800 raid and a fw400 bus-powered 2.5" portable). the portable travels with me when i work out of town. thatdrive was plugged into my powerbook, my employer's powermac g4 and my copywriter's ibook g4 all within half an hour and not one kernal panic. in the 6 years i've been using os x (back through to public beta) i've had about 5 kernal panics. most of those in the early days.
i haven't had a kp in about 3 years and i'm constantly hot-swapping firewire drives on all these machines. i'd venture to say i swap a firewire hard drive onto one machine or another about once a day and never have a problem. i also commonly power my external raid on and off which connected to the firewire port with no issues either.
Why is it that the Mac cultists always support ANYTHING Jobs and Co. do, but down on MS. I mean, if MS were to do this, people would be up in arms! "Charging for something we have free already? Come on! This should be FREE to all users! They just want more money!" Apple's basically pulling an MS and Mac people are going "Sure, it costs a little more, but what doesn't?:)"
bootcamp is a beta. it's always been labelled a beta. by your logic MS should be chastised for charging for windows vista when the beta is free to download and test.
Don't you mean AT&T? Why would Verizon run fiber to your home in CA?
because they already do? verizon fios is available in some cities in california already. in fact, i hope to be moving to a city that has it available relatively soon.
Yes, but on the other hand a glaring flaw in the depiction of a knowledge area with which you are familiar can detract from the experience.
that's a very good point. as a graphic designer i've nearly had movies ruined for me because the opening credits were so poorly typeset. seems impossible, i know, but i figure if their attention to detail is that lacking the rest of the movie likely suffers the same fate.
I work in the entertainment industry in L.A. I know absolutely no one who runs any OS other than OS X in the industry unless they want to run multiple OSes for some reason or other. It helps that there's a bajillion apple authorized retailers along with multiple Apple Stores in L.A.
a friend of mine is a script supervisor for episodic television and she used to use a sony vaio. it died and i had to recover the hard drive for her. she then picked up an ibook and neo office/j to do her script prep and hasn't looked back. she said people used to ask her all the time why she was running windows. in my experience in post production, i don't think i ever saw a windows machine. they were either all macs or high end workstations. there were years and years of my life when i literally did not know one person who used a windows box as their main machine. heck, i only know a couple of people who even have a windows machine at all.
apple has consistently been dropping the prices of their ipods. i think a more likely scenario for the price drop was to leave space at the top for a "super ipod" or the true video ipod that's been rumored. they dropped the price of their whole "full-size" line rather than just the 30Gb which indicates a larger plan than just undercutting the zune (which had yet to announce a price). it might be possible that they did it to drive the price of the zune down as one factor of their decision, but it's certainly not as clear as the grandparent implies.
So do they also skip the Apple Store? You can makeany numbers you want if you ask the "correct" set of stores for their sales data.
in other news, the zune debuts as the #1 music player in the microsoft campus employee store. the three zunes sweep the top three spots followed by employee-discounted versions of Xbox360 mousepads and visualstudio baseball caps.
Yes, I agree. The equivalent iPod is now $50 cheaper thanks to the Zune. I also think that indicates that Apple considers the Zune to be a far greater threat than their fanboys will admit, or Apple would not need to drop the price to remain competitive.
that would be an interesting point if it weren't completely wrong. apple dropped the price of the ipods before microsoft even announced the price structure for the zune. in fact, microsoft had to delay the announcement of the zune's price so they could have an internal meeting to decide how to react to the price drop of the equivalent ipod. the 30Gb iPod has been $249 for about a month and a half and the zune was just released last week.
Something just sounds fishy about this; like a scheme to power your car with it's own exhaust.
funny you should mention that because bmw made an announcement recently that does just that. obviously, it doesn't run the entire care off the heat generation from the exhaust, but it converts some of that wasted heat energy into propulsion. here's the car and driver article about it. it's called the bmw turbosteamer. your analogy is unintentionally apt because both systems use previously-wasted heat output to supplement the main power source. despite the fact that it hasn't been done before, it makes sense in both cases.
heat is generated regardless of the efficiency of the process. cpu's and gpu's are going to create heat. if chipmakers can get the cpus to generate less heat per cycle, then they'll make them run faster, thus negating the benefit in efficiency in device's heat signature. i mean, we're already seeing this. so if heat is going to be generated by necessity, any process that can give us a net gain by converting that heat into useable energy is a good thing as long as it's not hideously bulky. basically, it's turning your laptop into a toyota prius without all the smugness. i guess i'm not understanding the derision of this concept.
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has it occurred to anyone that graphic designers prefer using macs and that they might actually have good reasons to use the hardware that they do? i have a windows box that sits on the floor next to my mac. i use it once every couple months to double-check a website design or somesuch other little thing. when i switch to an intel-based mac, i suppose i'll bootcamp into windows for those occassions and not much else.
nobody questions the choices of people in other fields to standardize on particular platforms or apps, but for some reason people really enjoy debating the graphic artists/mac connection. why do people feel the need to question a professional's choice of tools. do you also debate why certain mechanics use snap-on versus milwaukee tools or why one doctor might use a different brand of stethoscope than another? i don't see how anybody in graphic arts has to justify their hardware choices to anybody.
the argument seems to generally stem from the "macs are too expensive" crowd. well, when you bill by the hour, having a computer that works perfectly 99% of the time counteracts that argument. i bought a quad core g5 with 4.5 Gb of RAM, a terabyte internal RAID0 setup and 2 24" monitors. how long did it take me to pay off that rig with work? about a week and a half. why would i, or should i switch to save a few bucks when i already know what i'm using works perfectly for my needs. it's not expensive in the world view, only when you compare it to crap pcs.
seriously, keep your "ooh shiny" and "hype from apple tv ads" and "designers are too dumb to use windows" comments to yourself. it's incredibly insulting. i could choose to learn any platform and could probably get my work done on windows or linux, but why should i? to satisfy the curiousity of some random slashdot posters? or perhaps so i could save $800 on a box and hope that i can transfer all my files, get app crossgrades and generally get up to speed with a different plaform in the 8 hours it would take me to justify the cost savings. anything over 8 hours and i'm losing money. i'd rather just make an educated decision to use macs for my own reasons. but thanks for caring.
well, they could pump up the contrast of their key to eliminate the very low green value in the subject whereas it would probably introduct edge artifacts if they were do pump the contrast of a red key enough to automatically key out skin and any value of red in clothes (which is very common). plus, don't most rgb devices (perhaps even the telecines) have less red photosensors than green and blue? i know bayer sensors on digital cameras are biased in some particular directions.
it's an interesting point. i would think that there are objects that go completely black on a subject especially now that so much work is being done on video rather than on film. an issue might be that there is no room for error. pulling mattes now will leave some fuzzy space that gets blasted over with the suppress pass. i still think there would be areas that are unresolvable and that the black key would be harder to pull against something like black fluffy hair (not that they're perfect on green or blue either). still, the material would be great to coat the insides of cameras and also to make shrouds for shooting large reflective objects so as not to be seen.
if you're talking about the key color spilling into the subject (like in between hair and such) than that's a different issue. that's why when you do a telecine, you'll do what's called a "suppress pass" which desaturated all of the key's color. that way you can comp the original footage minus the key color back into the comp to kill the color spill without having to hand-draw it into each frame.
i'm sure it could be used for some pretty interesting techniques in photography and film but color keying isn't likely to be one of them.
my apologies. i might have been commenting on flip rather than flip3d. i didn't see a 3d virtual desktop representation in my very limited experience. i was referring to the "windows stacked at a top 3/4 angle" feature that vista has and advertises as a "wow" feature.
i'm not getting bent out of shape. i was asking a question. if flip3d is only an application switcher then what's the point of being able to scroll through the open windows? however you want to define it, flip3d is obviously supposed to give you direct access to a window (not app) other than your current live one. vista seems to already have a separate app switcher that works similarly to the one in os x (or vice versa). it seems you're defending the lack of useability for flip3d by simply redefining what its purpose is. why would an app switcher need all active windows to be available through the scroll wheel of the mouse? that's a window switcher, not an app switcher.
isn't alt-tab an application switcher? from what i saw of vista in costco it has an app switcher that looks almost exactly like the one in os x (i'm not saying they copied it exactly since i don't know when windows included an app switcher). the flip3d thing to me really seems to serve no purpose at all. what exactly is it supposed to do if it's not supposed to serve the same function of expose? to me it seemed like a pretty useless version of expose where you can really only distinguish the first 3 windows from one another. the rest of them were basically there just for dress. also, it had a limited horizon so you could easily go beyond the window limit of flip3d (which basically defeats the whole purpose). what good is it to gather a representation of open windows if they're not all going to be in view in one shot? why should i go into flip3d and the be forced to scroll to get to the window i want? seems like i could find the actual window in about the same time. also, expose has a nice feature of grouping windows on one app together. is that was alt-tab is supposed to do? seriously, i don't know. i don't use windows nearly at all.
but can't you just delete the playlist and recreate it and burn it again? i don't really know since i've never wanted more than 2 copies of any playlist i've created. not sure why i'd want more than ten copies. even if i really did want more than ten copies, i'd probably just dupe the cd itself rather than burn each one individually from itunes.
i haven't had a kp in about 3 years and i'm constantly hot-swapping firewire drives on all these machines. i'd venture to say i swap a firewire hard drive onto one machine or another about once a day and never have a problem. i also commonly power my external raid on and off which connected to the firewire port with no issues either.
apple has consistently been dropping the prices of their ipods. i think a more likely scenario for the price drop was to leave space at the top for a "super ipod" or the true video ipod that's been rumored. they dropped the price of their whole "full-size" line rather than just the 30Gb which indicates a larger plan than just undercutting the zune (which had yet to announce a price). it might be possible that they did it to drive the price of the zune down as one factor of their decision, but it's certainly not as clear as the grandparent implies.
heat is generated regardless of the efficiency of the process. cpu's and gpu's are going to create heat. if chipmakers can get the cpus to generate less heat per cycle, then they'll make them run faster, thus negating the benefit in efficiency in device's heat signature. i mean, we're already seeing this. so if heat is going to be generated by necessity, any process that can give us a net gain by converting that heat into useable energy is a good thing as long as it's not hideously bulky. basically, it's turning your laptop into a toyota prius without all the smugness. i guess i'm not understanding the derision of this concept.