I have a Nano, and have absolutely no protection for it except the little leather-esque sleeve Apple now ships with them (they didn't come with the earlier shipments though).
I carry my Nano daily in the little pocket (match pocket, watch pocket) in my jeans, use it almost daily sitting out in a wood/metal shop (scenery shop at a theater), and it has no real scratches on it thus far, although it does collect dust.
No screen cracking, a few small scratches near the connector, but none near the screen which is especially telling as I have one of the infamous Black Nanos.
take for example Etymotic, with their earphones that absolutely seal into your ear canal, blocking out almost all outside noise, and putting themselves very close indeed to your eardrum.
Actually if used properly this will make the Etymotic/Shure headphones less likely to cause damage to your hearing.
You see hearing and volume are relative. The more background noise there is the louder the sound you are listening to has to be to overcome that background noise. With fully sealed in-ear designs you have very little background noise to overcome and thus can have a lower volume on your music and you will hear it similarly to if you cranked it up with normal headphones.
A great example of this is your car. When you are driving really slow you don't have to turn the radio up very high. Once you hit the highway, the road noise starts masking the music and you have to turn up. You get used to the music being so loud, then when you stop somewhere, turn off the car, then turn it back on you get a big surprise!
I bought a set of Etymotic ER6's for this very reason, I also got a set of custom earmolds made as I find earplugs very uncomfortable (no matter what size or type), as well as since I am an audio professional I can buy the Etymotic inserts that make them flat response earplugs. Very handy, plus since using them I have never experienced a threshold shift after listening on the headphones.
Of course care is needed with this type of headphone, as if you are not moderate with your listening level you can expose your ears to very high levels of music (which I can only imagine would be absolutely painful, but let's be honest, people are dumb), plus as another poster mentioned, the popping that occurs from plugging in and unplugging could potentially be very loud as well, so you would want to remove the headphones before connecting or disconnecting them.
That said, I haven't had a problem with this on my iPod Nano, the popping is very soft, even with the headphones in (yes, I occasionally forget...)
For the first generation iMac G5 it even tells you the color of the 3 screws that you need to remove, I bet that has not changed with the Intel version.
Actually since Intel designed the motherboards they required Apple to buy Genuine Intel screws which have quite a different hue than the regular Apple screws. As such several weeks of meetings between engineering and marketing (with Steve present of course) was spent ensuring that the new screw color scheme would match well with the color of all the cables and the circuit boards themselves.
The type of problem that having a not always on connection would help with is a remote attack.
A Broadband connection with a hardware router/firewall is much more secure against this type of attack. You are basically hoping that you win a Russian Roulette if you are hoping not to catch a worm by using dial up.
With a few of the more recent worms I have known more people with dial up to catch them then broadband users due to the fact that the broadband users had a hardware firewall (I don't set much stock in software firewalls, especially on Windows systems).
Get a broadband connection, and get a router/firewall box from any reputable manufacturer, and keep your system up to date. That is the best prevention, plus you get all the advantages of a broadband connection (always on, speed, etc)
A lot of people don't seem to see why you would really want to do this. Many businesses and universities are very PC only, even though they are curious about using/integrating Macs.
When I worked for a satellite campus of Indiana University, I was directly in charge of 2 Mac labs and 6 PC labs. One of the departments seriously was discussing moving their 3 PC only labs to Intel Mac if they could dual boot.
Why?
Because then they could still have all the software they already use, and the faculty and students could reboot into Mac OS to play around and see what was up with it. Surprisingly it was the most hard core PC only faculty that was really excited about this option. A chance for them to work in the same room(s) they always work in, but try out the other side.
Many of the students we encouraged to work on both ended up purchasing a Mac, but that is only because they had the ability to get exposed to them. In many universities this isn't the case anymore.
Most of the students where using Adobe and Macromedia products, but the fastest to consider switching where the Maya students. Showing them a lower spec'ed Mac easily outperforming our PC's (Opterons BTW) was very interesting. The only way we got better performance was on the PC's under Linux, which after trying that most students found they did not like dealing with Linux (sorry, I'll probably get mod'ed down for that, but it was truthfully what I saw).
Apple not hindering the ability to run windows, which they have stated they haven't done, and I have no reason to believe they have, in some cases could actually net them quite a few sales they would not have been able to get otherwise.
Seriously, I just got a Harmony 520. I have programmed Pronto remotes before, and if you are really hard core there are some shortcomings to the Harmonies, but for most people they work very well and are pretty painless to set up.
A few advantages:
1. My entire family can use it. Most of those people are very non-technical 2. Activity based with smart state: Have a stupid cable box that doesn't have discreet on and off commands? The remote remembers what it has turned on and off so that when it goes from one activity to another it can switch between multiple inputs and turn on/off only what is necessary. Have 4 inputs that need to be toggled through, it will do it. 3. Supports both Mac and PC out of the box. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Linux people with solutions to get it to work (the programming is done on the web site, the client side is a Java app that takes the file from the website and flashes the remote) 4. A set up activity will control everything in the system necessary for that activity. For example, when watching DVDs most buttons control the DVD player, but you can have the volume buttons control the AV Receiver, and other buttons controlling features on the TV like aspect control, etc. 5. Costs not much more than much less capable "universal" remotes.
I was not a believer in these things for years, but after using one (and the cheapest one available mind you) I'm pretty impressed.
So, what's the adjustable parameter for, then, if not to control the maximum output frequency? It's not like you'd need or want a way to limit the speed and quality of the onboard D/A.
I didn't see anything about 'adjustable parameter' on the oppodigital.com site. Maybe is that a down sampling option? Many players will down sample DVD-Audio to 96Khz or 48Khz so that it can be played via a digital connection and/or on an older receiver that only supports 48Khz audio connections.
Other than that you will have to be more specific as Oppo apparently doesn't have online manuals to download.
OPPO OPDV971H. Of course, I don't really have any way to tell whether it actually works, as I don't have any DVD-Audio discs, which was the point I was trying to make.
That device does not output 192Khz digitally. It has its own 192Khz D/A for DVD-Audio which you could listen to with Analog connections. With the digital connections you can only get 96Khz stereo, or 48Khz 5.1 if it uses DTS or Dolby Digital.
If you have a receiver with 192Khz D/A built in it is for 2 reasons:
1. So many devices use 192Khz chips (dvd players, and pro-sumer recording gear) that it is probably cheaper to source a 192K chip than just a 96K chip.
2. Marketing, most people don't realize that having 192Khz D/A in the receiver rather than 96K does absolutely nothing for them. But since the number is bigger they are more likely to buy it.
I'll bet you that it says it has a 192Khz D/A convertor. That doesn't mean that it has any method to get 192Khz into it digitally. I see this in spec sheets all the time, a convertor installed to up the specs even though most of the features can't be implemented by the hardware attached to it.
Check the specs, and try actually passing digital audio to it, can you actually get any 192Khz into it via optical or SPDIF? If so I would like to know what DVD player you have as none that I have ever seen support doing that. You can do 192Khz now on AES, possibly only with S/MUX though. Typically to get any more than stereo 96Khz on either SPDIF or optical requires S/MUX, which either halves your channels (i.e. 1 channel for TOSLINK, 4 channels for Lightpipe), or requires twice the number of connections.
Why not? Because the DRM is so cripplingly inconvenient, it's not worth it. With a CD I can listen on my iPod, stream over my home network and listen at any computer, listen on my PDA, play the CD in the car, make mix CDs for the car, and so on. With DVD-Audio, they won't even allow digital feed from the player to the amp, so I'd need to buy a set of extra analog cables, I'd get lower quality (my amp has much better D to A than my player), and I wouldn't be able to rip the audio conveniently.
Not being able to do either full DVD-audio or any SACD over digital connections has less to do with DRM and more to do with following standards. Digital connections all use the SPDIF format (or TOSLINK which pretty much is just optical SPDIF). The SPDIF standard only has enough bandwidth for 2 channels at 96Khz. If your DVD-Audio disk is stereo only at 96Khz you can transfer it digitally, if it is multi-channel at 96Khz, or stereo at 192Khz, then you have to go analog as SPDIF doesn't have the bandwidth with the current standards. SACD is a whole other beast since it is just a raw bitstream, no current standard digital connections support that, at least none used on consumer equipment.
Sure they could have made new standards to transfer these digitally, but then how many "standards" will we have ended up with? Yet another format war would have appeared, and on an item that was already going the way of a format war (one that still has no resolution in sight).
For the sake of argument, let's say that they did use an updated SPDIF format, or something new. Would you have bought a new receiver just for that connection for your DVD-Audio disks and/or SACDs? Most people probably wouldn't as it would be cheaper to connect the analog leads to the equipment they already have and probably like.
I wish I lived somewhere this was true. Cox charges a $14.50 per month charge for this. Both DirecTV and Dish Network are almost $5 per month for it.
If I don't have a need for digital cable, it would only cost me about $12.95 per month according to the Tivo site, and I would save $20 per month not getting the digital add-on to the normal cable (which usually has everything I really would want to watch anyway).
Sure, MythTV and/or Freevo might seem cheaper, but my time is valuable as well. I need to factor in the amount of time I will have to deal with getting them set up in a way that my Wife, and any babysitters would be able to use them without any issues. This is already a done deal with a Tivo.
which is how we came up with the so-called CD-quality audio of 16 bit amplitude at 44 KHz
Actually 44.1 was choosen as it was originally supposed to be 48KHz, but at that sampling rate with the size of the disc decided upon there was not enough space for the then president of Sony's favorite recording of Beethovin's 9th Symphony to fit on a single disc.
Sony engineers moved to 44.1KHz to make their president happy. It was as high resolution as they could get with the amount of time they needed. There were also battles to keep it at 16 bits as numerous entities wanted to use 14 bits. Thank goodness they didn't do that as that difference would be much more noticeable to the average listener than dropping from 48k to 44.1.
You don't need the RIAA to get your wares sold on iTunes. You need a CD with a professional looking label applied to it along with $500 given to CD Baby, and you'll be available through iTunes.
In this sense I am really somewhat of an oddball. If I buy an iPod it will be more for work than play.
I hardly ever just listen to music unless I am at home, or in the car. I would love an iPod for car trips, and that is one place where having the whole library would be great, as I am either just driving across town (and probably just a snippet off NPR will do), or on at least a week long trip across the country (both my parents and my in-laws are 15 hour car trips away). I would love to get a kit to control the iPod basics from the stereo, and still be able to get to the iPod to do more advanced searching when me and/or my wife decide it is time for something completely different. Plus the ability to get audiobooks without swapping disks is great, if only iTMS could set up a library type system (pay $1 to get an audiobook for a week for example) then I could convince my wife to let me buy an iPod in a heartbeat.
The other great advantage to having the whole library available is when I first meet with a director, if we start hashing out ideas for a show I can pull up some samples on the iPod no matter what genres we are thinking about. For this I am also thinking of getting one of the Altec Lansing or JBL speaker systems the iPod plugs into. Not terribly hifi, but more than enough for production meetings.
but I wouldn't personally buy anything with less than 20GB for songs.
You know I felt the exact same way a few days ago. My music library is about 9GB and growing (I'm a Sound Designer so I can tax deduct my music library). I really would find it way more usable to have my whole library on a device so that I can always pick and choose from the whole thing.
That nano is really nice looking though. Typically I wouldn't care much. I usually put function before form, especially in a device like this, but something about that nano really is drawing me in.
One part of the whole deal is that I don't feel like having to figure out which playlists to take with me at different times.
But the draw of the nano is making me start to think it wouldn't be that bad.
I'm feeling very confused and annoyed to have my typical efficient nature toyed with in this way.
Hm, lets see here, 500km/50L equals 10km/1L according to earth math.
And according to Google that equates to 23.5-ish mpg.
What I am really unsure of is wether I should be more amused that you were so far off in the first place, or that the mods put you at +5 Interesting at the time I viewed.
The suspension of disbelief is such an ancient concept that to encapsulate it as a function of modern filmaking is amazingly short sighted.
Anyone who has studied "entertainment arts" for the past few hundreds years has been aware of this issue. As a matter of fact it is one of the reasons that opera developed in the way it did. All dramatic plays at the time followed the rules of verisimilitude meaning that if an audience sat through a play for 3 hours the action of the play had to be 3 hours as well (no going from night scenes to day scenes, etc). Opera brought back the concept of suspension of disbelief in a major way (allowing fancy new technology to do quick scenery changes and new lighting effect to actually be used on stage).
Graphics are only a part of the whole that allow us either to suspend our disbelief of the world we view, or help draw us into the concept so we can empathise with the game characters (which brings catharsis into play). And that is the whole point of any entertainment - to draw the audience into it and make it seem real, even if for only a half an hour.
Spotlight is the evolution of Apple's search technology that was introduced with Sherlock in OS 8.1.
Sherlock added the option to do system wide contextual search. The major issue with it was that the indexing was scheduled. As such if you didn't run your computer 24/7 (indexing happened at night by default), or you didn't like the performance hit from a system task indexing all of your drives, it wasn't very useful to you.
This index by schedule and contextual search was also available under the previous versions of OS X, only by that time it was so unpopular that the options were a bit hidden in Get Info dialog boxes.
The changes introduced with Spotlight are that a full indexing path happens once after the initial OS install, then all indexing is done as files are created/modified, therefore making the system much more transparent and overall useful, as well as the inclusion of metadata/keywords/etc.
While Spotlight seems very new, especially as contextual search options under OS X have been hidden and/or disabled, it really is a natural evolution of a system that has been around for 7 or more years.
So if Apple is ripping off Microsoft on system wide search, it is only because Microsoft is already ripping them off. Or to put it bluntly, they are really ripping themselves off.
You are complaining about $35 to get set up in an online store? That is a one time fee for their labor to scan your album art and do ALL the conversion for their previews and all the online stores available.
Why do people have to be so incredibly cheap? This is just insane.
Not only does CD Baby do the above, but they actually have a human being listen to the files to ensure that they didn't get messed up, and to set up the "sounds like" links. You are easily getting a couple hours worth of work for $35.
Okay, if you don't have a bar code yet, that is an additional $20, but try registering yourself for your own barcodes, it is a heck of a lot more than $20.
I'm guessing that the Developer machines are Pentium 4 simply for cost reasons.
Apple wants as much software to be native and trouble free by the first time a production Intel machine ships, and making it cheaper for the Developers to get their hands on a test machine just makes sense.
Remeber Apple has been through a couple of major platform changes, they have an idea of all the speedbumps they are going to hit, and are trying their best to plan around them.
I maintain the IT for a small company with about 50 computers. We have computers 9-10 years old still running Windows 2000, on pentium 2's and what not. Sure its not XP, but other than the end of life of 2000, I still have yet to see the benifit of XP...
How many 10 year old macs are running OSX?
Er, XP has been out for 5 years now, so your 10 year old machines are running 5 year old outdated software. What you are really asking is how many 5 year old Macs are running OS X, and that number is probably pretty high as any Mac sold within the last 5 years is still supported by at least 10.3 if not 10.4.
I have a machine I purchased in early 2002. It replaced a machine I bought in 1997. That machine from 1997 continued to run until I sold it 3rd party in 2004, and I am sure it is still running today. If you wanted to you could run OS X on it, however it requires a 3rd party hack. But OS 9 for someone who hasn't had need to upgrade their software (much like you haven't had need of upgrading your OS) still works just fine. In fact I often wished that I still had that machine for a certain software that I still haven't found a real replacement for yet (and will not work in classic).
As a matter of fact I purchased one of the first PPC machines back in 1995, and it is still in use by the person I sold it to. That is definitely 10 years old, but no it does not run OS X, but the tools that person uses were not upgraded enough for X for it to make sense for him to upgrade.
The only reason I dream of upgrading today is simply for portability. I would love to have a laptop, and while newer machines can do tasks with a bit more spunk than my current machine, it certainly does handle what I need it to do.
Re:RAID for "personal computers"? but why?
on
Basics of RAID
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and a reasonable backup regimen
Ah, but that is the rub, is it not? Many people are using mirrored arrays as an excuse to not backup.
The university department I work for has a faculty member that teaches this through his actions. He claims everyone should backup (to cheap CDR's and DVD's mind you) and all of his workstations, and any students he has assisted with a purchase uses a Promise RAID1.
Some of those machines have returned for assistance with issues, and I have seen some pretty odd hacks to get those RAID1 systems set up!
This same faculty member has fought me on implementing a backup solution on the server that actual graded projects and finals exist on! Luckily I did convince them of deploying a RAID5 solution a while back, however as we all know that gives us uptime, but doesn't protect us when someone makes a boneheaded maneuver.
We finally had a big enough issue come up that the Dean got us special funding for a backup solution (I had been begging for for 2 years). Well, my wife has new employment, and we are moving so I turned in my resignation. He has already gotten the funds frozen, likely for re-assignment, as apparently without me around they will not need it. It seems they only need something like that when someone tells them they do, and when they leave the department no longer needs it.
Well, at least it has way better benefits than working in the real world...
Wow, you must have gotten a very different email than I did then.
To continue to provide you with premium Vonage service, please login to your web account to review this feature and acknowledge your understanding. We apologize for sending you repeated notifications, but we require your acknowledgement as a result of the FCC ruling.
They required the rest of us to log in, and to acknowledge the statement of differences between their 911 service and landline 911 service.
It doesn't state anything about being forced to enable the service, and when I read the acknowledgment page in my account it was not necessary to enable 911 service there either.
It is still optional to use the service, you are only required to read a statement that tells you it is optional, and possible issues you may have if you use that optional service.
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I have a Nano, and have absolutely no protection for it except the little leather-esque sleeve Apple now ships with them (they didn't come with the earlier shipments though).
I carry my Nano daily in the little pocket (match pocket, watch pocket) in my jeans, use it almost daily sitting out in a wood/metal shop (scenery shop at a theater), and it has no real scratches on it thus far, although it does collect dust.
No screen cracking, a few small scratches near the connector, but none near the screen which is especially telling as I have one of the infamous Black Nanos.
You see hearing and volume are relative. The more background noise there is the louder the sound you are listening to has to be to overcome that background noise. With fully sealed in-ear designs you have very little background noise to overcome and thus can have a lower volume on your music and you will hear it similarly to if you cranked it up with normal headphones.
A great example of this is your car. When you are driving really slow you don't have to turn the radio up very high. Once you hit the highway, the road noise starts masking the music and you have to turn up. You get used to the music being so loud, then when you stop somewhere, turn off the car, then turn it back on you get a big surprise!
I bought a set of Etymotic ER6's for this very reason, I also got a set of custom earmolds made as I find earplugs very uncomfortable (no matter what size or type), as well as since I am an audio professional I can buy the Etymotic inserts that make them flat response earplugs. Very handy, plus since using them I have never experienced a threshold shift after listening on the headphones.
Of course care is needed with this type of headphone, as if you are not moderate with your listening level you can expose your ears to very high levels of music (which I can only imagine would be absolutely painful, but let's be honest, people are dumb), plus as another poster mentioned, the popping that occurs from plugging in and unplugging could potentially be very loud as well, so you would want to remove the headphones before connecting or disconnecting them.
That said, I haven't had a problem with this on my iPod Nano, the popping is very soft, even with the headphones in (yes, I occasionally forget...)
(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
Bzzz. Sorry he/she fails.
The type of problem that having a not always on connection would help with is a remote attack.
A Broadband connection with a hardware router/firewall is much more secure against this type of attack. You are basically hoping that you win a Russian Roulette if you are hoping not to catch a worm by using dial up.
With a few of the more recent worms I have known more people with dial up to catch them then broadband users due to the fact that the broadband users had a hardware firewall (I don't set much stock in software firewalls, especially on Windows systems).
Get a broadband connection, and get a router/firewall box from any reputable manufacturer, and keep your system up to date. That is the best prevention, plus you get all the advantages of a broadband connection (always on, speed, etc)
A lot of people don't seem to see why you would really want to do this. Many businesses and universities are very PC only, even though they are curious about using/integrating Macs.
When I worked for a satellite campus of Indiana University, I was directly in charge of 2 Mac labs and 6 PC labs. One of the departments seriously was discussing moving their 3 PC only labs to Intel Mac if they could dual boot.
Why?
Because then they could still have all the software they already use, and the faculty and students could reboot into Mac OS to play around and see what was up with it. Surprisingly it was the most hard core PC only faculty that was really excited about this option. A chance for them to work in the same room(s) they always work in, but try out the other side.
Many of the students we encouraged to work on both ended up purchasing a Mac, but that is only because they had the ability to get exposed to them. In many universities this isn't the case anymore.
Most of the students where using Adobe and Macromedia products, but the fastest to consider switching where the Maya students. Showing them a lower spec'ed Mac easily outperforming our PC's (Opterons BTW) was very interesting. The only way we got better performance was on the PC's under Linux, which after trying that most students found they did not like dealing with Linux (sorry, I'll probably get mod'ed down for that, but it was truthfully what I saw).
Apple not hindering the ability to run windows, which they have stated they haven't done, and I have no reason to believe they have, in some cases could actually net them quite a few sales they would not have been able to get otherwise.
Seriously, I just got a Harmony 520. I have programmed Pronto remotes before, and if you are really hard core there are some shortcomings to the Harmonies, but for most people they work very well and are pretty painless to set up.
A few advantages:
1. My entire family can use it. Most of those people are very non-technical
2. Activity based with smart state: Have a stupid cable box that doesn't have discreet on and off commands? The remote remembers what it has turned on and off so that when it goes from one activity to another it can switch between multiple inputs and turn on/off only what is necessary. Have 4 inputs that need to be toggled through, it will do it.
3. Supports both Mac and PC out of the box. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Linux people with solutions to get it to work (the programming is done on the web site, the client side is a Java app that takes the file from the website and flashes the remote)
4. A set up activity will control everything in the system necessary for that activity. For example, when watching DVDs most buttons control the DVD player, but you can have the volume buttons control the AV Receiver, and other buttons controlling features on the TV like aspect control, etc.
5. Costs not much more than much less capable "universal" remotes.
I was not a believer in these things for years, but after using one (and the cheapest one available mind you) I'm pretty impressed.
Other than that you will have to be more specific as Oppo apparently doesn't have online manuals to download.
If you have a receiver with 192Khz D/A built in it is for 2 reasons:
1. So many devices use 192Khz chips (dvd players, and pro-sumer recording gear) that it is probably cheaper to source a 192K chip than just a 96K chip.
2. Marketing, most people don't realize that having 192Khz D/A in the receiver rather than 96K does absolutely nothing for them. But since the number is bigger they are more likely to buy it.
Check the specs, and try actually passing digital audio to it, can you actually get any 192Khz into it via optical or SPDIF? If so I would like to know what DVD player you have as none that I have ever seen support doing that. You can do 192Khz now on AES, possibly only with S/MUX though. Typically to get any more than stereo 96Khz on either SPDIF or optical requires S/MUX, which either halves your channels (i.e. 1 channel for TOSLINK, 4 channels for Lightpipe), or requires twice the number of connections.
Sure they could have made new standards to transfer these digitally, but then how many "standards" will we have ended up with? Yet another format war would have appeared, and on an item that was already going the way of a format war (one that still has no resolution in sight).
For the sake of argument, let's say that they did use an updated SPDIF format, or something new. Would you have bought a new receiver just for that connection for your DVD-Audio disks and/or SACDs? Most people probably wouldn't as it would be cheaper to connect the analog leads to the equipment they already have and probably like.
If I don't have a need for digital cable, it would only cost me about $12.95 per month according to the Tivo site, and I would save $20 per month not getting the digital add-on to the normal cable (which usually has everything I really would want to watch anyway).
Sure, MythTV and/or Freevo might seem cheaper, but my time is valuable as well. I need to factor in the amount of time I will have to deal with getting them set up in a way that my Wife, and any babysitters would be able to use them without any issues. This is already a done deal with a Tivo.
Sony engineers moved to 44.1KHz to make their president happy. It was as high resolution as they could get with the amount of time they needed. There were also battles to keep it at 16 bits as numerous entities wanted to use 14 bits. Thank goodness they didn't do that as that difference would be much more noticeable to the average listener than dropping from 48k to 44.1.
I hardly ever just listen to music unless I am at home, or in the car. I would love an iPod for car trips, and that is one place where having the whole library would be great, as I am either just driving across town (and probably just a snippet off NPR will do), or on at least a week long trip across the country (both my parents and my in-laws are 15 hour car trips away). I would love to get a kit to control the iPod basics from the stereo, and still be able to get to the iPod to do more advanced searching when me and/or my wife decide it is time for something completely different. Plus the ability to get audiobooks without swapping disks is great, if only iTMS could set up a library type system (pay $1 to get an audiobook for a week for example) then I could convince my wife to let me buy an iPod in a heartbeat.
The other great advantage to having the whole library available is when I first meet with a director, if we start hashing out ideas for a show I can pull up some samples on the iPod no matter what genres we are thinking about. For this I am also thinking of getting one of the Altec Lansing or JBL speaker systems the iPod plugs into. Not terribly hifi, but more than enough for production meetings.
That nano is really nice looking though. Typically I wouldn't care much. I usually put function before form, especially in a device like this, but something about that nano really is drawing me in.
One part of the whole deal is that I don't feel like having to figure out which playlists to take with me at different times.
But the draw of the nano is making me start to think it wouldn't be that bad.
I'm feeling very confused and annoyed to have my typical efficient nature toyed with in this way.
While in the minority, especially as far as advertising goes, these things still do exist.
Hm, lets see here, 500km/50L equals 10km/1L according to earth math.
And according to Google that equates to 23.5-ish mpg.
What I am really unsure of is wether I should be more amused that you were so far off in the first place, or that the mods put you at +5 Interesting at the time I viewed.
The suspension of disbelief is such an ancient concept that to encapsulate it as a function of modern filmaking is amazingly short sighted.
Anyone who has studied "entertainment arts" for the past few hundreds years has been aware of this issue. As a matter of fact it is one of the reasons that opera developed in the way it did. All dramatic plays at the time followed the rules of verisimilitude meaning that if an audience sat through a play for 3 hours the action of the play had to be 3 hours as well (no going from night scenes to day scenes, etc). Opera brought back the concept of suspension of disbelief in a major way (allowing fancy new technology to do quick scenery changes and new lighting effect to actually be used on stage).
Graphics are only a part of the whole that allow us either to suspend our disbelief of the world we view, or help draw us into the concept so we can empathise with the game characters (which brings catharsis into play). And that is the whole point of any entertainment - to draw the audience into it and make it seem real, even if for only a half an hour.
Spotlight is the evolution of Apple's search technology that was introduced with Sherlock in OS 8.1.
Sherlock added the option to do system wide contextual search. The major issue with it was that the indexing was scheduled. As such if you didn't run your computer 24/7 (indexing happened at night by default), or you didn't like the performance hit from a system task indexing all of your drives, it wasn't very useful to you.
This index by schedule and contextual search was also available under the previous versions of OS X, only by that time it was so unpopular that the options were a bit hidden in Get Info dialog boxes.
The changes introduced with Spotlight are that a full indexing path happens once after the initial OS install, then all indexing is done as files are created/modified, therefore making the system much more transparent and overall useful, as well as the inclusion of metadata/keywords/etc.
While Spotlight seems very new, especially as contextual search options under OS X have been hidden and/or disabled, it really is a natural evolution of a system that has been around for 7 or more years.
So if Apple is ripping off Microsoft on system wide search, it is only because Microsoft is already ripping them off. Or to put it bluntly, they are really ripping themselves off.
I had set up a number of Opteron workstations at a university that used Grub to dual boot between XP and SuSe 64 bit (9.2 Pro).
That worked perfectly, perhaps it is the version of Grub included with Gentoo?
Why do people have to be so incredibly cheap? This is just insane.
Not only does CD Baby do the above, but they actually have a human being listen to the files to ensure that they didn't get messed up, and to set up the "sounds like" links. You are easily getting a couple hours worth of work for $35.
Okay, if you don't have a bar code yet, that is an additional $20, but try registering yourself for your own barcodes, it is a heck of a lot more than $20.
Apple wants as much software to be native and trouble free by the first time a production Intel machine ships, and making it cheaper for the Developers to get their hands on a test machine just makes sense.
Remeber Apple has been through a couple of major platform changes, they have an idea of all the speedbumps they are going to hit, and are trying their best to plan around them.
I have a machine I purchased in early 2002. It replaced a machine I bought in 1997. That machine from 1997 continued to run until I sold it 3rd party in 2004, and I am sure it is still running today. If you wanted to you could run OS X on it, however it requires a 3rd party hack. But OS 9 for someone who hasn't had need to upgrade their software (much like you haven't had need of upgrading your OS) still works just fine. In fact I often wished that I still had that machine for a certain software that I still haven't found a real replacement for yet (and will not work in classic).
As a matter of fact I purchased one of the first PPC machines back in 1995, and it is still in use by the person I sold it to. That is definitely 10 years old, but no it does not run OS X, but the tools that person uses were not upgraded enough for X for it to make sense for him to upgrade.
The only reason I dream of upgrading today is simply for portability. I would love to have a laptop, and while newer machines can do tasks with a bit more spunk than my current machine, it certainly does handle what I need it to do.
The university department I work for has a faculty member that teaches this through his actions. He claims everyone should backup (to cheap CDR's and DVD's mind you) and all of his workstations, and any students he has assisted with a purchase uses a Promise RAID1.
Some of those machines have returned for assistance with issues, and I have seen some pretty odd hacks to get those RAID1 systems set up!
This same faculty member has fought me on implementing a backup solution on the server that actual graded projects and finals exist on! Luckily I did convince them of deploying a RAID5 solution a while back, however as we all know that gives us uptime, but doesn't protect us when someone makes a boneheaded maneuver.
We finally had a big enough issue come up that the Dean got us special funding for a backup solution (I had been begging for for 2 years). Well, my wife has new employment, and we are moving so I turned in my resignation. He has already gotten the funds frozen, likely for re-assignment, as apparently without me around they will not need it. It seems they only need something like that when someone tells them they do, and when they leave the department no longer needs it.
Well, at least it has way better benefits than working in the real world...
It doesn't state anything about being forced to enable the service, and when I read the acknowledgment page in my account it was not necessary to enable 911 service there either.
It is still optional to use the service, you are only required to read a statement that tells you it is optional, and possible issues you may have if you use that optional service.