I did an "upgrade" (a general "no-no" from most people, although it doesn't really affect much) and everything has been fine for me. Spotlight takes a moment longer than Quicksilver or Launchbar when it comes to searching, but it also indexes everything. It's also NOT based just on file names.
For instance, if you type in "word" it'll find documents that contain the word "word" but also.doc files created in word, help files for word, etc. So it's not just based on file names, like the above programs, and works out-of-the-box for the entire system.
So currently I use both.
Similarly, I've not experienced any issues with things being disabled, but there's also little out there that utilizes CoreImage functionality. If they've disabled it for the standard windowing GUI, it's not very noticeable.
Otherwise it's very stable and works as expected. Some of the newer technologies have some quirks but they all seem to be working quite well for me. I know I'm just one person, but it's usually the people who don't have any problems who make the least noise.
Re:Sure its a great RPG....
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Review: Jade Empire
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A great deal of the time in longer RPGs is in the combat, which is turn-based and takes much longer.
Similarly, combat is based on random encounters, rather than specific spots. For example, backtracking through an area in Final Fantasy will take a good half hour as you fight every other minute or so. In Jade Empire, it takes about 3 minutes, with 1 minute spent loading the area.
Add all those times up and it's easy to see that if Jade Empire had turn-based combat with random encounters, it would easily take at least twice as long.
As it is, it's a well-fleshed RPG without a great deal of padding -- most of the options and accessories deal more with choices you make for your character, rather than simply collecting everything. In fact, collecting everything will result in a shortage of money and an inability to max out the power of your styles.
It's an interesting approach to it and it works quite well for this game.
It took less than 10 years for MS to edge out Apple in hardware and IBM as a whole. The Intel/Windows market has gotten many, many people in the mindframe that it's perfectly OK to completely replace machines in 2-3 years. Nothing about their more recent software has done anything to change that.
With that, I'd say it will be a relatively short time if MS drops the ball and another competitor comes in. About 3-6 years. All it takes is another company to come out with an equivalent software with equivalent marketing. Apple is doing so well in the consumer market because of its various advantages, but it's not really pushing for the office space.
The problem is that there aren't many companies moving to replace them, or really seriously compete on the same level.
A lot of the people around your level have probably chosen to stop playing until these updates come out, as well, leaving only the very hardcore and the cheaters. I've noticed this -- when doing Matchmaking with my clan, we'll get our asses handed to us in Clan matches almost always, because the people playing clan matches are really 10 levels above us. If they don't win by superior skills, they win by cheating.
That's true in non-clan matchmaking as well, and has been for the last month. People who ranked up high will purposefully go into matchmaking and either quit right away or team kill, lowering their rank on purpose so they can get paired up against "noobs," which there are fewer and fewer of.
Personally I used to play very regularly until about the beginning of march, due to both the lack of playlist updates and the rampant cheating. I'm actually excited to play now.
Finally, when they do reset the rankings, they're also going to be adjusting the levels so people get paired up against others more accurately, rather than someone who is a 12 but should really be a 16 getting paired up against peopel who are 7's but should probably be a 6. So you'll probably move up and down in ranking a lot more quickly. After all, they have 50 levels, but realistically everyone's in the 10-25 range.
You have to choose to pay for the premium content.
For the auto updates, yes, plugging in your Xbox and signing in under a friend's account *should* net you at least the auto updates and the upcoming free maps. Similarly, taking one of your likely numerous "Free 2 Month Trial" cards and using those to get the update and the free maps will work as well.
Finally, like most pay content on Xbox Live, after a certain time the pay maps will be completely free. Bungie says "At the end of summer," meaning likely August or September, and they'll probably be staggered. So yeah, you could plug in your Xbox now and get the pair of free maps that are coming out in about a week, or if you don't really play that often, just wait until the end of summer when they're all free and snag them all.
Of course, Bungie's plan is pretty clever, as those who actually play Halo 2 multiplayer will likely be more than happy to pay, rather than wait, and those who don't mind waiting probably don't play that often anyway.
Plus the cheats are non-obvoius. They never took action against people who pulled flags through walls because that was a minor geometry glitch that was based more on giving the flag a wider and more powerful "pickup radius" than other objects. They're not taking action against people who fly up on top of the maps using weird jumps or hide the objective by "surfing" on a Banshee.
Really they're only fixing two "cheats," one being the standby glitch (and, really, why would a company test for people pressing the standby button on their DSL modem in order to suspend everyone who isn't the host) and an obscure "dummy" glitch that deals with the elite model and a warthog that, without hearing about how to do it from someone else, is pretty impossible to find.
Everything else that they're fixing are pretty much updates and changes to make the game more streamlined and fun, rather than fixing stuff that doesn't work.
After all, the game DOES play fine. There are just a couple of extremely annoying exploits that can be abused by a single person or pair of people that drastically reduce the enjoyment of the game for everyone, and since you only need one person to screw it all up, it affects the online game. You could still have played the past 5 months in custom games and never run into any of these problems, and similarly, you probably would not notice much of a difference in the other glitch fixes either -- except that certain parts of the game will now make a little more sense, like standing on a grenade will kill you;D
So yeah, I'm pretty much right here with drewmca, these patches are making the game better, not just fixing a bug that crashes the game or proves that the game was shipped unfinished. These types of patches show that the developer is still involved in the game and, after seeing hundreds of thousands of people play the game, have the chance to make a few tweaks to coincide with their new content that they've been busy working on for the past few months.
Re:I want animated program icons
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Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 2, Informative
First of all, on a default setup (which most people have), installing anything that starts automatically and runs in the background requires the user to plop in their password -- in a box that only appears when they're installing software, and is visually distinct from browser popups and the like.
So it can't just install itself from a user visiting a site, or clicking "OK." They would need to visit the site, have the pop up come up, then type in their password when it says "ADCrazy is trying to install BlahBlahBlah. Type in your Administrator password to continue."
Secondly, it can't hide in a registry and alter how your other apps work. Sure it can play with some plist files to make some changes, but OS X makes it quite hard for a program to run in such a way as to make it completely invisible to the user and hard to quit.
I'm not the grandparent and I'm not going to link them as it's not really worth either of our time, but there are distinct reasons why being "the biggest" doesn't make you the most vulnerable. Apache and IIS have rather equivalent marketshare, so to speak, yet IIS servers are the ones with bugs, problems, and security flaws.
Finally, outside of web-based trojans, OS X doesn't have the low-level integration of Safari and Mail, meaning that a virus written for those applications don't have nearly full-access to a system with permission to change other files/programs on the computer.
I will say this, though -- Longhorn and, to some degree SP2, will probably be all the evidence you need against this FUD of "the biggest programs have the biggest problems." I fully expect Longhorn to be relatively free from many of the malware problems that plague past Windows OS's, and it will very likely be on an exceedingly large number of computers. What will the argument be then, when one of the OS's with the largest marketshares proves the statement incorrect?
I get the impression that this is a case of those "10 in one" or "plug right into your TV" game console things, rather than actual NES and cartridges. You know, like all of those crappy game-things they sell in kiosks in malls nowadays.
There's lots of options nowadays that only use the external "breakout box" and connect using something like Firewire. There are pros and cons of both forms, but they're a good example of how PCI is a limited format, not for bandwidth but for size. You can't stick a lot of stuff on just a PCI card, and by forcing things onto a breakout box or dongle card, why not simply use a standardized high-bandwidth external protocol like Firewire?
Yeah, obviously there'll be more stuff coming out when it's more widely available on a major platform (the PowerMac is a small subset of even the Mac community). But I totally agree with you that PCI slots are becoming more and more a power-user only interface. Casual users like external stuff so they don't need to muck about on the internals, plenty of ports are getting stuck on the mainboard or have connectors to the outside world included, and there's less that people really need PCI for.
I mean, i've got the 3 slots, and I consider myself a power user, but they remain empty because all the ports I need are already on the computer, or it's cheaper/easier for me to simply buy an external device. I've got 2 FW enclosures and an external nice soundcard on FW.
I know it's not just me, either, since the last Windows computer I put together only used PCI slots for a FW card and a fancy soundcard. If anything, the video push going on will get FW on PC mainboards more steadily, and, well, most people don't need fancy soundcards either. I know shopping around there was always the "I need 6 PCI slots" crowd, but I would've been perfectly happy with just 2.
It's almost like, the sooner PCI is sidelined, the sooner mainboards will come with better equipment installed and the sooner external devices with essentially more functionality will become common. But now I'm dreaming...
I'm personally curious what companies think we're going to be using PCI-X and PCI-E for. Gamers are loving it for video cards, but games are really barely taxing those 8x AGP video cards.
I'm on a G5 with PCI-X cards and they're all SATA controllers and the like. Well, I've got external FW for that stuff, and FW is built in. So's USB. Most people nowadays use PCI for 2 things outside of the AGP video card -- extra ports, and soundcards. Apple don't need the internal soundcard support -- their built in audio is pretty much as good as many cheapy internal cards, and serious music people want external devices anyway. What's left? What are people going to be sticking in these super PCI slots that aren't grafted on to the mainboards already?
These guys (ADS Tech) makes some -- they're external and FW and capture in DV format. I've found the one I linked to for as cheap as $150-ish, which is pretty good considering it has component inputs. I'm sure there are others out there that capture to dv format as well, though.
I'm not sure if it was the rhetoric major or what, but my professors always made the distinction that some program or protocol was "an industry standard" rather than "the etc."
It makes sense, really -- different people in the industry use different things. Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, LaTeX -- they're all industry standards because there are groups of people out in the industry using them. For all the complaints about Word being standard, well, RTF is an industry standard as well and is used by a great many people in industry.
I have found that those standards tend to change depending on the needs of the company and the kind of work they're doing (and whether they even have an R&D staff). There's plenty of companies still using PageMaker, which WAS a standard, but InDesign has by far supplanted PageMaker as a standard. There's still those publishers out there using PageMaker, though, because they're afraid to change or aren't aware of the similarities/differences in other programs.
As far as I'm concerned, "Industry Standard" simply means "used by a non-insignificant portion of businesses/organizations."
That's different, though, from something that is standardized, like 508 compliancy or redbook encoding on commercial audio CDs, and I think that's where the disconnects in arguments above stem from. TFA goes on about de facto standards when they're simply formats that are used by a majority in an industry. From wikipedia:
De facto is a Latin expression that means "in fact" or "in practice". It is commonly used as opposed to de jure (meaning "by law") when referring to matters of law or governance or technique (such as standards), that are found in the common experience as created or developed without or against a regulation.
"De facto" is a qualifier which implies that what is being described is not quite universally accepted; otherwise, the idea (eg a standard) would usually be described without the term.
Any common experience that is understood as a de facto standard or experience may be accepted but that doesn't mean it's understood. My citation of 508 compliancy above is a good example -- it's well understood and documented AND it explains why it should be used. It's not a standard because of majority use, but because it's outlined, and people can choose to use it for a specific purpose. It's a much stronger standard for that, as it can be checked against for clarity.
A de facto standard like.wmv isn't, because although it's accepted as a suitable video file, that's only because people use it without really knowing better. It's closed, so there's no reference for programmers to check their code and usage against outside of the documents supplied by Microsoft. Same with.doc files. So yeah, it's a standard, and people in businesses use it, but generally the arguments for using it are "it's easy" and "i don't need to look up alternates cos my computer can do it right now." While those are reasons used commonly by professionals, it doesn't speak at all towards the flexibility nor durability of said standard.
Not exactly. It's not recompressed but it is encoded into.dv format. The video on the tape is just raw video -- if there was a way to browse the tape, you wouldn't just see a big.dv file (or series of files).
In most DV camcorders, they function as a.dv capture device. You can also purchase external (and internal, I'm sure) capture devices that capture direct to.dv format.
If you were to use a non DV camcorder and wanted to capture it as a.dv stream, you would need said capture device.
The stream is still unmolested, but it is being encoded into a.dv file. That's part of the reason why you need specific software in order to capture said video, rather than simply mounting it as a drive and copying it like it was a big file.
Yeah, call and ask. I ordered a refurb G5 last april, and the site said "ships with 10.2.8." It came with 10.3.4, but the disc was 10.2. If your mini still hasn't shipped yet, you should have no problem since they technically haven't sold it to you yet.
I'm going to stop by the bank and stock up on $2 bills. The sad thing is that the guy felt humiliated when he was in the right -- if anything, he should've been standing taller knowing that, if anything, he was OWED for his trouble.
So many instructions and manuals even tell you to bypass the warning. They state "A box will pop up warning you about Unsigned Drivers. Click OK to continue installation."
Developers don't care -- they're not going to delay their releases and pay the extra money to get their hardware drivers licensed, especially considering the amount of updates released. It's too easy to bypass and the negatives are inconsequential for most people.
Actually, I'm not surprised at all -- I'm doing the same thing myself:D I've got probably too much invested in random music gear, but I've never been deluded enough to think I should buy all this stuff because one day I want to "make it big." I just do it cos I love it:D
Re:How to beat this - a modest suggestion
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EZTree Shuts Down
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· Score: 1
That's the thing -- the torrents are still there, the people are still there, and all that's needed is another tracker. That's why it's almost a lost cause to pursue these trackers, because really, all they need to do is put it up, wait the few months for the Cease and Desist letter to arrive, and then pass it off to a buddy or acquaintance. If it's planned, they can even have everyone know of the new tracker location and it's just a matter of getting the seeds set up -- which, since more people are going to have the original files, will happen that much faster.
As a past WinMX and Usenet user, I gotta say that seeding and downloading torrents shows just how powerful the software is, as leeching is pretty much automatically controlled, the download speeds are fast, and it takes little time and effort to get rather huge files.
And anything can be shut down/tampered with/deleted. Look at the flooding of dummy files that's occured on P2P networks, or certain Usenet providers restricting access to, say, alt.binaries.* groups.
Anyway, there already are alternatives for tracker distribution, mostly thanks to tracker search engines. There's quite a few that search a huge swath of torrent sites, and I'd imagine if a tracker went down (for whatever reason, be it legal action or unpaid hosting fees), registering a new tracker and reposting torrents would take a matter of days. At that point, a search on one of those sites would turn up the new tracker, leading people to the new tracker's location for more specific torrent hunting.
You're right, and I should amend my original statement by adding that the fact that Microsoft is responsible for so much software available only for windows gives it a leg up on companies that require complete, integrated systems.
There are alternatives, for example Filemaker is ancient yet still up-to-date and supports systemwide group support. Novell supports OS X.
However, everything up until pretty much OS9 painted Apple in a pretty poor light, perhaps rightfully so. The apps that support wide-range system access like you mention take a while to develop, and it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing some more high-profile applications (or at least cross-compatibility) in the near future. Since I don't work in those types of fields, I can't comment on current alternatives, outside of Filemaker and our own network at work (which uses some of Office's tracking features as well as Entourage).
But I almost don't consider the "complete systems" a set of software (although it obviously is), as those systems are purchased as essentially complete systems to be used for an integrated purpose. Almost like Point-Of-Sales. For POS systems, you need to buy stuff that fits into the current system, and for many companies that's Windows -- not necessarily because there were no alternatives, but because when they were set up, Apple was in OS9 land and really wasn't a workable alternative.
Re:Shutting down Bittorrent one site at a time
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EZTree Shuts Down
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· Score: 1
It does seem like for every bittorrent site they take down, two more pop up in their place. And one of those is going to be hosted off of US shores.
Still, the legal torrent sites seem to be free from any lawsuit pressure, so I'm not sure it's a problem as much as simply the record industry filing lawsuits instead of actually offering a viable alternative. And there's nothing saying the proprietor of the site couldn't simply buy hosting with some other company -- it's an ISP issue, not a site issue.
I actually have much less of a problem paying more for indie stuff that's more obviously just some guys in a garage, or some dude with a computer.
I don't know, it feels more like I'm taking part. I feel the same way about software -- I never complain about people pirating Photoshop, but I encourage people to buy all that cheap software that is just one guy working on it on his free time.
Plus, those guys getting started usually get a lot more of the profits compared to Current MegaBand. If I buy a $10 CDR at a local show, I know the band gets like $8 after the cost of production off that $10. Rather than making me go "Bah, CDR!" I go "hey, that was a kickin' show, where's the CD?"
Of course, I also over-tip for good service in restaurants, buy local art, and more. Yeah, it's hard for those new guys to quit their day jobs and support themselves entirely on music, but if it was EASY... everyone would be doing it.
Yeah, quite a few major changes in the OS X market. No offense, but that's like saying "Windows sucks because 98 has crappy USB compatibility."
The only major failings that OS X has are in dealing with Windows code (it doesn't have all of the windows coding environments, perhaps obviously so), and it has very little CAD/other architectural programs and it has fewer games. It has a lot more games now than it used to, though, with big ones being Doom 3, WoW, and Unreal Tournament 2005.
All of the major apps are cross platform (adobe, macromedia, 3d apps, video apps, Office) and open up files the same regardless of where they were authored. In some cases, for the more "basic" software there are MORE choices, if only because the userbase is growing more from people who aren't simply using old mIRC or whatever, and there's a great number of linux/bsd programmers who are porting their work simply and quickly.
Recently I was looking for a decent IRC client. There's like 10 different apps, all with a different look and feel and how they handle the various features of OSX. For some of them, i emailed the developer asking about some functionality, and in every case, the guy got back to me right away. And this wasn't about compiling the software, but rather again just simply copying the app somewhere on my HDD and double-clicking it.
It's the same with FTP clients, text editors, video playback, and more. Perhaps the biggest difference is that there's a great deal of free software that isn't shareware with infinite nag screens.
So for people who are stuck using specific windows software, sure, you're going to have issues. But for pretty much everything besides games and CAD, there's really nothing that you can't do on OS X.
But you can't tell that by walking into a b&m and looking at what's on the shelf. You would need to actually look for it. Most Windows users are very comfortable looking for software online and know of the resources available to get it. To think that the same resources aren't available for OS X is kind of short sighted. As anyone who uses a mac will tell you, once you have it and are looking for programs, finding them is the easy part. But if you don't have the mac and aren't looking for the software, of course you're not going to know what's out there.
Fansubs typically come out at low quality because they're done on a fast deadline. Many fansub groups crave popularity so they work to get the show subbed and on the torrent as fast as possible. So the quality suffers.
Some fansub groups work solely for speed. Others are heavily focused on good codecs, heavy use of filters, and quality encodings to get a really good picture.
But it's not so much "fansub v DVD" as "TV Rip v DVD." The vast majority of fansubbed series are recorded off TV, so of course they're not going to be as high quality as a DVD rip. But they're also out usually a few weeks after the show airs (sometimes days for popular series, such as Bleach) rather than years.
But quality is part of the reason there are so many fansub groups, and why they often work on series at the same time -- some focus just on speed and getting the show out there, while others will focus on accurate translations and will put the show on hold if there's a conflict or problem, pushing it back a day or however long until it's resolved. The group Lunar is one such group, and have actually released multiple versions of releases that were found to have a problem, whether it be a codec issue or even a flub in the subtitles. One recent episode they put out went up to version 3.
So yeah, a lot of it is speed, but the biggest reason the quality suffers is because they're ripping from TV.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, if you type in "word" it'll find documents that contain the word "word" but also .doc files created in word, help files for word, etc. So it's not just based on file names, like the above programs, and works out-of-the-box for the entire system.
So currently I use both.
Similarly, I've not experienced any issues with things being disabled, but there's also little out there that utilizes CoreImage functionality. If they've disabled it for the standard windowing GUI, it's not very noticeable.
Otherwise it's very stable and works as expected. Some of the newer technologies have some quirks but they all seem to be working quite well for me. I know I'm just one person, but it's usually the people who don't have any problems who make the least noise.
Similarly, combat is based on random encounters, rather than specific spots. For example, backtracking through an area in Final Fantasy will take a good half hour as you fight every other minute or so. In Jade Empire, it takes about 3 minutes, with 1 minute spent loading the area.
Add all those times up and it's easy to see that if Jade Empire had turn-based combat with random encounters, it would easily take at least twice as long.
As it is, it's a well-fleshed RPG without a great deal of padding -- most of the options and accessories deal more with choices you make for your character, rather than simply collecting everything. In fact, collecting everything will result in a shortage of money and an inability to max out the power of your styles.
It's an interesting approach to it and it works quite well for this game.
With that, I'd say it will be a relatively short time if MS drops the ball and another competitor comes in. About 3-6 years. All it takes is another company to come out with an equivalent software with equivalent marketing. Apple is doing so well in the consumer market because of its various advantages, but it's not really pushing for the office space.
The problem is that there aren't many companies moving to replace them, or really seriously compete on the same level.
That's true in non-clan matchmaking as well, and has been for the last month. People who ranked up high will purposefully go into matchmaking and either quit right away or team kill, lowering their rank on purpose so they can get paired up against "noobs," which there are fewer and fewer of.
Personally I used to play very regularly until about the beginning of march, due to both the lack of playlist updates and the rampant cheating. I'm actually excited to play now.
Finally, when they do reset the rankings, they're also going to be adjusting the levels so people get paired up against others more accurately, rather than someone who is a 12 but should really be a 16 getting paired up against peopel who are 7's but should probably be a 6. So you'll probably move up and down in ranking a lot more quickly. After all, they have 50 levels, but realistically everyone's in the 10-25 range.
For the auto updates, yes, plugging in your Xbox and signing in under a friend's account *should* net you at least the auto updates and the upcoming free maps. Similarly, taking one of your likely numerous "Free 2 Month Trial" cards and using those to get the update and the free maps will work as well.
Finally, like most pay content on Xbox Live, after a certain time the pay maps will be completely free. Bungie says "At the end of summer," meaning likely August or September, and they'll probably be staggered. So yeah, you could plug in your Xbox now and get the pair of free maps that are coming out in about a week, or if you don't really play that often, just wait until the end of summer when they're all free and snag them all.
Of course, Bungie's plan is pretty clever, as those who actually play Halo 2 multiplayer will likely be more than happy to pay, rather than wait, and those who don't mind waiting probably don't play that often anyway.
Really they're only fixing two "cheats," one being the standby glitch (and, really, why would a company test for people pressing the standby button on their DSL modem in order to suspend everyone who isn't the host) and an obscure "dummy" glitch that deals with the elite model and a warthog that, without hearing about how to do it from someone else, is pretty impossible to find.
Everything else that they're fixing are pretty much updates and changes to make the game more streamlined and fun, rather than fixing stuff that doesn't work.
After all, the game DOES play fine. There are just a couple of extremely annoying exploits that can be abused by a single person or pair of people that drastically reduce the enjoyment of the game for everyone, and since you only need one person to screw it all up, it affects the online game. You could still have played the past 5 months in custom games and never run into any of these problems, and similarly, you probably would not notice much of a difference in the other glitch fixes either -- except that certain parts of the game will now make a little more sense, like standing on a grenade will kill you ;D
So yeah, I'm pretty much right here with drewmca, these patches are making the game better, not just fixing a bug that crashes the game or proves that the game was shipped unfinished. These types of patches show that the developer is still involved in the game and, after seeing hundreds of thousands of people play the game, have the chance to make a few tweaks to coincide with their new content that they've been busy working on for the past few months.
So it can't just install itself from a user visiting a site, or clicking "OK." They would need to visit the site, have the pop up come up, then type in their password when it says "ADCrazy is trying to install BlahBlahBlah. Type in your Administrator password to continue."
Secondly, it can't hide in a registry and alter how your other apps work. Sure it can play with some plist files to make some changes, but OS X makes it quite hard for a program to run in such a way as to make it completely invisible to the user and hard to quit.
I'm not the grandparent and I'm not going to link them as it's not really worth either of our time, but there are distinct reasons why being "the biggest" doesn't make you the most vulnerable. Apache and IIS have rather equivalent marketshare, so to speak, yet IIS servers are the ones with bugs, problems, and security flaws.
Finally, outside of web-based trojans, OS X doesn't have the low-level integration of Safari and Mail, meaning that a virus written for those applications don't have nearly full-access to a system with permission to change other files/programs on the computer.
I will say this, though -- Longhorn and, to some degree SP2, will probably be all the evidence you need against this FUD of "the biggest programs have the biggest problems." I fully expect Longhorn to be relatively free from many of the malware problems that plague past Windows OS's, and it will very likely be on an exceedingly large number of computers. What will the argument be then, when one of the OS's with the largest marketshares proves the statement incorrect?
I get the impression that this is a case of those "10 in one" or "plug right into your TV" game console things, rather than actual NES and cartridges. You know, like all of those crappy game-things they sell in kiosks in malls nowadays.
There's lots of options nowadays that only use the external "breakout box" and connect using something like Firewire. There are pros and cons of both forms, but they're a good example of how PCI is a limited format, not for bandwidth but for size. You can't stick a lot of stuff on just a PCI card, and by forcing things onto a breakout box or dongle card, why not simply use a standardized high-bandwidth external protocol like Firewire?
I mean, i've got the 3 slots, and I consider myself a power user, but they remain empty because all the ports I need are already on the computer, or it's cheaper/easier for me to simply buy an external device. I've got 2 FW enclosures and an external nice soundcard on FW.
I know it's not just me, either, since the last Windows computer I put together only used PCI slots for a FW card and a fancy soundcard. If anything, the video push going on will get FW on PC mainboards more steadily, and, well, most people don't need fancy soundcards either. I know shopping around there was always the "I need 6 PCI slots" crowd, but I would've been perfectly happy with just 2.
It's almost like, the sooner PCI is sidelined, the sooner mainboards will come with better equipment installed and the sooner external devices with essentially more functionality will become common. But now I'm dreaming...
Meant to say "... G5 with PCI-X and looking at the cards, they're all SATA..."
I'm on a G5 with PCI-X cards and they're all SATA controllers and the like. Well, I've got external FW for that stuff, and FW is built in. So's USB. Most people nowadays use PCI for 2 things outside of the AGP video card -- extra ports, and soundcards. Apple don't need the internal soundcard support -- their built in audio is pretty much as good as many cheapy internal cards, and serious music people want external devices anyway. What's left? What are people going to be sticking in these super PCI slots that aren't grafted on to the mainboards already?
These guys (ADS Tech) makes some -- they're external and FW and capture in DV format. I've found the one I linked to for as cheap as $150-ish, which is pretty good considering it has component inputs. I'm sure there are others out there that capture to dv format as well, though.
It makes sense, really -- different people in the industry use different things. Quark, PageMaker, InDesign, LaTeX -- they're all industry standards because there are groups of people out in the industry using them. For all the complaints about Word being standard, well, RTF is an industry standard as well and is used by a great many people in industry.
I have found that those standards tend to change depending on the needs of the company and the kind of work they're doing (and whether they even have an R&D staff). There's plenty of companies still using PageMaker, which WAS a standard, but InDesign has by far supplanted PageMaker as a standard. There's still those publishers out there using PageMaker, though, because they're afraid to change or aren't aware of the similarities/differences in other programs.
As far as I'm concerned, "Industry Standard" simply means "used by a non-insignificant portion of businesses/organizations."
That's different, though, from something that is standardized, like 508 compliancy or redbook encoding on commercial audio CDs, and I think that's where the disconnects in arguments above stem from. TFA goes on about de facto standards when they're simply formats that are used by a majority in an industry. From wikipedia:
Any common experience that is understood as a de facto standard or experience may be accepted but that doesn't mean it's understood. My citation of 508 compliancy above is a good example -- it's well understood and documented AND it explains why it should be used. It's not a standard because of majority use, but because it's outlined, and people can choose to use it for a specific purpose. It's a much stronger standard for that, as it can be checked against for clarity.A de facto standard like .wmv isn't, because although it's accepted as a suitable video file, that's only because people use it without really knowing better. It's closed, so there's no reference for programmers to check their code and usage against outside of the documents supplied by Microsoft. Same with .doc files. So yeah, it's a standard, and people in businesses use it, but generally the arguments for using it are "it's easy" and "i don't need to look up alternates cos my computer can do it right now." While those are reasons used commonly by professionals, it doesn't speak at all towards the flexibility nor durability of said standard.
In most DV camcorders, they function as a .dv capture device. You can also purchase external (and internal, I'm sure) capture devices that capture direct to .dv format.
If you were to use a non DV camcorder and wanted to capture it as a .dv stream, you would need said capture device.
The stream is still unmolested, but it is being encoded into a .dv file. That's part of the reason why you need specific software in order to capture said video, rather than simply mounting it as a drive and copying it like it was a big file.
Yeah, call and ask. I ordered a refurb G5 last april, and the site said "ships with 10.2.8." It came with 10.3.4, but the disc was 10.2. If your mini still hasn't shipped yet, you should have no problem since they technically haven't sold it to you yet.
I'm going to stop by the bank and stock up on $2 bills. The sad thing is that the guy felt humiliated when he was in the right -- if anything, he should've been standing taller knowing that, if anything, he was OWED for his trouble.
Developers don't care -- they're not going to delay their releases and pay the extra money to get their hardware drivers licensed, especially considering the amount of updates released. It's too easy to bypass and the negatives are inconsequential for most people.
Actually, I'm not surprised at all -- I'm doing the same thing myself :D I've got probably too much invested in random music gear, but I've never been deluded enough to think I should buy all this stuff because one day I want to "make it big." I just do it cos I love it :D
As a past WinMX and Usenet user, I gotta say that seeding and downloading torrents shows just how powerful the software is, as leeching is pretty much automatically controlled, the download speeds are fast, and it takes little time and effort to get rather huge files.
And anything can be shut down/tampered with/deleted. Look at the flooding of dummy files that's occured on P2P networks, or certain Usenet providers restricting access to, say, alt.binaries.* groups.
Anyway, there already are alternatives for tracker distribution, mostly thanks to tracker search engines. There's quite a few that search a huge swath of torrent sites, and I'd imagine if a tracker went down (for whatever reason, be it legal action or unpaid hosting fees), registering a new tracker and reposting torrents would take a matter of days. At that point, a search on one of those sites would turn up the new tracker, leading people to the new tracker's location for more specific torrent hunting.
There are alternatives, for example Filemaker is ancient yet still up-to-date and supports systemwide group support. Novell supports OS X.
However, everything up until pretty much OS9 painted Apple in a pretty poor light, perhaps rightfully so. The apps that support wide-range system access like you mention take a while to develop, and it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing some more high-profile applications (or at least cross-compatibility) in the near future. Since I don't work in those types of fields, I can't comment on current alternatives, outside of Filemaker and our own network at work (which uses some of Office's tracking features as well as Entourage).
But I almost don't consider the "complete systems" a set of software (although it obviously is), as those systems are purchased as essentially complete systems to be used for an integrated purpose. Almost like Point-Of-Sales. For POS systems, you need to buy stuff that fits into the current system, and for many companies that's Windows -- not necessarily because there were no alternatives, but because when they were set up, Apple was in OS9 land and really wasn't a workable alternative.
Still, the legal torrent sites seem to be free from any lawsuit pressure, so I'm not sure it's a problem as much as simply the record industry filing lawsuits instead of actually offering a viable alternative. And there's nothing saying the proprietor of the site couldn't simply buy hosting with some other company -- it's an ISP issue, not a site issue.
I don't know, it feels more like I'm taking part. I feel the same way about software -- I never complain about people pirating Photoshop, but I encourage people to buy all that cheap software that is just one guy working on it on his free time.
Plus, those guys getting started usually get a lot more of the profits compared to Current MegaBand. If I buy a $10 CDR at a local show, I know the band gets like $8 after the cost of production off that $10. Rather than making me go "Bah, CDR!" I go "hey, that was a kickin' show, where's the CD?"
Of course, I also over-tip for good service in restaurants, buy local art, and more. Yeah, it's hard for those new guys to quit their day jobs and support themselves entirely on music, but if it was EASY... everyone would be doing it.
The only major failings that OS X has are in dealing with Windows code (it doesn't have all of the windows coding environments, perhaps obviously so), and it has very little CAD/other architectural programs and it has fewer games. It has a lot more games now than it used to, though, with big ones being Doom 3, WoW, and Unreal Tournament 2005.
All of the major apps are cross platform (adobe, macromedia, 3d apps, video apps, Office) and open up files the same regardless of where they were authored. In some cases, for the more "basic" software there are MORE choices, if only because the userbase is growing more from people who aren't simply using old mIRC or whatever, and there's a great number of linux/bsd programmers who are porting their work simply and quickly.
Recently I was looking for a decent IRC client. There's like 10 different apps, all with a different look and feel and how they handle the various features of OSX. For some of them, i emailed the developer asking about some functionality, and in every case, the guy got back to me right away. And this wasn't about compiling the software, but rather again just simply copying the app somewhere on my HDD and double-clicking it.
It's the same with FTP clients, text editors, video playback, and more. Perhaps the biggest difference is that there's a great deal of free software that isn't shareware with infinite nag screens.
So for people who are stuck using specific windows software, sure, you're going to have issues. But for pretty much everything besides games and CAD, there's really nothing that you can't do on OS X.
But you can't tell that by walking into a b&m and looking at what's on the shelf. You would need to actually look for it. Most Windows users are very comfortable looking for software online and know of the resources available to get it. To think that the same resources aren't available for OS X is kind of short sighted. As anyone who uses a mac will tell you, once you have it and are looking for programs, finding them is the easy part. But if you don't have the mac and aren't looking for the software, of course you're not going to know what's out there.
Some fansub groups work solely for speed. Others are heavily focused on good codecs, heavy use of filters, and quality encodings to get a really good picture.
But it's not so much "fansub v DVD" as "TV Rip v DVD." The vast majority of fansubbed series are recorded off TV, so of course they're not going to be as high quality as a DVD rip. But they're also out usually a few weeks after the show airs (sometimes days for popular series, such as Bleach) rather than years.
But quality is part of the reason there are so many fansub groups, and why they often work on series at the same time -- some focus just on speed and getting the show out there, while others will focus on accurate translations and will put the show on hold if there's a conflict or problem, pushing it back a day or however long until it's resolved. The group Lunar is one such group, and have actually released multiple versions of releases that were found to have a problem, whether it be a codec issue or even a flub in the subtitles. One recent episode they put out went up to version 3.
So yeah, a lot of it is speed, but the biggest reason the quality suffers is because they're ripping from TV.