What life is like with WINDOZE?

So this is what life is like with Windoze! Great life!

get a REAL life.... get Mac!

XP on a Mac!? why?

Well this is the only reason I would see you would want to put xp on a mac!

WHAT VISTA STANDS FOR!

The next version of windows is called VISTA.... but what does it mean???... the secret is out!

BAD MAC SALESMAN!

I had a fun experience on the weekend... (NOT!)... I was waiting for my friend at an Big Department store that sold macs (NOT A APPLE STORE)... while waiting, I heard the sales man preach on to poor dumb customer, that Intel macs were no good, and nothing runs on them, and this is why you should by these two g4 powerbook 15inch's for your self and your daughter to run word and surf the net! When sleazy salesman went to get even more ripp off accessories, I had a quite word with the guy, pointing out you are being lied to, and salesman is trying to rip you off, and get rid of old stock, and you should really be getting the Mac book pro, as he is charging you the same price for them anyway! When customer asked sales man (after he returned) why he wasn't selling him a Mac Book Pro (Intel)... he said same old line... oh nothing runs on them (and he didn't have any in stock), they don't work right etc etc.... and you should just buy these two laptops (at 7 grand!).

The customer said " I think I will leave it thanks", the sale dude looked at me and said "what did you say to my customer", "if you don't like what I say LEAVE!", at this time I saw red, and told the sales dude STOP lying to the customer, and telling him half truths, and ripping him off, at this time the salesman let fly a hurl of abuse to me, and anyone else.... by this time the customer, just said.. forget it mate... I not buying anything from you... and walked out.. and thanked me as he walked by! I so HATE sleazy salesman!!!! I think the guy walked out to find a REAL Apple store!

BAD POWER

You might be wondering why there havnt been any updates for a while.. well not long after the picture of the Quad was taken, suddenly the Quad didnt want to power on anymore.. thinking a hardware problem, the Quad went back to Apple... no problems found after 3 days of testing... so I took it all home.. no problems there either for two days.... took it back to work.. no go!! get the power company out to work... bad harmonics in the power they say.. so I have been waiting 4 weeks for the power company to supply me with a UPS and a re-wire of all power back to switch board to try and resolve the problem! argh!

So till then the lovley quad sits in a corner, collecting dust, while I wait for the power compnay to fix the power problem!

QUAD G5 MONSTER!

Ok the new beast has arrived....

its a QUAD G5, with 4.5 GB of ram 3 X 500 GB drives with a 23 Inch cinema display.

YEA! just done some HD stuff today, impressive render times from the 2 X G4 processor system it replaced.

Best Tv show of 2005!?

The fabulous SciFi Channel remake of the 1980's classic Battlestar Galactica, starring Edward James Olmos has been picked by Time Magazine as the best television program of 2005.

For the fans of the dark and gritty series this comes as no surprise, but it certainly caught everyone else off-guard.

Why has this one program on a highly genre focused cable network won over the hearts and minds of the general viewing public? Simple math. Add a great writing staff and behind the camera crew, with an immeasurably talented ensemble cast headed up by the award winning Olmos, gripping stories each and every week with heart-stopping special effects and how could you miss?

Congratulations BSG it is a well deserved accolade.

But remember the Betamax

ok here is my spin.....The smart money will wait out the standards war before buying a high-definition DVD player.

If you were lucky enough to get a fancy HDTV set, you're probably eager for a high-definition DVD player to go with it. Note that the SONY 40" V SERIES BRAVIA LCD TV , is one of the very few TV's in Australia that can support true HD with a native Display Resolution: 1366 x 768, and it was only released late last year in November 2005.

But remember the Betamax! Consumer electronics is an industry notorious for rapid change and 2006 is already shaping up as a particularly disruptive year. Some of the changes will be incremental -- new phone features, lower prices for TVs -- but a standards war in DVD players and recorders has the potential to render some of the first players obsolete. Not only that, these new players have digital rights management (DRM) features that make Darth Vader look tame, more on DRM later.

Today's DVD players and recorders are based on red lasers, which read and write millions of little digital data pits on those shiny DVD discs. But the sun is setting on red-laser DVDs, because the relatively long wavelength of the red laser limits the capacity of a standard-size DVD disc, just as the world is making the transition to high-definition movies and television.

Blue lasers have a shorter wavelength, and thus can read and write much more data on the same-size DVD disc -- nearly 50 gigabytes on one type of double-layer blue-laser disc, more than enough for playing back a high-def movie or recording two or more hours of a high-def TV show.

Don't be a casualty of the standards war

Pioneer just announced that it will start selling blue-laser DVD drives for computers in Japan in just a few weeks, and in the United States by summer, making it the first to offer mass-market HD-capable DVD players and recorders to the public. Most of the major movie studios have promised to
have a selection of high-definition DVD movies available when the new drives arrive.

It will take many years for blue-laser DVDs to completely replace red-laser DVDs at your local Blockbuster, but as the world inexorably moves toward a high-definition future, red laser players are headed for obsolescence or so they would like you to believe.

The big problem is that two rival camps are competing to set the standards for blue-laser DVDs, and, just like earlier format wars -- Betamax versus VHS, Windows versus Mac, XM versus Sirius satellite radio, et cetera -- the two formats, known as Blu-ray and HD DVD, are incompatible.

A majority of major movie studios and many of the world's leading consumer electronics companies are backing the Blu-ray camp, led by Sony. The new Pioneer computer drives are based on the Blu-ray format.

Toshiba and NEC are leading the charge for the HD DVD format, and its backers include Warner Bros., HBO and New Line (like FORTUNE and CNNMoney, all divisions of Time Warner), as well as the dynamic PC duo of Microsoft and Intel.

A number of consumer electronics, computer and entertainment companies are supporting both formats for now, hedging their bets until a clear winner emerges.

The oddsmakers favour Blu-ray, in part because Blu-ray appears to have superior technical specifications and now has a head start over HD DVD in the race to market.

Blu-ray has a greater theoretical capacity than HD DVD (50GB versus 30GB for double-layer discs, as against 9GB for current red-laser DVDs), and Sony has said it will include a Blu-ray DVD drive in its forthcoming PlayStation 3> entertainment console, which, if the PS3 is as successful as the PS2, could
populate the world with millions of Blu-ray DVD players and sway any holdout movie studios to the format.

On the other hand, HD DVD supporters say their format makes it easier and cheaper to manufacture drives that are compatible with previous DVD and CD formats, lessening the cost and disruption of moving to a new HD format.

That's particularly important in the cut-throat PC business, and one reason Microsoft, Intel and HP have aligned with the HD DVD camp. (Apple and Dell, the world's largest PC maker, appear solidly in the Blu-ray camp.)

Microsoft is building HD DVD support into its next-generation version of Windows, called Vista, and presumably it wants HD DVD drives to be available for computers when Vista rolls out later this year. We can expect to see HD DVD players and recorders for home entertainment systems appear in stores
and in PCs in 2006, although the timing is unclear at this writing.

Now for the real issue of DRM. All these players have a specification for being online 24/7, that's right, they must have a Internet connection in order for them to even operate. So no net, no play. Every time you put in a disc, the player calls home and checks if its valid. What happens if you put in a non valid disc? Your player shuts down.. And you will have trust Sony or whoever to unlock it for it. Not only that it can be any non valid content (you home movie of your Xmas holiday). It gets better not only will your player shut down, the player will also send commands to anything it can control to shut that down too.. TV, stereo, hard drives... Whatever it can talk to. And we are to trust SONY to unlock it all for us? I think not.

I can see the consumer backlash on this feature alone will be enough to shut down the whole HD blue ray DVD war before it even begins.

The wildcard in all this is China. China has outlawed the use of any of the HD proprietary devices from Sony, Toshiba etc and, and come up with its own HD DVD standard based upon open standards, and based upon red laser technology using a superior CODEC chip to ones used today. In theory this could be used in any standard DVD player today with a chip swap out.

The bottom line

If you're not a big movie buff, and are happy with the quality of current prerecorded DVD movies, and if current generations of CD and DVD are sufficient for your backup and data transfer needs, sit tight.

The first blue-laser drives are certain to be expensive. Early adopters can expect to pay $1,000 or more for player-recorders, just as they did when red-laser DVD players were new. But today, basic DVD players are selling for as little as $30.

And lets not forget that less than 10,000 people in Australia are even capable of watching HD, as less than 10,000 TRUE HD TV sets have been sold in this country. Sales of True HD sets will pick up this year, industry is expecting every 1 in 25 sets sold this year will be true HD sets. Still this will not be a huge number of HD capable sets by the end of this year.

I seriously think the whole movement of little discs for video and data is rapidly approaching obsolescence. I'm betting on high-definition video-on-demand services, 100-megabit Internet pipelines and terabyte-size home media servers to make physical DVD players largely irrelevant within a decade, yes even in Australia, as wi fi services make a large presence in the next 5-10 years, with speeds over 100MB's via the airwaves.

One only has to look at the Apple business model of the distribution of audio and now video via its itunes store to realise the end of the local video store is near.

So sit back people and watch the rich elite buy stuff that will look like quadraphonic stereo sets ( a competitor to stereo in the mid 1970's that never went anywhere) by the end of the year.

2006 looks a year to sort the HD DVD industry out once and for all.

iborg = ipod

Gary Jones, president and CEO of eMagin Corp. of Bellevue, demonstrates his company's new wearable display for video iPods. Using the EyeBud headset is akin to watching a 105-inch display from 12 feet away. "Suddenly you've got this big-screen, movie-screen, home-theater experience wherever you are," he says. I say you look like a Borg, no longer will people be tuned OUT from sounds of their surroundings now they will walk in to you, saying "sorry, I was watching porn, didnt see you there". Next I guess there will be the brain interface, so instead of people looking like they are borg clones, they will look like the just smoked a large joint, when really they are just watching last nights lost on their ipod plugged into their brain (ala matrix style).

HAPPY NEW YEAR.. and BTW Power Point is EVIL..

HAPPY NEW YEAR, and Welcome to 2006! I thought of no better way to start the year than to start with a rant! I hope your new year is filled with less PowerPoint, why? You may ask?...if you sat through as many senseless, boaring, and death by PowerPoint sessions you wil understand.

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate Western World, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today's slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. But the format has become ubiquitous under PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft. PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

articularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Primary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding. This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make comparisons.

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers.

Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

xmas time... again....

new cam pics... :) yea...

Merry Xmas .... to me ;)

Xmas come a little bit early for me.. as all my new toys arrived today......Besides my new Quad G5, with 4GB ram and 1.5 TB of hard drive space, with a new Dual 23 Inch cinema display, I also got my new Camera gear, a Nikon D70s, and a new Sony hvr Z1 HD CAM with some great new wireless mics, and a miller tripod etc etc etc… here are just some pics of the new gear… (workstation I will post in the new year when I get it all set up ☺ )

Serenity .... WHAT Australia will get in the DVD set

The BAD NEWS is that the rating will not be a sticker and will therefore be permanent. The GOOD NEWS is the they have decided to print the sleeve double-sided. The inside of the sleeve will be exactly the same as the outside but with the rating removed from the front, spine and back. This means that when you get it home, all you have to do is pull the sleeve out, turn it over, pop it back in to the amaray and voila, you have one Serenity DVD sleeve with no visible rating! Yea!

As previously mentioned, there will also be a couple of exclusive packaging options/gifts with purchase. I can confirm that:

1. If you buy Serenity on DVD at JB H-Fi, you will receive (over the counter) an exclusive Slip Case/O-Ring that carries Joss Whedon's signature (these are not individually signed but the signature is part of the artwork). The O-Ring itself will have a mat finish and parts will have spot gloss and embossing so it will look fantastic!

2. If you buy Serenity on DVD at EzyDVD, you will receive (over the counter) an exclusive Tin Case. These have been produced by EzyDVD with artwork that we have provided and that artwork will be slightly different to that above so that it is exclusive.

3. Not a packaging option, but if you buy Serenity on DVD at Sanity, you will receive an exclusive Serenity Mouse Mat for FREE!

GO GET IT PEOPLE. IT will be soooo Shiny!!!

This is Australia?

I was in Sydney this week, and couldnt help notice this VERY BAD grammer at a Gloria Jenes Coffee shop at Darling Habour! No wonder the Queens English is stuffed with people posting signs like this!

Time for an UPGRADE

....this has been my set up for the past 2.5 years. Taken a few months back.. as I now have a video 8 and umatic 3/4 inch players in this mix as well (consoles on the LEFT)... its all about to be upgraded next two weeks witha quad g4, and a 23 inch cinema display, with sony Z1p HD cam, will slave the duel g4 off as a batch file compressor, and extra editing console... as if you hadnt guessed I am an editor.... cant wait...

The MUSIC of Firefly!

Miss the music from the series when you saw the movie??? well get this.. and hear all the gerat music from the TV series...... BTW the Score from the movie is also available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000AYYUGQ/qid=1133343381/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-6006799-4103803?s=music&v=glance&n=5174

Serenity .... BUY AUSTRALIAN!

Buy the Aussie version of the dvd.. Why.. Well we get 2 discs!




DISC 1
- The film itself (obviously! There may be some problems if we left this off!!)
- Deleted Scenes
- Outtakes
- Future History: That Story of Earth That Was
- What's In A Firefly
- Re-lighting The Firefly
- Joss Whedon Introduction
- Feature Commentary
- Easter Egg - We'll Have A Fruity Oaty Good Time
- A Filmmakers Journey: Journey with Joss from Script to Screen (this will be on all international DVDs but not the US version)

DISC 2 (at present, this disc is exclusive to Australia and Benelux - Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg - only but other international territories may decide to release the 2nd disc as well)
- Joss Whedon Q&A Session filmed at FOX Studios in Sydney
- Extended Scenes
- Take a Walk on Serenity: Cast & Crew take us on a special tour of the Serenity ship
- The Green Clan: Feature on Cinematographer Jack Green and his team



Out on Feb 1

MAC's ROCK... but why?

Some people accuse me of being a Mac Zealot and thinking Macs are perfect white machines that never fail. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact I think its most PC owners that are the Zealots....well the ones who protest at the highest tower as soon as you say Macs are better or Windows sucks.

I have used Macs and Pcs consistently for the last 20 years, and I have extensive experience on both platforms! That's right I use both systems daily. In fact I have more experience on PC's than Macs. But if you go to a restaurant and continue get bad a bad experience then you don't go back, well avoid it where ever you can (Windows) I choose better food, and one that doesn't give me a bad experience 9 times out of 10. Thus like most Mac users we have tasted the bad food and choose not to eat there any more, and if we cant avoid it,eat as little as possible. Like most food, some people like , some do not, what you like, your mate doesn't.. that's fine. But SOME PC owners think they can look at the window of the restaurant, and say YUCK! Sorry PC Zealot you are a hypocrite!

Windows continues to offer a bad experience to users, and now with 4 layers of virus protection, COUPLED with spyware, maleware, Trojan ware, whateverware and chickenware the whole net experience on Windoze is bad. You have to be some tech head to figure it all out.... and you are accused of being some simpleton if you choose a Mac above a PC by the Zealots cause you don't have a degree in computer science, or enjoy spending hours configuring your PC to actually be on the net, and constantly look over you shoulder for some nasty trying to get into your computer.

A recent person who converted to Mac after his whole life on windows said to me , he felt "naked" on his Mac, as he had no Virus protection, spyware etc etc running.. to which I answered no.. now you are free to use the net and all it offers with out Paranoia, fear of anything affecting your computer, now you see what Mac users are talking about, after 2 weeks of owning a Mac he has said, he doest know why he didn't do this years ago. Why indeed!? Most PC zealots have NEVER owned a Mac or even used one for that matter, thus have no IDEA what they are talking about, except FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) spread by wives tales, rumour, or prejudice by PC zealots WHO HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING of Macs at all.

Macs are not perfect, they have issues like any appliance, but next to a PC they start looking that way. For ever one problem I have had with my Macs over the years, I guarantee PC owners have had 100's. This is why over 1 MILLION PC owners have switched to Macs in the past 12 months.

So all you PC zealots out there, its time to put up and shut up. Wanna stay on your heathen box's fine... but don't bag what you don't understand, cause. You are just being RACIST!

BSG SEASON 3

Battlestar Galactica is such a huge hit for NBC Universal Studios and The Sci-Fi Channel that before the second season has even concluded it has been given the green-light for 20 new episodes for Season Three. Not only that, the first ten episodes of Season Two will be available on DVD release by December 20, 2005 for the holiday rush.

The entire cast will return for the conclusion of Season Two and all of Season Three. Also returning are executive producer and writer Ronald D. Moore and executive producer David Eick. YEA!

Sony finds the self destruct button

Well looks like sony found that self destruct button after all, Ever since Sony BMG decided that (a) its customers were all, of course, potential copyright thieves and (b) the fact that they'd bought a CD gave Sony the right to install dangerous software on their PCs to protect its digital rights, they have been enjoing so much negative press and customer hate mail, it makes Jonny's IR laws look like a picnic!

Latest news that the Texas Attorney General has filed a civil lawsuit against the company under the State's anti-spyware legislation, describing Sony's actions installing the XCP software - which includes a so-called "rootkit" - as "a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers".

It seems, however, that the deceit didn't end there. For instance, Sony claims to have withdrawn the offending CDs, but as recently as last Sunday, US time, Texas investigators were able to purchase several of the CDs at Austin retailers.

And just exactly how many dangerous CDs have been released on the market? According to Sony, they've sold only 2.1 million of 4.7 million CDs released with the XCP software. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation - which is also suing Sony BMG - claims that a second variation of the software, labeled as SunnComm MediaMax, has not been addressed and affects 20 million CDs.

The EFF claims the MediaMax software installs itself on computers even when users choose not to run the application. It says that software allows the company to track customers' listening habits despite denials the company collects such data, and it lacks any feature for deleting the program entirely.

Meanwhile, the fact that the software Sony deployed to protect itself from copyright violation contained software that violated the copyright of others, seems to expose it to more legal action - particularly ironic action, given the company has been suing college students and their parents over much less serious copyright infringements.

So far, it seems, Sony hasn't been experiencing much of a consumer backlash. But we expect it's only a matter of time.

We can only wonder whether Sony might begin to wonder, as it watches its reputation being shredded, whether it's really a good idea to try to stop its customers making a copy of the music they've paid for. Given that CDs seem to be rapidly becoming obsolescent technology, what with iTunes Music Store sales beginning to overtake the business being done in bricks and mortar stores.

Of course, none of this means anything to Mac or Linux users.... as this software from Sony does nothing to NON windows computers....so you should have bought a Mac shouldnt you...!? And if you dont own a Mac... GET ONE.. before Sony gets you ;-)