[Tfug] Nice score at WorldCare..

[Bowie Poag]

After 3 days, I've gotten around to installing OS X 10.5.6 on this  
thing, adding another 2TB worth of SATA to it, making this thing a  
media server for the whole house, and part-timing it as a Tivo-to- 
AppleTV transcoder. It's now chewing through about 500GB worth of TV  
shows, and dumping the results into my iTunes library so I can use it  
anywhere.

There are plenty of really, really nice things about OS X, even though  
it's a closed platform. It's heresy to say it here, but that's the  
truth of it. In a closed system, you benefit from interoperability and  
well-defined standards. Everyone knows the rules from the developers  
down to the users, and everyone plays the same game, accordingly.

All the apps related to burning/ripping/transcoding in OS X all know  
the lay of the land, so to speak, so everything you would want to do  
is generally a breeze to do. There's a common backbone to everything.  
Instead of a Rube Goldberg contraption glued together with the aid of  
a shell script requiring the user to install 30 different packages of  
5 different types with 100 different dependencies, all in an effort to  
convert from format A to Z, you just have one or two apps that are  
coherent in their approach to the problem, and deliver their results  
in a format everything already understands natively. It's drag and  
drop at that point. It ceases to be an "MP2/MP4/DivX/XviD/AVI/WMV/FLV- 
to-BIN/CUE/VOB/DVD/VCD" issue. It just works.

At no point have I even been bothered with the idea of a "format". It  
just works. Even when I don't expect it to, it works. It just.....works.

It's sort of an English/Metric thing. It's only when you switch to  
metric that you look back at english and realize how needlessly insane  
it is. Instead of measuring the world via an endless carnival of  
ridiculous ideas like feet, inches, yards, quarts, pints, gallons,  
furlongs and hogsheads, you only have two things to be concerned with.  
A meter, and a gram. If you have a situation where everyone agrees in  
advance, things get muuuuuuuch less complicated, and much more  
enjoyable.


On Sep 17, 2011, at 12:09 PM, pdorf at aol.com wrote:

> Hey everyone!
> Get yourselves to World Care in the next hour...there are some  
> screaming deals and raffling 17" flat screens on the hour! 2 to go!
> Lots of weird networking and sound studio stuff!  Hurry, hurry
> Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pdorf at aol.com
> Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:50:51
> To: Tucson Free Unix Group<tfug at tfug.org>
> Reply-To: pdorf at aol.com
> Subject: Re: [Tfug] Nice score at WorldCare..
>
> Glad u scored!
> Pam at World care
> ------Original Message------
> From: Bowie J. Poag
> Sender: tfug-bounces at tfug.org
> To: tfug at tfug.org
> ReplyTo: Tucson Free Unix Group
> Subject: [Tfug] Nice score at WorldCare..
> Sent: Sep 17, 2011 09:05
>
> 2x2.5 GHz dual PowerMac G5, 250GB SATA, 8GB DDR + 17" Cinema Display.
>
> $300, bitches.
>
> They have some interesting stuff this time, even a nice Exabyte  
> rackmount.
>
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>
> Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
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