Rob

Gad.

I *have* an Airport Extreme. I never said "Express." Perhaps I should have specified "Extreme", but I felt that the fact that Expresses don't *do* this would have been enough to indicate that I had an Extreme. However, the Airport Extreme, as far as I am aware, does not provide you with access to your iTunes video library on a connected hard drive without having an actual computer running an actual copy of iTunes.

As I said before:

1) I want to put a hard drive on my Airport Extreme that contains my iTunes library.
2) I want to turn off all my actual Mac computers, thus saving a good bit of power.
3) I then want to turn on an AppleTV, and still have access to the videos in my iTunes library.

Right now, as far as I am aware, I cannot access my music from my music library, should it be on an attached-to-my-Extreme-base-station hard drive, from, say, as an example of an arbitrary iOS device, my iPhone. Or an iPad. Or an AppleTV.

Right now, as far as I can tell, the only way to get information out of that media store is to have an actual computer running an actual copy of iTunes with that hard drive mounted on it. I do not WANT to do this. I would like the AppleTV to be able to mount the Airport Extreme-attached-hard-drive-based iTunes library and play media without iTunes getting involved.

If someone knows if this is possible, great. If someone knows for sure if it's not possible, well, not great but at least it would settle the uncertainty. But, really, it's not the drive sharing on the router that's the question. It's whether or not Apple has put code into the version of iOS running on the AppleTV to support letting it get data from a specified directory on a specified network volume without the intercession of a running copy of iTunes.

Okay?

Everybody clear?

That's the problem. I don't *want* to have iTunes open. That means I have to have my big ol' 200-watt-plus Mac Pro tower on to play media. I want to be able to park a drive on the Airport, turn on the ATV, and go from there. Period. No other devices required.

What I'd like to know is if you can stream from a drive connected to your Airport; I have a tower at home that's just a wee bit too power-hungry to keep on all the time to be a media server too, but if I can just plug a drive into the Airport, then I can manage the media from the Pro as needed, and watch it on the ATV ... but if that *doesn't* work, then I probably won't be getting an ATV, and will still be looking around for something else that can.

Holy smoke; please, never link to videos like that EVER AGAIN.

You kind of miss the point of the application, there; it isn't necessarily for people who want to make *attractive* graphs, it's for people who want to make *quick* and not terribly sucky graphs, particularly in live presentation situations. My wife and I (both university professors) have used this in class when we've been asked a question that we didn't have a slide prepared for; it's much better to have something that you can generate a quick, qualitative graph with than to stand there in front of a classroom full of students waving your hands in the direction the curve should go. Sure, we could turn on the lights and use the whiteboard, or fire up Illustrator and draw it, but this is quick, effective, and lets us keep going with the lecture with the minimum amount of fuss.

I have to wonder how different this from any console dev contract. The EFF is making a big stink about this one - which is fine, I contribute to them every so often, and have no problem with their activities - but I don't see how this is any different from the publishing and development system set up around, say, the PS3 or the 360 or whatever. From what I know of those contracts - which involves one (1) conversation with a guy I know who works at a game studio that's published a few 360 games - they're even more draconian ... so why yelp about the Apple ones in particular?

Just so you know: the song that you find so annoying was written for Rick Hansen, who was paralyzed in a car accident at age 15, and, inspired by Terry Fox's run for cancer, at age 28, decided to circle the globe in his wheelchair, in order to attract attention and funding to spinal injury research. Not simply travel around the world, but to actually go around the world pushing himself.

He did it. 40,000 kilometers, four continents, two years, and a heap of replacement wheelchair tires later, he rolled into Vancouver, having circumnavigated the globe, raising $26 million in the process. (There's a *reason* he was a torchbearer at the 2010 Vancouver games.)

Ya might think he deserves a little triumphant eighties pop, no?

Except that Repo Men is based on _The Repossession Mambo_, which was published two years before the script for Repo! was written, and preproduction started on it before Repo! was released. The director of Repo! even admitted this in print before Repo Men got close enough to release for ads to start running. (In point of fact, just as legitimate a case could be made for Repo! to be the cheap-ass Roger Corman-style steal-the-thunder ripoff of Repo Men, as for Repo Men to be a ripoff of Repo!)

So, really, it's far more likely that it's yet another example of two projects, both tapping into a common idea in the zeitgeist, both actually managing to reach release than anything else. But thanks for playing.

There's far, far, far more that can be done with HDR than these examples; I and my collaborator just published in Paleontological Electronica a quick survey paper of how to use the technique in paleo collections, and we have another paper submitted elsewhere on how to use it for much, much superior fine detail analysis for microscopic images. Currently, we get much better results assembling HDRs using FDRTools, not Photomatix Pro, although the tonemapping features of Photomatix are, usually, better than FDRTools. We're still living in hope that, one day, Hydra doesn't suck rocks, but so far, no dice.

I don't like her. Her voice grates, her comic timing is nil, and she's put into movies where every man is supposed to think she's the hottest thing on up to five legs ... remember that scene in _Ocean's Eleven_? They're in Vegas, they're surrounded by showgirls, and the best part of that character's day is when a completely-average woman walks down stairs? If you want people to *believe* a character is hot, how about casting someone who actually is? Her career consists almost entirely of Mary Sue fanfiction, and I'd really prefer she actually try to *act*, rather than playing the Amazingly Hot Lead. In the few cases where she *does* play a character, she's fine. But her Star Character was solidified with _Pretty Woman_, and heaven forfend she do something else.