Thanks, Adobe

In a mad attempt to control it's software, Adobe has taken to the clouds & forcing users to pay a monthly subscription fee & be connected to the intertubes to use their software. Barely up & running & je software is on Pirate Bay an thousands of user accounts have been compromised. Adobe gets screwed & all their customers get a gang bang.
While Adobe products are expensive for an amateur, they're not terribly expensive for a pro and, while most pros are going to pay, small, one man shops don't always have a steady revenue stream so the subscription plan just isn't a real good fit. Unfortunately, Adobe virtually has a monopoly in the graphic arts field.

CNET story here
AND
From Engadget

Let's Do a Show !
Used to be, putting on a show was fairly easy - a garage, some old chairs & blankets, maybe a monkey…..
Nowadays, if you don't have a robo-cyborg chick threatening to destroy the planet, nobody gives a crap and rightfully so. But Photoshop, Maya, Lightwave, Media Composer all cost an arm and a leg.
Well, you're still going to need a small render farm & hours & hours of work & learning but you can do it all in Blender for free. This exercise shows off what the software, that runs on Lin/Mac/Win, can accomplish. Obviously, talent & skill are required and this kinda proves that but talent's free at least, sort of...Tears of Steel

Wright Pat Shows Off It's New Computer

Wright Patterson Air Force Base, outside historic Dayton, OH, will show off it's new Cray "Raptor" system Friday. Cray Computer is probably best known for supplying Batman with his Batcave computer system.
The liquid cooled Raptor with petascale technologies checks in with virtually 89,805 gigabytes of memory and can scale to over 1,000,000 cores using AMD multi-core processors. The lucky bastards intend to use this Linux box for weapon systems design, modeling and simulation studies.
For more info on this beast click here.

Noose Son story here.

Cool things you can do with a Mac Mini.

Read the article here.

Installing Windows Vista Business SP1 on a MacBook Pro
First dilemma - how the hell do you open the Windows Vista box ?
It looks like a book and has a curved front along the left side of the box. But it doesn't open along the left side.
After breaking the box into pieces & still not being able to access the disk, I look online for Windows support and find out the box opens along the Z axis from down on the lower right.
This is going to go well.
I begin to partition my HD with Boot Camp Assistant. A few minutes into this and the computer crashes. oboy.
Fortunately, the partial partitioning somehow ate up a bunch of diskspace that I do not know how to clear, but now I do not have enough room to install Vista or do much else on the Mac side, either, for that matter. So it's time to wipe & reinstall Mac & lose my purloined Acrobat & InDesign.
No rest for the wicked.....
Re-installed Mac
Ran updates
Everything looks ok
Start up Bootcamp, partition works ok - start Windows installation.....
yeesh
This thing starts and stops so many times I don't know what the hell is going on.
Looked like everything was done, so I inserted the Mac installer disk to load Apple specific drivers & tried to run the installer but I kept getting a message saying I could not install because I had a "pending restart".
Sorta weird as I never saw a dialogue box saying I needed to restart and that I could do it now or later. So I restarted, and then I was able to install the drivers & Bootcamp control panel. It is just like the typical Mac startup disk control panel for anybody who remembers or still boots into OS9.
So, 4.5 hrs after I started I was booting back & forth between OSs.
Now I just have to install plug ins, applications on the Mac side, set up email and Airport....
ugh
Do that tomorrow.