New Apple Lust Objects

I'm pissed that there's no date set for when the service will be availible in the UK. I functions well and the previews are good. It needs a hell of a lot more catalogue, (1 Sun Ra album just ain't going to cut it), Apple need to work at picking up some large independents.

Or fly...

I disown you.

Obviously I did not have a satisfying lunch today and am extremely agitated

Anyway, that said: No, I'm sorry, I tried to read the Hobbit when I was a kid and didn't get into it; I am not interested in seeing the movies before reading the books but I also doubt I'll get around to reading the books anytime soon. I have read some about the creation of the various languages in the books and that was interesting...

So anyway. The "of course not" wasn't so much hobbit-hatin' as it was a reflection on the fact that I almost never see movies.

The glowing keyboard is pretty cool, though.

Dude, this so should have said "his mac is pretty cool too"

Well, the nickname I have for it is "the penis".

Ah, now this I fully sympathize with. :-)

Also there are rumours of the 15" Powerbooks being G5 and that the whole range going G5 by christmas, I find this a little harder to belive. Also the best speculatuion is that the 17" powerbook will become dual processor, something taht is more possible with the G5 as it consumes less power than the G4 but still not that believable.

apple knows it will be wise to re-ignite interest in the desktop range first. after all, there are still G3-based portables that fly off of shelves.

Personally, I'm more interested in the Panther announcements.

Anyway, I'm ignoring the rumors for now - however I WILL be at my local AppleStore to watch the keynote Monday morning.

"OPTICAL AUDIO = Pointless, unless you have a cable travelling hundreds of miles. Once it goes into the computer it has to be converted into electrical signal anyway, so why not just have a digital SPDIF copper cable for the few metres the signal is going to travel from your audio equipment without having an unnecessary conversion stage?"

But it's what a most of consumer digital audio devices have for digital input/output (and some pro ones for that matter). The question is will it be plain s/pdif or will it support ADAT lightpipe as well?

Key paragraph:

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Last night, while experimenting with the new iChat AV and speaking with a friend in Montreal (we both have cable modems), we were both experiencing very "muffled" sounding audio. We could hear each other, but it was hardly clear. After some experimentation, we found a couple of things that really help.

The first is probably obvious -- headphones made a big difference. Still, though, things sounded quite muddled. We then took a look at iChat -> Preferences -> Video, and found the real key to success. In the "Bandwidth Limit" drop-down, the initial setting is "none." When we lowered it to 100K, audio quality went up dramatically, but, of course, video quality suffered. After some epxerimentation, it seems that (between two cable modem connections, anyway), the 500K rate gives the best balance between video and audio quality. Your experience may differ, of course, but it's worth trying the different bandwidth limits to find one that strikes a good balance between audio and video quality.
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