murrays

1985 Toyota Celica...315,000 km or ~ 195,300 miles when I sold it in 2000. I changed the oil, sparkplugs and timing chain (once) and the engine still ran like a champ when I got rid of it. Best car I ever owned. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

My understanding is that the HC42 technology is different. Here's a review that says it shoots in true 16:9WIDE mode. Here's the quote: Wide Mode Function: You can record in 16:9 WIDE mode which is a true wide aspect and will play back on a wide-screen 16:9 aspect ratio TV. I also found this on the Sonystyle Canada website. here's a quote: "Unlike other wide-aspect camcorders that simply crop the top and bottom of the frame to mimic the look and feel of widescreen, the DCRHC42 captures more of the image, extending the scope from standard 4:3 Mega-wide shooting mode and recording the whole picture. Create digital video and playback for a complete theatre-like experience, or record in standard 4:3 Mega-wide shooting. The redesigned LCD also gives you the function and flexibility to do more." If that isn't different from say, your PC101 then I am wrong. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

As I look up from my seal flipper pie..... As far as I know the government has brought in guidelines to make the hunt as humane as possible. It is sustainable and a much needed source of income for the people in that region. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I was looking at one a couple of days ago as well....One thing about the HC42 that I think is cool is that it shoots in 16:9 as well as 4:3. And I understand it doesn't do this by just letterboxing the 4:3 image. I think it would be very cool to shoot skydiving in 16:9. I imagine that it would prevent firewiring stuff to you buddies unless they had a camera with similar 16:9 capabilities. iMovie HD in Apple's iLife'05 will edit in 16:9 so I'm ready to go today....just got too many other things to buy and pay for first. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

You know, if these computer things don't drive you nuts once in a while they aren't doing their job. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I bought an Optik using Bone Bonds over 2 years ago. Great deal. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

You're going to have to share some of your compositions with us! -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Hey JT, Glad to hear that it is working for you. Yeah, iTunes keeps you fully informed as to what is going on when it is being updated. Are the transfers happening at a proper (fast) speed now? -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

512mb iPod Shuffle - $99. I bought my oldest son one of these a couple of weeks ago. Great little device. Slips into a jeans coin pocket, rechargeable battery. You need Windows 2000 or XP and USB 2 ports - It will work with USB 1 but be very slow transferring tunes. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Try [url"http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61711"]this Apple Support document[/url] for Windows PCs and see if it helps you out. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I think you should give Apple tech support a call. I was also wondering what OS you are using.....I seem to recall that you need to have Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I bought my son an iPod Shuffle a few weeks ago and remember this being a requirement. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Firewire is highspeed. Period. Transfer speeds over Firewire to an iPod are very fast...to fill a 4 gb Mini should only take a few minutes....like less than 5. Are you using a USB connection? If you don't have USB 2 on your computer it will be really, really slow. USB 1.1 is deadly slow, downloading 50-60 mb if digital photos takes forever, let alone several gb of music. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I'm working ... too many tax deadlines and stuff to do. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Hi Marc, No, I used the internal Superdrive ...when I pick up a dual layer drive I will give it a whirl but that won't be real soon as our van just decided to deplete my bank account. Glad to hear you're liking that new G5 iMac machine

So, I came home from work and created a very small DVD project in iDVD and this time included some DVD-ROM content. I had iDVD create a Disk Image and then burned the disk image using Disk Utility... Perfect!!! The resulting DVD also has the DVD-ROM content. This is great! I'll be able to create a disk image archive that will also have the DVD-ROM content so that I don't have to re-render everything in iDVD in order to make additional copies of the DVD after I burn the initial run. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I tried having iDVD create a disk image last night as well and then burned it using Disk Utility. Worked perfectly....the only damn thing I forgot to do was to include some DVD-ROM material to see if it would include that in the disk image or not. I am working on our club's year end video and have a number of files I want to include as DVD-ROM contents. It will be very nice if the disk image will also include that material as it makes burning additional disks very easy and it allows me to turf the DVD project. I'll try this again tonight with DVD-ROM content and get back to everybody. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

On my iBook at work I run Virtual PC in order to run some PC tax programs and accounting programs. I use Win 98 as my Windows OS as it isn't as slow in the virtual environment. It takes a bit of configuration but you can drag and drop to and from the OS X/Win 98 desktops, use all the printers attached to your mac and it will recognize everything in the disc drive. One day I had Win 98 running, in OS X, while also running an old OS 9 application using the OS X Classic emulation and I also had a Terminal window open and was fiddling around with some Unix procedure that I had read about. 4 OS at the same time. Pretty neat. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

No, they have their own forms of petulant behavior! -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

iDVD 5 (part of iLife '05) is supposed to support external burners... I think you need to have 10.3.8... J Right now there are no dual layer Superdrives available from Apple so if a person wants to burn a dual layer disk...like when you're making a backup of a DVD..you have to use non-Apple software. Speaking of using external DVD burners and iDVD, I think that a workaround with the latest version of iDVD would be to have iDVD create a disk image of the project, mount the image and then use Roxio or maybe even Disk Utility to burn it to the external drive. Drew...what say you? -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

liz, Here's another thought or two for you.... Apple produces the hardware and operating system....and likely a lot of the software you will be using...iMovie/Final Cut, iTunes, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, iDVD, etc. If you are having a problem you only have to call Apple tech support. You won't get told...that's an OS issue, call them, that's a problem with your software, call them, that's a problem with your "peripheral", call them. Apple also is usually one of the top companies in Service and Reliability surveys by PC World and PC Magazine. Here's one by PC Magazine Here's a quote:"As you peruse the results, you'll see that no company is beyond reproach. Each is guilty of selling machines that need repair and providing poor technical support at times. The leading vendors—Apple in the desktop and notebook categories, Dell in desktops and servers, and IBM in notebooks—are those that keep criticism to a minimum." -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

So, now that we're talking about speed of the processor and how long it takes to really get things done, here is my example....my 3 year old 800mhz G4 iMac (that's 1/4 the clock speed of your machine) takes about 6 hours to render 2 hours of video into Mpeg2 (two pass variable bit rate encoding) when it burns a DVD in iDVD. I thought that was a long time but after hearing how long it is taking you my old iMac seems like a speed machine! I don't know if exporting to AVI is a similar compression task but that seems way too long for 20 minutes of video. I think that there is something that needs fixing on your machine. I don't use Windows but I would think that it is plenty fast enough to do all kinds of video work. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I send my Mac Excel files to our accountant all the time and have never had a problem while using Mac Office 98 for OS 9 and using Mac Office X for OS X. I have no idea what version of Office for the PC they are using but it has never been an issue for us. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I use a freeware program called VLC to play avi files and pretty much everything else that Quicktime or WMP won't play. I use the Mac version of Windows Media Player to play wmv files. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Apple has put a lot of work into OS X to make it work easily with PC networks and systems. File swapping is easy. I do it all the time between my iBook and old HP Laptop. Drag and drop. Word, Excel, POwerpoint files are interchangeable between the Mac and PC versions of Office. iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, iTunes...all great pieces of software and included with all new Macs as iLife 05. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I saw a dual layer drive for ale at costco a couple of days ago that included some Roxio software that ran on Macs. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey