I settled for $5 for an SSH/VNC client (iSSH). On Linux and Windows, there are several free tools for both that work very well, and I have used them for years.

Then you have yet to try using a video out cable, or you are still running a v2 OS.

The machine I was moving the files to was obviously not networked.

Which is virtually nothing, since Apple's designers favour spartan white and silver packaging over useful technical information. At any rate your point simply isn't true; I can do this with other MP3 players that I own; I can do this with every digital camera I own; I can do it with an audio recorder, as I already pointed out. None of them advertised the fact that they offered a filesystem that could be mounted via USB and I could store whatever files on it I wanted.

I guess I should be grateful that my computer works at all, because when I bought it, the boxes didn't spell out everything it was capable of doing. I -- mistakenly, apparently -- thought that this was rather the point of software -- to interact with hardware to make the device do something it wasn't able to before.

If Apple were concerned about files harbouring virii then why make it capable of handling PDF documents? Forget about unknown documents; PDFs are the number one vector for malware on any operating system.

However, your point is an interesting one but it's not quite right. I did have a reasonable expectation that both devices would be able to store a file. I have dozens of USB devices, and anything with a block storage device will happily store and retrieve any file you care to put on it. Whether the device will actually do anything with the file once it's there is another issue entirely.

What surprised me about the iTouch was that it was actively prohibiting me from doing something. I don't personally believe that consumer safety had anything to do with it; as another poster already pointed out, there are plenty of "WebDAV" applications that allow you to stick whatever file you want on the device so long as you pay for the privilege. I think the statement, "Apple would like you to pay them for the privilege" is a whole lot more of an honest and evidently truthful statement about what's going on here. I'm not even saying that's "wrong" or "bad"; wanting to make money isn't immoral. But I do believe in my right to choose to use the hardware the way I want as opposed to the way Apple wants me to; if that means buying from another hardware vendor, so be it.

Yes, they do. Why would the cable work with any v2 OS but not a v3 os?

If gtkpod works with the new iTouch it's news to me; it didn't work for me when I tried it. Admittedly by this point I was starting to lose patience, so it's entirely possible the failure was my fault.

I don't understand. Windows mounts the device just fine. I am able to browse folders. I just wasn't able to write to them; if the interface can read files surely it could be made to write them as well.

That's a fair statement, but it's more money spent on something that shouldn't be required to perform a simple file storage-and-retrieval task.

The rest of your post spews contradictory bile about how Linux sucks yet it powers a similar (and equally capable) device but that it's somehow stupid/fanboyish of me to vote with my dollars for having the freedom to install what software I want instead of what Apple approves.

Yes, I am fully aware that doing so will not be as easy as giving apple $5 every time I want to do it. Yes, I am aware that there are less GUI applications for Linux than there are for the iPhone/iTouch. Since this and your other posts make it clear you perceive "freedom" as it relates to software as a dirty word or that I am some mindless "fanboy", I will simply say, "Same to you."

The other reply already nailed it; it's a video out cable, and a Gen2 iTouch. Apparently the cable would work fine if I downgrade to the "v2" OS -- but then many of my apps would stop working. It's a firmware restriction. You are correct in that the cable still allows me to connect for data and charging -- for now. I would not be the slightest bit surprised if that changed at some point in the future.

Really? I thought the whole point of the Milestone was that it was "Droid for Canada", which presumably meant you'd get 3G on it. If iPhone is the only 3G contender in the Canadian market right now then I guess I will be settling for Edge for the foreseeable future, unless this new Wind company starts doing data within Ottawa anytime soon.

I wouldn't know about the phone part having never tried it, but I confess my wife said she would feel stupid holding it up to her head, and I can't really disagree. She is willing to spend less time on the phone and just do the occasional text instead if we had a halfway decent phone and a plan to go with it, which is why the N900 seems appealing; it's still pretty much just an internet tablet with a phone attached. But it's not made/cockblocked by Apple.

Frankly at this point I'd probably have already bought the N900 but it seems like battery life is a pretty big issue; from what I've read you can expect to charge it daily or even twice daily (!) which seems ridiculous; I know my wife will always forget to charge it and will end up charging it on and off in the car when she goes somewhere, which will kill the battery's life expectancy because of the memory effect. Maybe I can buy a bigger battery for it, but the device already seems a bit on the chubby side as-is.

At any rate, I'm with you; Apple's iTouch/iPhone hardware has its annoyances but it does work and most of what it does, it executes well. But when you say "With wifi for downloads", I wonder what/how you're downloading, because the last time I tried to download a file via Safari it refused to do it; the functionality just isn't there.

I -- and I'm sure, just about everyone else reading this -- strongly agree(s); and this one is a complete clustercuss shared between the phone companies and the hardware vendors. I can't for the life of me understand why the hell it matters where the data goes when it's downloaded if I'm paying for the service, but I confess I've never understood (nor particularly cared for) the insane politics surrounding wireless telecommunications.

Thank you for the suggestion.

I have used VirtualBox a bit in the past because unlike VMWare, it supports color management profiles on the display adapter (which are required to do color-critical photo editing) but I haven't forked out for the "commercial" edition yet because I find it to be considerably slower than VMware.

Do I have any reasonable expectation of the commercial edition being any faster, or is it mainly going to be a functional upgrade?

I know most users won't give up their iPhone/iTouch over their dead bodies -- and I've already invested in an iTouch, and I don't want to throw it away either while it still works.

But I'm done giving money to Apple for their mobile devices. I just got screwed buying an unlicenced cable because I didn't think charging CAD $55 was a reasonable price for a $3 output cable; turns out you either pay the piper or live without, because Apple (and their licencees) all chip their accessories now and the iPhone won't work without detecting one. The only exception seems to be charging, which I only discovered after spending another $50 or so to buy an AC-USB plug and another cable.

I am equally sick of forking out money every time I sneeze. Maybe it's unreasonable of me, but I somehow feel like I shouldn't be paying $10 for an ssh client, and that I shouldn't have to essentially "break the law" to use the underlying operating system features. I totally understand that to even develop for this thing costs you >$100/year; maybe I've been using Linux for too long.

I very much hate trying to interoperate with the device using Linux (it doesn't; not even a little bit; yes I've tried Wine and all the other native apps; it's not supported). Total waste of time. It's a good thing I have a token mac mini as an HTPC or it would be a total wash.

I recently needed to piggyback files from one windows computer to another and didn't have a USB key handy. But here was my iTouch. Done deal, right? This should be easy. Wrong. I couldn't put a zip file on it when mounted via USB, and I couldn't download the file directly from the web using Safari either. I ended up doing the job with a portable audio recorder, because yes -- even though this device has no reason to support anything but audio and audio metadata files, it didn't actively gun down any attempts to do otherwise.

Mobile devices seem to boil down to the same dilemma as on the desktop; you can either use Linux and have the freedom and choice -- which, for now, typically means either a lot less choice or a lot more effort to get things up and running like the state of affairs a decade or more ago; or you can grab your ankles, hand over your credit card and enjoy an overall smoother experience so long as you keep feeding proverbial quarters into the machine.

I've been holding out hope that the Nokia N900 comes to Canada in an 850MHz flavour but it looks like I'll be waiting in vain; time to decide whether to suck it up and deal with only EDGE connectivity or consider going to a different flavour of evil/greed from Apple.

Yes, there are actually numerous benefits you are missing, and none of them have anything to do with my "e-peen" as some other anonymous coward commented. The market for 30-and-higher bit display technologies is far from being electronic snake oil, I assure you; every movie you've ever seen in a digital cinema is projected at no less than 12 bits per colour component, for example -- considerably more colour than is supposedly "indistinguishable by the human eye" than my display is capable of reproducing.

I apologize if this comes across sounding tired and annoyed -- it is a little of both, admittedly -- but I tire of seeing this comment posted on discussion forums whenever "deep colour" displays are mentioned and hope you are genuinely interested as opposed to trolling.

It's trivially easy to illustrate how 24 bit displays are not beyond a human's ability to distinguish. Here's a simple test for you: Draw or display a gradient image from black to middle grey across the entire screen with no dithering. Can you see that there are bands of grey between those two values? You should have no difficulty whatsoever doing so (unless you have terrible vision). The fact that you can see those bands means you can easily distinguish between 16 million colours -- at least the way that colours are necessarily reproduced via red, green and blue channels.

Another easy experiment is to look at the colour "white" on your screen. Now look at a white sheet of paper held directly under a lamp, or out in direct sunlight. Sunlight is typically an order of magnitude brighter than most artificial light. If you can distinguish between 256 values between the blackest black and whitest white on your monitor, and the white outside is an order of magnitude brighter than the brightest white on your monitor, then you have just illustrated that you are theoretically capable of discerning more than 2500 shades of "grey" without even introducing any individual colours yet.

That said, the prime benefit of deep color monitors isn't that they can display all those colours simultaneously -- most software can't do that yet (despite microsoft's promise that Windows 7 would; even Adobe has as much as said that doing so would involve some serious rewrites to be able to display more than 8 bits per channel even though it can manipulate images with higher bit depths in memory).

The two primary benefits of deep colour monitors are A) A wider colour gamut than most monitors, particularly that of other LCDs; the colours are richer and more vibrant, and can completely encircle a colour space such as sRGB instead of covering most of it (which is the best most LCDs can do); and, more importantly, B) the monitor is internally capable of representing all of those colours, which is particularly important when displays are colour-calibrated.

The latter point is particularly important to prevent actual loss of colour. Remember the banding part I mentioned earlier? Well, banding becomes more prominent when displays are colour-corrected because an 8-bit monitor can only reproduce 16 million colours. When the display is calibrated, a lookup table or matrix is used to "transform" an absolute colour value -- say, a perfectly neutral 50% grey -- into what actually appears as being a perfectly neutral 50% grey on your display, which may in fact be something like (132,129,124) on your display if it has a blue cast like most LCD-backlit displays do. Because of this correction, you "lose" a lot of colours on your display because they fall outside the calibrated table, meaning your 16 million colours might be more like 12- or 13-million by the time you're done. This is unfortunately less trivially easy to experience -- especially if you don't have access to a colorimeter to calibrate your display or weren't at least provided with (and use) an ICM/ICC file by your display manufacturer -- but it is a well-documented phenomenon you'll see illustrated on LCD test suites like Lacom's (http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php).

Last but not least, part of the reason for purchasing the display wasn't just its abilities, but because good colour-critical displays also have very good brightness levels, viewing angles, completely consistent colour consistently across the entire surface of the display, and no infuriating backlight bleeds at the top/bottom of the screen even in complete darkness. The monitor also has a three-year, on-site warranty, which was a big draw for me after having two monitors in a dual-monitor rig fail on me within a week of one another and having multiple terrible service experiences in the RMA process.

As for the other comment about how nobody would get anything extra out of it, that's not true at all; most people still buy a whole computer from a vendor which typically come with a color profile for the display device pre-installed. Yes, it's "factory calibrated" (which means each devices gets a generic profile that somewhat resembles the device) but it's better than nothing, and the end-user doesn't have to do, install or own anything special to take advantage of it.

Further, I will point out that I do indeed do web design (as I mentioned) but also significant amounts of photographic work as part of my business, where colour is important not only for the web (because many browsers can now parse embedded colour profiles, as I already stated) but also for accurate colour work intended for other output mediums as well, such as print and projection.

Last but not least, the comment stating that, "a lot of people won't have calibrated displays so the effort is worthless," is as ridiculous as dismissing any other standard because it would place a burden upon you to be bothered to follow it.

Just as with any other standard, the purpose of accurate colour representation for designers isn't the expectation that it's going to display exactly the same on your screen as it does mine -- or even that the same image on the same screen is going to look the same to my eyes as it does your eyes -- but that it is supported by a widely supported standard, quantitative measurement that CAN be followed, as opposed to your apparent, "Well it looks fine to me so fuck you, your shit must suck," attitude that would somehow be a more appropriate professional response to a customer complaining that a colour seems off to them on their so-so laptop display.

I've been using VMware religiously for a few years now to test web pages in Windows-based browsers (I do web-based UI design on Linux and love it), but recently I've been doing more design/visual work and less markup/scripting, so I bought a deep-colour (10 bit) display with a much wider gamut than sRGB and promptly went about setting up the requisite software.

It took very little time for me to discover that VMware has absolutely no colour management capability, which completely kills any chance you have of using Windows-based, colour-managed applications like Photoshop (unless you are intentionally not using a colour-managed workflow).

The color matrix/LUT itself must obviously be created and applied in the host OS (I use Argyll and an X-Rite i1 Display 2 all on Linux, which work great) but it's useless if the Windows application isn't aware of the display profile.

I did a bit of reading and it turned out VirtualBox does support hardware display profiles for Windows guests; the same afternoon I had a Windows XP VirtualBox guest running Photoshop CS3 with full colour management and has since been working great. Strongly recommend to other Linuxy designer-types finding themselves in a similar situation.

On a related note, if ever you do create a calibrated monitor profile using Argyll that you intend to use with Firefox, use a matrix type profile, not a LUT -- Firefox apparently does not support the more accurate LUT profiles at all, but matrix profiles work just fine. I use the LUT for the general display profile but point firefox explicitly to an alternate matrix profile so that photos containing embedded display profiles show up with gamma and especially saturation levels for my display.

The reason you can't find a reference is because they never used SVG to animate the show. They currently use 3D software in production, according to their own FAQ from 2001:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/fans/faq/archives.php?month=5&year=2001#faq_732

I have been a big Xara user for over a decade, and I couldn't believe my good fortune when they started (finally) developing a Linux port. It was making amazing progress, then suddenly -- the entire project fell flat. It's very definitely dead; it hasn't so much as twitched in years. I suspect it's because Xara got themselves acquired/partnered (or whatevered) again by a company that didn't see any financial incentive in a Linux version and killed it, but I don't have the proof to back that claim up.

As for the inevitable suggestion "Its' open source, you go finish it" -- because this is Slashdot, after all -- I respond pre-emptively with the statement that while I am one of those users who are quite content to use illustration software for my work, I have very little interest in (and absolutely no time for) building one myself.

I've used Inkscape, but it's slow (maybe that's better now), the interface is really cumbersome, and really not well-suited to drawing accurate enough for bitmap export (which is really Xara's thing). And of course, its toolset is largely restricted to what SVG can do natively. SVG might have its day yet but it's still a long way from user-agent ubiquity; until then I am still stuck accessing Xara from a Windows virtual machine on a near-daily basis to get my work done as I use Linux on my desktop. I'll be checking out the latest Inkscape, but I doubt it's going to scratch the many itches I still have with it.

I applaud their continued efforts -- and all for free, at that -- all the same.

The font rendering settings are locked in. There are some Google Groups discussions about why this is so, but it was all white noise -- every other application can use .fonts.conf (even if it is a workaround to do so) and Chrome can't/won't for a while, so it got promptly uninstalled.

The Manifold series predicted many of the problems we have here today; the aging Shuttle fleet, the private entrepreneurs trying to step up to the plate to supply heavy lifting capability, and all the political BS from "The Gun Club" (NASA) cock-blocking the private entrepreneurs.

There's also no small mention of how asteroids are flying goldmines. If we want to head off-planet, it would be wise to take advantage of resources that aren't already at the bottom of a gravity well that costs what, $30,000/lb. to LEO?

... Then offer them an Energon goody. Works (almost) every time.

Allow me to say "arigato gozaimas" on the score tip -- I've heard about it (from the "making of" video) but haven't played nor seen the game played yet. To be honest, I'm tossed between upgrading an AGP video card or just buying a '360 -- I'm not particularly keen on either approach, but I've been hankerin' since I last played System Shock 2, which was a good 3-4 years ago now.

Say what you will, but Ken Lavine is one of the good guys. I've had the opportunity to have a (brief) exchange with him in the past; he's no-nonsense but similarly no-bullshit; in other words, the kind of guy every nerd would want to work for or have a beer with, or both. Cheers, Ken, for doing the right thing.