HodgeHi

I'm up to level 50 now. Thought about going prestige but in all honesty can't be bothered. After last nights gaming session, it really irritated the hell outta me. I shot someone enough times in the head (I actually aim and not try to just spray bullets all over the place) and didn't get the kill. The other guy/gal shot me twice (from what my camera angle was suggesting, but actually emptied an entire clip into me which was also all over the place so only about 2 bullets actually hit) in the feet and i dropped down dead. Then there's the ones where some guy shoots you and you know that you were under cover and yet they manage to hit you, without even having the hardened perk on. I use the AUG with hardened pro with direct hits into the opposition and still lost out to someone who had something like steady aim or slight of hand equipped. Also with the hardened pro if I can shoot through solid walls and metal doors, then why could i not shoot through a mesh floor or a stair rail??? I have also shot people after they have been battering me with rounds and they drop after shooting them in the knees. If that was me I would've been miffed. The game is just too random. The only thing I can guarantee is that the mortar, napalm and RC-XDs will always find me. And what is it with all the Ghost wearers. An entire team on team deathmatch had them with that stupid mp5k i think it is. I saw the new MoH in Asda the other night for £25. I bought it and will se how that one fairs. No more black ops for me i think. I do prefer the maps on this one though as opposed to MW2s. I loaned out my BC2 to a friend. If he's reading this, can I have it back please?

For me it's usually the 12 year olds that wind me up No skill and tonnes of jax. Riles me every time

I have finished the Single Player on Veteran and found it to be the simplest yet. AI is an absolute joke. I was going up the stairs to the doc just through the red doors after the round room. I had someone shooting me from behind i dived behind the big red door and the russian guy stood in the door way. The guy shooting me stood by the russian guy and kept shooting. The guy shooting couldn't see me. The russian guy just stood there ??? MP is utter rubbish, especially on PS3. People have been complaining about the crap PC port. The PS3 version is no better. Got migrated 6 times in one game of ground war and still didn't complete the entire game before getting booted due to server disconnection. The lag is beyond terrible. It even crashed my entire system at least 4 times. Ground war IMO is the best game type though. The more the merrier I've never been fond of the CoD games since the big red on PC (first one was perhaps the best). When MW2 came out i picked it up cheap but also picked up killzone 2 cheap as well. Played Killzone 2 and loved it. Online is excellent as well. Still suffers from the usual cheating scum (but it's just the sad way of the world I think where some feel they even have to get the upper hand in a game), laggers and lagging but being mission-based you tend to have an objective. Lately it's become more of a base raping constantly type of game. But if you get a good one it's really good and intense. With CoD they don't even bother with the objectives. You have the headquarters and most of the teams still sit camping in places where no one ever goes ???? WHY??? Capture the flag you moron! So I think Black Ops for me will probably be the last CoD game I buy. Loved BC2 but I pretty useless at it. Killzone 3 next for me i think PS. Is anyone seeing constant network related issues with Black Ops on the PS3, parties getting separated and mics getting lost? PPS. because of the way ranking works with online FPS games I also think they should have worldwide release at the same time so everyone has an even start. Just my 2p

You could try just setting up an iTunes account. You should then be able to use this for the find my iphone app.

Not really. you can download Facetime for mac and then create the account that way. Then using this account you should be able to set up the FindmyiPhone app

You can sign up for a free .mac address and then register an alternative address to use for the FindmyiPhone. I use my gmail address instead of the mobileme account. Works quite well as well. Always finds my phone at whichever house I'm at (moms or mine)

Apple has a PDF to assist in users migrating from their XServes after the service agreements run out or can't buy one after January. http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pdf I post this link because there is also some quite handy numbers and info in there that may help some of us making purchasing decisions on which option to go for (Mac Mini Server, Mac Pro or XServe (for now anyway))

If you are using Papercut the way I would do it is to create 2 queues for each printer. One colour one mono. Set each queue up with restrictions. If you print colour to the mono queue it will get denied or something to that effect.

I'm not sure if I have posted this before (looked through the subscribed threads but couldn't see it) but I will post the link again for info purposes. Might help some of us out there It's Apple's PDF on best practices on integrating OS X with AD. Not a lot in it but lists a few commands some people may find handy. I know I've used some of them in the past. Anyway the link is here. http://www.seminars.apple.com/contactme/pdf/L334436B_ActiveDirect_WP.pdf

Kensington Locks are pointless. If the iMac lock is the same as the old mac mini design then all you have to do is twist the entire lock and the plastic around the lock widens allowing the lock to be removed any way. Only took seconds to remove it. Didn't even need a loo roll either. It's a design flaw with the mac mini really a not an(other) issue of the lock itself.

I don't understand the market share argument. Most IT people tend to think the of the mac as a premium brand of laptops. This usually goes hand in hand with people with lots of money. If this is the case and Apple take an age to release updates for exploits (and I know they do, far too long if you ask me) then why would Virus creators not want to exploit those? Think about it for a sec before dismissing what I just wrote. You have a potentially vulnerable machine (with no AV detection and the idea of non required) for what could be a lengthy period unless the user is savvy enough to detect something fishy. This could allow your virus or other malicious software to do it's dirty work for quite a while. And if it's a virus or something that steals ID or whatever then if you are thinking of the type of user using the machine, you could potentially have a disabled cash cow just stranded waiting to be milked for all its worth. As a virus writer why wouldn't you want to at least try? Discuss.

Just out of curiosity why would you need Apple certified RAM?

Not sure if you guys know of a possible workaround for the iMovie issue? It does mean larger home dirs but you can first drag the video footage into iPhoto. This then adds the video into the iPhoto Library. You can then add the video from here into your iMovie files bypassing the issue with the Events folder since the footage is stored in the iPhoto library folder. It takes a little longer since it has to add the footage into iPhoto first and then builds the thumbnail images on import but it does work. The process is: Drag video into iPhoto > open iMovie > Click on iPhoto Video on the left > Choose the video clips you want.

Safari does tend to crawl along unless the caches folder has been redirected on login. You can make sure this is the case by checking in the users library folder. You should see an alias in there (should have a little black arrow in the bottom left corner of the icon). Also redirect the Logs folder. You could also update the flash plugin as this is perhaps the biggest bottleneck of all when browsing on a mac using safari. Failing that it could be something to do with the top sites. I found this to be pretty sluggish when behind a browser and across a networked home dir. One thing to test is perhaps a local user to see if they have the issue. If not then it is definitely something to do with the networked accounts. I haven't checked Chrome on mac for managed preference support. If you can add the plist file to the list in WGM then it you should be able to manage it. Just check the Once, often, Always settings. Some preferences will only work when set to often. You can copy the always settings and paste them into the often setting. It will ask to move them or something.

I agree. This sounds like a good thing to do. It is really difficult shopping for a VLE when you have no idea about the potential of the platform you are looking at. For example when having a demo from a company selling their platform to you, most of the time they show you how stuff is accessed and made but not the short-comings of the platform. Having an independent system to trial and even learn from could be an excellent resource. Those short-comings may just be a case of not knowing enough about the underlying system to find a work around or solution. I hope this makes sense. It's still quite early and I'm quite knackered

If they didn't charge so much for the drives maybe they wouldn't have a problem.

OS X clients do not update DNS records when getting an IP address from the DHCP server. You can make this happen by editing the permissions on the DHCP service to allow a user created by yourself for this very thing. Take a look through some of the threads relating to DNS in the mac section. You should come across it. If not then give me a shout and I'll see if I can find the link I used.

If you manage the side bar I don't think users can re-enable the setting. If it is set to always being managed then the settings are greyed out. Im my own testing though I don't think this worked. However, I have recently found that in 10.6.5 the Managedclient.app has more settings inside that may help to remedy this. To see these go to the details tab under preferences in WGM and then click the + button, navigate to system/library/coreservices/managedclient and then click choose. This will bring up a sizeable list which lets you manage much more than before. You can also remove the go to network option (using Simple Finder). The Keyboard shortcut though I'm not so sure about. Just checking now to see if this can be resolved. I have tried setting my own keyboard shortcut to override the network one but it didn't seem to work. Not sure how else this can be done since the keyboard shortcut for the network is not in the list in system prefs. Maybe request the feature where the keyboard shortcut can be turned off as the other issues can be worked around. Macs use this method to find other clients on it's network, using the bonjour method to find shared resources that you have access to. This is by design as far as I'm aware. Seeing servers in the same as being able to access them. Obscurity does not necessarily mean security.

You need to manage the Finder sidebar preference. However I think that the users can still get to this location by using a keyboard shortcut. The only way of resolving this issue is locking down shares with the correct permissions. If you are using 10.5 you can remove most mac clients by disabling bonjour. However, bonjour is part of 10.6 mdns daemon and so cannot be disabled. If you try to on 10.6 then you will also break dns resolutions. The only real way to do this properly is through permissions.

I don't think that there would be a way to do this as each user has the printer preferences stored in a Printers folder inside their Library folder in their Home dir.

I've just a quick question. How does the Core CAL Suite work? Do you still have to buy individual CALS or does this CAL Suite cover all your users/devices through the EES Agreement? I've been trying to work this out but still not sure what it means. If I've got this right the EES is based on FTE staff instead of computers which seems to be good but does this mean you then have to purchase CALs per user instead of per machine?

You can use WDS on XP as well. Installing WDS on Server 2003 R2 will give you the option to use legacy mode. Once all the tasks of getting the system set up and the additional drivers added to the riprep.inf file then the process is pretty straight forward. You can even pre-stage the machines in the AD (if its like RIS used to be) and then this will join the clients to the AD as well as rename them as it deploys the images to the clients. Similar to the Speccops mentioned earlier i should think. You can't deploy apps with it though. But if you already have software to do that anyway then just install the client on the machines before creating the image.

To be honest creating local accounts not that hard on multiple machines. It can be scripted via terminal and using ARD can be done in less than a minute if the clients are configured for remote management. Once I got my head around how to create the local accounts I created the account on 32 machines in the time it took to run the script. It's not the best solution but a workaround if you need one. Plus, macs run almost flawlessly when standalone / on a dedicated OD network. But I feel your pain. We had a new suite installed when we moved to a new school. It took me around 4 weeks of the 6 week hols to find out why mine were acting in a similar way to yours. However we don't use VLANs. Ours was a problem with the DNS forwarding the queries to the outside world. Windows and the web worked fine, however the macs just crashed. It was strange. As soon as I put in the correct forwarding address in the 2003 Server then the macs just sprung to life. No beach balls at all. Very odd. You could tcpdump to a file and then upload to here. Might be able to help a little more. You could also possibly tail the logs while logged in using ssh. This also helps to see what is happening.

This for me would be odd behaviour as Apple have given the option to choose SMB for networked home dirs unless this is solely for their own SMB implementation which IMO is rather poor.

Disk util allows for encrypted dmgs, read only dmgs, read/write dmgs at a pre defined size. You can create dmgs from files/folders to compress them. DMG is probably more like zip. A very useful feature of dmgs is that you can create a dmg from A DVD /CD and install the OS from it. Just pop it onto an iPod or external HDD and connect it to a client. Mount the dmg and then run the installation. It should then restart the client and mount the dmg from the external drive and install the OS. Not too sure if this is still allowed as the last time I tried it wouldn't work. 10.6 this was. Another type is CDR. This is creating a read only image of a DVD/CD similar to an ISO. In fact so similar that it is indeed possible to rename and CDR image with an ISO extension. Useful to know as most VM software uses ISOs instead of the CDR format. Slightly off topic though. My advice for the OP is perhaps to check out the mac tutorial vids.