unimatrix

Gimp is your best bet. If you need 3D work, try https://www.blender.org/. They have a solaris port of their system. Again it is free and open source.I used to have a decent illistrator program written for Solaris 8 that we used in house, but I don't think I have a copy any more...

which is the exact reason why I like the BSD license. At work, we won't touch GPL with a 10 foot stick even for internal programs. Just like anything we descide to release Opensource goes with the BSD licenese. I will make the arguement that true people that like Opensource for the sake of totally free (as in speech and beer) software go with BSD licensed products. Before I went to work there (and Apple Shake was released) they had a video editing system that was in house and written expressly with NetBSD running on Alpha. The program used some highly intergrated and rewritten kernel processes. It was fair to say that they had written their own OS based on NetBSD designed to compiste scenes and nothing else. It was small light (in terms of ditro size) and allowed the max amount of the CPU to be used for rendering. Actually it is far more effecient that our current systems, but with death of Alpha and rise of Macintosh in UNix land it was decided it would be cheaper and easier to switch to industry standard applications. They were thinking of selling the OS for video production companies still running ALPHA, but like I said, those days are over...poor Alpha...Still, when I release code, I do it under BSD if I don't want to make money from it and I don't really care if someone else does. If they can, good for them, they were smarter than I was or put forth the effort I didn't want too. Hell I'm happy as a lark if someone uses my code.Personally I find that most GPL folks want free beer and don't care so much about the speech part. BSD folk want the freedom of speech, usage, and if you can use it to buy a fine bottle of wine: more power to you!GPL = Freedom of Speech* (please see dislaimer below)BSD = Freedom of Speech* (Just attach the copyright notice please, thank you)

Why do they plan that far ahead? That's the nature of software and milestones. I remember when I worked as a lowly coder that we had a set of features for this release and a room or two or three planning on what features our clients wanted in the next release and then debating what was "acheiveable" by the next due date. We'd have a shipping party usually on a Friday that was always a brunch. We'd come in and the place would be full of Krispy Cremes and St. Louis Bread CO. stuff (that's Penera Bread for all you smucks outside of St. Louis) and then we'd order IMO's for Lunch (That's St. Louis for Pizza for again said smucks). We'd eat, drink, (being merry was not tolerated by company policy) until about 2PM and then go home. We'd usually get Monday off too, but Tuesday it was back to work answering tech support questions and bug fixing. The first of the next month, we'd already be into the planning stages of the next release to be rushed out in another 6 months. So planning like this isn't too uncommon especially on larger applications. I mean the stuff we were doing had 6 full time coders and maybe 150k lines of code. Imgaine something will millions and milllions and millions of lines of code. Sometimes the planning stages took longer than actual production. BUt that was for a small company that no longer exists today. Anyway....back on topic....The general consenses on WIndows today is that any major improvements will require a jump like Mac OS 9 to OS X: a complete rebuilding almost from scratch. Which is something MS might be considering. Now it would be something if they chose something like OpenBSD as their starting point and worked from there. Which under the BSD licenses they are free to do. Infact the Windows NT line of products include more than a few lines of BSD code in them already. (like the IP stack if I remember correctly) But Windows copy Macintosh? No....never...

Great something else that people can do with their cell phones. I am getting to where I hate having a cell phone. Seems like it is more of leash than a tool. I remember a day when if you weren't home, and someone from work called and I was out...I was out. Too bad. I'm enjoying a movie, eating at Applebees, or watching the game at Buffalo Wild Wings. Now I've learned what the off button and to leave the thing in my car when I'm out. I can see the line of people now shopping at the mall using Froogle to see who has the best sales on that week. "Should I go shopping at Dillards or JC Penny"...all my lady friends are going to love it...Me...I want my cell phone to do one thing: make clear calls with few discontections. That's all. I don't want to type IM's, I don't want to take pictures, I don't need it to tell me where I am and where I am going (however said lady friends might insist on that when I get lost and refuse to stop for directions). That being said, my dad already has some kind of dial up accelerator from Netscape that lessens the quality of images to load faster. The Feed reader sounds like Google News. There are tones of RSS/ATOM/whatever else readers that you can create your own custom news/info feed page if you want already on the market. Other than having the "google" name on it, I really don't see the major advantage. I like to say this though: I remember when Wal-Mart was a good company under Sam Walton. When he died the Harvard MBA's came in and started playing by their rules. So it's not Google now, it's who runs Google next that you have to worry about...

Altavista or astavista? One was for searching the net owned by DEC/Compaq/now HP, the other was for searching for less than reputable things on the internet. I still use the babel fish service through Altavista.com some to translate words, no not entire webpages. German is my second language and there are time I'm typing and can't think of a word. Babel fish is usually good to look up a word or two, especially if you remember it once you see it. Same if I run across a word I can't remember or have never seen before. Handy to translate that word usually. Google has the goal to basically "organize all the knowldege in the world". Someone else tried that once: it was called the Library of Alexanderia. Then when someone finally burned it to the ground, there was this nice period called "the dark ages". Google seeing information to be organized is starting to worry me a bit. It is bad enough that if you know someone's SSN you can get their credit reports, hell I even saw today on the news where you can get someone's cell phone records online for like $50. You can tell who they called, for how long, and even where they called from. That gets to be a little too much information for my taste. The sad part is google has the "do no evil" philosophy, but what they are doing (taking it that the see data and information as something to just be collected and organized) could be one of the most dangerous things they could do. And it's not Google that I'm worried about so much as people being able to use google to their own means and ends that concerns me.

Lots of drinking, lots and lots of drinking in the Dorm...kinda...When I was in college, the RA on my floor discovered this free webbased games called "Star-Kingdoms" that had like 600 players. So he signed up, played the end of a game and waited until reset we all signed up. There was like 30 of us in the dorm that and I developed the idea of forming our own secret alliance that involved yelling down the hall in the evening, "Hey this jerk just attacked me from 12:12". So we'd all log in and start probing and nuking the guy to death. We'd message their sector leader as the "Borg Collective, join us or die". Somehow I got dubbed as "Big X" (from the Movie the Great Escape) and later Unimatrix...where or how that exactly came about, can't remember. Anyway we played for a couple rounds then finals came up, everyone in the game started figure out what was going on and started to hunt us down, but it was great fun. The most surprising thing later was like my Junior or Senior year some freshman came up and knew who I was from that....that was just odd....

Gimp, to me, is better than PSP and free. The thing that really draws down GIMP is the lack of plug-ins like there are for Photoshop. There are several attempts to create knock offs, but overall the quality of Photoshop is just so much better and has so many more plug-ins to create many different things.I mainly use Photoshop for creating textures to use in 3D animation programs. Photoshop 6 still does everything I need, so I am hard pressed to spend the money on the upgrade. I am sure when I move to OSX-Intel in a couple years, I'll get the latest version then. But for now...The major problem I had with GIMP was that it didn't really show any improvement from 1999 to about 2003. In that time Photoshop went from version 4 to 7 and had a lot more features added that were useful and great additions while GIMP remained pretty stagnate. That hurt GIMP a lot in my book. Now GIMP has picked up steam and there seems to be a much better developers community and much more activity. GIMP is getting better with more options all the time and I could see a day when I go with GIMP and not need Photoshop if there are a couple GIMP plug-ins that are comparable to the ones I use now.

Some CMS systems create .html static output pages. I know with Drupel with the "search friendly" settting on that it creates static pages. Then if you edit it, then it generates a new static page at the same spot. So that is an idea you might want to explore. Although if you look at many forums, the'll have adsense ads that are displayed that advertise Macs if the topic is apple related, etc.

Typically I've been a bigger fan of ATi's cards over the year, but not of their drivers (at least on windows). I run Mac and for the most part we've always used ATi cards in our business. However, to be honest, we usually can't tell much of a difference betwen Nvidia and ATi performance. The question is what platform are you going to be using it on and what for? Gamers have different needs than say us in the Computer Graphics world. A little more info on what you plan to do with it, games or general use, will probably help a little.

I predict the next color option to be "Smurf Blue"....dunno why. Maybe because I was flipping through the channels and actually saw the smurfs on for the first time in 20 years...Although they could rebrand the U2 Ipod and call it the A-team model...keep the same color scheme, but have Hannaible smith say "I love it when a plan comes together" or Mr. T saying "Foo" when you make an error...Man...I really, really, really feel old now...

I use pay pal along with 2checkout on my ecommerce site. I was at home the other day and my Dad uses the Netscape 8 Browser on Windows. I went to the Paypal site direct and it wouldn't hardly let me on giving me all kinds of warnings. Kinda made me think about it for a second. I was never keen on Pay Pal and never keep more than 750 USD in the account. The way in which PayPal acts like a bank, but wasn't a bank, and some of their other issues in the past kept me away. However, owning a small ecommerce site that does like $1,350 a month in sales, having PayPal as an option is needed because a lot of people reconize the name over 2checkout.com. So it is a love hate thing. One of these days I need to really talk with my Bank and see about having US Bank process the CC payments. I might have to switch shopping carts, but US Bank is also heavier on the fees. $.30 + 3% for Pay Pal isn't bad, but $.50 + 5.5% that 2CO charges is about the same as my Bank....

And remind me, how much BSD code does Windows have in it again? Last check there were some major IP/stack and Kernel stuff almost cut and pasted from BSD to Windows NT/2k/XP in the last few years. Sometimes I wonder how Windows can take BSD, screw it up and Apple can take BSD and improve it for the average user...

Actually if Google were to say that, they would quickly see criminal charges filed against them and a whole lot of supenas for what: lying. Lying to the DOJ, or government, is the one sure way to get fines and people sent off to jail. That and not paying your taxes. Honestly, any body remember what Nixon got in trouble for? How about Clinton? Or Martha Steward? Was it insider trading or obstruction of justice & purgy? Anyone remember this now little accounting firm called Aurthur Anderson? The same "what records we just shredded" company? And on a side note: (and I do not support or endorce criminal activity in any way) If your going to run a criminal empire just remember this: The government doesn't care so long as you pay your taxes.

All the figures I've seen for the HD-DVD states around 18GB per disc, not the current 9. I know when customer's ask us, we tell them we're waiting until someone comes out ahead. Still I've not heard anything about which format Vivid or anyone else in the adult film business has chosen. Ultimately, they are the ones that decide which format will triumph, not the PS3 or Xbox crowd. Kinda surprising isn't it? Heck we get a subscription to an adult movie production magazine because they are the ones working with the latest and greatest CODEC's first. Funny how the world works somtime...

Privacy online is a myth, has always been one and privacy as a whole has not been as clearly defined as a lot of people think by SCOTUS. There is no such right granted in the consitution, it has been granted as an extention interpreted by SCOTUS in the last century. SCOTUS rulings can be over ruled at a later date: see Brown Vs. the Board of Education. The bigger point is that Google DOES collect this data. In this case the DOJ submitted a request and Google refused. They are playing with fire because it won't take much to have a rider attached to someother bill that can change the rules. However, if they were seeking information in a criminal investigation, a court ordered supena and Google has to comply. In my experiences, if law enforcement wants information, they will usually ask nicely first. If you want to save face in the eyes of particular clients, you can say "not with a court order". So the next day they come in with a court order and we already have the info they were looking for onto disks and print outs. Actually the few interactions with the FBI I've had on those type of topics has been pleasent. They understood why we wouldn't just hand over information without a court order. We knew they'd get their court order so it was really just a technicallity on everyone's part. As our corporate attourny said: "If they come asking for it, say 'court order please' and then start getting what they want ready and have it nicely boxed so they just have to show you the document, load the boxes, and leave". However, in most terms of use, there are specific sections that say: we will comply with law enforcement agencies" as an execption to stated privacy policies. I know all my website privacy statements carry that. Most larger companies will comply with DOJ requests because it is much easier to comply than try to fight it. Legal bills add up quickly because the first thing in house lawyers say are: hire specialists. If the government wants the info, they'll go to a judge, or congress can supeana as well, and get what they want. And Yes I am law student....

while the design of *iux makes it less prone to viruses, if 50% of the worlds computers were running <<pick your distro here>>, you'd see a lot more viruses out there for that system. That being said, people don't always download from "trusted" sources. That's one reason why Windows has so many problems. Especially from people trying to pirate software, music, and movies. Security through Obscurity seems to only work for AIX...

I am not sure about the new Intel iMacs with the EPI loader, but the section of that keeps system time ALSO controls the start up process. So if the battery dies, the system won't start. This is not unheard of, but rare. Usually if a system won't boot it is because:1) Not plugged in2) Logic board is bad98% of the time...its #1.

This does not surprise me. When I studied and worked in Germany for year, a lot of the students had dual boot laptops with both XP and SuSE Linux at the time. Mainly because SuSE was a home grown German developed software system based on Linux. In fact the Fachhochschule had a Linux Lab. I looked horribly out of place for most of the semester with my 14.1" iBook. Finally there were a couple of nice looking German girls that eventually showed up with their 12.1" iBooks so I didn't feel like such the outcast. But man did the German students give me crap until I showed them how best to run Windows 2000: in a Window on a mac. Then double click else where and get a real Unix prompt...Anyway I loved taunting them back as well. Especially when I conntected to the wireless (first time I used my airport card was in Europe) and they didn't see any cards hanging out the side of the laptop. As a whole though, Germany tended to have smaller Cell phones that we did in the US, were more open to using Wi-Fi technology (wifi didn't catch on until about 18 months after I got back home) and Linux. Some how I have a feeling that it has to do more with the fact that Microsoft is a US company and the view many in Europe take of any US company. Most Americans, especially home users, don't care and will use what is provided reguardless of alternatives. Hell, my dad still runs Windows 98 and Netscape 8 browser. All he does is check email online, check stocks, and plays solitare...oh and does his taxes...that's it.

First off Apple is a niche player. They have a loyal fan base and then an odd mixtures of those who want to use a computer that "just works" without being a nerd and powerusers/professionals. A lot of companies opted for Macs to replace aging DEC/SUN/Irix Unix workstations. I can remember a 166Mhz Sun SPARC workstation with 2GB of ram costing $16,000 each and that was like six years ago. So a 10Ghz Quad-core Power Mac with 8GB of Ram for $7,500 is a bargin to those folks. But really why do people spend so much for PowerMac machines? Apple Pro Tools. It's the software, not the hardware. Granted these tools are directly geared towards video and graphics industry. I mean our copies of the Compositing Application Shake were $3000 each. If you want to run Shake on Linux, it costs $5000. So you can actually buy a base-level PowerMac AND Shake for what it would cost for Shake on Linux. As far as pricing goes, that really is a myth for the most part that Apple is more expensive. At the local mall there is both an Apple Store and Sony Store. Compare the laptops in each...they are within a few dollars of each other for the same basic features. Now I will admit that the fact the Viao towers come with a built in video capture system is a nice feature (why Apple does NOT do this on the iMac and ESPECIALLY the PowerMac series is beyond me...), but still it comes down, at least for us, to: "Can you run Final Cut Pro on anything other than Mac?" No. I know that everytime I went to price out a laptop or home computer, I've found Apple to be within dollars or cheaper. I mean my Mac Mini was $850 plus $50 for the DVI to TV adaptor, mini-jack to RCA, and PS/2 mouse & keyboard to USB adaptors. I use my 42" LCD TV as the monitor (although I need to splurge and get the wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse). I get iTunes, iMovieHD, Garage Band, and all the other iLife software that allows be to do anything I need. It was $100 for a cheap firewire video capture device so I could record our old VHS movies to DVD. And it was easy to use with no hassles. Everything just worked and iMovie is extremely powerful for home movie editing. If you have a firewire or USB Mini-DV camcorder, you don't even need the video capture card, just plug it in. My two Sony Digital Camera's I've owned...just plugged them in and iPhoto pops up and down loads the images from the memory card: no need to load special software or drivers. The other big factor, that is hard to calculate, is I need not worry about spy ware, mal ware, or viruses as much. They still exist for Mac, but are not as many. Basically four years ago I got tired of my AMD tower crashing due to heat issues in Windows, the lack of many appliactions and divers for Linux (my printer [both HP820CSE and HP712C], scanner, nor sound card EVER had working drivers) and I was leaving to go out of the country for about a year. So I bought an iBook and never looked back. All by OSS Unix goodies, all the Apple only goodies, I could boot into WIndows 2000 via Virtual PC, and all my favorite commecial application like Photoshop and GoLive all on one laptop. Yeah, I'll pay a few bucks more for that convenence.

I am not a fan of AMD. I've had some major problems with AMD chips and heat in the past and won't even bother to give them a second look. (Also, having to be careful to get an AMD motherboard without a VIA chipset is a pain too) I am a much bigger fan of the concentration Intel is putting into the Performance/watt side of the house. That doesn't sound like a big deal until you see our company's power bill last month was USD 98,000 and a large chunk of that thanks to the over 180 computers and servers not to mention the costs to cool the server room. There are a couple major problems though: none of the major applications are released yet. None of the Pro Tool, Office, or Adobe line are being shipped yet. I was at the Apple store yesterday picking up a couple laptops that needed some repairs and was talking to our sales rep there. It will be March until those applications are even out. Hell I remember we still booted OS 9 until 2002 so we could use QuarkXpress. They took a really long time to port from OS 9 to OS X. (One reason why Pagemaker/InDesign made a come back) We won't even consider getting the laptops until the Protools are released and the second generation of MacBooks are out. We are a 100% Apple shop...we know better than to buy the first generation anything Apple.Also, we're in the video production and limited 3D animation business so we actually can take advantage of the 64-bit extentions the G5 Processors offer. How much of a performance boost will we actually see, if any, on the desktop side is yet to be seen, but I will say this much: Lightwave's rendering engine has been tweaked for the x86 architecture so when Lightwave 9 for OSX-Intel is released it should be interesting to see...However, the Macbook Pro, is where we are going to see the big improvement. Laptops are now out selling desktops and dare I say 40% of our editing is now done in the field by our production crews on PowerMacs. They usually have a rough edit complete by the time they get back to the studio and into one of the Editing bays where they can mix sound and render much faster on Quad-Core Powermacs and Xserve Raid units. Again, I think this is where Intel is going to hit the mark as well because as a laptop user I am willing to sacrifce some performance for battery life. If you can increase the performance per watt of your chips, that is going to make one heck of a difference. With Freescale/IBM unable to create a G5-like processor for the notebook and the production problems getting any more speed out of the PPC 870 series (moblie "G4"), Apple had to do something and they made the right move. I would not have gone with AMD either. The big reason why AMD doesn't enjoy more than 15% of the market share is that they don't have the production capacity Intel does. Even if 20% of users wanted AMD chips right now, they couldn't deliver that number of chips. Plus when Apple made the announcement, AMD was experiencing the same manufacturing problems as IBM/Freescale in the 90nm faberication process. If I were Apple, I would have said, "Wait are these the same basic problems as we are having with IBM at the moment minus the 'IBM wants to be a consulting company not a hardware company' bit?"In the long term, I think this is a good move for Apple. It gets rid of the "PPC Vs. X86" debates.

Mambo has been a staple of my business for years. I've help set up at least 12 sites for clients using mambo over the years. It is great for large expansive portal sites with lots of users, like the one I set up for our Dioceses, but it can be a little complex to manage. Last deployment took three months to set up the system and transistion all the content and six months to train all the empolyees how to use the system. In fact, my billable hours was three times as heavy for training verus programming. Anyway, with the recent split and the needs of my last couple clients, I've moved to Xoops. Xoops seems to be a little more friendly to administrate and train people, especally for smaller to medium sized sites. Right now I am working on sites for three Parishes in the Diocese and it is as been very pleasent to work with.Also, I've worked with Drupel in the past. Drupel was great for a personal site I had and had excellent help features. What every button did and was for had text or a mouse over help button. I don't think I had to consult a PDF manual once. However, Drupel has a couple quirks, like how it names stories and those files have to be added to a top level menu if they are say a static page, but over all very managable. Once things get settled or I need a robust CMS that will run off PostgreSQL, then I will go back and look at Mambo/Joombla.

I am a 3d animator 1st, game programer about 51st, but I downloaded Game Maker and it seems like a great application and pretty cheap too to create simple and complex games for non-coders. Which could be a blessing if you have some technical skills, but are a better storyteller or creative type that doesn't need 5 years of C++ classes not to mention how to write a graphics shader from scratch. I typically use Python with Blender 3D because I'm familar with Blender 3d and the game engine is intergrated. But the only time I use the game engine is to conduct rigid body simulations (we do car wreck animations for greedy trail lawyers...yeah, yeah, scum of the earth, but they pay upwards of $5000 per job). The nice thing about Blender is that it is cross-plaform compatible. SO if you code on a windows machine, it will work in OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, or anyother platform supported by Blender3d. Which is kinda cool. The basic functions are somewhat limiting, but if you learn Python (which isn't as bad as say any version of C) you can do some really powerful stuff and customize just about everything.Again Blender is designed to create 3D FPS and even RTS games and has a hefty learning curve if you want to learn how to model, texture, and animate. These days developement of Blender is more towards competiting with application like 3D Studio Max, Lightwave 3D, and Maya not as a game creation utility like it was originally designed for, but the game engine is still alive.

There is also a myrid of research showing that videogames can also influence the same area of the brain that controlls addiction. So the term "video game addict" may actually be medically correct. However, in modern western soecity, there is this shift that every else "causes" someone to do something instead of just holding a person responsible for what they do. There are too many people trying to figure out "why" instead of saying, "they violated our social order, no there is a punishment". Go back and ask yourself, "Did prohabition stop crime?"What we need is stop trying to figure out "why" and start going back to holding people responsible for their actions.

With enough low-level access? All you need is the O'reilly "MacOS X for Unix Geeks" book that shows how gain access to the core functions. Having used BSD systems for four years before switching to OSX....I can do anything that I could with FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux for that matter. The exception being Aqua, but I've never needed too. Plus I still don't understand this whole BS about "oh they are using Intel". The level of intergration will just help to improve the Apple "It should just work" philosophy. If they can customize hardware/software configs to a set spec, you should see a Mactel outperform any other OS with x86 chip-set combo. The G5 is arguably a more powerful chip BUT there are two major draw backs. One is business, the other is technical. The G5 processor, technically, is a flop for a laptop. Laptops are now outselling desktops and I think that trend is going to continue. The G-5's take too much power and produce too much heat for use in a laptop. Also IBM/Freecell have had many production and design problems in the last few years missing several promises. Bottom line Freecell couldn't deliver what they said they could when they said they would. Finally, IBM basically said they were shifting away from being a hardware company and becoming a consulting business. So what Apple wanted and what IBM wanted to do were shifting away from a business perpective. Now, if you want to produce a computer and don't want to risk production problems or headaches who do you turn too? AMD? No, AMD is facing the same production and fabercation woes that Freecell suffered. Furthermore, AMD is basically at capacity. They are selling everything they can produce. One of the big factors why they don't have more than a 15% market share is that they cannot produce more chips, so even if 25% of the market wanted AMD chips, AMD current CANNOT devliver. By default that leaves you with INTEL. Furthermore, INTEL is shifting away from the "make the fastest chip possible" and why AMD is current the favourite with gamers. Intel, on the otherhand, is going towards producing more effienct chips. Those that gain more performance using less power and producing less heat, which are the factors that dominate laptop performance. Personally, I would hedge bets on Intel over AMD. I honestly believe the days of a PC gaming machine are numbered and that people aren't going to need or really use 64-bit technology in their laptops. 64-bit chips typically perform worse at "business" applications like word processing and spreadsheet calculations. Also, Apple is heavy in the graphics market and most rendering technologies in the last couple years have been tweaked for x86 performance. Just something to note.... Now with all that being said, I would not buy a new Macbook Pro. Not until this time in 2007. It is a first generation Apple product. You don't buy first generation Apple products....ever!

The advantages of the intel chip in the iMac....I'm not sure since the older G5 iMacs should run some applications, like final cut pro, faster with 64-bit extenions. However, the Macbook is a welcome sight. The PowerBook has not advanced much. Mine is 1.25Ghz and Apple was really stuck there the past couple years. But this is Apple. I would not purchase either the new iMac or MacBook until at least this summer when the 2nd generations come out. I must say the new powercord for the MacBook is a great idea. How many times have I been at Coffeeshops and plugged in and someone almost kick my computer off the table tripping on the connector. Still, I hope there aren't some other problems with magnets around a computer...