unimatrix

I don't work for Apple. I work for a video production company technically as a consultant. They basically pay me to keep up on the latest and greatest Mac stuff and help develop some in house software. We have 1 full time techie and 2 software programmers then me in a company of approx. 25 full-time regular employees. We have the development boxes to test our in-house applications. I think less than 50 lines of code had to be changed for things to compile and work on the X86 version. I know several others in the Mac development community. These people that are complaining about Apple not letting them run OSX on whater joe user wants I think is going to be surprised when the line gets shifted over.

Guess I need to step in and clear somethings up here. First off I have one of the Mactel developer boxes and yes, I am bound by NDA on what I can say and can't say about it. 1) Yes you will have to purchase Apple branded hardware boxes. I suppose people will hack the system to install on commodity boxes. Why Apple doesn't want to do this is because Apple software is designed to work with Apple Hardware. Ever think its odd that when ATI ships a video card for Mac the drivers work. When they ship a card for Windows it takes 6 months before a decent set of drivers are out? That is part of the design philosophy that things should just work. I have worked in several IT (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, True64, NT4 for Alpha) eviroments and the one now is 100% Macintosh and it is the easiest to maintain. Apple doesn't want to spend the money to support every peice of hardware on the market and I don't blame them. The fact that everything works so well together on our network at work is a real blessing. The IT staff expense is 1 full-time employee that handle day-to-day issues and general tech support and me as a consultant for 20 employees. That single IT guy can actually spend time developing emergancy plans and manage backups because there are rarely any problems he has to deal with. We aren't worrying about the virus of the week. Hardware is more expensive up front, but they tend to use systems for upto 6 years. When they moved to the G5's, over half the desktops were G3's and the rest early G4's. 2) OS X is FreeBSD...kindaYes and not really. There is a lot based on FreeBSD, but the Kernal (the core of the OS) is MACH based. Almost like how Debian is FreeBSD with Linux kernal. Really the main part of OSX is the GUI interface Aqua. So to say it is a user friendly version of FreeBSD isn't exactly true, but most major *iux apps have been ported and it's not too hard to port from *iux to OSX. 3) Comment about Apple not being Stable. OS 8 or 9, yeah I would have to agree with and I didn't even touch a Mac and made fun of people who did. OS X is a different ball game. My iBook once went 183.4 days of uptime. A latop here. FInally the battery died completely on a 16 hour Journey from Europe to the United States. All I had to do was close the lid and open it again and it didn't crash. In fact I have only seen OSX crash once to the point where it became a paperweight. Even then we managed to SSH into the box and setup a new user account for the person and it is still working 2 years later. Then you also have to know the person that did it. Literally the guy that can touch a computer and brake it. We use Apple for video production. Editing, title effects using Lightwave 3D, post production in After-Effects and Shake, etc. Frankly when it comes to high-end, high load stuff, you can't get much more heavy duty then what we do. Some of our G5 boxes have 8GB of Ram, and all but the iMacs in the front office and the Xserve Cluster nodes have at least 4GB. Under high load and high stress, the systems perform great. Now we have applications crash, but rarely will it ever take the entire OS with it. We can lock them up when we have FCP, 30 windows of Photoshop, Safari, iTunes, and Aftereffects running and you go to check your email. Compare that to 30 windows of PS, Avid Xpress, itunes, Firefox, then open Outlook on your PC and see what happens. Basically, you really have to try and crash our Macs. 4) Speed issues. Depends on what you are doing. The G4 and G5 are behind in terms of rendering technologies. With Apple's move to OSX and the development of Final Cut Pro served to really PO Adobe to the point Adobe went to making PS for the PC platform first, Mac second. Most in the rendering community will say that PPC vs. X86 that x86 wins hands down. I think that assement is accurate. However, most Apple vs. PC speed tests really aren't helpful. Why? So the PC's are fast in 1v1 rendering tests in Photoshop of After Effects. Want to know why so many people switched to Mac in the Video production arena? Because Final Cut Pro 3 was far superior to Adobe Premiere 6. Premiere 6 was a POS. What's the point if it took 5 hours to render in Premiere on PC if it crashed 60% of the time 2 hours into the render vs taking 6 hours in FCP on a Mac? 5) The *iux workstation MarketIt wasn't that long ago I can remember engineering and graphics workstations costing USD 20,000 per unit from DEC, Sun, or SGI. Apple began to offer an extremely affordable and more powerful Unix workstation than anyone else out there. BTW, you can also run Microsoft Office and a wide range of other common commerical software. Plus all that stuff written for Irix or Solaris isn't that difficult to port to OSX. OSX really was the death nail into SGI's coffin. -------------------------------Frankly what I can understand is the reaction from people in the computer user world. There is a cult of "AMD RULZ and LINUX is even better" that rivals that of the Cult of Mac. While Apple has been running on PPC people's been like, well you can spend the more money on the PPC, but because it won't run games I am not going to buy it. Now that Apple decided to use Intel chips, for good reasons I can't go into, suddenly everyone thinks that they have a right to run Apple OS X on what ever they want. Most people that say this really don't understand Apple's market base. It is of low tech consumers that want things to be easy and work for a few tasks, and then powerusers willing to pay a premium for specific tasks. People think that AMD64 is da bomb. I still have a Quad DEC Alpha 500 with 2GB of ram in the basement with NT 4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5.6. I also have a PC version of Lightwave 5.6 and let's see who's system would win.

Previous company I worked for was in the process of switching back to intel machines from AMD's because of several issues they had with AMD and heat. This was in 2004. Personally I've had much better luck with Intel stuff over the years and a mixed history with AMD. We had an Intel 486DX2 for several years then I uped the speed with one of those AMD k5 upgrade kits to 133Mhz. Blazing for the day. My dad still has an older K6-2 400 compaq he's been running since 1999 when I went off to college. Works great for him even today.I went off to college with the PII 400 and I still have it today set up as a cheap file server at home with FreeBSD. We bought that in 1998 and I custom built a new system in 2002 with an AMD 1.2Ghz T-bird chip. I had nothing but problems with it until this time last year when it finally died. The system was never stable under Windows 98 SE and barely stable under Windows 2000 Professional. Heat was an issue from day one and I was running it in a full tower case with two extra fans. Finally had to take the side off and use a box fan on it and even then it still would lock up, especially in 98, from over heating during game play. Although, I know some of the instablity was caused from the VIA chipset on the motherboard. So much so that I now stay away from AMD just because so many motherboards for AMD use VIA chipsets. The fact the system never worked quite right that drove me to buy an iBook and really abandon the PC platform all together three years ago. The company I a was working for in 2002 as an intern was in the 3D animation business and they opted to go other custom built AMD machines because AMD offered a better price/performance at the time. They had similar issues with instablity and heat including more than one machine where the CPU actually melted. When the HT P4's were introduced, they were negoiating a deal with DELL for new boxes when I left last year. The first AMD 64 chips were out, but frankly the cost vs. benefit for rendering was not going to be useful until software was written for the AMD64 instruction set. The plan then was to move to more of grid system using IBM blade servers and Xeon chips. The company had had DEC Alpha boxes, still have a few too as far as I know, back in the day. Their lead technical people in the IT department even then wondered if the DEC Alpha boxes 64-bit processors really offered that much in Lightwave rendering or was it the fact they were 500mhz when PC's were 166Mhz? When BF2 was released I seriously considered buying a new PC until I read about all the game issues and that many people were having lots of heat issues even with gaming rigs from big manufactures including Falcon, Alienware, Dell, and especially home built units. When a version of BF2 was announced for the PS2 I decided that spending $50 for the game as opposed to $1,800 for a new PC was a better deal especially since I might get to play 8 hours a week max. At work we've had the 64-bit G5's for quite a while now. OS X isn't a true 64-bit platform, but some of our applictions, mainly final cut pro, do offer support through the extentions and we've noticed quite an improvement in rendering times. We also have a couple dozen Xserve Cluster nodes installed just for Lightwave rendering, and FCP as well. Howmuch having the 64-bit processors, especially the PPC chip for rendering, actual helps in lightwave is questionable. The common thought of most in the field today is that Intel and AMD chips beat the living daylights out of the PPC chips. Clearest example is the fact Mental Ray is now written to take advantage of the AMD 64 code set. Since the business in primarily in video production, getting the Xserves for FCP rendering was the main decision. Plus they were a 100% Apple shop to begin with. Lightwave is not used often enough to justify spending $50,000 for a renderfarm of its own.I could go on about the 64 bit thing, but we are just now starting to see software written for the AMD 64 platform, but still intel has to be supported because they have 70% + of the marketshare. If I were to build a new PC today, which I really wouldn't because we are in the middle of a transition in technology, I would probably go with an Intel chip and motherboard. Also, I'd get the biggest honking case I could find. It seems that a brick wall has been reached and that smaller=hotter=really big heat issues have become a major problem.

Too many factors to even consider purchasing an Xbox 360. Personally I am going to be sticking with my PS 2 mini form factor a while longer. Why? The xBox360 doesn't have the HD-DVD drive yet. THe whole HD-DVD vs Bluray thing needs to be sorted out, and lastly is up comming titles.

I am writing a script to add submit/add projects to a queue. I don't need a returned result other than it worked or failed. The script will execute a commandline like thisL'program -b $filename -s $start -e $end -a'all I need is for that command to be send and if it suceeds return a simple"This worked"or "This failed: here is why ___________". I am just trying to remember the difference between exec and system() for this task. I've read through the documentation and am still a little confused. It's the first time I've really used PERL in at least four years.

PHP frankly has become the preferred method of dealing with the type of site you are thinking about making. Sessions are also a better idea than cookies. The exact technical reasons I think really have to do with the perception that cookies are "evil" due to some of their uses in tracking users. If your going to be using MySQL, the PHP is the best option. If you are going to be dealing with text-based system, PERL is the way to go. Recently I've gone back to perl for a project. Sad thing is I used to know PERL extremely well when it was really the only way of creating dynamic sites on the web back in 1995/1996. Installed a number of simple PERL shopping carts back in the days when I used to do more web programming. The main reason why I am using PERL is because the form is on a webserver hosted by our ISP and it needs to pass back information to a server on our internal network. PERL is executed server side so that makes the most sense.

Days like today I am glad we run Macs. We had CNN on and they were going on about this for at least an hour. Wolf Blitzer trying to ad lib about technology was actually kind of sad and pathetic. It must of really been a slow news day.

May want to consider Python. Take a look at BLender3D, which has an intergrated game engine to create 3d based games. Also blender can be used to export to the crystal space 3d engine. Seems like there are alot of game engines, at least in Opensource land, that are using Python more and more.

Work:4 Dual 1.25Ghz PowerMac G4's10 Dual 2Ghz PowerMac G5's6 iMac's (various configs)3 Dual 2Ghz G5 Xserve2 1.2TB Xserve RAID50 Xserve Cluster Nodes (20 installed, 30 on order) for SCREAMERNET II (lightwave rendering engine)3 48-port Nortel Gigabit switchs1 Nortel router1 3.06 Ghz P4 FreeBSD configured as custom router/firewallHome:1 Dual 2.0Ghz g5 Powermac 1 Dual 1.25Ghz g4 PowerMac (OS 10.4 server unlimited) Xgrid Admin20 1.25Ghz Mac Mini's 512MB ram each (configured as Xgrid agents)1 Dlink gigabit game router1 26-port 10/100/1000 Trendnet switch

In the past couple months Atari released Falcon 4:Allied Force. This game was produced by people in the modding community and is everything that Falcon 4 should have been when shipped in 1998. Graphics are updated a little, but new campagins and the dynamic campagin engine actually works making it probably the last word in modern jet combat siims.

Comparing PC and consoles isn't really the best thing todo. There are games that PC's are still good for, RTS, most FPS (arguably), and flight sims. However this exception to Falcon 4:AF, I haven't purchased any new PC games since I went Macs for professional reasons. I seriously thought about spending the money for a new PC to play BF2 until I discovered a version will be released for the PS2 in October. One of thsoe things that since I spend 8 - 10 hours infront of a computer for work every day the last thing I want to do is get on another computer and play games. Guess it could be argued it's no different than playing a PS2 on the TV, but only get to do that a few hours on the weekend.

1 dual 2.0 Ghz g5 PowerMac 4GB Ram1 DUal 1.25Ghz g4 PowerMac 2GB Ram OS 10.4 server (unlimited) Grid Controller20 1.25 Mac Minis 512MB ram each configured as Grid Agents2 AMD64 2800's 1GB Ram FreeBSD (testing Xgridagent from sf.net)

I am going to be a little opinionated on this topic, but I work for a small video production company. Can you take movies with your digital camera? Yes. Quality-wise they are not going to be great, but I never underestimate cleverness. If you really want to do video, get a video camera. As far as digital camera's saving to the Quicktime format, that is really a good thing. People here seem to be against the format, but it is the default of the small video production industry. Most every editing program worht anything, including the blender (https://www.blender.org/) sequencer, can import and use quicktime .mov files so long as they are not encoded with a funky codec. However that problem is no different if you have an AVI or MPEG encoded in a funky codec. Blender 3D by the way is a free 3d Animation program for Linux/Windows/Mac/Sun/FreeBSD under 6MB download and very powerful. Trade off: learning curve is a real pain. For video editing, if you own a Mac, your lucky: iMovie is quite impressive and easy to use. $500 for a Mac Mini might be the cheapest editing box in the world especially now with the 512MB base Ram. If you own a PC or Mac buy QuickTime Pro. You can do some limited editing on the PC or Mac version of QuickTime Pro and it is by far the best $30 anyone that will be doing video just because it is the swiss army knife of video converters. Here comes my rule of thumb: if QuickTime Pro can't convert the format: You shouldn't be using it!If you are on the PC platform Avid offers a version of their software Avid Express DV for free: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ you are on Windows and cheap: consider Axogen compositor from http://www.blenderwars.com/. It is free, can do a lot more than just editing, and will render final output in either AVI or MOV. It can import any standard MOV file as well for editing. You can even do Blue/Green Screen compositing. Anyway, here are some suggestions to help you on the editing side.

It'd like to add the HTML editing program 1stpage 2000 (http://www.webdesignland.com/) to the list. Also Spybot S&D Cheating, but FreeBSD and OpenBSD also top my list too...

I've seen similar issues with BF2 around the net. Did you install the patch for BF2? If so reinstall a fresh clean version of the game and see what happens. The first patch they released caused some similar issues.Does this happen with any other games? If it does then it is your system. If its BF2, try reinstalling a fresh install and check and see if a newer patch has been released. I hope this helps.

Most video cards today have support for dual output in some form or fashion. I am on a PowerMac and we have a dual set up 23"HD display and 17" LCD for FCP editing and Lightwave work. It is great to have the tools on one screen and then the editing area in the other. We have an ATI card in this machine and we haven't had any problems.

Actually, indirectly getting people to give you their money is technically advertising. Marketing is different than sales or advertising. Sales and advertising are only functions of marketing, but they are not marketing itself. Working in Marketing is really kinda boring. It involves a lot of hours researching databases and doing research. Marketing is more about figuring out your customers and what they want and need. Also it is your job to figure out the best methods of reaching your target demographic. If that is through media, then you hire the advertisers to figure out how to reach them with create ads. If it is through direct contact, then you train and equip a sales force. As a small business owner, you often have to wear all the hats. Personally I hate the sales end of things. I hate cold calls. They are the spam of the business telephone world. Now giving a presentation or setting up a booth at a trade show I am great at standing and talking to people about our products and services. I am also good at talking with people and conversing on the spot. Granted I know my subject area, but I've always been more of the, "If they want our services and products they'll buy them" than asking for sales/closing. My degrees are in International Business and German with a focus on Marketing. Buying anything, especially cars, is a painful experience now because the sales guy makes his moves then I can tell him exactly what he is doing and the thought process behind it and why it won't work on me. Probably why I drive a Saturn.

I like evrsoft's 1stPage 2000. It is free and I've been using it for a number of years now. They have a new version 2stpage 2006 comming out one of these days that will offer WYSIWYG editing. http://www.webdesignland.com/

Pluto offical remained a planet. There was a lot of debate whether or not it was a planet or planetiod because Cheron is almost as big as Pluto and they kind of wobble around each other rather than Cheron orbit around Pluto. That 10th Planet has yet to be offically confirmed. It was still in the process of peer review when some clever googler came across the information online. The researcher published is findings with the note of "pending peer review". There were a couple articles about this on /. couple weeks ago.

In theory the sample for the powerbook *should* work on the iMac so long as they are the same chipset. However the powerbook version is probably the mobile version. As I said...it *should* work... As far as sound goes, I have no clue. What do you need sound for? My FreeBSD box I have I got my old Aureal Vortex 2 sound card to actually work...only to find there really wasn't much in terms of sound. Granted I use the box as a file server, but... The only time I've use OpenBSD are on x86 boxes designed as secure routers/firewalls for offices and to setup a VPN.

Right now AMD or Intel will work, but by the debute of the Mactel, that may not be the case. We have a couple of the development boxes in house. Unfortunately, we are also bound by NDA's on what we can and can't discuss relating to the x86 version of OS X. All I can say is that there is stuff on the horizon that really prompted the move by Apple. The fact that Steve Jobs is stressing Universal Binaries in Xcode has our development department wondering what exactly is in the pipeline down the road. Last week there was an article in the wall street journal about Intel and chip design: http://www.wsj.com/ That got us to thinking that the Intel chips Apple will use are not the x86 lines we see today and that the point of Universal Binaries are more to do with future compatiablity than backwards with the PPC line. As far as these virus writers go. That doesn't make sense. Why not target OSX now because they use PowerPC and not Intel or AMD? When people want to write viruses for stupid reasons like this, suddenly I don't mind the FBI going after them and throwing them in jail for a few years.

How many pictures do you normally take? Do you ever take more than 180 pictures at one setting? If not and money is not an issue and you want something that looks cool, that would be the choice. Now if you do take more than 180 pictures at a setting, then get the older and longer lasting version would probably be the best deal. I have an older cybershot and I've taken a total of 650 pictures in 3 years with it. (At least that's the number iPhoto says I have). I'm not sure on the newer models, but on mine, the batteries are rechargable, but you can also pop in regular AA's in a pinch if you needed too.