unimatrix

Here is my list- Tie Fighter Collectors CD-Rom. One of the best games of the genre, good graphics for the day, great story line, all around great game.- Wing Commander: Privateer. Someone mentioned Freelancer, try playing the original. One of the first that had an open sandbox. - Wolfenstien 3D - first FPS - Halo: Xbox version - first FPS that got it right on console- Sega Hockey (EA NHL up til about 97 for the Genesis.)- Falcon 4.0: Allied Force - the last and greatest flight combat SIMULATOR. I bought Falcon 4 in 1998. It was okay, but unfinished. AF finished it with the dynamic combat engine and new theaters and upgraded graphics.

Core 2 Duo. 2Ghz.

Yeah, Oct. is my huge technology upgrade cycle. Looking at a new Mac Pro to replace my QuadCore powerMac, upgrade to FC Studio 6, Adobe CS3 Premium and place the Quadcore G5 to my secondary unit with the Dual core G5 tower going to the Xgrid for rendering. I found CDW had a deal last spring, a MacBook Pro for $1300. Granted, only 512MB ram and 80GB HDD, but I use externals and for $145 got a 1GB stick still less than $1500 total. Great computer.

End of the story though, is if you look at those of us that purchase high end macs, most of us are in the video industry. And rendering 3D CGI on Macs became a problem a few years back when a lot of the top packages stopped support for the PPC all together. Also IBM et. al. were running into fabercation problems and it really looked like they had hit a wall in development. Their 90nm process had all sorts of flaws (ironically AMD was having the same production troubles at the time). Intel may have pulled some stunts in the past, like stealing ALPHA's architecture, but they are really sticking it to AMD. And now Apple doesn't have to worry about being stuck at 1.25Ghz for two years while the X86 crowd doubled their clock speeds and processing power. Especially in laptops.

Yeah, MS stopped development for Safari about 2003/2004. It's locked at the 5.0 browser stage where everyone is way pass that. Look into Opera as well as FF. Personally I think Opera is the most feature packed and fastest of the lot on Mac. I only use FF for interaction with Google since some of their features are FF only. (Which is just as bad as any other vender lock in. Yes I know FF is FOSS and all, but still it's vender lock-in just not with the name Apple or Microsoft infront of it.) Opera will even handle torrents. Not very well compared to dedicated programs like Azuerus, but still....

The reason for porting to windows was for developers as a SDK for the iPhone, not to compete with IE, FF, or any other browser. This is because Safari is the same core technology for devoping content for the iPhone and most of the world's developers are not on Macs, but like the iPod Apple is looking to get as many people hooked on their latest gaget. As far as the PPC vs. Intel move, which is really for another forum, while RISC is a better architecture, the move has been a smart one. At least for those of us in the Video side of the house. Most of today's 3D rendering engines are optimized for the x86 platform whether it be on Windows or Linux and now Mac. My Dad's Intel Core 2 Duo iMac beats my Dualcore 2Ghz G5 Powermac in most non-audio rendering tasts, even with FCP 5. So while we can argue theory on chip design, the reality of the situation is that it was a good move on their part. But releasing Safari on Windows was a move purely for the iPhone.

Actuall, you want to save in AVI since there is an uncompressed option. It's only been in the last few years that people have been DIVX encoding AVI. In animation, we either use OpenEXR or TGA (with RGBA options) to make compositing a lot easier down the road.

Yeah, I remember when FPS's first attempted to jump to consoles. It took Halo to finally put all the pieces together. I wish I had more time to play games, but life doesn't work that way. Plus I look at the cost of the new systems and games and I can't justify it anymore. Not with rent, car payments, insurance, etc.. Still, this is interesting, especially since it's a RTS. Turn based had been done before and I could see how those would work. I think the Sim City series had some console version along the way. Not sure how people reacted compared to on computer, but...

Slashdot has an article about it, but it looks like Apple is moving from HFS+ to ZFS for their harddrives, probably for Time Machine in OS 10.5 as the default file system. What does this mean? Support for OS9 is now gone, even on the PPC machines. Not a big shock, I have no applications in Classic anymore since QuarkXpress developed an OSX version. Also, it may help in indexing external hard drive arrays (for those of us in the video world) as well.

Quick answer is no, you don't if you don't want to spend the money. I always run my OSX macs with firewall on (software from System Prefrences) even behind a router. In my case, the cable outlet is in one room of my apartment and my computers are in another room, so I need the wireless feature to connect to the internet.Then I have an old wired gigabit router in the room for a wired LAN for Xgrid/Qmaster rendering. But again a have several computers.

externals are good if you are using for projects or between machines. (Typically everytime I start a new video project for a client, I get a new External firewire drive) But if you are going for biggest bang for the buck, I just picked up a 160GB HDD (EIDE) for USD $94 with local sales taxes. The old 80GB in my G4 tower died and I replaced it with this. I saw a SATA drive for $120 that was 300GB.

Creating a new user account usually fixes these type of problems. This one had a problem with the dock crashing on start up...creating a new user account and trashing the old one worked.

OSX 10.5 will be universal. Bootcamp is only useful IF you want to run windows. I know a lot of folks who do, but I know that when I bought my Quad Core G5 that I had assurances that there would be OS's through at least 2009.

I ended up seeing it again with family this weekend while I was visiting...the plot twists are much easier the second time around. Good for DVD, not there theater.

It depends. Blender 3D does a lot of things for free, but I can't the selection of high qualities models for sale that I can for say lightwave. If I have a client that needs, say a particular car, for project, it's still cheaper and easier to buy the model for Lightwave, set up the scene and render than to hire someone in Blender to make a high quality model with textures. However, for my personal projects, blender is nice because it's free, has a fast rendering engine, and if I need more power it's $20 for a month of unlimited rendering at Respower's 1100CPU renderfarm. I use the GIMP a well as Photoshop CS1. But the major applications that there are no good OSS solutions for are Final Cut and Shake. Now there are other none free, and cheaper, alternatives that are worth a look (as an example FXhome's collection). I play Freeciv and vegastrike, which are both open source, along with Beyond the Red Line because I like turn based games and space-sims that no one seems to make commerically anymore. So I use whatever the best tool for the job.

Just got out of the film and I have to say I pleasently surprised. I had heard some critics kind of pan it, but over all I liked it. Especially the ending. It ended how I wished more movies would. That's all I'll say not to spoil it for others. I will say this much, try not to step out and go to the bathroom during the first 90 minutes. The plot tends to get rather confusing...The second half is excellent with one complaint:

I read the other day that OS 10.5 is scheduled for the normal October release for operating systems. Kind of sucks because I need to get a new laptop, but I don't want to buy one now just to spend $130 in six months to get OS 10.5.

Hell, Apple had Apple Unix way before OSX came out. I know somefolks who were early on into the whole Hyperlinking idea that eventually became the Internet. They were all using Apple Unix machines back in the 1980's.

Halo 1 came out when I was in college. We used to play for hours in the dorms because it was pretty easy to hook 4 Xboxs together over a lan. It was a lot of fun. My old roommate after college had an Xbox (I have a PS2) and he bought Halo 2. We played through it MP co-op once and was like "Cool story, but damn, we beat it in a weekend and now have to wait for Halo 3 in a few years". He moved to a new job and I went back to grad school after that, so I no longer have an Xbox let a lone a 360 and I'm not willing to spend the money. Frankly, the WII would be the system I would buy. I have a friend with one and it's quite the hit at parties. Even people, like our girl friends/wives, will play tennis and the other sports game. Try getting them to play Halo....ain't going to happen. I'm sure it'll be a great game. If one of my friends gets an Xbox 360, I'll sit down and play it sure.

This must be a windows problem. I had no problems installing on either PPC or Intel based Macs. Sometimes though, you get a bad disc no matter what. I've had it happen before with a lightwave disc. It was scratched from the factory. Fortunately I was able to download and use the Dongle to activate it.

I have 20 year old IBM XT clone that works as paperweight. Actually it still boots with 640k of ram and Microsoft Works 1.0 (the one that existed before the invention of the mouse). Oh and Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 in all it's EGA graphics goodness. Heck I think it even has some of the classic Microprose games too. Bring this up to today, I can't run to the store and pick up an EIDE Harddrive anymore. Found that out replacing one this weekend. They only had 1 in the entire store on the shelf. (granted best buy, but only option in these parts). Now I have met one computer science student who took an old Apple IIE and installed the guts of an old G4 tower and has it running OSX 10 for kicks, but that was with some heavy case modding and I think he had to create his own interface for the keyboard....or drivers or something...still...

Turns out the hard drive it was saving to was going in and out. It was the original 80GB drive that came with the machine in 2002 and it was suffering some kind of mechanical problems. It would spin up, spin down, then not spin up again. With two other Hard Drives (both 160GB) I rarely used the smaller 80GB drive. Now I'm not having any problems...Strange what causes stuff sometimes...

I figured out what it was, one of the HDD's in the machine was goofing up. (the original 80GB drive that came with the machine). I managed to download the drive to an external back up and then went to Best Buy and picked up a new 160GB (largest EIDE they had) to replace it with. Not a bad buy for $100 and added 80GB of space to the system. Not sure what I'm going to use that for since it's just going to be a dedicated rendering node for Blender and Fincal Cut projects....

I've heard a lot of debate about this. The James Webb is designed to look at near infrared vs. visable light spectrums like the hubble. An interesting thing is that there was a group of professors who calculated it would be cheaper to build a new hubble, with newer technologies off the shelf, and launch it into orbit via a Delta rocket than it would be to service the old one. In fact for the cost of the service, you could launch a couple new hubbles over the next 20 years given that each one lasts about a decade. NASA does a lot of good. They are one of the few agencies, besides DARPA, that funds basic research. A lot comes from Basic research and since it's through public insitutions, others can then take that research and build practical applications for the technologies developed. Which benefits us all down the road. Still, NASA seems to have a few pipe dreams. I mean like the idea of a Single Stage to Orbit transport like the X-33. For DECADES (even when they were designing the shuttle), areospace engineers and scientists have said that a Dual Stage to Orbit system (Like the private Space Ship One) was not only more practical, but far more cost effective as a people shuttle to and from space. And in that design, you have 2 pieces that are 100% reusable. You only need 2 carriers to fly up to 60 - 70k feet (1 and a back up) and you could have several secondstage vechciles. Hell you could probably have a couple different designs. Say one for sending up people and supplies to the ISS, another with a huge open bay for working on sats, and a third with dedicated science labs for zero g research...and all for the same or less cost without the problems with external fuel tanks. There is the point of, "Hey why spend $XXX hundres of millions to fix hubble when you could replace it with something newer and better for about the same cost?"

I was trying to download the latest version of OpenOffice for Mac via bit torrent. It was going to take a few hours so I set it up and everything was going nicely at about 60 - 90kbps so I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, it was stuck at 99.8% no up and no down. So I reset the computer and still nothing. I was using the offical Bit Torrent Client and it came back with:CONNECTING TO PEERS - in the amount of time left. So I took a shower, ran some errands and came back, still nothing. So I reset the cable modem and router (but surfing wasn't a problem) and iChat connected, etc..In the lower corner of the client it said connected to 8 peers. But still no up or download. so I switched clients to Tomato and it just sat there for half an hour trying to connect to the tracker. So I went and found a couple more torrents with a lot of seeders and none of them connected with either of those clients. So I tried Azureus and still, nada. Thoughts ideas on what's going on?