unimatrix

If it's the generation I'm thinking of, most have needed new powersupplies after 4-5 years. It can happen, if you keep any computer that long it's one of the componets most likely to go.

What on the software end of things...yes. If the software was coded to take advantge of PPC features, I still think it would win hands down. RISC is just a better design period. That being said, I completely understand why Apple went with Intel and hold nothing against it. In the long run I think it's a good mood. As much as people love to trash intel, I've had fewer problems with Intel chips over the years than with AMD. I can't wait for OS 10.5 with all it's true 64-bit goodness.

I had a friend with an old Dual 1.25Ghz G4 quicksilver with 1.5GB of ram that went on the fritz. It was 5 years old and they told him it was the HDD. So he decided to buy a new MacPro instead of sinking more money into an old computer. (recently added 1GB of ram and had a new powersupply installed) He offered to sell me the hulk for $100 to cover shipping so I took him up. I had several good EIDE 80 and 120GB HDD's in a tub from old PC's so I figured cheap rendering node for my Xgrid. Well I got it and turns out the HDD was fine. I did a clean install of OS 10.2 then upgraded to 10.4 with the existing 160GB HDD and have had no real problems. The one thing I do notice is that one of the fans is a little noiser than my other G4 tower (1.33Ghz g4 with 4GB of Ram) and sometimes the fan will power down for a second, pause, then I get a beep like a Biegebox PC starting up and the fan starts up again. It sounds exactly like a single CMOS/BIOS beep on a PC. Almost like the fan stops and reboots. I've been around macs for a while and I've never heard a tower's fan powerdown and reboot like this. Any ideas? It's not affecting anything (as far as I can tell, just something that I noticed)

Really depends on the application. In the 3D world, PPC lost its luster a few years ago when everyone started to optimize their rendering engines for X86. I just tested the latest Lightwave 9 version on a Dual core 2Ghz G5 vs. a 2Ghz Dual Core iMac and the iMac won with less than half the RAM. Blender is another application which, I believe, is more optimized for the X86 platform since most of the developers and users are either on i386 Linux/BSD or on Windows. So that's what PPC has against it is the software coding. The biggest thing PPC had going for it was in applications like Final Cut and the fact they were Mac only. Also, Shake seems to run a lot smoother on PPC machines, but then again I have Shake 4 not 4,1 universial. Also a couple months ago CDW had MacBook Pro's for $1300. Only 80GB HDD and 512MB of ram, but for another $400 for an external HDD and a GB stick of Crucial ram...

I've been waiting for Linux to overtake Microsoft for the last 8 years...hasn't happened yet and isn't going to anytime soon. I'll go another step further and say it's not going to happen. Liniux killed Unix in the server room. Any hope of Linux making a big dent in the mainstrem commical/end user's life was headed off at the pass by a little company called Apple. I know far more people that switched from Linux to MacOSX a number of years ago (me...well in my case it was BSD to MacOSX, but still), and havn't looked back. It still goes back to that little point that OSX's Unix based core is friendly enough to run just about any OSS software outthere that Linux users have and has commercial outfits like Adobe and Intuite (quicken/quickbooks) which makes it attractive to small business owners like me that are willing to pay a premium upfront not to have the other issues associated with Windows. Granted I am in the video production world and use Final Cut Studio...so it's not like I have a lot of platform choice there.Dell has long been locked into the Microsoft licensing hell. They were rather late into the Linux server market. I don't think it's hurt them all that much, but still they were one of the last major vendors to support it after IBM basically dumped AIX for Linux and clearly took an early lead. Then there was the marriage to Intel. It's only been in the last year (maybe two) that Dell began offering computers with AMD chips. I'm more of an Intel man myself, so that never bothered me, but still I heard so many people say: "I would buy Dell if..." First it was Linux...then it was, "Well I'd buy a dell with linux if it ran on AMD". I'm wondering what the excuse will be now?I've dealt with Dells a lot over the year and they generally build a good computer. But I've also had some issues with them. For instance I was working earlier this year with a Medical supply company. They were upgrading their systems and the software they were considering ran on XP, it was not yet Vista compatiable. The company had to wait until March to buy the system and then the only thing they could get from dell for the workstations was Vista. Maybe we could have gotten a couple boxes with Linux installed then walked over to Best Buy and get a couple XP Pro boxes. Still, though, that would have been more expensive than going with the local company that built the systems from scratch. (Not my first choice, but small business to small business transaction...my client's wouldn't listen to me...but everything worked out so far)

I've not followed up on this in a few years, but NASA was scheduled to be launching a very long base line interferamter past the moon in the next five to eight years that should be able to view Earth sized planets. I think the initial date was 2012, but that was about 5 years when I last heard anything about the project. I've not been following up on space news like I used to these days. Just not enough time in the universe...as ironic as that sounds.

Game maker, if you are on windows, is a great learning tool and the full version was less than USD 50 the last time I checked (it's been a few years). That will allow you to learn the basics on what it takes to think through creating a game. The full version is actually quite powerful and used a version of BASIC if I remember correctly that allows you to code adanced actions. Another option to consider is Blender3D from Blender 3D.org. Blender does a lot of things, mainly people use it as a free Lightwave/MAX/Maya like CGI animation and modelling application, but it also includes a game engine. Blender was originally created to make NEOGEO games back in the day. It is free, opensource, and runs on any platform you can think of. Those are the plus sides. The down side is that Blender has a VERY STEEP learning curve. It's not as bad with all the online help today, but still it's a task in and of its self. Blender uses PYTHON as it's primary programing language. Of all the major scripting languages out there, PYTHON is one of the easists to learn and use. Google for Blendergames and see if the old site is available with demos and examples you can use to learn from. Next on the list are the game engines like Crystal Space and Ogre. Actaully Ogre is more of a graphics engine. You really need to know how to code to use either of them, but go to sourceforge and check out Crystal Space.

On an internal network, it would help if you were transfering large files. I deal with video files in uncompressed formats that can take up 100's of GB's for a project and we use a fibre channel card for several GB's/sec of transfer. In our render farm, every unit has 2 1GB/s NIC's, but mainly for redundancy. How much it actually helps in speeding up the distributed rendering projects is negliable, as far as I can tell. So for your usages, it's not going to help much. Even at home I have a 1MB/s symtric (meaning I get the same download and upload speed) so even an older 10MB/s card is going to be plenty.

While MySQL is the favorite, don't underestimate PostgreSQL. I like PostgreSQL for developing applications, but if I use ready made solutions, most of the time they are deployed on MySQL. I'd take a couple searches through Hotscripts.com and see what people have created and see if anything they have (purhaps for free) might work well for your purposes. It would save you a lot of time and effort of having to code from scratch. Anymore I find myself modifying what others have produced instead of starting for scratch. Given how many thousands of apps have been coded in php/MySQL these days...

I tested it on my new Intel based mac, and it's a lot faster in the native Intel format compared to CS1 running through Rossetta. Still, I don't have any need to spend the money to upgrade. More tools I'll never use so long as Kodak and Flaming Pear support CS1, I'm not going to spend the money this go around either. If I decide to go back and upgrade to the latest version of After Effects, then it might be a different story. Or If I continue to do some print work for some people, but they use Quark so....

I don't use a tablet, but all the guys who do seem to like the Wocom tablets. I've not really heard any major complaints and they work on most OS's (so long as they work on Mac I don't really care.)

Yeah, I remember reading the manual (yes I do read the manuals, saves a lot of time up front) and saying "If it stops working, unplug the power cord and wait 30 seconds then plug it in again. Now if I could just keep my PS2 on the same IP and not have to reset the DMZ settings everytime I restart (about every month). If I am going to be gone for a long period of time, like during breaks or vaction, I'll shut it and the modem down. Just because I don't want to waste a few pennies paying the power bill if I'm gone.

Seagate produces an expensive, but great HDD. We've used them in servers for years. I have a 1TB Western Digital (2x500GB) firewire drive along with several MyBook Western Digital. Mainly because I think "I need more HDD space for this video project" and run out to Best Buy and get whatever they have in stock. The fact that they are Mac OS X formated is a plus, but I run on macs.

From being in the video production industry this is something I've watched for a few years. My money has always been on this: by the time one format wins out, the optical disc will be obsolete with direct download replacing it. Whether that download is from the internet or On Demand Service from cable/sat provider is yet to be seen, but...I've been working with HDV for 4 years. When it was broadcast work, we always shipped around external HDD's around with the final product. I have both a Blu-Ray Burner and HD-DVD burner and recently used the HD-DVD burner to produce a HD video biography video for a client. That being said, something like the AppleTV is going to be the future in my humble opinion.

I leave mine on 24/7/365 along with cable modem. I do have to reset my router (and sometimes the modem) every few weeks, but never have any problems.

I'm using Photoshop CS1. Frankly 7 did everything I needed, but I bought the entire CS Suite for Mac. I'll upgrade to CS3 when I eventually switch over to Intel Macs. But with my friends in the industry dumping their PPC based machines and offering them to me at a good price, I have no plans to switch in the next couple years. (although likely to get a new laptop this fall that will be a MacBook) Frankly it's not Photoshop I need as much as the Kodak and Flaming Pear plug-ins I use on a weekly basis. I do a lot of photo restoration for folks and the Kodak plug-ins do an excellant job without a ton of tweaking. Now there are a few things I like better in the GIMP. For instance, I think GIMP creates better lens flares than PS. That's just a personal opinion. I like GIMP a lot and it wasn't for the plug-in's, I wouldn't need Photoshop.

I liked Halo 1 a lot. Again, though, I was in college and getting 8v8 in the dorms was pretty easy and a lot of fun. I rented Halo 2 and was frankly disapointed. Beat the game and went...WTF...OH another Squel. Now that it is coming out on the 360, chances are I won't be playing it. I just refuse to spend $500 on a gaming machines. I guess it's the curse of getting older. I used to like computer games, but between the fact that no one is making games I like to play (other than the Vega Strike folks and Freespace OSS projects, which happen to both be free and off Mac ports). If one of my friends gets a 360, I'll be playing...otherwise, probably not.

The law is one thing: policing it is another topic. I'm in law school for IP, so this stuff is up my ally. I believe that youtube.com and now Google has been named in an infringement suite, so...Anyway, what a lot of copyright holders have to ask is whether or not it impacts their bottomline? In many cases, since postings are often of reduced quality, it might be better from a marketing position to let, say, a music video be posted to you tube especially from a new group. It is likely that the video might generate buzz and lead to better music sales. Even if they don't post it themselves, having that or several copies on youtube really doesn't effect their overall bottomline. Another example was with the initial season of Battlestar Galactica (the new series). It aired in the UK about 6 months before it began in the US. A lot of people downloaded the episodes via torrents and P2P networs and Sci-Fi wondered what it would do to ratings. If nothing else, it helped boost the ratings because people wanted to see the episodes in full quality on TV. Since then the show, really the first, has embraced the internet with podcast commentaries, being one of the first on iTunes, and now offering their video maker's tool kit. Further more, they havn't gone after the Beyond the Red Line fan made game game based on the Freespace 2 engine. (now opensource)Again the BTRL folks are not making a profit and that is really what might be at stake. If one views YouTube/Google PROFITING from their IP, then I can see the case for damages, etc.. But while it may violate a TORT, it's up to the owner to persue legal challenges. And a lot of that depends on whether or not it's worth it.Something I've learned in law school is that sometimes you may be legally in the right, but it's cheaper to settle or not make a big deal of it.

Very true, but there are a lot of features that blender is still lacking in the 3D animation world, like volumetric lighting. That's been available in LW and MAX for at least a decade either intergrated into the software or via plug in. Yet it has failed to make it into Blender.

Not free, but Quicktime Pro can export to flash...not free, but only $30

Problem is programmers have no incentive to tighten code. I mean think about out it...Word Processors have done everything I've needed since Wordperfect 5 for DOS. Yet now some of my stories or such are 120k words and over a meg in size. Now I'm in the graphics world, particularly video editing and 3DFX. So the faster it takes to render something, the quicker I can go on to the next project and make more money! Right now I have the last generation PowerMac G5 Quadcore with 8GB of Ram. It makes rendering in Lightwave, FCP, and Apple Shake a breeze as well as burning with DVD Studio Pro. I am seriously looking at getting a new MacBook as my dad's intel iMac kicks the crap out of this powerbook g4 even though I have more Ram in the laptop. So a lot depends on your situation and what you are using your computer for.

There was a generation of audio DVD's made along with players. I know a couple audio files that loved them because they could listen to concerts in 5.1 surround sound.

I used Virtual PC for Mac for years, but now I would use Bootcamp, but there hasn't been a need for me to use windows in the past couple years. I've often thought about buying a cheap Windows machine to play Falcon 4.0 Allied somethinguruther but never have. After next month I think I'll have about an extra $850 and seriously might consider getting a new play box and adding a second HDD for FreeBSD to use a full time Blender 3D render agent.

Anyone else here use Apple Shake for compositing. I have Shake 4.0 on PPC (yes the version that was $2999 not $500...grrrr) and use it on a weekly basis in post production. Anyone have a favourite set of plug ins etc.?

This is funny. Although it is hard to explain to people that there are now 2 opearting systems in general use today: Windows and Unix. (Okay and we won't get into the fact that yes MacOS is a Mach kernel and Linux isn't really Unix, but symanics as far as I'm concerned with the big picture) Everything else falls into those two catagories. I would have loved to see what this person would have said back in the days of VMS and AMIEGA. Piracy is a big issue. I was one of the 50k other kids that had Photoshop et al when I was in college. All pirated of course because we couldn't afford it otherwise. The software industry lets that slide a little since when we get out into the working world guess what we tend to request/buy. Especially true since I'm in the video world. However out here in industry if you get caught using pirated applications you suddenly find yourself blacklisted especially in the videography industry. I do a fair bit of restoration and know kids that tried to do the same thing using pirated software cheaper. Funny, when they graduated and was looking for a job the had to move out of the area because those of us in the community knew what they were doing. It wasn't until I got into the shoes of earning a living via Intellectual property that I gained any respect for the subject.