unimatrix

I run blenderxgrid and blendergalactica.com so I like blender. That being said, professionally I still use Lightwave 9 for all my broadcast work. While Blender has come a long way and I use it for personal projects and previs work because the fast internal rendering engine, lighting over all in Blender needs work. There is no volumetric lighting and the shear number of models available for purchase for commerical usage without licensing issues make Lightwave a better choice. The downside to Lightwave is that rendering time is a complete well...it starts with b and rhymes with itch. That being said, I usually hire out a renderfarm for LW work and bill the client or include the estimate in the bid. Now LW's rendering engine is starting to show its age, but it's widely supported with 3rd party renderers, but still it is one of the few that can do broadcast work out of the box. One of the big hurdles Blender has to gain acceptance, especially in smaller shops like mine where we'd like the price point, is the Blender 3D's community. There are a core of Zealots that think everything should be free and open and somehow charging money for a model is a crime. The hoops I had to jump through just to get blendergalactica on blendernation was rediculous. Like I wanted people to register to gain access to the models for security and BW issues. Eventually we bowed and the resulting story ended up bleeding our 35GB/month BW alotment in less than 3 days. And that is with very few of our 20 - 40 MB high detailed models uploaded. Now I'm trying to get some stories posted about the blenderxgrid project especially since we have some customized submitting tools for OSX users and I'm getting the same "Well we have this or that concern". Personally I don't like being dictated to especially on projects that I'm spending $3000 out of my own pocket to fund. (That's how much the Xserve unit was for the controller, add another $1200/year for a dedicated 1MB/s business cable connection). And this is to help build an open access controller.Now I also use Terragen .9x for Mac for landscape renders. Great tool, other than the render times, but I'm not overly impressed yet with Terragen 2. Mainly since I have a license for Terragen and so many features diabled.

Company I work for just ordered all new comptuers. What OS? XP Pro. Why? Their medicare billing software might or might not run on Vista. So why take the chance? Especially with a company that is undergoing accreditation in a month for new services. As far as Apple comparisons go, in the last few years, yes Apple's released quite a few OS's, but also it was a major transition away from Mac to Unix. I remember when OS 9.2 was king, most software still supported hardware/software all the way back to OS 8.5 and 7.5 in some cases. But then MS did the same thing between 1995 - 2000 with NT4, 95a, 95b, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 pro. Most people were not forced to upgrade, but most did because of the rapid advance in hardware was too slow and PC's became cheaper. Apple is fairly predictable, a new OS release about every 2 years.What I get asked more about than anything is the different "versions" of Vista and which do they need. It's confusing to a lot of people. XP Home and XP Pro wasn't too hard: home, home | pro, office. Then there was media center edition which a lot of people have and never use all the features of (and don't know why they got it in the first place). And I'm not even including the server releases in here. Personally I run Macs, but I spend most of my time in the video editing world. Considering I spend more time getting work done on my macs rather than working on them is well worth any upgrade prices. However I should note, I never paid for a copy of OS 10.3. My iBook had the logic board and Apple installed it free (even gave me the discs).

Depends on who ends up running. While Hillary is the favorite, she doesn't set well with a majority of voters. Plus the general trend the past thirty years has been to elect people outside of washington as president. The only inside the beltway presidents since 1972 has been old man Bush. Even then he was VP.This bodes will for a Mit Romney or Guiliani. McCain is the front runner, but at some point I think age is going to become a factor with him. He's not young and if nominated could suffer the same fault as Bob Dole in 1996. Most people liked Bob Dole, but felt he was too old in the center/indepenant crowd. My darkhorse on the republican side is Mike Huckabee. If the republician are smart, a nomination with a McCain or Guiliani with a strong social conservative VP (like a Romney or Huckabee) is going to present a challenge to the democracts. McCain stands the best shot of getting the social conservatives behind him as Guiliani's "I'm against abortions, but not in favor of changing the law" and "Domestic Partnerships" (which is basically my stance) doesn't sit well with them. While the Democrats one a lot of seats, a lot of them were by slim margins and I suspect that's because the more fiscal conservatives (the "independants" that lean more libertarian) stayed home over issues like the defecits.

Storage space is not an issue when you can pick up a 1TB external Firewire hard dive for $500. We have a 6TB RAID system for storage with fibre-channel cards. Storage is extremely cheap these days.

Live disks are great for testing your hardware compatablity or if you need to run Linux on a machine you don't own. I would run it from a seperate HDD in dual boot if you plan to stick with it for the long haul.

I pay $25 a month for cable and get between 768 - 1MB/s with 512k up so I'm not complaining. My wireless router slows things down more than anything. My Mac Mini (that I used like a Apple TV before there was Apple TV with my 32" LCD 720p HDTV via DVI input). Is it the best in the world? Probably not, but it's good enough. Granted i own my own cable modem, so I get my service at a bit of a discount.

I just installed Drupal 5 on one of my none astahosted sites from scratch (here Cpanel will do it for you) and started playing around with it. Drupal is frankly more powerful if you have some programing talent. THere are things I like about it, such as the intergrated topics manager accross all modules, but again it does some things bass ackwards compared to other CMS systems like Xoops or Joomla. For me Drupal works because I'm the only access the content. If what you are looking for is just a blog, you might want to consider geeklog or wordpress, applications designed for blogging.

Don't rule out Apple either. You can get a loaded Macbook for a thousand pounds and a base level MacBook Pro for 1350 pounds. http://www.apple.com/uk/ With the new intel macs you can run windows on the same machine via bootcamp and the hardware specs are nearly identical.

Gimp does a lot of things I need and argueable does something like lens flares better. However, I have quite a few handy photoshop plug-ins I've purchased over time that have no equivlant in GIMP so my vote goes to Photoshop. Plus PS is the industry standard. If you are a home user looking for some more power, sure GIMP is a great option, but if you are a pro, Photoshop is the way to go.

I deal with Sony FX-1, FX-3, and 2 HC1 and editing HDV and I don't have a problem. Average file sizes I work with range from 5GB to 120GB depending whether it is a 30 second commerical or a 2 hour long documentry. FCP seems to work great and with very few hiccups. Combined with SHake for compositig and post needs and it becomes an extremely power tool for $10,000 in software and hardware.

Adobe Premiere is the FCP rough equivlant on the Windows platform. I started with Adobe Premiere 5 then Premiere 6 was god aweful with crashes and we started using FCP 3 and never looked back. Cold Moutain was another hollywood film cut on FCP and FCP is the industry standard for field journalists as well. Those tstorys from the front lines of war are often edited with FCP. I'll be upgrading to FCP 5 when I get a MacBook Pro this fall. Until then 4.5/HD does everything I need.

Before you go reinventing the wheel, check out Point of Sale software at http://sourceforge.net/. There are some handy open source wear that is Barcode scanner ready.

If you're going to use tape, use electrical tape. There is a reason why it's called ELECTRICAL tape. Still I'd stick with the 400w powersupply since they are not that expensive anymore. I had an AMD machine back in the 1.2Ghz Thunderbird stage and I ended up having to take the side off and run it with passive cooling to keep it running. After that, I haven't been a big fan (no pun intended) of AMD processors. And this was with a full sized server case with 2 80mm fans and an extra fan a PCI slot.

Also depends on what platform you are designing for. Apple, for instance, has a pretty strict code to how everything should look and function. Linux has no such rules. Windows has a set of rules, but only about half the developers actually follow them. So a lot depends on what platform you are coding for.

What is happening in Iraq now is not a Civil war as it is a proxy war being fought by Iran and the Saudis with the US stuck in the middle. The Saudis are providing the cash and weapons to the Sunnis while Iran are doing the same to the Shiites. Iran is a state that is going to have to be dealt with and I don't think diplomacy is going to work. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist pushing the Doomsday clock up a couple minutes is not only warranted, but I'm surprised it's not even closer. I don't see any effective way of ensuring the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities short of using ground penetrating tactical nukes.

We always save in 97/2000 format. That ways most everyone can open our documents whether they are on Mac, PC, or using some other Office product that can read .doc.

Goto Barnes and Noble or Boarders, grab a cup of coffee, and see if you can find the Apple technical manuals and repair study aids. Then look up iBook/Powerbook repair. IIRC there should be a list of parts and manufactures for the listed items. Then you can go only and see if you can pick one up for cheap. Then again, this is starting to kind of sound familar like a logic board issue I had once...

Drupel was equally as powerful and annoying when I tried it. I liked the intergrated Trove feature across the entire frame work (something Xoops sorely lacks), but then to add a menu item was bass ackwards. My big question is: does it support PostGreSQL again? If so I may deploy it again just to use it with PSQL on an upcoming project.

Well I've had similar problems in the past. Once with a Logic board (ie video card on a Mac) and in my Titanium powerbook when I broke a hinge. (Stupid me knocked it off the ledge of my couch...luckly hit plush carpet, but not plush enough...)Again, at 7 years, it's had a good life, time to move on and start saving for the new one.

In the video world, there is still a world of difference between 2k/4k film using a Digital intermeadatory (DI) and DV. DV is great for broadcast, but looses a lot more than you'd think when projected on to a 40 foot screen. For the Stills world, I'd say that by 2010 Film will be about gone outside of hobby/enthusiasts. It practically is now for consumer use. Still there are some professionals that can't do quite the same work in Digital and prefer the chemical stuff.

Does it do this when hooked up to an extrenal monitor? If so, then there is something goofy with your video card. My guess, however, is that a wire between the LCD and graphics card maybe loose. Especially if the connection is going through the hing. The other possibility would be that the LCD itself is on the last legs. If it's 7 years old then hardware failure is a likely cause. However, my money would be on a loose wire between the graphics card and dislay.

You can't do it with two external monitors. Your laptop screen is monitor 1 and your external is monitor 2. This is a feature that's been around a while. I can use it now with my aging Powerbook. I know, however, this doesn't work with the S-video feature though. So if you're trying to hook up to a projector or flat panel TV...

We were running it on a 2.4Ghz P4HT with 2GB of Ram when we had the developer's box to test our custom built application a couple years ago. So it's not impossible to do.

Apple should have trademarked anything starting with the lower case i and having to do with interactivity or filed a business process patent for things using the internet start with a lower case i followed by a capital letter....Given how screwy the business patent process is now, Apple probably could have gotten it approved.

Simple Red Hat doesn't have iTunes and the iTunes Store with contracts with the major networks and offer consumers a good balance between digital rights and fair use. Not only that, but AppleTV is the future of content delivery. Until recently, the cable package including in my condo fees did not include Sci-Fi. So I purchased the seasons pass for it off iTunes for $40. I know a lot of people who now wait for shows like lost and 24 to come out on DVD (if they don't have a DVR) so they can watch the series when they have time. With people skipping commericals, via DVR or downloading from iTunes or buying on DVD, the studios are having to figure out ways to make shows work $$$. Ultimately this is probably a good thing since shows that people want to watch will be purchased in some fashion as advertising gets reworked to where stars are "Going to starbucks" or "Drinking a Coke." with the cup/can clearly displayed in the show. Which ironically is how TV shows were orginally sponsored back in the 1950's. GM produced this show, Phillip Morris another (hey kids, smoking is good for you). I also think this will give creative folks another outlet. I am in the process of working on a 3D animated series of shorts targeted for the web and Video iPod to test the waters. The content is going to be offered free at first, but we may offer a higher resolution version for $2 off iTMS. If we get 3000 people to spend, we've brokeeven on production costs. The internet being what it is, if we produce something good, we can likely get that number. If it's crap, then we don't. I really believe the days of network TV may not be numbered, but I see the trend of products on demand soon being the way to go. If I were to get cable (currently included in my condo fee) on my own, my bill would be about $60 a month. The shows I watch on a regular basis are: Mythbusters, Battlestar Galactica, Stargates, and Glenn Beck Networks I watch from time to time: History (when its something new), CNN, and Fox News...oh and Fox Sports Midwest for Cardinals games during the summer. I do watch HBO often, but only because it's part of the package. I wouldn't pay for it seperately. $720 a year. Let's say those shows cost me $60 each for a season of downloads....that's $300 for BSG, MB, SG1, SGA, and say $20 a month for Glenn Beck. In total that's $540 a year. So even if Baseball was a $100 for the season for just the Cardinals...