unimatrix

In Beta/VHS round two Sony is a staggering 0-2. The Adult Film industry has decided on HD-DVD as their next format of choice for the very same reasons that they went with VHS twenty five years ago. While BRD is the technically superior format, with the Adult Entertainment industry going with HD-DVD the format war is over. I own my own small video production company (I do post-production for 6 other videographers and then do video Memoirs and a few weddings on my own.) and Currently I have both a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burner. I've done 2 projects on Blu-Ray, but still nada on HD-DVD (in fact I should have waited until I needed it to buy it.

Other than the technology will work with either Mac or PC. Apple isn't trying to lock people in. Although I find it extremely funny that the Zune isn't Vista compatiable.

The two long rumored devices were unveiled today. While the iPhone is still awaiting FCC acceptance, looks like the Apple TV is going to be here one of these days. And I'm thinking of waiting and getting the second generation of both. I've been predicting for a couple years this would happen and we'd see a major change in the way we watch TV. I foresee things going to all on demand and if you want to watch "24" you have to pay $50 for the season. I already do this for Battlestar Galactica as I don't get Sci-fi on my apartment's cable feed. (but that is changing yeah!)This is the perfect way to integrate my all Apple home.

My Dad's old Windows 98 system was having issues to where it wouldn't even shut down without turning off the power strip. My answer was to buy him an iMac, but he is keeping his old system up and running until he's sure he doesn't need any more files.

When I disabled threads (used a single processor) the render time was 1 minute, 26 seconds. Compare that to 7Minutes and 48 seconds on my machine and....Hell of a difference. I need to run the scene on my Dual Core 2Ghz G5 machine, but it's busy earning money.

Well I bought my Dad an intel imac and "installed" Photoshop CS1 to test it out versus my 1Ghz G4 Powerbook. His is a Core Duo 2Ghz machine and surprisingly, Photoshop did not gain much over my old G4 machine running at half the speed (assuming the Mactel was using 1 Core for Rosetaa and the other to run PS). I didn't bother with Final Cut, but now with FCP 5 in universal, some of those performance hits shouldn't be as drastic. Where I did notice a striking improvement was with Blender 3D. Took 46 to render a frame (with threads enabled) wiht blender 2.42a for OSX-INtel and almost 8 Minutes on my powerbook. Same frame same settings. Now that's a drastic difference.

First off there is iMovie HD that comes with a Mac or you buy with iLife for $80 if you have an out of date system. The major limitation with iMovie was the limit of only two sound tracks. However, with intergration with Garageband (also part of iLife) that limitation isn't as bad as it used to be. Now that's just the freebe. Frankly it's powerful enough for some of the video biography work I do where I don't need to do compositing or anything fancy.The kicker is Final Cut Express (for DV users) and Final Cut Pro (DV & Film). While FCP is not Avid, it's price point and user interface is perfect for those of us in the small/medium production side of the house and can't afford to drop $100k for an avid system. Also there is Apple Shake (which is the application I get paid the most to use). Shake is industry standard for compositing (okay some of the Discreet folks will say combustion but to each their own). When I bought shake, it was $3000. Now it is only $500 and works on Intel/PPC macs. A year ago I upgraded my main tower to a Quad Core Powermac (2x2x2.5Ghz = 10Ghz total power) with 8GB of Ram for about $8000 with the expensive video card and fibre channel card to connect to my 1TB storage system (Apple Xserve RAID). FCP 4.5HD was $1000 for the suite coupled with Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio Pro. DVD Studio Pro is great and even works with both my Blu-Ray and HD-DVD burners to burn HD content. You add it up and $8000 for the Machine ($2000 for the 23" HD Cinema display I bought in 2002 and $699 for the 17" flat panel secondary display which I already had too) $1000 for FCP, $500 for Shake and $6000 for the RAID system is pretty cheap for a complete production set up. (Blu-Ray burner was $750 and the external Firewire HD-DVD burner was $1200) I just purchased a Sony FX-1 HDV Camera for $3800 (before I was just doing editing and post production work for people) so I can do a few weddings and shoot HD video memories of people and I now have a complete HD set up for about $22,000. On post production, I get paid between $450 - $1000 PER SHOT. Video Biographies I make about $4500 each so I earn it back. If I do any 3D animation work, that's between $650 - $15000 per job.

This is cool for all the windows users of the world, but I'm using Mac OSX and not really all that worried about viruses yet. But other mail services have been doing this for years. In fact, the people I still know that just use Juno because all they want is email get Norton antivirus free through the service.

As a law student studying IP law...this will be extremely welcome as the USPTO search engine is well...is what it is (a pain in the...)Hats off to google for making useful tools. Make cool tools and offer them at the right price (free) and people will use them...like me. Google is doing a lot of cool things...can't wait to see what they'll think up next.At the same time, though, they want to be master and commander of all things information...which when misused, can be equally as scary.

If you can get a hard line(ethernet) connection, download the widget from Apple that allows you to scan all available Wireless connections. I can't think the name of it as I'm at a relatives, but I'll be back home tomorrow in front of a Mac. (on a windows XP box with only 256MB of ram and dial up....yuk.)On most degaulst systems, you should be able to turn on the Wireless card up at the right hand corner by the spotlight magnifying glass. After turning it on, wait 30 seconds and the click the icon and see if the airport card can locate the network and connect.

We had a Mactel developers box a couple years ago, but I finally purchased my first Mactel: a 2ghz 17" iMac for my father. To test the power, I used Blender 3D 2.42a and tested against my existing Powerbook (G4 1Ghz, 1GB RAM) and his iMac Dual Core 2Ghz chip and 1GB of ram. In a 1920x1080 (HDTV) rendering, it took about 8 minutes to complete on my powerbook. On his iMac with threads enabled: 48 seconds. This isn't exactly fair apples to apples, but the best I could do until I get home and see what my powermac (Dualcore 2.5Ghz G5, 2GB of Ram) can do on the same scene. Even then, it's not exactly the same, but the closested I can get to Apples to Apples,

Couldn't agree more. Might have helped three years ago with restoring some order as there would have been no way in the world Saddam would have returned to power. Even handing him over to the Hague and letting the Europeans deal with him might have had a similar effect: he's gone and ain't coming back. Why Sadr is still alive is well beyond me as Iraq has turned into a proxy war being supported by Iran. They are using the insurgancy in Iraq like Iran used Hezbulloh in proxy action against Israel to deflect attention away from their weapons programs. Not tears shed here now that the SOB is dead.

I have to agree, CMS is the way to go. Xisto here supports most of the major CMS systems that all install with a few clicks. You don't have to know PHP/MySQL (helps though) to get things to work. Try going to http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and you can test out various options.

Game maker is a nice application, but there are a number of applications in development to create cool games. Blender3D will do so with the reintroduction of the game engine, but attempts are being made to intergrate blender closely with the Crystal Space game engine, all of which are free and opensource. The nice thing about those apps are the cross platform compatiablity. Make it in windows, plays on Mac/Linux. Gamemaker is limited to the Windows platform only. That being said, for the $20 the program costs, it's a nice piece of software and worth it if you want to learn the basics without having to get into coding.However, if you want to make an advanced game, then your going to have to code at some point, period.

I know a couple firms that have beta copies, but not heard much in terms of what new features are worth anything. Frankly, for most users, including myself, upgrading past about version 6/7 has been pointless. I have CS1 and don't use 80% of the features. If it wasn't for a couple plug-ins that are invaluable to my business, I'd be running GIMP as my image editing application. That being said, I'm not a "power-user"...I just need it from time to time.

I've seen this before I think for PS2...in which case, no it's not free. That is if it's the same program that i'm thinking about. They do have a free download here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I'm not sure if it's free or not.

I vote that we limit the definition of a planet to those celetrial bodies with intelligent life upon them, which by definition, would make the Earth just another space rock while the Dolphins decide whether or not humans are considered "intelligent"

I have both. Since I'm in video production, specifically post production, I need the Quadcore PowerMac with 8GB of Ram and 30" HD displays. However I have a laptop too. (Currently a 1Ghz Titanium Powerbook G4 with 1GB of Ram). It's dated, but still runs FCP HD okay for general editing. Primarily I use this to design webpages, do business use, and check email now and some field production. A Macbook Pro will be in the works for next year, but I don't need any more write offs for this year. It's been a damn good laptop for the last 3 years. Granted, I have a QuadCore Power Mac, Dual Core 2Ghz G5 powermac, Dual 1.25Ghz G4 Powermac, 4 1.25Ghz G4 Mac Mini's, 1 1.8Ghz G5 iMac (1.25BG Ram), 1 2.Ghz G5 iMac (2GB Ram, and my Powerbook. So I'm mostly desktops.

First off, you don't sue the people using the software, you go after the big corporate enities distrubting the product. (Hey maybe MS can also sue SCO...or whatever they're called these days). Then you go after the big hosting companies, etc. etc.. Most patents that are filed are defensive, meaning someone files them to prevent others from coming up with the idea and then turning around and suing originators. They are rarely enforced. Sounds like the Linux group have probably stumbled into this area. They aren't big enough deals for MS to spend the legal fees on, I'm guessing, but reach a deal with the distributors for save your own *bottom* type stuff. Simply put, Novell made the deal so they could move on and no worries. MS is happy, novell's happy, and if microsoft goes on the offensive, then they have a serious selling point: hey use SuSE, we're safe.Linux isn't a threat to Microsoft in the desktop market. Apple is. Microsoft is starting to loose market share to Apple in that arena for the first time in a decade. Linux was the death nail to the Commcerial Unix market. Linux killed IRIX and most of the systems that would have been going to SUN or IBM are now running some form of Linux. I'm sure that's cut into the server side of MS as well, but the big customers of MS servers are small & medium sized businesses. Generally people without a dedicated IT department that sub-contracts out to other firms.

Yeah, it's a bad drive. Contact Apple support or the Genius bar at an Apple store if you have one near by. They'll be able to send it off for warrenty repairs.

The limit of a MySQL database depends on the size of your wallet. How much storage and horsepower can you afford? That being said, there does come a point where MySQL begins to degrade in performance. But that number is far larger than any database I've ever deployed.

Apple sometimes have been a few years way ahead of their time. Remember DVD-RAM? Well it's back in a lot of DVD-recorder machines so that you can use them like a DVR machine. The Newton had a rabid fan base...but they were a couple years ahead of their time. I remember someone having Airport in their dorm room back in 2000 when no body knew what wireless internet was. Now it's everywhere. Apple has a habbit of being on the bleeding edge and sometimes geting bloodied over it. Just like I think they'll go to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is going to be the Next Gen format of choice...at least until everyone has some kind of set top box to download content.

I worked in programming and 3D Animation systems admin for about 10 years and now on into Law School for IP Law. We came across this issue a lot of times when first exploring applications like CineGimp back in the day. We liked what we saw, but with the GPL, anything we developed had to stay internal. About half the company's profits came from reselling tools and plug-ins we first developed for in house needs and figured others out there could use what we had developed for a price. The GPL issue, and I'll be up front: I don't like linux period, was one reason we looked at the BSD systems for development. We could bundle NetBSD or FreeBSD into our producted without releasing any code...just including the BSD license and telling people it was a Unix based system. Now it's a moot point since just about everyone in our industry that was running IRIX, ALPHA, or SUN, are now on Macs. A few went to Linux, but just about everyone is on Macintoshs for workstations with Linux reserved for the renderfarms. I've read through the GPL 3 drafts, and when I finish law school, if clients ask me what I think about using any GPLed software, I'll tell them to avoid it all costs, especially if they want to add/modify/extend the program. I've seen a few people create some cool extentions, but then turn around a realise they can't sell the product and hope to make a profit.

I would wait until Apple gives the final release date for OS 10.5. The reason being, if you buy a Mac before the day they announce the release, you don't get the free upgrade. (Been there, done that with OS 10.1 to 10.2)That being said, the question is how much do you want to spend and what do you want. Laptop, the MacBook is reasonable as is the iMac on the desktop side. You want to get the Superdrive and at least 1GB of ram on any machine you buy. It will run fine on 512, I can run FCP 4.5HD on my older PowerBook (1ghz G4, 512MB Ram) okay. No RT rendering like on my Powermac towers. Same with Photoshop and other hungry apps, but things work a lot better with 1GB or more of RAM. (My Quadcore PowerMac G5 has 8GB of ram...so I can edit HD video and run shake or soundtrack without worrying about crashing the system.)

rarely have I had issues. The latest system update seems to cause Safari 2 to crash a lot for no good reason. One more reason to finally switch to Opera (which I'm using now) That being said, I've never had any issues with Mac patches screwing up other systems. I think I once had to download a new scanner driver or something because of an update conflict, but that's been about it. Personally I enjoy administrating macs over other OS's. Mac OSX Server is a dream to work with and if you know Unix you can get under the Unix hood and do things the old fashion way.