unimatrix

I remember text games being some of the funnist I ever played. I remember one star trek simulator where you had to type: launch tubes 1 2 at Falconor in short handla tu 1 2 at falor something like that. I used to play that game for hours in DOS. It might even have been Basic... All the eye candy in the world doesn't make it worth playing with out a good story line and only a few games in the last few years have been up to par in my book. Still, text only games have a speacial place in my book,

If I had a choice between the PS3 or 360, I'm going with the 360 with the HD-DVD drive. Frankly I see optical media being replaced with some kind of subscription based service (like iTunes) for downloading movies and tv shows, but I think most people are going to go with HD-DVD. I do HDV (High Def Video) work and so far this year I've gotten requests for 2 projects in Blu-Ray and six with HD-DVD. I have both an internal Blu-Ray Burner and an External Firewire HD-DVD burner and it looks like HD-DVD is going to win because 1) the 360 is cheaper than the PS3 and people think "DVD" and "HD" And put "HD-DVD" together welll. "Hey, that's a DVD for High Def." Ask them what blu-ray is and they aren't entirely sure unless they are techie types.

Even though I run Mac, I still have Norton Anti-virus for Mac. If Vista sees wide spread adoption, there will be viruses and hacks. Same if OSX continued to gain in popularity. I see more and more people with apple laptops out and about all the time. So you can't tell me that Mac isn't gaining in popularity.Running any OS not made by IBM without antivirus is kind of stupid.

Must be global warming....

Yeah, I'm sticking with PPC Macs for another couple years at least. Thankfully some can be had on Ebay at reasonable prices, so that's my new favourite shopping place. Personally I'd rather have 2 lesser machines for the same price as a brand new one. Then I can always work on one and then set it to render and work on something else on another machine.I am thinking about getting an intel iMac to test drive out the Mactels sometime this next year when OS 10.5 is released. Really that is the big hitch, I have the money in the bank, but I'm not going to spend $1000 then only to shove out another $150 for an upgrade two months later....Personally I'm interested in the Xgrid 2 stuff...that could solve some of the problem's I've been having with my set up.

Terragen .9.x is a great application either free or for the low cost of $70. Terragen 2 is looking real impressive with it's ablities and I can't wait for the application to come out of ALpha testing. (Some of its new core was used to create the planets in Star Trek: Nemesis. Still I just don't hope it comes in at the price tag of several hundred dollars...

Problem is that not many none-professional editing tools will read Mpeg-2 (DVD) format. In fact that takes a $20 plug-in even with Quick time Pro. Your best bet is to load it into a player and then export the files in some other format (like Quicktime Mov) where more editors will be able to read and make changes to the file.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of 3D Max. The industry stanndard now is Maya. Which I believed is owned by Discreet (same folks as Max)...so it will be interesting to see if Discreet screws with Maya the way they did Max after they bought Kinetix (the company that originally developed version 1 - 3)I like Lightwave far better.Another piece of software to check out is Cinema 4D. It's a rather impressive piece of software, especially given their support for Mac being the first none Apple program to be certified as Universal, and comes at a relatively cheap price tag compared to other solutions. Of course, there is the free, yet powerful, blender3D, which is opensource. If your looking not to invest a lot of money, but have plenty of time, Blender is an excellent choice now since there are a lot community sites with video tutorials like Blenderartists.org...which you'll find me there under the sasme handle.

I record to a VHS tape then burn to a DVD and rip the DVD and edit on my Mac's. Round about way...

I use Unix...with a Mach Kernal...also known as Mac OSX. Build on BSD (which is real Unix, not 'unix-like') technology it's the best of all worlds, especially with the new Mactel. You can run just about any Linux application or program (most have already been ported to OSX native) and you can get all your commerical software too like Photoshop and MS Office...and with the new Mactels...you can even load windows...if you really want too...

1 PowerMac G5 Quadcore, 8GB of RAM 1 Dual 1.25Ghz PowerMac G4, 4 GB of Ram1 Dual Core 2.5Ghz PowerMac G5, 3.5GB of Ram5x1.25 Mac Mini (512MB of ram each) (Xgrid Nodes)1 PowerBook Titanium (1Ghz, 1GB of RAM)1 iBook G3 (700Mhz, 256MB of Ram)On the way:1 Dual 1.8Ghz PowerMac G5, 2GB of RAM

I'm on Mac and use iMovie 06 a lot for capture and import from DV and even for quite a bit of simple cutting and to add the final track since it works much better with iTunes than FCP 4.5. For all my professional stuff, I'm still using FCP 4.5HD. I haven't needed to upgrade to FCP yet and don't plan on it until I get a MacTel. (I'm still 100% PPC and getting decent deals on Ebay on G5's....so I'm putting it off until I have to do it...)I have Adobe After Effects 5.5 (I don't use it much) and Apple Shake. (Although I paid $3000 and 4 months later they dropped the price to $500...grrrr...I'm still fuming over that one)However I am using EffectsLab Pro for a lot of my personal project and is a really good program for $150.

Don't forget the "Set Smooth" option under the edit tab.

The reason Apple switched to Intel was IBM/Motorola were having production troubles on their 90nm production lines. Incidentally, AMD was running into the same trouble about the same time with their production as well. Also, AMD was running into a production wall, they were already selling all the chips they produced.Basically, Apple wanted IBM to continue focus on developing the PPC platform them and IBM is gradually getting out of the R&D business and basically came back and said: "You want PPC chips, you can help by paying for some of the R&D to the tune of a Billion dollars a year". Furthermore, the G5 Chips for laptops just wasn't working. They could have pulled the G4 desktop vs. "G4" notebook chip (the G4 in laptops are a completely different chip series than those in desktops...and don't have near the performance of their desktop counterparts).When Apple went chip searching, Intel announced their focus on performance per watt. Something that really matters as notebook sales out paced desktop sales, especially for Apple. I see a lot of iBooks and Powerbooks around now and fewer iMacs/Powermacs at home. Whether you like Intel or not, they are the only company that can really meet the production needs for Apple. Apple is assured they will have chips for their machines. Now rendering in programs like FCP isn't so great, but should improve in programs like Lightwave and Maya as their rendering optimized for x86.

AutoCAD is CAD software designed for engineering and architecture. If your going to be using 3D Studio * products for animation and rendering, then it is a wise choice. Also if you think about things from more of a technical drawing mind set, it's a good program. However to do animations well, your going to need 3D Studio Max or Viz.

Try Blender 3D (free and opensource) or Maya Personal Learning edition if you want to learn on the industry standard application.

The big issue is providers wanting to charge you at both ends of the pipe. Not only for connecting to the internet, but to connect to that page on the other end. I've heard a lot about the idea if anyone can figure out a micropayments scheme for content (as a way of making ad revenue for sites) but I think that could turn against the internet as companies would figure out a way to use that to charge for looking at web pages.

I have the external 1TB Mybook drive from Western Digital with firewire cables. Currently I have it set for 500GB capacity with the other drive as RAID backup.

Mac OS X

My short answer is: NO. I've seen the argument that for the cost of a repair mission, NASA could build a brand new and improved Hubble successor (basically Hubble II) and launch it on board a traditional rocket for about the same cost. So that would be my vote.

This is one of my latest projects using phpWebsite. I plan to use Joomla later, but phpWebsite allowed me to get a basic site up and running quickly. Thoughts and reviews welcome.

I like Mambo/Joombla, but they've been a bit too much for the projects I've been deploying lately, but like most folks here, I'll check it out when the final becomes available.

Here is a trailer made from misc. Proof of Concept renders.... http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I have no idea, but it seems like every new theme I install wants to create a a white page. Now I can't log into two of my sites. The front page loads, but when I log in as admin, all I get is a blank white page....and it is getting annoying! This has happened across 3 of my sites (1 personal, 2 business that we're designing). And with a white blank page I can't even get into the admin control panel to fix it.....If you can't tell I'm a little irate. I love Xoops, but not today!

This has been polled to death already and simple fact is that still about 80% of webserfers use IE, 20% other including Firefox & Safari. Frankly I'm still sticking with Safari for the same reason most people use IE on windows...it's the default on Mac and works for all my needs. I keep Opera et. al. for testing since I do design webpages