unimatrix

Downloading now for OSX and I will tomorrow for all the office PC's. Although I have to admit, we're leaning towards Opera at this point when we do our next round of upgrades when we move to our new facility next year. Still I am using Safari right now because it works and does everything I need. If it ain't broke...However, some of our people boot XP on our intel iMacs and I don't let them surf with IE. So Firefox it is

Consider the phptriad option and then get phpForm Generator. I've found that to be a quick easy way of creating a custom database with online forms without having to code everything yourself. I am developing a CRM system to track some of our customers from a specfic promotion, instead of using our existing system, and used PhpFormGenerator which is free and opensource. Closest you'll find in the opensource world to Access. Again this is for a quick and dirty project. (Speed and function needed as opposed to looks)

First application to try: Quicktime Pro. When that doesn't work: burn the songs to a music CD and then rip them into mp3 format.

I still have one of the old ATI TV cards for the Mac in my g4 tower that's now 6 years old and it still works. I know ATi's only advanced the technology. Also I know of people who's had WinTV cards in the past and had good luck. Both have internal and USB2.0 capture cards. Now if your looking to capture video for edit...different story. All I've heard have been horror stories on both cards. In fact, professional, I either capture from DV or copy a VHS to a DVD using a professional quality transfer machine and then rip the DVD using Handbrake. Only way I know of getting content into a workable format without the hassles of a capture card. And I have a $1500 Firewire capture device too.

However, this is external. I can use it between my 3 towers, several Mac Mini's, and laptops to move large video projects around on one drive, plus I can take it with me on trips if I needed too as well. Again you pay for portablity.

A little off topic, but I still have MS flight simulator 1.0 for DOS on a 5.25" real floppy floppy disc. My last flight sim is Falcon 4.0: Allied Assualt or whatever it's called. I play it on my new iMac that I used Bootcamp to get XP to install. (It's an Intel iMac). I saw it at Gamestop last night when I was looking for used PS2 games. (why spend full price...)

Okay, so technically it's two 500MB drives, but I just got the myBook external HDD by Western Digital and I'm impressed. You have the option of using the unit as a single 1TB drive or in a RAID configuration for $500. I couldn't believe it was only $500. Since I do videos for people and have 4 - 6 projects at anyone time, I needed the extra space and I needed external with firewire. Why? Well I'll copy the files to one computer, let it be rendering a Final Cut Pro project and then go to my other editing machine and work on another project, let it render, and then go to my laptop and do billing/accounting and other stuff. The Raid is a nice option too if your looking for a triple redundant failsafe backup solution as well.

I'm still using CS 1 and I'd be using version 6 if it wasn't that I got the entire suite for indesign and Golive. The reason being is that photoshop 6 did everything I needed and then some. It's to the point now that the only thing the new versions do for me is eat up more resources. I sure there will come a day when I switch from PPC macs to Intel macs that I'll need to upgrade all my software, but until then...,

I am sticking with CS1. Frankly I haven't needed a new version of PS since about 6.0. Only reason I have it is because work paid for it. Even GIMP now does 95% of the things I need, except read photoshop plug-ins. There are a couple key plugins I use on a weekly basis.

I often use sendspace.com for files upto 300MB in size. We had a large 280MB powerpoint file that we had to share between offices and this was ideal to email the link back and forth.

The Final Product

If you want to have *iux on a laptop: buy a mac.

I wonder when the public love affair with Google will end and they will become the next "evil corporation" in everyone's eyes. Aka the next Microsoft. I've already seen it start with people criticising Google of censorship in China, etc.

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I loved monkey island and the Xwing Series. They were fun games during the day.Personally, if they redid the Xwing series or created some new titles, I'd buy them. The Space combatsim genere's been dead pretty much since Freespace 2.

It depends if your an amataur, hobbiest, or professional. Pros have been buying new cameras every year as the more mega pixals, the better large pictures they can take for weddings and what not. It's just been in the last year when the 12MP cameras came out that the some of the photographers I know finally leave their film cameras at home unless specifically requested. For my use, 5MP is plenty to due nice 8x10's and that's all I need. Most of the time I use my camera to make pics for ebay and that's about it.

Opera has produced a good browser now for many years. Especially for the mobile market. Even though its free, the fact that it is not opensource gets it killed by the "If it's not opensource then it's evil" crowd. Frankly there are some militant computer hippies in the OSS crowd that are rather vocal and put people off. I'm not talking about all OSS. I use plenty of applications, like Blender 3D and Xoops, on a daily basis. I think it's great that I can indudgle in 3D animation as a hobby without spending $1000 on software. I have Opera, because when I design webpages (which is a main part of my day job) I need to make sure it looks good for everyone. That being said, I still use Safari 99% of the time even though I have MSIE 5 for Mac, IE 7 for Windows, Firefix, Netscape 7 (MAC) 8 (PC), Opera, and iCAB.

Where I used to work we had 3 editing bays, each one had between 1.2 and 3TB of Xserve Raid systems with fiber link cards to PowerMacs for 500MB/s optical transfers. Then the animators had about 2.5 TB of storage on their system. Granted that was closer to 1.2TB of storage and 1.2TB of back up. When I left, they were in the process of debating what the next addition would be and I think it was around 11TB for video and audio projects. My home set up on my PowerMac 4x160GB (Dual G4) and then 250GB on my G5 tower (dual core 2.5Ghz G5). I also have 3 firewire 160GB external HDD's I use with my laptop to shoot and capture video to while I'm on the road. Again I'm in video production and that just eats HDD space.

I'm still not sure Hydrogen is the answer as it requires too much investment in to distribution systems. I think something more along the ways of Flexfuel hybrids are going to be the choice of the future. Then it can run on oil or E85 and get the benefit of equal/better milage with the hybrid.

The text to speech features have already been fairly impressive. Not that I've ever used it other than for fun when I first got a Mac.

Read up on using filters, especially the bump map filter. You can do a lot with bump maps. Also, that may just be a TT font you can download. Check out free font sites online and see if you can find something similar.

I use the backup application that's part of .Mac and go to DVD's with compressed files. Also, I use a 300GB external firewire HDD for video projects and stuff.

Without going into a lot of electrical engineering that I don't understand, the RISC archtecture of the PPC chips are far superior in encoding audio and video. Infact the US Navy uses PPC based chips in their sonar equipement because of this reasoning. Now in rendering, X86 has become the dominate processor because all the rendering engines have been optimized for that format and because of their low cost, one can build a grid of such machines that are powerful and relatively inexpensive compared to the super servers of the past. I'm happy to finally see native 64-bit in lepord for both Intel and PPC based macs. That was something that was missing and will help a lot with video encoding (which is what I spend most of my time doing). I can edit 3 hours of video down to a 42 minute documentry in about 60 hours of work. Takes 4 hours to render the final output. During that time, I can't do anything else. (other than goto Barnes and Noble, get a mocha and read a book...which isn't bad). However the faster a project gets finishes, the sooner I can move to the next task, and thus the more money I can make or the more play time I can have.

Try Quicktime Pro from Apple (yes there is a PC version). Although, RM formats are very hard to work with. One of the reasons why I avoid them unless it's a final output and a client wants wmv, mov, and rm files. That being said, the rmvb file for torrent downloads of tv shows, great. a 60 minute show in a 60MB file is great. Especially when you just want to see the episode you missed and not wanting to burn it to a DVD.

Also, there is a large repository of device drivers at sites like soundcard-drivers.com and others. Just do a google search