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a) Yes the author of the $200 Intel/Apple box bought and put together the Intel hardware for less than $200 ( a half hour assembly time??!!) - to run the Mac OS x86. Or do you mean - the advertising/marketing costs? We know that " Well Made, Well Priced, Usable Products Sell Well Through Word Of Mouth". Apple's market share? Apple has only 4% of the computer market right now.

b) Apparantly AMD tried talking to Apple -and no go!

c) Yes encoding farms can be used - and obviously a farm of 10 of the fastest dual core AMD's will be lightening speed ahead a farm of the fastest speed Intel/Apple dual cores - several research pieces show that now. And of course10 quadra core AMDs will be even faster - n'est pa? Again http://www.digitalpostproduction.com/index.jsp has always shown that Apple G5 dual core are slower than cheaper Dells! And that the lastest AMD Dual Cores 280 whip anything Intel has to offer - whips Intel badly.

d) Yes Apple OX users will be happy to know that there will be other brands of H.264 encoders to use that are not bloated nor non-interoperable (non-monopolizing) NOTICE APPLE does not own nor display the LOGO for H.264 Interoperability.

e) Assuming your a right - that the new Intel/ Apple boxes will be cheaper but to run - but at half the speed of AMD!!! Common lets get serious here.

First of all - stop sounding like an Apple Lemming Devotee Apologist - and attack anyone who questions what Apple does to consumers. In my opinion, Apple does not operate in the best interests of consumers - at least we can agree on that - yes/no? You want a specific example how Apple's monopolistic agenda is damaging my ability to do what I want to do? Well here's one. I have invest about 15 years in trying to use Apple products effectively and about $20,000 in Apple hardware. My focus - Tv on the web. Apple has a history of producing hardware that has been anywhere from 25 to 35 percent slower than similar priced Dell/ Intel boxes (check http://www.digitalpostproduction.com/ ). So Apple will be producing "special Intel boxes" to run the next Mac Os x. Unfortunately the best dual core Intel box is anywhere from 30% to 50% slower than a dual core AMD when encoding H.264. From Znet UK: "AMD currently offers the most attractive dual core option. The entry level Athlon 64 X2 3800+ may cost $87 more than its Intel counterpart, the Pentium D 820, but the AMD chip is a much better performer. It also uses considerably less power. A typical Athlon 64 X2 3800+ system uses less than 100W, while an equivalent Intel-based system uses about 50 per cent more, so it will be easier to build a quiet office PC around an AMD dual core chip. The lower electricity cost could also be a significant factor in enterprises with several thousand PCs." As well check out (http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/processorsmem ory/0,39024015,39233885-5,00.htm ) to see that a $900 Intel CPU chip is 50% to 80% slower than dual Athalon 4800+ when encoding H.264!!!!! That means I can be twice as productive on and AMD than on an Intel's high end CPU chip!!! Simply Eh! (as we say in Canada). Will I be able to install the next Mac OSX I buy on a AMD!? Who are the idiots who consider this issue flame bate - what jerk-offs.

Back to the Media and Apple. How many Macintosh magazines (in hard copy or online ) go after Apple/ Jobs for continuosly producing hardware and an OS that is inferior to Intel/Microsoft - when it comes to real work (not word processing;) ) For example, the "fastest" dual G5 is 25% slower than a Dell (lower price than the dual G5) when it comes to rendering or compressing video. Naturally the G5 would be even slower when compared to an dual AMD. Running MySLQ on a G5/Tiger is 5 times slower than running MySLQ on a G5/Linux!!! Don't believe me! Google all three statements. Or go search http://www.digitalpostproduction.com/ for starters.

Bit by bit copying isn't enough to make solid backups at this point. Many commercially purchased DVDs are over 8 or 9 GBs and available DVD+-R/RW media is maxed at 4.7 GBs. Though companies like Verbatim are promising to release dual-layer disks, they aren't on the market yet. The only way (that I know of) to split a single commercially available disk onto several smaller writable media and still have it be playable is to break the CSS.

What I'd like to see is someone taking the CSS code and writing a good open source DVDxCOPY type program.

Yes but I don't consider the digital color timing part of the VFX. Before the digital era and even before Star Wars, there were/are jobs called colorists which would time (that is color correct) the whole film. They didn't have anything to do with VFX, if anything they have to work with the finished VFX shots to match them to the surrounding shots. Now grading is becoming more digital and it has some connection with VFX as it's sort of related to compositing since you have to match elements.

The LOTR trilogy is using Colossus which was made by 5D which went out of business and Colorfront got a hold of it and I belive Discreet acquierd them and the new product will be called lustre. You can read a bit about it here:

5D Colossus Grades "The Lord Of The Rings" Trilogy
Colorfront to Develop 5D Colossus

Interestingly I thought sometime the color correction was to extreme and too contrasting. There is a shot at the end of TTT with the 3 main characters after being victorious in Helm's Deep, and the shot of Gandalf (which supposdely has the sun right behind him) is really contrasting to the shots of Aragorn and Legolas in terms of saturation and flestones in particular and looks a bit softer. There are several shots like that in both films which made me groan a bit ut are not a real big deal. It kinda reminded me of the extreme color saturation and washout in some shot of Geonosis in Ep. 2. I still think O Brother Where Art Thou is the most consistent in terms of extensive digital grading, but that's just me.

First off, just forget the friggin' pipe dream of ever running OS X on your home-built x86 shitbox. Apple's hardware and software businesses have a symbiotic relationship. Apple's software is what sells their hardware, the proceeds of which go towards the software development. remove one side of that equation and the whole thing collapses. Furthermore, even if Apple did move to x86, they would prevent OS X from running on commodity, non-Apple hardware, so you'd still be whining about it. They'd do it for two reasons: First, because the sanctioned Mac clones almost killed Apple back in the late 90's. Second, because what makes Macs work so well is that their software has ultra-tight integration with a limited spread of hardware.

If Apple is to compete at all, they really need to venture more into the business market.

Last I checked, consumers weren't the target market of rack-mountable servers or rack-mountable RAID units. And Apple destroys Microsoft on server software pricing. Apple charges $1000 for an unlimited client license for mail and filesharing. The last client of mine who got a unlimited CAL for Windows 2000 Server paid five figures, and I'm pretty sure that didn't cover Exchange Server.

Adobe has made it very clear that they prefer Intel over Apple for raw performance...and performance tests have proven it!

You mean those performance tests that were proven to be flawed because Adobe is too lazy to write their After Effects software to take full advantage of the Mac's dual processors?

And get this...512 megs of DDR333 memory cost $250 on Apple's website! That's insane!

Yes, it is. Luckily, Mac users with a clue buy their RAM elsewhere and install it themselves. For the rest, buying Apple RAM is like buying aspirin at 7 Eleven... it's unnaturally expensive because you're paying for the convenience.

It doesn't matter how fast a machine is, it's not more productive if the faster machine is always needing maintenance like Windows boxes. At my last job they were an all-Mac shop when I started. Not long after I started, my boss quit, and I was able to singlehandedly take care of over 100 users at three different locations while the company looked for a replacement for him. Mostly, I sat in my office all day reading and browsing the web, because other than people needing help with the Office documents sent to us by our Windows using clients (damn Microsoft and their ever-changing file formats), there was seldom a problem. Later the company decided to convert all but the production studio to Windows machines. Can you say expensive? Me, my new boss, and a summer intern could not keep up with all the shit that went wrong, hardware (Dell) and software-wise. Did I mention viruses? ILOVEYOU crippled us for most of the day it debuted. You can have an accident with a running chainsaw and still have enough fingers and toes to count the number of malicious Mac viruses that ever existed, and most if not all of them are extinct and have been for years. Security holes? The last one in Mac OS X, major or minor, was patched on March 24, a month and a half ago. There have only been FOUR since Jaguar was released (I just checked my Software Update log). How many for Microsoft? Four since March 24, and nineteen since XP SP1 was released in August (according to the Installed Updates list on my XP Pro box.)

Your problem is, you're in denial about the Mac advantages. The Mac is more secure, period. Viruses are practically a non-issue. Same with spyware. No worries about my Mac getting owned by some script kiddie or being used as a spam proxy. My G4 has never crashed since I got it in October. It doesn't try to thwart me at every turn when I'm trying to get work done. It's got a damn nice UNIX base lurking underneath a

The visual effects industry regularly makes models and puts them in a 3D scanner to get a basic mesh to work from. Also, the vfx industry regularly takes full lidar sweeps of outdoor sets to more easily do match-moves, make mattes, and such. For example, see: http://www.vfxpro.com/.getarticle/.772 954741 and http:/ /www.digitalpostproduction.com/Htm/Features/ScanMa ster/ScanMasters.htm

Heck, do a search for 3D scanner, and you come up with tons of hits...here's a couple:

• http://www.3dscanners.com/
• http://www.minolta3d.com/
• http://www.cyra.com/hdwrdesc.html
• http://www.3dlasermapping.com/serv_faq. html

So can someone please tell me what the big news is? Is is the resolution, I take it?...That IS pretty small and pretty cool...