What makes the powerbooks sweet machines is the compromise of speed, weight and battery endurance. A g4 powerbook is plenty power for everything these days, while running cooler and having much more autonomy than a g5 could.
Why desire a g5 powerbook ? Makes little sense to me. If you need macho processor power, go with desktop boxes.
OSX Unleashed is a great book, with the power to turn Mac GUI victims into power users. It covers very nicely the basics in Unix, the Next heritage, and advanced Mac geekness in general. It was the only book that explained what could be achieved with Netinfo (One of the Authors appeared to be a Next veteran). It is also very well written and quite entertaining for a technical book.
The US international policy is at the mercy of the whims of whoever is the elected (or not ^-^) president. Dubya and his illuminated cronies demonstrated repeatedly that they have no intent to seek consensus with world organizations or the US historical allies, obey international laws, honor treaties signed by former US administrations, or avoid opposing multilateral projects to make the planet a better place. (ACBM, Kyoto, International War Tribunal, Irak 2003, nuclear arms testing ban). They are also clearly stated that nations expressing opposing views on world affairs will face consequences. The current US administration is terrible. The next administration can be worse.The world needs a counterbalancing superpower to force the US to return to multilateralism and diplomacy.
Europe is an economic giant and a political dwarf (no military power without the blessing of the US through Nato). Every strategic step taken by Europe toward military independence and the nullification of exclusively US-controlled military technologies is a good thing for world stability.
However, while the typical military icon in the US is a glorious vision of a marine in a hummer speeding toward the sunset, in Europe the memories of two world wars with its mass destructions, countless horrors, millions of casualties and sacrified generations still remain vivid.
I doubt Europe has the will to become a military superpower or the stomach of exercising such power, not counting other reasons such as perpetual internal divisions and a clear preference to spend on social issues rather than the military.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, the world is a much less safe place. Saddam, formerly natural ennemy of Al Quaida, will now be delighted to provide them biochemical weaponry expertise, intelligence and money. Radiologic materials looted from AIEA sites are unaccounted for while radical groups find a larger and larger audience amongst the outraged islamic public in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe. Obviously, only good things to come.
I used VNC to run headless mac renderfarms. It runs like a charm.
It might be less complete or performant than solutions like Timbiktu or Apple remote desktop, but it is open source, free, runs over IP, is ported on all the platforms that you might want to use.
I think everyone assumes they want to transmit wifi inside the subway. That is silly.
They just plan to use the RATP's fiber network as a backbone for their wifis access points. Since the subway covers all the city, so does their fiber network, so does their wifi service.
This means you could get connected from any place in town, during lunch or shopping. Paris is just a wondeful place. Now expect to see geeks playing UT2003 in the gourmet restaurants of Paris:-)
It's called "using the provided software". Unless you consider using expert features of a program a hack. It is not uncommon to use the network renderer in pro houses for heavy comps. I never thought of using two "render nodes" on the same machine tho, but it makes total sense.
The big difference of AE for NT/2K/XP vs AE for Mac is that AE for windows is threaded and uses multiprocessoring (has been for years), while AE for Mac is not using both processors.
It is pure sillyness and lazyness from Adobe (or strategic evil payback to FCP by trying to move people out of Macs), since ALL the professional Mac animation/compositing monkeys use dual proc machines. Mac Duallies are standard in the industry for over 3 years..
Anyway, Adobe needs to seriouly overhaul its rendering sub system (practically unchanged since they bought "Causa After Effects 2.0", way back). They should use a self replicating render deamon, like many more efficient compositing systems. Maybe do something fancy like rendez-vous rendering a la Shake 3.
While not "top end" AE remains a bargain for the all the functionality it offers and remains the standard swiss knife for many effects/animation shops.
As for the guy stating that Mac users prefer to use FCP and Shake, obviously he does not know what he is talking about. Totally different stuff.
FCP is a (very nice) rather unexpensive, feature packed non linear editor with some compositing functions, but not a full fledged compositor like AE.
Shake is a great compositor for the wealthy ($5k license on macs, while AE production is what, $500?) with many great features (color tools, keying, easy scripting all over the place, SPEED) and unparalleled control, a toy for rather expert compositors. It also inherits from its "linuxy geeky" past many annoying inconsistancies (undos are ***ed up, UI is on the garish/unreadable/confusing side, file acess looks linuxy...). it is also lacking some features (hello ? where is the mesh warping ? Crappy timeline also). It will turn out beautifully in version 4 once apple spends some time polishing it.
Version 2.5 was just a quick port on the mac platform ("look Steve ! it does run on mac") but gave a feel of work in progress, performance wise and UI wise. Didnt try new vers 3 yet.
I started with a quadra 800 (68040 at 33mhz). This machine was the bomb in the early nineties (was it 92-93 ?). This box is now used once in a while in a log cabin in the alps as a web-email machine, although sadly it is pretty obsolete now (netscape 3.1 and Mosaic..:-). Next, I grabbed a powermac 7500 (around 96?), sweet machine with nice AV IOs, then an iMac 333 in 99, and a dual g4 450 in 2000.
Today the g4 is still my workhorse, the imac 333 is our web-mail-itunes station and runs OSX happily. Despite my job demands (2d compositor, motion graphics, animator) the dual g4 still churns data at a very acceptable rate. Actually OSX's multitasking goodness prolonged its life, since you can throw a bunch of heavy processes at the machine without noticing a decrease in reactivity.
I plan to grab a new multiprocessor mac with the next gen IBM chip, hopefully in september. The strawberry iMac it is still one of the cutest pieces of furniture that we have and we do not want to get rid of it, so I will have to find out something to do with it !
I am a hardcore computer game player. I have been on the Mac platform at home since forever, and I have always found more quality games that I could use simltaneously. Usually many of the best PC games make it to the mac, with a few exceptions. Agreed, we do not get all of the sucky PC games.
Quake +mods, UT + mods, Warcrafts, Diablos, Myth series, Warbirds, Giants, and a bunch of others, etc.. Can you play all of this and still have a life ? No !:-)
Is a great game if you are into tiny strategy games with a pinch of humor. Spent many hours on this little thing, it is as classic as can be. Supported multiplayer waaay back then. The AI is prety good too. A game with a galaxy size set to humongus should just last about 7 hours:-)
So many people, organistations and develloping countries could use IT Skills. An IT NGO could have several missions: supply IT expertise for other NGOs in need, devellop the infrastructure and spread IT science in the develloping countries.
I cannot begin to express how rewarding it is to teach people with hunger for knowledge and outside communication in some of the world's most deshinerited countries. I did it under contract for a private firm, but I would be willing to do it for a NGO. There are so many ways to help.
For me a piece of art is a subject of meditation, something that will enrich my life and broaden my perceptions, introduce new ideas, and will in some quantifiable way modify me. This can be anything, a painting, a piece of furniture, a haiku, a film, an object as unsignifant as a bottle opener. Expressed in such a manner, art is a deeply individual value: each of us has a different experience and is receptive in different manners.
IMO the difference between art and non-art is detemined by my perception of quality and innovation, taken in the boadest definition of these words. Most of the time one will percieve if an object is groundbreaking, or if it reflects enough human soul to be breathtaking. In the simple ackowledgement of the encounter with ones of those objects, lies art.
Given that personal definition, my obvious answer is that video games and program code do have a potential to be art. I have met occurences of both that have enlightened me, made me discover new concepts, ideas, knowledges, communication forms, etc...
The Myth I/IIcommunity on Bungie.net has IMHO the most elegant system against cheating: A force of trusted admins, designated amongst respected players, who act as moderators and can impose temporary or definitive bans on users.
Of course, this creates a whole series of issues, the first one being how to pick and designate the "trusted admins", what kind of power they have, how conviction is determined, etc... It can also raise protest amongst the people who want to consider online communities as a "free" society where they do not need to enforce real life social codes...
IMHO the admin factor strongly participated in the success of bungie.net creating one of the tightest, most dynamic and interesting communities in the realm of online gaming.
The Myth series was not a RPG, neither was it truely massive or persistent... The concept of adminhood in a MMOG might not be valid, but it might be worth to explore it.
Whatever anti-cheat technology is applied, it will never match a human judge.
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What makes the powerbooks sweet machines is the compromise of speed, weight and battery endurance. A g4 powerbook is plenty power for everything these days, while running cooler and having much more autonomy than a g5 could. Why desire a g5 powerbook ? Makes little sense to me. If you need macho processor power, go with desktop boxes.
OSX Unleashed is a great book, with the power to turn Mac GUI victims into power users. It covers very nicely the basics in Unix, the Next heritage, and advanced Mac geekness in general. It was the only book that explained what could be achieved with Netinfo (One of the Authors appeared to be a Next veteran). It is also very well written and quite entertaining for a technical book.
The US international policy is at the mercy of the whims of whoever is the elected (or not ^-^) president. Dubya and his illuminated cronies demonstrated repeatedly that they have no intent to seek consensus with world organizations or the US historical allies, obey international laws, honor treaties signed by former US administrations, or avoid opposing multilateral projects to make the planet a better place. (ACBM, Kyoto, International War Tribunal, Irak 2003, nuclear arms testing ban). They are also clearly stated that nations expressing opposing views on world affairs will face consequences. The current US administration is terrible. The next administration can be worse.The world needs a counterbalancing superpower to force the US to return to multilateralism and diplomacy.
Europe is an economic giant and a political dwarf (no military power without the blessing of the US through Nato). Every strategic step taken by Europe toward military independence and the nullification of exclusively US-controlled military technologies is a good thing for world stability. However, while the typical military icon in the US is a glorious vision of a marine in a hummer speeding toward the sunset, in Europe the memories of two world wars with its mass destructions, countless horrors, millions of casualties and sacrified generations still remain vivid. I doubt Europe has the will to become a military superpower or the stomach of exercising such power, not counting other reasons such as perpetual internal divisions and a clear preference to spend on social issues rather than the military.
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, the world is a much less safe place. Saddam, formerly natural ennemy of Al Quaida, will now be delighted to provide them biochemical weaponry expertise, intelligence and money. Radiologic materials looted from AIEA sites are unaccounted for while radical groups find a larger and larger audience amongst the outraged islamic public in Asia, Middle East, Africa and Europe. Obviously, only good things to come.
I used VNC to run headless mac renderfarms. It runs like a charm.
It might be less complete or performant than solutions like Timbiktu or Apple remote desktop, but it is open source, free, runs over IP, is ported on all the platforms that you might want to use.
Search for VNC on Version Tacker.
I think everyone assumes they want to transmit wifi inside the subway. That is silly. :-)
They just plan to use the RATP's fiber network as a backbone for their wifis access points. Since the subway covers all the city, so does their fiber network, so does their wifi service.
This means you could get connected from any place in town, during lunch or shopping.
Paris is just a wondeful place. Now expect to see geeks playing UT2003 in the gourmet restaurants of Paris
It's called "using the provided software". Unless you consider using expert features of a program a hack. It is not uncommon to use the network renderer in pro houses for heavy comps. I never thought of using two "render nodes" on the same machine tho, but it makes total sense. The big difference of AE for NT/2K/XP vs AE for Mac is that AE for windows is threaded and uses multiprocessoring (has been for years), while AE for Mac is not using both processors. It is pure sillyness and lazyness from Adobe (or strategic evil payback to FCP by trying to move people out of Macs), since ALL the professional Mac animation/compositing monkeys use dual proc machines. Mac Duallies are standard in the industry for over 3 years.. Anyway, Adobe needs to seriouly overhaul its rendering sub system (practically unchanged since they bought "Causa After Effects 2.0", way back). They should use a self replicating render deamon, like many more efficient compositing systems. Maybe do something fancy like rendez-vous rendering a la Shake 3. While not "top end" AE remains a bargain for the all the functionality it offers and remains the standard swiss knife for many effects/animation shops. As for the guy stating that Mac users prefer to use FCP and Shake, obviously he does not know what he is talking about. Totally different stuff. FCP is a (very nice) rather unexpensive, feature packed non linear editor with some compositing functions, but not a full fledged compositor like AE. Shake is a great compositor for the wealthy ($5k license on macs, while AE production is what, $500?) with many great features (color tools, keying, easy scripting all over the place, SPEED) and unparalleled control, a toy for rather expert compositors. It also inherits from its "linuxy geeky" past many annoying inconsistancies (undos are ***ed up, UI is on the garish/unreadable/confusing side, file acess looks linuxy...). it is also lacking some features (hello ? where is the mesh warping ? Crappy timeline also). It will turn out beautifully in version 4 once apple spends some time polishing it. Version 2.5 was just a quick port on the mac platform ("look Steve ! it does run on mac") but gave a feel of work in progress, performance wise and UI wise. Didnt try new vers 3 yet.
I must say that the Desktop Cray app is very impressive. After a few minutes spent on finding the correct presets the result was spectacular.
I started with a quadra 800 (68040 at 33mhz). This machine was the bomb in the early nineties (was it 92-93 ?). This box is now used once in a while in a log cabin in the alps as a web-email machine, although sadly it is pretty obsolete now (netscape 3.1 and Mosaic.. :-).
Next, I grabbed a powermac 7500 (around 96?), sweet machine with nice AV IOs, then an iMac 333 in 99, and a dual g4 450 in 2000.
Today the g4 is still my workhorse, the imac 333 is our web-mail-itunes station and runs OSX happily. Despite my job demands (2d compositor, motion graphics, animator) the dual g4 still churns data at a very acceptable rate. Actually OSX's multitasking goodness prolonged its life, since you can throw a bunch of heavy processes at the machine without noticing a decrease in reactivity.
I plan to grab a new multiprocessor mac with the next gen IBM chip, hopefully in september. The strawberry iMac it is still one of the cutest pieces of furniture that we have and we do not want to get rid of it, so I will have to find out something to do with it !
I am a hardcore computer game player. I have been on the Mac platform at home since forever, and I have always found more quality games that I could use simltaneously.
:-)
Usually many of the best PC games make it to the mac, with a few exceptions. Agreed, we do not get all of the sucky PC games.
Quake +mods, UT + mods, Warcrafts, Diablos, Myth series, Warbirds, Giants, and a bunch of others, etc.. Can you play all of this and still have a life ? No !
Is a great game if you are into tiny strategy games with a pinch of humor. Spent many hours on this little thing, it is as classic as can be. Supported multiplayer waaay back then. The AI is prety good too. A game with a galaxy size set to humongus should just last about 7 hours :-)
So many people, organistations and develloping countries could use IT Skills. An IT NGO could have several missions: supply IT expertise for other NGOs in need, devellop the infrastructure and spread IT science in the develloping countries.
I cannot begin to express how rewarding it is to teach people with hunger for knowledge and outside communication in some of the world's most deshinerited countries. I did it under contract for a private firm, but I would be willing to do it for a NGO. There are so many ways to help.
For me a piece of art is a subject of meditation, something that will enrich my life and broaden my perceptions, introduce new ideas, and will in some quantifiable way modify me. This can be anything, a painting, a piece of furniture, a haiku, a film, an object as unsignifant as a bottle opener. Expressed in such a manner, art is a deeply individual value: each of us has a different experience and is receptive in different manners.
IMO the difference between art and non-art is detemined by my perception of quality and innovation, taken in the boadest definition of these words. Most of the time one will percieve if an object is groundbreaking, or if it reflects enough human soul to be breathtaking. In the simple ackowledgement of the encounter with ones of those objects, lies art.
Given that personal definition, my obvious answer is that video games and program code do have a potential to be art. I have met occurences of both that have enlightened me, made me discover new concepts, ideas, knowledges, communication forms, etc...
The Myth I/IIcommunity on Bungie.net has IMHO the most elegant system against cheating: A force of trusted admins, designated amongst respected players, who act as moderators and can impose temporary or definitive bans on users. Of course, this creates a whole series of issues, the first one being how to pick and designate the "trusted admins", what kind of power they have, how conviction is determined, etc... It can also raise protest amongst the people who want to consider online communities as a "free" society where they do not need to enforce real life social codes... IMHO the admin factor strongly participated in the success of bungie.net creating one of the tightest, most dynamic and interesting communities in the realm of online gaming. The Myth series was not a RPG, neither was it truely massive or persistent... The concept of adminhood in a MMOG might not be valid, but it might be worth to explore it. Whatever anti-cheat technology is applied, it will never match a human judge.