Rantings of a Lunatic

Ok, so the weekend is over, but I ended up working a lot more than I had expected. For those who don’t know, I have taken a day job. I am a webmaster for a prominent local company by day, and a freelance designer by night. Now, on to the ranting….

It is absolutely the worst possible time to buy a computer. So don’t. Well, thats my perspective anyway. Apple just came out with their intel based machines, which is something I have been saying that they should do for at least 6 years. No, seriously. Now whats odd is that I am in the position where I have to decide if I am going to stick with them, or if I am going to jump ship again and go back to the MS system. Its not a decision I would be proud to make, but if I make it, it will purely be logical. You see, when I first started talking about how Mac should go to intel, (x86 really), it was purely because the G3-4 processors plainly suck at floating-point operations, which is where the x86 excels. Ok, now the G5 is remarkably better at FP operations, but this is mainly because its capable of 64bit processing. Now skip ahead to today, and apple is leaving 64bit for the intels which are 32bit. This is a bad move in my oppinion. but, its not the major point that is making me consider switch back. WinXP is only 32bit for all intensive purposes. Ok, so there is a 64bit version of WinXP, but the reason it doesn’t count is that there is very little 64bit support in all applications. Ok, reason 2, I like several applications, and there is just no telling how long it will be before they are supported on the Mactel processors, if at all. Its Adobe (Macromedia) and Alias (Autodesk) who don’t “make forward looking statements” about their products. This compounded upon the fact that Apple’s Pro apps are still not compatible with these machines yet. Thats a bad move on apple’s part, they should have made their apps work before they started selling the first one. Now, I haven’t researched it, but if I remember correctly, April 1st is Apple’s anniversary, 30th I think. Now, what if they had waited to release the Macbook Pro on intel with all the Pro apps on this day? Talk about a marketing option there. Of course as I write that, I think, maybe they will have the quad processor mactel tower come out this weekend, with all the Pro apps, but, still, they haven’t been helping the situation. And, what happened to the Firewire 800 support on the Macbook Pro? There is absolutely nothing Pro about that machine, it should have been the iMacBook, with a Pro version coming out later.

Then we come to the other side of the fence, and look at Windows Vista. Man, this just makes my head hurt when I think about it. How far off from the point can MS really be? I read a great article today on Digg, about how they should give up with Vista, and just start over from scratch. I think thats a great idea. I personally am not as enamoured with the Everywhere OS that they were tauting, but, I do agree that MS needs to step back from the legacy code and compatibility that they have kept building on. Write a new one, and run it, and if something isn’t compatible, a virtual OS would be sufficient. Plus, then you could make this virtual OS a stateless system, like in Virtual PC, so that its inherent sercurity flaws aren’t an issue, because it could be saved to a state of exactly when it was installed. Or it could be left to run as a simple system if you needed data collection or something.
Now aside from this, Windows does have the benefit that Autodesk prefers it, so Maya is most likely still going to be supported on it. And the latest version is already available for it. Then you add Adobe, again, all the important software is already available for it. So, I would lose access to Final Cut, but, for as much as I have used it in recent time, I can forgive it.
A good thing for Windows XP, is that it supports SLI. I haven’t used it, but I am really excited about it. The ability to leverage the power of two video cards for one monitor is absolutely awesome. If Apple could support the SLI, man that would allow it to be more readily seen as a gaming platform. But, I am not going to push my luck, for a long time, I was saying that they needed a workstation class video card, and they finally got one, but its performance difference is minimal over the next available videocard, and the price differential is $1100.

I would be wrong not to mention the Open Source offerings, because I believe that they are the way of the future, but as much as my ideals stress them, I can not claim that they are ready for a professional setting at this point. They can be used and work well for an entity that has the skills to alter and modify the code to fit their needs, but off the shelf, they are just not ready to be used when the files are passed back and forth with other production houses. Fear not, I will continue to keep my eye on them, because as I said, they will be the way of the future, but I think that they are still 5-10 years from primetime.

Ok, gotta get back to work.

Hey, I forgot to mention, my birthday is coming up, if you wanna make a donation to the upgrade my computer fund, please let me know. I will decide which way I go when I see how much money I have ready for the purchase. Will it be the Apple Quad G5 with the Nvidia Geforce 7800, 4 Gb of ram, and the 23″ LCD? Maybe the Macbook Pro? Or the Dell XPS600 with the dual core Intel Extreme Edition 955, dual Geforce 7800s in SLI configuration, 4Gb of ram, and a 24″ LCD? Or maybe the Dell Precision Workstation with dual dual core Xeon Processors, a Quadro 1500ish Video Card, 4Gb Ram, and a 24″ LCD?
Or the most likely 1GB Memory Module and possibly a Geforce 6800 or better video card to replace the Quadro 500 that I currently have in my machine?