Welcoming new additions to the family...

I'm back, at last! Well, it's been a hectic couple of months and, without going in to all the details of when and how, I am now the proud father of a little girl who has, it has to be said, settled in amazingly well, but has taken my attention away from my blog here and other things that I would usually do i my spare time. In fact, it's simple to say that I have had no free time. I wouldn't change a thing, however - she's perfect and mother and baby are doing astoundingly well.

 So what's new in the world of tech and gaming that I have been tinkering with? Well, first up would be iPhone OS 3.0 - it's funny how a few minor tweaks can turn something cool but not so practical into an indispensable tool, but that's just what OS 3.0 has done. The ability to sync Mail and Calendar to my Google account without requiring extra steps or interconversion on my part, the ability to search the entire phone, the ability to Copy/Paste and, best of all, tethering (where you use your phone as a wireless modem for your laptop) have made my life so much easier - I can copy text from web pages into emails, I don't have to send all my work appointments to my Gmail account, then import to iCal on my laptop, then sync them by connecting my phone and, joy of joys, I can now surf the net on my laptop whilst on the train without requiring a pre-paid dongle for £100+ and pay an arm and a leg for data usage (or pay yet another monthly contract fee). Ok, if you are stupid, your network provider will figure it out and block your phone, but for checking emails and browsing eBay on the move, it totally transparent as its the same level of data trafic you'd get surfing on your iPhone.

 To be honest, the latest Apple Keynote didn't wow me so much - the iTunes news was cool (DRM free songs, etc), but the rest left me a bit cold. With the iPhone 3GS, which has video (big whoop) and is marginally quicker than the standard 3G iphone, I don't really feel the need to rush out and upgrade, unlike the jump from iPhone to iPhone 3G, and the cost of upgrade is potentially huge (O2 and AT&T are not letting consumers upgrade part-way through a contract, depsite the fact the handset will cost £300ish). I also think that, because there was no true "Killer" product (no new Mac Tablet, or iNewton, etc) that Apple probably missed Steve Jobs' presentation style more keenly. Steve is cool in a way that Bill Gates could only dream of and the slightly portly fellow who did this keynote (whos name escapes me temporarily) is obviously a committed board member, who follows the Church of Jobs - I believe he has assisted in a few keynotes before - just didn't have the same charisma. He spoke the same sort of words, but they sounded like a school teacher trying to be "down with the kids" - I truly believe that a lot of Apple's ability to weather the global financial crisis is going to hinge on Steve Jobs' health as without him, Apple struggles to maintain its ice-cool image and begins to look like a bunch of middle-aged men trying to hang on to the image they had in their College days. There is also the danger that, without Jobs, Apple could slip back into the Gil Amelio-era style of iterative design and focus-groups - Apple is only competitive when it stays ahead of the game in terms of design - anyone could build a Xeon-based PC for the cost of the MacPro, but it's the qualit of the design and build and the superlative OS X that gives Apple that edge - lose that hip feel, need to innovate and design culture and Apple would sink faster than SGI, who went from top dog in the Supercomputer and 3D workstation market to bankrupt in a very short space of time and their arena of competition was far smaller. Get well soon, Steve, for Apple's sake not just your own!

  Sticking with Apple, the other news is that I have had to scale back plans to buy a new MacBook Pro 17" and an iMac (babies cost a lot ) and have just purchased a replacement for my old G4 Powermac (which now lives with my Mother who is in love with her "new" Mac) and also for the Dual Xeon PC that has been the staple of my home office for about eight years. This machine (Dual 1.7GHz Xeons, 4GB RAMBUS memory, RAID SCSI 10k drives, DVDRW and NVidia AGP 6800 card) has been more than quick enough until recently, when I just started to feel that it was becoming a bit long in the tooth - as PCs go, it's been great - reliable and fast, but then again, you do get what oyu pay for and, with the huge cost of RAMBUS memory when new, this beast weighed in at £10,000, including a (then) huge 18.1" LCD screen, DVDRAM backup drive and SoundBlaster Audigy with LiveDrive (connection breakout box in a drive bay, basically). Oh, and the Wildcat 5110 workstation class graphics card cost £1500 but was obsolete within 18 Months...still, such is the way with PCs.If you're ever in the market for a PC-based workstation, I can really recommend Boxx - their customer service was amazing over the life of this machine, but I never really enjoyed owning this computer in the same way I have a soft spot for my Macs (and my SGIs). So, rather than put it on eBay and get a pittance for it, I'm turning it over to the network for use as a video and music server and I'm also sacrificing the beloved Blue Dalamatian iMac G3, which is going to live with my parents in their guest room so that visitors can surf the net and check emails, etc. I've already got a G3 Pismo laptop serving that purpose here...

Power Mac G5 Introduction

  So, what did I buy? Well, after much hunting, I've just taken delivery of a Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 with 6GB of RAM and the 256MB X800T ATI graphics card. The silver hot rod also has 500GB of drive storage, which means I should need to upgrade for a while. I was after a Quad 2.5GHz machine, but my budget wouldn't quite stretch (although, in true sod's law fashion, minutes after I'd paid for mine, I had someone offer a Quad for not much more - ah well) and whilst I could have gotten a dual 2.7GHz, I picked this one as it had a good solid spec with a lot of RAM (one thing the Boxx did teach me is that 4GB or more of memory can really be worth a good 500MHz of CPU speed, as you'll lose more time writing to disk than you would waiting for a slower CPU to read out of RAM). I'm just awaiting the 22" widescreen TFT that was sent separately and I'll see if I can't get some photos or video of it all when I'm up and running.

 Given that I have a PS3, I'm not too fussed about not having a Gaming PC - I'd like to play Empire Total War, but, frankly, it's more important that the machine I use is stable and lets me do my work on it; I will work from home on it more than I will get to play on it - if I have leisure time it will most likely be spent with my family and games will be played in the lounge, socially, on the PS3.

 The other big reason I am happy with the G5 is that I'm not interested in running OSX 10.5 (Leopard), as it has no support for the old Classic applications and games that I have many of - I'm more likely to want to run the apps I spent money on than games I won't have time to play or be forced to pay out a fortune to update apps that still do the work I require just so they will work on OSX 10.5.

 I know that there is a good business case for dropping the legacy code now that Apple are aligned with Intel, but how many people bought a G5 at a cost of £4000+ that is still useful (and fast) as a work machine only to find it basically being phased out after two years or so - Leopard doesn't support anything less than an 800MHz G4 (according to Apple, anyway, although it might run if you hack the install), but Snow Leopard is due to drop all support for PowerPC systems, which means that machines that are still not end-of-life in studios and small businesses are effectively being made obsolete.

 Not since System 7 dropped support for the original Macintosh machines (68000 CPU series), forcing users to buy LCs or Macintosh Classics, has there been such a cull - by the time OSX rolled around, anything pre-PowerPC chip was basically landfill and most of the Beige G3 machies could run it, so it was a gradual process. A small business (and I know because I am, and have been, one) does not pay out £6k for a top-spec Mac and large screen only to replace it three or four years later - that machine will stay in service until it is literally of no practical use or it breaks down. It might not be the go-to machine after two eyars, but it will be used by junior staff, or as a back up, or for temps...then it might be used as a server or as a render-node, or even just to surf the net and write letters, but it will still be in use. Hell, last year I even saw a Blue and White G3 tower being put to use by an art department who needed all hands to help get a project out the door - sure, it wasn't quick and it ran an older version of Photoshop, but it still actually did the work and that's what businesses care about. The gamer culture of must-have-latest-and-greatest which is vaunted by the PC fanboys in their breating of Apple products is actually not sensible for business users, as those uber-quick gaming rigs tend to be unstable and unproven - agencies and the like need machines that are quick enough but, more importantly, are rock-solid and dependable - hence the proliferation of Apple machines.

 I guess that there is an incentive for Apple to force people to buy the new Intel machines, but there are a lot of XServe or G5 PowerMacs in academic use (Virginia Tech built a supercomputer for $5.2Million using them) and the custom apps on them either may not recompie on Intel x86 or it might be cost-prohibitive, so what about those users? I know for a fact that the media editing department of a multinational oil company still has a whole bunch of G5 towers under their desks, with only those which die beyond repair being replaced with Mac Pros - the investment is huge and corporate finance dictates that as long as the machines are useful, they won't be replaced and, unfortunately for those trying to sell you a new Intel Mac, Apple machines stay useful for far longer - Snow Leopard feels to me like an artificial attempt to force corporate buyers to replace machines in order for OS support contracts to stay in place, etc. In short, it feels a little cynical - what happened to Apple only phasing out sstem support when it was no longer a viable OS for the platform?

 Given that my old G4 which, although fitted with a Radeon card, larger hard drives and a lot more memory, was only a 400MHz CPU and still felt snappy enough for most work (ok, it chopped a bit when rendering out video and also could take a while to resize HUGE images) - especially Flash and web design work, where the files tend to be smaller, and the Dual 1.7GHz Xeon box was always quick because of the RAM and the drives, I can honestly say that my G5 will be the core of my studio for some time to come - especially as I want to be able to run my Classic apps. I dare say that in a year or so when I have some decent spare cash, I would like to get a Mac Pro 8 Core with all the bells and whistles, but actually....I think I'd much rather buy 5 G5 Quads for the same money and get more work done on a distributed workflow.

PowerMac G5 vs Dual Xeon PC

  I know it sounds stupid, but I have always preferred the RISC CPUs of MIPS on Silicon Graphics and Motorola/IBM's PowerPC on Macintosh to anything Intel have come up with. The Intel machines tended to run at faster cycles, but their instruction set and bad architecture tended to make them hot and not actually that quick in real-world terms (same goes for AMD). Basically, the G5 I have was proven to be 40% faster in real-world terms than a Dual 3.06GHz Xeon PC (which given I am only now running down a dual Xeon 1.7GHz machine gives an idea of how much more competent the Xeon workstation-class boxes are compared to a normal PC). I know for a fact that my Core Duo machine running at 1.6GHz (a £2000 Sony Vaio) was nowhere near as quick and, whilst I can get a quad core 3.0GHz Xeon for £LOTS, I really cannot justify the expense on a new machine when £500 on eBay has just upgraded my studio to be at least 50% more efficient for when I am working and made an infinite upgrade for my leisure time as I've got more power in less space and have freed up room for miniatures that need painting, the coffee maker that has been languishing in a cupboard and things are way more organised now I haven't got the extra machines taking up space.

 Life is never simple and now the money which was going to buy my new Mac G5, a new mic for podcasting (the Blue Snowball...mmm, yum!), a new set of paints and brushes for my miniatures, some clothes, some PS3 games and Bluray movies and a few days out and meals for myself and my lovely wife (and baby) has now been ear-marked for two single beds for the guest bedroom (not that we have that many guests), more baby clothes (our house looks like a branch of Mothercare collided with a Baby Gap already), a sewing machine (why?) and shopping spree around Babies'R'Us. Still, at least I have my PowerMac, the paints and the prospect of a few nice dinners....can't be all bad!