Roger writes: : I can't find any background to this thread (I may have deleted it if : it's a couple of months old), but Apple allows you to set a daily, : weekly or monthly automatic check for upgrades, and to download : upgrades in the background when they are available. Then you'll be : asked for confirmation. I doubt if any but the most naive Mac users : aren't aware of when upgrades are available. The default position is : to check for upgrades automatically. Apple may be as smug as they : are secretive, as security releases often follow information about : potential security breaches by several weeks. Installation of : upgrades is a trivial exercise (but I have cable). Some require : restarts, some not. they do strike me as awfully large, a lot larger than anything I've ever seen for a windows machine.. though I'm steering well clear of Vista.. lord knows what *that* will need in updates to make it usable! : What is the third dimension in 3D that you're referring to? A z : axis? Or some other parameter? Apart from holograms and the like, : most of the images we deal with are spatially 2D. Any image has many : axes, if you want to get into details, e.g. the color space could be : a third dimension. there's no 3rd dimension.. As I was writing before about 3D video cards being used by 2D image manipulators some time back - they're largely dead useless. 2D is bitmapped images of whatever colour depth (usually 8 bit) being delivered to the monitor. Sharpness, colour accuracy and decent refresh rates are what 2D are really all about. 3D is handled by the other part of modern video cards, the graphics processing unit (GPU) which does all sorts of rendering based on the needs of gamez.. sharpness and colour fidelity are usually discarded in the 3D rendering to achieve other effects like high frame rates, textures, shading and fog effects (to name but a few) - the 3D engine does things like make grass blow gently in the breeze in a computer game. 3D cards are often utterly rubbish for 2D in that they rarely can deliver as sharp an image or with anything approaching the colour accuracy of a true 2D specific card. Often the cards sound good because they have bucket loads of ram and massively fast GPU clock speeds - all of which do utterly nothing for 2D image rendering.. except compromise whatever 2D activities they can perform. It seems 2D specific cards for image editing are a bit of a rarity these days in the pro image editing environment which is a shame. a good 2D card is a pleasure to work with, even though they're erxpensive. more on 3D: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_computer_graphics and more on what we use, 2D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2D_computer_graphics
