[conspire] request recommendation for webcam for Mac G4 PPC - Mac OS 10.4.11

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> My sister has a Mac G4 PPC - Mac OS 10.4.11. She is considering purchasing a
> webcam. She wants it for Skype video chats - she communicates with her
> friends in Gaza that have Skype video.

This really is not a Macintosh OS X mailing list.  You would have a lot
better prospects asking for advice on a Macintosh forum of some sort.

That having been said, I _do_ think the best and highest use of a G4 PPC 
box is to run a Linux PPC distribution, such as:

o  MintPPC 9 LXDE
o  Lubuntu
o  Debian
o  CRUX

You can even run the proprietary (and now Microsoft-controlled) Skype
software on that, if you don't mind every spy or major criminal
organisation on the planet being able to log, analyse, and listen in to
your calls with trivial effort:

http://www.fiercevoip.com/story/skype-back-door/2008-07-25
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/05/a-liberating-betrayal/index.htm

Now, before you say so, I take it as given that your sister is not going
to want to run anything but OS X, and is unwilling to consider running a
different Unix (such as a Linux distro).  Part of the price that she is
going to pay for that viewpoint is that OS X has for a _very_ long time
been orphaned on OS X.  She could in theory upgrade to OS X 10.5
'Leopard' provided her PPC has a CPU clock speed of at least 867 MHz and
a minimum of 512 MB RAM -- and if she can still find and pay for that
version.  Absent those hardware minimums, it won't even install:  Sorry,
Apple has abandoned your machine, and wants you to shell out for a new
one.  But 10.5 Leopard, even at that, has itself been end-of-lifed since
August 2009, so it's increasingly dangerous even to expose to public
data, on account of unfixed critical security bugs that (now) will never
get fixed.

Likewise, _10.4_ 'Tiger', which your sister has, is an even more dire,
actively dangerous case:  10.4.11, which she has, was the final update,
in November 2007.  2007, Darlene!  On an Internet timescale, running an
overfetured consumer operating system that has been completely
unmaintained for _four years_ is a risk to security and privacy that I'd
never wish on anyone.

(That's not to mention that switching to LXDE on Linux gives you good
performance even on old machine with slow CPUs and so-so amounts of RAM,
but, hey, if she'd rather run a 4-year-old unmaintained, EOLed release
of OS X, some people just refuse to be helped.  My view, yours if you
want it.)