Only Apple get praised when their software "gets faster on the same hardware". Everyone else knows that that just means the first versions were really, really badly written.
It's a matter of priority and emphasis.
Apple: Make it work. Make it secure. Release it. Make it fast.
Microsoft: Make it fast. Release it. Make it work. Ehhh... that'll do.
Actually, in the case of a "kajillion" dollar marketing blitz, if we don't see it, and more importantly, you are completely unable to show it to us, it's a safe bet that it does not, in fact, exist.
The thing about ultra-expensive marketing campaigns is, they tend to be seen. That's what they exist for, to be seen.
Oooo... Mail! That's like... $0.37 per pro customer, assuming they didn't mail out to enough to get bulk rates. Assuming they are hitting 10,000 customers with these fliers, that's $3,700!
[sarcasm]Gosh, you're right, they are BREAKING THE BANK to get the word out about this product.[/sarcasm]
Give me a break. The money for mailings wouldn't cover the gas bill on the Mercedes and Gulf Stream V that Jobs uses to get around.
Do you subscribe to any digital photography mailing lists or magazines? Memberships to any Apple or photography related websites? Own (not have, but own) any other Apple software?
I own plenty of Apple software, but more to the point:
Just how do they go about spending a "kajillion" dollars on ads in obscure trade publications? I mean, come on. Even if they bought every pro photography magazine on the planet outright, it probably wouldn't cost more than a couple million.
And press hype? That's free. This is why Steve Jobs is the CEO and public face of Apple Computer. He's very, very good at blowing air up the skirts of the press and getting them to say pretty much anything he wants.
Apple probably spent more on their last company Christmas Party than they did on ads for Aperture so far.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
Thank you for your perfect, masterful, everybody-else-might-as-well-shut-the-fuck-up-now summary of what Aperture is for and why comparisons to various photo editing programs are worse than meaningless.
If only yours was the first response, it would have saved us all from endless conversations bickering about layer editing, plug-ins, and other irrelevant bullshit.
a cell phone may simply be unaffordable when they run $20-$60 a month. That's books for a semester.
Are you high!?
Perhaps I'm being too hard on you. Maybe you haven't taken a full-load semester of University courses for a while.
Even taking you absurd $60/month figure (a student would be an idiot to sign up for a plan that expensive these days), in three months that's $180.
At a lot of colleges, that could be ONE textbook!
Heck, even back when I was college (as I recall, that would be back in the opening years of the Bronze Age), we were shelling out about $60 per used book, if we were lucky enough to find them.
By the way, I'm impressed that you manage to deal with 60gb with OS X also installed for your PVR. I'm doing standard res TV, and the 80gb in my MythTV box is awful slim!
You obviously watch a lot more TV that I do. Apart from "House", "Lost" and maaaaybe the occasional Timberwolves game, I hardly ever bother to record anything. The vast majority of the time I use my media center, it's to watch movies or anime. (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is absolutely glorious with a 119" screen and DTS sound by the way.)
I actually swapped a smaller drive into it (60GB) because i wanted a 7200 RPM drive. I put the old 80 GB into a little USB2 case, which worked out nicely.
I wasn't compressing anything at all until recently. Compression was too slow and yielded a very poor image quality on HDTV systems. My PVR recordings were the full HD stream, and my DVD rips on the file server were straight full-size rips.
H264 has changed that a little bit, but also finally provoked me to move up to a faster system this month. I got a hell of a deal on a refurb dual-G5. Handbrake compresses disks to 60% H264 in only slightly more time that it takes to play them.
If only my mini (the faster one with a gig of ram) could do HD output. Or even a decent framerate on standard def divx files...
Stop trying to use VLC and/or MPlayer and it can. I had one hooked up to my 720p projector for a solid year and it did a great job, including on DivX rips of Doctor Who.
The secret is to go with a player that takes proper advantage of QuickTime. I used to use the EyeTV software as both my TV and my video player. Once iTunes bolted a video player on to that, I've found that it works just as well.
Hopefully Intel will give the Mini a real good boost, then - or some magic has to be done with the tuner, because the current solution for an Apple-based PVR timeshifting 1080i HDTV requires no less than a dual G5 (click requirements on right side).
I wouldn't even dream of using one of today's Minis as an HDTV PVR. I got so frustrated with mine that I sold it.
You must not have used enough RAM.
In spite of what the EyeTV box specs say, I used a Mac mini 1.42 as an HDTV PVR from the month that they came out, and it worked like a champ.
The only reasons I finally upgraded to a G5 tower (just a couple weeks ago) were 1: Decompressing large H264 files on the fly without frame drops, and 2: Better performance when playing games like World of Warcraft.
If it happens and is widely adopted, I think I'll start a betting pool on how long it will be before some hacker delivers a worm via this network's distribution system.
Somebody should start a network that does no other programming than picking up and continuing the shows that FOX kills too soon with the same cast & writers. Just think what their line-up would be like.
Arrested Development Tru Calling Firefly The TICK (both animated and live-action) Greg The Bunny Action Wonderfalls Titus Andy Richter Controls the Universe
There's three evenings worth of perpetual TiVo subscriptions right there, and I know I'm forgetting a bunch more.
I fear for "House." It's the best show on TV right now, and it's on FOX, so it doesn't really stand a chance.
In other words, they linked to a story about Front Row to make it seem like news, then linked to a RUMOR about Apple's streaming video plans to make it seem like the media streaming is the news.
Hence, "Apple Enters Media Center Doman" is a story about a product which has been out for months, with a link to wild speculation about What It All Means.
Without the redundant link to a useless Front Row review to make the headline kinda-sorta factual, you would be left with the far-less interesting story, "Another Rumor Going Around About Mac Media Centers."
"Apple Releases Front Row Media Software" is a news story. (Or, at the very least, a slashvertizement worth reading.)
"Somebody From CNN Write About Apple's Front Row Media Software, Which Was Released About A Month Ago" is the sort of submission that MacSlash and other "what Steve Jobs had for breakfast today is thrilling news to us" sites would probably reject.
I'd rather read a badly-written review of Front Row by some random slashbot (or a link to some techie-site review, like Ars) than another "OMG! Apple Matters So Much That CNN Is Writing About Their Software" submission. Come on, editors. You can do better.
And B5 first aired in January 1993 (the network chickened out and aired the pilot as a stand-alone movie, so the series launched the following year), so I'm not sure what you're trying to say with Earth 2 or Space: Above and Beyond.
I'm saying that before B5 had "proven" anything, TV producers were already ga-ga for sci-fi in the early 90s, and green-lit a shitload of shows.
When Earth 2 came out, people were still very uncertain that B5 was going to catch on with anybody, beyond a tiny cult following. The first season of B5 was just about un-watchable, and it took a long time for it to rebuild its reputation as a show worth paying any attention to. You certainly could not claim that Earth 2 and DS9 were riding B5's hype.
The show that kicked off the sci-fi craze of the 90s was, with little room for debate, Star Trek: The Next Generation. If it had tanked, nobody would have put up a single dime to produce B5.
As for the big sci-fi launch of '93, all I can remember is B5, DS9 and Space Rangers.
I'm not surprised that's all you can remember, because most of the shows launched at the time failed to capture audiences. IIRC, TV Guide had a special "Sci Fi" issue that fall, showcasing about seven different new shows which were comming down the pipe. B5 was one of them.
Actually, I remember vividly that the networks premiered several other non-Trek sci-fi shows around the same time. It's just the rest of them were flops, while B5 was a (very) modest success.
SeaQuest DSV: 1993 Adventures of Brisco County Junior: 1993 Time Trax: 1993 Earth 2: 1994 Sliders: 1995 Space - Above and Beyond: 1995... the list goes on.
Oh... and then there was this other little sci-fi show which came out a year before B5 which did pretty well. It was about two FBI agents investigating aliens. Maybe you've heard of it.
In terms of getting sci-fi accepted on TV, I would say that "Quantum Leap", "Alien Nation", and "V", all shows from the 80s, were vastly more important than B5.
Slashdot Mirror
Only Apple get praised when their software "gets faster on the same hardware". Everyone else knows that that just means the first versions were really, really badly written.
It's a matter of priority and emphasis.
Apple: Make it work. Make it secure. Release it. Make it fast.
Microsoft: Make it fast. Release it. Make it work. Ehhh... that'll do.
You don't see it != It doesn't exist.
Actually, in the case of a "kajillion" dollar marketing blitz, if we don't see it, and more importantly, you are completely unable to show it to us, it's a safe bet that it does not, in fact, exist.
The thing about ultra-expensive marketing campaigns is, they tend to be seen. That's what they exist for, to be seen.
So now you're saying they spent "kajillions" on sending out e-mail???
Even using MS Exchange servers, that can't possibly be right.
Oooo... Mail! That's like... $0.37 per pro customer, assuming they didn't mail out to enough to get bulk rates. Assuming they are hitting 10,000 customers with these fliers, that's $3,700!
[sarcasm]Gosh, you're right, they are BREAKING THE BANK to get the word out about this product.[/sarcasm]
Give me a break. The money for mailings wouldn't cover the gas bill on the Mercedes and Gulf Stream V that Jobs uses to get around.
Interesting that "Apple" could be relaced in that post with "Microsoft," and "DVD Studio Pro" or "Final Cut" could be replaced with Microsoft titles.
Microsoft always takes three tries at everything. Apple usually has it down by the second.
Google never comes out of beta, so they can say they haven't even made their first yet. They're the perfect company: No bugs in their 1.0 releases.
Do you subscribe to any digital photography mailing lists or magazines? Memberships to any Apple or photography related websites? Own (not have, but own) any other Apple software?
I own plenty of Apple software, but more to the point:
Just how do they go about spending a "kajillion" dollars on ads in obscure trade publications? I mean, come on. Even if they bought every pro photography magazine on the planet outright, it probably wouldn't cost more than a couple million.
And press hype? That's free. This is why Steve Jobs is the CEO and public face of Apple Computer. He's very, very good at blowing air up the skirts of the press and getting them to say pretty much anything he wants.
Apple probably spent more on their last company Christmas Party than they did on ads for Aperture so far.
Photoshop is the darkroom.
Aperature is the light table.
If you don't understand this, you're not the target market.
Thank you for your perfect, masterful, everybody-else-might-as-well-shut-the-fuck-up-now summary of what Aperture is for and why comparisons to various photo editing programs are worse than meaningless.
If only yours was the first response, it would have saved us all from endless conversations bickering about layer editing, plug-ins, and other irrelevant bullshit.
This thread is over. "mocsh" for t3h win!
Its like Frontrow, for me its useless as its not a PVR. Yet try and present this argument and you get flamed.
Isn't that a little bit like saying Photoshop is useless for you because it can't run spreadsheets?
While all 1.0 software falls short of users' and developers' hopes, not every 1.0 release comes with a kajillion-dollar marketing effort.
and neither did Aperture!
It was mentioned at a conference. Once conference. It got some hype on the web, and slightly less press hype in print.
There have been zero TV ads.
Zero radio ads.
Zero print ads.
In other words, apart from a couple of press releases which cost them basically nothing, there has been no marketing for Aperture whatsoever.
a cell phone may simply be unaffordable when they run $20-$60 a month. That's books for a semester.
Are you high!?
Perhaps I'm being too hard on you. Maybe you haven't taken a full-load semester of University courses for a while.
Even taking you absurd $60/month figure (a student would be an idiot to sign up for a plan that expensive these days), in three months that's $180.
At a lot of colleges, that could be ONE textbook!
Heck, even back when I was college (as I recall, that would be back in the opening years of the Bronze Age), we were shelling out about $60 per used book, if we were lucky enough to find them.
By the way, I'm impressed that you manage to deal with 60gb with OS X also installed for your PVR. I'm doing standard res TV, and the 80gb in my MythTV box is awful slim!
You obviously watch a lot more TV that I do. Apart from "House", "Lost" and maaaaybe the occasional Timberwolves game, I hardly ever bother to record anything. The vast majority of the time I use my media center, it's to watch movies or anime. (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is absolutely glorious with a 119" screen and DTS sound by the way.)
I actually swapped a smaller drive into it (60GB) because i wanted a 7200 RPM drive. I put the old 80 GB into a little USB2 case, which worked out nicely.
I wasn't compressing anything at all until recently. Compression was too slow and yielded a very poor image quality on HDTV systems. My PVR recordings were the full HD stream, and my DVD rips on the file server were straight full-size rips.
H264 has changed that a little bit, but also finally provoked me to move up to a faster system this month. I got a hell of a deal on a refurb dual-G5. Handbrake compresses disks to 60% H264 in only slightly more time that it takes to play them.
If only my mini (the faster one with a gig of ram) could do HD output. Or even a decent framerate on standard def divx files...
Stop trying to use VLC and/or MPlayer and it can. I had one hooked up to my 720p projector for a solid year and it did a great job, including on DivX rips of Doctor Who.
The secret is to go with a player that takes proper advantage of QuickTime. I used to use the EyeTV software as both my TV and my video player. Once iTunes bolted a video player on to that, I've found that it works just as well.
Hopefully Intel will give the Mini a real good boost, then - or some magic has to be done with the tuner, because the current solution for an Apple-based PVR timeshifting 1080i HDTV requires no less than a dual G5 (click requirements on right side).
I wouldn't even dream of using one of today's Minis as an HDTV PVR. I got so frustrated with mine that I sold it.
You must not have used enough RAM.
In spite of what the EyeTV box specs say, I used a Mac mini 1.42 as an HDTV PVR from the month that they came out, and it worked like a champ.
The only reasons I finally upgraded to a G5 tower (just a couple weeks ago) were 1: Decompressing large H264 files on the fly without frame drops, and 2: Better performance when playing games like World of Warcraft.
Wow. Talk about old news. This happened millions of years ago!
Damn, slashdot is behind these days.
If it happens and is widely adopted, I think I'll start a betting pool on how long it will be before some hacker delivers a worm via this network's distribution system.
Somebody should start a network that does no other programming than picking up and continuing the shows that FOX kills too soon with the same cast & writers. Just think what their line-up would be like.
Arrested Development
Tru Calling
Firefly
The TICK (both animated and live-action)
Greg The Bunny
Action
Wonderfalls
Titus
Andy Richter Controls the Universe
There's three evenings worth of perpetual TiVo subscriptions right there, and I know I'm forgetting a bunch more.
I fear for "House." It's the best show on TV right now, and it's on FOX, so it doesn't really stand a chance.
I stand corrected.
The hype is in the second link... the rumor on thinksecrets.com
.mac iDisk drives - including full length movies.
:)
Basically the speculation is that Apple might be letting users stream purchased content from
Fixed.
In other words, they linked to a story about Front Row to make it seem like news, then linked to a RUMOR about Apple's streaming video plans to make it seem like the media streaming is the news.
Hence, "Apple Enters Media Center Doman" is a story about a product which has been out for months, with a link to wild speculation about What It All Means.
Without the redundant link to a useless Front Row review to make the headline kinda-sorta factual, you would be left with the far-less interesting story, "Another Rumor Going Around About Mac Media Centers."
Lame.
"Apple Releases Front Row Media Software" is a news story. (Or, at the very least, a slashvertizement worth reading.)
"Somebody From CNN Write About Apple's Front Row Media Software, Which Was Released About A Month Ago" is the sort of submission that MacSlash and other "what Steve Jobs had for breakfast today is thrilling news to us" sites would probably reject.
I'd rather read a badly-written review of Front Row by some random slashbot (or a link to some techie-site review, like Ars) than another "OMG! Apple Matters So Much That CNN Is Writing About Their Software" submission. Come on, editors. You can do better.
And B5 first aired in January 1993 (the network chickened out and aired the pilot as a stand-alone movie, so the series launched the following year), so I'm not sure what you're trying to say with Earth 2 or Space: Above and Beyond.
I'm saying that before B5 had "proven" anything, TV producers were already ga-ga for sci-fi in the early 90s, and green-lit a shitload of shows.
When Earth 2 came out, people were still very uncertain that B5 was going to catch on with anybody, beyond a tiny cult following. The first season of B5 was just about un-watchable, and it took a long time for it to rebuild its reputation as a show worth paying any attention to. You certainly could not claim that Earth 2 and DS9 were riding B5's hype.
The show that kicked off the sci-fi craze of the 90s was, with little room for debate, Star Trek: The Next Generation. If it had tanked, nobody would have put up a single dime to produce B5.
As for the big sci-fi launch of '93, all I can remember is B5, DS9 and Space Rangers.
I'm not surprised that's all you can remember, because most of the shows launched at the time failed to capture audiences. IIRC, TV Guide had a special "Sci Fi" issue that fall, showcasing about seven different new shows which were comming down the pipe. B5 was one of them.
Nobody had ever written 92 episodes of Babylon 5 before, therefore he holds the record. I guess.
Then again, if you count all the "shipper" fan-fics floating around out there on usenet, he might not even rank in the top ten.
Actually, I remember vividly that the networks premiered several other non-Trek sci-fi shows around the same time. It's just the rest of them were flops, while B5 was a (very) modest success.
... the list goes on.
SeaQuest DSV: 1993
Adventures of Brisco County Junior: 1993
Time Trax: 1993
Earth 2: 1994
Sliders: 1995
Space - Above and Beyond: 1995
Oh... and then there was this other little sci-fi show which came out a year before B5 which did pretty well. It was about two FBI agents investigating aliens. Maybe you've heard of it.
In terms of getting sci-fi accepted on TV, I would say that "Quantum Leap", "Alien Nation", and "V", all shows from the 80s, were vastly more important than B5.
Besides, CAD has such a vastly different style
Really???
Because the first thing to enter my head when I first saw it was, "this looks almost exactly like Penny Arcade, except it's slightly less funny."
(and by that, I meant that Penny Arcade is not particularly funny, and this strip is not funny at all.)
IMHO, YMMV, TEHO, yadda yadda yadda...