to convince them, then you're definately not going to scare them into doing the right thing. You'll have to, as many others have stated already, create a policy that stores all their "my documents" data on the (whatever*nix) RAID'ed, redundant power supplied, UPS'ed, tape backed-up and fully documented SMB server. No need to get all those NT client licenses and over-spec'd machines if you dont need to, that'll make you look even more golden. And remember the documentation, the best Sys_admin that I have worked with made sure that everyone had a folder that explained, in layman's terms, all the procedures and settings for using a workstation on the network from where to save files to how to set up email clients and browser settings. Make sure they read it and understand it, it'll save everyone's arses and time in the long run and will ensure that you can go on holiday or take a sick day without getting called every 5 minutes.
No they shouldnt wait, in fact, they should take a leaf out of US policy and directly influence the deaths of a few million people, make sure theres at least 500,000 children in there aswell (thats acceptable isnt it Maddeline?). Then just kick back and wait for the terror to begin before adopting "draconian" legislation. Easy. The other cool part is, whilst in power you can use the legistlation to make yourself $$$ on the side by aquiring sensitive business info from companies that compete with your own and even destabilise them. Elegant.
This has less to do with national security than ensuring the destruction of Unionism in the interests of Liberal/Coalition security whilst appealing to Xenophobic sentiments that they've created in Australia lately. The Labour Paty is the Most popular political party in Australia only defeated in the last two elections due to a coalition between the Liberal Party and the National (farmers) Party. There's been a concerted effort by the current Coalition Government to destroy or at least singnificantly disenfranchise the union movement in Australia which is the main power-base behind the Labour Party. The most blatant evidence of this was the "waterfront dispute" between the totally unionised Patrick Stevedores waterfront and the Farmers Federation/Coalition Goverment which was designed to remove the unions from the wharves with sercurity guards and dogs and replace them with military-trained workers sympathetic to the Farmers Fed. despite evidence at the time that the Unions had been making significant progress toward reforms on the waterfront. Latest evidence of similar tactics today: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/09/10229 82798008.html Last year, just before the federal election, we had the federal government use the DSD, defence signals directorate, spy on communications between the Maritime Union of Aust. and the Tampa which was involved in rescuing assylum seekers from water close to northern Australia in an attempt to gather information to demonise the Unions and therefore the Labour party during an election campain which is entirly illegal, at least for the time being. The relevance of this is fairly clear, if the federal government was to be endowed with these new powers entire unions such as the MUA during the waterfront dipute, which became quite violent, could be classed as terrorist organisations and effectively investigated, arrested and interrogated incommunicado without legal representation and all the Union possesions impounded effectively grinding them to a halt. The actions of the Coalition in respect to the DSD issue last year and the waterfront dispute point to this conclusion. Why? as the coalition pointed out recently, they are massively underfunded compared tot he Union-Funded Labour Party and require massive corporate donations in order to survive and compete.
yes, because it's extremely hard to produce directional, broad-specturm sound with conventional speakers. you have all sorts of problems with delay, defraction etc.. (see previous posters expl..) In theory, this new process should be able to produce a relatively perfect sound quality over a large distance without causing illegal noise pollution.
The guys you're talking about are using a process which is all done within our hearing spectrum. The use slight delays to fool our ears into thinking that the sound is surrounding us. The pinnea (ear flaps) are used to channel and delay sound as it enters our ear to give us an impression of where the sound is coming from, so as sound hits our pinnea from one direction, it gets to the eardrum at a slighly different phase than from other directions, our brain learns to interpret these differences and give a direction to the source. The synthetic version of the process was called transaural. It was written up in the AES journals at least 7 years ago...
These people are actually doing something very different. They're taking ultra-high frequency sound which is way out of our audible range, the higher the frequency the more directional (which is why you dont need to worry too much about where your sub-woofer goes) and recreating audible sound by causing what is known as "beats" in two or more similar high frequency sound beams (guitarist will be familiar with beats, as they are very noticeable when tuning strings without a tuner). These beats are obviously at such a high rate when caused by high freq sounds (60khz!!) that they themselves create audible tones. If you need an example of how directional and effective high freq sound is, there have been numerous problems in horse racing over the last decade with people mounting high-freq sound emitting devices in binocculars which are then targetted at specific horses, causing them to freak out... Several people have been caught out in Australia with such devices. So, high frequency sound will not travel as far as low freq, but at 60khz, you can put as much power into it as you like and therefor push it as far as you like without annoying to many people, which makes it a hell of a lot more effective than normal "parabolic" cones or horns.
sorry but this nothing new, hardly noteworthy. So creative have poroduced a usb audio device, roland and yamahaha have had this kinda stuff for years now and arent exactly highly regarded by musicians or other "sound proffessionals" too much due to latency problems, although newer ASIO drivers are helping.
Metric Halo http://www.mhlabs.com/index2.html and others seem to have the right idea with Firewire devices, much higher bandwidth, lower latency etc etc... much more suitable to laptop musicians, especially those that use them to perform/record, especally since most new lappys have been sporting Firewire ports for the last year or so. Firewire audio devices have been around for at least a year now so why is it taking so long for the more "domestic" manufacturers (or even roland)to come up with similar products, they dont even need 1/4 of the features of a metric halo system to be useful to most musos.
Pardon my naivety but if a speed of over 7000 metres/sec is needed to achieve orbit, wouldn't the craft burn up?
And wouldn't it have to be going much faster than that off the launch track in order to be at 7000 m/s as it leaves the atmosphere?
It would be better to use the maglev to achieve the velocity necessary to cause a ramjet (or is it scram?) to ignite so as not to require the assistance of conventional jets, rockets and B52s to launch them.
It's a good point.
For that reason i've been working on resurecting old laptops with dead LCDs to turn them into low-power a firewall/router and a fileserver.
They were going to be thrown out as they couldn't be repaired so I bagged them before they got put in the dumpster. I've seen auctions of this sort of stuff around as well.
The router is an old olivetti p150 with 32MB and a 2 gig hdd, old pcmcia 10Mb ethernet card, running freeBSD (dont know why, just what I was playing with at the time, I'll probably change soon). The fileserver is similar but not doing much at the moment as I need to increase the drive size, maybe externally.
The good points, if not blantantly obvious, are low power consumption, low noise, low heat and they have a built-in UPS (although the batteries are nearly shot and dont last very long).
Check a map of autralia...
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/
Notice the climate, it's got more tropical, near tropical, desert, savanna etc etc than any other country. Better still, it's bigger than india and has less than 1/50th of the population, more available space, if native title issues ever get sorted.
In central australia there is an average of 11hrs sunlight a day all year which is the most important factor when using a greenhouse.
The way I see it, the turbines in this plant are likely to be as reliable as a hydro-electric turbine.
Hydro plants need dams, dams are big, destructive and (hopefully) very permanent.
Hopefully, instead of making new hydro plants, we'll make these things (need a cool acronym)instead.
I know for a fact that Farscape is keeping several production/post prod facilities afloat down here whilst our local industry is in a fairly bad slump at the moment. Don't know if the CG is done here though, probably not.
They might also have been encouraged by the recent anouncement of hefty tax breaks for produtions worth more than AUS$15 (US$8)million.
So get a flywheel to store the energy overnight or during lean times.
Nuclear aint worth the risk.
Fortunatly it won't be a part my country's energy policy in the forseeable future and hopefully not that of any countries in the southern hemisphere.
The USA could sue us for copywrite and reverse engineering of their laws;-)
Don't laugh, it will happen, we don't have a governmet of our own so we need to copy others.
And the law won't work for the US if others coutries don't follow suit, it will force r&d overseas, an example of which is IVF/Stemcell research in Aust. which went to Singapore and Italy after laws in '85 were implemented hampering research.
Sorry to be provocative here but there seems to be a number of people extolling the virtues of IDE over SCSI whilst overlooking one of the most important features:
Mean Time Before Failure.
If you go to your favourite disk manufacturer, here's mine: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/inde x/1,1123,,00.html
and compare the MTBF values of IDE and SCSI drives, you'll see a glaring difference.
One comparrison that stands out:
Cheeetah 73LP(Fibre Chan 160): 1,200,000-hour MTBF
Barracuda ATA III (IDE 40): 500,000 hour MTBF
Reliability and seek times are the main differences not capacity and burst speeds which is why they are still the only real choice for proffessional video/audio systems.
When I saw this mod a couple of months ago, I had the idea of converting an old ('87-'88 model)Compaq Portable(III) to a l337 LAN gamer.
I've yet to find one for sale down here and posting this probably won't help my cahnces...
But here's what i mean:
http://web.wt.net/~damoore/oldcomp/cpq3/cpq3.htm l
http://web.wt.net/~damoore/oldcomp/cpq/cpq.html
They're not exactly the same machine I have in mind, the one my dad had back then had a more prominent handle but you get the idea.
They're large enough and tough enough to fit anything you'll need for a damn fast gaming machine and be able to tote it around with you without fear of hurting it.
Another cool thing would be to use the inbuilt CGA as a second monitor for runnning diagnostics, statistics or whatever during LAN games, that's if the drivers required are fairly standard.
Alot of people could end up hating McAffee.
It's understandable when a new upstart company would have the audacity to give it a go and maybe even succede with a bit of dumbluck but a larger, well renowned company like Mc Affee could stand to lose a lot of professional respect for being blatantly opprtunistic and causing industry panic.
But they're probably just using this to temporarily bolster thier share price.
Can you understand what they're saying, or did they overdub the voices. I can't really remember his parts in the film, apart from watching pr0n on the TV in the dashboard;-)
When Jacki was here in Australia about 5 or so years ago making a couple of films that I was lucky enough to work on, he was adamant that he would never work in the US again (I think the last film he did in the US before then was Cannonball Run!). He hasn't got anything against the US as such, just his style of film making conflicts totally with the more professional, organised and unionised style of Hollywood filmcrews. Basically the guy is (or was) an insane workaholic, when he works on his own Hong Kong productions there's hardly a job on set and post production that he doesn't do.
I remember being on set one day watching him go about setting up a stunt scene. He correographed the stunt, wrote the lines to go along with it, directed the other actors then carried the camera to the top of a scaffold to set the camera angle he wanted. Later that evening, whilst he was in the studio where I was recording his voice-overs for a previous film, he broke the session so that he could look at the rushes from the previous days shoot. I thought he'd have an editor or an assistant do all the menial work for him but he grabbed the film cans and ran upstairs to the edit bench, laced up the print and sound himself. When I asked if he needed any help he got shitty and explained that he had an edit bench in his hotel room where he edited the film each night. He even did sound effects in the foley room later on when he wasn't happy with what the sound editors had done.
The main reason he doesn't (or didn't) like working for Hollywood was that union regulations wouldn't let him doing anything but act, he had to just sit in his trailer until his was called and they didn't appreciate his input into the correographing of fight scenes theat he felt were lame.
I guess things have changed a bit now, he's close to 50yo now and the injuries were starting to take there toll five years ago, so I guess that doing films like Rush hour are something akin to retirement for him;-)
One more thing I have to say is, he really is one of the warmest, most genuine guys you could work with in the film industry, not one hint of pretentiousness at all he treats everyone he works with equally and is funny as hell.
The dude rocks all round.
I doubt this will replace actors for a real long time, if ever....
It can take as little as three weeks or less to complete a film shoot for your "typical" actionless small to medium budget flick with "a" and "b" teams, plus a couple of months to edit. How long would it take for artists to animate the same film, 2-3 years?
OK, take into account extreme advancments in animation techniques, in ten years it'll probably be down to six months.
Problem is, you still got to pay for actors to do the voices (famous ones), render farms, script writers, directors, special effects directors, cgi directors, sooper special effects directors, artists, artists, artists, sound post production (which will be much more expensive due to lack of location "atmospheric" sound) etc. etc...
Another problem is that most of the current crop of directors and more importantly producers can't comprehend what it takes to make a totally cgi flick, so they're gonna be really shy of it for a long time, especially when many of them were/are actors and DOPs...
And the public can probably only take a limited number of such films before getting bored or
As an audio engineer, it took me years to decide on what to get as a home system. I put up with the most cheap, crappy shelf system 'coz I knew that nothing would compare with the studios that I worked in unless I spent over 100k and happened to find a house to rent with a room to put it in, with perfect geometry, security, clean power etc... I resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't possible or even remotley practical. And worse still, I was afraid that if I did by the system of my dreams, my girlfriend would destroy it by turning on the amps in the wrong order or by playing Destiny's Child or f%$king Sting!!
Then one day, I walked into a Bang and Olufsen showroom just to check out the super-wank-factor end of the marke, reserved for industrial designers, e-business directors and real-estate agents...
I thought I was going to be the sale rep's worst nightmare, going to destroy his marketing spiel with my "audio engineer" title and knowledge.
He basically kicked my arse!!
I had no idea how good the stuff actually is, the research and design that goes into the gear is amazing, I didn't expect to be so blown away by the frequency response, dynamic range and general "quality" of the sound from such small, stylish speakers.
I really can't believe that they don't push the quality and detail of their products in their marketing, it absolutly stupid! I know heaps of other engineers that would've bought B&O gear had they known more about it and if it didn't have such a wanky stigma attached to it.
The concept behind B&O products is Quality & practicality, they are so easy to use and the attention to detail is amazing. All the speakers are active and the links from the AV sytems are via a proprietory balanced line. If you've got more than one B&O device in the house you can connect them via the "link system" so that each device can controlled by the same remote and sound can be piped form one device to the other... Even the lights and curtains can be linked into the system, even the B&O telephones are linked in, so you can turn the audio down when you're on the phone.
So I gave up on the idea of a $100+ audiophile system in favour of a practical, good looking, extremely good sounding less than 10k system that I know will last for 15+ years and will also be compatible with new B&O gear for the next 10 years.
Best thing is, my girlfriend can use it without me having to tell her how, and she can't break it very easily. And if someone breaks into the house when I'm not there, she can beat the crap out of them with the remote, it's solid nickle!
Go to a showroom and check the stuff out, you'll be surprised.
Re:I am afraid it is you who are mistaken
on
Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 1
The majority of studios that I have recorded and mixed in, both post-production and music, do use NS-10's but never as main mix speakers, there's just not enough frequency response below 120Hz. Usually the main speakers are whopping great JBL's, or similar. NS-10's are used as near-field speakers, mostly to do the mundane editing, checking, testing and patching crap that you don't need the bowl-mulching effects of large JBLs for. NS-10's are generally used in production at the end of a mix with the main speakers. The final mix is passed through the NS-10's to make sure nothing really stands out in near-field like wierd phase relationships, pops and click etc etc.. that you might not pick up in the main speakers. Most studios also have an Auratone or two, these are the crappiest of all standard studio monitors, used as the lowest common denominator in mixes, so that they know that if someone happens to listen to the production on a crappy mono speaker, most of the important elements will be there. Then we usually dub it off to cassette and play it in a car stereo, just to be sure;-).
NS-10's are really not a good home speaker, they really are devoid of any warmth or low-end response and I don't think th e average Joe wants to get real friendly with a BBE sonic maximizer or even want to know what the "Q" factor of a parametric EQ is... They mostly want to listen to the music as the artist/producer intended.
I just wanted to add, that when I switched to a laptop for the majority of my work a while back, the occurance of eye problems seemed to drop dramatically (although posture problems have increased;-). I also noticed a decrease in skin problems on my face, less dryness etc.
I found this link which has a little info on what comes out of a CRT (or VDT) and the possible effects: http://www.eaie.nl/activities/es/ENIS/HEALTH/
Another to look out for, if you can find it, is a book called "Terminal Illness" (unfortunately there are several with this name at Amazon, none of which are the book I'm referring to) which has a very in-depth study on the health effects of sitting in front of a CRT over long periods..
I wouldn't be suprised if there's future litigation over this issue, much, much further down the track.
Slashdot Mirror
to convince them, then you're definately not going to scare them into doing the right thing. You'll have to, as many others have stated already, create a policy that stores all their "my documents" data on the (whatever*nix) RAID'ed, redundant power supplied, UPS'ed, tape backed-up and fully documented SMB server. No need to get all those NT client licenses and over-spec'd machines if you dont need to, that'll make you look even more golden.
And remember the documentation, the best Sys_admin that I have worked with made sure that everyone had a folder that explained, in layman's terms, all the procedures and settings for using a workstation on the network from where to save files to how to set up email clients and browser settings. Make sure they read it and understand it, it'll save everyone's arses and time in the long run and will ensure that you can go on holiday or take a sick day without getting called every 5 minutes.
No they shouldnt wait, in fact, they should take a leaf out of US policy and directly influence the deaths of a few million people, make sure theres at least 500,000 children in there aswell (thats acceptable isnt it Maddeline?). Then just kick back and wait for the terror to begin before adopting "draconian" legislation.
Easy.
The other cool part is, whilst in power you can use the legistlation to make yourself $$$ on the side by aquiring sensitive business info from companies that compete with your own and even destabilise them.
Elegant.
This has less to do with national security than ensuring the destruction of Unionism in the interests of Liberal/Coalition security whilst appealing to Xenophobic sentiments that they've created in Australia lately.9 82798008.html
The Labour Paty is the Most popular political party in Australia only defeated in the last two elections due to a coalition between the Liberal Party and the National (farmers) Party.
There's been a concerted effort by the current Coalition Government to destroy or at least singnificantly disenfranchise the union movement in Australia which is the main power-base behind the Labour Party. The most blatant evidence of this was the "waterfront dispute" between the totally unionised Patrick Stevedores waterfront and the Farmers Federation/Coalition Goverment which was designed to remove the unions from the wharves with sercurity guards and dogs and replace them with military-trained workers sympathetic to the Farmers Fed. despite evidence at the time that the Unions had been making significant progress toward reforms on the waterfront. Latest evidence of similar tactics today: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/09/1022
Last year, just before the federal election, we had the federal government use the DSD, defence signals directorate, spy on communications between the Maritime Union of Aust. and the Tampa which was involved in rescuing assylum seekers from water close to northern Australia in an attempt to gather information to demonise the Unions and therefore the Labour party during an election campain which is entirly illegal, at least for the time being.
The relevance of this is fairly clear, if the federal government was to be endowed with these new powers entire unions such as the MUA during the waterfront dipute, which became quite violent, could be classed as terrorist organisations and effectively investigated, arrested and interrogated incommunicado without legal representation and all the Union possesions impounded effectively grinding them to a halt. The actions of the Coalition in respect to the DSD issue last year and the waterfront dispute point to this conclusion.
Why? as the coalition pointed out recently, they are massively underfunded compared tot he Union-Funded Labour Party and require massive corporate donations in order to survive and compete.
yes, because it's extremely hard to produce directional, broad-specturm sound with conventional speakers. you have all sorts of problems with delay, defraction etc.. (see previous posters expl..)
In theory, this new process should be able to produce a relatively perfect sound quality over a large distance without causing illegal noise pollution.
The guys you're talking about are using a process which is all done within our hearing spectrum.
The use slight delays to fool our ears into thinking that the sound is surrounding us. The pinnea (ear flaps) are used to channel and delay sound as it enters our ear to give us an impression of where the sound is coming from, so as sound hits our pinnea from one direction, it gets to the eardrum at a slighly different phase than from other directions, our brain learns to interpret these differences and give a direction to the source.
The synthetic version of the process was called transaural. It was written up in the AES journals at least 7 years ago...
These people are actually doing something very different.
They're taking ultra-high frequency sound which is way out of our audible range, the higher the frequency the more directional (which is why you dont need to worry too much about where your sub-woofer goes) and recreating audible sound by causing what is known as "beats" in two or more similar high frequency sound beams (guitarist will be familiar with beats, as they are very noticeable when tuning strings without a tuner). These beats are obviously at such a high rate when caused by high freq sounds (60khz!!) that they themselves create audible tones.
If you need an example of how directional and effective high freq sound is, there have been numerous problems in horse racing over the last decade with people mounting high-freq sound emitting devices in binocculars which are then targetted at specific horses, causing them to freak out... Several people have been caught out in Australia with such devices.
So, high frequency sound will not travel as far as low freq, but at 60khz, you can put as much power into it as you like and therefor push it as far as you like without annoying to many people, which makes it a hell of a lot more effective than normal "parabolic" cones or horns.
sorry but this nothing new, hardly noteworthy. So creative have poroduced a usb audio device, roland and yamahaha have had this kinda stuff for years now and arent exactly highly regarded by musicians or other "sound proffessionals" too much due to latency problems, although newer ASIO drivers are helping.
Metric Halo http://www.mhlabs.com/index2.html and others seem to have the right idea with Firewire devices, much higher bandwidth, lower latency etc etc... much more suitable to laptop musicians, especially those that use them to perform/record, especally since most new lappys have been sporting Firewire ports for the last year or so. Firewire audio devices have been around for at least a year now so why is it taking so long for the more "domestic" manufacturers (or even roland)to come up with similar products, they dont even need 1/4 of the features of a metric halo system to be useful to most musos.
Pardon my naivety but if a speed of over 7000 metres/sec is needed to achieve orbit, wouldn't the craft burn up?
And wouldn't it have to be going much faster than that off the launch track in order to be at 7000 m/s as it leaves the atmosphere?
It would be better to use the maglev to achieve the velocity necessary to cause a ramjet (or is it scram?) to ignite so as not to require the assistance of conventional jets, rockets and B52s to launch them.
Light mesh and some little plugs made out of that foam-filter stuff would probably stop crud from getting in there and still allow some air through...
It's a good point.
For that reason i've been working on resurecting old laptops with dead LCDs to turn them into low-power a firewall/router and a fileserver.
They were going to be thrown out as they couldn't be repaired so I bagged them before they got put in the dumpster. I've seen auctions of this sort of stuff around as well.
The router is an old olivetti p150 with 32MB and a 2 gig hdd, old pcmcia 10Mb ethernet card, running freeBSD (dont know why, just what I was playing with at the time, I'll probably change soon). The fileserver is similar but not doing much at the moment as I need to increase the drive size, maybe externally.
The good points, if not blantantly obvious, are low power consumption, low noise, low heat and they have a built-in UPS (although the batteries are nearly shot and dont last very long).
heheheh, i am.
i'm really worried about this lack of summer at the moment...
Check a map of autralia...
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/
Notice the climate, it's got more tropical, near tropical, desert, savanna etc etc than any other country. Better still, it's bigger than india and has less than 1/50th of the population, more available space, if native title issues ever get sorted.
In central australia there is an average of 11hrs sunlight a day all year which is the most important factor when using a greenhouse.
The way I see it, the turbines in this plant are likely to be as reliable as a hydro-electric turbine.
Hydro plants need dams, dams are big, destructive and (hopefully) very permanent.
Hopefully, instead of making new hydro plants, we'll make these things (need a cool acronym)instead.
I know for a fact that Farscape is keeping several production/post prod facilities afloat down here whilst our local industry is in a fairly bad slump at the moment. Don't know if the CG is done here though, probably not.
They might also have been encouraged by the recent anouncement of hefty tax breaks for produtions worth more than AUS$15 (US$8)million.
So get a flywheel to store the energy overnight or during lean times.
Nuclear aint worth the risk.
Fortunatly it won't be a part my country's energy policy in the forseeable future and hopefully not that of any countries in the southern hemisphere.
The USA could sue us for copywrite and reverse engineering of their laws ;-)
Don't laugh, it will happen, we don't have a governmet of our own so we need to copy others.
And the law won't work for the US if others coutries don't follow suit, it will force r&d overseas, an example of which is IVF/Stemcell research in Aust. which went to Singapore and Italy after laws in '85 were implemented hampering research.
Sorry to be provocative here but there seems to be a number of people extolling the virtues of IDE over SCSI whilst overlooking one of the most important features:e x/1,1123,,00.html
Mean Time Before Failure.
If you go to your favourite disk manufacturer, here's mine: http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/ind
and compare the MTBF values of IDE and SCSI drives, you'll see a glaring difference.
One comparrison that stands out:
Cheeetah 73LP(Fibre Chan 160): 1,200,000-hour MTBF
Barracuda ATA III (IDE 40): 500,000 hour MTBF
Reliability and seek times are the main differences not capacity and burst speeds which is why they are still the only real choice for proffessional video/audio systems.
When I saw this mod a couple of months ago, I had the idea of converting an old ('87-'88 model)Compaq Portable(III) to a l337 LAN gamer.
m l
I've yet to find one for sale down here and posting this probably won't help my cahnces...
But here's what i mean:
http://web.wt.net/~damoore/oldcomp/cpq3/cpq3.ht
http://web.wt.net/~damoore/oldcomp/cpq/cpq.html
They're not exactly the same machine I have in mind, the one my dad had back then had a more prominent handle but you get the idea.
They're large enough and tough enough to fit anything you'll need for a damn fast gaming machine and be able to tote it around with you without fear of hurting it.
Another cool thing would be to use the inbuilt CGA as a second monitor for runnning diagnostics, statistics or whatever during LAN games, that's if the drivers required are fairly standard.
Alot of people could end up hating McAffee.
It's understandable when a new upstart company would have the audacity to give it a go and maybe even succede with a bit of dumbluck but a larger, well renowned company like Mc Affee could stand to lose a lot of professional respect for being blatantly opprtunistic and causing industry panic.
But they're probably just using this to temporarily bolster thier share price.
Can you understand what they're saying, or did they overdub the voices. I can't really remember his parts in the film, apart from watching pr0n on the TV in the dashboard ;-)
When Jacki was here in Australia about 5 or so years ago making a couple of films that I was lucky enough to work on, he was adamant that he would never work in the US again (I think the last film he did in the US before then was Cannonball Run!). He hasn't got anything against the US as such, just his style of film making conflicts totally with the more professional, organised and unionised style of Hollywood filmcrews. Basically the guy is (or was) an insane workaholic, when he works on his own Hong Kong productions there's hardly a job on set and post production that he doesn't do. ;-)
I remember being on set one day watching him go about setting up a stunt scene. He correographed the stunt, wrote the lines to go along with it, directed the other actors then carried the camera to the top of a scaffold to set the camera angle he wanted. Later that evening, whilst he was in the studio where I was recording his voice-overs for a previous film, he broke the session so that he could look at the rushes from the previous days shoot. I thought he'd have an editor or an assistant do all the menial work for him but he grabbed the film cans and ran upstairs to the edit bench, laced up the print and sound himself. When I asked if he needed any help he got shitty and explained that he had an edit bench in his hotel room where he edited the film each night. He even did sound effects in the foley room later on when he wasn't happy with what the sound editors had done.
The main reason he doesn't (or didn't) like working for Hollywood was that union regulations wouldn't let him doing anything but act, he had to just sit in his trailer until his was called and they didn't appreciate his input into the correographing of fight scenes theat he felt were lame.
I guess things have changed a bit now, he's close to 50yo now and the injuries were starting to take there toll five years ago, so I guess that doing films like Rush hour are something akin to retirement for him
One more thing I have to say is, he really is one of the warmest, most genuine guys you could work with in the film industry, not one hint of pretentiousness at all he treats everyone he works with equally and is funny as hell.
The dude rocks all round.
I doubt this will replace actors for a real long time, if ever....
It can take as little as three weeks or less to complete a film shoot for your "typical" actionless small to medium budget flick with "a" and "b" teams, plus a couple of months to edit. How long would it take for artists to animate the same film, 2-3 years?
OK, take into account extreme advancments in animation techniques, in ten years it'll probably be down to six months.
Problem is, you still got to pay for actors to do the voices (famous ones), render farms, script writers, directors, special effects directors, cgi directors, sooper special effects directors, artists, artists, artists, sound post production (which will be much more expensive due to lack of location "atmospheric" sound) etc. etc...
Another problem is that most of the current crop of directors and more importantly producers can't comprehend what it takes to make a totally cgi flick, so they're gonna be really shy of it for a long time, especially when many of them were/are actors and DOPs...
And the public can probably only take a limited number of such films before getting bored or
As an audio engineer, it took me years to decide on what to get as a home system. I put up with the most cheap, crappy shelf system 'coz I knew that nothing would compare with the studios that I worked in unless I spent over 100k and happened to find a house to rent with a room to put it in, with perfect geometry, security, clean power etc... I resigned myself to the fact that it wasn't possible or even remotley practical. And worse still, I was afraid that if I did by the system of my dreams, my girlfriend would destroy it by turning on the amps in the wrong order or by playing Destiny's Child or f%$king Sting!!
Then one day, I walked into a Bang and Olufsen showroom just to check out the super-wank-factor end of the marke, reserved for industrial designers, e-business directors and real-estate agents...
I thought I was going to be the sale rep's worst nightmare, going to destroy his marketing spiel with my "audio engineer" title and knowledge.
He basically kicked my arse!!
I had no idea how good the stuff actually is, the research and design that goes into the gear is amazing, I didn't expect to be so blown away by the frequency response, dynamic range and general "quality" of the sound from such small, stylish speakers.
I really can't believe that they don't push the quality and detail of their products in their marketing, it absolutly stupid! I know heaps of other engineers that would've bought B&O gear had they known more about it and if it didn't have such a wanky stigma attached to it.
The concept behind B&O products is Quality & practicality, they are so easy to use and the attention to detail is amazing. All the speakers are active and the links from the AV sytems are via a proprietory balanced line. If you've got more than one B&O device in the house you can connect them via the "link system" so that each device can controlled by the same remote and sound can be piped form one device to the other... Even the lights and curtains can be linked into the system, even the B&O telephones are linked in, so you can turn the audio down when you're on the phone.
So I gave up on the idea of a $100+ audiophile system in favour of a practical, good looking, extremely good sounding less than 10k system that I know will last for 15+ years and will also be compatible with new B&O gear for the next 10 years.
Best thing is, my girlfriend can use it without me having to tell her how, and she can't break it very easily. And if someone breaks into the house when I'm not there, she can beat the crap out of them with the remote, it's solid nickle!
Go to a showroom and check the stuff out, you'll be surprised.
The majority of studios that I have recorded and mixed in, both post-production and music, do use NS-10's but never as main mix speakers, there's just not enough frequency response below 120Hz. Usually the main speakers are whopping great JBL's, or similar. NS-10's are used as near-field speakers, mostly to do the mundane editing, checking, testing and patching crap that you don't need the bowl-mulching effects of large JBLs for. NS-10's are generally used in production at the end of a mix with the main speakers. The final mix is passed through the NS-10's to make sure nothing really stands out in near-field like wierd phase relationships, pops and click etc etc.. that you might not pick up in the main speakers. Most studios also have an Auratone or two, these are the crappiest of all standard studio monitors, used as the lowest common denominator in mixes, so that they know that if someone happens to listen to the production on a crappy mono speaker, most of the important elements will be there. Then we usually dub it off to cassette and play it in a car stereo, just to be sure ;-).
NS-10's are really not a good home speaker, they really are devoid of any warmth or low-end response and I don't think th e average Joe wants to get real friendly with a BBE sonic maximizer or even want to know what the "Q" factor of a parametric EQ is... They mostly want to listen to the music as the artist/producer intended.
I just wanted to add, that when I switched to a laptop for the majority of my work a while back, the occurance of eye problems seemed to drop dramatically (although posture problems have increased ;-). I also noticed a decrease in skin problems on my face, less dryness etc.
I found this link which has a little info on what comes out of a CRT (or VDT) and the possible effects: http://www.eaie.nl/activities/es/ENIS/HEALTH/
Another to look out for, if you can find it, is a book called "Terminal Illness" (unfortunately there are several with this name at Amazon, none of which are the book I'm referring to) which has a very in-depth study on the health effects of sitting in front of a CRT over long periods..
I wouldn't be suprised if there's future litigation over this issue, much, much further down the track.