From the industry buzz that's been going around, digital delivery is the Next Big Thing in film. What this hyped stunt is, basically, proof that it's fairly feasible to do. Now, I'm sure this isn't entirely practical at this point (how many theatres do you know hooked up to thw Qwest fiber backbone?) and 4 hours per film x 10 screens...well, you'll chew up a week downloading friday's new releases.
But the possibilities of an all-digital film...digitally filmed, digitally edited, digitally distributed...no bad film stock problems, no torn sprocket holes, FX compositing and color correction all without slow film-digital-film transfers. And then the trasnfer to DVD...oh baby.
The cost of producing and distributing a movie may actually go down. Although thanks to the bloated film industry, ticket prices will still go up just to increase profit margin that much more. Damn.
The next high-end version of Cubase will support 32-bit audio...Pro Tools as well, I think. I've already seen some softsynths that'll do that as well. Digital signal clipping begone!
Hell the big bang theory as initially proposed has been proved wrong many times
Which is why the theory has been revised numerous times since it was initially proposed. That's why it's a theory. It's a "best guess" kinda thing. There are plenty of physicists who dispute the big bang. There are plenty who agree. Cosmology is not a subject physicists take lightly. The Big Bang theory is just the best-fit right now. It wasn't always the prevailing theory, and if someone offers a more plausible or reasonable explanation, over time that'll become part of the favored TOE. This stuff never happens overnight anyway. You compare to the last days of steady-state...maybe these are the last days of Big Bang and/or Standard Model.
Personally, I think Black Holes are just a mighty-cool idea. Something so dense it messes with space-time...that just sounds neat.
Spoken like a young'un. Maybe you weren't around for the GIF vs. JPEG jihads^H^H^H^H^H^Hdebates. Thank god unisys whet postal regarding their patents and ended that war.
Well, I'm not a youg'un, but I like to believe that you're only as young as you feel, consarn it.
Anyway, GIF vs JPEG is a different analog than MP3 vs. CD, which was where I was going. GIF - compressed. JPEG - compressed. Battling compression formats. MP3 - lossy compressed. CD - uncompressed (all the analog audiophiles can just shut up now). Not really teh same kind of argument. What I was saying is I don't remember people posting "Jpeg is going to destroy the photographic industry" or "Jpeg sux cuz it's not as good as a real 5x7."
Java under LInux != Java under MacOS != Java under Windows != java under Solaris.
While this is true, it's not supposed to be. By design it's supposed to be write-once, run-anywhere. It's just stupid vendors who try and subvert this idea. Java under Linux and under Solaris are essentially the same...I've personally never had any issues between the two. Windows has it's own special problems, thank you M$.
on the Mac, Java can take three forms, Apple JVM, Microsoft explorer JVM, or Netscape JVM
This is the problem. It shouldn't be like this at all. A JVM should be a JVM, regardless. Maybe some performance differences, but Sun's and Apple's and Netscape's should all be in line. This pisses me off to no end. Corporate short-sightedness is ruining an otherwise wonderful concept.
Microsoft's fux0ring of the JVM is to be expected. But I don't know what Apple or Netscape's excuse is.
I can see why many of the hacks to NT are not reported...
Under NT it's often virtually impossible to figure out where they came from or how they got in. Reinstall NT, lock it down as best you can and hope that fixes it seems to be the best solution most of the time.
NT's event logger sucks horribly. I've had systems go completely belly-up without so much as a single entry in the eventlog. I've hack-tested some of my own machines, and punched holes and exploited them, and check later to find nothing in the security or system log. It boggles the imagination that a professional server wouldn't keep track, or at least have the option to keep track, of every system event.
I've got an older powermac, and currently I've got a Dell 19" monitor sitting on top of it. I had to buy a $15 pinout converter (has a few dips on it too), but it works like a charm. Strangely, my old applevision monitor came with a smaller pinout converter that just plug-n-plays with PCs. The 15" apple monitor sits atop a linux box in my living room right now.
As for video and sound, there are a bunch of PC components that are cross-compatible. And there are now a LOT of USB devices that plug into both systems, thanks to the popularity of the iMac. USB MIDI, USB drives, USB audio, etc etc. But as for PCI stuff...
Creative Labs has committed to making Soundblaster mac compatible
3dfx is making apple drivers for the voodoo cards
ATI's Rage card comes standard on some macs already
lots of the high-end digital audio hardware came first on mac anyway, and most of it is cross-platform
Drives are essentially drives. My old pre-IDE powermac has a frankensteinian assortment of SCSI drives attached to it. With the new ones having IDE built-in it's even easier to add drive space (although I'd never be without SCSI for doing high-end AV)
The only thing I can think of causing a problme might be a NIC, but since powemacs have those built-in, it shouldn't be an issue.
There are some observable psychoacoustic differences. Run an mp3 through a spectrum analyzer and you'll see some differences from the source. 99% of the time, you can't tell the difference, but if you're dealing with sounds that have a lot of complex waveforms and/or lots of funky stereo phasing (Clarke and Ware's "Prententious" comes to mind) you can in fact hear a fairly noticable difference.
Once you start "simplifying" the waveforms, you're going to get some changes in phase information, so anything that's encoded for psuedo-3d audio is going to lose some information. Something along those lines, anyway.
Still, the majority of the time mp3 is just fine. And for the garage/bedroom studio musician (like myself) it's MILES above what you can normally distribute (i.e. cassette).
The arguments do get pedantic. People go to war over a file format. A file format. If you think it sounds better on CD or vinyl, then buy the CD or the 12"...I don't see what the problem is here. I never saw anyone get so uptight over jpg.
I seem to remember a while back some company was trying to push an mp4 audio spec as a sucessor to mp3. Seems only logical that if that seemed likely, mp3.com would want to buy the domain name rights.
Looks like somebody beat them to the mp4 format punch, so to speak.
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I don't know Anime, but I know what I like
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
I was entirely surpirsed to find out how many of the cartoons I watched as a child turned out to be classics of the genre, just retitled, badly dubbed and serialized...Star Blazers ("Space Battleship Yamato"), Robotech ("Macross"), G-Force ("Battle of the Planets" or something), Voltron and so forth. Wow. Seems I knew a lot more about anime as a kid than I ever realized.
I've got several friends who are deeply immersed in anime, manga and the like and I can't say I share their vast plethora of resources. But I do know what I like as far as film goes, and there are some that would make excellent watching reagrdless of whether they're animated or not. Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop Those got me hooked. And the fairly good Gundam Wing is on cartoon network daily so it's all becoming a lot more easy to get hold of.
The thing that worries me is not the XBox itself. Even if MS is cheating on the demos now, I'm sure they'll still kick out a fairly decent product.
But we've got the PS2 with already huge support in Japan and it looks like a big market here in the US, coming out in a few months, with lots and lots of game backers behind it. I follow some of the XBox news and while it does look cool, it certianly doesn't yet have the bigname game developer support the PS2 does. This may change as they get closer to release date, but they have a lot of hype to generate first, and Sony already appears to be working on the PS-3. By the time the Xbox finally hits the shelves, it may already be irrelevant, doomed to the same realm as the ColecoVision.
The Xbox is only going to be as fun as the games that are written for it...
There's a fundamental fallacy often invoked in this line of reasoning, i.e. that nature is perfectly balanced and self-correcting.
We know this not to be the case. Lovelock and Gaia aside, ecosystems of all types are in flux and have always been in constant flux. Everything living alters its surrouding environment in some manner. Sure, there are often cycles, but even those are subject to the whims of nonlinear dynamics.
Life changes it's environment. Humans are just reaaallly good at it.
Is humanity going to destory the planet? No. Is humanity going to destroy all life on the planet? No. Is humanity going to destroy countless species and ruin the ecosystems of many others? Yes. Is humanity going to render the planet uninhabitable for humanity? Quite possibly. The earth will survive. Life will probably survive. We just probably won't. Give it a billion years or so, and the giant, ugly, sentient roaches will be posting here instead of us.
I've been through a number of "quality systems" arrangements at a few companies...
"Total Quality Management" has thus far been an excuse for managers to reoganize everything into micromanaged environments while claiming to empower employees. It's Dilberting of the highest order.
ISO9000 on the other hand, turned out to be, while not stellar, a dramatic improvement to workflow around a different company. Aside form the fact that we needed ISO compliance in manufacturing in order to sell our products to certain european governments, it finally forced a lot of the "Fast-and-loose" policies to be codified. Suddenly we had to document what we were doing - everyone, from the manufacturers to the sysadmins to the developers to the product support people. Often tedious, yes, but it ended up helping a lot - all the code had documentation, system changes were recorded, etc. While most of our IT staff had done this anyway, we finally were able to convince the management-types that 1) we needed a decent repository for this sort of data and that they too were responsible as well for knowing what was going on.
Possibly the best side effect is that managment suddenly realized that they'd lose their ISO certification if the ISO document storage systems went down, so they became very interested in uptime and redundancy - approving the requests for redundant systems that they'd shot down for expense reasons many times before.
The weirdest part of quality systems is that in the end, they're just codifications of common sense. Document your changes. Keep records of your processes. Centralize your enterprise-level information. Stuff that every IT person would consider a no-brainer, but stuff that your average marketing droid would've never had any exposure to.
Slashdot Mirror
But the possibilities of an all-digital film...digitally filmed, digitally edited, digitally distributed...no bad film stock problems, no torn sprocket holes, FX compositing and color correction all without slow film-digital-film transfers. And then the trasnfer to DVD...oh baby.
The cost of producing and distributing a movie may actually go down. Although thanks to the bloated film industry, ticket prices will still go up just to increase profit margin that much more. Damn.
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Only 24/96?
The next high-end version of Cubase will support 32-bit audio...Pro Tools as well, I think. I've already seen some softsynths that'll do that as well. Digital signal clipping begone!
----
Which is why the theory has been revised numerous times since it was initially proposed. That's why it's a theory. It's a "best guess" kinda thing. There are plenty of physicists who dispute the big bang. There are plenty who agree. Cosmology is not a subject physicists take lightly. The Big Bang theory is just the best-fit right now. It wasn't always the prevailing theory, and if someone offers a more plausible or reasonable explanation, over time that'll become part of the favored TOE. This stuff never happens overnight anyway. You compare to the last days of steady-state...maybe these are the last days of Big Bang and/or Standard Model.
Personally, I think Black Holes are just a mighty-cool idea. Something so dense it messes with space-time...that just sounds neat.
----
Well, I'm not a youg'un, but I like to believe that you're only as young as you feel, consarn it.
Anyway, GIF vs JPEG is a different analog than MP3 vs. CD, which was where I was going. GIF - compressed. JPEG - compressed. Battling compression formats. MP3 - lossy compressed. CD - uncompressed (all the analog audiophiles can just shut up now). Not really teh same kind of argument. What I was saying is I don't remember people posting "Jpeg is going to destroy the photographic industry" or "Jpeg sux cuz it's not as good as a real 5x7."
----
While this is true, it's not supposed to be. By design it's supposed to be write-once, run-anywhere. It's just stupid vendors who try and subvert this idea. Java under Linux and under Solaris are essentially the same...I've personally never had any issues between the two. Windows has it's own special problems, thank you M$.
This is the problem. It shouldn't be like this at all. A JVM should be a JVM, regardless. Maybe some performance differences, but Sun's and Apple's and Netscape's should all be in line. This pisses me off to no end. Corporate short-sightedness is ruining an otherwise wonderful concept.
Microsoft's fux0ring of the JVM is to be expected. But I don't know what Apple or Netscape's excuse is.
----
I can see why many of the hacks to NT are not reported...
Under NT it's often virtually impossible to figure out where they came from or how they got in. Reinstall NT, lock it down as best you can and hope that fixes it seems to be the best solution most of the time.
NT's event logger sucks horribly. I've had systems go completely belly-up without so much as a single entry in the eventlog. I've hack-tested some of my own machines, and punched holes and exploited them, and check later to find nothing in the security or system log. It boggles the imagination that a professional server wouldn't keep track, or at least have the option to keep track, of every system event.
----
I've got an older powermac, and currently I've got a Dell 19" monitor sitting on top of it. I had to buy a $15 pinout converter (has a few dips on it too), but it works like a charm. Strangely, my old applevision monitor came with a smaller pinout converter that just plug-n-plays with PCs. The 15" apple monitor sits atop a linux box in my living room right now.
As for video and sound, there are a bunch of PC components that are cross-compatible. And there are now a LOT of USB devices that plug into both systems, thanks to the popularity of the iMac. USB MIDI, USB drives, USB audio, etc etc. But as for PCI stuff...
The only thing I can think of causing a problme might be a NIC, but since powemacs have those built-in, it shouldn't be an issue.
Enjoy.
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There are some observable psychoacoustic differences. Run an mp3 through a spectrum analyzer and you'll see some differences from the source. 99% of the time, you can't tell the difference, but if you're dealing with sounds that have a lot of complex waveforms and/or lots of funky stereo phasing (Clarke and Ware's "Prententious" comes to mind) you can in fact hear a fairly noticable difference.
Once you start "simplifying" the waveforms, you're going to get some changes in phase information, so anything that's encoded for psuedo-3d audio is going to lose some information. Something along those lines, anyway.
Still, the majority of the time mp3 is just fine. And for the garage/bedroom studio musician (like myself) it's MILES above what you can normally distribute (i.e. cassette).
The arguments do get pedantic. People go to war over a file format. A file format. If you think it sounds better on CD or vinyl, then buy the CD or the 12"...I don't see what the problem is here. I never saw anyone get so uptight over jpg.
----
I seem to remember a while back some company was trying to push an mp4 audio spec as a sucessor to mp3. Seems only logical that if that seemed likely, mp3.com would want to buy the domain name rights.
Looks like somebody beat them to the mp4 format punch, so to speak.
----
I was entirely surpirsed to find out how many of the cartoons I watched as a child turned out to be classics of the genre, just retitled, badly dubbed and serialized...Star Blazers ("Space Battleship Yamato"), Robotech ("Macross"), G-Force ("Battle of the Planets" or something), Voltron and so forth. Wow. Seems I knew a lot more about anime as a kid than I ever realized.
I've got several friends who are deeply immersed in anime, manga and the like and I can't say I share their vast plethora of resources. But I do know what I like as far as film goes, and there are some that would make excellent watching reagrdless of whether they're animated or not. Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop Those got me hooked. And the fairly good Gundam Wing is on cartoon network daily so it's all becoming a lot more easy to get hold of.
----
The thing that worries me is not the XBox itself. Even if MS is cheating on the demos now, I'm sure they'll still kick out a fairly decent product.
But we've got the PS2 with already huge support in Japan and it looks like a big market here in the US, coming out in a few months, with lots and lots of game backers behind it. I follow some of the XBox news and while it does look cool, it certianly doesn't yet have the bigname game developer support the PS2 does. This may change as they get closer to release date, but they have a lot of hype to generate first, and Sony already appears to be working on the PS-3. By the time the Xbox finally hits the shelves, it may already be irrelevant, doomed to the same realm as the ColecoVision.
The Xbox is only going to be as fun as the games that are written for it...
----
We know this not to be the case. Lovelock and Gaia aside, ecosystems of all types are in flux and have always been in constant flux. Everything living alters its surrouding environment in some manner. Sure, there are often cycles, but even those are subject to the whims of nonlinear dynamics.
Life changes it's environment. Humans are just reaaallly good at it.
Is humanity going to destory the planet? No. Is humanity going to destroy all life on the planet? No. Is humanity going to destroy countless species and ruin the ecosystems of many others? Yes. Is humanity going to render the planet uninhabitable for humanity? Quite possibly. The earth will survive. Life will probably survive. We just probably won't. Give it a billion years or so, and the giant, ugly, sentient roaches will be posting here instead of us.
----
So we'll just have to start referring to singularities, if they exist, as "what we used to call a black hole."
I've gotta drive what we used to call a horseless carriage home now.
----
"Total Quality Management" has thus far been an excuse for managers to reoganize everything into micromanaged environments while claiming to empower employees. It's Dilberting of the highest order.
ISO9000 on the other hand, turned out to be, while not stellar, a dramatic improvement to workflow around a different company. Aside form the fact that we needed ISO compliance in manufacturing in order to sell our products to certain european governments, it finally forced a lot of the "Fast-and-loose" policies to be codified. Suddenly we had to document what we were doing - everyone, from the manufacturers to the sysadmins to the developers to the product support people. Often tedious, yes, but it ended up helping a lot - all the code had documentation, system changes were recorded, etc. While most of our IT staff had done this anyway, we finally were able to convince the management-types that 1) we needed a decent repository for this sort of data and that they too were responsible as well for knowing what was going on.
Possibly the best side effect is that managment suddenly realized that they'd lose their ISO certification if the ISO document storage systems went down, so they became very interested in uptime and redundancy - approving the requests for redundant systems that they'd shot down for expense reasons many times before.
The weirdest part of quality systems is that in the end, they're just codifications of common sense. Document your changes. Keep records of your processes. Centralize your enterprise-level information. Stuff that every IT person would consider a no-brainer, but stuff that your average marketing droid would've never had any exposure to.
----