This crime appears to be occurring in large cities and apparently is well known to the police community. Here is a typical scenario.
Business traveler goes to a bar after a long day at work, and while sitting there, meets a fairly attractive young woman and they hit it off.
Next thing he knows, he wakes up in a strange hotel room, he's flopped in a chair and his head is wrapped in a bandage. Written in lipstick a note on the table reads: "call 911, and don't touch your face!"
He calls 911 on the phone next to the chair. He tells the 911 operator his story; she already knows where he's going with this and in fact has already called for paramedics to race to his hotel room.
She tells him to very carefully reach in through the bandage and touch his chin. She asks if he can feel a five o'clock shadow. He does this and tells her he feels something more like steak.
The operator tells him to remain calm, stay in the chair and not to move, the paramedics are on their way. Apparently this is not another crime of organ harvesting....but this time, the havesting of the faces. Because of the demand for face transplants and the shortage of faces, there's now a flourishing black market in face harvesting.
For now this traveler is masked and awaiting his own face transplant. Lucky for him, the black market is thriving. He probably won't have to wait too long for another traveler to meet a nice looking young woman in a bar so he can have a new face.
Perhaps no other decade in history has contributed as much to the growth of the music industry as the 1990s, the digital decade. The new compact disc format is smaller, lighter, and more durable than vinyl and cassette. The sound quality does not diminish over time. CD players are inexpensive and accessible in cars, elsewhere, almost everywhere. Consumers are going digital; they're also going online.
No more do folks think that a sliding CD-ROM tray is a cup holder. Pop your CD into it and you hear music, which you can now convert into a file. Compression breakthroughs have made it easy to quickly download and distribute music files. This distribution can allow consumers to discover and follow new bands and to meet other fans with shared interests. This is great for the music industry: fans, artists, and record companies alike. The opportunities offered by the new technologies seem limitless. At the same time, in taking advantage of those opportunities, it is crucial that the artists who produce the music are not taken advantage of. That's not fair and it will hurt our creative future.
The RIAA's goals for the new millennium are to work with our industry and others to enable technologies that open up new opportunities but at the same time to protect the rights of artists and copyright owners.
Not Apple. Not Rio.
http://www.riaa.com/Music-Intro.cfm
They forgot, oh and do any of what we just said and you'll owe us a million or three.
Unobtainium - 0) A difficult to find and if found expensive element.1) Superman #1. 2) Real world, really, really hard to find sailboat, old car, vintage computer parts are made from Unobtainium.
A used iMac with a FireWire port is more suited to the job of editing video. I've seen them going for as little at $400. You might have to add some RAM but it's not like that's going to cost much.
Out of the box it's ready to edit. It runs iMovie which is really easy to use and produces great results. Plus you have an upgrade path to more powerful editors. You could graduate to tools such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Special effects tools like Adobe After Effects, Pinnacle Commotion and Descrete Combustion will also run on that little Mac. Sound editing is accomplished with Peak, ProTools or even Spark XL. Oh and don't forget the 3d tools you might need. You've got your choice of LightWave, Universe, and Hash just to name a few.
One thing that all the above have going for them is that those tools are all many rev's old. In my experience they seldom crash. So you can get real work done and it doesn't feel like beta testing.
Guard: Sorry no bags!
Me: It's not a bag it's a case.
Guard: No laptops. No cases. No kidding.
Me: I left the laptop at home.
Guard: What's in the "case" then?
Me: Stuff. You know. My camera, PDA, cell phone, GPS, DriveWallet, GameBoy, portable CD player, a MP3 player, this runs a wireless Linux server (holding up a SBC with a short antennae) which is grabbing frames from the camera on my hat.
Guard (holding hand on head): Oh, just go. NEXT!!!
Guard: Sorry no bags!
Next me: It's not a bag, it's a valise.
Okay so they checked the code. But did they test it out? Has somebody changed the time on a server [issolating it first] and seen if really starts flinging bad bits?
right...because they have a tech staff to support the artists. Just like Lucasfilms, PDI, Warner and all the other shops using *nix computers as a major part of the work flow.
Dreamworks and the like are not the typical "problem customer" mentioned by the Broadcast 2000 folks.
Essentially video editors are your typical clueless user that know a lot about what they do (movie making) and not a lot about technology. The idea that these people operate under is "time is money and it better work dammit because I just paid a lot of money for this tool!" They want to "get someone on the phone now!" when a tool doesn't work. I'm generalizing this user to make a point--a user that expects this kind of handholding doesn't fit well with the do-it-yourself-fix-it-yourself way of Linux.
Applications like Final Cut (Apple) and AfterEffects (Adobe) work so well that you'd have a tough time arguing that free is better (based on the time is money theory) with those tools than something free or open.
There are many, many resources for these tools--trouble shooting, advice, even users groups are active it places like LA and SF. I applaud the effort that the developers of Broadcast 2000 made and I support their decision to exit the market.
How come most of the examples given are about a person in the act of consuming? There's very little prediction about creating things or doing less work.
Nope, instead Mr. Martin's predictions focus on gimme, gimme, gimme, get, get, get.
Where is the mention of working less hours? How kids will learn more faster better? Or when the bot that fixes the bugs in my stupid code will be ready?
I downloaded the "demo" software that simulates typing with a normal keyboard to test out the company claims that it's fast to learn. True to their claim it took me just a few minutes to get used to the idea of pressing the space bar and key to to make letters from the other side of a normal keyboard. After 5 minutes of typing my name again and again, I could pound it out faster than doing it with one finger.
I'm not saying that it would be easy for me to switch over, especially with 25 years of typing two handed, but I could do it. And if this was the only thing I was typing on I'd make the switch much faster.
What I think is a serious design flaw is that Option and Command keys (or Control and Alt) are not their normal places. This is a pretty serious mistake. In the case of using a Wacom tablet and replacing a whole keyboard with a Half-a-Keyboard, functions click command-z, x, c, v are now different hand/chording positions. Yuck.
While it's sorta easy for me to learn a new way to type , it's much harder to make my hand unlearn these time embedded basic patterns.
To be fair most of this review is based on a picture on the companies web site and a software demo simulating the product. Then again, it was tiltled this way. I only promised "half a review".
I'm sorry, but with the a removable drive bay costing just $7.50 and a 20 gig drive near a $100 or less, I'm not seeing the Iomega offering as a solution that I want to buy into.
Besides I'm very reluctant to give more money to Iomega. Iomega got off the hook on the class action suit against them for making defective Zip drives (ie the click of death). The terms being "in order to collect your damages you must buy more stuff from us" which I question as punishment to the company and a settlement for my time, data lost and cost to replace the defective hardware.
And it wasn't just Zip disk/drive that were an issue. We were told that Jazz drives were the solution for1 gig removable storage. But that drive and media also had problems.
I predict that whatever Iomega is planning/making will continue to be very costly compared to the cost of DVD-R media, portable drives, or other media types not yet invented.
My vote would be "Noose" as in hangman's. That way you'd avoid a confusing conversation like this one:
Newbie: I just installed NewOS today!
L33t: You mean the new kernal release?
Newbie: NewOS. I installed NewOS.
L33t: Yes but which new OS? Windows XP? Win2k? OS X?
Newbie: NewOS.
L33t: You keep saying that but won't tell me.
Newbie: I am telling you. I installed NewOS.
L33t: Linux might seem like it's new but it's been around.
Newbie: No, NewOS!
L33t: Well at least we agree on one thing.
making a virus with one person's name on it
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
The question is, will it still work if they change their name?
Hmmmm... why upgrade at all then? I really have trouble coming up with a task that requires Photoshop 6 over 5.5 - if the artists are used to 5.5, and you don't want to spend the cash to teach them 6, why did you fork over the $200/license to get 6? The only reason I can imagine is pressure from the artists themselves (reading reviews and then requesting the upgrade saying it would make their job easier or something).
Three reasons:
1) The artists can't "wait" to get their hands on it. Think of this as upgrade fever. I'd rather they take a wait and see attitude but they don't. The new rev comes out, comes in via Hotline or from another source and spreads like a virus. And in the case of Illustrator 9 which moved it's file format to PDF based, it was a virus. Nothing would print, you couldn't change between 8 and 9 without a hassle, etc. All this was fixed in 9.01/2 but the damage had already been done.
2. There's always that "one feature" that truly will make life easier. I'll counter myself by saying it always comes at the cost of something else. To use the Illustrator example again the promise it had was "transparency" which all the artists have been "clammering" for for years. To get it the file format had to be the new and unproven PDF format. Adobe didn't bother saying "umm, hey guys, the entire file format is changed, proceed with caution." Instead they said "Now with Transparency!!!!"
3. Adobe doesn't "fix" software. They upgrade it. To get rid of old problems you have no choice but to uprade. You are very correct in saying there's no difference between 5.5 and 6.0. In the case of Photoshop there's no reason why 5.5, 5.0, 4.01, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5 or even 2.0 couldn't be in use today.
If the goal is to ship OS X with every machine Apple sells starting this summer, now is the time to get things straight. If that means "updates on Friday" then send them. Do it before it's flung unto the masses.
Personally, I'd rather have a bunch of close together updates then the monolithic updates that non-OS vendors force these days. For example the last releases of Photoshop and Illustrator had a disastrous effect on my business. The artists couldn't deal with the sweeping changes made by Adobe.
Finally, I imagine that it's easier for engineering and QA get their jobs done by shipping micro updates. Especially since there are so many different parts of this OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm... the BOFH excuse generator turns up a real excuse for once....
These examples don't work in Safari.
This crime appears to be occurring in large cities and apparently is well known to the police community. Here is a typical scenario.
Business traveler goes to a bar after a long day at work, and while sitting there, meets a fairly attractive young woman and they hit it off.
Next thing he knows, he wakes up in a strange hotel room, he's flopped in a chair and his head is wrapped in a bandage. Written in lipstick a note on the table reads: "call 911, and don't touch your face!"
He calls 911 on the phone next to the chair. He tells the 911 operator his story; she already knows where he's going with this and in fact has already called for paramedics to race to his hotel room.
She tells him to very carefully reach in through the bandage and touch his chin. She asks if he can feel a five o'clock shadow. He does this and tells her he feels something more like steak.
The operator tells him to remain calm, stay in the chair and not to move, the paramedics are on their way. Apparently this is not another crime of organ harvesting....but this time, the havesting of the faces. Because of the demand for face transplants and the shortage of faces, there's now a flourishing black market in face harvesting.
For now this traveler is masked and awaiting his own face transplant. Lucky for him, the black market is thriving. He probably won't have to wait too long for another traveler to meet a nice looking young woman in a bar so he can have a new face.
I always liked this doc telling the story of Demoing for Fun and Profit.
Perhaps no other decade in history has contributed as much to the growth of the music industry as the 1990s, the digital decade. The new compact disc format is smaller, lighter, and more durable than vinyl and cassette. The sound quality does not diminish over time. CD players are inexpensive and accessible in cars, elsewhere, almost everywhere. Consumers are going digital; they're also going online.
No more do folks think that a sliding CD-ROM tray is a cup holder. Pop your CD into it and you hear music, which you can now convert into a file. Compression breakthroughs have made it easy to quickly download and distribute music files. This distribution can allow consumers to discover and follow new bands and to meet other fans with shared interests. This is great for the music industry: fans, artists, and record companies alike. The opportunities offered by the new technologies seem limitless. At the same time, in taking advantage of those opportunities, it is crucial that the artists who produce the music are not taken advantage of. That's not fair and it will hurt our creative future.
The RIAA's goals for the new millennium are to work with our industry and others to enable technologies that open up new opportunities but at the same time to protect the rights of artists and copyright owners.
Not Apple. Not Rio.
http://www.riaa.com/Music-Intro.cfm
They forgot, oh and do any of what we just said and you'll owe us a million or three.
Right.
Unobtainium - 0) A difficult to find and if found expensive element.1) Superman #1. 2) Real world, really, really hard to find sailboat, old car, vintage computer parts are made from Unobtainium.
Isn't the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) really the
Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Prevention Act?
I just addressed and sent $0.02 to the address below. Also enclosed was a nicely worded note basically saying "No!"
Copyright Royalty Arbitration Panel (CRAP), P.O. Box 70977, Southwest Station, Washington, DC 20024-0977.
A used iMac with a FireWire port is more suited to the job of editing video. I've seen them going for as little at $400. You might have to add some RAM but it's not like that's going to cost much.
Out of the box it's ready to edit. It runs iMovie which is really easy to use and produces great results. Plus you have an upgrade path to more powerful editors. You could graduate to tools such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Special effects tools like Adobe After Effects, Pinnacle Commotion and Descrete Combustion will also run on that little Mac. Sound editing is accomplished with Peak, ProTools or even Spark XL. Oh and don't forget the 3d tools you might need. You've got your choice of LightWave, Universe, and Hash just to name a few.
One thing that all the above have going for them is that those tools are all many rev's old. In my experience they seldom crash. So you can get real work done and it doesn't feel like beta testing.
Guard: Sorry no bags!
Me: It's not a bag it's a case.
Guard: No laptops. No cases. No kidding.
Me: I left the laptop at home.
Guard: What's in the "case" then?
Me: Stuff. You know. My camera, PDA, cell phone, GPS, DriveWallet, GameBoy, portable CD player, a MP3 player, this runs a wireless Linux server (holding up a SBC with a short antennae) which is grabbing frames from the camera on my hat.
Guard (holding hand on head): Oh, just go. NEXT!!!
Guard: Sorry no bags!
Next me: It's not a bag, it's a valise.
I'm wondering if LISP might have been more popular if it had a name that didn't invoke a joke coming to mind every time the name comes up:
Interviewer: Do you program in LISP.
Candidate: Yeth.
Has this been a problem over the years or is it largely overlooked? Maybe there's an old story or two you could tell in this vain.
BOFH excuse generator proof? I gotta check into this!
Okay so they checked the code. But did they test it out? Has somebody changed the time on a server [issolating it first] and seen if really starts flinging bad bits?
Dictionary.com defines:Exodus
exodus
n.
1. A departure of a large number of people.
right...because they have a tech staff to support the artists. Just like Lucasfilms, PDI, Warner and all the other shops using *nix computers as a major part of the work flow.
Dreamworks and the like are not the typical "problem customer" mentioned by the Broadcast 2000 folks.
Essentially video editors are your typical clueless user that know a lot about what they do (movie making) and not a lot about technology. The idea that these people operate under is "time is money and it better work dammit because I just paid a lot of money for this tool!" They want to "get someone on the phone now!" when a tool doesn't work. I'm generalizing this user to make a point--a user that expects this kind of handholding doesn't fit well with the do-it-yourself-fix-it-yourself way of Linux.
Applications like Final Cut (Apple) and AfterEffects (Adobe) work so well that you'd have a tough time arguing that free is better (based on the time is money theory) with those tools than something free or open.
There are many, many resources for these tools--trouble shooting, advice, even users groups are active it places like LA and SF. I applaud the effort that the developers of Broadcast 2000 made and I support their decision to exit the market.
This place in San Francisco across the street from South Park has Legos at the bar!
How come most of the examples given are about a person in the act of consuming? There's very
little prediction about creating things or doing less work.
Nope, instead Mr. Martin's predictions focus on gimme, gimme, gimme, get, get, get.
Where is the mention of working less hours? How kids will learn more faster better?
Or when the bot that fixes the bugs in my stupid code will be ready?
I downloaded the "demo" software that simulates typing with a normal keyboard to test out the company claims that it's fast to learn. True to their claim it took me just a few minutes to get used to the idea of pressing the space bar and key to to make letters from the other side of a normal keyboard. After 5 minutes of typing my name again and again, I could pound it out faster than doing it with one finger.
I'm not saying that it would be easy for me to switch over, especially with 25 years of typing two handed, but I could do it. And if this was the only thing I was typing on I'd make the switch much faster.
What I think is a serious design flaw is that Option and Command keys (or Control and Alt) are not their normal places. This is a pretty serious mistake. In the case of using a Wacom tablet and replacing a whole keyboard with a Half-a-Keyboard, functions click command-z, x, c, v are now different hand/chording positions. Yuck.
While it's sorta easy for me to learn a new way to type , it's much harder to make my hand unlearn these time embedded basic patterns.
To be fair most of this review is based on a picture on the companies web site and a software demo simulating the product. Then again, it was tiltled this way. I only promised "half a review".
I'm sorry, but with the a removable drive bay costing just $7.50 and a 20 gig drive near a $100 or less, I'm not seeing the Iomega offering as a solution that I want to buy into.
Besides I'm very reluctant to give more money to Iomega. Iomega got off the hook on the class action suit against them for making defective Zip drives (ie the click of death). The terms being "in order to collect your damages you must buy more stuff from us" which I question as punishment to the company and a settlement for my time, data lost and cost to replace the defective hardware.
And it wasn't just Zip disk/drive that were an issue. We were told that Jazz drives were the solution for1 gig removable storage. But that drive and media also had problems.
I predict that whatever Iomega is planning/making will continue to be very costly compared to the cost of DVD-R media, portable drives, or other media types not yet invented.
My vote would be "Noose" as in hangman's. That way you'd avoid a confusing conversation like this one:
Newbie: I just installed NewOS today!
L33t: You mean the new kernal release?
Newbie: NewOS. I installed NewOS.
L33t: Yes but which new OS? Windows XP? Win2k? OS X?
Newbie: NewOS.
L33t: You keep saying that but won't tell me.
Newbie: I am telling you. I installed NewOS.
L33t: Linux might seem like it's new but it's been around.
Newbie: No, NewOS!
L33t: Well at least we agree on one thing.
The question is, will it still work if they change their name?
Hmmmm... why upgrade at all then? I really have trouble coming up with a task that requires Photoshop 6 over 5.5 - if the artists are used to 5.5, and you don't want to spend the cash to teach them 6, why did you fork over the $200/license to get 6? The only reason I can imagine is pressure from the artists themselves (reading reviews and then requesting the upgrade saying it would make their job easier or something).
Three reasons:
1) The artists can't "wait" to get their hands on it. Think of this as upgrade fever. I'd rather they take a wait and see attitude but they don't. The new rev comes out, comes in via Hotline or from another source and spreads like a virus. And in the case of Illustrator 9 which moved it's file format to PDF based, it was a virus. Nothing would print, you couldn't change between 8 and 9 without a hassle, etc. All this was fixed in 9.01/2 but the damage had already been done.
2. There's always that "one feature" that truly will make life easier. I'll counter myself by saying it always comes at the cost of something else. To use the Illustrator example again the promise it had was "transparency" which all the artists have been "clammering" for for years. To get it the file format had to be the new and unproven PDF format. Adobe didn't bother saying "umm, hey guys, the entire file format is changed, proceed with caution." Instead they said "Now with Transparency!!!!"
3. Adobe doesn't "fix" software. They upgrade it. To get rid of old problems you have no choice but to uprade. You are very correct in saying there's no difference between 5.5 and 6.0. In the case of Photoshop there's no reason why 5.5, 5.0, 4.01, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5 or even 2.0 couldn't be in use today.
If the goal is to ship OS X with every machine Apple sells starting this summer, now is the time to get things straight. If that means "updates on Friday" then send them. Do it before it's flung unto the masses.
Personally, I'd rather have a bunch of close together updates then the monolithic updates that non-OS vendors force these days. For example the last releases of Photoshop and Illustrator had a disastrous effect on my business. The artists couldn't deal with the sweeping changes made by Adobe.
Finally, I imagine that it's easier for engineering and QA get their jobs done by shipping micro updates. Especially since there are so many different parts of this OS.
I'm turning in that one guy who posts here all the time. You know Anonymous Coward.
He must be responsible for at least 500 machines all by himself!