Why would a company that makes a lot of money selling fairly expensive apps (Photoshop - $609) Spend the time to port those apps to a system whose user-base contains a huge percentage of people who are perceived to be opposed to paying for software? It doesn't make any business sense.
I hear a lot of folks here saying they want Adobe apps, Office, etc., but would they BUY a copy? Some would, I imagine, but the whole OSS, Free Beer/Free Speech thing makes it look like a waste of time, from, say, Adobe's point of view. The impression any suit who spends time hanging around/. or otherwise monitoring OSS-type goings-on is going to get is: "Let's see, they want the product for free, and we'll have to turn over our code as well."
Whether it's true, somewhat true, not true at all, doesn't matter. That's the impression they're going to get. I don't think we'll ever see Photoshop and its like on Linux.
Final Cut Pro is eating heavily into Avid's market share (as well as Media100's). I think I saw stats that claimed something like 30% of the market for FCP. That's without the new stuff. I have friends who've worked with both Avid and Media's stuff, and are now actively switching or planning to switch over to FCP. Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence, but it points to something I've been wondering about for awhile. namely, the democratization of film.
Apple gave us a set of tools in the 80's that democratized publishing. Took it out of the hands of those that could afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and consumables, and required people who could learn to code, and made it so anyone with a few grand and no arcane technical skills could do it. Badly, of course, but neverthless....It demolished that industry. Then they democratized prepress, that industry is almost gone. (I know, I worked in both of those industries.) Now it's film. Jobs has said that movies are going to be the DTP of the 21st century (or words to that effect) I think he knows what he's doing. If you think of Hollywood as an association of typesetters in the mid-80's, you can see why they're fighting anything that lets people create/use media on computers. The train is coming. More and more independent films made, more ways of distributing new content than just showing in theatres, etc., etc.
When budgeting for a stereo, plan to spend half of the budget on speakers. All that good shit inside doesn't matter if it gets translated to you by an idiot.
Everyone over 35 says it sucks 'cause they remember things like characters who seemed different from each other. But then, they also remember people who seemed different from each other.
If you're talking about that blue thing, any advantages its calibration bestows are demolished by that blue paint and hood. Like Sony's ridiculous 9500-9700 degree color temps (blue-white, not white) for tv's in the 70's and 80's, it's designed to sell on the showroom floor, not to give accurate color.
It'd be a decent monitor, painted Munsell (look it up) grey. As it is, feh.
during the last 25 years of working with computer and video screens:
1. Uncalibrated monitors are worthless except for texual information. Might as well be black and white. Hardware calibrated is best. Calibrated by eye with test patterns is better than nothing.
2.) Ambient light is key. Correct light is a source behind the monitor (no other sources) that is roughly (no more than) 20% as bright as the light from the monitor, and has the same color temperature. Refresh is key. Incandescent is best, or match the refresh of flourescent to monitor refresh. One of the best ways to get a headache is standard office setup: overhead flourescents oscillating at a different, subliminally perceived, refresh than the monitor's subliminally perceived refresh. And at a different color temperature. At first, you don't notice, but your brain is going "WTF!?! Are you TRYING to hurt me?!?!"
3.) Trinitrons suck. All inline tubes suck. Triads of dots, not stripes, are best for displaying anything not rectilinear and vertical. Trini's are nice and sharp when looking at office buildings; look at curves (or rotate the office building 14.3 degrees) and your res has just dropped through the floor due to aliasing) As Joe Kane (Google it) said, "When I look at a Trinitron, all I see is stripes".
There's LOTS more. but I'm too drunk and tired. But I've calibrated my TV's since 1990 and my monitors since the first 24 bit display hit the market, and my point is, hardware is the least of it. The least. Anyone who knows what they're doing can make a POS display look better than a zillion dollar unobtainium, proof of concept flim-flam, and with a little homework, you can too. The work's all been done for you (and me, I didn't make this shit up, I learned it). Go find it and use it.
It's nice to see, for a change, an article that doesn't pit Linux and OSX against each other, but instead focuses on how they can be complementary and what benefits there are for both camps. The article seemed very even-handed to me. It seemed to say "Linux is cool, OSX is cool, and the cross-pollination of advances in each is even cooler". Bravo.
I don't usually take the flamebait, but you're not only wrong, you're so wrong, that as Walter Huston said in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "You're so wrong there's nothing to compare you to!"
Ellison as a writer is uneven. Some of his early work is brilliant, some is crap. Ellison as an editor is why we're not still reading either space opera or artless thought experiments that are neither art or literature.
Dangerous Visions, the series he edited over 30 years ago, broke ground that no one else had the guts to tread upon. More than anyone, he opened the door to the writers who would challenge their readers on levels more fundamental than "Ooh! What if there was a whole world in zero gee..." yadayada.
He also wrote two of the best Outer Limits episodes: Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier, both of which won deserved Hugos. So blow me. End of rant.
If the story is true, Jobs did what men who make companies do: buy low, sell high. If Woz thought that his end was ok for four days work (and remember, this was when you could pay a couple of month's bills with $350) then I don't see the problem. Would I do that, when a friend was the other party? No. But I'm not rich, either.
Woz invented the Apple Computer. Could he have created the "company" Apple Computer? From what I've read about him, I don't think so. I have the greatest respect for the man and his work, but I don't see him doing that. For that, you need a guy like Jobs. This incident (true or not, accurate or not) is like a microcosmic fable about the synergy between talent and marketing. A certain kind of mind concentrates single-mindedly on a technical goal(1); another kind concentrates, just as single mindedly on using that results of that goal(1) as the means to another goal (money, usually). Both are necessary. It stinks a bit, to me, anyway, but it's a big part of why Apple isn't dead yet. Jobs is a good businessman, and, as an Apple fan, I'm glad he is.
If you're talking about motherboard failure (as opposed to upgrade), my personal experience with Mac's is that I have NEVER seen an Apple motherboard fail. Doesn't mean it can't happen, but I'd feel pretty secure about the stability of such a system.
I ran a couple of AppleshareIP servers in a heavy production system and they never failed, never had to be rebooted (except for easy hardware upgrades, sometimes) and just generally were invisible as far as maintenance went. For years. YMMV.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's funny that a dialogue about MS's next OS almost immediately devolves into an argument about how to spell the plural of "virus"?
Unless this has changed recently, Apple DOES get PPCs from IBM, just not the G4s (which are very similar to the G3 with the exception of Altivec). The faster G3s in the CRT iMacs were from IBM.
One of the biggest reasons Jobs was so pissed at Motorola was that the iMacs were at one time about to be running faster (Mhz-wise) than the flagship G4s in the Pro line. No good for marketing, of course. The problem is that IBM won't (or maybe legally can't) embrace Altivec. Believe me, if IBM would make a G4, Jobs would drop Motorola so fast it would happen before he did it.
IIRC, what Slashdot readers boycott accounts for about half of what I read here.;-)
Seriously, though, aren't our real-world responses to the media legitimate information? I wasn't intending to chest-thump; it was more my disgust with the networks that was coming out. More rant than brag. At least, that was my intention.
Personally, I would be interested in what decisions other have made concerning viewing habits/technology choices, and why. FWIW.
::The audio or video quality, no. The dramatic quality (such as it is) is another thing entirely. I don't know if losing one frame out of 44 can really alter our perception of a dramatic pause -- are there any editor/director types who claim that sort of precision? But that's not the issue.::
Actually, yes. In an interview, years ago, Chuck Jones showed a Road Runner gag, and both stated, and (to my mind, conclusively) demonstrated that it was only funny if it was twelve frames long. Nine frames, no good. Fifteen frames, also no good. In animation, at any rate, gods are sometimes gods for a reason. Occasionally in live action as well.
I decided ten years ago or so, that I would never again watch a movie on Network TV. Complete, uninterrupted, un-fucked with and in the correct aspect ratio only, please. That's why I bought the first LaserDisc player on the market, and calibrated my TV with test patterns and Wratten blue filters and so forth. I want to see what the artist made, not some hacked-up mess that some retarded suits think is acceptable.
I've stopped watching movies on AMC since they started interrupting them with commercials. Their advertisers stopped reaching me the day they started this practice. Too bad. They used to show some good films.
I'm currently working up a web server on my first computer, a mechanical binary computer I built when I was six, in 1963. The ip stack is two tin cans and a piece of string. Unfortunately, it can be slashdotted by jumping up and down next to it.
Remember that in the early days of film the stories were little more than technology demonstrations; eventually it grew into the major art form of the twentieth century.
We have the advantage now of knowing that it can be art. As well, we have many, many examples of what can make it so. We're ahead of the game. Just wait.
We're currently enamored of the tools, because they are new, and seem different. When these become simply the tools one uses, added to the rest of the arsenal, artists will return to concentrating on the tale as the end and the technique as the means.
I'm going to get to see things I've always wanted to see. That's enough for me.
Dude, we're talking operating systems, not mass media. $19MM in a week for an operating system for a niche machine is pretty fucking good. And that's without selling it on a single Mac. TiBooks and iBooks are flying off the shelves, and I'd be willing to bet that the next iMac (the widescreen one) will revitalize that line. When July rolls around and OS X is the default install, there's gonna be a whole shitload more *nix boxen out there. Very suddenly. I do believe that MS might like to nip that in the bud. And in the FWIW category, considering what he's done with the company since coming back, his compensation is not out of line, jerk or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would a company that makes a lot of money selling fairly expensive apps (Photoshop - $609) Spend the time to port those apps to a system whose user-base contains a huge percentage of people who are perceived to be opposed to paying for software? It doesn't make any business sense.
/. or otherwise monitoring OSS-type goings-on is going to get is: "Let's see, they want the product for free, and we'll have to turn over our code as well."
I hear a lot of folks here saying they want Adobe apps, Office, etc., but would they BUY a copy? Some would, I imagine, but the whole OSS, Free Beer/Free Speech thing makes it look like a waste of time, from, say, Adobe's point of view. The impression any suit who spends time hanging around
Whether it's true, somewhat true, not true at all, doesn't matter. That's the impression they're going to get. I don't think we'll ever see Photoshop and its like on Linux.
Or perhaps they're pointing out that you can load OSX on an iPod and boot from it, which you can.
Load it with OSX and some utilities and mp3's and you have the perfect troubleshooting device.
The mp3's are for listening to on the way to and from the client.
I'm buying one for this exact purpose.
Blue Man Group uses apples. They only hawk for Intel.
There was quite a stink about that recently.
Final Cut Pro is eating heavily into Avid's market share (as well as Media100's). I think I saw stats that claimed something like 30% of the market for FCP. That's without the new stuff. I have friends who've worked with both Avid and Media's stuff, and are now actively switching or planning to switch over to FCP. Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence, but it points to something I've been wondering about for awhile. namely, the democratization of film.
Apple gave us a set of tools in the 80's that democratized publishing. Took it out of the hands of those that could afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and consumables, and required people who could learn to code, and made it so anyone with a few grand and no arcane technical skills could do it. Badly, of course, but neverthless....It demolished that industry. Then they democratized prepress, that industry is almost gone. (I know, I worked in both of those industries.) Now it's film. Jobs has said that movies are going to be the DTP of the 21st century (or words to that effect) I think he knows what he's doing. If you think of Hollywood as an association of typesetters in the mid-80's, you can see why they're fighting anything that lets people create/use media on computers. The train is coming. More and more independent films made, more ways of distributing new content than just showing in theatres, etc., etc.
Sam Goldwyn, we're coming for you...
Follow the stereo rule:
When budgeting for a stereo, plan to spend half of the budget on speakers. All that good shit inside doesn't matter if it gets translated to you by an idiot.
Everyone over 35 says it sucks 'cause they remember things like characters who seemed different from each other. But then, they also remember people who seemed different from each other.
If you're talking about that blue thing, any advantages its calibration bestows are demolished by that blue paint and hood. Like Sony's ridiculous 9500-9700 degree color temps (blue-white, not white) for tv's in the 70's and 80's, it's designed to sell on the showroom floor, not to give accurate color.
It'd be a decent monitor, painted Munsell (look it up) grey. As it is, feh.
during the last 25 years of working with computer and video screens:
1. Uncalibrated monitors are worthless except for texual information. Might as well be black and white. Hardware calibrated is best. Calibrated by eye with test patterns is better than nothing.
2.) Ambient light is key. Correct light is a source behind the monitor (no other sources) that is roughly (no more than) 20% as bright as the light from the monitor, and has the same color temperature. Refresh is key. Incandescent is best, or match the refresh of flourescent to monitor refresh. One of the best ways to get a headache is standard office setup: overhead flourescents oscillating at a different, subliminally perceived, refresh than the monitor's subliminally perceived refresh. And at a different color temperature. At first, you don't notice, but your brain is going "WTF!?! Are you TRYING to hurt me?!?!"
3.) Trinitrons suck. All inline tubes suck. Triads of dots, not stripes, are best for displaying anything not rectilinear and vertical. Trini's are nice and sharp when looking at office buildings; look at curves (or rotate the office building 14.3 degrees) and your res has just dropped through the floor due to aliasing) As Joe Kane (Google it) said, "When I look at a Trinitron, all I see is stripes".
There's LOTS more. but I'm too drunk and tired. But I've calibrated my TV's since 1990 and my monitors since the first 24 bit display hit the market, and my point is, hardware is the least of it. The least. Anyone who knows what they're doing can make a POS display look better than a zillion dollar unobtainium, proof of concept flim-flam, and with a little homework, you can too. The work's all been done for you (and me, I didn't make this shit up, I learned it). Go find it and use it.
Somebody please mod this guy way, way up.
It's nice to see, for a change, an article that doesn't pit Linux and OSX against each other, but instead focuses on how they can be complementary and what benefits there are for both camps. The article seemed very even-handed to me. It seemed to say "Linux is cool, OSX is cool, and the cross-pollination of advances in each is even cooler". Bravo.
The alien anal probe stuck up my butt just BSOD'd...
I don't usually take the flamebait, but you're not only wrong, you're so wrong, that as Walter Huston said in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "You're so wrong there's nothing to compare you to!"
Ellison as a writer is uneven. Some of his early work is brilliant, some is crap. Ellison as an editor is why we're not still reading either space opera or artless thought experiments that are neither art or literature.
Dangerous Visions, the series he edited over 30 years ago, broke ground that no one else had the guts to tread upon. More than anyone, he opened the door to the writers who would challenge their readers on levels more fundamental than "Ooh! What if there was a whole world in zero gee..." yadayada.
He also wrote two of the best Outer Limits episodes: Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier, both of which won deserved Hugos. So blow me. End of rant.
A response to this, and the posts it generated:
If the story is true, Jobs did what men who make companies do: buy low, sell high. If Woz thought that his end was ok for four days work (and remember, this was when you could pay a couple of month's bills with $350) then I don't see the problem. Would I do that, when a friend was the other party? No. But I'm not rich, either.
Woz invented the Apple Computer. Could he have created the "company" Apple Computer? From what I've read about him, I don't think so. I have the greatest respect for the man and his work, but I don't see him doing that. For that, you need a guy like Jobs. This incident (true or not, accurate or not) is like a microcosmic fable about the synergy between talent and marketing. A certain kind of mind concentrates single-mindedly on a technical goal(1); another kind concentrates, just as single mindedly on using that results of that goal(1) as the means to another goal (money, usually). Both are necessary.
It stinks a bit, to me, anyway, but it's a big part of why Apple isn't dead yet. Jobs is a good businessman, and, as an Apple fan, I'm glad he is.
Where I come from, the four food groups are:
Alcohol
Nicotine
Caffeine
Sugar
As always, YMMV
Step 1: Cut up apples.
Step 2: Make crust.
Step 3: Shit! There's no step 3! Where the hell is Step 3?!
If you're talking about motherboard failure (as opposed to upgrade), my personal experience with Mac's is that I have NEVER seen an Apple motherboard fail. Doesn't mean it can't happen, but I'd feel pretty secure about the stability of such a system.
I ran a couple of AppleshareIP servers in a heavy production system and they never failed, never had to be rebooted (except for easy hardware upgrades, sometimes) and just generally were invisible as far as maintenance went. For years. YMMV.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's funny that a dialogue about MS's next OS almost immediately devolves into an argument about how to spell the plural of "virus"?
O, "big media" vs "bigger media"
Either way, they're both bigger than any regular Joe.
Unless this has changed recently, Apple DOES get PPCs from IBM, just not the G4s (which are very similar to the G3 with the exception of Altivec). The faster G3s in the CRT iMacs were from IBM.
One of the biggest reasons Jobs was so pissed at Motorola was that the iMacs were at one time about to be running faster (Mhz-wise) than the flagship G4s in the Pro line. No good for marketing, of course. The problem is that IBM won't (or maybe legally can't) embrace Altivec. Believe me, if IBM would make a G4, Jobs would drop Motorola so fast it would happen before he did it.
IIRC, what Slashdot readers boycott accounts for about half of what I read here. ;-)
Seriously, though, aren't our real-world responses to the media legitimate information? I wasn't intending to chest-thump; it was more my disgust with the networks that was coming out. More rant than brag. At least, that was my intention.
Personally, I would be interested in what decisions other have made concerning viewing habits/technology choices, and why. FWIW.
::The audio or video quality, no. The dramatic quality (such as it is) is another thing entirely. I don't know if losing one frame out of 44 can really alter our perception of a dramatic pause -- are there any editor/director types who claim that sort of precision? But that's not the issue.::
Actually, yes. In an interview, years ago, Chuck Jones showed a Road Runner gag, and both stated, and (to my mind, conclusively) demonstrated that it was only funny if it was twelve frames long. Nine frames, no good. Fifteen frames, also no good. In animation, at any rate, gods are sometimes gods for a reason. Occasionally in live action as well.
I decided ten years ago or so, that I would never again watch a movie on Network TV. Complete, uninterrupted, un-fucked with and in the correct aspect ratio only, please. That's why I bought the first LaserDisc player on the market, and calibrated my TV with test patterns and Wratten blue filters and so forth. I want to see what the artist made, not some hacked-up mess that some retarded suits think is acceptable.
I've stopped watching movies on AMC since they started interrupting them with commercials. Their advertisers stopped reaching me the day they started this practice. Too bad. They used to show some good films.
Maybe it's just me, but this smells like astroturf.
I'm currently working up a web server on my first computer, a mechanical binary computer I built when I was six, in 1963. The ip stack is two tin cans and a piece of string. Unfortunately, it can be slashdotted by jumping up and down next to it.
Remember that in the early days of film the stories were little more than technology demonstrations; eventually it grew into the major art form of the twentieth century.
We have the advantage now of knowing that it can be art. As well, we have many, many examples of what can make it so. We're ahead of the game. Just wait.
We're currently enamored of the tools, because they are new, and seem different. When these become simply the tools one uses, added to the rest of the arsenal, artists will return to concentrating on the tale as the end and the technique as the means.
I'm going to get to see things I've always wanted to see. That's enough for me.
Dude, we're talking operating systems, not mass media. $19MM in a week for an operating system for a niche machine is pretty fucking good. And that's without selling it on a single Mac. TiBooks and iBooks are flying off the shelves, and I'd be willing to bet that the next iMac (the widescreen one) will revitalize that line. When July rolls around and OS X is the default install, there's gonna be a whole shitload more *nix boxen out there. Very suddenly. I do believe that MS might like to nip that in the bud. And in the FWIW category, considering what he's done with the company since coming back, his compensation is not out of line, jerk or not.