Winterblink wrote: "Lets do a search on Amazon.com for Men in Black [amazon.com] as an example. Minus the MiB2 movie and a duplicate entry, we have FOUR EDITIONS of the same DVD. "Collector's", "Deluxe", "Collector's (with DTS)", and the recently released "Limited Edition" (which I might add does NOT include a DTS track). "
Last night, was going to go see LotR at the (two-) dollar theatre, but dinner went late, so I missed the start. So, since I figured I would want it anyhow, and since I would complain at near-retail prices for used copies for a while, and since I don't feel like taking a Kia test drive for the free movie... I bought it from the ugly blue-and-yellow logo place.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to watch it soon:)
timothy
p.s. And then, like some other people have suggested, I will probably wait for the UltraMondoSuperDeluxe all-three-movies-and-a-kiss-from-Galadriel version. I might continue to buy the "normal" versions of the next two movies, though.
Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) has some of the best literature ever written, from Alice in Wonderland to Emile Zola; you can download the complete works of Mark Twain as a single zipped archive:)
I wonder if anyone can suggest good analogs to PG for music and / or spoken-word materials, things like classic radio broadcasts, famous speeches, audio books with appropriate licenses, etc...
blogging is one, and I'm not sure the best buzzword for the other, though it's probably something close to "disintermediation."
Point is, I want to be able to walk through the NYC metaverse and read notes posted like "THIS RESTAURANT SUCKS! Despite being in Chinatown, this place is slow, and serves vomitous food with slow, resentful service. And not even the vomitous food that you ordered."
Or "Landlord here is a sucker; if one of your housemates is a cute girl, have *her* do the rent negotiations."
Or "This museum is worth the price, especially on Wednesday (half-price day)"
Or "This park is dangerous between the hours of midnight and the next midnight."
gwernol wrote: "The product names do not help here either."
What's wrong with "Cinelerra"? I frequently end up defending Ogg / Ogg Vorbis (which I happen to like, and think are no less euphonic than sterile-sounding MP3), but "Cinelerra" is one I figured nearly everyone would like. Easy to say, has the nice Cine- sound (like "telecine"), a little bit sexy but not trampish...
Actually, it's one of the best software names, IMO. ("VirtualDub"? "Outlook"? "Kazaa"?) Do you have a better name in mind, and if so, What? (Serious question.)
Microsoft attempting to use political pressure to restrict competition, lapping at the public trough for the biggest single chunk of its business, and participation in privacy-reducing, anti-individual measures like Passport might not please the average Ayndroid. Those are the sorts of things that Rand's villains would do.
(Now, different issue is the harrassment MS has faced from the competitor-fueled antitrust case;))
Glad to see that we arrived at similar numbers through similar reasoning. I'm tempted to heat up the credit card and do some ordering, but I shouldn't;)
Out of curiosity (well, and lust), I wanted to see what a low-end -- but complete, new -- system capable of running Cinellera would cost. That is, with no parts cannibalized from current computers, as if I was building / installing this sheerly for video play in addition to existing systems. (Actually, as you can see, I cheated in here with one or two things, but only slightly.) I decided I don't need video capture (yet), but I do want firewire in so I can play with video from my camcorder. Also, a CD-RW drive for making disks for give-away. The only place I went above the recommended minimum (I think, since I glanced and sought, didn't really study) is in spec'ing 1800 rather than 1600 dual processors.
Prices are from Pricewatch as of 20020813; most of them are the current lowball bid there, but some are just *near* the lowball bid. Slightly arbitrary, but hoping to avoid the worst liars.
To cut the drumroll short, the total price of the system I assemble here is (very close to) USD1350. Probably, the US is the cheapest place to make such a system, and only you can adjust for local currencies elsewhere:) Even so, that's not a cheap computer considering what can be had for under a thousand dollars right now, but is *is* less than most laptops, and cheaper than the lowest end G4 tower (and I am not knocking Apple hardware or software here, please don't start:)).
So here is my hypothetical firewire-only Cinelerra system -- is there anything hugely wrong with it? I've listed the components that I found, some with some additional info grabbed from the pricewatch product information. I'm not very familiar with dual athlon motherboards etc, perhaps I've picked a lemon, but this is all a thought experiment anyhow.
(At the end is another bit on price, lowballing even more, trampling on the recommendations:))
with cpu - Single Athlon MP 1800+ with Coolermaster heat sink & fan -complete combo kit,with 1 yr warranty.
(Part - S2460@1800(1)+)
Additional CPU: $125
Actually, listed for $137 at the moment, but I'm taking a slight liberty with this component, on the basis that I would order everything else, assemble, test, play, etc, and order this a month or so later; I bet by the time everything was in place, that will have been a fair price drop to calculate.
Video Card: $50
Would not be anything fancy, I realize.
1 GB DDR RAM: $222
ONLINE ORDER ONLY - major names, 512MB PC2700 333MHz DDR SDRAM CL2 CAS2.5 2.5v, 6 layer board,dealer OK
(just guessing; I don't see a list of supported cards on the HV site, so I'm guessing midrange of the first page of results:))
Sound Card: $25
(here too, I'm hoping that's good enough for a conservative estimate for a compatible card, even if it's not a great one.)
CD-RW drive: $35
(That's a computer-show price, but not that unreasonable for simply watching sales etc, IMO)
Keyboard and Mouse: $25
That $25 is for a logitech marble mouse. Keyboard scrounged.
Monitor: $200
(Scrimping here, but hey, *some* monitor is going to cost $200 or less, and even a small LCD can be had for $300... with video, I know it's a bad place to cut corners, but, well, this is all about cutting corners!)
That makes (in order) $(95, 297, 125, 50, 222, 264, 50, 25, 35, 25, 200)
Which, if I've just tossed the sums together correctly, comes to $1388. Rough number, since only some of those items include shipping cost etc, and obviously some of them guesstimates anyhow.
Now, subtracting certain things to arrive at a nicer price:
To make it a 512MB RAM system lowers it by $111 (new total, $1289)
Going with only one 120GB HD (hey, I've edited small videos on my 10GB iBook) subtracts $132 (new total $1157)
Going to a single Athlon 1800MP (dammit, any program that needs TWO of those is outright *nuts*!:)) cuts back $125 (new total tantalizingly close to a thousand: $1032)
Now, further scrimping on the basis that sound cards are ubiquitous and cheap ($10 at a computer show, saving $15) (and Yes, that I'll have a cheap one as a known limitation to this system), that I have an existing monitor, keyboard and trackball as well as a KVM switch to let me use them (letting me chop $225), that PC 2100 RAM can be had for $93/512MB (saving $18), that I could "scrape by" with a single 80GB drive instead ($85 shipped, saving $47) lets me cull another 47 + 18 + 15 + 225 for a total of $305.
Now, I'm down to a case / motherboard / single processor / video card / 80GB drive / firewire card / sound card, with scrounged keyboard and mouse, but the price is much more attractive - $727
Now, can anyone comment on whether such a system, though below the recommended list, would actually be a workable way to use Cinelerra?
well, people have different approaches to spending money / time.
I'm sure you're right for many people about just plunking down the extra money for Premiere or similar but not all. Just like some people do their own auto-repair, even if technically it's not economical on a dollar-per-hour basis -- calculating enjoyment / satisfaction is difficult, and you can only really do it by observation. ("Yup, test subject Dr. Smonger is again changing his own oil...he seems to enjoy it.")
For many people, the best hobbies are all about learning esoterica -- photographers, hot-rodders, kids into complicated game-pad manipulations to get extra lives, whatever. (I know not all photographers are interested in the intricate details, but boy, a lot of them are, same I'm sure goes for any analogous group.) Cinelerra looks like it could be satisfying to a pretty big chunk of computer tinkerers with camcorders.
If I did have the cash for a movie-editing box, I don't think I'd pay the extra money on top to get both a Microsoft operating system and an expensive editor if it were my machine, but I'm not likely to get a box anything close to the recommended specs here for a while;) Still, premiere + windows is money I'd rather put into RAM and hard drive space, or a good microphone...
A lot of Nikon coolpix users have paid $50 for the famous eBook on using it, and Cinelerra / HV might be smart to make something similar. Canon makes some great video cameras that are widely marketed at the "prosumer" crowd (XL1, GL1), and even though that term may grate on the ears of anyone so labeled, there are a lot of prosumers (arrgh, the sound! the sound!) out there.
Heck, anyone who learned Blender reasonably well (not me) will probably *prefer* the Cinelerra interface to, say, anything made by Apple:)
And if you count that group as including both high-dollar amateurs (dentists, lawyers, even programmers with some extra money) with an interest in creative editing, and low-budget professional users (like the folks who do wedding videos and take your guided horse-ride video etc, as opposed to the makers of Waterworld)*, there really is a big potential audience. Money to spend on it + motivation to learn a rigorous interface... just like the people who buy the new "mid-range" (but still pricey) digital SLRs.
Also, Heroine Virtual's website is always fun to read, a little bit like Dr. Bronner's soap. When I have (garrh!) a dual 1.6GHz athlon system with a gig of RAM and a firewire card, I hope to find it usable for simple editing, because it looks rather fun.
timothy
* And those overlapping groups is just how I would define "prosumer" anyhow.
please note that you can a) block the topic from every appearing on your page, b) block all of my posts and c) if you'd like, submit things you'd rather see.
Yes, those are the three obvious answers I see, plus the fourth even-more-obvious one. A lot of random letters don't interest me very much, so I guess YMMV.
danheskett wrote: "Glad other software worked for you, but lots of times, a critical feature is missing from an OSS package, and attitude is that 'you don't really need that anyways.'"
This is a valid point (that developers sometimes / often don't listen to users), but not confined to open-source software. I've made feature suggestions, web-page corrections of fact or phrasing, and minor bug reports to Free software developers, and most of them resulted in quick results (or at least responses) from the developers. If you wanted a new feature in Microsoft Word (what new feature would fit?:)), how likely do you think that your suggestion would even make it to a developer with the power to make the right change? My complaint letters to Adobe and Microsoft about various bugs / misfeatures over the last several years have gone either unanswered or yielded only bland, canned responses.
(Also, in many cases, the "you don't need that anyhow" is followed by "... unless you want to pay big bucks for another product higher up our product line." Or even small bucks, like QuickTime Pro.)
It's nice that Free software programmers tend to be more accessable, less bound by corporate rule-mongering than employees at NDA-loaded, market-driven, lawyer-heavy companies are.
Even if they use their time / money / life energies somewhat differently, the *programmers* themselves might be happy to make changes in both cases, but Free programmers seem better able to effect them. That's been my experience, anyhow:)
I don't run Windows on any of my machines, although I occasionally work from borrowed machines, some of which are running it -- when I visit my dad's place for instance, he has a machine running some version of Windows. Before discovering Linux, my computer preference was for Macintosh machines.
A few of my x86 machines (the laptops) came pre-installed with Windows, and one of them (not handy) may still have it installed on a partition. I'm too cheap to buy Windows without a compelling reason to. I have a copy of Windows 2000 (given to me as a gift) purchased in Indonesia for about USD2, and not one Microsoft has blessed, but I've never felt much of a hankering to install it anywhere.
I really don't play computer games, at least not the variety that only run on Windows, because I don't find them very interesting -- I'm a boring person:) I do like FlightGear (www.flightgear.org) and many of the small games that come with a typical Linux install (tux racer is fun, cannon smash, frozen bubble, and the addictive jezzball); I understand that Microsoft makes a good flight simulator, but I have not played it.
If Microsoft wants to pay for advertising, what would you like Slashdot (an advertising supported site for which the editorial staff does not select the advertisers), well, that's their right to do.
"It may not be easy to stop playing windows games, but you have other options." Heh, guess I shouldn't start, if it's so tough to stop. Of course, some games written for Windows can be played on Free operating systems using emulation, perhaps one day I'll try some more.
Yes, I know, it's a PDA, that flash memory is sufficient for many things, that I don't need to carry around the library of congress, etc, but still. I would like to be able to carry around a large collection of music, perhaps a movie in VCD or DivX format, many books, a small Linux image like the Progeny Net (debian) Installer...
This would have been a silly complaint not that long ago, but the iPod shows that it wouldn't take *that* much more space to do this... perhaps a separate iPod-sized add on which is mostly battery?:)
(I'm not saying you're actually my son, or that I have one.)
The edition I saw in Walmart yesterevening, and was tempted to buy but did not, was the 'standard' (not widescreen) version. All issue of fluff aside, this is not the way I'd rather own a copy LotR. Maybe they also had the widescreen somewhere in stock, but I didn't see it.
The *best* deal (wish I'd known to take advantage of it) was the one Blockbuster gave, with 10 free rentals + the 2-disk version for $27. However, since my brother did get this, I will hold out till October at least and get the one with extra footage. I wish it was like Dune, with a bajillion-hour version somewhere...
... that really, really, really, incredibly good-looking people like me made you feel so bad about yourself.
Just for that, I won't be reading *your* eugoogolie!
timothy
p.s. Errr, just kidding. I just really liked that movie; it deserves repeated viewings. If you didn't like it once, by the 5th or 6th time you might have changed your mind. Even if you hated it it has many great soundbites to pull for a pinball game.
p.p.s. Even better, as my brother suggested, might be a video game, complete with walk-off, gasoline fight, cemetery shoot out, etc.
The biggest hope I have at the moment for video production stuff on Linux is Jahshaka.* (see http://jahshakafx.sourceforge.net/)
Really, I'd be 80% happy with a freely licensed (GPL, BSD, whatver) ultra-simple (but grahical, something like iMovie on the Mac) program which would let me rearrange chunks of video so I could cull the junk which shows what a bad cameraman I really am, then save the result in a choice of formats (DV, MPEG4, hopefully before I die Ogg Theora).
Fancy titling and 3D effects are nice enough, just not something I want / need / wish for as much.
timothy
* And people complain about the name of Ogg Vorbis!
1) I pointed out that I don't *generally* find humor sites funny, but that this book was an exception, and it's actually made me appreciate better the website from which it sprang.
2) Paid to run reviews? Wow! I had no idea. I wonder if Andrew Marlatt pays me directly, or if I have to go through the publisher, Broadway Books? Or will Hemos send me a special check marked "book payola?" I'm really glad to know about this, because I could use an oil change, not to mention a newer laptop. Do you have any idea how much I might be paid? Please answer soon, because it will affect what I tell my broker later this week.
Sounds like a good deal, the sort of deal that MS gets by providing cheap software to students in the US, but without the hassle of moving around actual disks, paying for packaging, lawyers and underlings to deal with the licensing, etc.
So kids graduate from school with knowledge / familiarity with MS products, then they go to work. (Not that all Malaysians get deskjobs with computers, but talking about those who can and do.)
Now lowers the boom. That software it was OK to use for free (read "get used to") isn't OK for your employer to get for free. Thanks, here's your manual and shiny certificate.
Publically, MS probably needs to not thank anyone in Malaysia aloud, and keep on the track of the evil malicious dirty pirates...
When I was about 5, I put the legs of a large stapler into a 120v wall outlet. I saw a blue-white flash, smelled ozone, and then was inexplicably on a table in front of my surprised Sunday School classmates. (My muscles convulsed and launched me a bit.) Much more interesting to me than Sunday School. The teacher kept trying to make me admit that I stuck a pencil in the outlet, and I repeatedly denied this. Nope, not a pencil.
The outlet took the brunt of the visible damage, though -- it was cracked, blackened and partly melted. My thumb got a pretty interesting scar which lasted for the next few years but has unfortunately departed.
I was interested to see that Shuttle has a new case out with an AGP slot, but it's still one-off from what I'd like, because it doesn't take AMD chips, which I prefer.
Does anyone know of a similar case for Durons / Athlons? I hope this is Shuttle's next move, because these cases are quite nice looking.
The MPAA has a special email address for reporting "piracy" -- though I don't know of any planned piracy, it seems like the place that they would like to be told about violations of the DMCA as well, so I sent them this note:
- - - - Dear Sirs:
I work for Slashdot (http://slashdot.org), a Web site concerned primarily with free software, electronic freedoms, computer hardware and other things of interest to computer enthusiasts, as well as to those generally interested in online freedom. The DMCA (and the MPAA's involvement in that and similar laws) are frequent subjects of the postings and discussion at Slashdot.
I guess that someone at the MPAA is aware of Bruce Perens' demonstration Friday afternoon of (mostly trivial) circumvention techniques which allow consumers to view DVDs in contravention of the Digital Milenium Copyright Act. If not, here is a URL which links to both a discussion of this planned demonstration and an Infoworld article on it; several of the comments made in this discussion come from Mr. Perens himself. (The text of this note will be posted to the discussion as well, and you are invited to respond to it there, if you woud like.)
Will the MPAA be pursuing action (filing a complaint) against Mr. Perens for this public demonstration? If not, does this mean that other people may also use similar techniques to enjoy their own DVDs without fear of prosecution? I would also like to show people how to defeat annoying region locks and encryption standards which make it dofficult to watch the DVDs I have purchased.
I look forward to hearing from you; if the @hotline address is not the right place to address this inquiry, I would appreciate hearing from you about where I should direct it instead.
Oh, that'd be my niece, who I get to visit and carry around a bit tomorrow:)
She's ready to beat up (or at least intimidate) other kids who are the same age. They're building new charts to accomodate her. When she learns to walk, I believe people will find a trail of destruction in her path.
Slashdot Mirror
Winterblink wrote: "Lets do a search on Amazon.com for Men in Black [amazon.com] as an example. Minus the MiB2 movie and a duplicate entry, we have FOUR EDITIONS of the same DVD. "Collector's", "Deluxe", "Collector's (with DTS)", and the recently released "Limited Edition" (which I might add does NOT include a DTS track). "
;)
Of course it doesn't. It's limited.
timothy
Last night, was going to go see LotR at the (two-) dollar theatre, but dinner went late, so I missed the start. So, since I figured I would want it anyhow, and since I would complain at near-retail prices for used copies for a while, and since I don't feel like taking a Kia test drive for the free movie ... I bought it from the ugly blue-and-yellow logo place.
:)
Hopefully I'll get a chance to watch it soon
timothy
p.s. And then, like some other people have suggested, I will probably wait for the UltraMondoSuperDeluxe all-three-movies-and-a-kiss-from-Galadriel version. I might continue to buy the "normal" versions of the next two movies, though.
I fixed it, was my slip for letting that through.
timothy
Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/) has some of the best literature ever written, from Alice in Wonderland to Emile Zola; you can download the complete works of Mark Twain as a single zipped archive :)
...
I wonder if anyone can suggest good analogs to PG for music and / or spoken-word materials, things like classic radio broadcasts, famous speeches, audio books with appropriate licenses, etc
timothy
blogging is one, and I'm not sure the best buzzword for the other, though it's probably something close to "disintermediation."
Point is, I want to be able to walk through the NYC metaverse and read notes posted like "THIS RESTAURANT SUCKS! Despite being in Chinatown, this place is slow, and serves vomitous food with slow, resentful service. And not even the vomitous food that you ordered."
Or "Landlord here is a sucker; if one of your housemates is a cute girl, have *her* do the rent negotiations."
Or "This museum is worth the price, especially on Wednesday (half-price day)"
Or "This park is dangerous between the hours of midnight and the next midnight."
(details facetious, idea serious.)
timothy
gwernol wrote: "The product names do not help here either."
...
What's wrong with "Cinelerra"? I frequently end up defending Ogg / Ogg Vorbis (which I happen to like, and think are no less euphonic than sterile-sounding MP3), but "Cinelerra" is one I figured nearly everyone would like. Easy to say, has the nice Cine- sound (like "telecine"), a little bit sexy but not trampish
Actually, it's one of the best software names, IMO. ("VirtualDub"? "Outlook"? "Kazaa"?) Do you have a better name in mind, and if so, What? (Serious question.)
timothy
Microsoft attempting to use political pressure to restrict competition, lapping at the public trough for the biggest single chunk of its business, and participation in privacy-reducing, anti-individual measures like Passport might not please the average Ayndroid. Those are the sorts of things that Rand's villains would do.
;))
(Now, different issue is the harrassment MS has faced from the competitor-fueled antitrust case
timothy
I read your comment right after I posted my own much more long-winded comment in the same vein:
0 61 585
;)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=37865&cid=4
Glad to see that we arrived at similar numbers through similar reasoning. I'm tempted to heat up the credit card and do some ordering, but I shouldn't
timothy
Out of curiosity (well, and lust), I wanted to see what a low-end -- but complete, new -- system capable of running Cinellera would cost. That is, with no parts cannibalized from current computers, as if I was building / installing this sheerly for video play in addition to existing systems. (Actually, as you can see, I cheated in here with one or two things, but only slightly.) I decided I don't need video capture (yet), but I do want firewire in so I can play with video from my camcorder. Also, a CD-RW drive for making disks for give-away. The only place I went above the recommended minimum (I think, since I glanced and sought, didn't really study) is in spec'ing 1800 rather than 1600 dual processors.
:) Even so, that's not a cheap computer considering what can be had for under a thousand dollars right now, but is *is* less than most laptops, and cheaper than the lowest end G4 tower (and I am not knocking Apple hardware or software here, please don't start :)).
:))
,p4 450w(460w power now)
,with 1 yr warranty .
;)
:))
... with video, I know it's a bad place to cut corners, but, well, this is all about cutting corners!)
:)) cuts back $125 (new total tantalizingly close to a thousand: $1032)
Prices are from Pricewatch as of 20020813; most of them are the current lowball bid there, but some are just *near* the lowball bid. Slightly arbitrary, but hoping to avoid the worst liars.
To cut the drumroll short, the total price of the system I assemble here is (very close to) USD1350. Probably, the US is the cheapest place to make such a system, and only you can adjust for local currencies elsewhere
So here is my hypothetical firewire-only Cinelerra system -- is there anything hugely wrong with it? I've listed the components that I found, some with some additional info grabbed from the pricewatch product information. I'm not very familiar with dual athlon motherboards etc, perhaps I've picked a lemon, but this is all a thought experiment anyhow.
(At the end is another bit on price, lowballing even more, trampling on the recommendations
timothy
Case: $95
Skyhawk AL-ATX4378-9/450 aluminum midtower Silver 8bay ATX.3 fans sky hawk
[Wasn't sure if much less power would be adequate for a dual athlon
system]
Motherboard and CPU: $297
Tyan S2460 RETAIL BOX 2Yr Warr. PCI-1 AGP - DMA100 -DDR memory ATX,Tiger
MP AMD Dual AMD-762 Chipset
with cpu - Single Athlon MP 1800+ with Coolermaster heat sink & fan
-complete combo kit
(Part - S2460@1800(1)+)
Additional CPU: $125
Actually, listed for $137 at the moment, but I'm taking a slight liberty with this component, on the basis that I would order everything else, assemble, test, play, etc, and order this a month or so later; I bet by the time everything was in place, that will have been a fair price drop to
calculate.
Video Card: $50
Would not be anything fancy, I realize.
1 GB DDR RAM: $222
ONLINE ORDER ONLY -
major names, 512MB PC2700 333MHz DDR SDRAM CL2 CAS2.5 2.5v, 6 layer
board,dealer OK
$111 -- x2 = $222
240MB of Hard Drive: $264
120.0GB EIDE 7200RPM INTERNAL Model# IC35L120AVVA07, Part# 07N9219 - OEM,
DRIVE ONLY - 120GB
These are IBM drives, for good or ill
$132 x 2 = $264
Firewire Card: $50
(just guessing; I don't see a list of supported cards on the HV site, so I'm guessing midrange of the first page of results
Sound Card: $25
(here too, I'm hoping that's good enough for a conservative estimate for a compatible card, even if it's not a great one.)
CD-RW drive: $35
(That's a computer-show price, but not that unreasonable for simply watching sales etc, IMO)
Keyboard and Mouse: $25
That $25 is for a logitech marble mouse. Keyboard scrounged.
Monitor: $200
(Scrimping here, but hey, *some* monitor is going to cost $200 or less, and even a small LCD can be had for $300
That makes (in order) $(95, 297, 125, 50, 222, 264, 50, 25, 35, 25, 200)
Which, if I've just tossed the sums together correctly, comes to $1388. Rough number, since only some of those items include shipping cost etc, and obviously some of them guesstimates anyhow.
Now, subtracting certain things to arrive at a nicer price:
To make it a 512MB RAM system lowers it by $111 (new total, $1289)
Going with only one 120GB HD (hey, I've edited small videos on my 10GB iBook) subtracts $132 (new total $1157)
Going to a single Athlon 1800MP (dammit, any program that needs TWO of those is outright *nuts*!
Now, further scrimping on the basis that sound cards are ubiquitous and cheap ($10 at a computer show, saving $15) (and Yes, that I'll have a cheap one as a known limitation to this system), that I have an existing monitor, keyboard and trackball as well as a KVM switch to let me use them (letting me chop $225), that PC 2100 RAM can be had for $93/512MB (saving $18), that I could "scrape by" with a single 80GB drive instead ($85 shipped, saving $47) lets me cull another 47 + 18 + 15 + 225 for a total of $305.
Now, I'm down to a case / motherboard / single processor / video card / 80GB drive / firewire card / sound card, with scrounged keyboard and mouse, but the price is much more attractive - $727
Now, can anyone comment on whether such a system, though below the recommended list, would actually be a workable way to use Cinelerra?
well, people have different approaches to spending money / time.
...he seems to enjoy it.")
;) Still, premiere + windows is money I'd rather put into RAM and hard drive space, or a good microphone ...
I'm sure you're right for many people about just plunking down the extra money for Premiere or similar but not all. Just like some people do their own auto-repair, even if technically it's not economical on a dollar-per-hour basis -- calculating enjoyment / satisfaction is difficult, and you can only really do it by observation. ("Yup, test subject Dr. Smonger is again changing his own oil
For many people, the best hobbies are all about learning esoterica -- photographers, hot-rodders, kids into complicated game-pad manipulations to get extra lives, whatever. (I know not all photographers are interested in the intricate details, but boy, a lot of them are, same I'm sure goes for any analogous group.) Cinelerra looks like it could be satisfying to a pretty big chunk of computer tinkerers with camcorders.
If I did have the cash for a movie-editing box, I don't think I'd pay the extra money on top to get both a Microsoft operating system and an expensive editor if it were my machine, but I'm not likely to get a box anything close to the recommended specs here for a while
timothy
A lot of Nikon coolpix users have paid $50 for the famous eBook on using it, and Cinelerra / HV might be smart to make something similar. Canon makes some great video cameras that are widely marketed at the "prosumer" crowd (XL1, GL1), and even though that term may grate on the ears of anyone so labeled, there are a lot of prosumers (arrgh, the sound! the sound!) out there.
:)
... just like the people who buy the new "mid-range" (but still pricey) digital SLRs.
Heck, anyone who learned Blender reasonably well (not me) will probably *prefer* the Cinelerra interface to, say, anything made by Apple
And if you count that group as including both high-dollar amateurs (dentists, lawyers, even programmers with some extra money) with an interest in creative editing, and low-budget professional users (like the folks who do wedding videos and take your guided horse-ride video etc, as opposed to the makers of Waterworld)*, there really is a big potential audience. Money to spend on it + motivation to learn a rigorous interface
Also, Heroine Virtual's website is always fun to read, a little bit like Dr. Bronner's soap. When I have (garrh!) a dual 1.6GHz athlon system with a gig of RAM and a firewire card, I hope to find it usable for simple editing, because it looks rather fun.
timothy
* And those overlapping groups is just how I would define "prosumer" anyhow.
Yes, those are the three obvious answers I see, plus the fourth even-more-obvious one. A lot of random letters don't interest me very much, so I guess YMMV.
timothy
danheskett wrote: "Glad other software worked for you, but lots of times, a critical feature is missing from an OSS package, and attitude is that 'you don't really need that anyways.'"
:)), how likely do you think that your suggestion would even make it to a developer with the power to make the right change? My complaint letters to Adobe and Microsoft about various bugs / misfeatures over the last several years have gone either unanswered or yielded only bland, canned responses.
:)
This is a valid point (that developers sometimes / often don't listen to users), but not confined to open-source software. I've made feature suggestions, web-page corrections of fact or phrasing, and minor bug reports to Free software developers, and most of them resulted in quick results (or at least responses) from the developers. If you wanted a new feature in Microsoft Word (what new feature would fit?
(Also, in many cases, the "you don't need that anyhow" is followed by "... unless you want to pay big bucks for another product higher up our product line." Or even small bucks, like QuickTime Pro.)
It's nice that Free software programmers tend to be more accessable, less bound by corporate rule-mongering than employees at NDA-loaded, market-driven, lawyer-heavy companies are.
Even if they use their time / money / life energies somewhat differently, the *programmers* themselves might be happy to make changes in both cases, but Free programmers seem better able to effect them. That's been my experience, anyhow
timothy
I don't run Windows on any of my machines, although I occasionally work from borrowed machines, some of which are running it -- when I visit my dad's place for instance, he has a machine running some version of Windows. Before discovering Linux, my computer preference was for Macintosh machines.
:) I do like FlightGear (www.flightgear.org) and many of the small games that come with a typical Linux install (tux racer is fun, cannon smash, frozen bubble, and the addictive jezzball); I understand that Microsoft makes a good flight simulator, but I have not played it.
A few of my x86 machines (the laptops) came pre-installed with Windows, and one of them (not handy) may still have it installed on a partition. I'm too cheap to buy Windows without a compelling reason to. I have a copy of Windows 2000 (given to me as a gift) purchased in Indonesia for about USD2, and not one Microsoft has blessed, but I've never felt much of a hankering to install it anywhere.
I really don't play computer games, at least not the variety that only run on Windows, because I don't find them very interesting -- I'm a boring person
If Microsoft wants to pay for advertising, what would you like Slashdot (an advertising supported site for which the editorial staff does not select the advertisers), well, that's their right to do.
"It may not be easy to stop playing windows games, but you have other options." Heh, guess I shouldn't start, if it's so tough to stop. Of course, some games written for Windows can be played on Free operating systems using emulation, perhaps one day I'll try some more.
timothy
If a zaurus had a hard drive, I'd buy it.
...
... perhaps a separate iPod-sized add on which is mostly battery? :)
Yes, I know, it's a PDA, that flash memory is sufficient for many things, that I don't need to carry around the library of congress, etc, but still. I would like to be able to carry around a large collection of music, perhaps a movie in VCD or DivX format, many books, a small Linux image like the Progeny Net (debian) Installer
This would have been a silly complaint not that long ago, but the iPod shows that it wouldn't take *that* much more space to do this
timothy
(I'm not saying you're actually my son, or that I have one.)
...
The edition I saw in Walmart yesterevening, and was tempted to buy but did not, was the 'standard' (not widescreen) version. All issue of fluff aside, this is not the way I'd rather own a copy LotR. Maybe they also had the widescreen somewhere in stock, but I didn't see it.
The *best* deal (wish I'd known to take advantage of it) was the one Blockbuster gave, with 10 free rentals + the 2-disk version for $27. However, since my brother did get this, I will hold out till October at least and get the one with extra footage. I wish it was like Dune, with a bajillion-hour version somewhere
timothy
... that really, really, really, incredibly good-looking people like me made you feel so bad about yourself.
Just for that, I won't be reading *your* eugoogolie!
timothy
p.s. Errr, just kidding. I just really liked that movie; it deserves repeated viewings. If you didn't like it once, by the 5th or 6th time you might have changed your mind. Even if you hated it it has many great soundbites to pull for a pinball game.
p.p.s. Even better, as my brother suggested, might be a video game, complete with walk-off, gasoline fight, cemetery shoot out, etc.
p.p.p.s. "what is this, a post for *ants!?*"
The biggest hope I have at the moment for video production stuff on Linux is Jahshaka.* (see http://jahshakafx.sourceforge.net/)
Really, I'd be 80% happy with a freely licensed (GPL, BSD, whatver) ultra-simple (but grahical, something like iMovie on the Mac) program which would let me rearrange chunks of video so I could cull the junk which shows what a bad cameraman I really am, then save the result in a choice of formats (DV, MPEG4, hopefully before I die Ogg Theora).
Fancy titling and 3D effects are nice enough, just not something I want / need / wish for as much.
timothy
* And people complain about the name of Ogg Vorbis!
Hmm, there are two things wrong here :)
1) I pointed out that I don't *generally* find humor sites funny, but that this book was an exception, and it's actually made me appreciate better the website from which it sprang.
2) Paid to run reviews? Wow! I had no idea. I wonder if Andrew Marlatt pays me directly, or if I have to go through the publisher, Broadway Books? Or will Hemos send me a special check marked "book payola?" I'm really glad to know about this, because I could use an oil change, not to mention a newer laptop. Do you have any idea how much I might be paid? Please answer soon, because it will affect what I tell my broker later this week.
timothy
how hard would you (really) fight this?
...
Sounds like a good deal, the sort of deal that MS gets by providing cheap software to students in the US, but without the hassle of moving around actual disks, paying for packaging, lawyers and underlings to deal with the licensing, etc.
So kids graduate from school with knowledge / familiarity with MS products, then they go to work. (Not that all Malaysians get deskjobs with computers, but talking about those who can and do.)
Now lowers the boom. That software it was OK to use for free (read "get used to") isn't OK for your employer to get for free. Thanks, here's your manual and shiny certificate.
Publically, MS probably needs to not thank anyone in Malaysia aloud, and keep on the track of the evil malicious dirty pirates
timothy
more importantly, bring along your smart, cute, single, forgiving, sarcastic female friends and / or relatives so lunch will be more fun.
Can travel.
timothy
When I was about 5, I put the legs of a large stapler into a 120v wall outlet. I saw a blue-white flash, smelled ozone, and then was inexplicably on a table in front of my surprised Sunday School classmates. (My muscles convulsed and launched me a bit.) Much more interesting to me than Sunday School. The teacher kept trying to make me admit that I stuck a pencil in the outlet, and I repeatedly denied this. Nope, not a pencil.
The outlet took the brunt of the visible damage, though -- it was cracked, blackened and partly melted. My thumb got a pretty interesting scar which lasted for the next few years but has unfortunately departed.
timothy
I was interested to see that Shuttle has a new case out with an AGP slot, but it's still one-off from what I'd like, because it doesn't take AMD chips, which I prefer.
Does anyone know of a similar case for Durons / Athlons? I hope this is Shuttle's next move, because these cases are quite nice looking.
timothy
The MPAA has a special email address for reporting "piracy" -- though I don't know of any planned piracy, it seems like the place that they would like to be told about violations of the DMCA as well, so I sent them this note:
5 6
- - - -
Dear Sirs:
I work for Slashdot (http://slashdot.org), a Web site concerned
primarily with free software, electronic freedoms, computer hardware and
other things of interest to computer enthusiasts, as well as to those
generally interested in online freedom. The DMCA (and the MPAA's
involvement in that and similar laws) are frequent subjects of the
postings and discussion at Slashdot.
I guess that someone at the MPAA is aware of Bruce Perens' demonstration
Friday afternoon of (mostly trivial) circumvention techniques which allow
consumers to view DVDs in contravention of the Digital Milenium Copyright
Act. If not, here is a URL which links to both a discussion of this
planned demonstration and an Infoworld article on it; several of the
comments made in this discussion come from Mr. Perens himself. (The text
of this note will be posted to the discussion as well, and you are invited
to respond to it there, if you woud like.)
URL: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/24/04152
Will the MPAA be pursuing action (filing a complaint) against Mr. Perens
for this public demonstration? If not, does this mean that other people
may also use similar techniques to enjoy their own DVDs without fear of
prosecution? I would also like to show people how to defeat annoying
region locks and encryption standards which make it dofficult to watch the
DVDs I have purchased.
I look forward to hearing from you; if the @hotline address is not the
right place to address this inquiry, I would appreciate hearing from you about where I should direct it instead.
Sincerely,
[signed, etc.]
Oh, that'd be my niece, who I get to visit and carry around a bit tomorrow :)
She's ready to beat up (or at least intimidate) other kids who are the same age. They're building new charts to accomodate her. When she learns to walk, I believe people will find a trail of destruction in her path.
Gigantic baby in the good sense.
timothy