...but not intentionally. A friend of mine once called me over to his shop to check out his new IBM PC 286 clone and a clone-PostScript laser printer. You can tell this was a LONG time ago. I fired up Corel Draw and did a few odd things, like a PostScript pattern fill inside a clipping path. I sent it to print and nothing happened. It was 5PM on Friday, he said he never turns off his computers, so we just left it running and left for the weekend. On monday morning, I got an excited phone call from my friend, the page had just popped out of the printer! That means the print job ran on the laser printer's processor for about 2.5 days.
And just how do you know this? From reading websites?
ILM has never been an all-SGI shop, they used to be a primarily Mac/SGI shop.
My friend who worked at ILM back around the late 1980s (the time frame we're talking about here) told me how their digital matte process ran on a custom app written exclusively for Macs. John Knoll personally gave me a copy of Photoshop.096b after showing me some of his Photoshop/Swivel animatics for "Hunt for Red October." Photoshop would not exist except for ILM, which needed some specialized tools, so John Knoll wrote em.
Anyway, it is not surprising that much of this process is shrouded in mystery, ILM is very secretive. Even unto this day, the ILM street address is a not-very-well-kept secret, their name doesn't appear on the building, or in any published literature. My friend at ILM told me that employees were prohibited, upon penalty of termination, of EVER having an email address with their real name, or ever using their real name anywhere on the internet. They were concerned about the legions of Star Wars weirdos getting ahold of an employee's info and stalking him.
Right.. Someone who needs a $6 ethernet cable from Cables R Us should instead buy a $15 bulk spool of CAT5 cable, a $10 box of connectors, and a $15 crimper tool to put the connectors on the cable. And then they can use the box of leftover cable as a nice footstool, and the crimper makes a nice paperweight.
You obviously don't know how Japanese corporations work. Sharp has deep pockets, and is fully committed to keeping prestige products on sale, even if they're not making money, even if it's only limited markets (i.e. Japan only) in order to keep their name established as a market leader. And then someday the market will ripen, and they'll still be poised to make a big splash. That's how they look at it.
You're BOTH misreading it. Macs and SGIs worked side by side. SGI gave ILM special favors, in return for ILM pretending the Star Wars films were exclusively done with SGI machines.
Most people don't realize, much of the primary CG work done on the Star Wars films are done on Macs. But ILM signed contracts with SGI which prohibits them from acknowledging the contribution of any system other than SGI. Inside ILM, this contractual obligation is known as "the Jedi Clause." So the contribution of Macs and Mac users to these films go largely unrecognized.
If I were an HR manager at Apple, I would never EVER consider offering these guys a job. I'd want them exactly where they are, trying to figure out the secret of life, and working with people who are trying to cure cancer.
Sony service can be horrible if you're not in a big city. I just had a big runaround myself. It could hardly get worse, I'm sure Sony had to act.
I bought a 32 inch Sony Trinitron XBR^2 set a few years back, their top quality product, made in Japan with Sony's highest labor costs (they were shifting production to Mexico and across Asia), that set was widely considered the best TV ever made, and I expected it to last until HDTV became affordable (which should be a few years yet). But the power supply blew, a simple repair, I thought.
My local dealer went out of business, so I called the largest nearby dealer, Ultimate Electronics. First they told me there was a 5 week lead time on repairs. Then they told me they so behind in repairs, they would only service their own customers, I didn't buy from them, so they wouldn't fix my set. I never heard of any major electronics manufacturer that would permit their servicing dealers to refuse customers because they didn't buy it there. Finally they called me back out of the blue, and said that my set could not be serviced because it was so old. Yeah right, it was only about 7 years old, should have years of life left, hell, I'm using a Sony monitor right now and it's at least 12 years old, in perfect shape. That's why I buy Sony at premium prices, I have NEVER had a Sony product die on me, or even need repairs. But now my perfect repair record was broken.
THIS sort of pathetic customer service from major vendors is what drove Apple to go into the market themselves. If your vendors aren't servicing your customers, they're alienating your customers, and will switch brands at the first opportunity. Customer service isn't that profitable in the short run, but it builds long term customer relationships.
I called around, and I found an old TV guy who does component repairs, and is Sony authorized. He told me the big chain store's authorized Sony repairmen had recently quit, they had no repairmen at ALL, they only do warranty swaps. no wonder they lied to me. The TV guy repaired my set for about $125, a total bargain, he said the set should last many more years, it was in perfect shape now. It only took about 5 days, of which 3 was spent waiting for parts to arrive. What a deal.
In my photography classes, the professors used to talk about "seeing" photos (a term that goes back to Ansel Adams) but they were really talking about the mental process of visualizing the photographic image you wanted to produce.
This doesn't agree with another similar study I recall reading quite a few years ago. A group of college students were given written tests (similar to everyday college class tests) under controlled temperature conditions. The students who took the tests under cooler conditions scored better than students in warmer conditions. Humidity was also tested, moderately high humidity also improved test scores, but after a certain point, it gets too humid and scores declined. Perhaps there is a difference in environmental effects between relatively mechanical work like typing, and purely mental activities like test taking.
I studied with Nam June Paik, who surprised me by declaring the World's Greatest Artist's Tool to be the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He said that if you wanted to know something to help you make some artwork, all you had to do was look it up in the Yellow Pages, phone up someone and ask, and they'd tell you everything you needed to know. No matter how obscure a subject it is, there's always some lonely expert out there, just dying to talk to someone about his specialty, if someone would just phone him up and listen to him.
After criticising the entire concept of using computers to teach art, I decided to look at the problem from another angle. I pondered what free "software" (like books) would be of actual, practical value to students and their instructors.
Students need to learn how to draw and paint, the techniques have not changed much since the Renaissance. Not surprisingly, many of the best art instructional materials are long out of copyright, and are freely available. For example, you can feel free to reproduce Leonardo da Vinci's "Lessons on Painting" or Andrea Pozzo's "Perspective in Architecture and Painting" as they both date back to the 17th century.
You would be surprised at the amount of free instructional materials that art supplies vendors will give you, just for the asking. Of course they have a financial incentive to attract new artists to their products, but hey, an oil painting lesson sheet works the same with Windsor & Newton oil paints as it does with Holbein oil paints.
Artists tend to learn best by example, by viewing other artists' works. Any computer with a browser might be helpful in sampling artworks, but ultimately, no video display can show the subtle nuances of an artwork sufficiently for a student to understand them. So again, computers won't be much help. A trip to the local museum would be much better.
Artists are also a good resource. I know many artists who would be glad to talk with students and give their advice, even for free, if someone would just ask them. My university often got internationally famous artists (I mean REALLY famous artists) to come to lecture at my art school, merely by offering them room and board and a relaxing stay at our laid-back campus. This cost the school essentially nothing. I asked my professor who got my favorite painter to come and lecture, how she convinced someone like that to come to our school for basically no money. She said, "well, I ASKED him and he said yes."
So I hope I've offered a few areas to investigate for free study materials. Every art instructor should already have ideas about what materials are suitable, they wouldn't be much of an artist if they didn't.
BTW, I should tell you about a book I read way back when I was a newbie art student. I found a book in our university's art library, commissioned by IBM in the 1960s, describing how computers could be applied to the Arts. There wasn't really any such thing as computer graphics as an art media back then, so the book focused on odd applications, the one I remember best was a computer search that could attempt to fit broken fragments of archaeological pieces back together. They managed to even reunite two pieces of pottery from different museums, now the two pieces together were worth far more than the sum of the parts. But I digress.. what really got to me was an extensive statistical survey of art students and professors, the data all crunched on vintage punchcard mainframes. The survey was an attempt to find out what exactly do students LEARN in art school. The statistics were clear, and the conclusion astonishing (to me at least). There were only 2 things that students really learned in Art School: 1. How to dress like an artist. 2. How to act like an artist. Art students learned this merely by copying the dress and behavior of their teachers. Actual learning of technical skills were so statistically insignificant that they could not be measured. The survey concluded that if you just act like an artist, you will be considered an artist. Perhaps this survey revealed more about the limitations of the minds of IBM statisticians.
You still don't get it, coward. When I say "unlimited technical resources," I mean exactly that. This project was the MS flavor of the month, right in MS's back yard, they had the pull to take ANY Microsoft employee from ANY project and set them to work fixing the bugs. So they did. But they failed.
The impact is obvious. If MS can't deliver an acceptable lo rez digital video signal over a single point-to-point link, even with an unlimited amount of technical resources devoted to the project, how the hell are they going to pull off a massive HDTV project like this one?
You're new to this business, right? Don't feel bad, Microsoft is new to the broadcast industry too.
I gave sufficient info for anyone inside the biz to verify the story and find out the rest of the dirty details (but it won't be easy). I'll have to leave it at that.
IIRC, this was about a year, maybe 18 months ago. Nothing has changed that much between now and then. It's not a matter of codec development, this was an uncompressed video transmission system. The other vendors involved (Cisco, a couple of others) were mighty pissed at MS as well, they were depending on MS getting this off the ground. The TV station learned one valuable lesson: Microsoft can't deliver what they promise. That's why I can't identify the station, MS forced them to keep quiet under an NDA. With the potential future money involved, I wouldn't be suprised if MS was willing to whack people to keep them quiet about this failure.
A friend of mine worked at a TV station that I am not permitted to reveal (but is right in MS's backyard somewhere). They had a multimillion dollar pilot project to use Microsoft software to deliver digital signals between the studio and the transmitter (and cable distro point) with dedicated, unlimited bandwidth digital circuits. Microsoft threw millions of dollars of research money into the project, it was to be their showpiece, to demonstrate how MS could provide end-to-end digital infrastructure for TV stations.
It was an utter failure. Despite the use of supposedly uncompressed video, everyone started complaining the picture was fuzzy and the audio didn't sync perfectly. The station abandoned the project after millions of dollars of their own investment, MS lost even more money.
And this was plain old NTSC video, not even HDTV. If MS couldn't get this project to work with the entire company behind it, what in the HELL makes people think they could succeed at HDTV?
I entered Art School around 1975, about the time I started building my first microcomputer from a kit. I majored in drawing and photography, but dabbled with computers and took a lot of computer classes. The compsci department treated me like crap, I was just a dumb artist (yeah, a dumb artist that switched majors from Honors Chemistry/PreMed). But I was the first person to exhibit computer graphics and primitive computer animation at my art school. The art school Dean was very conservative and considered drawing/painting, printmaking, and sculpture to be the only valid areas of study. Even the new Photography department was considered the Black Sheep of the family, it was not art, merely technology. I got kicked out of art school during my senior year, they got fed up with me. I used to go around telling my professors that I was sick of drawing with charcoal, that technology hadn't changed since Paleolithic Man dragged a burnt stump out of a campfire and scratched it on a cave wall, I wanted a NEW artist's studio, more like a mad scientist's laboratory with bubbling beakers and sparking coils. So I went to work, and spent many years working in prepress, computer graphics, etc. To my utter astonishment, as new computer tools like Photoshop were released, I consistently found that my traditional art school techniques (i.e. my darkroom classes) were the most valuable training I could have taken in preparation for these programs. I consistently got better results than the computer geeks around me that had no art skills. Back around '92 when the recession hit, I decided to go back and finish my BFA. And to my astonishment, my old art school was only then just installing its first computer classroom. By that time, I had seen and done about everything in the computer graphics field, I completely abandoned doing computer graphics and focused on oil painting. And when I finished my degree, I found my CG work was much stronger. Anybody can push around pixels (or paint, for that matter) but it takes artistic skill, training, and practice to understand why an image has to be THIS way and not THAT way. If you have no ability to plan out what kind of result you want, you will have no way to create the work. You will be randomly wandering through the program trying to figure out why you aren't getting results. I continually assert: there is NO image you can create with a computer that can't be done with conventional tools. It may take an infinitely larger amount of effort, but it could be done. The fundamentals of art production have not changed with the introduction of computers. This is why it is easier to train artists how to use computers than it is to teach computer experts how to be an artist. Artists always know what they would like to create, maybe they have dreamt of artworks that were beyond their capabilities before computers, but they still have ideas about how they would go about creating the artwork even without a computer. The same cannot be said of computer geeks, they cannot see how an artwork could be created without computers. The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last. My old Photo professor said that a true artist can make art despite his tools, a great photographer could take great photos with a pinhole camera, but a crappy photographer couldn't take great photos even with a great camera. Great art tools like computers are useless in the hands of someone with no artistic training.
Budding artists don't need to wrestle with poorly constructed software like GIMP, they need skills that can actually EARN MONEY, they need to learn apps with the most acceptance in the field, which means Photoshop/Painter, XPress/InDesign, Illustrator/Freehand, Dreamweaver/GoLive. And since the graphic arts industry is still predominantly Mac, they need Mac skills.
Um, where in this article did it explain what is going on? Sure everyone knows it's a marketing tool. What's the story line so far? Sure I've seen the site, I don't have the time to play, doesn't anyone have a synopsis? Go ahead and give spoilers, it's almost over anyway.
Right, and soon LOTR will be like Lucas' films with 3 different versions of the early Star Wars films. I've seen about 5 or 6 different packages of the Star wars films. And there are about 4 different editions of Terminator. What the person who modded my remark as -1 Troll does not realize, is that this is now Standard Operational Procedure in the music and video industry. They have deliberate plans to get customers to repurchase their favorite products over and over, to maximize profits. The music industry was the first to catch on, they frequently release remastered albums, or extended editions with outtakes or unreleased tracks. But they never release an ultimate edition right off the bat, they dole it out over time, so the truly demented^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdedicated fans will purchase the same product several times, first the remastered edition, then the extended edition, then the Ultimate edition. Why settle for just ONE CD purchase when you can get customers to buy it 3 or 4 times?
If you already use a shopper's card or pay with a credit card, the supermarkets already have all the data on your shopping habits they need.
No, there is a vast untapped world of data the stores want to access, data that can't be gathered at the checkout counter. They want to know how long you spend in each aisle, and where you stop to look at the display racks. They want to know your total time in the store, your path through the store, etc. This is easy when you have a smart cart, they can track it continuously, and collect the data even if you pay with cash.
Slashdot Mirror
...but not intentionally. A friend of mine once called me over to his shop to check out his new IBM PC 286 clone and a clone-PostScript laser printer. You can tell this was a LONG time ago. I fired up Corel Draw and did a few odd things, like a PostScript pattern fill inside a clipping path. I sent it to print and nothing happened. It was 5PM on Friday, he said he never turns off his computers, so we just left it running and left for the weekend.
On monday morning, I got an excited phone call from my friend, the page had just popped out of the printer! That means the print job ran on the laser printer's processor for about 2.5 days.
ILM has never been an all-SGI shop, they used to be a primarily Mac/SGI shop.
My friend who worked at ILM back around the late 1980s (the time frame we're talking about here) told me how their digital matte process ran on a custom app written exclusively for Macs. John Knoll personally gave me a copy of Photoshop
Anyway, it is not surprising that much of this process is shrouded in mystery, ILM is very secretive. Even unto this day, the ILM street address is a not-very-well-kept secret, their name doesn't appear on the building, or in any published literature. My friend at ILM told me that employees were prohibited, upon penalty of termination, of EVER having an email address with their real name, or ever using their real name anywhere on the internet. They were concerned about the legions of Star Wars weirdos getting ahold of an employee's info and stalking him.
Right.. Someone who needs a $6 ethernet cable from Cables R Us should instead buy a $15 bulk spool of CAT5 cable, a $10 box of connectors, and a $15 crimper tool to put the connectors on the cable. And then they can use the box of leftover cable as a nice footstool, and the crimper makes a nice paperweight.
Sheesh.
This device is the simplest solution to your problem.
No, I'm not kidding.
You obviously don't know how Japanese corporations work. Sharp has deep pockets, and is fully committed to keeping prestige products on sale, even if they're not making money, even if it's only limited markets (i.e. Japan only) in order to keep their name established as a market leader. And then someday the market will ripen, and they'll still be poised to make a big splash. That's how they look at it.
You're BOTH misreading it. Macs and SGIs worked side by side. SGI gave ILM special favors, in return for ILM pretending the Star Wars films were exclusively done with SGI machines.
Most people don't realize, much of the primary CG work done on the Star Wars films are done on Macs. But ILM signed contracts with SGI which prohibits them from acknowledging the contribution of any system other than SGI. Inside ILM, this contractual obligation is known as "the Jedi Clause." So the contribution of Macs and Mac users to these films go largely unrecognized.
If I were an HR manager at Apple, I would never EVER consider offering these guys a job. I'd want them exactly where they are, trying to figure out the secret of life, and working with people who are trying to cure cancer.
Sony service can be horrible if you're not in a big city. I just had a big runaround myself. It could hardly get worse, I'm sure Sony had to act.
I bought a 32 inch Sony Trinitron XBR^2 set a few years back, their top quality product, made in Japan with Sony's highest labor costs (they were shifting production to Mexico and across Asia), that set was widely considered the best TV ever made, and I expected it to last until HDTV became affordable (which should be a few years yet). But the power supply blew, a simple repair, I thought.
My local dealer went out of business, so I called the largest nearby dealer, Ultimate Electronics. First they told me there was a 5 week lead time on repairs. Then they told me they so behind in repairs, they would only service their own customers, I didn't buy from them, so they wouldn't fix my set. I never heard of any major electronics manufacturer that would permit their servicing dealers to refuse customers because they didn't buy it there. Finally they called me back out of the blue, and said that my set could not be serviced because it was so old. Yeah right, it was only about 7 years old, should have years of life left, hell, I'm using a Sony monitor right now and it's at least 12 years old, in perfect shape. That's why I buy Sony at premium prices, I have NEVER had a Sony product die on me, or even need repairs. But now my perfect repair record was broken.
THIS sort of pathetic customer service from major vendors is what drove Apple to go into the market themselves. If your vendors aren't servicing your customers, they're alienating your customers, and will switch brands at the first opportunity. Customer service isn't that profitable in the short run, but it builds long term customer relationships.
I called around, and I found an old TV guy who does component repairs, and is Sony authorized. He told me the big chain store's authorized Sony repairmen had recently quit, they had no repairmen at ALL, they only do warranty swaps. no wonder they lied to me. The TV guy repaired my set for about $125, a total bargain, he said the set should last many more years, it was in perfect shape now. It only took about 5 days, of which 3 was spent waiting for parts to arrive. What a deal.
Precisely.
In my photography classes, the professors used to talk about "seeing" photos (a term that goes back to Ansel Adams) but they were really talking about the mental process of visualizing the photographic image you wanted to produce.
This doesn't agree with another similar study I recall reading quite a few years ago. A group of college students were given written tests (similar to everyday college class tests) under controlled temperature conditions. The students who took the tests under cooler conditions scored better than students in warmer conditions. Humidity was also tested, moderately high humidity also improved test scores, but after a certain point, it gets too humid and scores declined.
Perhaps there is a difference in environmental effects between relatively mechanical work like typing, and purely mental activities like test taking.
Darn it, I forgot my best anecdote.
I studied with Nam June Paik, who surprised me by declaring the World's Greatest Artist's Tool to be the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He said that if you wanted to know something to help you make some artwork, all you had to do was look it up in the Yellow Pages, phone up someone and ask, and they'd tell you everything you needed to know. No matter how obscure a subject it is, there's always some lonely expert out there, just dying to talk to someone about his specialty, if someone would just phone him up and listen to him.
After criticising the entire concept of using computers to teach art, I decided to look at the problem from another angle. I pondered what free "software" (like books) would be of actual, practical value to students and their instructors.
Students need to learn how to draw and paint, the techniques have not changed much since the Renaissance. Not surprisingly, many of the best art instructional materials are long out of copyright, and are freely available. For example, you can feel free to reproduce Leonardo da Vinci's "Lessons on Painting" or Andrea Pozzo's "Perspective in Architecture and Painting" as they both date back to the 17th century.
You would be surprised at the amount of free instructional materials that art supplies vendors will give you, just for the asking. Of course they have a financial incentive to attract new artists to their products, but hey, an oil painting lesson sheet works the same with Windsor & Newton oil paints as it does with Holbein oil paints.
Artists tend to learn best by example, by viewing other artists' works. Any computer with a browser might be helpful in sampling artworks, but ultimately, no video display can show the subtle nuances of an artwork sufficiently for a student to understand them. So again, computers won't be much help. A trip to the local museum would be much better.
Artists are also a good resource. I know many artists who would be glad to talk with students and give their advice, even for free, if someone would just ask them. My university often got internationally famous artists (I mean REALLY famous artists) to come to lecture at my art school, merely by offering them room and board and a relaxing stay at our laid-back campus. This cost the school essentially nothing. I asked my professor who got my favorite painter to come and lecture, how she convinced someone like that to come to our school for basically no money. She said, "well, I ASKED him and he said yes."
So I hope I've offered a few areas to investigate for free study materials. Every art instructor should already have ideas about what materials are suitable, they wouldn't be much of an artist if they didn't.
BTW, I should tell you about a book I read way back when I was a newbie art student. I found a book in our university's art library, commissioned by IBM in the 1960s, describing how computers could be applied to the Arts. There wasn't really any such thing as computer graphics as an art media back then, so the book focused on odd applications, the one I remember best was a computer search that could attempt to fit broken fragments of archaeological pieces back together. They managed to even reunite two pieces of pottery from different museums, now the two pieces together were worth far more than the sum of the parts. But I digress.. what really got to me was an extensive statistical survey of art students and professors, the data all crunched on vintage punchcard mainframes. The survey was an attempt to find out what exactly do students LEARN in art school. The statistics were clear, and the conclusion astonishing (to me at least). There were only 2 things that students really learned in Art School:
1. How to dress like an artist.
2. How to act like an artist.
Art students learned this merely by copying the dress and behavior of their teachers. Actual learning of technical skills were so statistically insignificant that they could not be measured. The survey concluded that if you just act like an artist, you will be considered an artist. Perhaps this survey revealed more about the limitations of the minds of IBM statisticians.
You still don't get it, coward. When I say "unlimited technical resources," I mean exactly that. This project was the MS flavor of the month, right in MS's back yard, they had the pull to take ANY Microsoft employee from ANY project and set them to work fixing the bugs. So they did. But they failed.
The impact is obvious. If MS can't deliver an acceptable lo rez digital video signal over a single point-to-point link, even with an unlimited amount of technical resources devoted to the project, how the hell are they going to pull off a massive HDTV project like this one?
I don't need to karma whore, my karma's been maxed out for years now. But thanks for playing, coward.
You're new to this business, right? Don't feel bad, Microsoft is new to the broadcast industry too.
I gave sufficient info for anyone inside the biz to verify the story and find out the rest of the dirty details (but it won't be easy). I'll have to leave it at that.
IIRC, this was about a year, maybe 18 months ago. Nothing has changed that much between now and then. It's not a matter of codec development, this was an uncompressed video transmission system. The other vendors involved (Cisco, a couple of others) were mighty pissed at MS as well, they were depending on MS getting this off the ground.
The TV station learned one valuable lesson: Microsoft can't deliver what they promise. That's why I can't identify the station, MS forced them to keep quiet under an NDA. With the potential future money involved, I wouldn't be suprised if MS was willing to whack people to keep them quiet about this failure.
60 Billion didn't help them succeed at the first project. Won't help them this time either.
A friend of mine worked at a TV station that I am not permitted to reveal (but is right in MS's backyard somewhere). They had a multimillion dollar pilot project to use Microsoft software to deliver digital signals between the studio and the transmitter (and cable distro point) with dedicated, unlimited bandwidth digital circuits. Microsoft threw millions of dollars of research money into the project, it was to be their showpiece, to demonstrate how MS could provide end-to-end digital infrastructure for TV stations.
It was an utter failure. Despite the use of supposedly uncompressed video, everyone started complaining the picture was fuzzy and the audio didn't sync perfectly. The station abandoned the project after millions of dollars of their own investment, MS lost even more money.
And this was plain old NTSC video, not even HDTV. If MS couldn't get this project to work with the entire company behind it, what in the HELL makes people think they could succeed at HDTV?
Precisely. Let me tell you a little story.
I entered Art School around 1975, about the time I started building my first microcomputer from a kit. I majored in drawing and photography, but dabbled with computers and took a lot of computer classes. The compsci department treated me like crap, I was just a dumb artist (yeah, a dumb artist that switched majors from Honors Chemistry/PreMed). But I was the first person to exhibit computer graphics and primitive computer animation at my art school. The art school Dean was very conservative and considered drawing/painting, printmaking, and sculpture to be the only valid areas of study. Even the new Photography department was considered the Black Sheep of the family, it was not art, merely technology. I got kicked out of art school during my senior year, they got fed up with me. I used to go around telling my professors that I was sick of drawing with charcoal, that technology hadn't changed since Paleolithic Man dragged a burnt stump out of a campfire and scratched it on a cave wall, I wanted a NEW artist's studio, more like a mad scientist's laboratory with bubbling beakers and sparking coils.
So I went to work, and spent many years working in prepress, computer graphics, etc. To my utter astonishment, as new computer tools like Photoshop were released, I consistently found that my traditional art school techniques (i.e. my darkroom classes) were the most valuable training I could have taken in preparation for these programs. I consistently got better results than the computer geeks around me that had no art skills.
Back around '92 when the recession hit, I decided to go back and finish my BFA. And to my astonishment, my old art school was only then just installing its first computer classroom. By that time, I had seen and done about everything in the computer graphics field, I completely abandoned doing computer graphics and focused on oil painting. And when I finished my degree, I found my CG work was much stronger. Anybody can push around pixels (or paint, for that matter) but it takes artistic skill, training, and practice to understand why an image has to be THIS way and not THAT way. If you have no ability to plan out what kind of result you want, you will have no way to create the work. You will be randomly wandering through the program trying to figure out why you aren't getting results.
I continually assert: there is NO image you can create with a computer that can't be done with conventional tools. It may take an infinitely larger amount of effort, but it could be done. The fundamentals of art production have not changed with the introduction of computers. This is why it is easier to train artists how to use computers than it is to teach computer experts how to be an artist. Artists always know what they would like to create, maybe they have dreamt of artworks that were beyond their capabilities before computers, but they still have ideas about how they would go about creating the artwork even without a computer. The same cannot be said of computer geeks, they cannot see how an artwork could be created without computers.
The moral of the story: artists need to study art, not computers. They need paper and pencils first, and computers last. My old Photo professor said that a true artist can make art despite his tools, a great photographer could take great photos with a pinhole camera, but a crappy photographer couldn't take great photos even with a great camera. Great art tools like computers are useless in the hands of someone with no artistic training.
Budding artists don't need to wrestle with poorly constructed software like GIMP, they need skills that can actually EARN MONEY, they need to learn apps with the most acceptance in the field, which means Photoshop/Painter, XPress/InDesign, Illustrator/Freehand, Dreamweaver/GoLive. And since the graphic arts industry is still predominantly Mac, they need Mac skills.
Um, where in this article did it explain what is going on? Sure everyone knows it's a marketing tool. What's the story line so far? Sure I've seen the site, I don't have the time to play, doesn't anyone have a synopsis? Go ahead and give spoilers, it's almost over anyway.
Right, and soon LOTR will be like Lucas' films with 3 different versions of the early Star Wars films. I've seen about 5 or 6 different packages of the Star wars films. And there are about 4 different editions of Terminator.
What the person who modded my remark as -1 Troll does not realize, is that this is now Standard Operational Procedure in the music and video industry. They have deliberate plans to get customers to repurchase their favorite products over and over, to maximize profits. The music industry was the first to catch on, they frequently release remastered albums, or extended editions with outtakes or unreleased tracks. But they never release an ultimate edition right off the bat, they dole it out over time, so the truly demented^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdedicated fans will purchase the same product several times, first the remastered edition, then the extended edition, then the Ultimate edition. Why settle for just ONE CD purchase when you can get customers to buy it 3 or 4 times?
No, there is a vast untapped world of data the stores want to access, data that can't be gathered at the checkout counter. They want to know how long you spend in each aisle, and where you stop to look at the display racks. They want to know your total time in the store, your path through the store, etc. This is easy when you have a smart cart, they can track it continuously, and collect the data even if you pay with cash.