This is the Personal Learning Edition, which as others have noted, puts a big ugly watermarks your images, it even puts the watermark on your work windows so you can't just do screen caps for output. It is not possible to use Maya PLE for real work, just for learning the program functions, and even that can be tough working behind the watermarks. PLE cannot import or export data from real Maya versions, nor can it use plugins. It's pretty much useless for anything except learning the program basics. Of course, the full Maya release is pirated to hell and back, anyone who really wants the full version can get it if they want it. Or you could get a lower cost educational version if you're eligible. I also note that Maya for MacOS X doesn't match the features of the other versions. No 3D Invigorator, no Maya Unlimited (no cloth, fur, etc). Maya is a speed demon on dual proc Macs, they really need to get the damn Mac versions up to speed.
Interesting article, but I wonder why he left out the most interesting of Edison's anticompetitive actions. In Hollywood, it is legendary how Edison hired assassins to shoot his competitors movie cameras when they worked on location. He could have drawn a comparison to Orrin Hatch's proposal to make computers self-destruct when playing pirated tunes.
I looked up "your" 6060, and of course it isn't YOUR machine, just because you're the intern who makes copies doesn't mean YOU own it, this is a mega-expensive beast and nobody but large companies could afford it. Definitely more expensive than even an Iris inkjet which is designed just for what the guy asked for. The 6060 uses the EFI rip, which if it's like every EFI RIP/laser printer system I ever used, doesn't use halftone screens at all, it just uses variable toner density to produce flat colors. So your 6060 doesn't do 200 line screen, it doesn't do ANY line screen. This is inadequate for prepress proofing. Even if it's somehow set to halftone mode, xerox says it only has 600dpi rez at 8 bit color depth, which will get you 80linescreen, just like I said. I read your Pantone press release. Xerox is lying, there are many many printers with the Pantone license, they certainly are not the first, as they claim. Even so, the Pantone cert is worthless. I can prove it. Take your Pantone Color Formula Guide 747XR (you DO own one, right? Every designer has one) and pick an intense Pantone primary color like Pantone Rubine Red C or Pantone Orange 021C. Then print that on your 6060 and put the real Pantone swatch up against the printed swatch. Notice the huge difference, the CMYK version is weaker than the true Pantone color. I repeat: "Pantone Certification" is a marketing gimmick. Designers (at least the ones who know what they're doing) don't use Pantone in their designs unless they're really going to output with spot color Pantone inks. If they use CMKY, they are better off using a CMYK system like TruMatch.
You have no way to determine that. QT is a media wrapper, I can just as easily render using a 3rd party codec like Sorenson 3 as QT's own internal renderers like the obsolete Cinepak. The benchmarker conspicuously avoided saying which codec they used. They could have used the Mac mpeg2 renderer vs PC uncompressed, that would have really stacked the deck towards PCs and still fulfilled the description of rendered "to QuickTime format." There IS no "QuickTime format," it is just a wrapper around ANY format you could cook up. But this problem is even less relevant than another glaring problem. Other people pointed out that the PCs had RAIDs and the Mac didn't. This is a benchmark of RAID vs nonRAID, they've benchmarked I/O performance, not CPU performance.
I've argued with benchmarkers over and over about this, Premiere is a lousy benchmark, used only by people who want to stack the deck against Macs. Premiere is highly optimized for PCs, and highly unoptimized against Macs. Fortunately that benchmark will go away soon since there won't BE any further Mac Premiere versions. If you want to do a proper test, you'd use a crossplatform product that runs equally well on both platforms and is highly optimized for dual processors, like Discreet Cleaner or Combustion. There's only one benchmark I can think of that is more worthless than Premiere, the "MSWord scroll test." For some stupid reason, some benchmarkers think it's a useful test to see how fast the can scroll to the end of a long Word document with the arrow key. Unfortunately, Word has a delay loop built into the scroll function, it even changes the delay loop depending on the speed of the CPU. The results are totally useless.
Time-Life produced a famous series of large-format photo instruction books, they're from the analog era but will be useful for anyone learning any type of photography. They have lucious printing in photogravure, to show you what photography can REALLY do in a high quality printed format. Some of them focus on developing and printing so they'd be less useful for digital guys, but there are several books on shooting techniques and composing shots, etc. I don't think I'd recommend buying these sight unseen, but just about every library should have a set of these on the shelves. Check em out.
I concur, the Ansel Adams books are classic. I have a BFA in photography, and I learned the Zone System from a student of Ansel Adams, it was the most useful training I ever had on the subject. The best thing about the AA book series is that it teaches you how to SEE photographs without a camera. You have to learn to look at light, and how that shapes what your camera can produce. Adams is big on the "previsualization" theory, you have to mentally imagine the photograph you want and then you know what you have to do with the technology to produce it.
Bullshit. I can do 200 line screen on my HP B&W laser, but I only get 4 levels of gray and the results are useless for proofing. This is even worse of a problem on color lasers. Name your product and I'll shoot holes in your claim.
And FYI, there is no such thing as Pantone color on a CMYK printer. Pantone colors are made from up to 11 colors of ink, many of those colors are so intense they are beyond the CMYK gamut, and even beyond the RGB gamut. Why do you think people USE Pantone inks? It's because they can't get that color with mere CMYK inks. There is no way to represent Pantone colors accurately in CMYK. "Pantone Certified" is strictly a marketing gimmick. If you work in CMYK, use a system designed to work within that gamut, like TruMatch.
I've worked in prepress for many years, and I can guarantee you that no laser printer is going to work for your proofing purposes. Laser printers will only do an 80 line screen at best, it is good for an overall proof, but it's completely useless if your purpose is to detect image flaws or artifacts, as you describe. Laser prints have terrible color accuracy and flatness problems, even using color control systems. That's just the way lasers are. They'd be adequate for proofing only if you're doing cheap newsprint publications at 80 linescreen, but you say you're doing medical publications and you really deserve a better proof for complex technical work. What you really need is a system designed specifically for digital proofing, like the 3M Rainbow or an Iris. It's going to cost you big bucks, but just think of the money you'll save on botched print runs. Rainbow and Iris prints are widely considered "contract proof" quality, although nothing's going to come close to a real Matchprint made from film seps.
Thanks for your kind words. You know, on a lark, I decided to look up the old company on the web. I found 2 people who claimed to have written code for this product, neither of them touched it. One was the boss's silent partner that was seen in the offices about one hour every two months, the other one I never heard of and sure as hell never worked at the company. I even found our full product in a public domain archive. And here I am, broke and unemployed, still protecting the company and their unscrupulous managers by not disclosing their names. But I know who is telling the truth, and who has integrity.
Apple would not have replaced the motherboard with a revision 2.
You are misinformed. Apple Service Centers replaced r1 motherboards with r2 if you complained about incompatibility with IDE slave drives. But you had to ask them for it. My business partner had his swapped out, they swapped mobos for free, under warranty. But none of this changes the fact you're whining about a problem from 4 years ago.
The C64 was way late in the history of Commodore, it surely ranks as the LEAST of their innovations, compared to the early models like the Commodore PET. I remember working on PET models, we were developing accounting software systems using UCSD Pascal on the Apple II, the same code compiled and ran with almost no modification on all our in-house systems, including Ohio Scientific, CBM PET, Apple/// prototypes (we were a beta site for Apple) etc. We even managed to get the system to work as a multiuser system, using early networked Corvus hard disk systems, even between dissimilar systems. I was completely surprised to see we could create interoperable software with file and record locking in a mixed network of different CPUs. And this was way WAY before the C64 ever existed. The software never really made it in the market, though. We finished the product for the Apple, but weren't quite finished with the CBM version. We all had a profit share in the results, so we were anxious to get it finished, but delays in the Corvus CBM drivers put the Commodore release behind schedule. Then the boss negotiated a secret deal with Commodore. He received a secret payoff of tens of thousands of dollars to delay the Apple release (which was completely finished) until we could complete the CBM release. Commodore wanted to be taken seriously as a business computer, and did not want Apple to get ahead in the accounting market. So one day the boss drove up to work in his brand new Lancia sports car and announced we were all fired. He didn't need us anymore, he just needed one programmer to finish the CBM port. The software came to market about a year later, after several competitors released similar products. We never got our profit share. The boss killed his own company and his own product, but walked away with the payola in his pocket. He screwed us all, but he didn't care because HE made a killing.
You're criticising Apple over IDE bugs in the rev 1 Yosemite, a 4 year old machine. If you'd have griped about this 4 years ago when it was still under warranty, Apple would have replaced your motherboard with a Rev 2. FYI, I have have no problems with the 3 hard drives in my rev 1 Yosemite, using the Apple-supplied Adaptec SCSI card. And 3rd party IDE cards are cheap.
Your mine tailing problem is not unique to uranium mines. I used to live in Colorado, and I can personally attest that almost all the mountain streams have been sterilized by copper and gold mine tailings. Uranium mines are rare, nonradioactive mines are quite common. Expending effort to clean up uranium mines will give negligible returns, cleaning up mining in general will give huge returns.
So I guess the whole world is contaminated, and we have to dig up all the uranium and safely rebury it to keep it away from humans. Are you starting to see how ridiculous this concept is?
The bacteria converts the uranium to insoluble form. So instead of having contaminated water, we just have contaminated land. Somewhere in this process I must have missed the description about how the contamination is removed from the environment completely. Don't get me wrong, I believe nuclear power is a good thing, and is inherently less polluting than any other form of energy. But this stuff smacks of bad science. Apparently I must be the only person that remembers my Jr Hi grade biology class. We had to read ecologists like Garret Hardin, I still remember his essays, he constantly hammered on the concept of "throwing things away." But there IS no "away." A good example is how people used to burn trash in incinerators to keep the landfills from filling up. Then people finally got hip to air pollution, they finally realized they were throwing their trash into the air instead of the landfill. So now we don't burn trash that anymore, we just need more and more landfills. It would be better to reduce the amount of trash we generate, and stop the problem at the source.
Yep, that's an accepted practice in mission critical real-time systems. I recall reading about the IBM computers used in the Space Shuttle, they have triple redundancy, all 3 computers operate in parallel, and they "vote" on all results. If one computer doesn't agree with the other two, it is outvoted. Of course this is an extreme oversimplification of the software design, but you get the idea.
Almost all US phone systems now have Call Blocking. When you receive an incoming fax call, hang up, and then pick up the phone and dial *60, and follow the instructions. You will never ever receive a call from that number again. Anyone who dials you from that number will be intercepted, and not get through. Problem solved. Warning: I heard that there is a charge for this service, something like $1 per blocked number. I've never used it, so call your local telco for details.
Don't be so dense. In my room, the light is on, so to me, the whole grid is on. In the other room, the light is off, so for that room, the grid is off (disconnected). McLuhan uses this as an exercise in thinking about media from the receiver to the sender, rather than the sender to the receiver. It is not intended to be a metaphor that has a comprehensive theory of media, just a gedankenexperiment. Go read the book.
Marshal McLuhan once wrote that the electric power grid is a medium, but it only carries one bit: on or off. The status is plainly visible by looking at the nearest light bulb.
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This is the Personal Learning Edition, which as others have noted, puts a big ugly watermarks your images, it even puts the watermark on your work windows so you can't just do screen caps for output. It is not possible to use Maya PLE for real work, just for learning the program functions, and even that can be tough working behind the watermarks. PLE cannot import or export data from real Maya versions, nor can it use plugins. It's pretty much useless for anything except learning the program basics. Of course, the full Maya release is pirated to hell and back, anyone who really wants the full version can get it if they want it. Or you could get a lower cost educational version if you're eligible.
I also note that Maya for MacOS X doesn't match the features of the other versions. No 3D Invigorator, no Maya Unlimited (no cloth, fur, etc). Maya is a speed demon on dual proc Macs, they really need to get the damn Mac versions up to speed.
Interesting article, but I wonder why he left out the most interesting of Edison's anticompetitive actions. In Hollywood, it is legendary how Edison hired assassins to shoot his competitors movie cameras when they worked on location. He could have drawn a comparison to Orrin Hatch's proposal to make computers self-destruct when playing pirated tunes.
I looked up "your" 6060, and of course it isn't YOUR machine, just because you're the intern who makes copies doesn't mean YOU own it, this is a mega-expensive beast and nobody but large companies could afford it. Definitely more expensive than even an Iris inkjet which is designed just for what the guy asked for.
The 6060 uses the EFI rip, which if it's like every EFI RIP/laser printer system I ever used, doesn't use halftone screens at all, it just uses variable toner density to produce flat colors. So your 6060 doesn't do 200 line screen, it doesn't do ANY line screen. This is inadequate for prepress proofing. Even if it's somehow set to halftone mode, xerox says it only has 600dpi rez at 8 bit color depth, which will get you 80linescreen, just like I said.
I read your Pantone press release. Xerox is lying, there are many many printers with the Pantone license, they certainly are not the first, as they claim. Even so, the Pantone cert is worthless. I can prove it. Take your Pantone Color Formula Guide 747XR (you DO own one, right? Every designer has one) and pick an intense Pantone primary color like Pantone Rubine Red C or Pantone Orange 021C. Then print that on your 6060 and put the real Pantone swatch up against the printed swatch. Notice the huge difference, the CMYK version is weaker than the true Pantone color.
I repeat: "Pantone Certification" is a marketing gimmick. Designers (at least the ones who know what they're doing) don't use Pantone in their designs unless they're really going to output with spot color Pantone inks. If they use CMKY, they are better off using a CMYK system like TruMatch.
You have no way to determine that. QT is a media wrapper, I can just as easily render using a 3rd party codec like Sorenson 3 as QT's own internal renderers like the obsolete Cinepak. The benchmarker conspicuously avoided saying which codec they used. They could have used the Mac mpeg2 renderer vs PC uncompressed, that would have really stacked the deck towards PCs and still fulfilled the description of rendered "to QuickTime format." There IS no "QuickTime format," it is just a wrapper around ANY format you could cook up.
But this problem is even less relevant than another glaring problem. Other people pointed out that the PCs had RAIDs and the Mac didn't. This is a benchmark of RAID vs nonRAID, they've benchmarked I/O performance, not CPU performance.
I've argued with benchmarkers over and over about this, Premiere is a lousy benchmark, used only by people who want to stack the deck against Macs. Premiere is highly optimized for PCs, and highly unoptimized against Macs. Fortunately that benchmark will go away soon since there won't BE any further Mac Premiere versions.
If you want to do a proper test, you'd use a crossplatform product that runs equally well on both platforms and is highly optimized for dual processors, like Discreet Cleaner or Combustion.
There's only one benchmark I can think of that is more worthless than Premiere, the "MSWord scroll test." For some stupid reason, some benchmarkers think it's a useful test to see how fast the can scroll to the end of a long Word document with the arrow key. Unfortunately, Word has a delay loop built into the scroll function, it even changes the delay loop depending on the speed of the CPU. The results are totally useless.
Time-Life produced a famous series of large-format photo instruction books, they're from the analog era but will be useful for anyone learning any type of photography. They have lucious printing in photogravure, to show you what photography can REALLY do in a high quality printed format. Some of them focus on developing and printing so they'd be less useful for digital guys, but there are several books on shooting techniques and composing shots, etc. I don't think I'd recommend buying these sight unseen, but just about every library should have a set of these on the shelves. Check em out.
I concur, the Ansel Adams books are classic. I have a BFA in photography, and I learned the Zone System from a student of Ansel Adams, it was the most useful training I ever had on the subject.
The best thing about the AA book series is that it teaches you how to SEE photographs without a camera. You have to learn to look at light, and how that shapes what your camera can produce. Adams is big on the "previsualization" theory, you have to mentally imagine the photograph you want and then you know what you have to do with the technology to produce it.
Bullshit. I can do 200 line screen on my HP B&W laser, but I only get 4 levels of gray and the results are useless for proofing. This is even worse of a problem on color lasers. Name your product and I'll shoot holes in your claim.
And FYI, there is no such thing as Pantone color on a CMYK printer. Pantone colors are made from up to 11 colors of ink, many of those colors are so intense they are beyond the CMYK gamut, and even beyond the RGB gamut. Why do you think people USE Pantone inks? It's because they can't get that color with mere CMYK inks.
There is no way to represent Pantone colors accurately in CMYK. "Pantone Certified" is strictly a marketing gimmick. If you work in CMYK, use a system designed to work within that gamut, like TruMatch.
I've worked in prepress for many years, and I can guarantee you that no laser printer is going to work for your proofing purposes. Laser printers will only do an 80 line screen at best, it is good for an overall proof, but it's completely useless if your purpose is to detect image flaws or artifacts, as you describe. Laser prints have terrible color accuracy and flatness problems, even using color control systems. That's just the way lasers are. They'd be adequate for proofing only if you're doing cheap newsprint publications at 80 linescreen, but you say you're doing medical publications and you really deserve a better proof for complex technical work.
What you really need is a system designed specifically for digital proofing, like the 3M Rainbow or an Iris. It's going to cost you big bucks, but just think of the money you'll save on botched print runs. Rainbow and Iris prints are widely considered "contract proof" quality, although nothing's going to come close to a real Matchprint made from film seps.
There's only been one product ever made that does everything you want: the Apple PowerCD.
/
http://www.applefritter.com/accessories/powercd
Too bad they don't make em anymore. They're really rare and expensive collector's items.
Thanks for your kind words.
You know, on a lark, I decided to look up the old company on the web. I found 2 people who claimed to have written code for this product, neither of them touched it. One was the boss's silent partner that was seen in the offices about one hour every two months, the other one I never heard of and sure as hell never worked at the company. I even found our full product in a public domain archive.
And here I am, broke and unemployed, still protecting the company and their unscrupulous managers by not disclosing their names. But I know who is telling the truth, and who has integrity.
You are misinformed. Apple Service Centers replaced r1 motherboards with r2 if you complained about incompatibility with IDE slave drives. But you had to ask them for it. My business partner had his swapped out, they swapped mobos for free, under warranty.
But none of this changes the fact you're whining about a problem from 4 years ago.
The C64 was way late in the history of Commodore, it surely ranks as the LEAST of their innovations, compared to the early models like the Commodore PET. I remember working on PET models, we were developing accounting software systems using UCSD Pascal on the Apple II, the same code compiled and ran with almost no modification on all our in-house systems, including Ohio Scientific, CBM PET, Apple /// prototypes (we were a beta site for Apple) etc. We even managed to get the system to work as a multiuser system, using early networked Corvus hard disk systems, even between dissimilar systems. I was completely surprised to see we could create interoperable software with file and record locking in a mixed network of different CPUs. And this was way WAY before the C64 ever existed.
The software never really made it in the market, though. We finished the product for the Apple, but weren't quite finished with the CBM version. We all had a profit share in the results, so we were anxious to get it finished, but delays in the Corvus CBM drivers put the Commodore release behind schedule. Then the boss negotiated a secret deal with Commodore. He received a secret payoff of tens of thousands of dollars to delay the Apple release (which was completely finished) until we could complete the CBM release. Commodore wanted to be taken seriously as a business computer, and did not want Apple to get ahead in the accounting market. So one day the boss drove up to work in his brand new Lancia sports car and announced we were all fired. He didn't need us anymore, he just needed one programmer to finish the CBM port. The software came to market about a year later, after several competitors released similar products. We never got our profit share. The boss killed his own company and his own product, but walked away with the payola in his pocket. He screwed us all, but he didn't care because HE made a killing.
You're criticising Apple over IDE bugs in the rev 1 Yosemite, a 4 year old machine. If you'd have griped about this 4 years ago when it was still under warranty, Apple would have replaced your motherboard with a Rev 2.
FYI, I have have no problems with the 3 hard drives in my rev 1 Yosemite, using the Apple-supplied Adaptec SCSI card. And 3rd party IDE cards are cheap.
Your mine tailing problem is not unique to uranium mines. I used to live in Colorado, and I can personally attest that almost all the mountain streams have been sterilized by copper and gold mine tailings. Uranium mines are rare, nonradioactive mines are quite common. Expending effort to clean up uranium mines will give negligible returns, cleaning up mining in general will give huge returns.
So I guess the whole world is contaminated, and we have to dig up all the uranium and safely rebury it to keep it away from humans. Are you starting to see how ridiculous this concept is?
The bacteria converts the uranium to insoluble form. So instead of having contaminated water, we just have contaminated land. Somewhere in this process I must have missed the description about how the contamination is removed from the environment completely.
Don't get me wrong, I believe nuclear power is a good thing, and is inherently less polluting than any other form of energy. But this stuff smacks of bad science.
Apparently I must be the only person that remembers my Jr Hi grade biology class. We had to read ecologists like Garret Hardin, I still remember his essays, he constantly hammered on the concept of "throwing things away." But there IS no "away." A good example is how people used to burn trash in incinerators to keep the landfills from filling up. Then people finally got hip to air pollution, they finally realized they were throwing their trash into the air instead of the landfill. So now we don't burn trash that anymore, we just need more and more landfills. It would be better to reduce the amount of trash we generate, and stop the problem at the source.
Hmm.. a quick google reveals we are both wrong, they have 5 computers. How odd (literally).
Yep, that's an accepted practice in mission critical real-time systems. I recall reading about the IBM computers used in the Space Shuttle, they have triple redundancy, all 3 computers operate in parallel, and they "vote" on all results. If one computer doesn't agree with the other two, it is outvoted. Of course this is an extreme oversimplification of the software design, but you get the idea.
They have previously discussed this, they use error correction algorithms, no ECC RAM necessary.
Almost all US phone systems now have Call Blocking. When you receive an incoming fax call, hang up, and then pick up the phone and dial *60, and follow the instructions. You will never ever receive a call from that number again. Anyone who dials you from that number will be intercepted, and not get through. Problem solved.
Warning: I heard that there is a charge for this service, something like $1 per blocked number. I've never used it, so call your local telco for details.
McLuhan is a complex, deep thinker. You are not. I withdraw my recommendation, I suggest you avoid ever reading McLuhan.
Don't be so dense. In my room, the light is on, so to me, the whole grid is on. In the other room, the light is off, so for that room, the grid is off (disconnected). McLuhan uses this as an exercise in thinking about media from the receiver to the sender, rather than the sender to the receiver. It is not intended to be a metaphor that has a comprehensive theory of media, just a gedankenexperiment. Go read the book.
And what if my TV is off and yours is on? Does that make it any less of a medium?
Go read "Understanding Media" by McLuhan.
Marshal McLuhan once wrote that the electric power grid is a medium, but it only carries one bit: on or off. The status is plainly visible by looking at the nearest light bulb.