Granted, US workers probably need to become more efficient, but: If all of our high-paying jobs are going elsewhere (say, manufacturing to China, or tech support to India) then US residents will be working for much lower wages in service industries. We won't be able to afford the very goods that we USED to make, causing US companies to fail, cycling us into a depression, until we become the cheap labor again. In the long term, outsourcing hurts corporations as much as us lowly workers.
Also, $5 an hour isn't accurate. It is closer to 30 CENTS an hour for some jobs. Maybe $2 if you have remarkable English skills. Hard-working Non-complaining workers have been outsourced. They never opened their mouths until the stench of burgers at the golden arches became too much.
I am working in a field that can't be outsourced. I chose it in part for that reason. Some people don't have a choice though...I am lucky to be able to afford a full college education. Some people have to start work right out of high school.
If we have to compete in a global marketplace, we should at least have the same benefits as Indian, Chinese or even European workers: Some amount of Gov't healthcare, access to higher education, and perhaps a government that doesn't give tax breaks to companies that outsource US jobs.
Market economics will eventually take care of outsourcing.
If all of our high-paying jobs are going elsewhere (say, manufacturing to China) then US residents will be working for much lower wages in service industries. We won't be able to afford the very goods that we USED to make, causing US companies to fail, cycling us into a depression, until we become the cheap labor again. In the long term, outsourcing hurts corporations as much as us lowly workers.
That being said, we need to stop corporate tax breaks for outsourcing and understand that US corporations are nothing without US consumers and US workers. A global economy can only work if we grow in such a way to bring standards and wages up around the world...Corporate-dominated market-economics destroys the very consumers needed to sustain capitalist growth.
I drafted a letter to the office, and I will be hand-delivering the following tomorrow, since I have appointments in DC anyway:
Copyright GC/ I&R, P.O. Box 70400 Southwest Station Washington, DC 20024-0400
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing in regards to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on preregistration of copyright claims, issued July 22, 2005 (37 CFR Part 202, docket No. RM 2005-9). The notice seeks information in regards to the exclusive use of the Internet Explorer for electronic-only preregistration forms.
I strongly object to the use of Internet Explorer as a standard for electronic-only preregistration forms. I object because an IE-only-registration system cannot adequately meet the needs of copyright holders. I maintain digital recording and editing systems for multi-million dollar media facilities. I manage copyright and royalty filings for both my own record company and several clients. My clients in the film and audio recording businesses hold many copyrights that have been violated in the past, and have a high potential for violation. The reasons for my objection to the use of a single software program for preregistrations stem from a few key issues. Preregistration is going to become a critical tool for protecting intellectual property, and my clients need unfettered access to that tool.
Internet Explorer represents a security and stability risk to the facilities I serve. A computer problem can cause tens of thousands of dollars in downtime expenses, and I seek to minimize those expenses for my clients. Clients do not usually use Internet Explorer for Internet access because too many bugs and security holes exist. On Windows computers, it is often unwise to allow Internet access with IE because of the security risks involved. It is preferable that facilities use web browsers that use established, rather then proprietary Microsoft standards, because they are more compatible and secure.
Another problem with using IE as the standard for a web interface is that it causes problems for many people working in creative fields. Microsoft Windows/IE is not a standard platform for creative work. It should be noted that many companies, and a majority of my clients do not use a single Microsoft Windows based computer in their entire facility. Microsoft has chosen to stop development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh, meaning that Macintosh users will no longer be able to use certain proprietary Microsoft technologies . In addition, Microsoft has never released a version of IE for a Linux/Unix platform. If the copyright office uses an IE only system, people using Apple Macintosh and Linux/Unix computer systems would be shut out of an electronic-only preregistration system. This would place an undue hardship on many copyright holders and applicants.
The copyright office has a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers and copyright holders to implement systems that serve the most people the best way possible. The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (2003) policy implementation specifically endorses a policy of technology neutrality:
Accordingly, the final guidance [of the GPE Act] maintains the basic policy of technology neutrality for automated transactions while recognizing that agencies should select an alternative relative to the risk of the application, and calls on agencies to consider all of the available electronic signature technologies (including the advantages of public key technology) as part of their assessments.
Also, 1703 b (1)(B) of the GPE Act states:
(1) The procedures developed under subsection (a)... (B) may not inappropriately favor one industry or technology;
The endorsement of a specific technology, company, or web browser, therefore contradicts a policy implemented by the rest of the federal government.
Well, sort of. You are right, the VHS format differences were more about different views on tech standards then restricting choice. However, once they realized they COULD restrict choice, they did. You see this in the worldwide implementation of VHS standards:
One of my jobs is doing royalty paperwork for TV. I get VHS dubs from around the world. I have a $700 US Samsung VCR that plays NTSC (and NTSC 4.43), PAL (B/G, I and D/K), SECAM (B/G and D/K), PAL-N, PAL M MESECAM and some S-VHS.
Before doing this, I had no idea there were so many VHS formats. Slowly, people are switching to DVD. Luckly, post production houses all burn internal DVDs as region-free or all-region enabled even the mystery 7, and coveted 8.
The DVD region codes are already hackable, and I'm sure a manufacturer will come out with a 'Pro' DVD player that plays everything, like this Samsung VCR deck.
My boss uses a system I don't entirely approve of, but it works regardless. I work at a sound studio, and he does the following: Current projects are on his main computer's drives, backed up to a 1 TB LaCie nightly. Once a week, he brings in a firewire drive from home and backs up recently finished projects. In essance, he dumps projects onto drives as they are finished.
When the terabyte drive gets full, he stores it in a fire-safe cabinet in the studio, so he is able to access it within a few minutes (plug and mount). When his 'home drive' gets full, he puts it in a firesafe cabinet at home and buys another one. When projects run 4-9 gigbytes, this system has a large cost advantage over remote servers. The issue is that he does not back up his operating system, libraries, plugins or virtual instruments. It costs him a few hundred every time he has to pay me to reinstall everything. Also, the system isn't the most orderly to use. The advantage is that he has 3 TB, or over 400 projects easily accessable.
I would not upgrade to a commodity PC, only to get burned by Microsoft. There are a few post houses that have switched to commodity PC hardware. It isn't always good. I know of one that has a bunch of Avid desks, purchased 2 years ago, and every time some shmuck editor brings in his hard drive with his custom plugin and filter set, or insists his personal laptop be connected to the network, something screws up the Avid Unity, or the workstation. The head of Post said of the Avid Unity/PC setup, that he would have prefered Macs, but Final Cut Pro and the xSan weren't quite there yet. He regrets not waiting until FCP5, because that fits his needs perfectly.
At this level, you might spend 3 grand for a PC, or 4 grand for a Mac, but you will spend another 12-25 grand on each workstation after fibre channel cards, video capture cards (or Digi cards for audio), SCSI/SATA cards and drives, and software licenses for Avid/FCPHD/Boris/Degidesign/Media100. The point is, original platform hardware is a small cost when getting 'burned'. It's a small cost at any point. The 3rd party equipment costs hurt more then having to buy a G5/Xeon. It is more the compatibility issue. And given the problems with upgrading to XP from a Windows/DOS platform, and the future problems with longhorn not implementing.NET, it seems like an even trade. We get burned no matter what.
The other big issue is reliability. If it isn't broken, a lot of people just won't upgrade. My boss is still using OpCode's Vision audio/MIDI sequencer, and has no regrets. It does everything he needs it to, and it is exceedingly stable. The thing that most people don't realize about the Audio/Visual industry is that equipment is still purchased and used the way it was 30 years ago. You use it until it breaks, or until new stuff is needed to get the job done. That is why Macs have always been prized in my industry. They are as reliable as the 24 track magtape Otari sitting next to me.
++ TOSLINK. I use both S/PDIF and ADAT Optical. I have had far less problems with optical connections then S/PDIF over coax/RCA cables. I do have to worry about jitter, but if you are operating a home theater/computer with only 4 or 5 digital input sources, all within the same room, you have nothing to worry about. Just use decent cables. Some problems can arise from varying sample rates and bit depth, but that is pretty easy to deal with.
One of the most interesting applications of a PowerPC chip is the TC electronics PowercCore platform. It is an audio signal processing PCI card that uses a 266 mhz 603e processor plus four additional DSP chips @ 150mhz. For $500, it is quite a deal. No main processor load, a few really, really good plugins... It is like having a Power Macintosh 5500 on a PCI card.
Music is not a finite good. It can be copied thousands of times for virtually nothing. The car analogy doesn't work. Ferarri actually tried to do this in the early 1990s. They leased a model instead of selling them, but that's another story.
I own an indie label, and I have no problem with people selling CDs to each other. I don't even care if people let friends rip our CDs. I would like people to buy them, but at least people are hearing the music. The artsts are hurt financially though when that copying takes place. In the end, given our size, all publicity is good publicity, but every downloaded track is a track the atists don't make money from, even if they do publicize the group.
The point is, a song on a P2P network is no longer a singular entity, like a car. If it is shared, it becomes as many entities as there are downloaders. That is where the problem is.
For reference: Under compulsory licensing, if you wanted to license and record a cover of any song out there, the artist would get about 10 cents a song a CD in royalties at a minimium. So, if you covered a song one of my artists did and sold a platinium (million in sales) album, my artist would get $100,000.
Speaking of ancedotal evidence, I was on a Cessna 182 long ago, and the Garmin GPS navigation/weather system would screw up whenever a cell phone was being used. The pilot semi-legally made two calls, both to FBOs at our destination. I remember big patches of yellow appearing on the Garmin screen, indicating a 100% chance of severe lightening on a crystal clear spring day.
I know the larger IFR-capable planes use more robust systems, but I would agree, the risk is still there...And I assume anybody using a cell phone on an airplane to be utting me in serious danger.
Also, if I remember correctly, commerical airplanes use wireless networks to communicate amongst different systems within the plane and also to send real-time diagnostics to the manufacturer or maintenence center.
The USC compulsory licens law arose from a 1909 court case involving player pianos.
Basically, the law currently says: If your music has been publically released, anyone can cover or perform it. They have to pay you too. Current rates are something like 9.8 cents per song per copy. So, if someone covers a single song of yours for an album of theirs, they have to pay you 9.8 cents for every album they sell with your song on it. The Harry Fox Agency does most of the clearance work in the US.
I admin a sound studio with 10 macs and two windows machines. Nine run X.3 and one runs 9.2.2. The two windows machines run GigaStudio and are never, and will never be connected to the internet. I run antivirus software on the macs connected to the internet, and nothing has ever come up in a scan. Ever. I have run every single single version of X since 10.2.1 and they all stayed clean.
As for patching, I patch manually, because of quirks in all the audio software we run, but OS X will patch automatically if you set it up to. you will be manually installing patches for any apps not distributed by apple, but all of Apple's stuff will update automatically.
One of Apple's core markets is Audio/Visual production. Folks like me, who use FCPHD and ProTools, Digital Performer or Logic on a daily basis want this. They will put 4 CPUs in a desktop, because the market is there. I wouldn't mind being able to run three or four instances of EastWest's Symphonic Orchestra at the same time. The possibility of the phrase "real-time HD rendering" is something that comes to mind as well...
Well, eventually, the pros moved over to Digibeta, and Sony still makes all that shit...Their top of the line deck (VCR if you insist) runs $40,000USD. The future is high-def on the DV platform, as far as pro video goes. I don't remember seeing laser disk players lying around post houses at all...I do know they were used in the educational market for a long time.
CNC milling is a cool process. If you want to see a truly amazing CNC machine, look at scaled composites. They now have a 5-axis numerically controlled gantry router. The thing is 50 feet by 20 feet.
Anyway, I agree that a formal education is good for some things. I am pursuing a career in audio engineering. I plan try and take pure science oriented classes and apply them to my work myself, rather then sit through classes that force me to learn DSP technology or applications that will be obsolete in a few years.
I would rather be able to discuss the whole "why" thing then demonstrate my ability to regurgitate answers from the back of the exam book...
Underlying theory is gone from American education, becuase we are such a results-driven society. How many times have you heard from a boss or management: "I don't care HOW it gets done, just get it done. Fast. Cheap.", which often results in a crappy job... I am two years out of high school, and I have learned more from working and interning than I did from advanced classes in highschool AND the part-time college classes I have been taking. The nly reason I am going back to school full time is because of the whole marketability issue. Nobody wants to hire someone without the degree, even if the experience and professional credit is there.
The last/. google story was on the new google campus in the Dalles. What happens when you combine the following:
1)A huge bundle of OC lines running down the Columbia Gorge. (some for a Hanford-Los Alimos network, some for Internet2, and some standard teir one backbone.) 2)30 acres, and possible 80 acres more of server farms in an inductrial park. 3)A 2000 mW power plant less than a mile away, with google asking for a guaranteed supply AND a guarantee that the power-hungry aluminium smelting plants won't re-open. 4) Google's recent purchases around the country of dark fibre. 5) The release of a google movie tool.
Video servers need to be magnitudes more powerful than a normal SQL/static HTMl web page...It seems to me as if google is slowly setting up for a video on demand service.
On the consumer level, you might be right. Apple is selling an experience. But, as an audio engineer, there is a huge benefit in using a unified platform. The CoreAudio API/interface lets me do things stabley that a PC could never do decently. I pay the premium for the platform just like a limo driver gets a stretch Benz or Cadillac instead of a Yugo.
Then there is the whole issue of RISC vs. CISC architecture, but I digress.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, US workers probably need to become more efficient, but: If all of our high-paying jobs are going elsewhere (say, manufacturing to China, or tech support to India) then US residents will be working for much lower wages in service industries. We won't be able to afford the very goods that we USED to make, causing US companies to fail, cycling us into a depression, until we become the cheap labor again. In the long term, outsourcing hurts corporations as much as us lowly workers.
Also, $5 an hour isn't accurate. It is closer to 30 CENTS an hour for some jobs. Maybe $2 if you have remarkable English skills. Hard-working Non-complaining workers have been outsourced. They never opened their mouths until the stench of burgers at the golden arches became too much.
I am working in a field that can't be outsourced. I chose it in part for that reason. Some people don't have a choice though...I am lucky to be able to afford a full college education. Some people have to start work right out of high school.
If we have to compete in a global marketplace, we should at least have the same benefits as Indian, Chinese or even European workers: Some amount of Gov't healthcare, access to higher education, and perhaps a government that doesn't give tax breaks to companies that outsource US jobs.
Market economics will eventually take care of outsourcing.
If all of our high-paying jobs are going elsewhere (say, manufacturing to China) then US residents will be working for much lower wages in service industries. We won't be able to afford the very goods that we USED to make, causing US companies to fail, cycling us into a depression, until we become the cheap labor again. In the long term, outsourcing hurts corporations as much as us lowly workers.
That being said, we need to stop corporate tax breaks for outsourcing and understand that US corporations are nothing without US consumers and US workers. A global economy can only work if we grow in such a way to bring standards and wages up around the world...Corporate-dominated market-economics destroys the very consumers needed to sustain capitalist growth.
I drafted a letter to the office, and I will be hand-delivering the following tomorrow, since I have appointments in DC anyway:
Copyright GC/ I&R, P.O. Box 70400
Southwest Station
Washington, DC
20024-0400
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing in regards to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on preregistration of copyright claims, issued July 22, 2005 (37 CFR Part 202, docket No. RM 2005-9). The notice seeks information in regards to the exclusive use of the Internet Explorer for electronic-only preregistration forms.
I strongly object to the use of Internet Explorer as a standard for electronic-only preregistration forms. I object because an IE-only-registration system cannot adequately meet the needs of copyright holders. I maintain digital recording and editing systems for multi-million dollar media facilities. I manage copyright and royalty filings for both my own record company and several clients. My clients in the film and audio recording businesses hold many copyrights that have been violated in the past, and have a high potential for violation. The reasons for my objection to the use of a single software program for preregistrations stem from a few key issues. Preregistration is going to become a critical tool for protecting intellectual property, and my clients need unfettered access to that tool.
Internet Explorer represents a security and stability risk to the facilities I serve. A computer problem can cause tens of thousands of dollars in downtime expenses, and I seek to minimize those expenses for my clients. Clients do not usually use Internet Explorer for Internet access because too many bugs and security holes exist. On Windows computers, it is often unwise to allow Internet access with IE because of the security risks involved. It is preferable that facilities use web browsers that use established, rather then proprietary Microsoft standards, because they are more compatible and secure.
Another problem with using IE as the standard for a web interface is that it causes problems for many people working in creative fields. Microsoft Windows/IE is not a standard platform for creative work. It should be noted that many companies, and a majority of my clients do not use a single Microsoft Windows based computer in their entire facility. Microsoft has chosen to stop development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh, meaning that Macintosh users will no longer be able to use certain proprietary Microsoft technologies . In addition, Microsoft has never released a version of IE for a Linux/Unix platform. If the copyright office uses an IE only system, people using Apple Macintosh and Linux/Unix computer systems would be shut out of an electronic-only preregistration system. This would place an undue hardship on many copyright holders and applicants.
The copyright office has a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers and copyright holders to implement systems that serve the most people the best way possible. The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (2003) policy implementation specifically endorses a policy of technology neutrality:
Accordingly, the final guidance [of the GPE Act] maintains the basic policy of technology neutrality for automated transactions while recognizing that agencies should select an alternative relative to the risk of the application, and calls on agencies to consider all of the available electronic signature technologies (including the advantages of public key technology) as part of their assessments.
Also, 1703 b (1)(B) of the GPE Act states:
(1) The procedures developed under subsection (a)...
(B) may not inappropriately favor one industry or technology;
The endorsement of a specific technology, company, or web browser, therefore contradicts a policy implemented by the rest of the federal government.
Technologies exist
Well, sort of. You are right, the VHS format differences were more about different views on tech standards then restricting choice. However, once they realized they COULD restrict choice, they did. You see this in the worldwide implementation of VHS standards:
One of my jobs is doing royalty paperwork for TV. I get VHS dubs from around the world. I have a $700 US Samsung VCR that plays NTSC (and NTSC 4.43), PAL (B/G, I and D/K), SECAM (B/G and D/K), PAL-N, PAL M MESECAM and some S-VHS.
Before doing this, I had no idea there were so many VHS formats. Slowly, people are switching to DVD. Luckly, post production houses all burn internal DVDs as region-free or all-region enabled even the mystery 7, and coveted 8.
The DVD region codes are already hackable, and I'm sure a manufacturer will come out with a 'Pro' DVD player that plays everything, like this Samsung VCR deck.
My boss uses a system I don't entirely approve of, but it works regardless. I work at a sound studio, and he does the following: Current projects are on his main computer's drives, backed up to a 1 TB LaCie nightly. Once a week, he brings in a firewire drive from home and backs up recently finished projects. In essance, he dumps projects onto drives as they are finished.
When the terabyte drive gets full, he stores it in a fire-safe cabinet in the studio, so he is able to access it within a few minutes (plug and mount). When his 'home drive' gets full, he puts it in a firesafe cabinet at home and buys another one. When projects run 4-9 gigbytes, this system has a large cost advantage over remote servers. The issue is that he does not back up his operating system, libraries, plugins or virtual instruments. It costs him a few hundred every time he has to pay me to reinstall everything. Also, the system isn't the most orderly to use. The advantage is that he has 3 TB, or over 400 projects easily accessable.
I would not upgrade to a commodity PC, only to get burned by Microsoft. There are a few post houses that have switched to commodity PC hardware. It isn't always good. I know of one that has a bunch of Avid desks, purchased 2 years ago, and every time some shmuck editor brings in his hard drive with his custom plugin and filter set, or insists his personal laptop be connected to the network, something screws up the Avid Unity, or the workstation. The head of Post said of the Avid Unity/PC setup, that he would have prefered Macs, but Final Cut Pro and the xSan weren't quite there yet. He regrets not waiting until FCP5, because that fits his needs perfectly.
.NET, it seems like an even trade. We get burned no matter what.
At this level, you might spend 3 grand for a PC, or 4 grand for a Mac, but you will spend another 12-25 grand on each workstation after fibre channel cards, video capture cards (or Digi cards for audio), SCSI/SATA cards and drives, and software licenses for Avid/FCPHD/Boris/Degidesign/Media100. The point is, original platform hardware is a small cost when getting 'burned'. It's a small cost at any point. The 3rd party equipment costs hurt more then having to buy a G5/Xeon. It is more the compatibility issue. And given the problems with upgrading to XP from a Windows/DOS platform, and the future problems with longhorn not implementing
The other big issue is reliability. If it isn't broken, a lot of people just won't upgrade. My boss is still using OpCode's Vision audio/MIDI sequencer, and has no regrets. It does everything he needs it to, and it is exceedingly stable. The thing that most people don't realize about the Audio/Visual industry is that equipment is still purchased and used the way it was 30 years ago. You use it until it breaks, or until new stuff is needed to get the job done. That is why Macs have always been prized in my industry. They are as reliable as the 24 track magtape Otari sitting next to me.
++ TOSLINK. I use both S/PDIF and ADAT Optical. I have had far less problems with optical connections then S/PDIF over coax/RCA cables. I do have to worry about jitter, but if you are operating a home theater/computer with only 4 or 5 digital input sources, all within the same room, you have nothing to worry about. Just use decent cables. Some problems can arise from varying sample rates and bit depth, but that is pretty easy to deal with.
OT:
One of the most interesting applications of a PowerPC chip is the TC electronics PowercCore platform. It is an audio signal processing PCI card that uses a 266 mhz 603e processor plus four additional DSP chips @ 150mhz. For $500, it is quite a deal. No main processor load, a few really, really good plugins... It is like having a Power Macintosh 5500 on a PCI card.
ahhh..alas.
Music is not a finite good. It can be copied thousands of times for virtually nothing. The car analogy doesn't work. Ferarri actually tried to do this in the early 1990s. They leased a model instead of selling them, but that's another story.
I own an indie label, and I have no problem with people selling CDs to each other. I don't even care if people let friends rip our CDs. I would like people to buy them, but at least people are hearing the music. The artsts are hurt financially though when that copying takes place. In the end, given our size, all publicity is good publicity, but every downloaded track is a track the atists don't make money from, even if they do publicize the group.
The point is, a song on a P2P network is no longer a singular entity, like a car. If it is shared, it becomes as many entities as there are downloaders. That is where the problem is.
For reference: Under compulsory licensing, if you wanted to license and record a cover of any song out there, the artist would get about 10 cents a song a CD in royalties at a minimium. So, if you covered a song one of my artists did and sold a platinium (million in sales) album, my artist would get $100,000.
Interns, my friend. Interns.
well, one could buy the board as well...member by member.
Speaking of ancedotal evidence, I was on a Cessna 182 long ago, and the Garmin GPS navigation/weather system would screw up whenever a cell phone was being used. The pilot semi-legally made two calls, both to FBOs at our destination. I remember big patches of yellow appearing on the Garmin screen, indicating a 100% chance of severe lightening on a crystal clear spring day.
I know the larger IFR-capable planes use more robust systems, but I would agree, the risk is still there...And I assume anybody using a cell phone on an airplane to be utting me in serious danger.
Also, if I remember correctly, commerical airplanes use wireless networks to communicate amongst different systems within the plane and also to send real-time diagnostics to the manufacturer or maintenence center.
a an addition to the parent post:
The USC compulsory licens law arose from a 1909 court case involving player pianos.
Basically, the law currently says: If your music has been publically released, anyone can cover or perform it. They have to pay you too. Current rates are something like 9.8 cents per song per copy. So, if someone covers a single song of yours for an album of theirs, they have to pay you 9.8 cents for every album they sell with your song on it. The Harry Fox Agency does most of the clearance work in the US.
I admin a sound studio with 10 macs and two windows machines. Nine run X.3 and one runs 9.2.2. The two windows machines run GigaStudio and are never, and will never be connected to the internet. I run antivirus software on the macs connected to the internet, and nothing has ever come up in a scan. Ever. I have run every single single version of X since 10.2.1 and they all stayed clean.
As for patching, I patch manually, because of quirks in all the audio software we run, but OS X will patch automatically if you set it up to. you will be manually installing patches for any apps not distributed by apple, but all of Apple's stuff will update automatically.
One of Apple's core markets is Audio/Visual production. Folks like me, who use FCPHD and ProTools, Digital Performer or Logic on a daily basis want this. They will put 4 CPUs in a desktop, because the market is there. I wouldn't mind being able to run three or four instances of EastWest's Symphonic Orchestra at the same time. The possibility of the phrase "real-time HD rendering" is something that comes to mind as well...
Well, eventually, the pros moved over to Digibeta, and Sony still makes all that shit...Their top of the line deck (VCR if you insist) runs $40,000USD. The future is high-def on the DV platform, as far as pro video goes. I don't remember seeing laser disk players lying around post houses at all...I do know they were used in the educational market for a long time.
CNC milling is a cool process. If you want to see a truly amazing CNC machine, look at scaled composites. They now have a 5-axis numerically controlled gantry router. The thing is 50 feet by 20 feet.
Anyway, I agree that a formal education is good for some things. I am pursuing a career in audio engineering. I plan try and take pure science oriented classes and apply them to my work myself, rather then sit through classes that force me to learn DSP technology or applications that will be obsolete in a few years.
I would rather be able to discuss the whole "why" thing then demonstrate my ability to regurgitate answers from the back of the exam book...
Underlying theory is gone from American education, becuase we are such a results-driven society. How many times have you heard from a boss or management: "I don't care HOW it gets done, just get it done. Fast. Cheap.", which often results in a crappy job... I am two years out of high school, and I have learned more from working and interning than I did from advanced classes in highschool AND the part-time college classes I have been taking. The nly reason I am going back to school full time is because of the whole marketability issue. Nobody wants to hire someone without the degree, even if the experience and professional credit is there.
Or, we could even go to our web browser and type in www.AcronymFinder.com....
We don't even turn the heat on in the winter, we just turn the AC off and open the door to the server room and put a fan there...
The last /. google story was on the new google campus in the Dalles.
What happens when you combine the following:
1)A huge bundle of OC lines running down the Columbia Gorge. (some for a Hanford-Los Alimos network, some for Internet2, and some standard teir one backbone.)
2)30 acres, and possible 80 acres more of server farms in an inductrial park.
3)A 2000 mW power plant less than a mile away, with google asking for a guaranteed supply AND a guarantee that the power-hungry aluminium smelting plants won't re-open.
4) Google's recent purchases around the country of dark fibre.
5) The release of a google movie tool.
Video servers need to be magnitudes more powerful than a normal SQL/static HTMl web page...It seems to me as if google is slowly setting up for a video on demand service.
MSN and GMail? No competition there in terms of quality, only in market penetration :)
Apple might be a hardware company, but it should be noted that the software is still top-notch.
On the consumer level, you might be right. Apple is selling an experience. But, as an audio engineer, there is a huge benefit in using a unified platform. The CoreAudio API/interface lets me do things stabley that a PC could never do decently. I pay the premium for the platform just like a limo driver gets a stretch Benz or Cadillac instead of a Yugo.
Then there is the whole issue of RISC vs. CISC architecture, but I digress.
Or replace everything with aluminium foil replicas....