I'm afraid you've missed the boat pretty much completely here. Give an example, EVER, in the history of the world, where an economy as a whole was gutted by imports.
If the scenario you describe were actually to start to happen, we'd see the salaries start to converge. Also, cheaper outsourcing means cheaper goods and services, so the cost of living will go down as well. In the long term, free trade always helps both parties in aggregate, even if there are individuals who don't do well.
The only long-term way for the US to grow jobs is to continue to have high labor productivity. If we want to have five times as many dollars spent on us than the average Indian worker (bear in mind that salary isn't close to all of the costs of employing a worker), we need to be five times are productive.
Let me give an example of how free trade works, just look at the USA. The Constitution had as a main goal free trade, by taking away the rights of states to limit interstate commerce. Read your post again, and substitute "New York" for "USA" and "South Carolina" for "India." Lots of jobs move around with the country, with limited tools for states to change things. But have we seen the economy as a whole decline? Absolutely not.
And that's a good example of why free trade is a good thing. The benfits to the few who gain by high sugar prices are a lot less in total than the losses to all of us who have to pay for high sugar prices, and the losses to those in the third world who would otherwise be growing cheap sugar for us.
The best thing we could do for the third world is to drop our agricultural and textile tariffs. Foreign aid is a good thing, but most of the world would be better off if we had zero aid and zero tariffs.
Well, as in all jobs, you compete by being more productive than the next guy. This means you add more value to the company proportional to your cost (which is more than just salary).
Hopefully you have some skills the other guys don't have, or are willing to work longer hours, or are willing to work for less. If there are more experienced folks out there who are willing to work as hard as you, as long, and for the same money, well, you're in trouble:).
Still, our economy is quite good and finding work for those who have valuable skills. If you can't find a job right away, do some volunteer work to build up the skills and resume.
I know LOTS of people who have been laid off, but one way or another, they're all doing something, and paying the bills today. Myself, I started up my own consulting practice, which is a great way to make money while still having time to spend with my kids while they're small.
The higher the data rate, the more transparent the encode, so differences between codecs will shrink. Since 160 MP3 sounds "close enough" to lossless for most listeners, there isn't that much room for a better codec to pay off. But while I can't really listen to 128 MP3 for for, 128 AAC-LC sounds great, even though headphones. And compare them at 96 Kbps at 44.1, the difference is huge.
Actually, if you're doing low bitrate speech in Windows Media, you'll be a lot better of with Windows Media Audio 9 Voice. WMA is meant as a general-purpose codec. Low bitrate speech codecs are a different beast.
AAC-LC does somewhat better than stock WMA at low bitrate speech in my experience.
There are three speed/quality settings in QuickTime. The first is fast and cheap, and really only meant for real-time broadcasting. For this, we're interested in "Better" and "Best" modes. The only real difference between then is when working with more than 16-bit source. Better uses every quality optimization technique that works when the source is only 16-bit. Best uses additional techniques that improve quality with higher bit sources (like 20 or 24 bit, common in audio mastering).
iTunes is tuned for CD ripping, so using "Better" mode by default is just fine.
AAC-LC can also decode at more than 16-bit in some implementations. This means it's possible to make a AAC-LC encode that is better than CD quality, if the source is more than 16-bit. I gather Apple does this with the iTunes music store, using better than CD quality masters for the encode when available.
Actually, it shouldn't have a downward effect on US living standards. Since the software is largely sold in the US, outsouring should make it cheaper or better, making the US economy more productive. And if the software doesn't get any cheaper, IBM makes more money, which gets into the pockets of US citizens via divdends and captial gains.
Free trade is generally a positive for both sides. The problem is that the pain of free trade is concentrated, but the benfits are diffused. Outsourcing always hurts a few people a lot, and helps a lot of people a little. But the net effective is positive.
In the long term, wages are proportional to the net productivity created by a given worker. Over time, expect the ratio between US and Indian salaries to roughly mirror the relative productivity of US and Indian workers. And don't forget this is just salary. Stuff like office buildings, the utility of being able to talk face to face with management, etcetera, all factor into productivity.
And the stupid thing is why worry about the RGB outputs? RGB is already lossy from the source (4:2:0 Y'CbCr). SDI output from DVD would be far more worrysome, since that'll give you the exact output from the MPEG-2 decoder in its native pixel space.
Of course, as you point out, DeCSS rather opened the barn door on this one!
Before mine died, I occasionally used it for web browsing. There was a good version of Omniweb for OpenStep, but it was SLOOW on the Black hardware. Lynx worked great, of course.
Did you ever get Doom to run with audio? I never got this to work on my Color NeXTStation Turbo (which was the fastest unit they ever made).
33 MHz of 68040 firepower, baby! DMA, a great DSP. *sigh*. Its power supply finally died in 2002 - it was running as a secondary DNS server until the last.
Actually, I didn't start doing much of that kind of stuff until after I got married - this was one of my first shows. My wife is a lot more outgoing than I am, and ran trade show booths before the kids. She really helped me get going with that part of my business. Now I present at 8-12 trade shows a year (I'm writing this during a break from a class I'm teaching in NYC, where I'm here between DV Expo and MacWorld).
I'm certainly a lot more productive after marriage than before, both due to having more responsibilities to meet (nothing focuses the mind like a mortgage and baby to focus the mind, and because my wife is a lot better and some things than me. Much more forceful, and a much better sense of navigation, so I make a lot more follow up calls now, and get lost a lot less on road trips.
I met my wife at a trade show - the (late, lamented) Portland Creative Conference. She had a badge from our local PBS station, which my company at the time was doing some work for, so I walked over, introduced myself, and *BAM* six years later we've got a couple of kids and a minivan.
Meeting at an event of mutual interest gives you something to talk about, and ensures a certain level of commonality.
Of course, it's useful to have the right interests! A film industry trade show is a lot more fertile ground for meeting unattached women than, say, an Open Source conference. I'm sure it's possible, but the odds and competition would be much more against you.
The big problem with parties and bars is that they're typically loud, and there's nothing obvious to talk about, other than them being loud.
Well, you can certainly make a "consumer grade" PDF from the print box in OS X, but this doesn't really touch the power of the full Acrobat with forms, interactivity, etcetera. I use the export all the time for short docs, but for anything I'm going to distribute, I still need to use Distiller, tweak in Acrobat, etcetera. Plus there's that whole LZW patent thing - Apple PDFs will be a lot larger for the same content.
If anything, I imagine Apple's probably get more value out of PDF becoming a standard than they lose out of sales from Apple's support. Heck, why do you think Adobe did a full, open publication of the format standard.
Folks seem to have a lot of bitterness towards RealNetworks. I certainly agree the download process is self-defeatingly difficult. But of the Big Three propritary formats, RealNetworks is the only one shipping a *NIX player. It's community supported only, but is really pretty good, and they provide downloadable updates to the latest.
Real also provides authoring tools for Linux, albeit command-line only.
Also, the Real codecs are really quite nice. RealVideo 9 is second only to Windows Media Video 9 in terms of compression efficiency, and performs better on lower end machines. The audio codecs are getting a little long in the tooth, but are still more than adequate for real-time streaming applications.
Well, the laptop percentage went up because the absolute number of desktop sales was going way way down. Apple's machines were stuck at at 166 MHz FSB, and otherwise weren't much faster than machines that were a year or so old.
Now that the Freaking Awesome G5 machines are about to be released, the absolute number of desktop sales should increase massively, reducing the laptop percentage. With the new machines shipping in September or so, I'd expect that Apples 2003H2 laptop sales to drop to 20% or something (while still showing reasonable growth in absolute numbers).
Apple will certainly keep the iBook around forever, but I certainly expect it to go G4 eventually (certainly by the time PowerBook goes G5). The big advantage of the G3 was that it was cheap and power efficient. The new Motorola G4 chips are going to be as cheap and power efficient.
There are lots of reasons why Apple would like to have ALL new Macs have AltiVec, so they can rely on its awesomeness. Note that iChat AV requires a G3 600+, or any G4.
You specifically mentioned you were using authoring apps, which tend to be optimized for dual processors, hence my example. And a dual processor is a great thing for iTunes, since it can have a proc all to itself if you're using other unithreaded apps. A dual processor certainly doesn't double performance in all caes, but for processor intensive operations like video compression, it can really get close to 2x.
I think you're saying that you can upgrade your current Win32 box for less that it would cost to buy a brand new Mac of equivalent performance? That's probably true, but wouldn't be any less true if you weren't talking about Macs at all. Conversely, someone could upgrade a Mac for less than buying a new PC, in many cases (processor upgrades are pretty expensive on a Mac, but video cards, drives, memory, etcetera are the same as on IA32 platforms).
Er, no. No way does your machine compare to the current Mac high end.
Your single 1.5 GHz P4 beats two 1.4 G4? No way. Plus a top of the line Mac will have 2 GB of RAM. And an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 MB, which will leave your Voodoo 3 in the dust by a healthy order of magnitude.
Heck, the worst graphic card you can buy in a Mac is a Radeon Mobility (an iBook), which is likely still better than your Voodoo 3.
Now, you can argue that your current machine is fast enough, and that the fastest Wintel box is faster than the fastest Mac today. But today's fastest Macs really are quite speedy, and extremely productive. And in about 48 hours...
Okay, it's off topic, but man does Handspring have bad compressionists!
The file is encoded with the freeware version of the original Sorenson Video codec, and with the horribly old, bulky IMA audio codec. Video quality is terrible, expecially considering the data rate. I'm always surprised how companies with otherwise good marketing wind up doing terrible quality video. Look how blocky it gets with a transition. If they'd just used Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro with MP3 audio, they could have had a file that would play almost everywhere the current one would, with better quality, and at half the file size.
Whatever money they saved by having someone do this as their first compression job certainly will be lost in bandwidth charges after having the link posted on Slashdot!
I run a 10.2.7 Server for my email, FTP, etcetera. It's an old Blue and White G3 400, and it's plenty fast for me for everything I've done. And the GUI doesn't eat up cycles when the machine isn't being used hands on. I can ssh in and run top, and the Windows Server is only around 1%, even though it's plugged into a monitor, with a pre Quartz Extreme video card.
I really like the Mac server. Easy to administrate, with all the UNIX goodness lying just under the surface. And while I'm a generally technical guy, I'm certaily not an admin by nature.
Are you running a MacOS X box with Quartz Extreme? I'm writing this right now on a PowerBook G4 800, and the UI is nearly always as responsive as I could ask. Certainly, some applications like the Finer are slow, but heck, even when the whole Finder is locked, I can still drag a Finder window around perfectly smoothly, thanks to QE.
Why would Apple buy SGI instead of doing it all themselves? Like you say, in the long term, the OS and the current hardware and the sales organization would be punted. With the 970, Apple looks to be be developing the guts of a strong workstation/server technology on their own. Buying the customers and transitioning over might be possible, but would the (checks NASDAQ.com) $241M be worth it? Wait, $241M? That's all for all of SGI? Well then!
A few things I could see Apple wanting out of SGI:
Maya. Buying that and making it Mac only would be in keeping with all of Apple's purchases lately. Make a free rendering client for Xserve. It'd be neat
The sales organization. Given what SGI is facing in the market place, that they're still around and showing some revenue suggestions SOMEONE is rising to the challenge there.
Existing customer base. Buy the accounts. Make an IRIX compatibility layer for MacOS X.
Engineers. Presumably they've still got some good folks there. Apple could certainly use all the talent they can get in UNIX code, hardware design, etcetera.
I don't see much long term value in SGI's existing products if Apple bought them though, and Apple is certainly willing to give up market share on other platforms in order to make a package Mac-only.
Still, given that the whole company is only $241M, it seems like there might be something worth cherry-picking there.
The cache certainly helps a lot for stuff that can fit in the cache, but for "streaming" tasks, where data is read, processed, and output without being reused, you rapidly hit against memory bandwidth. Well optmized video code definitely runs out of cache quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid you've missed the boat pretty much completely here. Give an example, EVER, in the history of the world, where an economy as a whole was gutted by imports.
If the scenario you describe were actually to start to happen, we'd see the salaries start to converge. Also, cheaper outsourcing means cheaper goods and services, so the cost of living will go down as well. In the long term, free trade always helps both parties in aggregate, even if there are individuals who don't do well.
The only long-term way for the US to grow jobs is to continue to have high labor productivity. If we want to have five times as many dollars spent on us than the average Indian worker (bear in mind that salary isn't close to all of the costs of employing a worker), we need to be five times are productive.
Let me give an example of how free trade works, just look at the USA. The Constitution had as a main goal free trade, by taking away the rights of states to limit interstate commerce. Read your post again, and substitute "New York" for "USA" and "South Carolina" for "India." Lots of jobs move around with the country, with limited tools for states to change things. But have we seen the economy as a whole decline? Absolutely not.
And that's a good example of why free trade is a good thing. The benfits to the few who gain by high sugar prices are a lot less in total than the losses to all of us who have to pay for high sugar prices, and the losses to those in the third world who would otherwise be growing cheap sugar for us.
The best thing we could do for the third world is to drop our agricultural and textile tariffs. Foreign aid is a good thing, but most of the world would be better off if we had zero aid and zero tariffs.
Well, as in all jobs, you compete by being more productive than the next guy. This means you add more value to the company proportional to your cost (which is more than just salary).
:).
Hopefully you have some skills the other guys don't have, or are willing to work longer hours, or are willing to work for less. If there are more experienced folks out there who are willing to work as hard as you, as long, and for the same money, well, you're in trouble
Still, our economy is quite good and finding work for those who have valuable skills. If you can't find a job right away, do some volunteer work to build up the skills and resume.
I know LOTS of people who have been laid off, but one way or another, they're all doing something, and paying the bills today. Myself, I started up my own consulting practice, which is a great way to make money while still having time to spend with my kids while they're small.
The higher the data rate, the more transparent the encode, so differences between codecs will shrink. Since 160 MP3 sounds "close enough" to lossless for most listeners, there isn't that much room for a better codec to pay off. But while I can't really listen to 128 MP3 for for, 128 AAC-LC sounds great, even though headphones. And compare them at 96 Kbps at 44.1, the difference is huge.
Actually, if you're doing low bitrate speech in Windows Media, you'll be a lot better of with Windows Media Audio 9 Voice. WMA is meant as a general-purpose codec. Low bitrate speech codecs are a different beast.
AAC-LC does somewhat better than stock WMA at low bitrate speech in my experience.
There are three speed/quality settings in QuickTime. The first is fast and cheap, and really only meant for real-time broadcasting. For this, we're interested in "Better" and "Best" modes. The only real difference between then is when working with more than 16-bit source. Better uses every quality optimization technique that works when the source is only 16-bit. Best uses additional techniques that improve quality with higher bit sources (like 20 or 24 bit, common in audio mastering).
iTunes is tuned for CD ripping, so using "Better" mode by default is just fine.
AAC-LC can also decode at more than 16-bit in some implementations. This means it's possible to make a AAC-LC encode that is better than CD quality, if the source is more than 16-bit. I gather Apple does this with the iTunes music store, using better than CD quality masters for the encode when available.
Actually, it shouldn't have a downward effect on US living standards. Since the software is largely sold in the US, outsouring should make it cheaper or better, making the US economy more productive. And if the software doesn't get any cheaper, IBM makes more money, which gets into the pockets of US citizens via divdends and captial gains.
Free trade is generally a positive for both sides. The problem is that the pain of free trade is concentrated, but the benfits are diffused. Outsourcing always hurts a few people a lot, and helps a lot of people a little. But the net effective is positive.
In the long term, wages are proportional to the net productivity created by a given worker. Over time, expect the ratio between US and Indian salaries to roughly mirror the relative productivity of US and Indian workers. And don't forget this is just salary. Stuff like office buildings, the utility of being able to talk face to face with management, etcetera, all factor into productivity.
And the stupid thing is why worry about the RGB outputs? RGB is already lossy from the source (4:2:0 Y'CbCr). SDI output from DVD would be far more worrysome, since that'll give you the exact output from the MPEG-2 decoder in its native pixel space.
Of course, as you point out, DeCSS rather opened the barn door on this one!
What do you use it for?
Before mine died, I occasionally used it for web browsing. There was a good version of Omniweb for OpenStep, but it was SLOOW on the Black hardware. Lynx worked great, of course.
Did you ever get Doom to run with audio? I never got this to work on my Color NeXTStation Turbo (which was the fastest unit they ever made).
33 MHz of 68040 firepower, baby! DMA, a great DSP. *sigh*. Its power supply finally died in 2002 - it was running as a secondary DNS server until the last.
Actually, I didn't start doing much of that kind of stuff until after I got married - this was one of my first shows. My wife is a lot more outgoing than I am, and ran trade show booths before the kids. She really helped me get going with that part of my business. Now I present at 8-12 trade shows a year (I'm writing this during a break from a class I'm teaching in NYC, where I'm here between DV Expo and MacWorld).
I'm certainly a lot more productive after marriage than before, both due to having more responsibilities to meet (nothing focuses the mind like a mortgage and baby to focus the mind, and because my wife is a lot better and some things than me. Much more forceful, and a much better sense of navigation, so I make a lot more follow up calls now, and get lost a lot less on road trips.
I met my wife at a trade show - the (late, lamented) Portland Creative Conference. She had a badge from our local PBS station, which my company at the time was doing some work for, so I walked over, introduced myself, and *BAM* six years later we've got a couple of kids and a minivan.
Meeting at an event of mutual interest gives you something to talk about, and ensures a certain level of commonality.
Of course, it's useful to have the right interests! A film industry trade show is a lot more fertile ground for meeting unattached women than, say, an Open Source conference. I'm sure it's possible, but the odds and competition would be much more against you.
The big problem with parties and bars is that they're typically loud, and there's nothing obvious to talk about, other than them being loud.
Well, you can certainly make a "consumer grade" PDF from the print box in OS X, but this doesn't really touch the power of the full Acrobat with forms, interactivity, etcetera. I use the export all the time for short docs, but for anything I'm going to distribute, I still need to use Distiller, tweak in Acrobat, etcetera. Plus there's that whole LZW patent thing - Apple PDFs will be a lot larger for the same content.
If anything, I imagine Apple's probably get more value out of PDF becoming a standard than they lose out of sales from Apple's support. Heck, why do you think Adobe did a full, open publication of the format standard.
Folks seem to have a lot of bitterness towards RealNetworks. I certainly agree the download process is self-defeatingly difficult. But of the Big Three propritary formats, RealNetworks is the only one shipping a *NIX player. It's community supported only, but is really pretty good, and they provide downloadable updates to the latest.
Real also provides authoring tools for Linux, albeit command-line only.
Also, the Real codecs are really quite nice. RealVideo 9 is second only to Windows Media Video 9 in terms of compression efficiency, and performs better on lower end machines. The audio codecs are getting a little long in the tooth, but are still more than adequate for real-time streaming applications.
Well, the laptop percentage went up because the absolute number of desktop sales was going way way down. Apple's machines were stuck at at 166 MHz FSB, and otherwise weren't much faster than machines that were a year or so old.
Now that the Freaking Awesome G5 machines are about to be released, the absolute number of desktop sales should increase massively, reducing the laptop percentage. With the new machines shipping in September or so, I'd expect that Apples 2003H2 laptop sales to drop to 20% or something (while still showing reasonable growth in absolute numbers).
I'm talking about this Bad Boy:
s um mary.jsp?code=MPC7457&nodeId=03C1TR04670871865 3
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_
Should be shipping in quantity Q3 of this year.
In fact, current iBooks have Quartz Extreme. Minimum requirement is a Radeon, which my wife's six month old iBook 800 MHz has.
Apple will certainly keep the iBook around forever, but I certainly expect it to go G4 eventually (certainly by the time PowerBook goes G5). The big advantage of the G3 was that it was cheap and power efficient. The new Motorola G4 chips are going to be as cheap and power efficient.
There are lots of reasons why Apple would like to have ALL new Macs have AltiVec, so they can rely on its awesomeness. Note that iChat AV requires a G3 600+, or any G4.
You specifically mentioned you were using authoring apps, which tend to be optimized for dual processors, hence my example. And a dual processor is a great thing for iTunes, since it can have a proc all to itself if you're using other unithreaded apps. A dual processor certainly doesn't double performance in all caes, but for processor intensive operations like video compression, it can really get close to 2x.
I think you're saying that you can upgrade your current Win32 box for less that it would cost to buy a brand new Mac of equivalent performance? That's probably true, but wouldn't be any less true if you weren't talking about Macs at all. Conversely, someone could upgrade a Mac for less than buying a new PC, in many cases (processor upgrades are pretty expensive on a Mac, but video cards, drives, memory, etcetera are the same as on IA32 platforms).
Er, no. No way does your machine compare to the current Mac high end.
Your single 1.5 GHz P4 beats two 1.4 G4? No way. Plus a top of the line Mac will have 2 GB of RAM. And an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128 MB, which will leave your Voodoo 3 in the dust by a healthy order of magnitude.
Heck, the worst graphic card you can buy in a Mac is a Radeon Mobility (an iBook), which is likely still better than your Voodoo 3.
Now, you can argue that your current machine is fast enough, and that the fastest Wintel box is faster than the fastest Mac today. But today's fastest Macs really are quite speedy, and extremely productive. And in about 48 hours...
Okay, it's off topic, but man does Handspring have bad compressionists!
The file is encoded with the freeware version of the original Sorenson Video codec, and with the horribly old, bulky IMA audio codec. Video quality is terrible, expecially considering the data rate. I'm always surprised how companies with otherwise good marketing wind up doing terrible quality video. Look how blocky it gets with a transition. If they'd just used Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro with MP3 audio, they could have had a file that would play almost everywhere the current one would, with better quality, and at half the file size.
Whatever money they saved by having someone do this as their first compression job certainly will be lost in bandwidth charges after having the link posted on Slashdot!
I run a 10.2.7 Server for my email, FTP, etcetera. It's an old Blue and White G3 400, and it's plenty fast for me for everything I've done. And the GUI doesn't eat up cycles when the machine isn't being used hands on. I can ssh in and run top, and the Windows Server is only around 1%, even though it's plugged into a monitor, with a pre Quartz Extreme video card.
I really like the Mac server. Easy to administrate, with all the UNIX goodness lying just under the surface. And while I'm a generally technical guy, I'm certaily not an admin by nature.
Are you running a MacOS X box with Quartz Extreme? I'm writing this right now on a PowerBook G4 800, and the UI is nearly always as responsive as I could ask. Certainly, some applications like the Finer are slow, but heck, even when the whole Finder is locked, I can still drag a Finder window around perfectly smoothly, thanks to QE.
This is a non-rhetorical question.
Why would Apple buy SGI instead of doing it all themselves? Like you say, in the long term, the OS and the current hardware and the sales organization would be punted. With the 970, Apple looks to be be developing the guts of a strong workstation/server technology on their own. Buying the customers and transitioning over might be possible, but would the (checks NASDAQ.com) $241M be worth it? Wait, $241M? That's all for all of SGI? Well then!
A few things I could see Apple wanting out of SGI:
Maya. Buying that and making it Mac only would be in keeping with all of Apple's purchases lately. Make a free rendering client for Xserve. It'd be neat
The sales organization. Given what SGI is facing in the market place, that they're still around and showing some revenue suggestions SOMEONE is rising to the challenge there.
Existing customer base. Buy the accounts. Make an IRIX compatibility layer for MacOS X.
Engineers. Presumably they've still got some good folks there. Apple could certainly use all the talent they can get in UNIX code, hardware design, etcetera.
I don't see much long term value in SGI's existing products if Apple bought them though, and Apple is certainly willing to give up market share on other platforms in order to make a package Mac-only.
Still, given that the whole company is only $241M, it seems like there might be something worth cherry-picking there.
The cache certainly helps a lot for stuff that can fit in the cache, but for "streaming" tasks, where data is read, processed, and output without being reused, you rapidly hit against memory bandwidth. Well optmized video code definitely runs out of cache quickly.