My perspective and verbage comes from the fact that I work two full-time jobs : the one I have to and the one I want to, and have adapted my entertainment intake accordingly. <3
There's "have fun" and there's "waste time" - to friends of mine, SL and WoW and such all into the former category. For me, they're in the latter. I enjoy gaming, but I do it when there's literally nothing else to do - when I'm on the bus or waiting for the bus or when I'm on the train.
SL, There, WoW, Everquest, etc. are all modern versions of MUDs or MUSHes - the "point" is to muck about, explore the game world, make friends and so forth. They are, ultimately, all timesinks - which is why those of us with to-do lists longer than our lifespans either don't get them or don't use them.
... and if they gave us that, it would take a huge chunk out of Apple's obscenely bloated Powermac margins.
I just want a modern mac with dual displays. I already own the displays, the keyboard, the pointing device, etc - so I don't need an iMac, and a Mini doesn't do what I need.... which ratchets the price point from 700$ up to 1800$+ just for the ability to drive multiple displays.:P
I'd settle for a slightly larger mini with a user-serviceable video board - but expandable, upgradeable hardware runs contrary to apple's business model.
If you want a good "behind the scenes" documentary, the one on The Last Starfighter is easily the best. CGI was in its infancy then - these days, it's just "bigger and more" of techniques that were pioneered with movies like TLS and Tron. The TLS documentary (which is on the TLS DVD) includes some great stories about the tricks they pulled and breakthroughs they managed in order to get the thing done - even more impressive when they tell you that the rendering hardware (which was, truly, a supercomputer) was so overtaxed that they could either preview the renders or output to film, but not both.
Oh, and there's a brief clip of some X-wings. They pitched the idea of CGI spaceships to Lucas between Star Wars and ESB - and Lucas scoffed at them.
A guy who was ahead of the curve with motion control had a chance to stay ahead of the curve with CGI and instead waited twenty years to wade back in doing the exact same thing everyone else is, only bigger and more of it. Ha.
I call bullshit. On the ready bit, anyway. Just imagine the sheer force of the political shitstorm a First Contact would stir up. Anyone who could decode the garbage we eject into space would be smart enough to scope out the political situation - anywhere you put down, you're going to be politically validating whoever's collecting taxes on the ground you drop on.... and if you don't land in the US, you'll have the US military six feet up your ass muscling whoever else out of the way for first call on photo ops, resources, etc. Land in the middle east and you've not only brought that political shitstorm to a boil, you've also incited two of the world's major religions. Then there's the language thing.
Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.
Simple. Their magnetic bottle lost containment. Titanium may be tough (at the right thicknesses, etc) but when the jet it's attached to goes kerplooey, you don't see pristine sheets of the stuff spanging off the ground.
Just because WE can't find a means of damaging, distorting, or otherwise rending a material doesn't mean the forces it contained weren't great enough to do so.:P
There's no way in hell a P-51 could catch or even ding the launch and cruise stages of a Saturn moon rocket. But those little bitty slow moving paper-thin moonlanders? That's another story.
I'll bet the damned thing sucked a bird into an intake or something.
but most people who use their computer move the dock to the side,
Of the dozens of Mac users I've met and hung out with over the years, I know of only ONE who kept her dock on the side. One out of dozens is hardly "most."
I tried it on the side, but a few minutes in photoshop convinced me otherwise. So it's on the bottom on all of my machines - the same place I keep my Windows start bar. Not only is it less obtrusive, it's the default - one less thing to worry about.
Don't get me wrong. I've hated the shit out of the Quicktime player since 4.x. It's a piece of shit* on the mac, and it's even worse on Windows.
My point is that the interface of the app window is identical or near-identical on both platforms, so some dipshit whining that it's "not windows enough" is a moot point, since Safari isn't trying to be "windows" at all.
* For consumer "media player" use. It's a damned fine pro tool.
Which "they" ? The Windows users who think the Mac is the platform of trendy, Gap-shopping asshats with too much money? Or the Mac users who've loathed Brushed Metal in all of its incarnations since Quicktime 4?
Apple apps on Windows act like their Mac counterparts - to the extent that the Windows APIs and the obvious disdain for the platform that Apple coders seem to have (Quicktime for Windows, anyone?).
I use Firefox for the bank and porn, and that's pretty much it. I use Safari for everything else, because of two things - bookmark management and history management. I find its bookmark management to be vastly superior to every web browser I've ever used, and the History management/use is vastly superior to Firefox's.
Of course, the Firefox history thinger blows ass, so it's kind of like comparing a Ford to a skateboard with broken wheels. Rendering counts for a lot, but Firefox sucks ass in a lot of little tiny ways that Safari doesn't, and that matters to me. Creating or opening new windows in FF is also a hair slower* than it is in Safari.
What I do find hilarious about Safari is that when I went to check out the Leopard preview on the Apple website, none of the goddamned thumbnails worked properly. You'd think Apple would bother to vet their own site in their own browser under conditions other than "100% optimal."
* blah blah custom builds. Firefox used to be seriously slower in the UI department - it's gotten a lot better of late.
No, the Gimp UI is ass any way you cut it. It's the big-boned, severely overweight, retarted cousin of the Photoshop UI. "Big" and "Clunky" might work for FOSS peoples who occasionally need to futz with images from their cameras or to optimize logos (or slap text on a lolcat or whatever), but it's nowhere near elegant enough for production useability by artists who live in Adobe apps.
And yes, you can "customize" it. Something FOSS peoples absolutely love, something artkids absolutely hate (fine when you're learning from scratch but once you've got some experience, you expect your vector app to behave like the vector app you learned and you expect your image editor to behave like the image editor you learned and if they don't there's no real reason to switch - there's a reason web browsers all handle more or less the same).
When you need a paintbrush, you need a paintbrush, not a swiss army knife with 497 unrelated functions, 32 of which combine to form a perl-scriptable paintbrush - but only if you compile it with the right version of GCC.
It has really amazing gif, png and jpg optimization routines built-in via save for web.
The photoshop jpeg exporter is utter shit. GIF support is fine but there's only so many ways you can screw up an indexed color palette. Fireworks (now owned by Adobe) blows the Photoshop and Imageready exporters clean out of the water. I've been using it as my default image optimizer since version two and I've never gone back. I'll periodically check Photoshop's results against Fireworks and regardless of version, photoshop-exported jpegs have a larger file size and look crappier (blockiness, color quality, etc) compared to the results I get from Fireworks.
... or they use NO plugins and have a few thousand.psd documents that don't open properly in the GIMP.
Nevermind fonts or vector support or CMYK - I'm talking basic blending modes and masking. If you think OpenOffice support for word.docs is "special," try operating in an environment where only 100% compatability is Good Enough.
The issue is that the media has stopped reporting everything that's going on and has instead shifted into more of a "crowd control" role over the past couple of decades. The information is still out there for the people who actually seriously care, but the fact is that just about nobody does.
Media spinelessness isn't the issue. Apathy and willful ignorance is the issue.
Ultimately, the point I'm aiming at is that paying premium prices for bargain basement video really chafes my ass - if I'm going to lay down for kit that's twice the price of an equivalently powered wintel box, I'd like some name brand video and user access to all of the system memory.
Intel graphics are fine if all you run is Office... personally, I can't stand the fact that the chipset's VRAM is actually system RAM, and "shared video memory" doesn't mean "I have a gig of ram! I can run Doom3 with 512 megs of VRAM!" It means "I have X megs of system ram that I can never, ever use for anything but video memory."
Which is really misleading when they're billing a machine that has ~448 megs of useable ram as having 512.
Regardless of the "for" arguments, the fact that Apple - who bills their kit as high-end "luxury" personal computers - is using fleamarket video at maserati prices.
UBs are the new Fat Binaries - Apple dropped the 68k as soon as they were able but Fat Binary soft that could run on both 68k and PPC was around for quite a long while thanks to the big install base of 68ks. Now history's repeating itself - the only reason we have UBs is because of the hugehugehuge (proportionately speaking) PPC install base.
Apple has no reason to go back to the PPC. The profit margin on intel kit is much higher..... and if you don't think it's about profit, ask yourself why all of the low end PPC machines had okay ATI or NVidia graphics, while all of the new low end intel machines have totally bullshit Intel GMA graphics?
Apple : Not Passing The Savings On To The Consumer since.... what, 1984?
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I do my reading before bed and on the john.
My perspective and verbage comes from the fact that I work two full-time jobs : the one I have to and the one I want to, and have adapted my entertainment intake accordingly. <3
That or he's got nothing better to do.
There's "have fun" and there's "waste time" - to friends of mine, SL and WoW and such all into the former category. For me, they're in the latter. I enjoy gaming, but I do it when there's literally nothing else to do - when I'm on the bus or waiting for the bus or when I'm on the train.
SL, There, WoW, Everquest, etc. are all modern versions of MUDs or MUSHes - the "point" is to muck about, explore the game world, make friends and so forth. They are, ultimately, all timesinks - which is why those of us with to-do lists longer than our lifespans either don't get them or don't use them.
... and if they gave us that, it would take a huge chunk out of Apple's obscenely bloated Powermac margins.
:P
I just want a modern mac with dual displays. I already own the displays, the keyboard, the pointing device, etc - so I don't need an iMac, and a Mini doesn't do what I need.... which ratchets the price point from 700$ up to 1800$+ just for the ability to drive multiple displays.
I'd settle for a slightly larger mini with a user-serviceable video board - but expandable, upgradeable hardware runs contrary to apple's business model.
If you want a good "behind the scenes" documentary, the one on The Last Starfighter is easily the best. CGI was in its infancy then - these days, it's just "bigger and more" of techniques that were pioneered with movies like TLS and Tron. The TLS documentary (which is on the TLS DVD) includes some great stories about the tricks they pulled and breakthroughs they managed in order to get the thing done - even more impressive when they tell you that the rendering hardware (which was, truly, a supercomputer) was so overtaxed that they could either preview the renders or output to film, but not both.
Oh, and there's a brief clip of some X-wings. They pitched the idea of CGI spaceships to Lucas between Star Wars and ESB - and Lucas scoffed at them.
A guy who was ahead of the curve with motion control had a chance to stay ahead of the curve with CGI and instead waited twenty years to wade back in doing the exact same thing everyone else is, only bigger and more of it. Ha.
Why does cable cost 65$* a month when it's being so heavily subsidized by advertising?
:P
Simple. People will pay for it. Do you really think that advertising "savings" is going to be passed on to the customer? Of course not.
* Just pulling that number out of my ass. I haven't owned a TV since the 90s.
They wouldn't. But you can bet that world governments would be pushing for a face-to-face visit, vying to be the first country visited.
It couldn't have been that hard.
I call bullshit. On the ready bit, anyway. Just imagine the sheer force of the political shitstorm a First Contact would stir up. Anyone who could decode the garbage we eject into space would be smart enough to scope out the political situation - anywhere you put down, you're going to be politically validating whoever's collecting taxes on the ground you drop on.... and if you don't land in the US, you'll have the US military six feet up your ass muscling whoever else out of the way for first call on photo ops, resources, etc. Land in the middle east and you've not only brought that political shitstorm to a boil, you've also incited two of the world's major religions. Then there's the language thing.
Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.
Simple. Their magnetic bottle lost containment. Titanium may be tough (at the right thicknesses, etc) but when the jet it's attached to goes kerplooey, you don't see pristine sheets of the stuff spanging off the ground.
:P
Just because WE can't find a means of damaging, distorting, or otherwise rending a material doesn't mean the forces it contained weren't great enough to do so.
You've got the pop sci-fi on the brain.
There's no way in hell a P-51 could catch or even ding the launch and cruise stages of a Saturn moon rocket. But those little bitty slow moving paper-thin moonlanders? That's another story.
I'll bet the damned thing sucked a bird into an intake or something.
Of the dozens of Mac users I've met and hung out with over the years, I know of only ONE who kept her dock on the side. One out of dozens is hardly "most."
I tried it on the side, but a few minutes in photoshop convinced me otherwise. So it's on the bottom on all of my machines - the same place I keep my Windows start bar. Not only is it less obtrusive, it's the default - one less thing to worry about.
Don't get me wrong. I've hated the shit out of the Quicktime player since 4.x. It's a piece of shit* on the mac, and it's even worse on Windows.
My point is that the interface of the app window is identical or near-identical on both platforms, so some dipshit whining that it's "not windows enough" is a moot point, since Safari isn't trying to be "windows" at all.
* For consumer "media player" use. It's a damned fine pro tool.
Neither are Apple's Quicktime Player or iTunes. They've been around for years and we don't hear anybody whining about those, now do we?
Oh, and that list of gripes? Safari for OS X doesn't do any of that either.
Well, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6.
As usual, it sounds like the crowd who likes their $thing One Specific Way is furious that $new_app doesn't behave exacty like $thing. Boo hoo.
Which "they" ? The Windows users who think the Mac is the platform of trendy, Gap-shopping asshats with too much money? Or the Mac users who've loathed Brushed Metal in all of its incarnations since Quicktime 4?
Apple apps on Windows act like their Mac counterparts - to the extent that the Windows APIs and the obvious disdain for the platform that Apple coders seem to have (Quicktime for Windows, anyone?).
I use Firefox for the bank and porn, and that's pretty much it. I use Safari for everything else, because of two things - bookmark management and history management. I find its bookmark management to be vastly superior to every web browser I've ever used, and the History management/use is vastly superior to Firefox's.
Of course, the Firefox history thinger blows ass, so it's kind of like comparing a Ford to a skateboard with broken wheels. Rendering counts for a lot, but Firefox sucks ass in a lot of little tiny ways that Safari doesn't, and that matters to me. Creating or opening new windows in FF is also a hair slower* than it is in Safari.
What I do find hilarious about Safari is that when I went to check out the Leopard preview on the Apple website, none of the goddamned thumbnails worked properly. You'd think Apple would bother to vet their own site in their own browser under conditions other than "100% optimal."
* blah blah custom builds. Firefox used to be seriously slower in the UI department - it's gotten a lot better of late.
No, the Gimp UI is ass any way you cut it. It's the big-boned, severely overweight, retarted cousin of the Photoshop UI. "Big" and "Clunky" might work for FOSS peoples who occasionally need to futz with images from their cameras or to optimize logos (or slap text on a lolcat or whatever), but it's nowhere near elegant enough for production useability by artists who live in Adobe apps.
And yes, you can "customize" it. Something FOSS peoples absolutely love, something artkids absolutely hate (fine when you're learning from scratch but once you've got some experience, you expect your vector app to behave like the vector app you learned and you expect your image editor to behave like the image editor you learned and if they don't there's no real reason to switch - there's a reason web browsers all handle more or less the same).
When you need a paintbrush, you need a paintbrush, not a swiss army knife with 497 unrelated functions, 32 of which combine to form a perl-scriptable paintbrush - but only if you compile it with the right version of GCC.
The photoshop jpeg exporter is utter shit. GIF support is fine but there's only so many ways you can screw up an indexed color palette. Fireworks (now owned by Adobe) blows the Photoshop and Imageready exporters clean out of the water. I've been using it as my default image optimizer since version two and I've never gone back. I'll periodically check Photoshop's results against Fireworks and regardless of version, photoshop-exported jpegs have a larger file size and look crappier (blockiness, color quality, etc) compared to the results I get from Fireworks.
... or they use NO plugins and have a few thousand .psd documents that don't open properly in the GIMP.
.docs is "special," try operating in an environment where only 100% compatability is Good Enough.
Nevermind fonts or vector support or CMYK - I'm talking basic blending modes and masking. If you think OpenOffice support for word
The issue is that the media has stopped reporting everything that's going on and has instead shifted into more of a "crowd control" role over the past couple of decades. The information is still out there for the people who actually seriously care, but the fact is that just about nobody does.
Media spinelessness isn't the issue. Apathy and willful ignorance is the issue.
NURBS modelling with a tablet? I think my brain just exploded. o_o
Try running, say..... Maya. Or Motion.
Ultimately, the point I'm aiming at is that paying premium prices for bargain basement video really chafes my ass - if I'm going to lay down for kit that's twice the price of an equivalently powered wintel box, I'd like some name brand video and user access to all of the system memory.
Intel graphics are fine if all you run is Office... personally, I can't stand the fact that the chipset's VRAM is actually system RAM, and "shared video memory" doesn't mean "I have a gig of ram! I can run Doom3 with 512 megs of VRAM!" It means "I have X megs of system ram that I can never, ever use for anything but video memory."
Which is really misleading when they're billing a machine that has ~448 megs of useable ram as having 512.
Regardless of the "for" arguments, the fact that Apple - who bills their kit as high-end "luxury" personal computers - is using fleamarket video at maserati prices.
UBs are the new Fat Binaries - Apple dropped the 68k as soon as they were able but Fat Binary soft that could run on both 68k and PPC was around for quite a long while thanks to the big install base of 68ks. Now history's repeating itself - the only reason we have UBs is because of the hugehugehuge (proportionately speaking) PPC install base.
Apple has no reason to go back to the PPC. The profit margin on intel kit is much higher..... and if you don't think it's about profit, ask yourself why all of the low end PPC machines had okay ATI or NVidia graphics, while all of the new low end intel machines have totally bullshit Intel GMA graphics?
Apple : Not Passing The Savings On To The Consumer since.... what, 1984?