I live on the south side of Pittsburgh, and I work in the educational district - in both cases, the grid has a hell of a lot of load, and power can get very, very "noisy" in the summer. Hell, there isn't a day at work where I don't hear the UPSsen buzz-click at least once. In the summer, it's multiple blinks a week - sometimes multiple blinks or short outages a day. When the juice gets that erratic, anything that can't take the pressure is going to cave - CF is a little too pricy to be bitching out in the first round, imo.
I have two standard flourescent fixtures in my house - livingroom and kitchen. Those big long tubes that break into a jillion tiny pieces? Yeah, those. I've never, ever had problems with those.
And I've never had problems using bulbs the other sockets were designed for.
I tried CF bulbs a couple of years ago, for about three months. Three months (closer to four) is how long it took every CF bulb in the house to stop working. These things are supposed to last longer than regular light bulbs (LASTS OVER FIVE YEARS!!!!1 the packaging said) - but in my experience, they were vastly more likely to die during a power surge, power outage, or other form of "electrical event" than traditional bulbs.
Of course, I rent a Fight Club house with old wiring, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of my equipment (oldskool light bulbs, half a dozen computers, alarm clock, etc) is still plugging away. But I can't exactly put the ceiling fixtures on a surge protector.:P
So until I hear for sure that CFs will actually last on a power grid that looks more like an EKG than a nice straight line, I'm sticking with the older technology - I'd rather spend five bucks a year on lightbulbs than twenty bucks a month.
As for the OMG UR ELECTRIK BILLZ!! - I run my lights for about two hours a day, tops. Maybe four. I don't really live in my house, so the utility difference is nill.
The problem with "good enough" is that most graphics and video professionals consider the current crop of pay-soft to be just that. FCP is "good enough." After Effects is "good enough." Photoshop CS2 is "good enough" - older versions are "better than," depending on what bit Adobe's recently changed just to piss you off.
I thought AE was incredibly easy to learn, but I'd already had a few courses in 3d Studio MAX. AE is a combination of MAX's track view (you want to talk about a pain in the ass? THAT is a pain in the ass.) and Photoshop layering. I picked up the basics in AE3 in about ten minutes - the only thing that's really changed since then is that each successive version has more restrictive licensing and seems to render slower than the one before it.
Not from FCP. Maybe from FCPE or iMovie. It'll be easy for Adobe to inject the app back into the Mac world - many people use Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects with all kinds of video work.
The fact that it's not a UB is a big setback - just about everyone I know who does video on a Mac is still on PPC. Why? Because all the coder and sysadmin kiddies with the macbooks make about two to three times the cash that we do.
That and there's a huge variety of workflow software that's still either PPC or has yet to be updated to UBs.
Premiere 6.5 was a steaming pile of ass - somewhere slightly above iMovie and very, very far below FCP in terms of functionality - and a collosal pain in the ass to use for capturing. Premiere was always crap in that department, especially for anyone stuck using it on, say, a 601-based PPC... and, much like Quark Xpress, Premiere for OS X didn't change much and definitely had a rushed feel to it - making it even easier for anyone to switch up to software that worked better and offered vastly more functionality for the price.
For the kind of work I do, Premiere and Media100 were gross, horribly constrained applications that were dumped for FCP as soon as I could convince my division manager to budget for a DVR.
For my needs, the only thing "Premiere Pro" might be able to add to the mix is better After Effects integration, which I'd appreciate.
Personally, anyone who thinks Premiere competes against FCP in any of its forms just doesn't understand the market - much like the GIMP vs. Photoshop argument. Pro video users don't need "good enough." They need "better than."
If Premiere Pro is Better Than FCP for a few things, I'll probably wind up running it when the division moves to intel powermacs (a day that will suck for me, as I'm continually constrained to Classic for functionality Adobe keeps screwing up and moving around in successive versions of Photoshop). Until then, the only instances of Premiere I've witnessed are 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x - all of which are rancid redneck underwear stains compared to the ease of use and functionality of FCP.
1. Baltar on the basestar is incredibly boring. I think a lot of this has to do with the writers dropping the interesting disease/genocide angle in favor of several episodes of the 'hybrid' mumbling. Combined with the cheapass set design and the "inside the Cylons" aspect of season three isn't just a boring letdown, it's a cheap boring letdown. The Cylons were better off as faceless killbot "less is more" things - this attempt to plumb their psyche feels like a set-dressed coffee shop on a slow business day.
2. Anders. The writers haven't known what to do with him since he survived New Caprica.
3. Bulldog. You're telling me a guy who's been imprisoned by the Cylons for three YEARS makes it to the Galactica (a gaping plot hole in and of itself), does his one-episode drama thing and then completely disappears?
4. "Religion" - such as it is. BSG may periodically arc quite nicely, but the show has never bothered much with foreshadowing. The fact that bits like the "temple of jupiter" (or whatever it's called) just pop up without being hinted at previously indicates to me that the writers are definitely not thinking very far ahead.
Season three definitely feels like it's dragging ass, much like the second half of season two - the show would be better served with either shorter seasons on the same budget (so we've got Good Episodes and no filler), or with a higher budget. Make the goddamned Basestar look like a starship-sized biomechanoid instead of a department store after-hours, dangit.
I'll be a happy camper if Anders get whacked and we never see the inside of a Cylon Basestar again. Mostly the latter.
Personally, I think Cost - in the sense of the show's budget - is the major issue with the series at the moment. Three or four AWESOME effects-heavy episodes followed by a bunch of tepid drama so irritating (sick of Starbuck And Apollo, really amazingly disappointed with the Cylon 'hybrid' and the Basestar as a whole) that I've gone back to watching Farscape.
If you think the DVDs are a ripoff, you've obviously never bought anime. typically 20-30$ for four 22-24 minute episodes*, with shows typically being 26 episodes or so (sans franchises like Naruto and Dragonball - I feel sorry for the bastards who are paying out the ass for those on DVD) - it's a lot of cash for not a lot of content.
* The episode itself barely clocking in at 18 to 20 after the overlong intro operetta and the lengthy credits sequences all anime seem to have.
Seriously. I have five of them (quadra 605 and 610-based, plus MPEG board) in my basement. Apple put some serious effort into developing a cable/set-top box prototype, but it never went to market.... and I'd have more to say on the matter if I could actually read the contents of the one hard drive that came with the lot.
The propable functionality has likely been superceded by the tv shows on ITMS, but that isn't the point.
Seriously. Every Katz "article" was the dictionary definition of "-1, Flamebait" and the comments were usually along the lines of "OMFG STFU!!!!" or "OMFG FOAD!!! AUGH!" or such.
IME, "near-universally reviled" and "controversial" are different things, and Katz (his/. "articles" at any rate) is the former.
Apple released a sub-notebook in 1992 - the Duo 230. I've often wished for a modern equivalent - I haven't used the optical drive on my iBook since I installed the OS and apps, and I doubt it would be much of a technological stretch to push everything but a USB port and a headphone jack into a Firewire port-extender. The iBook is nice, but it's still too big for convenient day-to-day backpack transport. I'd love to have OS X on something smaller.
What's the point of this game anyway? To manage to get yourself a bigger second-hand ship after you transported 56,730 tons of merchandise through the galaxy in 536 hyperspace jumps?
It's like life that way.
Unlike life, you can get pissed and make a decent run of it as a space pirate.:P
Why not, for example, a space exploration game -- concentrating on the science, economics, and logistics involved, instead of the usual shoot-the-evil-green-aliens theme?
Give Escape Velocity Nova a try, if you haven't already. It's available for Windows and MacOS and it's quite entertaining. It may not have the depth you're looking for, but it's extremely freeform for a modern game - you can be a trader, a raider, a transporter, a diplomat... sure there's combat involved, but it's more along the lines of Asteroids than Doom. I find the game highly enjoyable - it's the first piece of shareware I actually payed money for!
Parent said There isn't a computer maker in the top ten that is really doing anything innovative anyway it's all copying or refining what has gone on before them before and marketing it as something people will want. If they get that right things fall into place.
Everything Apple is doing now has been done by somebody else years ago. Usually that somebody else was Apple, but the time or the technology wasn't right. Now the hardware's caught up - they finally have their video store to go with the VOD prototypes from ten years ago.:P
Yes there's Blizzard and Id titles and a few others but there's no Halo 2 (yet), and there's no Halflife or Halflife 2. Which means no Counterstrike, no Counterstrike CS, no anything that requires Steam.
Then there's 3dStudioMAX, Rhino, and a load of CAD packages.
Not all professionals can just pick up and move, and everyone who uses a computer for Entertainment Purposes Only has about 15x the game library on Windows.
(People with the cash and resources own both but not everybody has the money or the space)
Apple doesn't need to buy SGI. They've taken over the mindshare that SGI had in the 90s amongst the artsy/3d/video crowd, and they've grown it.
SGI was the sexy hardware, the killer apps, the unix OS.
Apple IS the sexy hardware, the killer apps, the unix OS. Plus laptops and music players, on a prosumer budget - the toys aren't just for rich bastards and companies anymore.
When I went to skool, SGI had the reputation of being the machines people did Real Work on - Macs and the NT boxes were regarded as cheap POS toys by comparison. A few years later - with SGI absolutely FAILING to maintain its graphics lead - the 400$ dell is the cheap POS and the 5,000$ Mac is the new sex people use for Real Work.
Unless you're one of those asshats* who needs something built against the Windows APIs, of course.:P
Can we just get BACK TO THE MOON ALREADY?!. Sheesh. Before I'm collecting social security, please?!
Seriously. Rebuild the launch technology first, then follow it up with improvements and start planting bases and solar arrays and observatories like cigarette butts in the park.
Why should I "trust" Symantec? Hell, I don't trust Google... why should I trust a company whose entire revenue stream is built out of "fixing" "broken" boxes?? D:
Mod me redundant if you'd like but let's be serious here - money doesn't build trust. Never has. Never will.
Slashdot Mirror
ALSA.
'nuff said.
I live on the south side of Pittsburgh, and I work in the educational district - in both cases, the grid has a hell of a lot of load, and power can get very, very "noisy" in the summer. Hell, there isn't a day at work where I don't hear the UPSsen buzz-click at least once. In the summer, it's multiple blinks a week - sometimes multiple blinks or short outages a day. When the juice gets that erratic, anything that can't take the pressure is going to cave - CF is a little too pricy to be bitching out in the first round, imo.
I have two standard flourescent fixtures in my house - livingroom and kitchen. Those big long tubes that break into a jillion tiny pieces? Yeah, those. I've never, ever had problems with those.
And I've never had problems using bulbs the other sockets were designed for.
I tried CF bulbs a couple of years ago, for about three months. Three months (closer to four) is how long it took every CF bulb in the house to stop working. These things are supposed to last longer than regular light bulbs (LASTS OVER FIVE YEARS!!!!1 the packaging said) - but in my experience, they were vastly more likely to die during a power surge, power outage, or other form of "electrical event" than traditional bulbs.
:P
Of course, I rent a Fight Club house with old wiring, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of my equipment (oldskool light bulbs, half a dozen computers, alarm clock, etc) is still plugging away. But I can't exactly put the ceiling fixtures on a surge protector.
So until I hear for sure that CFs will actually last on a power grid that looks more like an EKG than a nice straight line, I'm sticking with the older technology - I'd rather spend five bucks a year on lightbulbs than twenty bucks a month.
As for the OMG UR ELECTRIK BILLZ!! - I run my lights for about two hours a day, tops. Maybe four. I don't really live in my house, so the utility difference is nill.
The problem with "good enough" is that most graphics and video professionals consider the current crop of pay-soft to be just that. FCP is "good enough." After Effects is "good enough." Photoshop CS2 is "good enough" - older versions are "better than," depending on what bit Adobe's recently changed just to piss you off.
I thought AE was incredibly easy to learn, but I'd already had a few courses in 3d Studio MAX. AE is a combination of MAX's track view (you want to talk about a pain in the ass? THAT is a pain in the ass.) and Photoshop layering. I picked up the basics in AE3 in about ten minutes - the only thing that's really changed since then is that each successive version has more restrictive licensing and seems to render slower than the one before it.
Not from FCP. Maybe from FCPE or iMovie. It'll be easy for Adobe to inject the app back into the Mac world - many people use Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects with all kinds of video work.
The fact that it's not a UB is a big setback - just about everyone I know who does video on a Mac is still on PPC. Why? Because all the coder and sysadmin kiddies with the macbooks make about two to three times the cash that we do.
That and there's a huge variety of workflow software that's still either PPC or has yet to be updated to UBs.
Premiere 6.5 was a steaming pile of ass - somewhere slightly above iMovie and very, very far below FCP in terms of functionality - and a collosal pain in the ass to use for capturing. Premiere was always crap in that department, especially for anyone stuck using it on, say, a 601-based PPC... and, much like Quark Xpress, Premiere for OS X didn't change much and definitely had a rushed feel to it - making it even easier for anyone to switch up to software that worked better and offered vastly more functionality for the price.
For the kind of work I do, Premiere and Media100 were gross, horribly constrained applications that were dumped for FCP as soon as I could convince my division manager to budget for a DVR.
For my needs, the only thing "Premiere Pro" might be able to add to the mix is better After Effects integration, which I'd appreciate.
Personally, anyone who thinks Premiere competes against FCP in any of its forms just doesn't understand the market - much like the GIMP vs. Photoshop argument. Pro video users don't need "good enough." They need "better than."
If Premiere Pro is Better Than FCP for a few things, I'll probably wind up running it when the division moves to intel powermacs (a day that will suck for me, as I'm continually constrained to Classic for functionality Adobe keeps screwing up and moving around in successive versions of Photoshop). Until then, the only instances of Premiere I've witnessed are 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x - all of which are rancid redneck underwear stains compared to the ease of use and functionality of FCP.
My bitchlist is similar.
1. Baltar on the basestar is incredibly boring. I think a lot of this has to do with the writers dropping the interesting disease/genocide angle in favor of several episodes of the 'hybrid' mumbling. Combined with the cheapass set design and the "inside the Cylons" aspect of season three isn't just a boring letdown, it's a cheap boring letdown. The Cylons were better off as faceless killbot "less is more" things - this attempt to plumb their psyche feels like a set-dressed coffee shop on a slow business day.
2. Anders. The writers haven't known what to do with him since he survived New Caprica.
3. Bulldog. You're telling me a guy who's been imprisoned by the Cylons for three YEARS makes it to the Galactica (a gaping plot hole in and of itself), does his one-episode drama thing and then completely disappears?
4. "Religion" - such as it is. BSG may periodically arc quite nicely, but the show has never bothered much with foreshadowing. The fact that bits like the "temple of jupiter" (or whatever it's called) just pop up without being hinted at previously indicates to me that the writers are definitely not thinking very far ahead.
Season three definitely feels like it's dragging ass, much like the second half of season two - the show would be better served with either shorter seasons on the same budget (so we've got Good Episodes and no filler), or with a higher budget. Make the goddamned Basestar look like a starship-sized biomechanoid instead of a department store after-hours, dangit.
I'll be a happy camper if Anders get whacked and we never see the inside of a Cylon Basestar again. Mostly the latter.
Personally, I think Cost - in the sense of the show's budget - is the major issue with the series at the moment. Three or four AWESOME effects-heavy episodes followed by a bunch of tepid drama so irritating (sick of Starbuck And Apollo, really amazingly disappointed with the Cylon 'hybrid' and the Basestar as a whole) that I've gone back to watching Farscape.
If you think the DVDs are a ripoff, you've obviously never bought anime. typically 20-30$ for four 22-24 minute episodes*, with shows typically being 26 episodes or so (sans franchises like Naruto and Dragonball - I feel sorry for the bastards who are paying out the ass for those on DVD) - it's a lot of cash for not a lot of content.
* The episode itself barely clocking in at 18 to 20 after the overlong intro operetta and the lengthy credits sequences all anime seem to have.
Seriously. I have five of them (quadra 605 and 610-based, plus MPEG board) in my basement. Apple put some serious effort into developing a cable/set-top box prototype, but it never went to market.... and I'd have more to say on the matter if I could actually read the contents of the one hard drive that came with the lot.
The propable functionality has likely been superceded by the tv shows on ITMS, but that isn't the point.
Seriously. Every Katz "article" was the dictionary definition of "-1, Flamebait" and the comments were usually along the lines of "OMFG STFU!!!!" or "OMFG FOAD!!! AUGH!" or such.
/. "articles" at any rate) is the former.
IME, "near-universally reviled" and "controversial" are different things, and Katz (his
Yeah but it's got an optical drive. The thing I liked about the duo was it was completely barebones - no crap I don't need.
;p
Oh, and the 230 had a trackball.
Apple released a sub-notebook in 1992 - the Duo 230. I've often wished for a modern equivalent - I haven't used the optical drive on my iBook since I installed the OS and apps, and I doubt it would be much of a technological stretch to push everything but a USB port and a headphone jack into a Firewire port-extender. The iBook is nice, but it's still too big for convenient day-to-day backpack transport. I'd love to have OS X on something smaller.
Final Fantasy III cost me 70$. I still have the receipt. :P
SNES retail was 40$ for "budget" titles, 55-60 for everything else, 65-70 for certain Big games. The "bargin bin" level was 20-35$.
What's the point of this game anyway? To manage to get yourself a bigger second-hand ship after you transported 56,730 tons of merchandise through the galaxy in 536 hyperspace jumps?
:P
It's like life that way.
Unlike life, you can get pissed and make a decent run of it as a space pirate.
Why not, for example, a space exploration game -- concentrating on the science, economics, and logistics involved, instead of the usual shoot-the-evil-green-aliens theme?
Give Escape Velocity Nova a try, if you haven't already. It's available for Windows and MacOS and it's quite entertaining. It may not have the depth you're looking for, but it's extremely freeform for a modern game - you can be a trader, a raider, a transporter, a diplomat... sure there's combat involved, but it's more along the lines of Asteroids than Doom. I find the game highly enjoyable - it's the first piece of shareware I actually payed money for!
Parent said There isn't a computer maker in the top ten that is really doing anything innovative anyway it's all copying or refining what has gone on before them before and marketing it as something people will want. If they get that right things fall into place.
:P
Everything Apple is doing now has been done by somebody else years ago. Usually that somebody else was Apple, but the time or the technology wasn't right. Now the hardware's caught up - they finally have their video store to go with the VOD prototypes from ten years ago.
OS X ain't got shit for games, period.
Yes there's Blizzard and Id titles and a few others but there's no Halo 2 (yet), and there's no Halflife or Halflife 2. Which means no Counterstrike, no Counterstrike CS, no anything that requires Steam.
Then there's 3dStudioMAX, Rhino, and a load of CAD packages.
Not all professionals can just pick up and move, and everyone who uses a computer for Entertainment Purposes Only has about 15x the game library on Windows.
(People with the cash and resources own both but not everybody has the money or the space)
Fill in that ????? bit between $thing and Profit!. :P
/., not Harvard Business College or whatever.
Seriously, this is
Idiots should have got into the GFX card market.
Uh... people who worked for SGI DID. It ain't their fault that management's a bunch of asshats.
Where the smegging hell do you think ATI and NVidia got their talent, hmmmmmmm?
Apple doesn't need to buy SGI. They've taken over the mindshare that SGI had in the 90s amongst the artsy/3d/video crowd, and they've grown it.
:P
SGI was the sexy hardware, the killer apps, the unix OS.
Apple IS the sexy hardware, the killer apps, the unix OS. Plus laptops and music players, on a prosumer budget - the toys aren't just for rich bastards and companies anymore.
When I went to skool, SGI had the reputation of being the machines people did Real Work on - Macs and the NT boxes were regarded as cheap POS toys by comparison. A few years later - with SGI absolutely FAILING to maintain its graphics lead - the 400$ dell is the cheap POS and the 5,000$ Mac is the new sex people use for Real Work.
Unless you're one of those asshats* who needs something built against the Windows APIs, of course.
* self included.
Got me. The Newton got whacked before my time.
:P
I don't see why it couldn't have offered both.
Let's see.
Apple has:
1. Style.
2. Newton OS / Handwriting recognition / IP - all recognized as lightyears ahead of anything (at least back in the day).
3. The BeFS dude.
Palm has:
1. BeOS IP.
2. PalmOS / Handwriting "recognition" that "works" nothing like the Newtons (vastly inferior).
3. Not much else.
What use would Apple have for Palm, exactly?
Can we just get BACK TO THE MOON ALREADY?!. Sheesh. Before I'm collecting social security, please?!
Seriously. Rebuild the launch technology first, then follow it up with improvements and start planting bases and solar arrays and observatories like cigarette butts in the park.
Why should I "trust" Symantec? Hell, I don't trust Google... why should I trust a company whose entire revenue stream is built out of "fixing" "broken" boxes?? D:
Mod me redundant if you'd like but let's be serious here - money doesn't build trust. Never has. Never will.
Seriously. Look at the number of meds out there that cause people to gain weight as a "side effect."
Personally, I'll take the torrential anal leakage.