Straight up, if I slept until I was Fully Rested, I'd wake up at noon or one in the afternoon instead of ten, which is when the alarm goes off and when I get up and Go. Forget feeling "fresh"- that's what a cold shower and coffee are for, damnit. I'm awake enough by noon that it isn't a problem the rest of the day.
I would, however, love a device I could attach to the alarm clock which would kick on the overheads.:) Nothing like painfully bright light to kick your ass out of bed in the morning.
Personally, I think your prediction is, given current trends, more accurate and more likely than the typical masturbatory pseudotopian CRAP published Sci-Fi authors spew out whenever they try to predict the near-future.
Haven't been to Michigan, but urban and near-urban PA roads are pretty bad. Rural isn't horrible- it's either DIRT or PAVED- and a couple of the major arteries (route 15 comes to mind) are in startlingly good repair.
But then you get stretches like Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. I've lived here for almost ten years and this is THE FIRST TIME I've seen road crews on fifth- which in Oakland is a four lane road, three lanes inbound with the bus lane outbound.
They peeled up the asphalt prior to smacking down the new coat a couple of weeks ago. Normally this makes for a REALLY bumpy ride if you're not used to it.... but I didn't even notice.:P
They ARE fairly good about announcements and detours, but road work seems to take MONTHS. MONTHS. Why the hell does it take six weeks to repave a mile and a half of street?:|
I hate penndot. So much. For exactly this reason. The companies that got the contract to build the new stadiums in Pittsburgh got that shit done almost overnight.... yet penndot does nothing but sit on their ass and occasionally repave a small chunk of road. During rush hour.
Oh, and PA has some of the worst roads in the country. These guys could actually WORK a full shift and they'd never have to worry about running out of things to do.
Likewise, I pay the bills using Adobe and Apple software. I've had the misfortune of suffering Adobe's piss-poor, somebody-kick-their-engineers-in-the-balls-plz OS X software. It's balls. I remember when Photoshop 5 running on a 9600 spanked the crap out of a p450 (which was more than twice as fast!). PS CS on the AMD box in the office absolutely annihilates PS on our G5s.
Consequently, we've been looking to drop Adobe software where feasable, and Premiere was the first thing to go. Why we even had it, I'm not sure- it was a legacy purchasing decision made by someone who doesn't work here anymore. Premiere is decent for quick and dirty audio editing of existing video, but using it as an editor is a joke. Capturing with it a scream to watch. Final Cut Pro absolutely creams Premiere in every category- particularly interface (intuitive! FANCY THAT.), manual (documentation! FANCY THAT.), memory utilization (FCP4 loads in 1/4 the time the last version of Premiere for OS X took to load on the same hardware), multiple audio and video tracks....
Really, Premiere fit somewhere between iMovie and FCP. Much closer to iMovie. Adobe pulling the software for the Mac is as much an admission of their inability to produce something useable as it is Apple's ability to do the reverse.
The odds of Adobe doing anything with Core Image anytime soon are really slim- AE is also a PC app, much like photoshop, which means that Adobe has to balance API-hooking against a portable codebase.
That said, I use AE 6 and it's solid for a lot of things, but it's FREAKING SLOW on a 2x2ghz g5 with 2g ram. And it's time control / scrubbing functionality sucks ass. A BIG, SWEATY ass.
I don't want more features, I want a more tightly optimized app that handles as fluidly as Final Cut Pro.
And it doesn't look like I'll be getting that from Adobe.:P
Even though AE gets more expensive with every version, its still a hell of a lot cheaper than Combustion, Commotion, and other Professional Compositing Apps.
AE is a lot like Final Cut Pro. People use it because it's powerful enough for the price. They'll drop it the second something better comes along.
I can't wait to get Motion at work. If it proves out, then the only Adobe app I'll need on my system is Photoshop, which I run in Classic anyway (since type handling in PS6 and higher makes said versions useless for the sort of work I do anyway).
I use After Effects for a lot of the work I do for my day job, and to put it bluntly, AE6 SUCKS. It's incredibly slow, most of which is due to generous memory defaults that tell the app to use a hell of a lot of swap (living in swap slows ANYTHING in OS X down to a crawl- it's orders of magnitude more sluggish than VM in OS 9), and there's a ton of issues with the rendering engine- namely the fact that it doesn't apply blending modes during a scrub, which hoses any benefit OF scrubbing when you have a ton of elements that suddenly turn into flat-colored, zero detailed blocks. Scrub and one of my projects suddenly looks like it's being produced for an Atari 2600.:P
That and navigating by timecode is an incredible pain in the ass in AE- you have to either manually input the time you want, or use the interface panel buttons for next/previous frames.
AE has a lot of good points, but it's sluggish and the interface is seriously lacking. Like most Adobe apps, it hasn't transitioned to OS X very well at all. It's still faster to use/render in 4 in Classic (which does 90% of what 5-6 do, if you're only concerned with the basics) than it is to use/render in 5.5 or 6.:P
I mean, you use your terminal (aka "web browser") to connect to the master server that holds the content and responds to your queries (aka the "web site") all the time, don't you? None of that stuff is actually on your home machine, you're just accessing it remotely...
It's that only one-fifth of their product line has upgradeable video hardware. You want to buy a Mac right now? With an upgradeable video card? You get a G5. You get a "choice" of how fast you want it, but the iMac, iBook, eMac, etc. barely come with enough VRAM to run Quartz Extreme.
Oh, and PCI Radeon 7000s with Mac roms still go for around 80$ on ebay (the last time I looked). Nevermind something like, say.... AGP. The pricing on Mac graphics boards is absoluttely disgusting.
So as a mac user, your options are video that can't even run current games (my Pismo horked on UT when UT and my Pismo were new.... modern iBooks and Powerbooks fare no better), or paying out the smegging nose for something that'll do the job.
Of course, once you have a decent video board, your game options consist of Blizzard, iD, Epic, and whichever of the various companies have ported the DnD games.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh used to have a couple of labs of Sun Ray 100s. Bit on the pricy side, but they kicked ass when they were in service.
Unfortunately, CLP canned 'em and replaced them with Windows boxes. Most likely cheaper than a Sun support contract.:-|
Sick thing is that due to tax / tax code reasons, they couldn't donate the hardware to anyone else. It got tossed into the dumpster.:(
Do you REALLY think that Joe Dickhead the fratboy has even the ghost of a cluestain what CSS is? What HTML stands for? What Javascript is?
If you answered yes, you're the one that's clueless. Since the mid to late nineties, the average web user has been just that- a USER.
USERS DO NOT WANT TO LEARN. They want the thing to download porn and mp3s and movies and check email and camwhore and submit scans of their boobs to deviantart. Most of them get disk capacity and RAM confused.
Sort of explains the continued MS dominance, really.
I'm sick of having to keep track of my logins for six home machines, work workstation, nine work servers, about FORTY FREAKING WEBSITES, and the ten or twelve remote machines I have accounts on.
SSH dsa keys help, until you get the massively ANAL sysadmin that forces you to change your password. Apple's developer connection was THE WORST for this. They made you change your password at fixed intervals and kept a very LONG log of your OLD passwords... they wouldn't let you use variants on old passwords, they wouldn't let you recycle old passwords and they damned sure as shit wouldn't let you auto-login. I stopped bothering with ADC because, simply put, logging in was too much of a pain in the ass.
If computing as a whole goes to a simlar model, I'm going back to the fucking abacus. The abacus doesn't require that I log in and change my password to something completely different every three weeks.
If I get owned, it's my own freaking fault- force me to change my password and you've forced me out of using your service. Your server isn't the only login I have to remember and trying to force it to the front of my head is a waste of my time. Keep track of the IP and MAC I login from and get anal with me if it changes- I can understand that.
There's a vast gulf between Secure Enough and Fucking Annoying.
But pr0n is logged in a separate notebook and hard drive.:P
The Big Wad O Notebooks isn't cross-referenced or even really indexed- I pull 90% of what I need from memory. The majority of it's there as a record of the evolution of the project.
There was a "casting delay" if you were actually playing the sprite or the girl. If you were playing the boy, then you could essentially "override" the casting delay through remote controlling the other members in your party.
Still one of my favorite games.... though I spent hundreds of hours more on the original (released as Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy in the US... still have my copy, though the battery's frooged out.).
Balance-wise, the Sprite kicked ass, the guy was good in hand-to-hand, and the girl was meh outside of healing... personally, balance issues didn't deter from my enjoyment of the game in the least.
FF7 had nowhere near the individual character depth that 6 did, in terms of individual skills and abilities. Materia made them modular and consequently, the game boiled down to the three characters you favored getting all of the xp. No reason to use the rest.
Mana is still my favorite adventure RPG- I absolutely love the menu system. My biggest gripe about NWN is the fact that their character menus are about the CRAPPIEST implimentation of the Mana menu concept I've ever seen. Takes too long to drill around to what you want.:-|
Or at least Marvel comics, back in the day- which is why Image exists now. If you worked for Marvel, they owned everything that came out of your brain. Doodle on a napkin at a bar? Theirs. Sketch on a piece of toilet paper in a Greyhound bus bathroom? Theirs. Any artistic output that you're not doing for them specifically while you're employed by them (including the pr0n you draw)? Theirs.
McFarlane, Leifeld (ick), Lee, etceteras weren't happy about this and founded Image- a publishing label for creator-owned works, which was an instant success with the crowd that's into Marvel books.
In context, it makes sense. From a business standpoint, Marvel's always looking for another franchise to flog into the ground and ride the shareholders into more green. From a genre standpoint, the superhero scene is so oversaturated that they need anything that smells halfway original.
Of course, the independant comics publishers (Dark Horse, Antarctic Press, Slave Labor, others) have Known Better for years... and their books aren't recycled rehash.:)
I dunno if Marvel's lightened up since the Image thing, but that's how it used to be. The fact that IT has similar catches written into contracts isn't much of a surprise.
Don't get me wrong, it makes my ass hair smoulder.
I've kept a dated notebook since 1994. All of my creative output and most of my sketch and development work spans the volumes- timed and dated. The first four and a half years are sealed in storage. The rest of it I'm still occasionally pulling out as reference.
The project I've been spending most of my free time predates my entire professional career, and by its very nature, it's excruciatingly well documented.:D
I can get 640x480 with my existing video card, according to the benchmarks and reviews. What I have is still expensive on the mac and considered "dated" in the PC world.
A bottom-of-the-line PC that will barely handle Doom3 (again, at 640x480) was specced by my coworker at ~480$, which is still 280$ more than X-box + Doom.
Sony shot themselves in the face with Betamax. The JVC deck was cheaper to manufacture- and JVC licensed the technology to other companies, such as RCA.
Oh, and there was that little thing about length- VHS tapes held more.
If you could have jammed three two hour movies onto a Betamax tape, the format would still be around.
I'm a Mac owner, with a dual g4 450.:| My options for doom3 consist of the following:
1. Proc upgrade, video card upgrade. The proc up to dual 1.24ghz is ~600$. Gamer-friendly mac video cards are goddamned joke- that's another 300$ for something that would cost 125$ tops on the pc. My current video card meets Minimum Requirements for video, though. So, 600$ + Game. 660$ (Mac games are almost never the same price as the PC equivalent.). Oh, and add waiting for the mac port.
2. Buy a PC. If I'm going to do that, then I'd be springing for a Good video card. Recent figures from my coworker puts a useable box at about 900$. Plus the game. 950$.
3. Xbox + Doom3 for Xbox = 200$.
So realistically speaking, the XBox version of doom is actually the cheapest solution available to me.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Straight up, if I slept until I was Fully Rested, I'd wake up at noon or one in the afternoon instead of ten, which is when the alarm goes off and when I get up and Go. Forget feeling "fresh"- that's what a cold shower and coffee are for, damnit. I'm awake enough by noon that it isn't a problem the rest of the day.
:) Nothing like painfully bright light to kick your ass out of bed in the morning.
I would, however, love a device I could attach to the alarm clock which would kick on the overheads.
Heh. Nice.
Personally, I think your prediction is, given current trends, more accurate and more likely than the typical masturbatory pseudotopian CRAP published Sci-Fi authors spew out whenever they try to predict the near-future.
Haven't been to Michigan, but urban and near-urban PA roads are pretty bad. Rural isn't horrible- it's either DIRT or PAVED- and a couple of the major arteries (route 15 comes to mind) are in startlingly good repair.
:P
:|
But then you get stretches like Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. I've lived here for almost ten years and this is THE FIRST TIME I've seen road crews on fifth- which in Oakland is a four lane road, three lanes inbound with the bus lane outbound.
They peeled up the asphalt prior to smacking down the new coat a couple of weeks ago. Normally this makes for a REALLY bumpy ride if you're not used to it.... but I didn't even notice.
They ARE fairly good about announcements and detours, but road work seems to take MONTHS. MONTHS. Why the hell does it take six weeks to repave a mile and a half of street?
I hate penndot. So much. For exactly this reason. The companies that got the contract to build the new stadiums in Pittsburgh got that shit done almost overnight.... yet penndot does nothing but sit on their ass and occasionally repave a small chunk of road. During rush hour.
Oh, and PA has some of the worst roads in the country. These guys could actually WORK a full shift and they'd never have to worry about running out of things to do.
More like grants and donations.
:P
I left out the bit about the dumpster diving.
Pulled twenty Rays, but only five mice and four keyboards. Been waiting on someone to reverse engineer the protocol so I can put them to use.
Likewise, I pay the bills using Adobe and Apple software. I've had the misfortune of suffering Adobe's piss-poor, somebody-kick-their-engineers-in-the-balls-plz OS X software. It's balls. I remember when Photoshop 5 running on a 9600 spanked the crap out of a p450 (which was more than twice as fast!). PS CS on the AMD box in the office absolutely annihilates PS on our G5s.
Consequently, we've been looking to drop Adobe software where feasable, and Premiere was the first thing to go. Why we even had it, I'm not sure- it was a legacy purchasing decision made by someone who doesn't work here anymore. Premiere is decent for quick and dirty audio editing of existing video, but using it as an editor is a joke. Capturing with it a scream to watch. Final Cut Pro absolutely creams Premiere in every category- particularly interface (intuitive! FANCY THAT.), manual (documentation! FANCY THAT.), memory utilization (FCP4 loads in 1/4 the time the last version of Premiere for OS X took to load on the same hardware), multiple audio and video tracks....
Really, Premiere fit somewhere between iMovie and FCP. Much closer to iMovie. Adobe pulling the software for the Mac is as much an admission of their inability to produce something useable as it is Apple's ability to do the reverse.
The odds of Adobe doing anything with Core Image anytime soon are really slim- AE is also a PC app, much like photoshop, which means that Adobe has to balance API-hooking against a portable codebase.
:P
That said, I use AE 6 and it's solid for a lot of things, but it's FREAKING SLOW on a 2x2ghz g5 with 2g ram. And it's time control / scrubbing functionality sucks ass. A BIG, SWEATY ass.
I don't want more features, I want a more tightly optimized app that handles as fluidly as Final Cut Pro.
And it doesn't look like I'll be getting that from Adobe.
Even though AE gets more expensive with every version, its still a hell of a lot cheaper than Combustion, Commotion, and other Professional Compositing Apps.
AE is a lot like Final Cut Pro. People use it because it's powerful enough for the price. They'll drop it the second something better comes along.
I can't wait to get Motion at work. If it proves out, then the only Adobe app I'll need on my system is Photoshop, which I run in Classic anyway (since type handling in PS6 and higher makes said versions useless for the sort of work I do anyway).
I use After Effects for a lot of the work I do for my day job, and to put it bluntly, AE6 SUCKS. It's incredibly slow, most of which is due to generous memory defaults that tell the app to use a hell of a lot of swap (living in swap slows ANYTHING in OS X down to a crawl- it's orders of magnitude more sluggish than VM in OS 9), and there's a ton of issues with the rendering engine- namely the fact that it doesn't apply blending modes during a scrub, which hoses any benefit OF scrubbing when you have a ton of elements that suddenly turn into flat-colored, zero detailed blocks. Scrub and one of my projects suddenly looks like it's being produced for an Atari 2600. :P
:P
That and navigating by timecode is an incredible pain in the ass in AE- you have to either manually input the time you want, or use the interface panel buttons for next/previous frames.
AE has a lot of good points, but it's sluggish and the interface is seriously lacking. Like most Adobe apps, it hasn't transitioned to OS X very well at all. It's still faster to use/render in 4 in Classic (which does 90% of what 5-6 do, if you're only concerned with the basics) than it is to use/render in 5.5 or 6.
I mean, you use your terminal (aka "web browser") to connect to the master server that holds the content and responds to your queries (aka the "web site") all the time, don't you? None of that stuff is actually on your home machine, you're just accessing it remotely...
It's that only one-fifth of their product line has upgradeable video hardware. You want to buy a Mac right now? With an upgradeable video card? You get a G5. You get a "choice" of how fast you want it, but the iMac, iBook, eMac, etc. barely come with enough VRAM to run Quartz Extreme.
.
Oh, and PCI Radeon 7000s with Mac roms still go for around 80$ on ebay (the last time I looked). Nevermind something like, say.... AGP. The pricing on Mac graphics boards is absoluttely disgusting
So as a mac user, your options are video that can't even run current games (my Pismo horked on UT when UT and my Pismo were new.... modern iBooks and Powerbooks fare no better), or paying out the smegging nose for something that'll do the job.
Of course, once you have a decent video board, your game options consist of Blizzard, iD, Epic, and whichever of the various companies have ported the DnD games.
There is so MUCH Sonic fan art on deviant art that it practically deserves its own category.
Since the only Nintendo fan art I've seen on DA is fetish pr0n, I guess that attests to the popularity of the Sonic series.
Me, I was more of a Mario fan.
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh used to have a couple of labs of Sun Ray 100s. Bit on the pricy side, but they kicked ass when they were in service.
:-|
:(
Unfortunately, CLP canned 'em and replaced them with Windows boxes. Most likely cheaper than a Sun support contract.
Sick thing is that due to tax / tax code reasons, they couldn't donate the hardware to anyone else. It got tossed into the dumpster.
Do you REALLY think that Joe Dickhead the fratboy has even the ghost of a cluestain what CSS is? What HTML stands for? What Javascript is?
If you answered yes, you're the one that's clueless. Since the mid to late nineties, the average web user has been just that- a USER.
USERS DO NOT WANT TO LEARN. They want the thing to download porn and mp3s and movies and check email and camwhore and submit scans of their boobs to deviantart. Most of them get disk capacity and RAM confused.
Sort of explains the continued MS dominance, really.
Gimme a thumprint scanner.
I'm sick of having to keep track of my logins for six home machines, work workstation, nine work servers, about FORTY FREAKING WEBSITES, and the ten or twelve remote machines I have accounts on.
SSH dsa keys help, until you get the massively ANAL sysadmin that forces you to change your password. Apple's developer connection was THE WORST for this. They made you change your password at fixed intervals and kept a very LONG log of your OLD passwords... they wouldn't let you use variants on old passwords, they wouldn't let you recycle old passwords and they damned sure as shit wouldn't let you auto-login. I stopped bothering with ADC because, simply put, logging in was too much of a pain in the ass.
If computing as a whole goes to a simlar model, I'm going back to the fucking abacus. The abacus doesn't require that I log in and change my password to something completely different every three weeks.
If I get owned, it's my own freaking fault- force me to change my password and you've forced me out of using your service. Your server isn't the only login I have to remember and trying to force it to the front of my head is a waste of my time. Keep track of the IP and MAC I login from and get anal with me if it changes- I can understand that.
There's a vast gulf between Secure Enough and Fucking Annoying.
Pismos have the 100mhz bus going in their favor... they also have two megs of CPU cache, whereas the iBooks have much, MUCH less. :)
... how the Daleks became such a threat when they CAN'T WALK UP STAIRS OR LADDERS.
That always boggled the heck out of me.
But pr0n is logged in a separate notebook and hard drive. :P
The Big Wad O Notebooks isn't cross-referenced or even really indexed- I pull 90% of what I need from memory. The majority of it's there as a record of the evolution of the project.
There was a "casting delay" if you were actually playing the sprite or the girl. If you were playing the boy, then you could essentially "override" the casting delay through remote controlling the other members in your party.
:-|
Still one of my favorite games.... though I spent hundreds of hours more on the original (released as Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy in the US... still have my copy, though the battery's frooged out.).
Balance-wise, the Sprite kicked ass, the guy was good in hand-to-hand, and the girl was meh outside of healing... personally, balance issues didn't deter from my enjoyment of the game in the least.
They don't make 'em like they used to.
FF7 had nowhere near the individual character depth that 6 did, in terms of individual skills and abilities. Materia made them modular and consequently, the game boiled down to the three characters you favored getting all of the xp. No reason to use the rest.
:-|
Mana is still my favorite adventure RPG- I absolutely love the menu system. My biggest gripe about NWN is the fact that their character menus are about the CRAPPIEST implimentation of the Mana menu concept I've ever seen. Takes too long to drill around to what you want.
They look nice, but fall down on combat use.
Or at least Marvel comics, back in the day- which is why Image exists now. If you worked for Marvel, they owned everything that came out of your brain. Doodle on a napkin at a bar? Theirs. Sketch on a piece of toilet paper in a Greyhound bus bathroom? Theirs. Any artistic output that you're not doing for them specifically while you're employed by them (including the pr0n you draw)? Theirs.
:)
McFarlane, Leifeld (ick), Lee, etceteras weren't happy about this and founded Image- a publishing label for creator-owned works, which was an instant success with the crowd that's into Marvel books.
In context, it makes sense. From a business standpoint, Marvel's always looking for another franchise to flog into the ground and ride the shareholders into more green. From a genre standpoint, the superhero scene is so oversaturated that they need anything that smells halfway original.
Of course, the independant comics publishers (Dark Horse, Antarctic Press, Slave Labor, others) have Known Better for years... and their books aren't recycled rehash.
I dunno if Marvel's lightened up since the Image thing, but that's how it used to be. The fact that IT has similar catches written into contracts isn't much of a surprise.
Don't get me wrong, it makes my ass hair smoulder.
I've kept a dated notebook since 1994. All of my creative output and most of my sketch and development work spans the volumes- timed and dated. The first four and a half years are sealed in storage. The rest of it I'm still occasionally pulling out as reference.
:D
The project I've been spending most of my free time predates my entire professional career, and by its very nature, it's excruciatingly well documented.
I can get 640x480 with my existing video card, according to the benchmarks and reviews. What I have is still expensive on the mac and considered "dated" in the PC world.
A bottom-of-the-line PC that will barely handle Doom3 (again, at 640x480) was specced by my coworker at ~480$, which is still 280$ more than X-box + Doom.
Sony shot themselves in the face with Betamax. The JVC deck was cheaper to manufacture- and JVC licensed the technology to other companies, such as RCA.
Oh, and there was that little thing about length- VHS tapes held more.
If you could have jammed three two hour movies onto a Betamax tape, the format would still be around.
I'm a Mac owner, with a dual g4 450.
So realistically speaking, the XBox version of doom is actually the cheapest solution available to me.