I am in full agreement that a high-end wintel box will out-render any mac, and I run a mac-oriented media production unit. But...
I read said article in a copy of some trade mag. I was annoyed and immediately recycled it, because: 1. Focus on hardware alone misses the point and causes people like me extra unnecessary work. 2. The 'article' in question is being used as a large advertorial insert partnered by adobe and intel, IN DISGUISE. 3. The 'article' and all the surrounding 'information' leaves out crucial issues like uptime, human interface, Return On Investment, training time, technical support, h/w-s/w integration, and other minor economic factors that add up significantly over a year's production. These factors more than make up for the difference in render time. [Ask any of my friends who've tried and tried to make Premiere do what it promises how much time they've saved...]
I keep telling my interns [and anyone else who will listen]: it doesn't matter how fast your hardware is if your wetware is lagging. Speed requires optimization all the way down the signal path, starting with ideas.
A hideous looking but magnificently functional design for its intended use. The best thing about them? Quiet. Who needs a quiet fan when you _ d o n ' t _ n e e d _ a _ f a n !
I had to support a variety of those iMac thingies over the years, and I was sad when they dropped the IR port. I nearly wet the floor when I was looking at that port and had the user's Palm III in my hand, then on a whim instead of setting up his cradle I just pointed it and pressed hotsync... and it did.
OK, I know it's normal for laptops, but usually fussy. This just... worked.
A few years later I was problemsolving a printing crisis with a bad ethernet cable and no crimp goodies. Again, point the oldy-but-goody bondi iMac and shoot at the HP printer with 20 seconds of configuration... and it prints. Damn!
And yes, after I realized they were just a laptop with a CRT glued on, I used the handle to lug them between buildings.
Even better, the heat vents were wisely on a slope, so the cats could never settle down on them.
I'm typing this on one of those purse-looking iBooks (aka the "toilet seat" laptop) and it has rubberized round edges, a metal handle, tough flexible plastic, no little doors, and typical Apple tightly engineered construction inside. I took it apart to upgrade the HD and wow, nicely designed. I've dropped it, stepped on it, and feel like I could toss it if I had to. It's the toughest non-specialized laptop I've seen.
One of the mac magazines awhile back tortured one of these to death to see when it would quit, which involve spilling on the keyboard, playing frisbee, dropping it, smashing with a hammer etc. It finally wouldn't boot after the blowtorch treatment.
Sometimes I look at my 2 and 5 year old and wonder whether they'll be the first generation of the truly long-lived, and know that if they are I probably won't make it with them.
Then I get that sense of parental wonder, what are these amazing little beings going to get up to... and the prospect of them staving off aging stretches that wonder out another order of magnitude.
runs various useful office programs including MSword 3.0 which means WYSYWIG columns, dropcaps, styles, embedded images, footnotes, chapters, indexes, etc.
doesn't crash (EVER!!)
networked over a printer cable, once upon a time
entertained/survived two toddlers
was made in early 1985
I wrote a master's thesis on this thing in the backyard, squatting in the grass with a long extension cord, published books and 'zines, hauled it around in a shoulder bag on trains and planes and boats, and generally thrashed it with everyday use.
Recently moved 6,000km, and couldn't give it away or sell it, and since it still works, hauled it some more. It's set up for more occasional abuse, though it gets less and less.
I love hearing the particular sound of those floppy drives used as incongruous 'hacker' sound effects in cheesy hollywood movies!
I'm guessing that Park has an agenda in asserting these rules that is not really scientific.
I'd say that Park fails to be sufficiently skeptical, and acknowledge that all conclusions are provisional. Thus references to "the most fundamental laws of nature" and
a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole
Seems like he's taking an ideological stance that energy states are finite, and that our sense of scale is accurate. In other words, he comes out as one of the physicists opposed to the idea of a "Zero Point Field" below 10^-33 m wavelength and that energy is all-pervasive and abundant even at 0 Kelvin. There are, however, other very well informed and quantitatively supported camps on this issue.
Scientists, Engineers, and Naturalists: beware of excessive Reductionism, Positivism, Absolutism, Materialism, Relativism. They are provisional tools, like hypotheses, that can easily lead to overweening worldviews that have little to do with the endeavour of science, and everything to do with protecting privileges.
Yes, Opera on X suX. But when setting up an old 180MHz PPC with not much RAM or HD on a cable connection, I found that it took Opera or iCab to surf decently... and Opera has the better interface (sans ads) and rendering in the pre-OS X version, IMHO. Actually, WannaBe has the best speed-surfing experience, as it's text only...
You left out firewire (or is that on Dell MB's these days?) and gigabit ethernet. Mind you these machines are apples and oranges, since they're aimed at different users. Don't forget the time involved in setup: plug in your DV camera, and compare techtime vs production time; or even just open the box, turn it on, and time to being productive. But I guess that gets into TCO and ROE, another thread...
The Power4 should be interesting when it comes to render times, a crucial issue with the mac high-end market (and one of the bleeding factors).
Whether or not this is truly attributable to Bill Gates or Billy Goats, even as a fiction this interview suggests the monolithic behaviour of big software developers. Joe User gets blamed for not adapting to the software.
Most of the users I've been training for years and years, on Macs or D'OS or Win3.x-2K, blame their own timidity and perceived inferiority for the problems they encounter.
Sometimes they're right! Who told them that they could check email while printing and performing an interminable Access query without crashing! Sheesh!
Was I an idiot in 1996 for trusting that win95 could run as a simple file server without needing to reboot every 44 days whether it crashed or not?
Users don't have the language, time, or context to report bugs. They just curse mr goats and get on with rebooting. Only geeks really care enough.
Soundscapes and Acoustic Ecology
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 1
Acoustic ecology and soundscape studies try to puzzle out the whole relationship of humans to sound; this goes from physics to cultural stuff like music, and includes wierdness like how we respond to harmonics, sub/ultrasonics, and the like. Just a FYI since no-one else has mentioned this and it's core to the topic.
Re:Cathedrals and Nazi's use infrasound
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 1
Hitler [or one of his cronies] claimed that "without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany" [paraphrased and hearsay from Jacques Attali, ymmv]. They understood emotions and acoustics. That knowledge was largely transferred to USSR and USA spy agencies after WW2.
[btw: you mean "incite", though they did have insight into violent emotions too]
I still have an old [16yrs] 'toaster' mac 512ke, and in a pinch it runs MSWord 3 just fine off the floppy, when it isn't entertaining the kids. The damn thing is STILL a better typewriter/word processor than any of the modern machines I'm using! Boots in 17 seconds, never crashes (well, for the last few months I have to smack the side of it now and then to bring the video back up), does dropcaps, columns, tables, and styles, etc, and despite running off the floppy hardly seems slower than running MSWord X. (OK, when I need speed or compatibility I don't use MS...)
No, I'm NOT posting from it.
And it doesn't get used too much for video editing...
Delaney is one of the writers who best expresses the ways in which we can be incredibly advanced technically yet (for comfort's sake) retain primitive habits, as part of a very complex culture.
He's also one of the very few writers, along with John Varley, who has a decent grasp of gender and sex.
Samuel R. Delaney, himself one of the great SF writers, once made the distinction that "Literature" and Science Fiction were different genres, with separate systems of symbols determining meaning.
For example, when Jane Austen writes "Her world exploded", it means something entirely different from the same words written by, say, Niven.
I notice nobody has mentioned Olaf Stapledon. Terrible literary form, but his books pretty much outlined about 70% of all SF plots to date. Arthur Clarke's most popular writings, are, for example, really derivative of Stapledon (intentionally or not). If plot is your main fixation, check out Stapledon's Last and First Men (the entire multi-billion year history of humanity) or Star Maker (nothing less than the history of the cosmos).
Take current global demographic predictions, shake and stir, and bake in a populated solar system for 200 years. Hello new society!
I'm getting older and so more cranky about SF that doesn't get 'culture' -- that there's a massive breadth and variety to human behaviour, and an enormous set of options for our adaptability.
This is where a great deal of SF falls down, so you find things like Heinlein's caricatures-as-characters and a star drek universe filled with Euros with funny foreheads.
It's the writers who really combine the ability to create realistic characters and put them in inventive cultural predictions, combined with a grand vision of the human experiment, who do the best job on nailing the technological futurism that makes SF so much fun. So, writers like John Varley who understand that culture changes at least as quickly as technology, and that the two are deeply intertwined, do a pretty good job at showing us where we can go. (Despite the fact that his characters have a Heinleinian glibness to them, he still pulls off some character depth and realism--and I think it's because he really likes the whole species.)
Kim Stanley Robinson is another excellent example of somebody who gets this intersection of cultural demographics and tech that we're working on (though his amazing Mars trilogy downplays the interaction of computer / brain tech in order to play out his political scenarios).
Some other writers who get this (or try to): N. Stephenson, S. Delaney, LeGuin, Gibson, O. Butler, A. Bester (sortof), Brin/Benford/Bear, Vinge, etc. Writers who say they do but don't: Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, and yes, [not meant to be flamebait] Herbert.
To me, most of the 'cyberpunk' derived SF is engaging simply because of the cultural complexity these stories acknowledge. I'm really tired of the naturalization of mid 20C US mainstream culture throughout the cosmos.
Pretty much all SF has a strong covert or overt narrative tension between Utopia and Dystopia, and whether we realize it or not when we're reading it, this dynamic between where 'we' want to go and were we'll go if we blow it is one of the key movers of a good SF plot. You can't deal with either Utopia/Dystopia or technological development properly without the variable of cultural transformation front and centre.
MHz, GUI, whatever; it's the user that makes the biggest difference, and the interface or processor can help, that's about it.
I was given a purseBook (366MHz iBook G3, 192MB RAM) to use at work and took awhile to change it over from OS 9.1 not because of speed issues, but because I've been using Keyquencer for years to avoid the mouse and script simple or complex everyday tasks with a keystroke. An app that lets you keep the gui yet avoid the mouse, that speeded me up way more than any upgrade.
Sure, some things are visually slow in Aqua, especially on this machine (not on the media workstations I manage, however); but I have alot more going on, fingers keep moving, and it's therefore even faster than my tweaked OS 9 systems. Especially now that LaunchBar lets me access just about anything without the mouse, combined with keyboard GUI access through Aqua. I'm starting to grok OS X, and it helps me do that since it's based on many open standards and years of interface development.
So: slower to sit and watch; faster to use. Whatever, RTFM and get a wetware upgrade, for the best real world result times.
But should a major world event take place in the coming months/years, the Internet is going to be the primary news source for many millions of people, particularly those without access to a quality television news service.
Please be advised that your set needs adjusting... It's pretty clear from the evidence (and from a phenomenological point of view if you observe your own reactions) that the experience of watching a major event on television as it unfolds barely qualifies as useful information, due in part to the nature of the medium, but largely due to the nature of media filters and techniques. When you see something like 9/11 going on, it's much closer to entertainment, unfortunately, than providing one with reconnaisance leading to rational behaviour. The drama of the moment helps you develop powerful emotions in relation to the event, but what kind of info do you really get?
What our study revealed, in fact, is that TV news seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Even after controlling for all other variables, we discovered that the correlation between TV watching and knowledge was actually quite often a negative one.
In other words, you'd actually be better off combing through usenet than sucking on the immediacy of the glass teat.
Qualifier: I've worked in media-democracy-oriented film/video for years, I'm involved and devoted to the medium!
Re:This upgrade makes sense
on
Apple Updates iBook
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've owned both the old toilet seat model and the newer iceBook model, and they're darn near bulletproof.
Macworld Mag had a pretty funny 'realworld test' article about the iClam model, called "dieBook"--which included testing the toughness with things like a blowtorch.
http://www.macworld.com/2001/05/buzz/diebook.html
I think MacAddict did something like this too...
I remember lots of stories of 2-story drops and cars backing up over 1xx PowerBooks that still booted. Bragging about your trashed 'Book: a weird kind of macho?
You'll notice that PowerPoint is running but docked (thus hidden... untill you look at processes).
Re:An Argument For No Other Life
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
d) intelligent life is stay-at-home
e) there are stringent galactic environmental controls
f) they don't want us to know about them
g) they're very small and don't use planets
h) they're invisible to us in many ways
i) ad infinitum...
Come on, we know nearly nothing and even the simplest answer requires some data!
If you're going to make calls to hypothesize about a mystery with almost no evidence, you'll have to show some imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
I am in full agreement that a high-end wintel box will out-render any mac, and I run a mac-oriented media production unit. But...
I read said article in a copy of some trade mag. I was annoyed and immediately recycled it, because:
1. Focus on hardware alone misses the point and causes people like me extra unnecessary work.
2. The 'article' in question is being used as a large advertorial insert partnered by adobe and intel, IN DISGUISE.
3. The 'article' and all the surrounding 'information' leaves out crucial issues like uptime, human interface, Return On Investment, training time, technical support, h/w-s/w integration, and other minor economic factors that add up significantly over a year's production. These factors more than make up for the difference in render time. [Ask any of my friends who've tried and tried to make Premiere do what it promises how much time they've saved...]
I keep telling my interns [and anyone else who will listen]: it doesn't matter how fast your hardware is if your wetware is lagging. Speed requires optimization all the way down the signal path, starting with ideas.
Still waiting for somebody to combine heat pipes in a laptop with a micro stirling engine for keeping those batteries alive a little longer.
A hideous looking but magnificently functional design for its intended use. The best thing about them? Quiet. Who needs a quiet fan when you _ d o n ' t _ n e e d _ a _ f a n !
I had to support a variety of those iMac thingies over the years, and I was sad when they dropped the IR port. I nearly wet the floor when I was looking at that port and had the user's Palm III in my hand, then on a whim instead of setting up his cradle I just pointed it and pressed hotsync... and it did.
OK, I know it's normal for laptops, but usually fussy. This just... worked.
A few years later I was problemsolving a printing crisis with a bad ethernet cable and no crimp goodies. Again, point the oldy-but-goody bondi iMac and shoot at the HP printer with 20 seconds of configuration... and it prints. Damn!
And yes, after I realized they were just a laptop with a CRT glued on, I used the handle to lug them between buildings.
Even better, the heat vents were wisely on a slope, so the cats could never settle down on them.
I'm typing this on one of those purse-looking iBooks (aka the "toilet seat" laptop) and it has rubberized round edges, a metal handle, tough flexible plastic, no little doors, and typical Apple tightly engineered construction inside. I took it apart to upgrade the HD and wow, nicely designed. I've dropped it, stepped on it, and feel like I could toss it if I had to. It's the toughest non-specialized laptop I've seen.
One of the mac magazines awhile back tortured one of these to death to see when it would quit, which involve spilling on the keyboard, playing frisbee, dropping it, smashing with a hammer etc. It finally wouldn't boot after the blowtorch treatment.
Then I get that sense of parental wonder, what are these amazing little beings going to get up to... and the prospect of them staving off aging stretches that wonder out another order of magnitude.
has a whopping 512K of RAM and a 9" b/w monitor
runs on two 800k floppies
boots in 17 seconds
runs various useful office programs including MSword 3.0 which means WYSYWIG columns, dropcaps, styles, embedded images, footnotes, chapters, indexes, etc.
doesn't crash (EVER!!)
networked over a printer cable, once upon a time
entertained/survived two toddlers
was made in early 1985
I wrote a master's thesis on this thing in the backyard, squatting in the grass with a long extension cord, published books and 'zines, hauled it around in a shoulder bag on trains and planes and boats, and generally thrashed it with everyday use.
Recently moved 6,000km, and couldn't give it away or sell it, and since it still works, hauled it some more. It's set up for more occasional abuse, though it gets less and less.
I love hearing the particular sound of those floppy drives used as incongruous 'hacker' sound effects in cheesy hollywood movies!
I'd say that Park fails to be sufficiently skeptical, and acknowledge that all conclusions are provisional. Thus references to "the most fundamental laws of nature" and
Seems like he's taking an ideological stance that energy states are finite, and that our sense of scale is accurate. In other words, he comes out as one of the physicists opposed to the idea of a "Zero Point Field" below 10^-33 m wavelength and that energy is all-pervasive and abundant even at 0 Kelvin. There are, however, other very well informed and quantitatively supported camps on this issue.
Scientists, Engineers, and Naturalists: beware of excessive Reductionism, Positivism, Absolutism, Materialism, Relativism. They are provisional tools, like hypotheses, that can easily lead to overweening worldviews that have little to do with the endeavour of science, and everything to do with protecting privileges.
Yes, Opera on X suX. But when setting up an old 180MHz PPC with not much RAM or HD on a cable connection, I found that it took Opera or iCab to surf decently... and Opera has the better interface (sans ads) and rendering in the pre-OS X version, IMHO. Actually, WannaBe has the best speed-surfing experience, as it's text only...
You left out firewire (or is that on Dell MB's these days?) and gigabit ethernet. Mind you these machines are apples and oranges, since they're aimed at different users. Don't forget the time involved in setup: plug in your DV camera, and compare techtime vs production time; or even just open the box, turn it on, and time to being productive. But I guess that gets into TCO and ROE, another thread...
The Power4 should be interesting when it comes to render times, a crucial issue with the mac high-end market (and one of the bleeding factors).
Most of the users I've been training for years and years, on Macs or D'OS or Win3.x-2K, blame their own timidity and perceived inferiority for the problems they encounter.
Sometimes they're right! Who told them that they could check email while printing and performing an interminable Access query without crashing! Sheesh!
Was I an idiot in 1996 for trusting that win95 could run as a simple file server without needing to reboot every 44 days whether it crashed or not?
Users don't have the language, time, or context to report bugs. They just curse mr goats and get on with rebooting. Only geeks really care enough.
World Forum for Acoustic Ecology
Silence and Noise
World Soundscape Project
[btw: you mean "incite", though they did have insight into violent emotions too]
No, I'm NOT posting from it.
And it doesn't get used too much for video editing...
Delaney is one of the writers who best expresses the ways in which we can be incredibly advanced technically yet (for comfort's sake) retain primitive habits, as part of a very complex culture.
He's also one of the very few writers, along with John Varley, who has a decent grasp of gender and sex.
Samuel R. Delaney, himself one of the great SF writers, once made the distinction that "Literature" and Science Fiction were different genres, with separate systems of symbols determining meaning.
For example, when Jane Austen writes "Her world exploded", it means something entirely different from the same words written by, say, Niven.
I notice nobody has mentioned Olaf Stapledon. Terrible literary form, but his books pretty much outlined about 70% of all SF plots to date. Arthur Clarke's most popular writings, are, for example, really derivative of Stapledon (intentionally or not). If plot is your main fixation, check out Stapledon's Last and First Men (the entire multi-billion year history of humanity) or Star Maker (nothing less than the history of the cosmos).
Take current global demographic predictions, shake and stir, and bake in a populated solar system for 200 years. Hello new society!
I'm getting older and so more cranky about SF that doesn't get 'culture' -- that there's a massive breadth and variety to human behaviour, and an enormous set of options for our adaptability.
This is where a great deal of SF falls down, so you find things like Heinlein's caricatures-as-characters and a star drek universe filled with Euros with funny foreheads.
It's the writers who really combine the ability to create realistic characters and put them in inventive cultural predictions, combined with a grand vision of the human experiment, who do the best job on nailing the technological futurism that makes SF so much fun. So, writers like John Varley who understand that culture changes at least as quickly as technology, and that the two are deeply intertwined, do a pretty good job at showing us where we can go. (Despite the fact that his characters have a Heinleinian glibness to them, he still pulls off some character depth and realism--and I think it's because he really likes the whole species.)
Kim Stanley Robinson is another excellent example of somebody who gets this intersection of cultural demographics and tech that we're working on (though his amazing Mars trilogy downplays the interaction of computer / brain tech in order to play out his political scenarios).
Some other writers who get this (or try to): N. Stephenson, S. Delaney, LeGuin, Gibson, O. Butler, A. Bester (sortof), Brin/Benford/Bear, Vinge, etc. Writers who say they do but don't: Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, and yes, [not meant to be flamebait] Herbert.
To me, most of the 'cyberpunk' derived SF is engaging simply because of the cultural complexity these stories acknowledge. I'm really tired of the naturalization of mid 20C US mainstream culture throughout the cosmos.
Pretty much all SF has a strong covert or overt narrative tension between Utopia and Dystopia, and whether we realize it or not when we're reading it, this dynamic between where 'we' want to go and were we'll go if we blow it is one of the key movers of a good SF plot. You can't deal with either Utopia/Dystopia or technological development properly without the variable of cultural transformation front and centre.
MHz, GUI, whatever; it's the user that makes the biggest difference, and the interface or processor can help, that's about it.
I was given a purseBook (366MHz iBook G3, 192MB RAM) to use at work and took awhile to change it over from OS 9.1 not because of speed issues, but because I've been using Keyquencer for years to avoid the mouse and script simple or complex everyday tasks with a keystroke. An app that lets you keep the gui yet avoid the mouse, that speeded me up way more than any upgrade.
Sure, some things are visually slow in Aqua, especially on this machine (not on the media workstations I manage, however); but I have alot more going on, fingers keep moving, and it's therefore even faster than my tweaked OS 9 systems. Especially now that LaunchBar lets me access just about anything without the mouse, combined with keyboard GUI access through Aqua. I'm starting to grok OS X, and it helps me do that since it's based on many open standards and years of interface development.
So: slower to sit and watch; faster to use. Whatever, RTFM and get a wetware upgrade, for the best real world result times.
But should a major world event take place in the coming months/years, the Internet is going to be the primary news source for many millions of people, particularly those without access to a quality television news service.
Please be advised that your set needs adjusting... It's pretty clear from the evidence (and from a phenomenological point of view if you observe your own reactions) that the experience of watching a major event on television as it unfolds barely qualifies as useful information, due in part to the nature of the medium, but largely due to the nature of media filters and techniques. When you see something like 9/11 going on, it's much closer to entertainment, unfortunately, than providing one with reconnaisance leading to rational behaviour. The drama of the moment helps you develop powerful emotions in relation to the event, but what kind of info do you really get?
When it comes to war, TV obscures. For instance, see this study on media and the gulf war. [Remember that? Oh wait, it's still happening.] A salient quote:
In other words, you'd actually be better off combing through usenet than sucking on the immediacy of the glass teat.
Qualifier: I've worked in media-democracy-oriented film/video for years, I'm involved and devoted to the medium!
Macworld Mag had a pretty funny 'realworld test' article about the iClam model, called "dieBook"--which included testing the toughness with things like a blowtorch. http://www.macworld.com/2001/05/buzz/diebook.html
I think MacAddict did something like this too...
I remember lots of stories of 2-story drops and cars backing up over 1xx PowerBooks that still booted. Bragging about your trashed 'Book: a weird kind of macho?
Power Page has some of these stories archived.
e) there are stringent galactic environmental controls
f) they don't want us to know about them
g) they're very small and don't use planets
h) they're invisible to us in many ways
i) ad infinitum...
Come on, we know nearly nothing and even the simplest answer requires some data!
If you're going to make calls to hypothesize about a mystery with almost no evidence, you'll have to show some imagination.