This, in turn, makes it possible to do color correction on darker tones without blowing up noise.
Noise isn't as big a problem as you'd think. Most cameras capable of 1080p have pretty good SnR going on, and ProRes 422 HQ and DNxHD 175 X have reasonable noise levels. Hell, even XDCAM HD422 at 50Mb/s delivers reasonable noise.
In fact, the whole framing of the dyamic range happens in post now and the actual caputerd image is 10 or more bits per chanel with shadows being much brighter and highlights being much darker.
Depends on the camera and media. For instance, all XDCAM media has 8-bit color depth, as does AVCHD and most flavors of H.264 shot by DSLRs. AVC-Intra and XAVC support 10-bit color, but those are only available on a fraction of the cameras in the market right now.
Now, you could get into Log and Raw formats, but then your market of available cameras narrow further, and production costs start to shoot up, as do storage requirements and how much work you need to put into post-production, since you can't just feed raw into Media Composer and do your work in there. That's when you get into having to do an offline/online thing and you're going to need a real color suite to do it all in.
... and post-processing designed to counteract century-old technological biases as old as the medium itself."
In other words, they've gotten better at color correction. I worked on color correction for Walt Disney's Heroes Work Here campaign and I spent a long time agonizing over the woman in the stadium. It wasn't because of any kind of racial bias, it wasn't because of any kind of subconscious decisions. It's entirely because of shooting technique and conditions. The problem was making her skin exhibit contrast against the dark background without making her dress completely blown out.
It was a combination of the fact that she wasn't shot with enough lighting to make her stand out against the background, and that digital imaging sensors don't have as wide a range of exposure (dynamic range) as the human eye.
The problem is even further than that. When you get into psychovisual enhancements to allow lossy compression to better do its job that means discarding details, and details we least often notice happen to be in the darker portions of luminance. What's needed there is some sort of more intelligent encoding system that can differentiate foreground objects from background objects.
Hell, it was common on the original Xbox for some games to silently update the Dashboard when you were playing. I remember it was the bane of some peoples' existence when they were trying to softmod their machines.
No, headsets, in general. Like the one-speaker-and-a-mic kind used by people for phones, or VoIP/Video chat services. The kinds of services where the quality coming out of Bluetooth or USB far surpasses the quality of what's coming into the device to start with.
Except no one uses DAB for headsets, nor analog VHF FM. I suppose you could use a modified S/PDIF or TOSLINK interface for headsets, but that would be costly and bulky. Bluetooth and USB are common, cost-effective, consumer-friendly systems.
I don't want to hear any of those people complaining about how pricey PC gaming is compared to console gaming either. $250 for a headset? To play a $60 game? Crimeney, I spent that much on stuff for bicycling, except the difference is that I benefit from riding my bicycle via better health and less money spent on fuel for my car.
It's a game! I wouldn't even call it a proper hobby.
Actually almost all new phones today use USB Micro-B connectors to comply with the Common External Power Supply to comply with EU standards. Apple is perhaps the highest profile exception to this, providing micro-B to Dock/Lighting adapters with their devices in Europe in order to comply.
And what else was using headsets at that time? 2.5mm headsets were quite common, actually. Most cell phones supported them, aside from Nokia which either changed around the pins or used their Pop-Port. It's only recently that 3.5mm headsets have become more common, with the iPhone originally driving the push towards combining the headphone and headset connectors into a single port.
The XBox 360 has a 3.5mm jack on the controller, for headsets to plug into.
You mean 2.5mm. The original Xbox had one of these too, but you had to use a doodad that connected through the memory card port in the controller. Kind of like how they forced you to purchase a remote control in order to watch DVDs. Also the original headset for the 360 was designed in such a way that it utilized a connector that prevented its use with anything other than a first party (or similarly designed third party) Xbox 360 controller.
So let's not get all high and mighty about which console manufacturer is better than the other. They all do it. That's what console gaming has become. And if you don't like it, your option is to either wait for Steam Machines or build yourself a PC, because that's the alternative.
You'd think that, but it seems like Sony is starting to come to the realization that some things need to open up a bit. Their e-readers include SD card slots, the PlayStation 3 used bluetooth headsets, and they licensed XDCAM to competing manufacturers, including Canon and JVC. Even BluRay manufacturing has expanded to include several other companies now.
If Sony was going to have a proprietary headset solution, they'd have announced it by now so people can pre-order them, though this does seem a very curious blunder on their part.
There was no "biggest" failing point, in my opinion. I would have been willing to shell out $499 for that thing if I could have run things outside of Metro that wasn't Office. No Java? Well there goes my ability to use a number of the network controlled devices we have. I can't even compile my own code (like, say, if I wanted to build rsync)? That pretty much eliminated half of the utility of the device.
Then there was the pricing for the keyboard cover. $129 for the Type Cover? OK, that I'll accept. $119 for the Touch Cover? What the hell is that all about. $10 difference? That doesn't really jive too well with me.
And even now, at $349, it's not that attractive since it's competing against the Acer Iconia W3, which uses an x86 processor, meaning people can choose between nicer hardware or more (and more flexible) software.
Probably, depending on the hardware, the security of the boot-loader lockdown, if HTC was planning to unlock this one, and if the drivers are available.
Yes. I loved my HTC s620 (AKA: "Excalibur," and "T-Mobile Dash"). Except for some of the limitations of Windows Mobile it was some really solid hardware. And reviews for the Nexus One, also built by HTC, were stellar, the Tytn II was pretty popular, and people seemed to like the T-Mobile G1. For the longest time there, HTC really did rule the roost. It's only relatively recently, if I remember correctly, that Samsung started to totally dominate, right around the time they launched the Galaxy platform.
Just out of curiosity, what are you using for virualization? VirtualBox, or some commercial tool?
And I don't know if the shift towards iOS-ness is as minor as we think it is. Right now, it's not so bad. It's far less shocking than the jump from Windows 7 to Windows 8, but what's really chafing me is the hardware. I kind of like some user serviceability. I like being able to buy some RAM and jam it in myself, or doing the same with a battery. And when it comes to my desktops, I especially like being able to upgrade things like my hard disks. It seems pretty absurd that you have to make the decision about how much RAM you want in your machine up front, with no upgrade path.
What is the feeling/experience of other 'traitors' who run OS X for the desktop and Linux for everything else?
Wrong way to look at this. When I was in high school I almost exclusively used Linux (Mandrake, eventually switched to Debian, back before everyone had proper package managers). Eventually I got an iBook running OS X 10.3 because I wanted a Unix laptop that delivered great battery life, and at the time the iBook's promised 6 hours was far better than the two hours you could find in most competing laptops; plus it had a dedicated GPU, so I could at least dream about gaming on it in my off-time. But it had a big bonus: it ran Photoshop and Illustrator so well (again, this was back in the day where if you threw a 200+ MB PSD file at the Windows and OS X copies of Photoshop, you'd see the Windows copy freak out and crash while the OS X copy would eventually open it). At the time, I thought I was going to get into graphic arts, and this seemed like the best combination of features I could get, though it was admittedly expensive.
When I went to college, I bought a MacBook Pro. I had changed directions in education, and now I was sprinting full throttle into video production, and being able to run Final Cut Pro was a deal-breaker (especially since my school only taught Premiere and Avid Media Composer). The five-day turnaround on repairs was a huge plus, as was the reliability factor. Major bonus points were awarded that I wasn't being conned into getting Windows Vista, but had the option to make that mistake if I wanted. On top of that, Time Machine saved my bacon more than a couple times (mostly user error). This ended up being a very good decision, since knowing both Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer is what landed me my first job.
All the while, I maintained a Linux server. Why? Because just like the Macs I bought were great tools for image and video editing when I bought them, Linux was great at being a reliable file server, firewall, and DVR (thanks to MythTV). I still run one today, though because of the direction Apple is taking the entire OS X platform in (hardware and software), I'm considering changing that. I use Final Cut in the office enough that my skills are kept in tip-top shape, and personally I prefer Avid when I have my druthers, which runs on Windows.
For me, it's not about the politics of this or that, it's about what tool will do the job I need to do, and do it well. Beyond that, then decisions about what kinds of companies I want to support, their practices, environmental record, prices, etc. gets factored in.
But the problem is that in this case diversity isn't bringing strength. There needs to be some kind of leader to prove the viability of the currency, otherwise no one will have faith in the idea of a cryptographically-backed currency.
People would merely convert to EuroDollars as necessary. Kind of like how the US Dollar was far more useful in many markets than the local currencies. I think for a while there in East Europe (it may have been the Soviet Union at the time) it was preferable to do transactions in USD rather than, say, the Rouble. That doesn't mean that the Rouble didn't exist, but no one wanted to use it. It'd be the same situation: people would use EUR only when necessary, and keep the rest of their money in the preferred currency.
Well, to be fair, it's not so much a strawman so much as it's a question of which society is dominating the other. Kind of like mob territories and "encouraged" purchases. Not that I'm saying anything you've said is wrong, but we have a pretty functional society today, and the mob still exists.
A big corporate computer manufacturer is going under? It's bad, but not catastrophic. It's not catastrophic in economic terms, but it's bad for the people who have to support them. There's plenty of other manufacturers out there, so it's not like this is going to make a huge impact outside of IT departments, because the money that was going to go into computers is still going to be spent, it's just going to be spent elsewhere. People buying from MPC are just going to go to Dell or HP.
The bright side of this is that competition is still going to exist. We've still got Dell, HP, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony and Apple. They're still all fighting for market share, they're still all viable, so this isn't a real hit.
Agreed. We've got a third-hand Gateway (in the Aegis case, dated around 2003 I think) and I recently had to reinstall Windows on it because the existing install was totally trashed. I went to MPC's website and I couldn't even find a spec list because their website decided my S/N doesn't exist any more. I couldn't even get information on who the manufacturer was for the ethernet card. It took me two days before I could find the right driver, and a few other third party tools to figure out who made the freaking thing.
I'm out of state for schooling nine months out of the year, and I can only imagine what kind of hell my family is going to go through if we even need to go through something like this again. I'm so glad they've got a pair of Mac laptops I can fix by remote, and is vertically integrated. Not to evangelize Apple too much, but it's perfect for a family that wouldn't know the difference between PCI, AGP and ISA slots, and couldn't figure out how to install a driver to save their lives.
Now, not to say that Windows is worthless in this respect, but when the company's support assets have been sold two or three times, and you can't even find a spec sheet for your computer any more, that's pretty bad. It's more about information being lost and having to go down rabbit holes. The same thing would happen to Mac OS if Apple did the same things Gateway has done.
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Noise isn't as big a problem as you'd think. Most cameras capable of 1080p have pretty good SnR going on, and ProRes 422 HQ and DNxHD 175 X have reasonable noise levels. Hell, even XDCAM HD422 at 50Mb/s delivers reasonable noise.
Depends on the camera and media. For instance, all XDCAM media has 8-bit color depth, as does AVCHD and most flavors of H.264 shot by DSLRs. AVC-Intra and XAVC support 10-bit color, but those are only available on a fraction of the cameras in the market right now.
Now, you could get into Log and Raw formats, but then your market of available cameras narrow further, and production costs start to shoot up, as do storage requirements and how much work you need to put into post-production, since you can't just feed raw into Media Composer and do your work in there. That's when you get into having to do an offline/online thing and you're going to need a real color suite to do it all in.
In other words, they've gotten better at color correction. I worked on color correction for Walt Disney's Heroes Work Here campaign and I spent a long time agonizing over the woman in the stadium. It wasn't because of any kind of racial bias, it wasn't because of any kind of subconscious decisions. It's entirely because of shooting technique and conditions. The problem was making her skin exhibit contrast against the dark background without making her dress completely blown out.
It was a combination of the fact that she wasn't shot with enough lighting to make her stand out against the background, and that digital imaging sensors don't have as wide a range of exposure (dynamic range) as the human eye.
The problem is even further than that. When you get into psychovisual enhancements to allow lossy compression to better do its job that means discarding details, and details we least often notice happen to be in the darker portions of luminance. What's needed there is some sort of more intelligent encoding system that can differentiate foreground objects from background objects.
Hell, it was common on the original Xbox for some games to silently update the Dashboard when you were playing. I remember it was the bane of some peoples' existence when they were trying to softmod their machines.
No, headsets, in general. Like the one-speaker-and-a-mic kind used by people for phones, or VoIP/Video chat services. The kinds of services where the quality coming out of Bluetooth or USB far surpasses the quality of what's coming into the device to start with.
Except no one uses DAB for headsets, nor analog VHF FM. I suppose you could use a modified S/PDIF or TOSLINK interface for headsets, but that would be costly and bulky. Bluetooth and USB are common, cost-effective, consumer-friendly systems.
It's a game! I wouldn't even call it a proper hobby.
Actually almost all new phones today use USB Micro-B connectors to comply with the Common External Power Supply to comply with EU standards. Apple is perhaps the highest profile exception to this, providing micro-B to Dock/Lighting adapters with their devices in Europe in order to comply.
Except true 5.1 surround sound involves five speakers and a subwoofer. You're two outputs short of "true" 5.1.
If you want a really uncommon port, consider that until 2009 HTC was using a proprietary USB Mini-B-like connector for headsets on all their smartphones. And there was also the Pop-Port, which I mentioned above.
You mean 2.5mm. The original Xbox had one of these too, but you had to use a doodad that connected through the memory card port in the controller. Kind of like how they forced you to purchase a remote control in order to watch DVDs. Also the original headset for the 360 was designed in such a way that it utilized a connector that prevented its use with anything other than a first party (or similarly designed third party) Xbox 360 controller.
The PS3 instead supported standard USB headsets and Bluetooth headsets which are just as prevalent (if not more so, combined) than 2.5mm headsets. Also, this is in stark contrast to the Xbox 360's wireless headset, which used a proprietary RF interface. The only time, to my knowledge, that the Xbox 360 supported a USB microphone was in Rock Band and its sequels.
Then there's the storage drives. For the PS3 it was a 2.5" SATA drive hidden behind a little door, and could be easily removed and replaced. The Xbox 360 utilized 2.5" SATA drives as well, but hidden inside a proprietary case with a proprietary connector that was only to be replaced with other Microsoft manufactured drives. The 360 S *also* used 2.5" SATA drives, but in a different casing that made it entirely incompatible with the original 360 drives (both of which are sold at an exorbitant markup versus standard SATA drives), and to transfer data between drives you had to have a proprietary cable.
Then there was the proprietary Wifi adapter for the 360, and Xbox Live, which is necessary to play games online, be involved in party chats, use the web browser, and watch videos through other services you may already be paying for (including YouTube, Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Comcast's Xfinity among many others) which went from $45 per year to $60 per year (or from $8/mo to $10/mo).
So let's not get all high and mighty about which console manufacturer is better than the other. They all do it. That's what console gaming has become. And if you don't like it, your option is to either wait for Steam Machines or build yourself a PC, because that's the alternative.
You'd think that, but it seems like Sony is starting to come to the realization that some things need to open up a bit. Their e-readers include SD card slots, the PlayStation 3 used bluetooth headsets, and they licensed XDCAM to competing manufacturers, including Canon and JVC. Even BluRay manufacturing has expanded to include several other companies now. If Sony was going to have a proprietary headset solution, they'd have announced it by now so people can pre-order them, though this does seem a very curious blunder on their part.
Obligatory reference to the Newton.
There was no "biggest" failing point, in my opinion. I would have been willing to shell out $499 for that thing if I could have run things outside of Metro that wasn't Office. No Java? Well there goes my ability to use a number of the network controlled devices we have. I can't even compile my own code (like, say, if I wanted to build rsync)? That pretty much eliminated half of the utility of the device. Then there was the pricing for the keyboard cover. $129 for the Type Cover? OK, that I'll accept. $119 for the Touch Cover? What the hell is that all about. $10 difference? That doesn't really jive too well with me. And even now, at $349, it's not that attractive since it's competing against the Acer Iconia W3, which uses an x86 processor, meaning people can choose between nicer hardware or more (and more flexible) software.
I'm remembering that scene from Toy Story where they're all watching the kids walk into the house with presents. "SpELL trAsH CaN."
Apparently by linking to that image, you were stealing it. Who knew?!
I believe it's called the "sell" button in your stock portfolio. Either that or make something bad happen for them.
Probably, depending on the hardware, the security of the boot-loader lockdown, if HTC was planning to unlock this one, and if the drivers are available.
Yes. I loved my HTC s620 (AKA: "Excalibur," and "T-Mobile Dash"). Except for some of the limitations of Windows Mobile it was some really solid hardware. And reviews for the Nexus One, also built by HTC, were stellar, the Tytn II was pretty popular, and people seemed to like the T-Mobile G1. For the longest time there, HTC really did rule the roost. It's only relatively recently, if I remember correctly, that Samsung started to totally dominate, right around the time they launched the Galaxy platform.
And I don't know if the shift towards iOS-ness is as minor as we think it is. Right now, it's not so bad. It's far less shocking than the jump from Windows 7 to Windows 8, but what's really chafing me is the hardware. I kind of like some user serviceability. I like being able to buy some RAM and jam it in myself, or doing the same with a battery. And when it comes to my desktops, I especially like being able to upgrade things like my hard disks. It seems pretty absurd that you have to make the decision about how much RAM you want in your machine up front, with no upgrade path.
Wrong way to look at this. When I was in high school I almost exclusively used Linux (Mandrake, eventually switched to Debian, back before everyone had proper package managers). Eventually I got an iBook running OS X 10.3 because I wanted a Unix laptop that delivered great battery life, and at the time the iBook's promised 6 hours was far better than the two hours you could find in most competing laptops; plus it had a dedicated GPU, so I could at least dream about gaming on it in my off-time. But it had a big bonus: it ran Photoshop and Illustrator so well (again, this was back in the day where if you threw a 200+ MB PSD file at the Windows and OS X copies of Photoshop, you'd see the Windows copy freak out and crash while the OS X copy would eventually open it). At the time, I thought I was going to get into graphic arts, and this seemed like the best combination of features I could get, though it was admittedly expensive.
When I went to college, I bought a MacBook Pro. I had changed directions in education, and now I was sprinting full throttle into video production, and being able to run Final Cut Pro was a deal-breaker (especially since my school only taught Premiere and Avid Media Composer). The five-day turnaround on repairs was a huge plus, as was the reliability factor. Major bonus points were awarded that I wasn't being conned into getting Windows Vista, but had the option to make that mistake if I wanted. On top of that, Time Machine saved my bacon more than a couple times (mostly user error). This ended up being a very good decision, since knowing both Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer is what landed me my first job.
All the while, I maintained a Linux server. Why? Because just like the Macs I bought were great tools for image and video editing when I bought them, Linux was great at being a reliable file server, firewall, and DVR (thanks to MythTV). I still run one today, though because of the direction Apple is taking the entire OS X platform in (hardware and software), I'm considering changing that. I use Final Cut in the office enough that my skills are kept in tip-top shape, and personally I prefer Avid when I have my druthers, which runs on Windows.
For me, it's not about the politics of this or that, it's about what tool will do the job I need to do, and do it well. Beyond that, then decisions about what kinds of companies I want to support, their practices, environmental record, prices, etc. gets factored in.
But the problem is that in this case diversity isn't bringing strength. There needs to be some kind of leader to prove the viability of the currency, otherwise no one will have faith in the idea of a cryptographically-backed currency.
People would merely convert to EuroDollars as necessary. Kind of like how the US Dollar was far more useful in many markets than the local currencies. I think for a while there in East Europe (it may have been the Soviet Union at the time) it was preferable to do transactions in USD rather than, say, the Rouble. That doesn't mean that the Rouble didn't exist, but no one wanted to use it. It'd be the same situation: people would use EUR only when necessary, and keep the rest of their money in the preferred currency.
Well, to be fair, it's not so much a strawman so much as it's a question of which society is dominating the other. Kind of like mob territories and "encouraged" purchases. Not that I'm saying anything you've said is wrong, but we have a pretty functional society today, and the mob still exists.
A big corporate computer manufacturer is going under? It's bad, but not catastrophic. It's not catastrophic in economic terms, but it's bad for the people who have to support them. There's plenty of other manufacturers out there, so it's not like this is going to make a huge impact outside of IT departments, because the money that was going to go into computers is still going to be spent, it's just going to be spent elsewhere. People buying from MPC are just going to go to Dell or HP. The bright side of this is that competition is still going to exist. We've still got Dell, HP, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony and Apple. They're still all fighting for market share, they're still all viable, so this isn't a real hit.
I'm out of state for schooling nine months out of the year, and I can only imagine what kind of hell my family is going to go through if we even need to go through something like this again. I'm so glad they've got a pair of Mac laptops I can fix by remote, and is vertically integrated. Not to evangelize Apple too much, but it's perfect for a family that wouldn't know the difference between PCI, AGP and ISA slots, and couldn't figure out how to install a driver to save their lives.
Now, not to say that Windows is worthless in this respect, but when the company's support assets have been sold two or three times, and you can't even find a spec sheet for your computer any more, that's pretty bad. It's more about information being lost and having to go down rabbit holes. The same thing would happen to Mac OS if Apple did the same things Gateway has done.