I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter: most people are satisfied with their computing experience, for better or worse. In my opinion, both OS X and Linux are better than Windows, but I know that my opinion is just my opinion.
TV production is NOT the same as print production: you're using two completely different color models and two different methods of color reproduction. TV color isn't nearly as critical as color for print production because there's no readily discernible standard for the end product. That is to say, while there are standards, you have no control what people will see on their own TVs or monitors, which are relatively low resolution devices compared to a 2,400 dpi/175 line screen printing job.
Print production, on the other hand, has very exacting specs, and when the client asks for a particular four (or five or six) color mix, the client expects (with good reason) that the specified color will be exact over the length of the print run. Matching and reproducing color for print is a much harder job, which is why we have $1,800 monitors and $250,000 digital matchprint machines.
Look, if you want to get all big-dick-swinging about this, send me your client list, a link to your portfolio (including samples from all of the international ad campaigns you've worked on and the awards you've won) and your fee list and we can see who's the biggest, baddest, most calibratingest knowingest motherfucker of them all. If you don't want to do that, just try to be less of a dick when you post.
I've been doing this since Photoshop 1.0 (and PageMaker and Illustrator 88. ..) so I am sure of where I speak. Am I the bestest retoucher in the universe? No, because no matter how good you are, there's always someone better. The best guy I've ever worked with was a portrait painter in a former life (he painted the portrait of Reagan which hangs in the White House) and working next to him was a revelation: he could paint photorealistic images in Photoshop with the same effort I take to tie my shoes.
That aside, no monitor in the world will accurately show you low values of yellow and cyan. Sure, something will be on the screen, but to really check and make sure your whitest areas are 2/2/2/0 (or 5/5/5/0 or whatever standard the shop you work in uses for non-specular highlights) you need to use both the info palette and a matchprint/high end digital color proof. That's just the way it is, and all of the people I've worked with in all of the years will say the same thing. Trusting the monitor--any monitor--is asking for a surprise when things come off the press. It's just the nature of conversion from additive to subtractive color models.
D'oh! I got teh numbers wrong: the human eye can discern about 350,000 colors (warning: MS Word file).
My point, though, was that it's a silly lawsuit. As someone who spends hours in Photoshop doing color correction I know the monitor is, at best, a blunt instrument. That's why we have matchprints and digital color proofs and the like.
Since your eyes can only detect about 16,000 colors, it's a moot point, made all the mooter that even the best calibrated monitor can't show you low percentages of cyan or yellow. A well-calibrated monitor's best aspect is good gray balance, which tells you at a glance how much contrast is in your shot and whether or not you're losing detail in the highlights. Other than that, it's all about Photoshop's info palette, boys and girls.
Hmm. . . maybe I should sue God for making these substandard eyes!
I don't think they can do this, though, because of their religion of backwards compatibility. Too many corporations still run old software which requires Windows to be enormously backwards compatible. Walking away from these applications/companies, IMO, is something which Microsoft is absolutely unwilling to do, largely because their corporate culture is ossified and unimaginative. 95% of their effort seems to go towards keeping the status quo functioning rather than looking towards the future.
None of this touches the twin problems which makes Microsoft's release schedules so awful: the religion of backwards compatibility and a overly-managed, near-chaotic corporate culture which emphasizes endless meetings and paper trails over innovation. Both of these items stem from something Microsoft can't control, which is the necesity of leaning on Windows/Word as their two dominant profit engines. Essentially, Microsoft has worked their way into a position in which true innovation (of the kind Apple was forced into with the failures of Copland and Pink and the adoption of OS X) is nearly impossible, because anything which threatens to cut off a sizeable portion of their user base directly threatens the company's bottom line.
In other words, the problem isn't Windows per se, or 32- versus 64-bit, or any other technical issue. The problem is Microsoft needs Windows simultaneously to be the same old operating system you've been using for years and the latest, greatest thing, and it can't be both. For a technology point of view, the best thing would be to really remake Windows from the ground up as Apple was forced to do with OS X and just tell people that if they bought their machine before 2001 they're out of luck. But they can't, and won't, do this, so their release schedule will continue to be contrained by the need to do two opposing things at the same time.
I was under the impression that the next Windows would be released much quicker than Vista, in fact I was under the impression that "Vienna" is what pushed Vista out of the door with the lack of some of the earlier features promised. 2009 isn't very far away.
If you believe Microsoft's published release schedules I have a lovely bridge to sell you. Low use, well maintained and just had a new paint job.
Why was this modded flamebait? I'm a massive BSG fan, it's one of my favourite shows on TV, but it has taken a dive in quality since the beginning of the third season.
I agree with you. And, for me, the reason is pretty simple: Moore has abstracted himself from the writing and directing. He did the brunt of the creative work in the mini-series and the first two seasons himself, and he was great. I initially ignored the show because he was so inolved with the new Star Trek series, which are the dictionary definition of mediocre, and didn't get hooked until I caught an early episode by accident. And I was pleasantly surprised: no stupid monologues about some moral lesson we need to learn, no cardboard cutout characters existing in a spotlessly prefect hi tech world, no deus ex machina/technobabble endings. Instead I found a very lean, very well shot and written show which went in directions I couldn't have imagined and actually made me think.
The third season, though. . . Wow. It's clear to me that only Moore really has enough of a grasp on the show, and its a good enough writer (when he wants to be) to carry this show off. My biggest disappoiontment was the softness of the characters. Somewhere around the middle of the season they were reduced to yelling at each other a lot, and the more yelling I see on a show, the more I know that the writers are either out of ideas or just not good enough to handle emotions other than OMG! I LOVE YOU! and HULK SMASH! The two or three episodes around the boxing one were so bad I almost stopped watching. The one written by one of the Buffy writers (I don't rememeber the name of the episode, thank God) was so bad it should have been left on the cutting room floor. And then burned. And the ashes should've been launched into the sun.
That said, I will watch the series to the end, and hope that Moore takes the reins more in this last season. I hope the show addresses the deeper and, to me, more interesting themes, particularly the ideas the show has explored around religion. I liked the fact that the "bad" guys are the monotheists and the "good" guys were the suicide bombers. And I want to see what, if anything, the shows does with the idea of relgious duty versus individual choice.
Are they including iTunes downloads and DVD sales? If not, why not? These days, anyone between the ages of 15 and 30 spends more time watching downloads and DVDs than they do tuning into TV broadcasts.
When someone in the TV biz says "viewership" what they really mean is "seling ads." As TV in the U.S. is nominally free (minus the ~$80 Time Warner fucks me for each month) the shows we like and hate are paid for by advertising. The networks have a different metric for judging a good show than do you or I. To them, a good show is one for which they can sell lots of expensive ads for many years. This is why so many mediocre shows, which nonetheless have large audiences, stay on forever while better shows don't.
This also answers your question: Shows bought from iTMS and on DVD don't have ads, and even though the networks make money from them it's probably an order of magnitude or two less cash than they make from advertising. The networks, like the record companies, are caught in a revenue model which is out of sync with technology. The only big difference between the two is that you can fit a whole lot more audiointo a small size file than you can video, which has given the networks a slight repreive.
This is also why the networks and their friends have fought tooth and nail against TiVO and related technologies: they know that 99.9% of people out there will skip ads when they can. They also know, even if they won't admit it, that they're living on borrowed time.
Magazines need to realise that it's the buyers who provide the money - They even provide the advertising money indirectly. The advertisers don't buy advertising because the want to magazine to do well. They buy it because they want to sell their product.
Hate to burst your bubble, but this isn't remotely close to being the case. The amount of money your average magazine gets from readers is miniscule compared to what it gets from advertisers. In fact, the first thing decided in any issue of any magazine is the placement of the ads. The rest is laid out around ad space.
I learned on PageMaker. And Illustrator 88. And I used Photoshop 1.0. ..
For the record, any statements along the lines of "And then Adobe wiped the floor with Quark" and the same kind of marketing crap people are attacking Microsoft for. While ID has been able to steal significant market share from Quark, Quark is still an entrenched and important tool. I tell people getting into the industry they need to know both programs in order to be considered for a job. Beyond that, ID is just another page layout program with its own set of strengths and weaknesses.
If your average corporate user is like a drunk teenager with a loaded pistol, your average campus user is like a tantrum-throwing toddler with a bazooka.
The machine couldn't be hacked, so they relaxed the rules so it could be? I wish they'd been more explicit as to what 'relaxing the rules' meant. But maybe that would've spoiled the story.
Distros like Ubuntu are making headway in this market, but still have a little ways to go. ..
They have a long way to go.
Example: to start up Samba in OS X: click on one box on the Sharing Control Panel. To start up Samba in Ubuntu: apt-get install samba; edit smb.conf; create password for Samba share. For your average user, the one step in OS X can be somewhat confusing. The idea of editing smb.conf might as well be performing open heart surgery. I run Ubuntu on my laptop at home, and I like it. But it's nowhere near ready to be a desktop for your average user.
Windows user might not notice it, but to a Mac Classic user it's like fingernails on a chalkboard.
This Classic user has been using Macs since 1989 and I don't find it 'fingernails on a chalkboard'. In fact, I find the column view to be amazing, and do almost all my Findering in that. It's especially wonderful for moving around in deep server hierarchies, which really shows the limits of a spatial system.
People used to Classic are driven spare by the Command-N keyboard shortcut that used to create a new folder, but now creates a new window-- even in Spatial mode (which makes no sense.)
Actually, this makes perfect sense, and corrects an inconsistency which has been in Apple's GUI since the beginning: in every other instance Apple-N creates a new document. Since a Finder "document" is a window, this is now more consistent. We we just used to the old consistency.
I know there's a lot of talk about Fix the Fucking Finder, but I have never understood what people were complaining about. Once I found the column view I never went back, and on the few occasions I still work in OS 9, I find the Finder to be clunky.
Given, a bad Macintosh file browser is still as good as the average Linux or Windows file browser
I find both Windows Explorer (or whatever it's called) and the Finder-like apps in Gnome, KDE and XFCE to be very clunky and feature-poor when compared to the OS X Finder. I still do most of my file maintenance in Linux with the command line, because there are so many things Nautilus and friends can't do, or do very poorly.
I have a Core 2 Duo MacBook. It would benefit from native 64-bit Intel code.
I'm curious how a machine with a 2 gigabyte limit on RAM will benefit from 64-bit code, since the main benefit of 64-bit code is to allow your machine to address more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. Seems to be you're never going to have that issue. Now, while I am being snarky, I'm also asking a serious question. It's possible that you know more than I do about this stuff and that there are some benefits to 64-bit code which do not have to do with memory addressing and of which I am not aware. If that's not the case, then it seems to be that you're not losing anything from having to wait for Leopard, other than a reason to complain.
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I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter: most people are satisfied with their computing experience, for better or worse. In my opinion, both OS X and Linux are better than Windows, but I know that my opinion is just my opinion.
This is true, and rarely ever mentioned.
The more I look, the more values I find. I think we can agree on three things:
1) My original quote of 16,000 was wrong;
2) The human eye can see many more colors, between a range of 350,000 and several million;
3) Only the Flying Spaghetti Monster knows what the real number is.
TV production is NOT the same as print production: you're using two completely different color models and two different methods of color reproduction. TV color isn't nearly as critical as color for print production because there's no readily discernible standard for the end product. That is to say, while there are standards, you have no control what people will see on their own TVs or monitors, which are relatively low resolution devices compared to a 2,400 dpi/175 line screen printing job.
Print production, on the other hand, has very exacting specs, and when the client asks for a particular four (or five or six) color mix, the client expects (with good reason) that the specified color will be exact over the length of the print run. Matching and reproducing color for print is a much harder job, which is why we have $1,800 monitors and $250,000 digital matchprint machines.
Look, if you want to get all big-dick-swinging about this, send me your client list, a link to your portfolio (including samples from all of the international ad campaigns you've worked on and the awards you've won) and your fee list and we can see who's the biggest, baddest, most calibratingest knowingest motherfucker of them all. If you don't want to do that, just try to be less of a dick when you post.
I've been doing this since Photoshop 1.0 (and PageMaker and Illustrator 88. . .) so I am sure of where I speak. Am I the bestest retoucher in the universe? No, because no matter how good you are, there's always someone better. The best guy I've ever worked with was a portrait painter in a former life (he painted the portrait of Reagan which hangs in the White House) and working next to him was a revelation: he could paint photorealistic images in Photoshop with the same effort I take to tie my shoes.
That aside, no monitor in the world will accurately show you low values of yellow and cyan. Sure, something will be on the screen, but to really check and make sure your whitest areas are 2/2/2/0 (or 5/5/5/0 or whatever standard the shop you work in uses for non-specular highlights) you need to use both the info palette and a matchprint/high end digital color proof. That's just the way it is, and all of the people I've worked with in all of the years will say the same thing. Trusting the monitor--any monitor--is asking for a surprise when things come off the press. It's just the nature of conversion from additive to subtractive color models.
D'oh! I got teh numbers wrong: the human eye can discern about 350,000 colors (warning: MS Word file).
My point, though, was that it's a silly lawsuit. As someone who spends hours in Photoshop doing color correction I know the monitor is, at best, a blunt instrument. That's why we have matchprints and digital color proofs and the like.
Maybe I should sue in India. All those gods. . .
Since your eyes can only detect about 16,000 colors, it's a moot point, made all the mooter that even the best calibrated monitor can't show you low percentages of cyan or yellow. A well-calibrated monitor's best aspect is good gray balance, which tells you at a glance how much contrast is in your shot and whether or not you're losing detail in the highlights. Other than that, it's all about Photoshop's info palette, boys and girls.
Hmm. . . maybe I should sue God for making these substandard eyes!
I don't think they can do this, though, because of their religion of backwards compatibility. Too many corporations still run old software which requires Windows to be enormously backwards compatible. Walking away from these applications/companies, IMO, is something which Microsoft is absolutely unwilling to do, largely because their corporate culture is ossified and unimaginative. 95% of their effort seems to go towards keeping the status quo functioning rather than looking towards the future.
None of this touches the twin problems which makes Microsoft's release schedules so awful: the religion of backwards compatibility and a overly-managed, near-chaotic corporate culture which emphasizes endless meetings and paper trails over innovation. Both of these items stem from something Microsoft can't control, which is the necesity of leaning on Windows/Word as their two dominant profit engines. Essentially, Microsoft has worked their way into a position in which true innovation (of the kind Apple was forced into with the failures of Copland and Pink and the adoption of OS X) is nearly impossible, because anything which threatens to cut off a sizeable portion of their user base directly threatens the company's bottom line.
In other words, the problem isn't Windows per se, or 32- versus 64-bit, or any other technical issue. The problem is Microsoft needs Windows simultaneously to be the same old operating system you've been using for years and the latest, greatest thing, and it can't be both. For a technology point of view, the best thing would be to really remake Windows from the ground up as Apple was forced to do with OS X and just tell people that if they bought their machine before 2001 they're out of luck. But they can't, and won't, do this, so their release schedule will continue to be contrained by the need to do two opposing things at the same time.
If you believe Microsoft's published release schedules I have a lovely bridge to sell you. Low use, well maintained and just had a new paint job.
I agree with you. And, for me, the reason is pretty simple: Moore has abstracted himself from the writing and directing. He did the brunt of the creative work in the mini-series and the first two seasons himself, and he was great. I initially ignored the show because he was so inolved with the new Star Trek series, which are the dictionary definition of mediocre, and didn't get hooked until I caught an early episode by accident. And I was pleasantly surprised: no stupid monologues about some moral lesson we need to learn, no cardboard cutout characters existing in a spotlessly prefect hi tech world, no deus ex machina/technobabble endings. Instead I found a very lean, very well shot and written show which went in directions I couldn't have imagined and actually made me think.
The third season, though. . . Wow. It's clear to me that only Moore really has enough of a grasp on the show, and its a good enough writer (when he wants to be) to carry this show off. My biggest disappoiontment was the softness of the characters. Somewhere around the middle of the season they were reduced to yelling at each other a lot, and the more yelling I see on a show, the more I know that the writers are either out of ideas or just not good enough to handle emotions other than OMG! I LOVE YOU! and HULK SMASH! The two or three episodes around the boxing one were so bad I almost stopped watching. The one written by one of the Buffy writers (I don't rememeber the name of the episode, thank God) was so bad it should have been left on the cutting room floor. And then burned. And the ashes should've been launched into the sun.
That said, I will watch the series to the end, and hope that Moore takes the reins more in this last season. I hope the show addresses the deeper and, to me, more interesting themes, particularly the ideas the show has explored around religion. I liked the fact that the "bad" guys are the monotheists and the "good" guys were the suicide bombers. And I want to see what, if anything, the shows does with the idea of relgious duty versus individual choice.
When someone in the TV biz says "viewership" what they really mean is "seling ads." As TV in the U.S. is nominally free (minus the ~$80 Time Warner fucks me for each month) the shows we like and hate are paid for by advertising. The networks have a different metric for judging a good show than do you or I. To them, a good show is one for which they can sell lots of expensive ads for many years. This is why so many mediocre shows, which nonetheless have large audiences, stay on forever while better shows don't.
This also answers your question: Shows bought from iTMS and on DVD don't have ads, and even though the networks make money from them it's probably an order of magnitude or two less cash than they make from advertising. The networks, like the record companies, are caught in a revenue model which is out of sync with technology. The only big difference between the two is that you can fit a whole lot more audiointo a small size file than you can video, which has given the networks a slight repreive.
This is also why the networks and their friends have fought tooth and nail against TiVO and related technologies: they know that 99.9% of people out there will skip ads when they can. They also know, even if they won't admit it, that they're living on borrowed time.
Hate to burst your bubble, but this isn't remotely close to being the case. The amount of money your average magazine gets from readers is miniscule compared to what it gets from advertisers. In fact, the first thing decided in any issue of any magazine is the placement of the ads. The rest is laid out around ad space.
MacWorld is an awful magazine and has been for years.
A lot of the music I like isn't in WalMart. It is in the iTMS.
I learned on PageMaker. And Illustrator 88. And I used Photoshop 1.0. . .
For the record, any statements along the lines of "And then Adobe wiped the floor with Quark" and the same kind of marketing crap people are attacking Microsoft for. While ID has been able to steal significant market share from Quark, Quark is still an entrenched and important tool. I tell people getting into the industry they need to know both programs in order to be considered for a job. Beyond that, ID is just another page layout program with its own set of strengths and weaknesses.
If your average corporate user is like a drunk teenager with a loaded pistol, your average campus user is like a tantrum-throwing toddler with a bazooka.
The machine couldn't be hacked, so they relaxed the rules so it could be? I wish they'd been more explicit as to what 'relaxing the rules' meant. But maybe that would've spoiled the story.
In the Microsoft playbook: say device is beneath your worry;
Step 2: Attack device as imminent failure;
Step 3: Watch as device becomes success;
Step 4: Purchase company which produces device. If this is not possible;
Step 5: Release half-assed version of device which fails on all levels except hype.
I'm still runnig Edgy, so I can't comment on Feisty. Hopefully it's better.
They have a long way to go.
Example: to start up Samba in OS X: click on one box on the Sharing Control Panel. To start up Samba in Ubuntu: apt-get install samba; edit smb.conf; create password for Samba share. For your average user, the one step in OS X can be somewhat confusing. The idea of editing smb.conf might as well be performing open heart surgery. I run Ubuntu on my laptop at home, and I like it. But it's nowhere near ready to be a desktop for your average user.
AMD64? But the Core 2 Duo is an Intel chip. Or is there something I am not understanding?
This Classic user has been using Macs since 1989 and I don't find it 'fingernails on a chalkboard'. In fact, I find the column view to be amazing, and do almost all my Findering in that. It's especially wonderful for moving around in deep server hierarchies, which really shows the limits of a spatial system.
Actually, this makes perfect sense, and corrects an inconsistency which has been in Apple's GUI since the beginning: in every other instance Apple-N creates a new document. Since a Finder "document" is a window, this is now more consistent. We we just used to the old consistency.
I know there's a lot of talk about Fix the Fucking Finder, but I have never understood what people were complaining about. Once I found the column view I never went back, and on the few occasions I still work in OS 9, I find the Finder to be clunky.
I find both Windows Explorer (or whatever it's called) and the Finder-like apps in Gnome, KDE and XFCE to be very clunky and feature-poor when compared to the OS X Finder. I still do most of my file maintenance in Linux with the command line, because there are so many things Nautilus and friends can't do, or do very poorly.
I'm curious how a machine with a 2 gigabyte limit on RAM will benefit from 64-bit code, since the main benefit of 64-bit code is to allow your machine to address more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. Seems to be you're never going to have that issue. Now, while I am being snarky, I'm also asking a serious question. It's possible that you know more than I do about this stuff and that there are some benefits to 64-bit code which do not have to do with memory addressing and of which I am not aware. If that's not the case, then it seems to be that you're not losing anything from having to wait for Leopard, other than a reason to complain.