Makes a huge difference for interaction with digital cameras. Digital has come VERY far in the 2 years since CS was released. The RAW plug-in is pretty good (note the plug-in was $$$ with PS 7, and is bundled with CS, so that's a big deal), but the file browser in CS is still pretty clunky (I export the cache, and it comes to a crawl -- why should I need to manually export any time I do anything anyway?).
I'll check it out but very likely upgrade. There are certainly some worthwhile features, and it's not like it's some bullcrap forced upgrade program like Intuits. "New videos! $69.95!!!"
Sure, you can get a good image out of the camera. But you can do a TON more in post processing.
For B&W photography, you use burning, dodging, bleaching, and a whole host of darkroom tricks. For digital (or slides!) you use Photoshop. Most of the pro art photographers I talk to shoot medium format and scan it in on a $100K scanner, then take to it in Photoshop.
I read an article on the Luminous Landscape just today that explained someone's workflow (as fine art), he took WEEKS to get the image perfect:
Photoshop can't make a bad photo good, but it can make an adequate or good photo GREAT.
As for other packages, I don't know. It's not worth my time to try something else, and tools like the RAW converter make so many new things possible... no way I'm gonna wait for some Linux coder to get around to a RAW plug-in that's professional quality, sorry.
Photoshop is big and bloated and pretty slow in my use, but it's certainly CAPABLE.
Which is pretty farking dumb, as the OS has PDF generation BUILT IN. There is maybe one time out of 1 thousand that I'd want Adobe's PDF generator over the built-in one in OS X. And for that, they have a stupid toolbar that automatically comes up in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and maybe Entourage (I never use Entourage).
And the BEST thing... it has a bug in it, so every time you quit Excel, you get an ERROR dialog. Sweet.
Can't say I give Adobe higher than a 4 on the software quality scale:-/
That's a contrived example. And neither are likely supported on Windows XP for production.
For production, they BOTH will support Windows Server 2000, and Windows Server 2003. And support windows are for 3-6 years, typically.
My point is, there are about 500 Linux distros. And binaries built for one, typically don't work on another. Most commercial vendors won't ship source for their products, so it's a mess.
I know; I've been there. Used to sell a CORBA ORB that had a Linux version. We shipped built on GCC 2.95.3, which worked fine. Then Red Hat had the genius to ship the GCC 2.96 compiler, which was pretty broken. We didn't want to build/ship with this compiler, but lots of our customers started using it, and demanded builds. We knew it was a transient condition and they'd want a GCC 3 based version in the future, but what a fucking mess.
Software vendors really want and need stable OS platforms to build/test/ship software on. My example was somewhat contrived, by for example you see that Oracle specifically supports a couple Linux version: Red Hat Enterprise, and "United Linux" which was a former group that certified testing and interoperabilty. I don't know if United Linux holds favor anymore.
But if you're using something like Gentoo, God help you running commercial applications.
What if my SAP version is only tested and supported with Red Hat Enterprise 4, and my Oracle version is only tested and supported with Suse Enterprise 8?
That's a serious issue for shops that need accountabilty for supported systems. Sure, they could move everything to Postgres. LOL.
Apple has been on the "leading" edge for a while
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· Score: 4, Interesting
OS X 10.2 shipped with GCC 3.1 I believe -- a while before it was released.
10.3 shipped with GCC 3.3, before 3.3 was released.
10.4 looks to continue the pattern. Apple takes a snapshot of GCC, forks it 6-9 months before the OS ships, tweaks/tunes/optimizes GCC, builds and ships with that version of the compiler, and then re-submits its changes, so future GCC builds (especially the PPC ones) get all the goodies.
And the compiler has had 6-9 months of QA from Apple, which is as good as the amount of credit you give their QA department;-)
A side benefit of templates...
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· Score: 1
Morons like myself that don't code for a living can no longer understand WTF is going on with the code, so we can't get our hands dirty and screw things up.
Next step, shaving the center of my head and molding the sides into nice little pointy things. The transition has begun.
The tax laws change SUBSTANTIALLY in little ways, every year. So it's necessary to have lawyers work with the programmers and make sure everything is correct. Rules for things like alt min, deductions, etc. all change in little ways. The application coding itself has few changes, but there are some-number-of-hundred tax forms that need to be included, and interpreted, CORRECTLY, every year. That would be an awful lot of monitoring for someone to do "gratis."
And this is completely ignoring the indemnity issue -- if one of the forms in the OSS is wrong and you get audited and your balls busted, you'd be on your own. The commercial implementations typically have a "make it right" clause that will assist you if it's their error, and not yours.
Do their online service, it's cheap. Or you can spend $19 or $29 for the non "premier" version. Premier is a ripoff and has lots of stupid movies that tell you how to save money NEXT year.
File sharing (AFP) is substantially more flexible on OS X server.
Not to mention, it includes Open Directory, an LDAP based directory service that uses Kerberos for authentication (fairly equivalent to Active Directory or NDS), QuickTime streaming Server, and all sorts of other stuff. And it has a DNS, DHCP, etc, built in, and GUIs for configuring them all.
Sure, they're both UNIX, but there are a ton of extra services on OS X server, and tools for managing them. Downloading BIND, building it, installing it, and configuring via config files is not worth many peoples' time if they need the service. Not everyone is hardened UNIX admin.
So why not use it? It's a full featured directory service based on OpenLDAP with Kerberized AFP and SMB built in, so why use a Linux server and "roll your own" with everything, and do all the extra work?
Motion requires a baller 3D graphics card -- we're talking 9600 XT or better.
Since the Geforce 6800 GT costs $500, or the same as the entire rumored low-end Mac, I'm sorta doubting it would be possible:-)
I know I tried to install motion on my 2 year old 1 GHz PowerBook G4, and it said "no... hardware is insufficient." And I had a 64 MB Radeon 7500 in there.
I'd agree that better schools give you a better chance of getting in the door... the first job I got out of Grad school, I wouldn't have gotten the interview if I hadn't had a big "name" school on the diploma (it was a 10 person startup at the time -- with 5 Stanford grads, 3 Cal grads, an MIT grad and an admin). So that helped.
Once you have experience, it's not as important -- your work experience becomes very important.
Excellent summary, though -- IMO college is most definitely NOT vocational training, but it is a very good test of how well you can learn, and how well you can "play by the rules," because you spend 4 years having to learn, study, and test a variety of things, and people who like to blame the system get bounced out (you can't make it through on excuses, because sooner or later you'll hit a professor who doesn't give a sh!t about your sob story).
You sound a bit bitter to me. Perhaps you let your cynicism get in the way and didn't really work that hard?
By FAR the most important things I learned in college were critical thinking and logic. I'm frequently amazed by the ways some people I work with who didn't go to college come to conclusions -- they tend to miss some major things they should consider.
Not saying it's impossible to be a good critical thinker without going to college. But the thing about a 4 year degree from a decent institution is, you have to be able to cope and get through some things -- you demonstrate you can take on something long term and involved, and complete it.
This box does NOT have the same functionality of EMC Symmetrix. It's not even close.
That $3.6 M price (which IS ridiculous, I'll give you that), comes with an actual HUMAN who sits in your data center and plays Tetris on that EMC box, and if a drive fails he swaps it out with the one he has sitting on the shelf. It's Cadillac level service, with an F1 car price tag (sorry for the bad metaphors, I need mor e coffee;-)
This is just a storage box. And it's more expensive than throwing 4 SATA drives in an enclosure. It's on the "dirt cheap" end, with reliability to match. It makes things like Apple's Xserve RAID look "high end" and "expensive" though products like Xserve RAID are still DIRT cheap from a storage standpoint (enterprise storage has different QOS than the pr0n box you have sitting next to your home PC).
How do I get that webcast from OZ when I'm in a gym in Atlanta? Schlepping the exercise bike to the elliptical trainer doesn't seem... super convenient.
Except radio is AWFUL... a typical playlist is 15 songs per day, repeated over and over and over. And many radio stations out here in NorCal take 4 1/2 minute commercial breaks... how annoying is that when you're working out? There's way too much blather... I never hear what I want and when I'm somewhere other than home, I can fish on the radio for 15 minutes before finding a song I like... which cuts out 30 seconds later and goes to... commercial.
With satellite, you can have 5 or 6 commercial-free stations that you like, and "in theory" get them anywhere. In concept it sounds great -- my DirecTV has digital radio stations and I listen sometimes when I'm tired of what I have on the iPod. But in practice, satellite radio reception is a bit spotty (as noted in the article).
You're always free to break it, and if they deactivate your account, contest that fact in court.
Just like if you get a traffic ticket, you're free to contest that in court.
To say the license is "just a piece of paper..." well that's a bit naieve. But you go keep thinking that way. Did you insist that Gore won in 2000 as well?
Had you actually BOUGHT the game, instead of using "I" to describe conjecture which would represent what YOU would have probably seen had you ACTUALLY procured said media, you might have seen that there are big stickers that you must tear to GET to the CD which say "by opening this package, you agree to read and accept the license agreement."
Pretty much ALL shrink-wrap agreements now include this sort of thing. And they indiciate you can return them, without opening the media, for a refund if you choose not to accept.
There have been court challenges of these "shrink wrap" licenses, claiming ignorance, and I'm not 100% sure of all the details -- some are enforceable, and some are not. But they're certainly (at least initially, unless you want to spend $$$ to hire a baller lawyer) enforceable contracts, so it's a good idea to actually READ the license agreement first, or at least READ the sticker and KNOW that you're going to be presented with a license.
Claiming flat-out ignorance (EXPECIALLY when you've never even looked at the box)... well it's like walking in the road without looking and getting hit by a bus and suing because you weren't told to look for buses. Stupid (but then again, it happens, so it proves people are stupid).
Read the agreement. It says, in very plain terms, SOFTWARE IS LICENSED, NOT SOLD. Which means you have purchased a license to run the software. And when you run the installer, almost always you have to click through to AGREE to this. The fact that there's a CD in the box which allows it to install is a convenience to you -- but it could just as easily be a link to a URL where you could download it.
You may SAY you buy software and not licenses, but the contract says plainly that you're buying a license, so you are in fact incorrect.
So your excuse is that you didn't read the click through license agreement, so the fact that you were using a pirated key and they deactivated your account should mean they owe you compensation?
Makes a huge difference for interaction with digital cameras. Digital has come VERY far in the 2 years since CS was released. The RAW plug-in is pretty good (note the plug-in was $$$ with PS 7, and is bundled with CS, so that's a big deal), but the file browser in CS is still pretty clunky (I export the cache, and it comes to a crawl -- why should I need to manually export any time I do anything anyway?).
I'll check it out but very likely upgrade. There are certainly some worthwhile features, and it's not like it's some bullcrap forced upgrade program like Intuits. "New videos! $69.95!!!"
You know, they make Photoshop Elements for people who don't need the pro features. 90% of the features for like $99. Ever heard of it?
Sure, you can get a good image out of the camera. But you can do a TON more in post processing.
g es .shtml
For B&W photography, you use burning, dodging, bleaching, and a whole host of darkroom tricks. For digital (or slides!) you use Photoshop. Most of the pro art photographers I talk to shoot medium format and scan it in on a $100K scanner, then take to it in Photoshop.
I read an article on the Luminous Landscape just today that explained someone's workflow (as fine art), he took WEEKS to get the image perfect:
http://luminous-landscape.com/essays/making-ima
Photoshop can't make a bad photo good, but it can make an adequate or good photo GREAT.
As for other packages, I don't know. It's not worth my time to try something else, and tools like the RAW converter make so many new things possible... no way I'm gonna wait for some Linux coder to get around to a RAW plug-in that's professional quality, sorry.
Photoshop is big and bloated and pretty slow in my use, but it's certainly CAPABLE.
Which is pretty farking dumb, as the OS has PDF generation BUILT IN. There is maybe one time out of 1 thousand that I'd want Adobe's PDF generator over the built-in one in OS X. And for that, they have a stupid toolbar that automatically comes up in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and maybe Entourage (I never use Entourage).
:-/
And the BEST thing... it has a bug in it, so every time you quit Excel, you get an ERROR dialog. Sweet.
Can't say I give Adobe higher than a 4 on the software quality scale
iPods don't come with free songs anywhere. So I don't think you're being "ripped off."
That's a contrived example. And neither are likely supported on Windows XP for production.
For production, they BOTH will support Windows Server 2000, and Windows Server 2003. And support windows are for 3-6 years, typically.
My point is, there are about 500 Linux distros. And binaries built for one, typically don't work on another. Most commercial vendors won't ship source for their products, so it's a mess.
I know; I've been there. Used to sell a CORBA ORB that had a Linux version. We shipped built on GCC 2.95.3, which worked fine. Then Red Hat had the genius to ship the GCC 2.96 compiler, which was pretty broken. We didn't want to build/ship with this compiler, but lots of our customers started using it, and demanded builds. We knew it was a transient condition and they'd want a GCC 3 based version in the future, but what a fucking mess.
Software vendors really want and need stable OS platforms to build/test/ship software on. My example was somewhat contrived, by for example you see that Oracle specifically supports a couple Linux version: Red Hat Enterprise, and "United Linux" which was a former group that certified testing and interoperabilty. I don't know if United Linux holds favor anymore.
But if you're using something like Gentoo, God help you running commercial applications.
What if my SAP version is only tested and supported with Red Hat Enterprise 4, and my Oracle version is only tested and supported with Suse Enterprise 8?
That's a serious issue for shops that need accountabilty for supported systems. Sure, they could move everything to Postgres. LOL.
OS X 10.2 shipped with GCC 3.1 I believe -- a while before it was released.
;-)
10.3 shipped with GCC 3.3, before 3.3 was released.
10.4 looks to continue the pattern. Apple takes a snapshot of GCC, forks it 6-9 months before the OS ships, tweaks/tunes/optimizes GCC, builds and ships with that version of the compiler, and then re-submits its changes, so future GCC builds (especially the PPC ones) get all the goodies.
And the compiler has had 6-9 months of QA from Apple, which is as good as the amount of credit you give their QA department
Morons like myself that don't code for a living can no longer understand WTF is going on with the code, so we can't get our hands dirty and screw things up.
Next step, shaving the center of my head and molding the sides into nice little pointy things. The transition has begun.
The tax laws change SUBSTANTIALLY in little ways, every year. So it's necessary to have lawyers work with the programmers and make sure everything is correct. Rules for things like alt min, deductions, etc. all change in little ways. The application coding itself has few changes, but there are some-number-of-hundred tax forms that need to be included, and interpreted, CORRECTLY, every year. That would be an awful lot of monitoring for someone to do "gratis."
And this is completely ignoring the indemnity issue -- if one of the forms in the OSS is wrong and you get audited and your balls busted, you'd be on your own. The commercial implementations typically have a "make it right" clause that will assist you if it's their error, and not yours.
Do their online service, it's cheap. Or you can spend $19 or $29 for the non "premier" version. Premier is a ripoff and has lots of stupid movies that tell you how to save money NEXT year.
Well, mainly that it's integrated with Open Directory and the built-in GUI supports sharing of whatever you want.
With the "client" version of OS X, you have to resort to Sharepoints. Plus, the client is limited to 10 connections, and server is unlimited.
Well..
File sharing (AFP) is substantially more flexible on OS X server.
Not to mention, it includes Open Directory, an LDAP based directory service that uses Kerberos for authentication (fairly equivalent to Active Directory or NDS), QuickTime streaming Server, and all sorts of other stuff. And it has a DNS, DHCP, etc, built in, and GUIs for configuring them all.
Sure, they're both UNIX, but there are a ton of extra services on OS X server, and tools for managing them. Downloading BIND, building it, installing it, and configuring via config files is not worth many peoples' time if they need the service. Not everyone is hardened UNIX admin.
So why not use it? It's a full featured directory service based on OpenLDAP with Kerberized AFP and SMB built in, so why use a Linux server and "roll your own" with everything, and do all the extra work?
I have to be missing something here.
Motion requires a baller 3D graphics card -- we're talking 9600 XT or better.
:-)
Since the Geforce 6800 GT costs $500, or the same as the entire rumored low-end Mac, I'm sorta doubting it would be possible
I know I tried to install motion on my 2 year old 1 GHz PowerBook G4, and it said "no... hardware is insufficient." And I had a 64 MB Radeon 7500 in there.
Ferrari must be using Xserves for this same analysis ;-)
I'd agree that better schools give you a better chance of getting in the door... the first job I got out of Grad school, I wouldn't have gotten the interview if I hadn't had a big "name" school on the diploma (it was a 10 person startup at the time -- with 5 Stanford grads, 3 Cal grads, an MIT grad and an admin). So that helped.
Once you have experience, it's not as important -- your work experience becomes very important.
Excellent summary, though -- IMO college is most definitely NOT vocational training, but it is a very good test of how well you can learn, and how well you can "play by the rules," because you spend 4 years having to learn, study, and test a variety of things, and people who like to blame the system get bounced out (you can't make it through on excuses, because sooner or later you'll hit a professor who doesn't give a sh!t about your sob story).
You sound a bit bitter to me. Perhaps you let your cynicism get in the way and didn't really work that hard?
By FAR the most important things I learned in college were critical thinking and logic. I'm frequently amazed by the ways some people I work with who didn't go to college come to conclusions -- they tend to miss some major things they should consider.
Not saying it's impossible to be a good critical thinker without going to college. But the thing about a 4 year degree from a decent institution is, you have to be able to cope and get through some things -- you demonstrate you can take on something long term and involved, and complete it.
This box does NOT have the same functionality of EMC Symmetrix. It's not even close.
;-)
That $3.6 M price (which IS ridiculous, I'll give you that), comes with an actual HUMAN who sits in your data center and plays Tetris on that EMC box, and if a drive fails he swaps it out with the one he has sitting on the shelf. It's Cadillac level service, with an F1 car price tag (sorry for the bad metaphors, I need mor e coffee
This is just a storage box. And it's more expensive than throwing 4 SATA drives in an enclosure. It's on the "dirt cheap" end, with reliability to match. It makes things like Apple's Xserve RAID look "high end" and "expensive" though products like Xserve RAID are still DIRT cheap from a storage standpoint (enterprise storage has different QOS than the pr0n box you have sitting next to your home PC).
How do I get that webcast from OZ when I'm in a gym in Atlanta? Schlepping the exercise bike to the elliptical trainer doesn't seem... super convenient.
Except radio is AWFUL... a typical playlist is 15 songs per day, repeated over and over and over. And many radio stations out here in NorCal take 4 1/2 minute commercial breaks... how annoying is that when you're working out? There's way too much blather... I never hear what I want and when I'm somewhere other than home, I can fish on the radio for 15 minutes before finding a song I like... which cuts out 30 seconds later and goes to... commercial.
With satellite, you can have 5 or 6 commercial-free stations that you like, and "in theory" get them anywhere. In concept it sounds great -- my DirecTV has digital radio stations and I listen sometimes when I'm tired of what I have on the iPod. But in practice, satellite radio reception is a bit spotty (as noted in the article).
You're always free to break it, and if they deactivate your account, contest that fact in court.
Just like if you get a traffic ticket, you're free to contest that in court.
To say the license is "just a piece of paper..." well that's a bit naieve. But you go keep thinking that way. Did you insist that Gore won in 2000 as well?
Had you actually BOUGHT the game, instead of using "I" to describe conjecture which would represent what YOU would have probably seen had you ACTUALLY procured said media, you might have seen that there are big stickers that you must tear to GET to the CD which say "by opening this package, you agree to read and accept the license agreement."
Pretty much ALL shrink-wrap agreements now include this sort of thing. And they indiciate you can return them, without opening the media, for a refund if you choose not to accept.
There have been court challenges of these "shrink wrap" licenses, claiming ignorance, and I'm not 100% sure of all the details -- some are enforceable, and some are not. But they're certainly (at least initially, unless you want to spend $$$ to hire a baller lawyer) enforceable contracts, so it's a good idea to actually READ the license agreement first, or at least READ the sticker and KNOW that you're going to be presented with a license.
Claiming flat-out ignorance (EXPECIALLY when you've never even looked at the box)... well it's like walking in the road without looking and getting hit by a bus and suing because you weren't told to look for buses. Stupid (but then again, it happens, so it proves people are stupid).
No, you buy LICENSES.
Read the agreement. It says, in very plain terms, SOFTWARE IS LICENSED, NOT SOLD. Which means you have purchased a license to run the software. And when you run the installer, almost always you have to click through to AGREE to this. The fact that there's a CD in the box which allows it to install is a convenience to you -- but it could just as easily be a link to a URL where you could download it.
You may SAY you buy software and not licenses, but the contract says plainly that you're buying a license, so you are in fact incorrect.
So your excuse is that you didn't read the click through license agreement, so the fact that you were using a pirated key and they deactivated your account should mean they owe you compensation?
Good God.
LOL. Where are the Lisp bindings for MySQL?