because in some situations it's better to have an application that can appear and disappear instantly. i don't need a application to track my packages open all the time when i'm doing other stuff, but i also don't want to have to backtrack and get my tracking number or link from the shipping email. with widgets i can put the tracking number in, and it keeps track of it itself without me having to click on another link. the ftp widget is great. i have the ftp client as a standalone app, but having the widget means i can drop files onto the widget and have the the app open itself, go to that directory and replace the files all in one motion. that's pretty great. if i need to do more ftp stuff than that, i can open the application separately.
the old mode of having applications open and visible constantly (or even hidden) while running isn't the best solution for every problem. sometimes it's better to have them "active" but not cluttering up my workspace or even my dock. it's an elegant solution to a problem most people don't realize they have.
What are these guys thinking? What about the Tiger widgets ripoff, now called gadgets? (BTW, I think both are useless).
dashboard+widgets [b]can[/b] be very useful. of course, there are only specific tasks where it makes sense. when i first installed tiger i figured the dashboard thing would be cute for a few days and then just be a resource hog. but after a while i've found many situations where dashboard is extremely useful. much better than any other solution really. here are a few examples.
- rpn calc widget: if i'm doing a layout and i suddenly need to do some calculation like converting a fraction into a decimal, i can dashboard into rpn calc and do the calculation right there. the significant bits are that i don't have to open another application and i can see the wordspace exactly as i left it to reference the numbers in my calculations. adobe apps hide all their pallettes when you switch away from them to keep from clutttering up the whole desktop. so if i were to switch to a different app, i would lose all those pallettes.
- the transmit ftp client widget: awesome awesome awesome. i can assign a transmit widget to a particular directory on an ftp volume. this is handy since i manage one particular site that changes its homepage information every few days. i can make my changes in dreamweaver, click and hold on the index.htm file, activate expose and then just drag the index file onto the expose widget. i don't have to open transmit, open my ftp bookmark, and then drag into my transmit window. it does it all for me (except quit the app when done).
- flight tracking widget: if you're waiting for someone to fly in, this is invaluable. work away and occassionally hit expose to see how their flight is progressing. very handy. better and more accurate than using the airline's own flight progress pages.
- package tracking widget: very nice feature. better than constantly going back to my email, searching for my package shipping confirmation email, and then clicking on a tracking link to get to the fedex or ups tracking page. updates automatically. so over the course of 3 days or a week you can check on the status your shipment.
those are the ones i use the most. the rest of them i turn off so they don't take up memory, but overall i've been very pleased with dashboard widgets. they're much more useful than i originally thought. now that i think about it, it would drive me nuts to do without them now.
if everyone is overlooking it, it is not obvious. even though it might be a perfect solution, it is still an obscure perfect solution. so, thanks for that info.:)
At least Japan knows how to PR the tech - you never hear about it here - which is just sad.
actually there was a story (maybe two) about thermal depolymerization on slashdot years ago. that's where i first read about the technology. it was prompted by an article in discover magazine about their first plant in carthage, MO. it's a pretty good article and i'm surprised we haven't heard more about how the carthage plant has been doing. all i've been able to find about it recently is that they had to do some modifications to the exhaust system because the smell was bothering the residents too much (which is probably quite a feat in a place that produces livestock).
i actually thought the increase in oil prices would probably help this technology along. the only thing anyone has questioned about the process is the cost efficiency of making oil from thermal depolymerization versus the cost of just buying it from opec countries and/or successfully mining it from the oil shale in canada. i think the depolymerization method obviously has a lot more positives in its favor.
i also read that the livestock manufacturers, now understanding that their waste was actually useful and profitable for someone, had decided to charge for their waste product rather than just give it away, which was at least somewhat assumed by the cost analysis of depolymerization to begin with. even though it made sense at the time to assume that rather than paying for people to remove biological waste, they would rather have someone do it for free or even pay them for it, you can never overestimate the greed of corporations. i sure hope the technology continues to develop until it becomes more cost efficient. even if it can only reduce our needs for oil a small percentage, that would be a significant difference in our reliance on opec.
That's an incredible technology. If it works as demonstrated, I can see it replacing the mouse. If we can get useful keyboards in there (sorry, software-based on-screen keyboards suck, they lack tactile feedback) as well, this could open up a whole new way in which to interact.
personally i can't see it completely replacing a mouse for general computing. but for certain functions i can see it being a great addition. the ergonomics of using one of those things is actually not so great when you think about using it all day like we use our mouse(s). in order for the touchscreen to be convenient and useable by our hands our head would have to be pointing down the whole time to see what we're doing. but if we arrange it so that it's in a comfortable viewing position like a monitor, it's inconvenient and tiring to use with our hands. the only way i could see it working over the long term is if it mirrors what's happening on your main screen and you only look down at it occassionally. for example, i get neck pains when i have to type and view things on my laptop for a long time. it probably doesn't help that i'm fairly tall.
i'm looking at my computer set up right now. i have two lcd's mounted on vesa mounts to raise them up closer to my eyeline. i rarely, if ever, look down at my input devices. there's no need and it's not particularly comfortable to keep my head in that position anyway.
i can see it being really good for a digital device. mostly because we're already accustomed to staring down, up, sideways at it. i use a tablet regularly for photo retouching. but i didn't buy one of them that has and lcd behind the touchpad. while it may be more intuitive and exact in some situations, i just didn't want to have to stare down into the tablet surface all the time. plus it's way too expensive.
Does it matter? the intel Macs top out at 2GB ram. Your DP G5 can handle at least 4GB - and you need it if you're running those apps.
actually i run handbrake quite a bit recently and i usually have the activity monitor open. handbrake doesn't use very much ram at all. it uses the cpu a LOT 270% on my quad. but it has a VERY small ram footprint.
You can tell the difference with film or video, it's just a little more subtle. A lot of people actually prefer the 24 fps look for narrative works. There are all sorts of theories about why this is the case. Some people claim it looks less realistic, which causes the audience to suspend disbelief more easily. My guess is it's just that people have come to associate the 24 fps look with movies (usually high-quality production), and the 60 fps look with television (often 'extruded consumer product'). So, they see the 24 fps look and immediately think "Hey, this must be good."
i think it has more to do with the fact that 24fps is closer to how the human eye perceives motion. video, at 30fps, is rather unnatural-looking because it's TOO sharp. it's not a matter of what the human eye can resolve but more a function of how the brain perceives that information. the brain perceives a lot of motion blur where if you concentrated on the subject you could likely see it much more clearly.
i've worked on a number of commercials. some we chose to shoot at 30fps in film and most at 24fps (30 fps is useful in effects work because you avoid having to deal with pulldown frames). the 30fps spots, even shot on film, always looked a little too "video-y" and the parallax looks somewhat unnatural. a number of tv shows are going to 24fps since video cameras are now being produced with 24p.
Keep in mind how Apple makes money. Apple is making money through a set of ad campaigns that have given their products a popular image, so they can currently demand high profit margins on their iPods. Apple's strength is in marketing -- they have Jobs running around in a black turtleneck, sell shiny products, and basically sell a self-image of creativity to consumers.
you obviously have never worked in any sort of marketing. apple's strength is NOT their "ad campaigns". in fact, apple does relatively little advertising for the amount of the market that they control. i know it might be hard for you to believe, but maybe apple ipods are preferred because their usability is superior to other music players. if the advertising business were as powerful as you make it out to be, then running a company would be the simplest task possible. just make a mediocre product and hire the best ad agency in the world. david ogilvy once famously said "the fastest way to kill a bad product is to give it great advertising." using effective marketing for a substandard product only brings in more people to quickly realize that you're marketing junk.
people are too quick to judge apple's success based on their marketing and trendiness. don't discount the quality and competitive advantages of a product simply because it's trendy. a product does not automatically become solely the effect of evil marketing just because it has become extremely popular.
That's not likely to last forever. All it takes is one good competing ad campaign, and they've lost that. Also, iPods are consumer electronics devices. When one wears out, there's a clean "breaking point" where there's no cost to the customer is switching to a competing brand with more space for the cost. Apple's personal computer market is a lot more stable -- people put a lot of time into learning how to use their computers, they own hardware and software for their computers, and there's a lot of incentive to get a new Mac. That isn't the case for iPods -- I mean, Apple can make a lot of money on 'em in the short term, but they can also dry up quickly.
please stop talking about "ad campaigns" like an old episode of bewitched. advertising does not have the power to ascribe to it. if it did, then i'd be a much wealthier man. i spent years advertising products that people don't consider "cool" (*cough*windows media center*cough*). you CANNOT just tell people something is cool and expect them to believe it.
at this point it will take a lot more than just a competitive ad campaign to unseat the ipod. ipods are now being integrated into oem car stereos. plus the itunes music store dominates the legal download market. the infrastructure around the ipod is so strong now that it's effectively making all other music players less useful. when you buy a chrysler group car next year, your choice of music players will be: an ipod, which has an integrated dock cord and can be controlled through the oem headunit, or a dell dj which has no integration from the factory whatsoever in your car. ipod compatible products are assuring the ipod's dominance in the market for quite some time.
When did increasing the cost of ad space count as an idea? Hey I've got a revolutionary idea - I'll sell you a car for 100x the normal price. Instead of buying the car, you'll buy each individual part. Only buy the ones you need!
ever heard of "parting out" a car? check ebay and you'll see a lot of parts from one individual vehicle (if you check a seller's other auctions). it's a viable and profitable business. do you think car junkyards just buy your old clapped out car out of benevolence?
the cheapness of video gear and the increasing quality of video technology will definitely have an effect on indy film making. right now the main thing holding them back is the printing process. since most places don't do digital projection, filmmakers still have to make film prints of their movies even if they originate on video. that's a VERY costly process. it'll take some time but i think we'll see it. i liken it to the "democratization" of print. when desktop publishing became available to everyone at a cheap price, there was a flood of crappy design and "zine" writing. however, in the end, it probably benefitted the field in general. some of those people can turn out to be very very good at what they do. 99.5% of them will be terrible. but that's true of anything. it will all be worth it for the small percentage that are good. because they wouldn't have had the distribution or production capabilities only a few years ago.
You are forgetting about Robert Rodriguez of Trouble Maker Studios fame. You might have seen some of his movies. Sin City, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids. He started out with a seriously small indy film called "El Mariachi". This was a full movie that cost only 7,000 to make. He didn't have any Hollywood support. He just did it himself.
let's not throw around the $7000 figure in his case. all of his equipment and post work was done at the university of texas' film department while he was a student there. i was in the communication department as well around the same time. the movie that he did produce for $7000 is not at all what you see when you rent "el mariachi" from your local video store. the version that was distributed had MANY dollars (i've heard over $100,000) spent in post to fix all the weird glitches in his cheap version.
i agree that he has really done a great job moving forward, but the myth that you can create a movie like el mariachi for $7000 all by yourself has bankrupted many an indy filmmaker since then. haha.
this page comes up blank for me too. oddly i haven't seen one site, other than this one, with that issue. i guess i don't visit sites by people hosted on godaddy.
Actually, coming out with an Intel based iBook first and then the PowerBook later makes sense. As others have noted the apps that power users want will come out later than the included apps.
well, something else to consider is that if they can get a dualcore chip into the powerbooks, rosetta might run fast enough to emulate a single-core g4. that's a perfect scenario for them since power users won't feel much of a loss of speed and they can get people to jump in and continue buying powerbooks.
what's not absolutely clear is how much slower the emulation is. also, a technical question is: if rosetta itself is mp aware, does that mean it could actually possibly emulate a FASTER chip than currently available g4's?
Anyone can make an duplicate of any garment or anything they want. Granted you have to pay for the material - but compare that to the fact you have paid for the piece of hardware you use to play the copied music on. Yeah you can argue that the hardware allows for an unlimited supply of music to be copied and re-distributed, but so does the material you buy to make your garment - you can unstitch it and make something completely different, or you buy truckloads of material in the first place anticipating that you will copy many garments.
well, it's not an exact duplicate then. what you're describing would be known better as a "knock off". that would be more akin to me buying a cd, and then re-recording all the music while trying my hardest to make it sound exactly the same. then distributing my recording in place of the original. that, by the way, is also illegal (in both the music and garment cases).
At least the department store removes the tag after you buy it.
yeah, but let's see if the department store would remove the mag-tag if doing so allowed you to make exact duplicates of that garment and give it away free to anyone who wants it. i bet you'd have to get used to having that tag's imprint on your ass.
BeOS worked well, still does, actually. And if Apple had bought BeOS it wouldn't be considered a failure.
actually, it would probably be considered a failure along with the now-dead company known as apple. if apple had bought beos rather than next, jean-louis gasse would have been at apple rather than steve jobs. jobs' insistence on things being "just right" saved the company. the jellybean imac was the savior of the whole company. i have a friend who worked closely with apple at the time of the transition and they were pretty close to being on a month-to-month basis of surviving. so if we were to revise the history, beos would probably be even more dead than it is now along with apple computer and the ipod wouldn't have existed.
Apple announced their products at 1 PM.
You're a professional art director and you wake up at 1 PM?
i'm a freelancer and i work from home or from a client's office depending on the situation. i'm not booked this week and am just working on a personal project. i woke up at 9am PST today and ordered a machine. would you like to know what i had for breakfast? if you want to see my experience, i have a hyperlink right there next to my name. thanks for caring though.
Hell, I'm amazed anyone is actually planning on buying ANY Apple hardware based on the obsolete PowerPC architecture.
you're looking at it from the wrong way. i'm a professional art director/graphic designer and i ordered a quad core this morning when i woke up. a lot of small studios and pro who aren't on a strict purchasing schedule have been waiting a very long time for this machine. the reason being, we all know the intel transition is coming. i would be one of the first early adopters of it IF i knew that my needed graphics apps were going to be ported quickly and the bugs of the processor transition were squashed. but since we don't know really when the all the apps will be ready, we need a machine that is future-proofed for a couple of years.
i'm looking for a machine to last me for probably two to three years. it's likely i won't switch to the intel platform until the second generation and i bet a lot of other pros are waiting it out as well. ppc is a known quantity and familiarity and predicability are very important when you rely on your computer and third party apps to make a living. so i'll stick on ppc until i KNOW that all the issues are worked out on intel. a quad 2.5 machine is the perfect machine to tide me over until macintel gen 2.
i did some pro-bono advertising work for the computer history museum and our agency also had the microsoft account. so we somewhat facilitated this step. if you have a chance to visit the chm, it's really a worthwhile trip. when i met them they weren't in their current building and their "visible storage" was in an old airplane hanger. the new display is quite interesting. everyone stops at the front display for at least 20 minutes looking at all the tech they've owned over the years. they have a lot of very significant machines (including one of the enigma machines).
they also hold a number of symposia with very significant speakers. i saw a tim berners-lee there. pretty humbling to see the man who is largely responsible for the invention of the internet. try to catch some of their lectures by people who have made history. it's really enlightening.
Yet Apple will claim to have the first hand held video player, ignoring the PSP and other hand held video players. Just like the iPod was not the first MP3 player either. Of course, Apple is great at rewriting history.
History should really be about stuff, that, oh, I dunno, really happened. Then that is just my opinion.
where has apple ever said they INVENTED the portable music player? sure they've become the dominant player, but i seem to recall jobs even saying, when he introduced the ipod, that while they weren't the first to market, the others haven't done it right. history has proven him right.
being in los angeles, we definitely are starting to see the hybrids as a fashion statement more than the hybrids as a philosophical statement. there are plenty of full-gasoline cars or diesels out there that consume less gas than the toyota prius. in fact, the honda civic hybrid has very few sales compared to the toyota prius. why? because the civic hybrid looks like... a honda civic. so if you're going to be seen in a cheap car, you want to at least get credit for being in an "environmentally friendly" cheap car, which carries its own cache. god forbid you're actually mistaken for someone who can only afford a honda civic. the prius is a huge fashion statement, and i'd suspect that is the case elsewhere in the country as well. there are many MANY cars you could buy right now for much less money than the prius that are friendlier to the environment than a toyota prius. a biodiesel converted car, a compressed natural gas converted car, a very efficient old economy car.
now, i'm all for hybrid technology because you're never really going to get people to put the environment above their own vanity on the priority ladder. so anything that reduces gas consumption by any means is a "good thing." but to believe that people are buying hybrids without any desire to "make a statement" is a bit naive. i think they all want to pat themselves on the back a bit for driving such a conspicuously hybrid vehicle. as evidenced by the kinship they have when passing each other on the road. i've never seen honda crx hf drivers waving at each other and smirking at how green they are.
Perhaps you haven't seen Current TV yet... Not only do they allow viewer content submissions, allow "pod" viewing on their website, and have a radically different approach to showing their content, they are also apparently heavily backed by Google.
cool. i'll check that out. what google would bring to the table is, of course, legitimacy and likely great design and code. similar to the way that apple seems to wait for markets to develop and then do one better by boiling down the needs of the market to its essence and designing an elegant solution to solve that problem, i think google has been/will do the same thing in this next medium. wasn't there just a story a couple weeks back on here about how google was buying a lot of dark fiber? might be related.
Somehow I doubt that commercials will be sepeartely downloadable (or skippable in any other way either). Just like TV today, You'll be forced to watch commercials in order to get the good content. Heck maybe they will implement some sort of counter, so that you HAVE to watch so many before you can view-on-demand a particular program.
i think it'll be something more along the lines of a sponsorship banner on the bottom. or should be. something that will be included in the content since self-contained clips will always be ignored or skipped somehow.
oddly enough, i just theorized this plan yesterday over lunch with a friend of mine. being in advertising, i can see the potential here. in much the same way google delivers "unobtrusive" ads in their search engine, they can delivery custom long-form video content with banners or logo bugs in them. the major cost of television is the broadcast and the infrastructure needed. that's why you see television being run by very few large corporations. once you minimize the difficulty of distribution, the production costs of MOST tv content is quite low. the cost of a 30-second tv commercial can run into the millions. if you can use that money all in production for long-form content and only a fraction of it for distribution, then you have great potential in the world of marketing.
in the end, i also think it will IMPROVE a lot of content. since nobody really wants to download an infomercial, the content will have to be interesting/informative to make it worthwhile. for those of us in media, we should buckle up, because the whole paradigm is about to change.
Slashdot Mirror
the old mode of having applications open and visible constantly (or even hidden) while running isn't the best solution for every problem. sometimes it's better to have them "active" but not cluttering up my workspace or even my dock. it's an elegant solution to a problem most people don't realize they have.
- rpn calc widget: if i'm doing a layout and i suddenly need to do some calculation like converting a fraction into a decimal, i can dashboard into rpn calc and do the calculation right there. the significant bits are that i don't have to open another application and i can see the wordspace exactly as i left it to reference the numbers in my calculations. adobe apps hide all their pallettes when you switch away from them to keep from clutttering up the whole desktop. so if i were to switch to a different app, i would lose all those pallettes.
- the transmit ftp client widget: awesome awesome awesome. i can assign a transmit widget to a particular directory on an ftp volume. this is handy since i manage one particular site that changes its homepage information every few days. i can make my changes in dreamweaver, click and hold on the index.htm file, activate expose and then just drag the index file onto the expose widget. i don't have to open transmit, open my ftp bookmark, and then drag into my transmit window. it does it all for me (except quit the app when done).
- flight tracking widget: if you're waiting for someone to fly in, this is invaluable. work away and occassionally hit expose to see how their flight is progressing. very handy. better and more accurate than using the airline's own flight progress pages.
- package tracking widget: very nice feature. better than constantly going back to my email, searching for my package shipping confirmation email, and then clicking on a tracking link to get to the fedex or ups tracking page. updates automatically. so over the course of 3 days or a week you can check on the status your shipment.
those are the ones i use the most. the rest of them i turn off so they don't take up memory, but overall i've been very pleased with dashboard widgets. they're much more useful than i originally thought. now that i think about it, it would drive me nuts to do without them now.
i actually thought the increase in oil prices would probably help this technology along. the only thing anyone has questioned about the process is the cost efficiency of making oil from thermal depolymerization versus the cost of just buying it from opec countries and/or successfully mining it from the oil shale in canada. i think the depolymerization method obviously has a lot more positives in its favor.
i also read that the livestock manufacturers, now understanding that their waste was actually useful and profitable for someone, had decided to charge for their waste product rather than just give it away, which was at least somewhat assumed by the cost analysis of depolymerization to begin with. even though it made sense at the time to assume that rather than paying for people to remove biological waste, they would rather have someone do it for free or even pay them for it, you can never overestimate the greed of corporations. i sure hope the technology continues to develop until it becomes more cost efficient. even if it can only reduce our needs for oil a small percentage, that would be a significant difference in our reliance on opec.
i'm looking at my computer set up right now. i have two lcd's mounted on vesa mounts to raise them up closer to my eyeline. i rarely, if ever, look down at my input devices. there's no need and it's not particularly comfortable to keep my head in that position anyway.
i can see it being really good for a digital device. mostly because we're already accustomed to staring down, up, sideways at it. i use a tablet regularly for photo retouching. but i didn't buy one of them that has and lcd behind the touchpad. while it may be more intuitive and exact in some situations, i just didn't want to have to stare down into the tablet surface all the time. plus it's way too expensive.
i've worked on a number of commercials. some we chose to shoot at 30fps in film and most at 24fps (30 fps is useful in effects work because you avoid having to deal with pulldown frames). the 30fps spots, even shot on film, always looked a little too "video-y" and the parallax looks somewhat unnatural. a number of tv shows are going to 24fps since video cameras are now being produced with 24p.
people are too quick to judge apple's success based on their marketing and trendiness. don't discount the quality and competitive advantages of a product simply because it's trendy. a product does not automatically become solely the effect of evil marketing just because it has become extremely popular.
please stop talking about "ad campaigns" like an old episode of bewitched. advertising does not have the power to ascribe to it. if it did, then i'd be a much wealthier man. i spent years advertising products that people don't consider "cool" (*cough*windows media center*cough*). you CANNOT just tell people something is cool and expect them to believe it.at this point it will take a lot more than just a competitive ad campaign to unseat the ipod. ipods are now being integrated into oem car stereos. plus the itunes music store dominates the legal download market. the infrastructure around the ipod is so strong now that it's effectively making all other music players less useful. when you buy a chrysler group car next year, your choice of music players will be: an ipod, which has an integrated dock cord and can be controlled through the oem headunit, or a dell dj which has no integration from the factory whatsoever in your car. ipod compatible products are assuring the ipod's dominance in the market for quite some time.
the cheapness of video gear and the increasing quality of video technology will definitely have an effect on indy film making. right now the main thing holding them back is the printing process. since most places don't do digital projection, filmmakers still have to make film prints of their movies even if they originate on video. that's a VERY costly process. it'll take some time but i think we'll see it. i liken it to the "democratization" of print. when desktop publishing became available to everyone at a cheap price, there was a flood of crappy design and "zine" writing. however, in the end, it probably benefitted the field in general. some of those people can turn out to be very very good at what they do. 99.5% of them will be terrible. but that's true of anything. it will all be worth it for the small percentage that are good. because they wouldn't have had the distribution or production capabilities only a few years ago.
i agree that he has really done a great job moving forward, but the myth that you can create a movie like el mariachi for $7000 all by yourself has bankrupted many an indy filmmaker since then. haha.
this page comes up blank for me too. oddly i haven't seen one site, other than this one, with that issue. i guess i don't visit sites by people hosted on godaddy.
what's not absolutely clear is how much slower the emulation is. also, a technical question is: if rosetta itself is mp aware, does that mean it could actually possibly emulate a FASTER chip than currently available g4's?
i'm looking for a machine to last me for probably two to three years. it's likely i won't switch to the intel platform until the second generation and i bet a lot of other pros are waiting it out as well. ppc is a known quantity and familiarity and predicability are very important when you rely on your computer and third party apps to make a living. so i'll stick on ppc until i KNOW that all the issues are worked out on intel. a quad 2.5 machine is the perfect machine to tide me over until macintel gen 2.
actually they have a punchtape of the original dos. this was years ago before the microsoft donation. pretty cool.
they also hold a number of symposia with very significant speakers. i saw a tim berners-lee there. pretty humbling to see the man who is largely responsible for the invention of the internet. try to catch some of their lectures by people who have made history. it's really enlightening.
now, i'm all for hybrid technology because you're never really going to get people to put the environment above their own vanity on the priority ladder. so anything that reduces gas consumption by any means is a "good thing." but to believe that people are buying hybrids without any desire to "make a statement" is a bit naive. i think they all want to pat themselves on the back a bit for driving such a conspicuously hybrid vehicle. as evidenced by the kinship they have when passing each other on the road. i've never seen honda crx hf drivers waving at each other and smirking at how green they are.
in the end, i also think it will IMPROVE a lot of content. since nobody really wants to download an infomercial, the content will have to be interesting/informative to make it worthwhile. for those of us in media, we should buckle up, because the whole paradigm is about to change.