You're joking, right? Gimp's interface is a fast track to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. It is so despised at the Linux based VFX facility I work at (300-500 people depending on current project load) that people have taken to either bringing in their own laptops with Photoshop to paint with or they run Photoshop under Wine. Seriously, are people actually still trying to compare Gimp to Photoshop from a usability standpoint? The performance difference alone should be enough to convince anyone to Photoshop comes out ahead.
I'm sure most of Big Western Europe will honor the terms of this treaty in much the same way they are honoring the terms of the Eurpean Union economic agreements, by forcing others to do what they cannot. France, Germany and others run budget deficits in flagrant violation of European law while trying to enforce those rules on the new members from the East. I am sure Kyoto will be no different as it is economically improbable (or even impossible) that they will be able to maintain the terms of Kyoto.
Not neccesarily. Almost all "Big" houses do have windows machines. Photoshop, texure painting software are almost exclusively in the windows domain (except for Mac Photoshop users.) And yes, most people use Photoshop for matte painting, not Gimp. You would be VERY hard pressed to get a matte painter to struggle though the pain of doig work in Gimp.
But I digress. I suspect that they developed in Windows because it is easier to find windows developers and easier to support a common platform (no worries about which toolkit to use, which version of libc, etc. a Win32 has a common API and works on all windows machines) Also, I think game developers are a larger part of their target market, and that is a predominantly Windows crowd.
Or I should say we just had a demo. I work for a Digital Post Production house and we also use Massive for crowd simulation. Endorphin is an interesting technology which I believe demos very well but practical use may prove to be a bit harder.
The basic concept is intersting. Actors are "trained" using a neural network setup. The actions are not captured or keyframed, they are "learned" based on a fuzzy set of rules that allow the actor to adapt to its environment. These behaviors can then be combined to create a complete motion. For instance, in one of the demos you can have one actor tackle another. This is something you could easily motion capture, but the interesting bit happens when you change the direction of the tackle. The actor adapts and falls in a new way because the "tackle" is a behavior. The combination of dynamics and adaptive motion allow you to make changes without having to build lots of new in-betweens or blend shapes. It also allows you to set target poses, not target positions. For instance, in that tackle, if you want the actor to end in a Hesiman pose and then change the animation to a different position, the actor will finish in that pose in the new end position, not snap back to where you set the pose.
Unfortunately, this also has some big drawbacks. These behaviors that are taught to the nueral nets can only be built but the software's creator. You cannot create your own behaviors. I'm sure this type of thing will be opened up in the future, but for now you are stuck with some canned behaviors. Again, makes for great demos but I can easily see hitting the wall with that limitation in production.
Secondly, it only works on bipeds, or more specifically, their biped. Motion re-targeting will allow you to remap the motion to non-human bipeds, but you are still limited to bipeds with human like bio-mechanics.
I also wonder about low level noodle-ability. In animation production, it doesn't matter if it is physically correct, it matters if it looks good and the director is happy. That usually has very little to do with reality (i.e. how interesting would the Matrix have been if people moved in real-world way instead of an interestingly choreographed ballet-fight?) I wonder how adaptable such a sytem is.
This product has a different market than Massive. Massive includes a more simplified fuzzy brain system that allows your motion captured creatures to adapt to their environments or even interact with dynamics. Endorphin is more about syntesizing motion from neural net behaviors. (That is a gross simplification, but hopefully gives some context.)
I like the idea of where this is going, but I think it has to mature a bit more before it is really useful to us.
Well the OpenGL tooltip bug is fixed. That makes me very happy. Prior to SP2, if you had an OpenGL app open, tooltips did not refresh correctly, often displaying a previous tip. A fix apparently exsited for a while but MS wasn't distributing it easily until SP2.
Bluetooth seems more reliable than the implemention that was shipped from Belkin with my USB bluetooth device. It does seem to have fewer services though. For instance, there is no way to send a contact to Outlook from my phone or vice versa.
At least IE renders slashodot correctly. With firefox 0.9.2 under XP, the articles and the left nav bar overlap. I found it a bit ironic that the premiere open source browser doesn't render the premiere open source news site.
I just got off Around the World in 80 Days, one of our vendors (ironically named "Rushes") in London used Rush and seemed to be happy with it. Rush was written by Greg Ercalano, formerly of Digital Domain (and about a million other studios.) He wrote the Race render queue at DD and has a wealth of production experience, so you know you are getting a queue from someone who knows a production environment. And if Thad used it and like it, you know it is bulletproof. Thad is easily one of the smartest people I know in this business.
From a hardware standpoint, back up a step and decide what it is you are going to be doing. You mentioned After Effects and Maya. Do you have some setups you are rendering now? Take them to a reseller and benchmark it. Find out what hardware runs it best. If you are committed to a Mac frontend, you might think about being consistent witht the backend. When we first converted from SGI to Intel/Linux, no small but of time was spent trying to figure out why a certain bit of software worked on one platform but not another, or why it produced just slightly different results. These issues are less common now, but they do happen. That being said, I agree with Thad, the AMD platform is much more cost effective from a price/perfomance standpoint.
Actually, I don't believe this to be true. You can copy from it, but the file names and directory paths are somewhat obfuscated, making it diffcult (but not impossible) to do so when it is mounted as a FAT filesystem. At least I think thats what you are talking about.
I'm not usually an early adopter, but I jumped in and switched from Verizon to AT&T last monday. Here it is Wednesday and I still cannot receive calls on my AT&T phone. Even if I could, I don't seem to get any AT&T GSM coverage in my office any, so I'm not even sure I will stay with AT&T through the grace period. At least with portability I can (in theory) move to yet another provider. Cingular seems to get coverage here.
If Verizon had provided Bluetooth and international (GSM) abilities, I would have stayed with them. Best coverage, worst phones (Verizon) or bad coverage, good phones (everyone else.) I chose better phone, but I am having seconds thoughts now...
Thta funny, I actually worked on the port of Photoshop from Mac to Irix for a short time. I was responsible for tuning some of the painting and filter loops for MIPs chips. The biggest speedup I got was converting integer divides (somewhere on the order of 135 cycles) to floating point divides (convert float, divide, convert back to int. something on the order of 18 cycles.) The app was ported using Quorum originally, a Mac toolkit emulator running in X11. Ah, the stories.....
I would also add that is is important for developers to see a standard environment as well. For instance, if I am Adobe looking to port Premiere to Linux, which toolkit should I use? Qt/KDE? GTK/Gnome? Which distro should I target with which version of gcc and runtime libs? Red Hat? Suse? You can't just pick one, the user may not have that environment installed, and even if it is all statically linked, it may not behave/look the same as the rest of the user's environment. All of this translates to extra expense and hassle in development, which I suspect is a lot bigger turnoff than any GPL hangups people may have. As much as we may bash Windows for changing the environment, at least the Win32 API has remained consistent for the developer.
We may argue that we have all of the Open Source apps we need, but there is still no decent DV video editor such as Final Cut Pro or Premiere. Photoshop is light years ahead of GIMP in features and usability. Roxio has a very full featured and easy to use CD and DVD burner on Mac and Windows, nothing in Linux really compares. Until we make it easy for the developers AND show a market by attracting home users, I don't think we will see these types of apps ported.
The first annual Visual Effects Awards, which was specifically created to honor Visual Effects, had a category for Best Performance by an Actor in an Effects Film. Winners are listed here. Serkis won, along with Elijah Wood and Sean Astin. Even if the academy will not recognize digital performances, other Hollywood organizations will.
Because there is no other choice
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I hate to run a cold shower on your collective open source hard-ons, but the reason most studios that are Linux based use GIMP as their paint tool is because there is NO OTHER CHOICE. I work at one of the studios listed in the article. The artists on my team doing texture painting will actually go look for a 5 year old SGI octane with Photoshop 3.0 to use because it is faster and easier to use than GIMP. Let that settle in for a moment. These kids love fast machines, they crave them like crack cocaine. However, they will go sit in front of a 250MHz boat anchor and use a product released 8 years ago because it is a better tool. GIMP has a UI that that the Surgeon General should place warnings on for RSI risks (repetitive stress injury for the non acronym types.)
The availability of Deep Paint or Photoshop on Linux would signal the end of GIMPs use in studios. It is not a matter of free as in beer tools, it is a matter of Total Cost of Ownership. If it takes my artists 3 times as long to produce paintings/textures in GIMP as it does in Photoshop/Commercial Tool X, I am walking straight into my Producer's office with a P.O. for Photoshop licenses. Because at the end of the day, our highest costs are labor, not software. And we are not zealots. We, as the rest of capitalistic America, want to make money. And we can't do that with inefficient process.
I'm seeing lots of strangeness in LA as well. Most sites are very slow to load if at all. I do not know if it is local problem within our company or area wide.
Also, my father still does some performance tuning occasioanlly. He still sees a lot of FORTRAN codes kicking around. They've been there a while, they work, and no one wants to take the effort to re-write them.
One of the major reasons FORTRAN became so popular in the high performance arena was data dependecy analysis. Companies like Alliant, Convex, and SGI were building parallelizing compilers based upon Kuck's concurency analysis. In order to make things concurrent in a loop (execute in parallel), the compiler needed to make sure there was no data dependency. In example:
for (i=0 ; i<100; i++) {
a[i] = b[i] + c[i];
}
In theory, each iteration of the loop could run on a seperate thread because it is not data dependent. i.e. neither the value in b[] or c[] depend on any previous iteration. In C however, b[] and c[] could be pointers to some section of a[]. For instance, b = &(a[i-1]);. The value of b[] could be the value of a[] from the previous iteration of loop. This is nearly impossible to check for at compile time. In FORTRAN, (or more specifically, FORTRAN 77) there are no pointers. Every array is a unique block of memory. The sheer simplicity of the language makes compile time dependency analysis much more feasible.
I have been away from this area for a while, but I believe this is still a problem in C, although pragmas can allow the user to give the compiler some hints. It also seems parallelism is more explicit these days at the thread level, compile time concurrency is not as much of a hot topic. Anyway, food for thought.
We are al so quick to jump in and bash Microsoft for what they do. However, I have rarely if ever have seen anyone in the linux camp doing much in the way of forward thinking research. Mostly, it is just re-inventing the wheel in an open source way, following, Be's Microsoft's, Apple's or Sun's lead. I'm sure someone has said this in the comments already, but I'm running out the door and only skimmed the reponses.
I work in the FX industry and previously worked at SGI. IBM is correct, we are moving towards Linux. Partially because it is open source, perhaps more because it is Unix like and doesn't require a big workflow change. Mostly however, because it is cheap. FX is a little to no margin cutthroat business. If any of us makes a 5% profit, it's been a pretty good day. Commodity hardware like Intel platforms will help keep costs down, but they typically won't be name brand machines. They will be build it yourself, pick your graphics card and keep it cheap type machines. I have seen some major companies use HP, as they were one of the first to have support for Linux and partnered with Side Effects Software. However, there is no loyalty and I'm sure that those companies on the next round of buying will be purchasing generics. It has to be, economics dictates it.
As far as SGI, I don't think any in the big FX houses will ever take them seriously again after the 320/540 Visual Workstation debacle. It is hard to say if they will be supporting the product you just bought in six months because they change their business model so often.
I thought I saw this in the Santa Monica Museum of Flying about three years ago. Same one? Or is it just a big fib? Reminds me of of the time I saw someone selling the Earth as God on Ebay. "Earth, slightly used. Doesn't work."
I'm suprised they weren't more concerned that IL sounds a lot like their ImageVision library (also called IL.) OpenIL could be construed to be a version of their Image Library, ImageVision.
Knowledge should be free, unless it is yours...
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 1
I found it amusing that the message "Knowledge and information should be free to all people" was being touted by the same industry that brought you the DeCSS case.
I'd have to second that. Just about anytime you see someone sueing a tech company over
what amounts to stock volatility, you are virtually guaranteed it's these folks. I saw
them go after SGI more than once, as well as Informix, People Soft and more when their
stock dropped. They are not popular among the high tech community.
Interesting links about Lerach:
I purchased a Yamaha RX-V990 a year and half ago and have been very pleased. It has both Optical toslink and coxial inputs as well as S-video switching capability. This allows you to have multiple s-video input sources (DV, DVD, VCR, etc...) into your TV, have it switched with your audio and on screen display. Also has Dolby Digital 5.1, although these days 6.1 digital has been released as well as DTS-ES, adding a rear center channel. Yamaha's amplifiers are very clean in my opinion. Some people complain of Yamaha sounding too "bright" (I used to), but with a good speaker matchup I think they sound very balanced.
In short, look for amps that have the basics, S-video in, Toslink optical in, the types of surround you want (DTS-es, 6.1, etc..) and then go listen to it. All the features in the world won't make you happy if you personally don't like the sound. I also saw someone post about audioreview.com, it is a great source for getting some basic opinions.
It seems odd to have reviews posted on Slashdot 2 weeks after the movie was released. Even more odd to give such a good review to something that floated in a strange purgatory between laughable and dreadfully boring. I consider it a bad sign when the audience laughs at mooments when the filmakers were trying to build tension, not humor. Katz is the first person I have seen having so much positive to say about this movie as a viewing experience.
Slashdot Mirror
You're joking, right? Gimp's interface is a fast track to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. It is so despised at the Linux based VFX facility I work at (300-500 people depending on current project load) that people have taken to either bringing in their own laptops with Photoshop to paint with or they run Photoshop under Wine. Seriously, are people actually still trying to compare Gimp to Photoshop from a usability standpoint? The performance difference alone should be enough to convince anyone to Photoshop comes out ahead.
I'm sure most of Big Western Europe will honor the terms of this treaty in much the same way they are honoring the terms of the Eurpean Union economic agreements, by forcing others to do what they cannot. France, Germany and others run budget deficits in flagrant violation of European law while trying to enforce those rules on the new members from the East. I am sure Kyoto will be no different as it is economically improbable (or even impossible) that they will be able to maintain the terms of Kyoto.
Not neccesarily. Almost all "Big" houses do have windows machines. Photoshop, texure painting software are almost exclusively in the windows domain (except for Mac Photoshop users.) And yes, most people use Photoshop for matte painting, not Gimp. You would be VERY hard pressed to get a matte painter to struggle though the pain of doig work in Gimp.
But I digress. I suspect that they developed in Windows because it is easier to find windows developers and easier to support a common platform (no worries about which toolkit to use, which version of libc, etc. a Win32 has a common API and works on all windows machines) Also, I think game developers are a larger part of their target market, and that is a predominantly Windows crowd.
Or I should say we just had a demo. I work for a Digital Post Production house and we also use Massive for crowd simulation. Endorphin is an interesting technology which I believe demos very well but practical use may prove to be a bit harder.
The basic concept is intersting. Actors are "trained" using a neural network setup. The actions are not captured or keyframed, they are "learned" based on a fuzzy set of rules that allow the actor to adapt to its environment. These behaviors can then be combined to create a complete motion. For instance, in one of the demos you can have one actor tackle another. This is something you could easily motion capture, but the interesting bit happens when you change the direction of the tackle. The actor adapts and falls in a new way because the "tackle" is a behavior. The combination of dynamics and adaptive motion allow you to make changes without having to build lots of new in-betweens or blend shapes. It also allows you to set target poses, not target positions. For instance, in that tackle, if you want the actor to end in a Hesiman pose and then change the animation to a different position, the actor will finish in that pose in the new end position, not snap back to where you set the pose.
Unfortunately, this also has some big drawbacks. These behaviors that are taught to the nueral nets can only be built but the software's creator. You cannot create your own behaviors. I'm sure this type of thing will be opened up in the future, but for now you are stuck with some canned behaviors. Again, makes for great demos but I can easily see hitting the wall with that limitation in production.
Secondly, it only works on bipeds, or more specifically, their biped. Motion re-targeting will allow you to remap the motion to non-human bipeds, but you are still limited to bipeds with human like bio-mechanics.
I also wonder about low level noodle-ability. In animation production, it doesn't matter if it is physically correct, it matters if it looks good and the director is happy. That usually has very little to do with reality (i.e. how interesting would the Matrix have been if people moved in real-world way instead of an interestingly choreographed ballet-fight?) I wonder how adaptable such a sytem is.
This product has a different market than Massive. Massive includes a more simplified fuzzy brain system that allows your motion captured creatures to adapt to their environments or even interact with dynamics. Endorphin is more about syntesizing motion from neural net behaviors. (That is a gross simplification, but hopefully gives some context.)
I like the idea of where this is going, but I think it has to mature a bit more before it is really useful to us.
I often associate growing up with good English skills, like spelling.
:-)
"Category"
Well the OpenGL tooltip bug is fixed. That makes me very happy. Prior to SP2, if you had an OpenGL app open, tooltips did not refresh correctly, often displaying a previous tip. A fix apparently exsited for a while but MS wasn't distributing it easily until SP2.
Bluetooth seems more reliable than the implemention that was shipped from Belkin with my USB bluetooth device. It does seem to have fewer services though. For instance, there is no way to send a contact to Outlook from my phone or vice versa.
At least IE renders slashodot correctly. With firefox 0.9.2 under XP, the articles and the left nav bar overlap. I found it a bit ironic that the premiere open source browser doesn't render the premiere open source news site.
I just got off Around the World in 80 Days, one of our vendors (ironically named "Rushes") in London used Rush and seemed to be happy with it. Rush was written by Greg Ercalano, formerly of Digital Domain (and about a million other studios.) He wrote the Race render queue at DD and has a wealth of production experience, so you know you are getting a queue from someone who knows a production environment. And if Thad used it and like it, you know it is bulletproof. Thad is easily one of the smartest people I know in this business.
From a hardware standpoint, back up a step and decide what it is you are going to be doing. You mentioned After Effects and Maya. Do you have some setups you are rendering now? Take them to a reseller and benchmark it. Find out what hardware runs it best. If you are committed to a Mac frontend, you might think about being consistent witht the backend. When we first converted from SGI to Intel/Linux, no small but of time was spent trying to figure out why a certain bit of software worked on one platform but not another, or why it produced just slightly different results. These issues are less common now, but they do happen. That being said, I agree with Thad, the AMD platform is much more cost effective from a price/perfomance standpoint.
Good luck
Derek
Actually, I don't believe this to be true. You can copy from it, but the file names and directory paths are somewhat obfuscated, making it diffcult (but not impossible) to do so when it is mounted as a FAT filesystem. At least I think thats what you are talking about.
I'm not usually an early adopter, but I jumped in and switched from Verizon to AT&T last monday. Here it is Wednesday and I still cannot receive calls on my AT&T phone. Even if I could, I don't seem to get any AT&T GSM coverage in my office any, so I'm not even sure I will stay with AT&T through the grace period. At least with portability I can (in theory) move to yet another provider. Cingular seems to get coverage here.
If Verizon had provided Bluetooth and international (GSM) abilities, I would have stayed with them. Best coverage, worst phones (Verizon) or bad coverage, good phones (everyone else.) I chose better phone, but I am having seconds thoughts now...
Thta funny, I actually worked on the port of Photoshop from Mac to Irix for a short time. I was responsible for tuning some of the painting and filter loops for MIPs chips. The biggest speedup I got was converting integer divides (somewhere on the order of 135 cycles) to floating point divides (convert float, divide, convert back to int. something on the order of 18 cycles.) The app was ported using Quorum originally, a Mac toolkit emulator running in X11. Ah, the stories.....
I would also add that is is important for developers to see a standard environment as well. For instance, if I am Adobe looking to port Premiere to Linux, which toolkit should I use? Qt/KDE? GTK/Gnome? Which distro should I target with which version of gcc and runtime libs? Red Hat? Suse? You can't just pick one, the user may not have that environment installed, and even if it is all statically linked, it may not behave/look the same as the rest of the user's environment. All of this translates to extra expense and hassle in development, which I suspect is a lot bigger turnoff than any GPL hangups people may have. As much as we may bash Windows for changing the environment, at least the Win32 API has remained consistent for the developer.
We may argue that we have all of the Open Source apps we need, but there is still no decent DV video editor such as Final Cut Pro or Premiere. Photoshop is light years ahead of GIMP in features and usability. Roxio has a very full featured and easy to use CD and DVD burner on Mac and Windows, nothing in Linux really compares. Until we make it easy for the developers AND show a market by attracting home users, I don't think we will see these types of apps ported.
The first annual Visual Effects Awards, which was specifically created to honor Visual Effects, had a category for Best Performance by an Actor in an Effects Film. Winners are listed here. Serkis won, along with Elijah Wood and Sean Astin. Even if the academy will not recognize digital performances, other Hollywood organizations will.
I hate to run a cold shower on your collective open source hard-ons, but the reason most studios that are Linux based use GIMP as their paint tool is because there is NO OTHER CHOICE. I work at one of the studios listed in the article. The artists on my team doing texture painting will actually go look for a 5 year old SGI octane with Photoshop 3.0 to use because it is faster and easier to use than GIMP. Let that settle in for a moment. These kids love fast machines, they crave them like crack cocaine. However, they will go sit in front of a 250MHz boat anchor and use a product released 8 years ago because it is a better tool. GIMP has a UI that that the Surgeon General should place warnings on for RSI risks (repetitive stress injury for the non acronym types.)
The availability of Deep Paint or Photoshop on Linux would signal the end of GIMPs use in studios. It is not a matter of free as in beer tools, it is a matter of Total Cost of Ownership. If it takes my artists 3 times as long to produce paintings/textures in GIMP as it does in Photoshop/Commercial Tool X, I am walking straight into my Producer's office with a P.O. for Photoshop licenses. Because at the end of the day, our highest costs are labor, not software. And we are not zealots. We, as the rest of capitalistic America, want to make money. And we can't do that with inefficient process.
I'm seeing lots of strangeness in LA as well. Most sites are very slow to load if at all. I do not know if it is local problem within our company or area wide.
Also, my father still does some performance tuning occasioanlly. He still sees a lot of FORTRAN codes kicking around. They've been there a while, they work, and no one wants to take the effort to re-write them.
One of the major reasons FORTRAN became so popular in the high performance arena was data dependecy analysis. Companies like Alliant, Convex, and SGI were building parallelizing compilers based upon Kuck's concurency analysis. In order to make things concurrent in a loop (execute in parallel), the compiler needed to make sure there was no data dependency. In example:
for (i=0 ; i<100; i++) {
a[i] = b[i] + c[i];
}
In theory, each iteration of the loop could run on a seperate thread because it is not data dependent. i.e. neither the value in b[] or c[] depend on any previous iteration. In C however, b[] and c[] could be pointers to some section of a[] . For instance, b = &(a[i-1]); . The value of b[] could be the value of a[] from the previous iteration of loop. This is nearly impossible to check for at compile time. In FORTRAN, (or more specifically, FORTRAN 77) there are no pointers. Every array is a unique block of memory. The sheer simplicity of the language makes compile time dependency analysis much more feasible.
I have been away from this area for a while, but I believe this is still a problem in C, although pragmas can allow the user to give the compiler some hints. It also seems parallelism is more explicit these days at the thread level, compile time concurrency is not as much of a hot topic. Anyway, food for thought.
We are al so quick to jump in and bash Microsoft for what they do. However, I have rarely if ever have seen anyone in the linux camp doing much in the way of forward thinking research. Mostly, it is just re-inventing the wheel in an open source way, following, Be's Microsoft's, Apple's or Sun's lead. I'm sure someone has said this in the comments already, but I'm running out the door and only skimmed the reponses.
As far as SGI, I don't think any in the big FX houses will ever take them seriously again after the 320/540 Visual Workstation debacle. It is hard to say if they will be supporting the product you just bought in six months because they change their business model so often.
Entropy Rules
I thought I saw this in the Santa Monica Museum of Flying about three years ago. Same one? Or is it just a big fib? Reminds me of of the time I saw someone selling the Earth as God on Ebay. "Earth, slightly used. Doesn't work."
I'm suprised they weren't more concerned that IL sounds a lot like their ImageVision library (also called IL.) OpenIL could be construed to be a version of their Image Library, ImageVision.
I found it amusing that the message "Knowledge and information should be free to all people" was being touted by the same industry that brought you the DeCSS case.
The "Lerach" bill
Year 2000 suits
And on Red Herring
When they got sued and lost
I purchased a Yamaha RX-V990 a year and half ago and have been very pleased. It has both Optical toslink and coxial inputs as well as S-video switching capability. This allows you to have multiple s-video input sources (DV, DVD, VCR, etc...) into your TV, have it switched with your audio and on screen display. Also has Dolby Digital 5.1, although these days 6.1 digital has been released as well as DTS-ES, adding a rear center channel. Yamaha's amplifiers are very clean in my opinion. Some people complain of Yamaha sounding too "bright" (I used to), but with a good speaker matchup I think they sound very balanced.
In short, look for amps that have the basics, S-video in, Toslink optical in, the types of surround you want (DTS-es, 6.1, etc..) and then go listen to it. All the features in the world won't make you happy if you personally don't like the sound. I also saw someone post about audioreview.com, it is a great source for getting some basic opinions.
It seems odd to have reviews posted on Slashdot 2 weeks after the movie was released. Even more odd to give such a good review to something that floated in a strange purgatory between laughable and dreadfully boring. I consider it a bad sign when the audience laughs at mooments when the filmakers were trying to build tension, not humor. Katz is the first person I have seen having so much positive to say about this movie as a viewing experience.