Ok. You originally said: "Guess we don't want to talk about how much a 8 core mac pro is going to cost vs. a similarly powerful PC?" So lets compare it. Apple at $5,775 (8 gigs RAM, 3GHz Intel 8-cores, wifi, bluetooth), or Sun for $38,995 (2.2 GHz AMD 8-cores, 5 gigs RAM). Apple offers OSX; Sun basically offers something (Solaris) not a lot different from Linux (and of course, OSX has those same capabilities, generally speaking.) But the Apple has all manner of cool software, and a much better UI. Oh, and complementary multi-core systems from $600.
There. It's been compared. I'm still laughing.:-)
You might want to try this again when you find a system that is actually somewhat on par. In the meantime, that ol' Apple sandbox is looking pretty sweet.
Oh. So what you're actually saying is, there is no such similarly powerful machine at present? I have to invent one out of thin air, imagine features as implemented by the manufacturer, conceive of a price... and then discuss? I guess you really don't want to "talk about about how much a(n) 8 core mac pro is going to cost vs. a similarly powerful PC."
Well, when anyone has such a beast, by all means, let's talk about it.
if you make something ubiquitous and cheap to duplicate, you are going to hurt the producers.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you have reversed the actual situation. Music is naturally ubiquitous and inexpensive to duplicate in the current environment. It is DRM that inverts this natural order, and it is DRM that artificially establishes a continuing market. The producers aren't complaining by the way - never, ever make the mistake of characterizing the RIAA as "the producers." They represent the middlemen. Not the producers. It is the middlemen that are complaining, by and large.
The RIAA and the music stores are competing with an illegal movement.
iTunes is illegal? Online CD sales are illegal? Bands offering free downloads of their work are breaking the law? Bands offering direct sales of their work are breaking the law?
These are what are actually killing the record stores. Of the number of sales to be made, they are taking the lion's share because technically speaking, they have the advantages: More customers; larger inventory; centralized distribution; better pricing; lower overhead; ability to sell the customer what they want, instead of one or two songs they want, and ten that aren't worth the energy it took to blow the craters on the CD's surface. iTunes, with the addition of the non-DRMed EMI catalog, will be a perfect source for digital music; they have the features buyers want - preview, track-specific sales, great search, superb in-computer players and portables - and if DRM comes off the rest of the catalog, that'll be the new paradigm for music mega-stores. I'll be buying from iTunes as soon as the DRM goes away.
Another factor is that frankly, a band that has a moderately technical fellow with a good ear can replace the recording studio, the mastering house, the CD replicator up front. A few more skills, and $35/year and they've got a website and no need for the marketing engine that the record companies (sort of) offer. Plus, now they're not trying to compete with a corrupt industry that pushes pop to the exclusion of anything else - so they can create something in a genre other than pop and still find an audience without having to kowtow to the least common denominator with regard to taste (cough.) They can give out - or sell - their CDs at gigs, or simply to friends over coffee, and not one tiny bit of this is illegal - it is just different and it does not create a hole where middlemen such as the RIAA represent can reside; instead, it removes quite a few of said holes.
...and by the way, would you like to listen to one of my free tracks? It is lounge-lizard style guitar noodling. You can download it, stuff it in your music library, give it away, whatever you like. Legally.:-)
Market share is what drove Apple to the x86 platform.
No. Motorola's (and Freescale's) inability to produce higher performance PowerPC CPUs in an acceptable timeframe is what drive Apple to the x86 platform. Nothing else - and there needed to be nothing else, that's quite a problem by itself.
Actually, when I look at your post, I see only fear of accomplishment and a neurotic hatred of literacy. Maybe you should see someone about that. Eventually, if you work for fifty years or so as I have, you may be able to "own crap" as well. I highly recommend it. "Crap", as you put it, is useful, not to mention fun. Likewise, literacy and adequate reading capabilities are within your grasp. That's more difficult for anyone already out of childhood, but it can be done.
Good luck.
Consider a computer: we don't have a specific button for 'launch excel, launch graph wizard, choose scatter chart'. We have to go through menus. That's a *good* thing.
No, actually, I do have a button based interface. I use a Mac; the program comes from the dock. The dock is a series of buttons. I grab tools from an omnipresent tool palette; that's a button based interface. I grab effects from an effects caddy that is a series of buttons that are always there. Direct access all the way, and as a result, I work a good deal faster than anyone who has to go through menus to accomplish the same thing, for instance, in Photoshop or the Gimp. And that, my friend, is what is actually a good thing. Menus are terrible for commonly used operations. Until you've been freed from them, you don't realize how much time they actually cost you.
There are network analyzers and parametric analyzers from the '80's that are just nightmares to use because of the sheer number of buttons they have.
I don't have any trouble with them at all. But then again, I like associating a physical location with a function. Perhaps you just haven't had enough experience with buttons - I've been prodding test gear such as you describe since O-scopes were all tube and 5 MHz was a good upper bandwidth limit for them.:-)
My idea of a perfect interface is my Mackie 32-channel board. Every channel has exactly the same strip of controls; learn one strip, you've learned all 32 channels. That is a lot of real-world controls — over a thousand of them — and one hell of a lot of functionality, and every bit of it is physical - reach, and you have it. To which you can add the controls for the 8 busses and the main section. I've got digital mixers that have what amounts to one (very nice) channel strip and you assign it to the channel you want, but (a) you can't see the settings on any channel but the one that is selected, and (b) there's no physicality to the location of the controls so you can't know "the flute is on channels 1:2 with AUX 3 routed through the 'verb" and look over there and check levels or settings. The cost, of course, is real estate. The Mackie is large; the digital mixers are small. Predictably, given my bias, I make far better recordings with the Mackie.
Menus are better when you don't know what you're doing; they lead you by the nose. And, as you say, they hide things you don't need to see - or at least, people don't think you need to see. My effect caddy based system lets me decide what needs to be in front of me on a button for any one workflow, and that means that to some degree, the interface design is in my hands as an end user - and that's just the way I like it. Other users might prefer something different, and the interface will accommodate them. Predictably, since (as will probably not surprise you) I designed the entire interface system. I don't want my choices to have to be yours, nor do I want yours to have to be mine. I've even got a full set of menus for the button impaired, plus slow old school Select-Then-Apply-Effect modality available. Doesn't hurt to have either one of them, as long as you aren't forced to use them.
Really good interface design can optimize the workflow no matter what you're up to. But a truly optimized workflow won't have you in menu after menu, time after time. Minimal motion, minimal context shifting, physical association with function - these are what make people who use a tool a lot into experts. Ideally, watching someone like that, it should seem like they're flying - bam bam bam bam - through their work, you can't even follow what they're doing. When you consistently see your customers reach that level, you know you've done something right.
One of the reasons I bought my Olympus E-20 5MP was it was full of directly accessed controls; it could be run just like an old-school SLR, auto or either shutter or aperture priority as you pleased, plus it had a nice range of digital advantages - my favorite being an infrared shutter remote; no more cable to the tripod, not even a ghost of a chance of disturbing the camera during a low light or macro shot. I look at the naked, control-free bodies of the consumer cameras and I kind of twitch a little bit; I know they've got everything buried in menus, and the idea of trying to find the EV adjustment or the "film" speed for a shot that is fleeting makes me more than a little unwilling to try a camera like that, no matter *how* good a shot it takes. I spent a lot of years learning to run a camera, and I like running a camera.:-)
I meant lack of a format in the intellectually encumbered, "we own this" sense. I'm an engineer; I understand the issues just fine.
BTW, storage is not even remotely the driving force behind compression of music and video. Network bandwidth is.
No — it really isn't. People are downloading multi-gig movies (and often in multi streams, like bittorrent); time, and therefore bandwidth, isn't a significant factor (and becoming less so all the time) they wouldn't give a rats butt if a tune took 4 megs and 8 seconds or 40 and 80 seconds in transfer of the tune, what they're counting is how many tunes they have. That's the bottom line. You don't see ipods and their ilk advertised as how fast they can move data; they're advertised in how many tunes they hold. It's all about storage - you're completely off base here.
And streaming - that is *so* old news. No serious number of people wants streamed music. They want the music itself, in the library and owned. You couldn't sell me a streamed tune unless you provided a hot and willing brunette with it.
Re Ogg, yes it is free, and one hopes it remains free. But the odds of some submarine patent torpedoing it are probably approaching 100%; just like JPEG. We live in an intellectually damaged society and will as long as patents in their present form remain status quo. The less tech is used in stuffing music, video, etc into a file, the less likely it is to be caught. No one has a patent on a text file, for instance.
The whole point of TFA was that the RIAA's tactics trying to "hold on" to their business killed it about as fast as optimally possible, given a retrospective view of the situation.
Yes, I understand they were trying to blame it on the RIAA, but again, I disagree. It wasn't the RIAA. It was digital, easily transferred music. Didn't matter one whit what the RIAA did, that store would still be out of business right now. The RIAA didn't make music available on the net for free in digital form; you can't blame that on them. But *that* is what killed the store. They - and you - can try to blame the RIAA until you turn blue in the face, but that's not going to make it anything more than a sideshow. I said - clearly - that I thought the article was a poor one. This is why. No one promised the middleman anything, and technology passed them by.
they could have easily extended their run and lifetimes quite a bit if they'd adopted technology and social change rather than turning luddite and then turning on their customer base.
Well, I hear you, but I don't think that because you say so, it becomes fact. YMMV.
I don't think there is anything that could be done to save brick and mortar record stores the NYT article was bitching about either, and that was really my point. It didn't have anything to do with the RIAA, really. The RIAA was fighting for its life, and that's to be expected. They're being stupid about it, we think, and that's because we've already abandoned the RIAA's business model - we do not think it is reasonable (and for the record, I think that is precisely correct.) The thing that has changed here was the ability to get a good digital single at 2am, seconds after you discover it. From Europe, if required. No brick and mortar store can compete with that.
As far as DRM goes, that, I think, will be a drop in the bucket. I'll tell you why: Everything to do with music and video and book "formats" can trace its roots back to insufficient storage. Everyone was looking for compression. Preferably lossless, but lossy was OK too if it wasn't too onerous. Today, you can buy fast storage devices in the half terabyte range for a few hundred dollars, and there is every sign that this trend of more storage for less money will continue for a while. There's nothing stopping any musician from putting down music in uncompressed raw format and handing it out. There's nothing stopping us, as customers, from storing it. No "format" involved really, more like "lack of a format." We're not there yet for video, but I think we will be. There may yet be a few free compressed formats that we can use, too. Also, eventually patents will begin to run out; and finally, no one can tell me, as a musician, that I can't give my music away to you. There are other models besides I give you music, you give me money. I write a blog, for instance, and I make a decent amount from the google ads. You can read the blog for free. Maybe you'll click an ad, maybe you won't, but enough people do to keep me writing. I've even got some music on there. I despise DRM, but I rest content in the fairly certain presumption that it will die because it is stupid and because it has its roots in conditions that will not obtain for all that long.
I disagree. The market changed. There's no guarantee that says people with middleman jobs (persons who try to add value by standing between the producer of a good or service and the consumer of that good or service) will have a job forever and a day, even if it seems likely to them. Markets change. People change. For many reasons, some of them you may be in sympathy with, some of them not.
I used to run a web store, "The Martial Arts Bookstore." Very specialized. I added value by carefully categorizing the books, inventing a "virtual shelves" mechanism that fit the needs of the shoppers. I also did capsule reviews of each book (I'm a martial artist with dan ranking across several disciplines and a scholarly interest in all of them.) I wouldn't even carry the low quality books that plague martial arts; there are plenty that were very high quality indeed. Initially, it did very well. Then Amazon opened; they not only had oodles more purchasing power than I did, they were able to run at a loss for years; I couldn't possibly do that. So I ran a last fire sale (which didn't sell much either) and then closed the site. I wasn't angry, I didn't write a whiny letter to anyone, and in fact, I became a very good customer of Amazon. I moved on to something else that was more appropriate to the times, and I have no complaints at all. It was fun, it was interesting, and it wasn't permanent. I see nothing to bitch about in any of that.
Things change. Accept it, move on, STFU.
Music isn't dead, and it isn't going to die. Let's face it - as musicians, as listeners - the producers and consumers - we're going to be fine. As musicians, maybe we'll have to move to a different distribution model, and maybe it'll be different as to how one becomes top of the heap. It'll still depend on your music to some degree, though; maybe moreso. As consumers, maybe we'll have to use different skills to find stuff we like. Surely the radio hasn't been a good source for anything but the crassest pop and bottomfeeder "repeat it until it sucks" marketing mechanisms for years - personally, I look forward to changes in the landscape. As for the middlemen, things change. Maybe I'll have to close my music studio. No sign of that yet in terms of my customers, but OTOH, you can buy mixing and recording equipment for a fraction of what it used to cost, a rack-mount mastering unit that can really do a very good job... there are no guarantees, anywhere for middle people. Not in music, not in written material, and not in video. If you find a niche and you can make it work, my hat is off to you. If it stops working, though, it is you that needs to change - sniveling about how you thought you'd be able to "spend your life" doing something is just despicable.
So that's why I'm not very impressed with the article.
Knobs aren't that expensive. As a wild guess, I'd say that each button is going to add maybe $.05 to the production cost, and each knob around $.10.
No, you're way off. It isn't just a knob. It's drilling and finishing the faceplate, the knob, the potentiometer (or other sensor, today), the wiring, the circuitry it controls, be that an a/d input or something more discrete. Also, today's controls - generally - aren't as massive and reliable as those on that Marantz; certainly the one-year or so old buttons on my Denon (and its remote) aren't - they're just little chiclets and the remote's touchscreen is already starting to require firmer presses on common operations. The Marantz's controls - all of them - still work 100%, and it has been in use over 3 decades. So while I might agree that today's buttons are perhaps a few cents each, I'd also note that you get what you pay for.
I think that with modern receivers, the reason that there aren't a lot of buttons is that you're not supposed to use the device itself as the user interface. You're supposed to use a multipurpose remote that's got a bazillion buttons.
Well, that'd be fine if the entire interface was brought out on the remote. Reliably. But it isn't. The Denon's EQ is layers deep in there, for instance - one of the most common things you'd want to get at. Setting the surround mode (and there are a ton of them) is not only buried in menus on the main unit, it is buried in menus on the remote, too! The remote isn't going to last 30 years, either. Already it is losing touch sensitivity in several areas (mode changes, worse yet) so that soon, I won't be able to set the surround mode without going to the main unit and wearing out its buttons.
As an example, consider that the price of mixers (audio boards) has dropped dramatically over the last two decades - from about $1000 for a low end 16 channel board to about $150 now. Those are practically made of nothing but knobs and buttons.
I am well aware of the state of mixer tech. I own a recording studio, and aside from that, I have a modest setup in my home with 32 channel Mackie and 16 channel Behringer analog boards. At the studio, the SSL-4000 G+ does not use cheap little knobs and buttons - and the price reflected that. The Neve 60 channel again uses great hardware, but you could buy a house for what it cost. My Mackie at home cost several grand, the Behringer about $500, and both of them use relatively cheap hardware (though the Mackie is, I have to say, a very fine board for the price.) The bottom line is, one knob does not necessarily compare to another knob, and that is what is wrong with your idea here. The Marantz is a fabulous piece of hardware; the Denon, frankly, is not.
...and I just noticed that my saved link now points to the DAC-200, rather than DAC-100. I presume this is a minor upgrade; same price, and it looks the same, I don't see any new features listed. Might be better specs, too. Just a heads-up.
TBC == Time Base Correction/Corrector. They can fix sync width and levels, chroma phase, overall video timing, black levels and sometimes even more. Think of them as an all-round cleanup device for video. There is some discussion of this, plus this link, higher up in the thread. There are tons of them out there from el cheapo to thousands. The more switchable features, the better, generally speaking, and the more expensive.
My DAC-100 is by Datavideo. I bought mine here. It is a stand-alone box with composite, SVideo, analog audio, and firewire, with all of these both in, and out. For the digital audio that is on the firewire, there's a button to choose 12-bit or 16-bit encoding/decoding. There's an external power supply, a wall wart. It has LED indicators for analog audio bit depth, digital video, and analog video. It's got externally accessible dip switches that set NTSC/PAL, 0 IRE/7.5 IRE, and manual or auto mode. The DIP switches are generally set once and forget, everything else is automatic - just plug it in and it works. I am not aware that if handles SECAM. It's in a silver plastic case, is heavy enough to not be dragged around by its cables, and comes with no cables - you'll need to buy a firewire cable at the very least to go from it to the Mac, plus the appropriate video cables for your method of use - SVideo or composite (if you're using firewire, eg a digital camcorder, you can plug right into the Mac and you don't need the DV-100 - though it should be noted the DV-100 can make nice SVideo and composite out of DV.) You'll also need standard RCA audio cables for SVideo or composite use. I paid about $200 for it.
The only piece left is the see through monitors. I would love to have one of those.
Then set one up. All you need is a projector that does skew correction (most do) and some transparent material with a partial matte surface. Hit the material from a sharp angle, and the screen will light up and remain transparent, while the through-light goes up and sinks into a black topper, or reflects off the back into another black topper. Shouldn't be much of a challenge at all. Or you can cheap out and use a regular monitor with a camera behind it, and simply mix the camera output with the material to be displayed. It's not really transparent, but then again, what's the difference? You can still see through it, so...:-)
See, the thing about menu driven interfaces is they are serious compromises. They trade cost (many buttons and the space they take up) for layers on a single interface (a screen.) When operating critical machinery, you can't be navigating menus. For instance, if cap'n starboy says "shields up", you can't say, "sorry, I didn't get them up in time because I was in the turbolift interface." You need to press a button that puts the shields up, and *right now.* Likewise for any number of critical functions.
I can give you a practical modern example. I own a Denon 7.1 channel surround system. It's really pretty decent quality, and it is the main system for our theater. If you want to do anything besides change sources or volume, you'll be navigating menus. Sometimes... lots of menus. It's a pain in the butt, and it is slow. This thing cost me about two grand.
In my library, I have a Marantz 2325, circa 1975 or so. This has every control and status display on a button, knob, or dial. There are only two multi-purpose things on it. Consequently, it is a lot easier to run - everything is always in the same place, and the things you use often you learn where are almost immediately - and it is a whole lot faster to operate. Want to turn up the bass? Reach for the bass control. Want just bass on the left speaker? Inner concentric ring of the bass control. And so on, for almost every function on the unit. It's not perfect - FM muting level is on the rear, and the Dolby levels take over the FM signal strength meter when you want to look at them, but man is it a lot easier and more comfortable to operate than the Denon. But accounting for inflation, the retail on this was about five grand. Those buttons and knobs are very costly. It isn't just advances in electronics that make that relative price drop!
The Denon actually has a lot more functionality. But getting at it is tough. Practically speaking, that actually means that mostly, I don't get at it at all.
Coming back to a computer interface for a spacecraft or a watercraft or any war machine, I can see them going back to buttons regardless of the ability to fold functionality into a graphic interface, because with a button, a well trained person goes right to the function and time may be of the essence in any one of a number of situations, including some that may not have been foreseen by the system designers. Buttons cost more in terms of real estate, but then again, they can give you more in terms of outright survival.
Buttons are faster than speech, too, even if there is no latency. Takes about 40 ms to hit a button. You can't talk that fast. It's just that simple. Now, if they ever manage to make a mind to machine interface, we'll be on new ground, but until then... buttons ftw.:-)
Sure. The first thing I tried worked perfectly; that was a free program called Hyper-engine AV.
I bought the DAC-100, and the day it arrived, I downloaded Hyper engine AV. I plugged in the firewire cable between the DAC-100 and the Mac, plugged the SVideo cable between the deck and the DAC-100, pressed play on the deck and record in Hyperengine AV and had no problems. Soon, I ran into an older tape of one of my students that wasn't recording (digitally) well, or playing back well, so I dragged a TBC out of our video lab and put that in line, and got that recorded without any further problems. There was no software configuration involved, no drivers, no etc. It just worked. You can also use various s/w to put PIP into the Mac from the DAC-100 / firewire combo; the Mac knows about incoming video on firewire and there is just no trick to it at all - 2 seconds after you hook up, you're watching video on your Mac in a window. You can also plug in a DV camera with a firewire port directly - nothing to that, either. It just works.
At the time, my machine was a 1.42 GHz single PPC CPU Mac Mini. Today, you get a dual-core Intel mini with about 5x the horsepower for the same price (I suggest you go for 2 gigs of RAM if you get a mini for video work, btw), and my PPC unit never had any trouble at all with handling or recording the signal. However, some tasks - such as encoding the signal into some particular digital file format - are definitely CPU power related. More power means faster encoding. Apple's got a decent range of CPU capacities, from the mini to the recent and expensive 8-core 3-GHz machine (a little under five grand, configured with 8 cores and four gigs, wifi and bluetooth.) I don't know if the multiple cores are used in encoding at this point, but I will know soon. I'll be ordering one of the 8-core machines in the next 90 days or so, and that machine will be my desktop machine.
As multiple cores are fairly new tech, it may well be that only one will be used. But I expect that to change in the near term; video encoding would lend itself very well (on a per-scanline or per frame group basis) to multiple core approaches. And of course there is plenty of other software out there. I didn't explore any more because my needs were met first time out - but I've noticed program after program that provide various interesting combinations of video processing for the Mac. Some free, some not.
You're welcome. Another interesting tidbit in this whole tempest in a teapot is that Sony's own Blueray player provides 720p Blueray component output. That's an curious data point when contrasted with your stance that (paraphrasing) "there are no 720p HD systems, only 1080i or 1080p HD systems." Why would Sony do this if that were the case? I mean, aside from the fact that a 720 progressive signal is higher quality than an interlaced signal at 1080 - no jitter and twice the frame rate is much more pleasant to watch, and of course a down-converted 1080i to 720p signal is still 1/2 the frame rate or a true 720p signal.
Yet we live in a predominately religious society (check the census data if you doubt it) that has a high level of technology, is controlled by a secular rule of law, and is one of the most sexually permissive in the world (after most of Europe and largely Catholic South America, of course). Not all the world has protestant hang-ups, you know.
I live in the USA. One of the most god-deluded societies in the world; and quite retarded sexually, primarily as the direct result of Judeo-Christian values. Our technological lead, once undeniable, is now something one has to go to very narrow areas to demonstrate. Our rule of law has degenerated such that we no longer can point to our constitution with any degree of accuracy and say it is the root of our government. Surveys show that atheists are the least trusted segment of the population (and most theists can't even accurately define what an atheist is.) So no, I live in a religious society, not a secular one.
Out of a global population of near 1 billion muslims, how many have actually done that?
Wrong question. Out of that same population, how many have done things like that and in support of that? For instance, strapping a bomb to your balls and walking into a cafe is for all intents and purposes the same act, only with a smaller effect and so if anything, that much more insane. The answer to that question is a large number; you can add all the kami kaze from Japan and the Muslims bombing the middle east and the abortion clinic bombers to it. You wouldn't find an atheist in the bunch. More to the point, you find - in all cases - the religions behind these people encouraging their acts, promising them rewards after death; and behind that you find the rest of the religious people, going "uh-huh, praise the whatever." Remember what happened after they flew into the towers? Was it rioting in the muslim streets, demanding the heads of the plotters? No, it was partying in the streets, cheering them on.
If you're trying to argue that religion is the only belief system that inspires people to kill/die for a cause
No, I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just arguing that religion, among its many other deep and disgusting blemishes, is one of those things. So you can take that strawman home, thank you.
Has your head exploded yet?
No. There are examples all over the board. What matters is the general trend and the overall view. Your pakistanis are exceptions from a generally superstitious population. Your nun is *really* an exception. And you know this. So your entire thesis, that I should take note of these things, is truly pointless.
Churches, bed manufacturers, gazebo salesmen...any vulnerable group is subject to scams by unscrupulous people. That's what "vulnerable" means. The guy next door to you who goes to church every Sunday isn't Oral Roberts, and there are many more like him.
There's a huge difference here. The bed manufacturer has something to exchange that is real. The gazebo salesman has something to exchange that is real. Oral Roberts and the local pastor have nothing at all; they are selling a "product" that has no basis in reality. The guy next door isn't Oral Roberts, of course not. I never implied he was. He is the victim of Oral Roberts and his fellow scammers.
despite the fact that the majority of the population are religious in some way, we in the west have a reasonably liberal set of laws (depending on your exact location, of course).
No. We (here in the USA) do not. Our laws are a horrible mess of religious-inspired folly. From "only heteros can marry" to "can't buy beer on Sunday" to "OMG that (sexually active person) is over an imaginary age line completely unrelated to any biolog
You're just a wealth of misinformation. The PS3 does have a hardware scaler. Aside from that, your continuing denial of problems the entire PS3 technical community acknowledges is just a waste of everyone's time.
In my experience most people with religious beliefs are happy, well adjusted and function perfectly well, even if they persist in holding views that defy reason.
For values of "well-adjusted" and "functioning perfectly well" that fall into the ranges "completely bewildered about science, ethics, morals and sexuality", "willing to fly into buildings", "willing to scam old people for their last cent", and "fully intending to legislate their opinions onto the backs of others", I absolutely agree.
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Ok. You originally said: "Guess we don't want to talk about how much a 8 core mac pro is going to cost vs. a similarly powerful PC?" So lets compare it. Apple at $5,775 (8 gigs RAM, 3GHz Intel 8-cores, wifi, bluetooth), or Sun for $38,995 (2.2 GHz AMD 8-cores, 5 gigs RAM). Apple offers OSX; Sun basically offers something (Solaris) not a lot different from Linux (and of course, OSX has those same capabilities, generally speaking.) But the Apple has all manner of cool software, and a much better UI. Oh, and complementary multi-core systems from $600.
There. It's been compared. I'm still laughing. :-)
You might want to try this again when you find a system that is actually somewhat on par. In the meantime, that ol' Apple sandbox is looking pretty sweet.
Oh. So what you're actually saying is, there is no such similarly powerful machine at present? I have to invent one out of thin air, imagine features as implemented by the manufacturer, conceive of a price... and then discuss? I guess you really don't want to "talk about about how much a(n) 8 core mac pro is going to cost vs. a similarly powerful PC."
Well, when anyone has such a beast, by all means, let's talk about it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you have reversed the actual situation. Music is naturally ubiquitous and inexpensive to duplicate in the current environment. It is DRM that inverts this natural order, and it is DRM that artificially establishes a continuing market. The producers aren't complaining by the way - never, ever make the mistake of characterizing the RIAA as "the producers." They represent the middlemen. Not the producers. It is the middlemen that are complaining, by and large.
iTunes is illegal? Online CD sales are illegal? Bands offering free downloads of their work are breaking the law? Bands offering direct sales of their work are breaking the law?
These are what are actually killing the record stores. Of the number of sales to be made, they are taking the lion's share because technically speaking, they have the advantages: More customers; larger inventory; centralized distribution; better pricing; lower overhead; ability to sell the customer what they want, instead of one or two songs they want, and ten that aren't worth the energy it took to blow the craters on the CD's surface. iTunes, with the addition of the non-DRMed EMI catalog, will be a perfect source for digital music; they have the features buyers want - preview, track-specific sales, great search, superb in-computer players and portables - and if DRM comes off the rest of the catalog, that'll be the new paradigm for music mega-stores. I'll be buying from iTunes as soon as the DRM goes away.
Another factor is that frankly, a band that has a moderately technical fellow with a good ear can replace the recording studio, the mastering house, the CD replicator up front. A few more skills, and $35/year and they've got a website and no need for the marketing engine that the record companies (sort of) offer. Plus, now they're not trying to compete with a corrupt industry that pushes pop to the exclusion of anything else - so they can create something in a genre other than pop and still find an audience without having to kowtow to the least common denominator with regard to taste (cough.) They can give out - or sell - their CDs at gigs, or simply to friends over coffee, and not one tiny bit of this is illegal - it is just different and it does not create a hole where middlemen such as the RIAA represent can reside; instead, it removes quite a few of said holes.
Ok, I'll bite. Why do you think an OC3 can't transfer 30+ gigs in a "practical" manner? What is impractical about it?
Actually, I'd very much like to. First, which 8-core 3GHz PC are you referring to?
I think you may have meant to use the phrase "for all intents and purposes"
No. Motorola's (and Freescale's) inability to produce higher performance PowerPC CPUs in an acceptable timeframe is what drive Apple to the x86 platform. Nothing else - and there needed to be nothing else, that's quite a problem by itself.
Actually, when I look at your post, I see only fear of accomplishment and a neurotic hatred of literacy. Maybe you should see someone about that. Eventually, if you work for fifty years or so as I have, you may be able to "own crap" as well. I highly recommend it. "Crap", as you put it, is useful, not to mention fun. Likewise, literacy and adequate reading capabilities are within your grasp. That's more difficult for anyone already out of childhood, but it can be done. Good luck.
No, actually, I do have a button based interface. I use a Mac; the program comes from the dock. The dock is a series of buttons. I grab tools from an omnipresent tool palette; that's a button based interface. I grab effects from an effects caddy that is a series of buttons that are always there. Direct access all the way, and as a result, I work a good deal faster than anyone who has to go through menus to accomplish the same thing, for instance, in Photoshop or the Gimp. And that, my friend, is what is actually a good thing. Menus are terrible for commonly used operations. Until you've been freed from them, you don't realize how much time they actually cost you.
I don't have any trouble with them at all. But then again, I like associating a physical location with a function. Perhaps you just haven't had enough experience with buttons - I've been prodding test gear such as you describe since O-scopes were all tube and 5 MHz was a good upper bandwidth limit for them. :-)
My idea of a perfect interface is my Mackie 32-channel board. Every channel has exactly the same strip of controls; learn one strip, you've learned all 32 channels. That is a lot of real-world controls — over a thousand of them — and one hell of a lot of functionality, and every bit of it is physical - reach, and you have it. To which you can add the controls for the 8 busses and the main section. I've got digital mixers that have what amounts to one (very nice) channel strip and you assign it to the channel you want, but (a) you can't see the settings on any channel but the one that is selected, and (b) there's no physicality to the location of the controls so you can't know "the flute is on channels 1:2 with AUX 3 routed through the 'verb" and look over there and check levels or settings. The cost, of course, is real estate. The Mackie is large; the digital mixers are small. Predictably, given my bias, I make far better recordings with the Mackie.
Menus are better when you don't know what you're doing; they lead you by the nose. And, as you say, they hide things you don't need to see - or at least, people don't think you need to see. My effect caddy based system lets me decide what needs to be in front of me on a button for any one workflow, and that means that to some degree, the interface design is in my hands as an end user - and that's just the way I like it. Other users might prefer something different, and the interface will accommodate them. Predictably, since (as will probably not surprise you) I designed the entire interface system. I don't want my choices to have to be yours, nor do I want yours to have to be mine. I've even got a full set of menus for the button impaired, plus slow old school Select-Then-Apply-Effect modality available. Doesn't hurt to have either one of them, as long as you aren't forced to use them.
Really good interface design can optimize the workflow no matter what you're up to. But a truly optimized workflow won't have you in menu after menu, time after time. Minimal motion, minimal context shifting, physical association with function - these are what make people who use a tool a lot into experts. Ideally, watching someone like that, it should seem like they're flying - bam bam bam bam - through their work, you can't even follow what they're doing. When you consistently see your customers reach that level, you know you've done something right.
One of the reasons I bought my Olympus E-20 5MP was it was full of directly accessed controls; it could be run just like an old-school SLR, auto or either shutter or aperture priority as you pleased, plus it had a nice range of digital advantages - my favorite being an infrared shutter remote; no more cable to the tripod, not even a ghost of a chance of disturbing the camera during a low light or macro shot. I look at the naked, control-free bodies of the consumer cameras and I kind of twitch a little bit; I know they've got everything buried in menus, and the idea of trying to find the EV adjustment or the "film" speed for a shot that is fleeting makes me more than a little unwilling to try a camera like that, no matter *how* good a shot it takes. I spent a lot of years learning to run a camera, and I like running a camera. :-)
I meant lack of a format in the intellectually encumbered, "we own this" sense. I'm an engineer; I understand the issues just fine.
No — it really isn't. People are downloading multi-gig movies (and often in multi streams, like bittorrent); time, and therefore bandwidth, isn't a significant factor (and becoming less so all the time) they wouldn't give a rats butt if a tune took 4 megs and 8 seconds or 40 and 80 seconds in transfer of the tune, what they're counting is how many tunes they have. That's the bottom line. You don't see ipods and their ilk advertised as how fast they can move data; they're advertised in how many tunes they hold. It's all about storage - you're completely off base here.
And streaming - that is *so* old news. No serious number of people wants streamed music. They want the music itself, in the library and owned. You couldn't sell me a streamed tune unless you provided a hot and willing brunette with it.
Re Ogg, yes it is free, and one hopes it remains free. But the odds of some submarine patent torpedoing it are probably approaching 100%; just like JPEG. We live in an intellectually damaged society and will as long as patents in their present form remain status quo. The less tech is used in stuffing music, video, etc into a file, the less likely it is to be caught. No one has a patent on a text file, for instance.
Yes, I understand they were trying to blame it on the RIAA, but again, I disagree. It wasn't the RIAA. It was digital, easily transferred music. Didn't matter one whit what the RIAA did, that store would still be out of business right now. The RIAA didn't make music available on the net for free in digital form; you can't blame that on them. But *that* is what killed the store. They - and you - can try to blame the RIAA until you turn blue in the face, but that's not going to make it anything more than a sideshow. I said - clearly - that I thought the article was a poor one. This is why. No one promised the middleman anything, and technology passed them by.
Well, I hear you, but I don't think that because you say so, it becomes fact. YMMV.
I don't think there is anything that could be done to save brick and mortar record stores the NYT article was bitching about either, and that was really my point. It didn't have anything to do with the RIAA, really. The RIAA was fighting for its life, and that's to be expected. They're being stupid about it, we think, and that's because we've already abandoned the RIAA's business model - we do not think it is reasonable (and for the record, I think that is precisely correct.) The thing that has changed here was the ability to get a good digital single at 2am, seconds after you discover it. From Europe, if required. No brick and mortar store can compete with that.
As far as DRM goes, that, I think, will be a drop in the bucket. I'll tell you why: Everything to do with music and video and book "formats" can trace its roots back to insufficient storage. Everyone was looking for compression. Preferably lossless, but lossy was OK too if it wasn't too onerous. Today, you can buy fast storage devices in the half terabyte range for a few hundred dollars, and there is every sign that this trend of more storage for less money will continue for a while. There's nothing stopping any musician from putting down music in uncompressed raw format and handing it out. There's nothing stopping us, as customers, from storing it. No "format" involved really, more like "lack of a format." We're not there yet for video, but I think we will be. There may yet be a few free compressed formats that we can use, too. Also, eventually patents will begin to run out; and finally, no one can tell me, as a musician, that I can't give my music away to you. There are other models besides I give you music, you give me money. I write a blog, for instance, and I make a decent amount from the google ads. You can read the blog for free. Maybe you'll click an ad, maybe you won't, but enough people do to keep me writing. I've even got some music on there. I despise DRM, but I rest content in the fairly certain presumption that it will die because it is stupid and because it has its roots in conditions that will not obtain for all that long.
I disagree. The market changed. There's no guarantee that says people with middleman jobs (persons who try to add value by standing between the producer of a good or service and the consumer of that good or service) will have a job forever and a day, even if it seems likely to them. Markets change. People change. For many reasons, some of them you may be in sympathy with, some of them not.
I used to run a web store, "The Martial Arts Bookstore." Very specialized. I added value by carefully categorizing the books, inventing a "virtual shelves" mechanism that fit the needs of the shoppers. I also did capsule reviews of each book (I'm a martial artist with dan ranking across several disciplines and a scholarly interest in all of them.) I wouldn't even carry the low quality books that plague martial arts; there are plenty that were very high quality indeed. Initially, it did very well. Then Amazon opened; they not only had oodles more purchasing power than I did, they were able to run at a loss for years; I couldn't possibly do that. So I ran a last fire sale (which didn't sell much either) and then closed the site. I wasn't angry, I didn't write a whiny letter to anyone, and in fact, I became a very good customer of Amazon. I moved on to something else that was more appropriate to the times, and I have no complaints at all. It was fun, it was interesting, and it wasn't permanent. I see nothing to bitch about in any of that.
Things change. Accept it, move on, STFU.
Music isn't dead, and it isn't going to die. Let's face it - as musicians, as listeners - the producers and consumers - we're going to be fine. As musicians, maybe we'll have to move to a different distribution model, and maybe it'll be different as to how one becomes top of the heap. It'll still depend on your music to some degree, though; maybe moreso. As consumers, maybe we'll have to use different skills to find stuff we like. Surely the radio hasn't been a good source for anything but the crassest pop and bottomfeeder "repeat it until it sucks" marketing mechanisms for years - personally, I look forward to changes in the landscape. As for the middlemen, things change. Maybe I'll have to close my music studio. No sign of that yet in terms of my customers, but OTOH, you can buy mixing and recording equipment for a fraction of what it used to cost, a rack-mount mastering unit that can really do a very good job... there are no guarantees, anywhere for middle people. Not in music, not in written material, and not in video. If you find a niche and you can make it work, my hat is off to you. If it stops working, though, it is you that needs to change - sniveling about how you thought you'd be able to "spend your life" doing something is just despicable.
So that's why I'm not very impressed with the article.
No, you're way off. It isn't just a knob. It's drilling and finishing the faceplate, the knob, the potentiometer (or other sensor, today), the wiring, the circuitry it controls, be that an a/d input or something more discrete. Also, today's controls - generally - aren't as massive and reliable as those on that Marantz; certainly the one-year or so old buttons on my Denon (and its remote) aren't - they're just little chiclets and the remote's touchscreen is already starting to require firmer presses on common operations. The Marantz's controls - all of them - still work 100%, and it has been in use over 3 decades. So while I might agree that today's buttons are perhaps a few cents each, I'd also note that you get what you pay for.
Well, that'd be fine if the entire interface was brought out on the remote. Reliably. But it isn't. The Denon's EQ is layers deep in there, for instance - one of the most common things you'd want to get at. Setting the surround mode (and there are a ton of them) is not only buried in menus on the main unit, it is buried in menus on the remote, too! The remote isn't going to last 30 years, either. Already it is losing touch sensitivity in several areas (mode changes, worse yet) so that soon, I won't be able to set the surround mode without going to the main unit and wearing out its buttons.
I am well aware of the state of mixer tech. I own a recording studio, and aside from that, I have a modest setup in my home with 32 channel Mackie and 16 channel Behringer analog boards. At the studio, the SSL-4000 G+ does not use cheap little knobs and buttons - and the price reflected that. The Neve 60 channel again uses great hardware, but you could buy a house for what it cost. My Mackie at home cost several grand, the Behringer about $500, and both of them use relatively cheap hardware (though the Mackie is, I have to say, a very fine board for the price.) The bottom line is, one knob does not necessarily compare to another knob, and that is what is wrong with your idea here. The Marantz is a fabulous piece of hardware; the Denon, frankly, is not.
TBC == Time Base Correction/Corrector. They can fix sync width and levels, chroma phase, overall video timing, black levels and sometimes even more. Think of them as an all-round cleanup device for video. There is some discussion of this, plus this link, higher up in the thread. There are tons of them out there from el cheapo to thousands. The more switchable features, the better, generally speaking, and the more expensive.
My DAC-100 is by Datavideo. I bought mine here. It is a stand-alone box with composite, SVideo, analog audio, and firewire, with all of these both in, and out. For the digital audio that is on the firewire, there's a button to choose 12-bit or 16-bit encoding/decoding. There's an external power supply, a wall wart. It has LED indicators for analog audio bit depth, digital video, and analog video. It's got externally accessible dip switches that set NTSC/PAL, 0 IRE/7.5 IRE, and manual or auto mode. The DIP switches are generally set once and forget, everything else is automatic - just plug it in and it works. I am not aware that if handles SECAM. It's in a silver plastic case, is heavy enough to not be dragged around by its cables, and comes with no cables - you'll need to buy a firewire cable at the very least to go from it to the Mac, plus the appropriate video cables for your method of use - SVideo or composite (if you're using firewire, eg a digital camcorder, you can plug right into the Mac and you don't need the DV-100 - though it should be noted the DV-100 can make nice SVideo and composite out of DV.) You'll also need standard RCA audio cables for SVideo or composite use. I paid about $200 for it.
Then set one up. All you need is a projector that does skew correction (most do) and some transparent material with a partial matte surface. Hit the material from a sharp angle, and the screen will light up and remain transparent, while the through-light goes up and sinks into a black topper, or reflects off the back into another black topper. Shouldn't be much of a challenge at all. Or you can cheap out and use a regular monitor with a camera behind it, and simply mix the camera output with the material to be displayed. It's not really transparent, but then again, what's the difference? You can still see through it, so... :-)
See, the thing about menu driven interfaces is they are serious compromises. They trade cost (many buttons and the space they take up) for layers on a single interface (a screen.) When operating critical machinery, you can't be navigating menus. For instance, if cap'n starboy says "shields up", you can't say, "sorry, I didn't get them up in time because I was in the turbolift interface." You need to press a button that puts the shields up, and *right now.* Likewise for any number of critical functions.
I can give you a practical modern example. I own a Denon 7.1 channel surround system. It's really pretty decent quality, and it is the main system for our theater. If you want to do anything besides change sources or volume, you'll be navigating menus. Sometimes... lots of menus. It's a pain in the butt, and it is slow. This thing cost me about two grand.
In my library, I have a Marantz 2325, circa 1975 or so. This has every control and status display on a button, knob, or dial. There are only two multi-purpose things on it. Consequently, it is a lot easier to run - everything is always in the same place, and the things you use often you learn where are almost immediately - and it is a whole lot faster to operate. Want to turn up the bass? Reach for the bass control. Want just bass on the left speaker? Inner concentric ring of the bass control. And so on, for almost every function on the unit. It's not perfect - FM muting level is on the rear, and the Dolby levels take over the FM signal strength meter when you want to look at them, but man is it a lot easier and more comfortable to operate than the Denon. But accounting for inflation, the retail on this was about five grand. Those buttons and knobs are very costly. It isn't just advances in electronics that make that relative price drop!
The Denon actually has a lot more functionality. But getting at it is tough. Practically speaking, that actually means that mostly, I don't get at it at all.
Coming back to a computer interface for a spacecraft or a watercraft or any war machine, I can see them going back to buttons regardless of the ability to fold functionality into a graphic interface, because with a button, a well trained person goes right to the function and time may be of the essence in any one of a number of situations, including some that may not have been foreseen by the system designers. Buttons cost more in terms of real estate, but then again, they can give you more in terms of outright survival.
Buttons are faster than speech, too, even if there is no latency. Takes about 40 ms to hit a button. You can't talk that fast. It's just that simple. Now, if they ever manage to make a mind to machine interface, we'll be on new ground, but until then... buttons ftw. :-)
Sure. The first thing I tried worked perfectly; that was a free program called Hyper-engine AV.
I bought the DAC-100, and the day it arrived, I downloaded Hyper engine AV. I plugged in the firewire cable between the DAC-100 and the Mac, plugged the SVideo cable between the deck and the DAC-100, pressed play on the deck and record in Hyperengine AV and had no problems. Soon, I ran into an older tape of one of my students that wasn't recording (digitally) well, or playing back well, so I dragged a TBC out of our video lab and put that in line, and got that recorded without any further problems. There was no software configuration involved, no drivers, no etc. It just worked. You can also use various s/w to put PIP into the Mac from the DAC-100 / firewire combo; the Mac knows about incoming video on firewire and there is just no trick to it at all - 2 seconds after you hook up, you're watching video on your Mac in a window. You can also plug in a DV camera with a firewire port directly - nothing to that, either. It just works.
At the time, my machine was a 1.42 GHz single PPC CPU Mac Mini. Today, you get a dual-core Intel mini with about 5x the horsepower for the same price (I suggest you go for 2 gigs of RAM if you get a mini for video work, btw), and my PPC unit never had any trouble at all with handling or recording the signal. However, some tasks - such as encoding the signal into some particular digital file format - are definitely CPU power related. More power means faster encoding. Apple's got a decent range of CPU capacities, from the mini to the recent and expensive 8-core 3-GHz machine (a little under five grand, configured with 8 cores and four gigs, wifi and bluetooth.) I don't know if the multiple cores are used in encoding at this point, but I will know soon. I'll be ordering one of the 8-core machines in the next 90 days or so, and that machine will be my desktop machine.
As multiple cores are fairly new tech, it may well be that only one will be used. But I expect that to change in the near term; video encoding would lend itself very well (on a per-scanline or per frame group basis) to multiple core approaches. And of course there is plenty of other software out there. I didn't explore any more because my needs were met first time out - but I've noticed program after program that provide various interesting combinations of video processing for the Mac. Some free, some not.
You're welcome. Another interesting tidbit in this whole tempest in a teapot is that Sony's own Blueray player provides 720p Blueray component output. That's an curious data point when contrasted with your stance that (paraphrasing) "there are no 720p HD systems, only 1080i or 1080p HD systems." Why would Sony do this if that were the case? I mean, aside from the fact that a 720 progressive signal is higher quality than an interlaced signal at 1080 - no jitter and twice the frame rate is much more pleasant to watch, and of course a down-converted 1080i to 720p signal is still 1/2 the frame rate or a true 720p signal.
I live in the USA. One of the most god-deluded societies in the world; and quite retarded sexually, primarily as the direct result of Judeo-Christian values. Our technological lead, once undeniable, is now something one has to go to very narrow areas to demonstrate. Our rule of law has degenerated such that we no longer can point to our constitution with any degree of accuracy and say it is the root of our government. Surveys show that atheists are the least trusted segment of the population (and most theists can't even accurately define what an atheist is.) So no, I live in a religious society, not a secular one.
Wrong question. Out of that same population, how many have done things like that and in support of that? For instance, strapping a bomb to your balls and walking into a cafe is for all intents and purposes the same act, only with a smaller effect and so if anything, that much more insane. The answer to that question is a large number; you can add all the kami kaze from Japan and the Muslims bombing the middle east and the abortion clinic bombers to it. You wouldn't find an atheist in the bunch. More to the point, you find - in all cases - the religions behind these people encouraging their acts, promising them rewards after death; and behind that you find the rest of the religious people, going "uh-huh, praise the whatever." Remember what happened after they flew into the towers? Was it rioting in the muslim streets, demanding the heads of the plotters? No, it was partying in the streets, cheering them on.
No, I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just arguing that religion, among its many other deep and disgusting blemishes, is one of those things. So you can take that strawman home, thank you.
No. There are examples all over the board. What matters is the general trend and the overall view. Your pakistanis are exceptions from a generally superstitious population. Your nun is *really* an exception. And you know this. So your entire thesis, that I should take note of these things, is truly pointless.
There's a huge difference here. The bed manufacturer has something to exchange that is real. The gazebo salesman has something to exchange that is real. Oral Roberts and the local pastor have nothing at all; they are selling a "product" that has no basis in reality. The guy next door isn't Oral Roberts, of course not. I never implied he was. He is the victim of Oral Roberts and his fellow scammers.
No. We (here in the USA) do not. Our laws are a horrible mess of religious-inspired folly. From "only heteros can marry" to "can't buy beer on Sunday" to "OMG that (sexually active person) is over an imaginary age line completely unrelated to any biolog
You're just a wealth of misinformation. The PS3 does have a hardware scaler. Aside from that, your continuing denial of problems the entire PS3 technical community acknowledges is just a waste of everyone's time.
For values of "well-adjusted" and "functioning perfectly well" that fall into the ranges "completely bewildered about science, ethics, morals and sexuality", "willing to fly into buildings", "willing to scam old people for their last cent", and "fully intending to legislate their opinions onto the backs of others", I absolutely agree.