Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying its "ok" cause art is subjective and therefore lower quality art will do. I'm just a) pointing out that its not just programmers getting abused b) its not as cut and dry with artists due to the subjective nature of the work. Therefore its easier for people to justify the abuse as more productive.
I'm looking at the job market same as you are and am probably just as angry as you are. And the sentiment of collectively putting our foot down is shared. That said, I also see the cards stacked against us. Federal labor laws stacked against us. Armies of eager young folks willing to do the same job for free just because its cool to be working in entertainment. More and more companies hiring armies of unpaid non matriculated interns rather than actual employees. More and more companies using pirated software to cut even more costs... in turn causing the industry to cut wages further to compete with one another. Its enough to drive a guy to a career change. And I have thought about it quite a bit in recent months. Used to be you could always "start your own company" but the reality is, you'd have to do all those nasty things to your employees just to compete... and become the bad guy yourself. I see no good way out except to unionize and IMMEDIATELY get the support and sympathy of SAG in a concrete way. Otherwise, we'd unionize and be fired and replaced by armies of fanboys and fangirls. But what are the chances of that happening?
I think its important to note that not everyone pulling 80 hour work weeks at EA is a programmer. There are a ton of 3d artists there too. And honestly, as a 3d artist myself I can say: plenty does get done in those extra hours. Its not all neccesarily good. But since "ok looking" art is a bit more subjective than a hard and fast bug, its easy to say the 80+ hour work week is more productive than the 50 hour when it comes to the artists I would immagine. For managers at least...
"Realone is trying to break apple fans from apple loyality"
I'm not sure thats really the case. The IPOD userbase is entirely different than the macintosh userbase. I don't think Real expects to disuade the mac base. I think they are appealing to the base of ipod owners who are not mac centric. And based on the figures we've seen regarding ipod sales, I suspect the "ipod not mac" crowd is probably huge. I was just in bloomingdales... and ipods were in the glass case by the front door along with watches. I don't think most of the sales go to existing mac users.
Of course its no surprise that a segment of the mac centric community is enraged and vocal. But if my classmates are any example, there are a ton of ipod users out there who don't own a mac and don't intend to own a mac. They are likely to be more receptive to Real's campaign.
Gee, and here I thought spending 20 minutes on this would be a fun diversion from babysitting renders (aka. watching digital paint dry). But apparently my time is far too important for you to let me waste. CHILL OUT!
I was about to install suse 9.1 over win2k on a machine anyway so I thought I'd give this hare thing a try for the fun of it. No personal information on the machine and my other machines are safe from tampering even if this goes haywire.
anyhow, end results:
render of a fairly complex frame using softimage 4.0 with mental ray 3.3 at a fairly low res.
with hare, 1:30. without hare, 1:24.
So hare actually managed to slow down the render a tad. This is mostly a cpu and memory intensive task with a little opengl thrown on top for showing me the rendered frame.
so I'd say this thing is bogus. Especially given that 3d rendering should be heavily helped by any 64 or 88 bit kernel optimization voo doo.
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I'm looking at the job market same as you are and am probably just as angry as you are. And the sentiment of collectively putting our foot down is shared. That said, I also see the cards stacked against us. Federal labor laws stacked against us. Armies of eager young folks willing to do the same job for free just because its cool to be working in entertainment. More and more companies hiring armies of unpaid non matriculated interns rather than actual employees. More and more companies using pirated software to cut even more costs... in turn causing the industry to cut wages further to compete with one another. Its enough to drive a guy to a career change. And I have thought about it quite a bit in recent months. Used to be you could always "start your own company" but the reality is, you'd have to do all those nasty things to your employees just to compete... and become the bad guy yourself. I see no good way out except to unionize and IMMEDIATELY get the support and sympathy of SAG in a concrete way. Otherwise, we'd unionize and be fired and replaced by armies of fanboys and fangirls. But what are the chances of that happening?
I think its important to note that not everyone pulling 80 hour work weeks at EA is a programmer. There are a ton of 3d artists there too. And honestly, as a 3d artist myself I can say: plenty does get done in those extra hours. Its not all neccesarily good. But since "ok looking" art is a bit more subjective than a hard and fast bug, its easy to say the 80+ hour work week is more productive than the 50 hour when it comes to the artists I would immagine. For managers at least...
I'm not sure thats really the case. The IPOD userbase is entirely different than the macintosh userbase. I don't think Real expects to disuade the mac base. I think they are appealing to the base of ipod owners who are not mac centric. And based on the figures we've seen regarding ipod sales, I suspect the "ipod not mac" crowd is probably huge. I was just in bloomingdales... and ipods were in the glass case by the front door along with watches. I don't think most of the sales go to existing mac users.
Of course its no surprise that a segment of the mac centric community is enraged and vocal. But if my classmates are any example, there are a ton of ipod users out there who don't own a mac and don't intend to own a mac. They are likely to be more receptive to Real's campaign.
Gee, and here I thought spending 20 minutes on this would be a fun diversion from babysitting renders (aka. watching digital paint dry). But apparently my time is far too important for you to let me waste. CHILL OUT!
I was about to install suse 9.1 over win2k on a machine anyway so I thought I'd give this hare thing a try for the fun of it. No personal information on the machine and my other machines are safe from tampering even if this goes haywire.
anyhow, end results:
render of a fairly complex frame using softimage 4.0 with mental ray 3.3 at a fairly low res.
with hare, 1:30.
without hare, 1:24.
So hare actually managed to slow down the render a tad. This is mostly a cpu and memory intensive task with a little opengl thrown on top for showing me the rendered frame.
so I'd say this thing is bogus. Especially given that 3d rendering should be heavily helped by any 64 or 88 bit kernel optimization voo doo.