Your honor I didn't commit the crime! I just broke open the window and crawled into their house. Moved all their stuff around and then helped up 3 other criminals into the window. I didn't take anything!
Apes kill one another. Ant colonies kill one another. All species if put under sufficient strain will kill their own so that *THEIR* genes not their fellow genes are sufficient. The only reason humans haven't stabilized is because we're evolving tools faster than the consequences.
It's like the deer which swims out into a lake and drowns because the consequences of the swim are not apparent until return is impossible.
The file format was sort of non-proprietary at one point. It's JP2K compliant at its heart (or at least it used to be until they encrypted it) but with some fancy proprietary tricks.
What the hell is an open source lens mount? Anyone can make a canon or PL compatible lens mount. And if you did make an "open" lens mount were are you going to find "open source" lenses for super 35mm? There's no such thing. The reason they call it "Four Thirds" is because it's for a very specifically sized sensor.
PL is the defacto standard. And every cinema lens company makes lenses to that standard.
Red is delivering a product that its customers can actually use. And if some standardized lens mount did come along red can release it. The lens mount is replaceable.
Actually they have a proprietary JP2k compatible wavelett codec called "REDCODE". It reduces that 261Mp down to a manageable 13GB per minute.
With the 'lower end' 9k cameras you only record 3GB per minute.
Compare that to film where an hour of film would... 5400 feet of film and your 1TB Raid per hour for 24k footage is actually smaller, lighter and less fragile.
Furthermore if you want 24k quality footage from film (Which is impsosibl or at least nobody makes that large of a format motion picture camera). You would nee something like 50,000 feet of footage. Which would enormous and probably require a truck to move.
This is possible and the Viper camera does it. It effectively can do a delta(luminance) read where it reads off a pixel site before it fully saturates. And records how fast that happened.
The problem is it's not too useful for cinema applications which is the domain of RED.
If you have an object moving through the frame at 10pixels per second and you read off one at 1/100th of a second one another pixel at 1/50th of a second you have a different shutter speed for each pixel. The result is dark parts of the image are really blurred and bright elements have no motion blur.
Double the framerate per half horizontal resolution.
So if they're pumping out 6k at 100fps then they can do 200fps at 3k and 400fps at 1.5k. Which is comparable to what you're reporting. Furthermore one of the huge bottlenecks of the red camera is that it in real time compresses to a JP2k compatible codec and doesn't require a RAM storage device.
Furthermore let's compare the quality of your 1.3 megapixels to red's 1.3megapixels. The red will most likely have exponentially superior dynamic range (aka lower noise) and color reproduction.
It's unfair but it also has to be done unless you trust your manager to fully understand the risks.
If the company management isn't IT centric they may not understand the costs and risks of switching to a contract service.
As an employee however you can be expected to clearly itemize how you spent your time if requested so that the management can do those risk analysis.
"What do you do in an average month? What additionally happens bimonthly? Annually?" Give them a punch list of what you do and then let them decide how much of that can be replaced by replacing faulty systems outright instead of fixing them or replacing some functions with part time.
We have 4 computers per person at our company and no IT department full time. Our on-call contract service is more than effective enough for the cost. However we'll all pretty technically savvy. Our software mostly just works all the time. A lot of people seem to be ignoring the option that this slashdotter might run the quick numbers and find out he's not worth the cost.
That's weird and here all these years I thought Avid MC systems running on Windows were the mainstay of feature film and television editing.
No editing applications for Linux worth a damn? Bizzare and here I thought Smoke combined with FFI were the ultimate online conforming tool for ads.
No compositing tools? Shake, Nuke and Fusion aren't enough? All of which have or have had Windows, Mac and Linux builds.
Adobe sucks? That's why every single VFX workstation on earth has a copy of Photoshop? And here I thought all these years it was because it continues to offer the latest and greatest in 2D tools.
CS2 isn't good enough. I need HDR editing. CS3 is about to be replaced this week sometime because CS4 has some extremely pursuasive features.
Can't run blender. Performance is no where near 3dsmax + Brazil. Quality is no where near 3dsmax + Brazil. We also have tens of thousands of dollars invested in proprietary 3dsmax extensions.
Believe it or not Blender sucks. I know it's hard to understand when you don't actually use the software but for those who actually need a top of the line app that's an important thing to consider. And that's not just me saying that. When the Big Buck Bunny team was asked what they thought of Blender they said the same thing. We don't pay $3500 a seat for Max because we're thinking "OMG it's teh 1337 to buy super awesome software!" It's because it's worth an extra $3500 dollars per seat.
Because even if the ship were sinking there is money to be made before grabbing a life raft.
Sell to the 98% of the passengers for as long as you can and then if the boat doesn't look like it's going to stay afloat grab a life raft along with your briefcase full of money.
Can I run photoshop in linux? Nope. Can I run 3dsmax in linux? Nope. So in other words my fancy workstation would be a fancy eepc for browsing the web. Yep. That really encourages me to buy Video Corp's fancy new video card. So that I can run Open Office and Firefox.
"What's that? Linux doesn't require as new of CPUs and as much RAM? Why then as a hardware manufacturer would I want to encourage the efficient OS?"
Seriously though I hear a lot of bitching about how someone needs to upgrade their Athlon 2100 XP processor and 128MB of RAM to run Vista. If the concern of the user is that they don't want to buy new hardware--why would hardware manufacturers want to work with you?
With Windows 7 the feature has to work before it becomes part of the build. They've completely changed their management structure for Windows 7 because Windows Vista was so poorly led.
I would imagine that this new "If it doesn't make it into the build it's not a feature" philosophy would imply that anything you see working is actually working and not some wishlist item.
Ummmm.... Finder is really nothing like the start menu. And apple's dock is very similar to windows 95 -> Vista's taskbar. The taskbar is still an incredibly simple and elegant solution to multi-tasking. Something which I don't feel as if OSX has achieved out of the box without switcher which I always install on any OSX computer I use.
Look dow at the bottom of a linux or windows machine and what do you see? A big button to launch all your applications. (Finder doesn't list all your applications). A few quicklaunch buttons (introduced in windows 95), a graphical icon and title for all your currently open windows and a region for persistently running applications that don't need anything more than icon for extremely rudimentary interaction. It's in my opinion the most elegant and perfect solution to multi-tasking and takes up less than 5% of my screen realestate. I'm 1 click away from any running application or window. That's glorious. To me the taskbar IS windows. Linux blatantly ripped it off. And not in the "It's a graphical user interface therefore it's ripping off apple." fanboyism. It's unique it's lightning fast and incredibly clear and obvious to the user.
If it weren't so distinctly windows I almost guarantee you that Apple would be using it.
I'm not too happy with the lack of labels on the new taskbar but to sugges that any time that Microsoft refines their design is ripping off apple is ludicrous.
Let's see... touchscreen phone that runs applications and the web? Wow that sounds cool. Too bad Microsoft never thought up that idea.
A music player that plays digital files? That's a brilliant idea! Thank God Apple invented the MP3 player.
Apple has founded its reputation as usability geniuses. That's what they sell. Usability. And you know what I would hand it to them on just about every front. I don't think they always do it best. I miss the taskbar in OSX but they do an impressive job delivering a quality user experience. But to give them credit for creating these ideas and everyone else ripping them off is ludicrous. Apple doesn't invent. They refine very very well. They're also really good about being first to market with ideas that are borderline inevitable. The iPhone is a brilliant example of this. Just as ~3inch LCDs really start to approach the point where they're mass marketable. Just where battery life and processors power started to converge and sell affordable devices. Just as cellphone networks were dropping their data prices to the point where normal people would justify having internet in their hand. Just as Android was approaching its release. Just as solid state memory prices were approaching affordability levels Apple shows up with a more useable but in many ways less functional product. It's sexy. It's affordable and it's putting together the best of 10 years of smart phones. That's not inventing. Thats executing very well.
So let's be clear when talking about "Micro$oft stealing" everyone's ideas because most of those ideas weren't apple's and many of those ideas were poorly implemented Microsoft ideas (instant search being an example of an announced vista feature LONG before apple announced their equivalent.)/rant
"I'm sorry, but I've never, ever met a professional audio or video producer who used anything but the Mac. And, being an artsy fartsy type, I've met a lot. "
!?
Avid once announced that they were effectively going to discontinue their Mac support. They never followed through but most Avid DS and Media Composer systems run on Windows.
Mac support for Maya is still a little bit dodgy. It's largely Linux or Windows.
Shake used to run dramatically better on Intel/Windows but then Apple killed the Windows version. The Intel/Linux version was still astronomically faster than the G4 OSX version. Until Apple released Intel hardware the OSX version of Shake was noticeably slower than any other build of Shake.
3DsMAX only runs on Windows. If you took Maya, XSI and Houdini and combined all of their sales they still wouldn't even sell as many copies as 3DsMax.
Lustre is Windows XP only.
Assimilate Scratch is Windows only.
Flame, Flint and Inferno until very recently were Solaris only. Now linux.
ZBrush only this month got an OSX build.
TV stations run almost exclusively on windows based Avid solutions.
If by 'professional video producer' you mean those guys with DVXs and iphones shooting indie films. Then I'll agree with you. But people who actually work in high-end professional film and video post production mostly use Linux or Windows.
OSX does not support 64 bit applications yet. Our last project required 64 bit rendering. We literally could not have completed it on schedule with OSX.
Our studio produces VFX and motion graphics for TV and web ads. If you watch TV you've probably seen our work.
We switched half of our workstations to Vista last year. No problems at all. In fact it solved some of our XP problems. This last month we converted our render farm to Vista. The farm only gets any kind of update when we're confident it won't break anything.
I'm the last computer in the network on XP now (x64) at work and that's just because I upgraded out of cycle to test the waters for the x64 conversion. My verdict was use Vista x64 instead.
If we can switch to Vista without incident then people who run Outlook shouldn't have any problems. If you are having problems then your system vendor... sucks monkey balls and is selling you a poorly vetted hardware configuration.
Anecdote: My Netgear Wifi card would reguire a netgear network manager to operate in XP. It had god awful stability and sucked the life from my soul.
When I installed Vista it automatically found the drivers. Used vista's network manager and found the network without any headache. It just prompted me for the WEP password and never gave me any trouble what so ever.
Ubuntu couldn't find any drivers for the card's 108mbps mode.
Yes. Let's not forget why Microsoft WON the browser war. Key word there is *WON* the browser war. They didn't steal it. Despite quite a bit of monopolistic intervention in between. Their competitor Netscape was garbage.
By the time IE claimed the thrown web "standards" were "Netscape Standards" and "IE Standards". The only reason we're talking about the fall of IE is because they stopped working on it and people released SUPERIOR products.
Why does Microsoft need to become standard compliant? Because it produces a superior product. The easiest way to win the market is to sell the best gizmo at the lowest price.
There's also the danger of knowing "Just enough to be trouble."
I've had clients in the past who knew just enough about my field to offer bad solutions. The best supervisors and clients I've ever had knew next to nothing or were experts.
This is how a good meeting goes with a technically unsavvy supervisor:
Bossman: "How long will it take you to do XYZ and UVW?" Me: "4 hours and probably about 8 hours respectively. And for UVW I'll need ABC" Bossman: "Ok. Bob is working on ABC and he says he should be done in about 6 hours. Work on XYZ for now but UVW is really the priority so as soon as Bob is done if you could switch to that and get it done before lunch tommorow we'll be able to stay on schedule." Me: "Will do."
This is how it goes with a technically savvy supervisor:
Bossman: "Does 4 hours for XYZ and 8 hours for UVW sound about right for how long you expect it to take? Do you need anything from anybody to work on XYZ?" Me: "Time frame sounds reasonable but I'm waiting on ABC." Bossman: "Ok. Bob is working on ABC and he says he should be done in about 6 hours. Work on XYZ for now but UVW is really the priority so as soon as Bob is done if you could switch to that and get it done before lunch tommorow we'll be able to stay on schedule." Me: "Will do."
The danger is when the supervisor thinks they know what is involved due to their minimal exposure to the field. Or if they keep insiting you do something which they've 'heard before' even though it doesn't apply at all to the situation. Many technical people often end up micromanaging and poorly delegating as you said. If they combine techincal and leadership they are by far the best. But I would take ignorant and trusting over savvy and poor at managing any day.
And like a large software project it also might be a lot of hoopla about day to day operations.
If someone posted an hourly press release for my internal work process at work it would also be full of failures. "Gavin wastes an hour on an idea which goes nowhere." "Gavin thinks he has found solution but actually finds more problems." "Gavin runs projections and determines his initial idea would result in a complete failure."
I would like to know whether the project is actually off track--or just working through the problems that are a result of doing something difficult. With any large project you spend most of your time screwing up. My favorite anecdote is from one of the editors of Apocalypse Now. They calculated the number of individual edits they made in the film and divided it by the number of days they were editing. If they had been able to work without any mistakes and just cut the film they would have only needed to cut two shots per day.
I went to a 4 year game/film college. The people who came into the program without any prior self education almost universally failed. I would say of my class of 80 about 6-7 at most actually were employable. Of those 7 or so I can only think of 2 who came in without any previous 3D experience and one of them had extensive traditional art training before hand so really only one I can think of who had no experience.
It's a myth that you can learn this stuff in 4 years. The only people who I have seen succeed without coming in with an extensive self-taught background have put in enough time for 6+ years through online courses and other extracurricular training.
If you're an artist you have to be a real artist. You have to have an eye. You should probably have a background in your field. Lots of people graduate. Very few people are actually sufficiently qualified. Teachers need to be more honest with their students about their real abilities and employability. It would save a lot of people a lot of money.
So you just made the case to keep using Windows too.
How many times have I heard people say "People just won't use Linux because it's different! It's a lot better once you relearn where everything is!"
Personally I think that the new Office layout is so much better once you relearn a handful of button locations that any re-learning process is worth every second. The new table features are infinitely more intuitive. The layout is actually easy to learn now.
Is it different? Yes. But so is OpenOffice. All the icons are different in Open Office from Office 2003. All of the menus are different. So I guess nobody should swtich to Oo3 either lest they get lost and confused.
The quality of my documents has improved remarkeably since switching to Office 2007. And I've actually learned how to use Excel well because more features are exposed than I would have gone looking for. I find using Word much much faster and again use far more features than I used to.
Change happens. Stop being a troglodyte and bitching about it being different. If "different" were the only metric then you should be using Windows 3.1 or DOS. Microsoft Office 97 -> XP pretty much had the exact same interface. The new interface is going to be in far more applications than just Office. So people can start to become accustomed to something more efficient than 20 year old menu layouts designed for applications with only a handful of tools.
- Buying explosives. Thanks tom! - Shaping explosvies. - Milling bomb casing. - Filling bomb casing. - Rigging fuse. Hehe I made the + terminal blue instead of RED! That'll get'em! - Putting bomb in suitcase. This new Ralph Lauren suitcase design is DYNOMITE!:D - Getting in car. We sould really put some Al-Qaeda funds into something better than an 92 GeoMetro. This thing sucks. - Leaving on Airplane. Phone off! ByeBye for now! Don't want to crash plane. - Landed! The big apple awaits! - Picked up food at McDonalds on third street. Mmmmmm McFlurry goodness. - Bomb planted on 5th and James. They should make larger trashcans. Those things are TINY!1! - Bored. Waiting at Starbucks. Prices are insane!
My AT&T phone lets me use any MP3 as long as it's less than 60 seconds long and a couple of sampling requirements. Which tells me it's related to the ringtone playback software not some lockdown. Also the Googlephone allows this.
What's an "Actual network cost" I'm happy that 14 year old girls are subsidizing my actual network costs with their outrageous text messaging fees. With an unlimited data plan you can IM all you want through chat applications. For instance the Google phone's best feature is its notifications pane which does an amazing job of managing all your internet aware apps. So forget text messaging and just use GTalk or MSN or whatever IM clients it supports. Also with the google phone I think TMobile includes texting with the data plan so you could do that too.
Again. Android has little to zero branding. IPhone has almost no branding. HTC Touch/TouchPro/Diamond don't seem very heavily branded or modified. Even my AT&T Phone looks like any other LG Phone except that it has AT&T up on the status pane. OH NO!
How would this magical "no redundancy" network operate exactly? And how would they share space? "Oh sorry I already have a tower in downtown New York. Too bad for you! And if someone's tower coverage was poor who do you complain to? Who's tower was it? That sounds like a fantastic way to develop a network monopoly. I also don't see how this free for all would result in better coverage in rural areas. I'm suspicious that the only profit that they derive from those towers as it is--is from urban centers offsetting their costs and offering the rural areas to ensure their customers can roam.
Considering all handsets tend to be carrier subsidized I'm not certain how all phones being sold at retail price would be considered "cheaper". It would certainly mean less lock-in but I don't know about cheaper. I'm not going to pay $600 for a smart phone I know that.
Again. I'm not certain what draconian rules you're refering to. Let's take Android as an example. What draconian rules are being imposed? The only software I think that is banned is VOIP software. And that would probably be spectacularly spotty in quality over a wireless data link. VOIP requires nice low latency coverage. Low Latency and multi-point wireless broadband are not synonymous. This might be true of my AT&T LG phone. But the sky is the limit with just about every single Windows Mobile, Android or iPhone.
I'm all about dumb fat pipe but I disagree strongly with how far from that we currently are. Furthermore. I also disagree that our cellphone networks are ready for a dumb fat pipe to work well.
Right. Because everyone always follows up with their doctor on everything to let them know how well it turned out. But I'm sure it's all working just fine like you say.
Slashdot Mirror
Your honor I didn't commit the crime! I just broke open the window and crawled into their house. Moved all their stuff around and then helped up 3 other criminals into the window. I didn't take anything!
True it's the species. But it's hardly unique.
Apes kill one another.
Ant colonies kill one another.
All species if put under sufficient strain will kill their own so that *THEIR* genes not their fellow genes are sufficient. The only reason humans haven't stabilized is because we're evolving tools faster than the consequences.
It's like the deer which swims out into a lake and drowns because the consequences of the swim are not apparent until return is impossible.
The file format was sort of non-proprietary at one point. It's JP2K compliant at its heart (or at least it used to be until they encrypted it) but with some fancy proprietary tricks.
What the hell is an open source lens mount? Anyone can make a canon or PL compatible lens mount. And if you did make an "open" lens mount were are you going to find "open source" lenses for super 35mm? There's no such thing. The reason they call it "Four Thirds" is because it's for a very specifically sized sensor.
PL is the defacto standard. And every cinema lens company makes lenses to that standard.
Red is delivering a product that its customers can actually use. And if some standardized lens mount did come along red can release it. The lens mount is replaceable.
Actually they have a proprietary JP2k compatible wavelett codec called "REDCODE". It reduces that 261Mp down to a manageable 13GB per minute.
With the 'lower end' 9k cameras you only record 3GB per minute.
Compare that to film where an hour of film would ... 5400 feet of film and your 1TB Raid per hour for 24k footage is actually smaller, lighter and less fragile.
Furthermore if you want 24k quality footage from film (Which is impsosibl or at least nobody makes that large of a format motion picture camera). You would nee something like 50,000 feet of footage. Which would enormous and probably require a truck to move.
This is possible and the Viper camera does it. It effectively can do a delta(luminance) read where it reads off a pixel site before it fully saturates. And records how fast that happened.
The problem is it's not too useful for cinema applications which is the domain of RED.
If you have an object moving through the frame at 10pixels per second and you read off one at 1/100th of a second one another pixel at 1/50th of a second you have a different shutter speed for each pixel. The result is dark parts of the image are really blurred and bright elements have no motion blur.
Double the framerate per half horizontal resolution.
So if they're pumping out 6k at 100fps then they can do 200fps at 3k and 400fps at 1.5k. Which is comparable to what you're reporting. Furthermore one of the huge bottlenecks of the red camera is that it in real time compresses to a JP2k compatible codec and doesn't require a RAM storage device.
Furthermore let's compare the quality of your 1.3 megapixels to red's 1.3megapixels. The red will most likely have exponentially superior dynamic range (aka lower noise) and color reproduction.
It's unfair but it also has to be done unless you trust your manager to fully understand the risks.
If the company management isn't IT centric they may not understand the costs and risks of switching to a contract service.
As an employee however you can be expected to clearly itemize how you spent your time if requested so that the management can do those risk analysis.
"What do you do in an average month? What additionally happens bimonthly? Annually?" Give them a punch list of what you do and then let them decide how much of that can be replaced by replacing faulty systems outright instead of fixing them or replacing some functions with part time.
We have 4 computers per person at our company and no IT department full time. Our on-call contract service is more than effective enough for the cost. However we'll all pretty technically savvy. Our software mostly just works all the time. A lot of people seem to be ignoring the option that this slashdotter might run the quick numbers and find out he's not worth the cost.
Oh my! Only Macs can edit video?
That's weird and here all these years I thought Avid MC systems running on Windows were the mainstay of feature film and television editing.
No editing applications for Linux worth a damn? Bizzare and here I thought Smoke combined with FFI were the ultimate online conforming tool for ads.
No compositing tools? Shake, Nuke and Fusion aren't enough? All of which have or have had Windows, Mac and Linux builds.
Adobe sucks? That's why every single VFX workstation on earth has a copy of Photoshop? And here I thought all these years it was because it continues to offer the latest and greatest in 2D tools.
CS2 isn't good enough. I need HDR editing. CS3 is about to be replaced this week sometime because CS4 has some extremely pursuasive features.
Can't run blender. Performance is no where near 3dsmax + Brazil. Quality is no where near 3dsmax + Brazil. We also have tens of thousands of dollars invested in proprietary 3dsmax extensions.
Believe it or not Blender sucks. I know it's hard to understand when you don't actually use the software but for those who actually need a top of the line app that's an important thing to consider. And that's not just me saying that. When the Big Buck Bunny team was asked what they thought of Blender they said the same thing. We don't pay $3500 a seat for Max because we're thinking "OMG it's teh 1337 to buy super awesome software!" It's because it's worth an extra $3500 dollars per seat.
Because even if the ship were sinking there is money to be made before grabbing a life raft.
Sell to the 98% of the passengers for as long as you can and then if the boat doesn't look like it's going to stay afloat grab a life raft along with your briefcase full of money.
Can I run photoshop in linux? Nope. Can I run 3dsmax in linux? Nope. So in other words my fancy workstation would be a fancy eepc for browsing the web. Yep. That really encourages me to buy Video Corp's fancy new video card. So that I can run Open Office and Firefox.
"What's that? Linux doesn't require as new of CPUs and as much RAM? Why then as a hardware manufacturer would I want to encourage the efficient OS?"
Seriously though I hear a lot of bitching about how someone needs to upgrade their Athlon 2100 XP processor and 128MB of RAM to run Vista. If the concern of the user is that they don't want to buy new hardware--why would hardware manufacturers want to work with you?
With Windows 7 the feature has to work before it becomes part of the build. They've completely changed their management structure for Windows 7 because Windows Vista was so poorly led.
I would imagine that this new "If it doesn't make it into the build it's not a feature" philosophy would imply that anything you see working is actually working and not some wishlist item.
Ummmm.... Finder is really nothing like the start menu. And apple's dock is very similar to windows 95 -> Vista's taskbar. The taskbar is still an incredibly simple and elegant solution to multi-tasking. Something which I don't feel as if OSX has achieved out of the box without switcher which I always install on any OSX computer I use.
Look dow at the bottom of a linux or windows machine and what do you see? A big button to launch all your applications. (Finder doesn't list all your applications). A few quicklaunch buttons (introduced in windows 95), a graphical icon and title for all your currently open windows and a region for persistently running applications that don't need anything more than icon for extremely rudimentary interaction. It's in my opinion the most elegant and perfect solution to multi-tasking and takes up less than 5% of my screen realestate. I'm 1 click away from any running application or window. That's glorious. To me the taskbar IS windows. Linux blatantly ripped it off. And not in the "It's a graphical user interface therefore it's ripping off apple." fanboyism. It's unique it's lightning fast and incredibly clear and obvious to the user.
If it weren't so distinctly windows I almost guarantee you that Apple would be using it.
I'm not too happy with the lack of labels on the new taskbar but to sugges that any time that Microsoft refines their design is ripping off apple is ludicrous.
Let's see... touchscreen phone that runs applications and the web? Wow that sounds cool. Too bad Microsoft never thought up that idea.
A music player that plays digital files? That's a brilliant idea! Thank God Apple invented the MP3 player.
Apple has founded its reputation as usability geniuses. That's what they sell. Usability. And you know what I would hand it to them on just about every front. I don't think they always do it best. I miss the taskbar in OSX but they do an impressive job delivering a quality user experience. But to give them credit for creating these ideas and everyone else ripping them off is ludicrous. Apple doesn't invent. They refine very very well. They're also really good about being first to market with ideas that are borderline inevitable. The iPhone is a brilliant example of this. Just as ~3inch LCDs really start to approach the point where they're mass marketable. Just where battery life and processors power started to converge and sell affordable devices. Just as cellphone networks were dropping their data prices to the point where normal people would justify having internet in their hand. Just as Android was approaching its release. Just as solid state memory prices were approaching affordability levels Apple shows up with a more useable but in many ways less functional product. It's sexy. It's affordable and it's putting together the best of 10 years of smart phones. That's not inventing. Thats executing very well.
So let's be clear when talking about "Micro$oft stealing" everyone's ideas because most of those ideas weren't apple's and many of those ideas were poorly implemented Microsoft ideas (instant search being an example of an announced vista feature LONG before apple announced their equivalent.) /rant
"I'm sorry, but I've never, ever met a professional audio or video producer who used anything but the Mac. And, being an artsy fartsy type, I've met a lot. "
!?
Avid once announced that they were effectively going to discontinue their Mac support. They never followed through but most Avid DS and Media Composer systems run on Windows.
Mac support for Maya is still a little bit dodgy. It's largely Linux or Windows.
Shake used to run dramatically better on Intel/Windows but then Apple killed the Windows version. The Intel/Linux version was still astronomically faster than the G4 OSX version. Until Apple released Intel hardware the OSX version of Shake was noticeably slower than any other build of Shake.
3DsMAX only runs on Windows. If you took Maya, XSI and Houdini and combined all of their sales they still wouldn't even sell as many copies as 3DsMax.
Lustre is Windows XP only.
Assimilate Scratch is Windows only.
Flame, Flint and Inferno until very recently were Solaris only. Now linux.
ZBrush only this month got an OSX build.
TV stations run almost exclusively on windows based Avid solutions.
If by 'professional video producer' you mean those guys with DVXs and iphones shooting indie films. Then I'll agree with you. But people who actually work in high-end professional film and video post production mostly use Linux or Windows.
OSX does not support 64 bit applications yet. Our last project required 64 bit rendering. We literally could not have completed it on schedule with OSX.
Our studio produces VFX and motion graphics for TV and web ads. If you watch TV you've probably seen our work.
We switched half of our workstations to Vista last year. No problems at all. In fact it solved some of our XP problems. This last month we converted our render farm to Vista. The farm only gets any kind of update when we're confident it won't break anything.
I'm the last computer in the network on XP now (x64) at work and that's just because I upgraded out of cycle to test the waters for the x64 conversion. My verdict was use Vista x64 instead.
If we can switch to Vista without incident then people who run Outlook shouldn't have any problems. If you are having problems then your system vendor ... sucks monkey balls and is selling you a poorly vetted hardware configuration.
Anecdote:
My Netgear Wifi card would reguire a netgear network manager to operate in XP. It had god awful stability and sucked the life from my soul.
When I installed Vista it automatically found the drivers. Used vista's network manager and found the network without any headache. It just prompted me for the WEP password and never gave me any trouble what so ever.
Ubuntu couldn't find any drivers for the card's 108mbps mode.
What standard is it that they should be following for cloud based services?
I was unaware there was such a thing.
Yes. Let's not forget why Microsoft WON the browser war. Key word there is *WON* the browser war. They didn't steal it. Despite quite a bit of monopolistic intervention in between. Their competitor Netscape was garbage.
By the time IE claimed the thrown web "standards" were "Netscape Standards" and "IE Standards". The only reason we're talking about the fall of IE is because they stopped working on it and people released SUPERIOR products.
Why does Microsoft need to become standard compliant? Because it produces a superior product. The easiest way to win the market is to sell the best gizmo at the lowest price.
There's also the danger of knowing "Just enough to be trouble."
I've had clients in the past who knew just enough about my field to offer bad solutions. The best supervisors and clients I've ever had knew next to nothing or were experts.
This is how a good meeting goes with a technically unsavvy supervisor:
Bossman: "How long will it take you to do XYZ and UVW?"
Me: "4 hours and probably about 8 hours respectively. And for UVW I'll need ABC"
Bossman: "Ok. Bob is working on ABC and he says he should be done in about 6 hours. Work on XYZ for now but UVW is really the priority so as soon as Bob is done if you could switch to that and get it done before lunch tommorow we'll be able to stay on schedule."
Me: "Will do."
This is how it goes with a technically savvy supervisor:
Bossman: "Does 4 hours for XYZ and 8 hours for UVW sound about right for how long you expect it to take? Do you need anything from anybody to work on XYZ?"
Me: "Time frame sounds reasonable but I'm waiting on ABC."
Bossman: "Ok. Bob is working on ABC and he says he should be done in about 6 hours. Work on XYZ for now but UVW is really the priority so as soon as Bob is done if you could switch to that and get it done before lunch tommorow we'll be able to stay on schedule."
Me: "Will do."
The danger is when the supervisor thinks they know what is involved due to their minimal exposure to the field. Or if they keep insiting you do something which they've 'heard before' even though it doesn't apply at all to the situation. Many technical people often end up micromanaging and poorly delegating as you said. If they combine techincal and leadership they are by far the best. But I would take ignorant and trusting over savvy and poor at managing any day.
And like a large software project it also might be a lot of hoopla about day to day operations.
If someone posted an hourly press release for my internal work process at work it would also be full of failures. "Gavin wastes an hour on an idea which goes nowhere." "Gavin thinks he has found solution but actually finds more problems." "Gavin runs projections and determines his initial idea would result in a complete failure."
I would like to know whether the project is actually off track--or just working through the problems that are a result of doing something difficult. With any large project you spend most of your time screwing up. My favorite anecdote is from one of the editors of Apocalypse Now. They calculated the number of individual edits they made in the film and divided it by the number of days they were editing. If they had been able to work without any mistakes and just cut the film they would have only needed to cut two shots per day.
I went to a 4 year game/film college. The people who came into the program without any prior self education almost universally failed. I would say of my class of 80 about 6-7 at most actually were employable. Of those 7 or so I can only think of 2 who came in without any previous 3D experience and one of them had extensive traditional art training before hand so really only one I can think of who had no experience.
It's a myth that you can learn this stuff in 4 years. The only people who I have seen succeed without coming in with an extensive self-taught background have put in enough time for 6+ years through online courses and other extracurricular training.
If you're an artist you have to be a real artist. You have to have an eye. You should probably have a background in your field. Lots of people graduate. Very few people are actually sufficiently qualified. Teachers need to be more honest with their students about their real abilities and employability. It would save a lot of people a lot of money.
Please. Teaching successful manipulation of the system for your own and others' gain is not limited to a single economy.
A harvard business grad would be just as adept in a green economy as a carbon one. Money, Power and Influence are aquired the same no matter the game.
So you just made the case to keep using Windows too.
How many times have I heard people say "People just won't use Linux because it's different! It's a lot better once you relearn where everything is!"
Personally I think that the new Office layout is so much better once you relearn a handful of button locations that any re-learning process is worth every second. The new table features are infinitely more intuitive. The layout is actually easy to learn now.
Is it different? Yes. But so is OpenOffice. All the icons are different in Open Office from Office 2003. All of the menus are different. So I guess nobody should swtich to Oo3 either lest they get lost and confused.
The quality of my documents has improved remarkeably since switching to Office 2007. And I've actually learned how to use Excel well because more features are exposed than I would have gone looking for. I find using Word much much faster and again use far more features than I used to.
Change happens. Stop being a troglodyte and bitching about it being different. If "different" were the only metric then you should be using Windows 3.1 or DOS. Microsoft Office 97 -> XP pretty much had the exact same interface. The new interface is going to be in far more applications than just Office. So people can start to become accustomed to something more efficient than 20 year old menu layouts designed for applications with only a handful of tools.
- Buying explosives. Thanks tom! :D
- Shaping explosvies.
- Milling bomb casing.
- Filling bomb casing.
- Rigging fuse. Hehe I made the + terminal blue instead of RED! That'll get'em!
- Putting bomb in suitcase. This new Ralph Lauren suitcase design is DYNOMITE!
- Getting in car. We sould really put some Al-Qaeda funds into something better than an 92 GeoMetro. This thing sucks.
- Leaving on Airplane. Phone off! ByeBye for now! Don't want to crash plane.
- Landed! The big apple awaits!
- Picked up food at McDonalds on third street. Mmmmmm McFlurry goodness.
- Bomb planted on 5th and James. They should make larger trashcans. Those things are TINY!1!
- Bored. Waiting at Starbucks. Prices are insane!
Ummmm...
My AT&T phone lets me use any MP3 as long as it's less than 60 seconds long and a couple of sampling requirements. Which tells me it's related to the ringtone playback software not some lockdown. Also the Googlephone allows this.
What's an "Actual network cost" I'm happy that 14 year old girls are subsidizing my actual network costs with their outrageous text messaging fees. With an unlimited data plan you can IM all you want through chat applications. For instance the Google phone's best feature is its notifications pane which does an amazing job of managing all your internet aware apps. So forget text messaging and just use GTalk or MSN or whatever IM clients it supports. Also with the google phone I think TMobile includes texting with the data plan so you could do that too.
Again. Android has little to zero branding. IPhone has almost no branding. HTC Touch/TouchPro/Diamond don't seem very heavily branded or modified. Even my AT&T Phone looks like any other LG Phone except that it has AT&T up on the status pane. OH NO!
How would this magical "no redundancy" network operate exactly? And how would they share space? "Oh sorry I already have a tower in downtown New York. Too bad for you! And if someone's tower coverage was poor who do you complain to? Who's tower was it? That sounds like a fantastic way to develop a network monopoly. I also don't see how this free for all would result in better coverage in rural areas. I'm suspicious that the only profit that they derive from those towers as it is--is from urban centers offsetting their costs and offering the rural areas to ensure their customers can roam.
Considering all handsets tend to be carrier subsidized I'm not certain how all phones being sold at retail price would be considered "cheaper". It would certainly mean less lock-in but I don't know about cheaper. I'm not going to pay $600 for a smart phone I know that.
Again. I'm not certain what draconian rules you're refering to. Let's take Android as an example. What draconian rules are being imposed? The only software I think that is banned is VOIP software. And that would probably be spectacularly spotty in quality over a wireless data link. VOIP requires nice low latency coverage. Low Latency and multi-point wireless broadband are not synonymous. This might be true of my AT&T LG phone. But the sky is the limit with just about every single Windows Mobile, Android or iPhone.
I'm all about dumb fat pipe but I disagree strongly with how far from that we currently are. Furthermore. I also disagree that our cellphone networks are ready for a dumb fat pipe to work well.
Right. Because everyone always follows up with their doctor on everything to let them know how well it turned out. But I'm sure it's all working just fine like you say.