You're in a spacecraft with 2 small children. The spacecraft is leaking air. You exclaim "I'm no engineer, but I bet a piece of duct-tape would patch that up." You apply a strip of duct tape and the leak is stopped.
This is the exact same analogy. If the air stops leaking. You've found a solution. I'm not suggesting it's a good one. But that individual *has* found a solution.
Now if you were an engineer I'm sure you would wander in and exclaim! See now this is the problem with the world, all of these non-engineers failing to understand the difficulty of designing a high quality long term, maintainable solution to a problem!
The point is, the amateur found a solution. The whole point of the "I'm no ___ but ______" statement is not to imply that the be all end all solution has been found it simply means. "If I can figure this out, I'm sure someone with more understanding and experience should be able to manage just fine." Which was my point all along, and you missed 2 times now.
Specifically my original comment was to response to someone who exclaimed something to the effect of 'Woe is me! I wouldn't even be able to write a simple text search algorithm with these new standards!' If that were the case. That individual would be incompetant if I could manage well enough.
So sit on your high pedestal of superiority. But let me tell you if I can find a solution, I will sure as hell expect a professional to do as well or better.
That could be the dumbest idea I've heard all day.
So... a program that's in danger of being cut back intentionally causes a significant failure! Why not just submit a proposal to cancel the program? These are not the headlines LM wants right now. When lots of money has been spent, people irrationally expect perfection. Flying to Japan participating in exercises and kicking ass would have gone much further to proving the program viability than creating false doubts of reliability!
Actually they're significantly better than the Eurofighters.
Let's look at a few simple theoretical examples.
You're flying into heavily armed enemy space at night:
- You fly in 100 Eurofighters. Your enemy has 1000 missiles. You lose 100 Eurofighters
and hit no targets.
- You fly in 1 F-22. Your enemy has 1000 missiles, they never detect you. You hit your
target and leave enemy airspace.
In this case the F-22 was better than 100 Eurofighters.
-You're flying alone into enemy territory. You spot a flight of 3 Eurofighters flying in
formation. You fall into a following position on their tail. You fire 3 missiles
simultaneously and before the enemy pilots can react. They're dead.
In the Alaskan trials the F-22s ammased 144 kills to 0 losses. That's a pretty good investment. And while they weren't flying against Eurofighters, I'm not sure it would have helped. It doesn't come down to who can turn twice as fast. It's who can fight twice as smart. During this same combat exercise Raptors engaged enemy forces out numbered 4-1 and stil came out victorious.
In previous exercises a single pilot was able to engage 9 enemy fighters, and then ran out of targets, but still had some ammunition remaining. What's most impressive is the ability for the F-22 to multiply the effectiveness of the existing airforce. In the same engagement that F-22 enabled a supporting flight of older aircraft to achieve a kill/loss ratio of 83-1.
I agree the code would be garbage I probably wouldn't even be able to make heads or tails of it in a few months and nobody would want to use it. However my point is, the task is so simple, it can be understood by someone with a cursory understanding of the subject.
For instance: a man wanders into a restaurant bleeding profusely from a wound. You might expect someone to exclaim "I'm no doctor but we should probably put a bandage on that wound and try to stop the bleeding!" I'm sure a surgeon could a better job even with the equipment at hand but it's a perfectly valid remark. I know it's nigh on impossible, but perhaps that is one pet peeve that could benefit from some reexamination.
He's telling me that this is really difficult to understand and parse?
Sure it's not as clean as HTML for such a small bit of text, but it's not impossible to wield, unless you want pixel accuracy, in which case, CSS is difficult as well.
Whoops missed preview, that was inept mouse work on my part.
>>After only about 20 lines defining all of the classes. It hits the document:
<w:body><w:p><w:pPr><w:ind w:firstLine="720"/></w:pPr><w:r w:rsidR="00E94934"><w:t>Hello World. This is a short sentence to test Word XML.</w:t></w:r></w:p><w:p><w:r w:rsidR="00E94934"><w:tab/><w:t>Here is a new paragraph.</w:t></w:r></w:p><w:sectPr w:rsidR="00E94934" w:rsidSect="008A7339"><w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/><w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440" w:header="720" w:footer="720" w:gutter="0"/><w:cols w:space="720"/><w:docGrid w:linePitch="360"/></w:sectPr></w:body>
>>After that it goes on to define a million other things such as my margins etc.
P.S. it did illustrate though how easy it would be to parse a document and search for text. HTML parseing does it automatically. The horror!
My guess, however, is that all 6,000 nor all 700 pages are *required* on every document. I would assume the complexity scales with the complexity of the document.
Sure you might not be able to perfectly reproduce the document with only 500 or 600 lines of each standard, but it should be enough to get the general idea.
Take this example from a simple MS-Word document.
After only about 20 lines defining all of the classes. It hits the document:
Hello World. This is a short sentence to test Word XML.Here is a new paragraph.
After that it goes on to define a million other things such as my margins etc.
If you wanted to say... "search a document" such as another poster requested. Just search for hte text that *isn't* in brackets. There you go, now search that. "" Simple enough. Include that in your basic spec.
Looking at the XML document: about 75% of this example is either A)Defining HTML safe font equivalents or else B)Defining the parameters of the document's styles such as "header" "norma" "title 1" etc...
I'm no programmer but it wouldn't take me a whole lot of time to write a basic parser.
I don't know. I would also like to know how you can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a system based solely by its size.
Besides, how often is a human planning on parsing the files manually? If you ask me, the only purpose these open document file formats serve is to be opened by other word processors, which means as long as its standardized it could probably look like Chinese and it wouldn't phase me in the least.
I strongly disagree with that position. This is the same kind of bullshit that has been propagated for decades. "Artists should starve for their work." Why? Why shouldn't they be entitled to get payed for their talents like everybody else.
I am one of those "nonexistant artists who can't punch in" I don't punch in, but if I work 8 hours, I get payed for 8 hours. I also do speculative work, but I don't think my economic security should be put entirely in jeopardy just because what I create is something people find entertaining. You hate your job? I'm sorry, sounds like you made a bad career choice. Making films is a very very difficult business and it's hard enough finding enough work that to suggest when you do find work you should have to eat the risk on every project you work on is lunacy. Most of the people working on films aren't even doing anything "creative", they're craftsman, they're highly skilled and they are good at what they do. Should carpenters build houses speculatively? Should workers in an oil field operating drilling equipment pray to god they hit oil, because if they don't, they won't be able to eat that month? No! Sure you need someone at the top who is willing to take a risk, sure there will be those crazy drillers who will find a venture capital firm willing to sponsor a well or two. There will always be those who want to take the big risk to get the big reward and sometimes they do make it big. Google comes to mind. But that should be limited to a very small number of people as it is today, otherwise until *YOU* start the next google, you have to work at Red Robin serving drinks waiting for a chance to program the next big killer app.
You can be creative, and you can create art on the clock just as easily as a programmer can create code. Once you've proven yourself as a capable and productive, profitable content producer, I see no reason why you shouldn't be insulated from waiting tables and payed a decent wage to produce future products. Some products might succeed some might fail.
What next? Cancer researchers should all be independent? Let's have them raise the money on their own to buy the lab equipment and out of their sterile garages produce the next big cure! No! So why should the entertainment industry be any different? If you want to try creating the next big cure... go for it, this is america/canada/britain/france/[insert just about any first world country] go out and do it, if you hit it big, you'll be the next rodriguez.
You have obviously never worked on a production. The *only* way that small independent films keep their budgets out of the millions for a feature film is because everybody works for free.
Even larger independent films (we're talking sundance winners) still depend on massive ammounts of volunteer help to come to completion. The moment you add visual effects you just enormously increased your man hours on and off the set.
Even if you didn't pay anybody you still have to aquire equipment. Cameras, Audio, Lights, Grip and Post gear all add up quickly. In the case of post production equipment on a visual effects intensive film you might be swapping out hardware during production. Now even if you only have 150 (volunteer) workers you've just invested another half million dollars. Plus your render farm will also need updating, assume two nodes per artist at a minimum: another half million. You're going to need a massive SAN to handle the data calls and writes. Now no production can run without food, so we'll factor in $3 per person per meal per day and assume post production with 150 artists runs for 12 months there's another 160,000. We'll also assume production required 70 employees all volunteers, but they require 3 meals for 30 days because they're working all day, chalk up another 20k.
But like I said that's assuming everyone is a volunteer. Equipment is an almost insignificant percentage of a final budget. Human resources, the people who actually have to operate the gear will more than quadruple your costs even at very low rates. A grip working at $30 an hour + overtime for 18 hours a day for 30 days has already cost you more than double that of one of those new "inexpensive" cameras which is going to save us so much money.
Tech isn't going to save the movie industry. Movies are expensive now and shall forever more be expensive. That is until you decide to employ slaves.
Because what the article fails to mention is VPN clients aren't the only thing broken. Xbox Live and others are also experiencing problems with this new router. It's a systemic problem not an isolated application.
Linux is an excellent platform for multimedia artists.
Ubuntu Media Center Edition... isn't a positive or a negative force for visual content creators.
I'm not married to Windows. But I don't hold anything against it either. Since it runs effectively everything except for shake, I don't see a reason to switch.
Personally running linux is like shooting myself in the foot because it only limits my options. If I was working right now at a Nuke, Fusion or Shake studio, I would be perfectly content to work in a linux environment, or an Apple environment depending on what I was doing. But bundling Gimp, Blender and Jahshaka isn't adding any value to the deal. It's bundling applications I won't be using, and for the most part aren't ready for production. (Have you tried using JahShaka?)
Therefore I agree with the OP. It's bloatware. I would much rather see a "Linux Nuke Edition" that boots straight into Nuke and has nothing except Nuke, Firefox and a few other tools. Frees up the rest of the memory and just streamlines the whole thing to run super fast. That is something I would be interested in. They could call it Nubunkeu.
I don't expect bundled software with my OS. In fact I frown upon it. I'll choose what I think is the best tool for the job. In this case. I don't find any of the bundled tools as the best offering, so they're just bogging down the system.
Everyone jumped on the OP and attacked him for saying "Linux isn't fit for multimedia production" but none of them stopped to read the post and make sure he actually said that. Which he didn't.
>As a professional 3D artist you will find Blenders mesh modeling tools fairly comparable for SubD modeling. Maybe with Maya's, but Maya's imo are pretty poor and all of the main apps now have inexpensive plug-ins to add Modo level functionality.
>sculpting tools fairly comparable to zbrush (although with tradeoffs and limitations - we have native retopology currently but lack masking capabilites so you can only hide mesh). But the engine wasn't designed to handle millions upon millions of polygons in real time, so if it's hampered by interaction it's not going to catch on. This is the problem Maya, max and XSI face with their sculpting tools. Fine for quick tweaks, but not for a dedicated sculpting app. Interaction is almost Feature #1 on a digital sculpting app.
>uv unwrapping that is superior to all of those listed. Actually it uses the same algorithm as Max's PeltMapper. Also Maya and XSI have implementations now. Plus Gator is pretty freaking cool for low poly stuff.
>node based texturing is fairly comparable - it lacks certain shaders specifically a SSS shader. But it lacks a good DX shader creation system.
When your rates are > than $100 an hour, it doesn't take much time saving to pay off a new application every 18 months. That's the problem Blender is facing. It's doing quite well. It's easily comparable to the best 3d application a few years ago, but "fairly good", "Almost as fast" and "reasonable" aren't adjectives when the clock is running. That's why studios will buy both Mudbox and Zbrush. The only software that usually gets used isn't software that's "Almost as good as A" it's software that's the best for that task. And there is nothing that Blender does best. It's in a game of catch-up and I feel like it's investing too much time into the frivolous externalities like liquid sim, that aren't going to convince people to pick it up in their pipeline. Look at Modo. It offered the best modelling tools and it exploded onto the scene, because it had something to offer. I can't think of a single thing which makes me want to add Blender to my pipeline over something I already have.
Once Blender has a trojan feature to worm its way into the pipelines it'll get the attention it needs across the board to be really really competitive.
I would start with just blatantly ripping off all of the neat Silo/Modo features for modelling. Then hit the animation side in full force, get those tools up to snuff, then rendering and finally start adding dynamics and "fun" features.
Why in that order? Because models are easily transferable inbetween apps. Pipelines are modeler agnostic right now. You could model in ASCII and most pipelines wouldn't care. If blender just showed up one day with the most powerful modelling package, it would be adopted left and right. And it would give people a chance to explore the other features while they're there.
As a joke a friend and I used it on Spiderman 3. But not for anything useful, just to say we did. We just created a plane and exported it as an OBJ. Although I'm not sure if we ended up using that plane...
> How is Blender's sculpt mode shaping up against zbrush*, silo2 and mudbox?
It's not. Because it's not designed to handle hundreds of millions of polygons. It would probably require a full rewrite to function effectively. This is the same problem Maya, Max and XSI have. (Although there is a plugin for Max which sort of implements a semi functional version (Polyspeed)).
The only mature video editing tools for Linux are Smoke and Fire both are in the high 5 to low 6 digit price range. And both were only ported to Linux several years ago. If you want 'robust and mature' you want Avid, it was one of the first and it's still imo the best for the money. It does not, however, run on Linux.
The open source offerings are barely competing with Windows Movie Maker and iMovie.
Photoshop desperately needs some competition to force them to rethink their UI. CS3 is different, I haven't had time to look at it yet, but hopefully it's brand spanking new.
And for christ's sake how about CTRL + DRAG brush resizing... they're only the last major paint application to not implement it: Painter, Combustion etc...
P.S. as of the last update of Gimp I used, you couldn't resize brushes, you had to create a new brush at a different size. That = Garbage Bin alone. It might have changed by now.
The problem I've had with just about every single large Open Source project is it requires me to contribute. I don't want to contribute to it, I want to use it. If I had time to contribute I would be a software developer not an artist. This is why projects like Apache do very well in an Open Source environment. People who use it, contribute to it and make it better, because using it is improving it.
Yeah but he wasn't saying Linux is useless for professionals. He was saying this pack didn't include any of the useful tools for professionals that runs on linux:
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. Ubuntu (w/gnome) 2001 vs XP 2001
Your mom is stupid.
You're in a spacecraft with 2 small children. The spacecraft is leaking air. You exclaim "I'm no engineer, but I bet a piece of duct-tape would patch that up." You apply a strip of duct tape and the leak is stopped.
This is the exact same analogy. If the air stops leaking. You've found a solution. I'm not suggesting it's a good one. But that individual *has* found a solution.
Now if you were an engineer I'm sure you would wander in and exclaim! See now this is the problem with the world, all of these non-engineers failing to understand the difficulty of designing a high quality long term, maintainable solution to a problem!
The point is, the amateur found a solution. The whole point of the "I'm no ___ but ______" statement is not to imply that the be all end all solution has been found it simply means. "If I can figure this out, I'm sure someone with more understanding and experience should be able to manage just fine." Which was my point all along, and you missed 2 times now.
Specifically my original comment was to response to someone who exclaimed something to the effect of 'Woe is me! I wouldn't even be able to write a simple text search algorithm with these new standards!' If that were the case. That individual would be incompetant if I could manage well enough.
So sit on your high pedestal of superiority. But let me tell you if I can find a solution, I will sure as hell expect a professional to do as well or better.
That could be the dumbest idea I've heard all day.
So... a program that's in danger of being cut back intentionally causes a significant failure! Why not just submit a proposal to cancel the program? These are not the headlines LM wants right now. When lots of money has been spent, people irrationally expect perfection. Flying to Japan participating in exercises and kicking ass would have gone much further to proving the program viability than creating false doubts of reliability!
Actually they're significantly better than the Eurofighters.
Let's look at a few simple theoretical examples.
You're flying into heavily armed enemy space at night:
- You fly in 100 Eurofighters. Your enemy has 1000 missiles. You lose 100 Eurofighters
and hit no targets.
- You fly in 1 F-22. Your enemy has 1000 missiles, they never detect you. You hit your
target and leave enemy airspace.
In this case the F-22 was better than 100 Eurofighters.
-You're flying alone into enemy territory. You spot a flight of 3 Eurofighters flying in
formation. You fall into a following position on their tail. You fire 3 missiles
simultaneously and before the enemy pilots can react. They're dead.
In the Alaskan trials the F-22s ammased 144 kills to 0 losses. That's a pretty good investment. And while they weren't flying against Eurofighters, I'm not sure it would have helped. It doesn't come down to who can turn twice as fast. It's who can fight twice as smart. During this same combat exercise Raptors engaged enemy forces out numbered 4-1 and stil came out victorious.
In previous exercises a single pilot was able to engage 9 enemy fighters, and then ran out of targets, but still had some ammunition remaining. What's most impressive is the ability for the F-22 to multiply the effectiveness of the existing airforce. In the same engagement that F-22 enabled a supporting flight of older aircraft to achieve a kill/loss ratio of 83-1.
You could say XP was the only operating system at the beginning of 2007.
Plus the latest Ubuntu stable release wasn't released *after* vista.
So the fair comparison is still XP (as of Winter 06) to Ubuntu (as of Winter 06).
Continuing off topic...
I agree the code would be garbage I probably wouldn't even be able to make heads or tails of it in a few months and nobody would want to use it. However my point is, the task is so simple, it can be understood by someone with a cursory understanding of the subject.
For instance: a man wanders into a restaurant bleeding profusely from a wound. You might expect someone to exclaim "I'm no doctor but we should probably put a bandage on that wound and try to stop the bleeding!" I'm sure a surgeon could a better job even with the equipment at hand but it's a perfectly valid remark. I know it's nigh on impossible, but perhaps that is one pet peeve that could benefit from some reexamination.
He's telling me that this is really difficult to understand and parse?
Sure it's not as clean as HTML for such a small bit of text, but it's not impossible to wield, unless you want pixel accuracy, in which case, CSS is difficult as well.
Office XML document:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<pkg:package xmlns:pkg="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/200 6/xmlPackage"><pkg:part pkg:name="/_rels/.rels" pkg:contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-pa ckage.relationships+xml" pkg:padding="512"><pkg:xmlData><Relationships xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2 006/relationships"><Relationship Id="rId3" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/extended-properties" Target="docProps/app.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId2" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/20 06/relationships/metadata/core-properties" Target="docProps/core.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId1" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/officeDocument" Target="word/document.xml"/></Relationships></pkg: xmlData></pkg:part><pkg:part pkg:name="/word/_rels/document.xml.rels" pkg:contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-pa ckage.relationships+xml" pkg:padding="256"><pkg:xmlData><Relationships xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2 006/relationships"><Relationship Id="rId3" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/webSettings" Target="webSettings.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId2" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/settings" Target="settings.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId1" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/styles" Target="styles.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId5" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/theme" Target="theme/theme1.xml"/><Relationship Id="rId4" Type="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocu ment/2006/relationships/fontTable" Target="fontTable.xml"/></Relationships></pkg:xmlD ata></pkg:part><pkg:part pkg:name="/word/document.xml" pkg:contentType="application/vnd.openxmlformats-of ficedocument.wordprocessingml.document.main+xml">< pkg:xmlData><w:document xmlns:ve="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup -compatibility/2006" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:o12="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/200 4/7/core" xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeD ocument/2006/relationships" xmlns:m="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeD ocument/2006/math" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:wp="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/drawin gml/2006/wordprocessingDrawing" xmlns:w10="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:w="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordpro cessingml/2006/main" xmlns:wne="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/wor d/2006/wordml">
<w:body>
<w:p><w:pPr><w:ind w:left="720"/></w:pPr>
<w:r w:rsidR="00F4543A">
<w:t>Hello World.</w:t>
</w:r>
<w:r w:rsidR="00F4543A"><w:br/></w:r>
<w:r w:rsidR="00F4543A"><w:br/>
<w:t>Hello Universe.</w:t>
</w:r>
</w:p>
<w:sectPr w:rsidR="0074581F" w:rsidSect="008A7339"><w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/>
<w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440" w:header="720" w:footer="720" w:gutter="0"/>
<w:cols w:space="720"/>
Whoops missed preview, that was inept mouse work on my part.
r that it goes on to define a million other things such as my margins etc.
>>After only about 20 lines defining all of the classes. It hits the document:
<w:body><w:p><w:pPr><w:ind w:firstLine="720"/></w:pPr><w:r w:rsidR="00E94934"><w:t>Hello World. This is a short sentence to test Word XML.</w:t></w:r></w:p><w:p><w:r w:rsidR="00E94934"><w:tab/><w:t>Here is a new paragraph.</w:t></w:r></w:p><w:sectPr w:rsidR="00E94934" w:rsidSect="008A7339"><w:pgSz w:w="12240" w:h="15840"/><w:pgMar w:top="1440" w:right="1440" w:bottom="1440" w:left="1440" w:header="720" w:footer="720" w:gutter="0"/><w:cols w:space="720"/><w:docGrid w:linePitch="360"/></w:sectPr></w:body>
>>Afte
P.S. it did illustrate though how easy it would be to parse a document and search for text. HTML parseing does it automatically. The horror!
My guess, however, is that all 6,000 nor all 700 pages are *required* on every document. I would assume the complexity scales with the complexity of the document.
Sure you might not be able to perfectly reproduce the document with only 500 or 600 lines of each standard, but it should be enough to get the general idea.
Take this example from a simple MS-Word document.
After only about 20 lines defining all of the classes. It hits the document:
Hello World. This is a short sentence to test Word XML.Here is a new paragraph.
After that it goes on to define a million other things such as my margins etc.
If you wanted to say... "search a document" such as another poster requested. Just search for hte text that *isn't* in brackets. There you go, now search that. "" Simple enough. Include that in your basic spec.
Looking at the XML document: about 75% of this example is either A)Defining HTML safe font equivalents or else B)Defining the parameters of the document's styles such as "header" "norma" "title 1" etc...
I'm no programmer but it wouldn't take me a whole lot of time to write a basic parser.
I don't know. I would also like to know how you can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a system based solely by its size.
Besides, how often is a human planning on parsing the files manually? If you ask me, the only purpose these open document file formats serve is to be opened by other word processors, which means as long as its standardized it could probably look like Chinese and it wouldn't phase me in the least.
I strongly disagree with that position. This is the same kind of bullshit that has been propagated for decades. "Artists should starve for their work." Why? Why shouldn't they be entitled to get payed for their talents like everybody else.
I am one of those "nonexistant artists who can't punch in" I don't punch in, but if I work 8 hours, I get payed for 8 hours. I also do speculative work, but I don't think my economic security should be put entirely in jeopardy just because what I create is something people find entertaining. You hate your job? I'm sorry, sounds like you made a bad career choice. Making films is a very very difficult business and it's hard enough finding enough work that to suggest when you do find work you should have to eat the risk on every project you work on is lunacy. Most of the people working on films aren't even doing anything "creative", they're craftsman, they're highly skilled and they are good at what they do. Should carpenters build houses speculatively? Should workers in an oil field operating drilling equipment pray to god they hit oil, because if they don't, they won't be able to eat that month? No! Sure you need someone at the top who is willing to take a risk, sure there will be those crazy drillers who will find a venture capital firm willing to sponsor a well or two. There will always be those who want to take the big risk to get the big reward and sometimes they do make it big. Google comes to mind. But that should be limited to a very small number of people as it is today, otherwise until *YOU* start the next google, you have to work at Red Robin serving drinks waiting for a chance to program the next big killer app.
You can be creative, and you can create art on the clock just as easily as a programmer can create code. Once you've proven yourself as a capable and productive, profitable content producer, I see no reason why you shouldn't be insulated from waiting tables and payed a decent wage to produce future products. Some products might succeed some might fail.
What next? Cancer researchers should all be independent? Let's have them raise the money on their own to buy the lab equipment and out of their sterile garages produce the next big cure! No! So why should the entertainment industry be any different? If you want to try creating the next big cure... go for it, this is america/canada/britain/france/[insert just about any first world country] go out and do it, if you hit it big, you'll be the next rodriguez.
You have obviously never worked on a production. The *only* way that small independent films keep their budgets out of the millions for a feature film is because everybody works for free.
Even larger independent films (we're talking sundance winners) still depend on massive ammounts of volunteer help to come to completion. The moment you add visual effects you just enormously increased your man hours on and off the set.
Even if you didn't pay anybody you still have to aquire equipment. Cameras, Audio, Lights, Grip and Post gear all add up quickly. In the case of post production equipment on a visual effects intensive film you might be swapping out hardware during production. Now even if you only have 150 (volunteer) workers you've just invested another half million dollars. Plus your render farm will also need updating, assume two nodes per artist at a minimum: another half million. You're going to need a massive SAN to handle the data calls and writes. Now no production can run without food, so we'll factor in $3 per person per meal per day and assume post production with 150 artists runs for 12 months there's another 160,000. We'll also assume production required 70 employees all volunteers, but they require 3 meals for 30 days because they're working all day, chalk up another 20k.
But like I said that's assuming everyone is a volunteer. Equipment is an almost insignificant percentage of a final budget. Human resources, the people who actually have to operate the gear will more than quadruple your costs even at very low rates. A grip working at $30 an hour + overtime for 18 hours a day for 30 days has already cost you more than double that of one of those new "inexpensive" cameras which is going to save us so much money.
Tech isn't going to save the movie industry. Movies are expensive now and shall forever more be expensive. That is until you decide to employ slaves.
Because what the article fails to mention is VPN clients aren't the only thing broken. Xbox Live and others are also experiencing problems with this new router. It's a systemic problem not an isolated application.
How would that be different from paying a company to develop it for them. I don't know... maybe someone like... say... Microsoft?
You know just to manage the programming teams, provide support and handle QA.
But... Geometry Wars is in HD...
I've made money off work that has passed through MS Paint. Does that make it a professional image editing tool?
Linux is an excellent platform for multimedia artists.
Ubuntu Media Center Edition... isn't a positive or a negative force for visual content creators.
I'm not married to Windows. But I don't hold anything against it either. Since it runs effectively everything except for shake, I don't see a reason to switch.
Personally running linux is like shooting myself in the foot because it only limits my options. If I was working right now at a Nuke, Fusion or Shake studio, I would be perfectly content to work in a linux environment, or an Apple environment depending on what I was doing. But bundling Gimp, Blender and Jahshaka isn't adding any value to the deal. It's bundling applications I won't be using, and for the most part aren't ready for production. (Have you tried using JahShaka?)
Therefore I agree with the OP. It's bloatware. I would much rather see a "Linux Nuke Edition" that boots straight into Nuke and has nothing except Nuke, Firefox and a few other tools. Frees up the rest of the memory and just streamlines the whole thing to run super fast. That is something I would be interested in. They could call it Nubunkeu.
I don't expect bundled software with my OS. In fact I frown upon it. I'll choose what I think is the best tool for the job. In this case. I don't find any of the bundled tools as the best offering, so they're just bogging down the system.
Everyone jumped on the OP and attacked him for saying "Linux isn't fit for multimedia production" but none of them stopped to read the post and make sure he actually said that. Which he didn't.
>As a professional 3D artist you will find Blenders mesh modeling tools fairly comparable for SubD modeling.
Maybe with Maya's, but Maya's imo are pretty poor and all of the main apps now have inexpensive plug-ins to add Modo level functionality.
>sculpting tools fairly comparable to zbrush (although with tradeoffs and limitations - we have native retopology currently but lack masking capabilites so you can only hide mesh).
But the engine wasn't designed to handle millions upon millions of polygons in real time, so if it's hampered by interaction it's not going to catch on. This is the problem Maya, max and XSI face with their sculpting tools. Fine for quick tweaks, but not for a dedicated sculpting app. Interaction is almost Feature #1 on a digital sculpting app.
>uv unwrapping that is superior to all of those listed.
Actually it uses the same algorithm as Max's PeltMapper. Also Maya and XSI have implementations now. Plus Gator is pretty freaking cool for low poly stuff.
>node based texturing is fairly comparable - it lacks certain shaders specifically a SSS shader.
But it lacks a good DX shader creation system.
When your rates are > than $100 an hour, it doesn't take much time saving to pay off a new application every 18 months. That's the problem Blender is facing. It's doing quite well. It's easily comparable to the best 3d application a few years ago, but "fairly good", "Almost as fast" and "reasonable" aren't adjectives when the clock is running. That's why studios will buy both Mudbox and Zbrush. The only software that usually gets used isn't software that's "Almost as good as A" it's software that's the best for that task. And there is nothing that Blender does best. It's in a game of catch-up and I feel like it's investing too much time into the frivolous externalities like liquid sim, that aren't going to convince people to pick it up in their pipeline. Look at Modo. It offered the best modelling tools and it exploded onto the scene, because it had something to offer. I can't think of a single thing which makes me want to add Blender to my pipeline over something I already have.
Once Blender has a trojan feature to worm its way into the pipelines it'll get the attention it needs across the board to be really really competitive.
I would start with just blatantly ripping off all of the neat Silo/Modo features for modelling. Then hit the animation side in full force, get those tools up to snuff, then rendering and finally start adding dynamics and "fun" features.
Why in that order? Because models are easily transferable inbetween apps. Pipelines are modeler agnostic right now. You could model in ASCII and most pipelines wouldn't care. If blender just showed up one day with the most powerful modelling package, it would be adopted left and right. And it would give people a chance to explore the other features while they're there.
As a joke a friend and I used it on Spiderman 3. But not for anything useful, just to say we did. We just created a plane and exported it as an OBJ. Although I'm not sure if we ended up using that plane...
Hahah whoops. Yep I meant Blender.
> How is Blender's sculpt mode shaping up against zbrush*, silo2 and mudbox?
It's not. Because it's not designed to handle hundreds of millions of polygons. It would probably require a full rewrite to function effectively. This is the same problem Maya, Max and XSI have. (Although there is a plugin for Max which sort of implements a semi functional version (Polyspeed)).
The only mature video editing tools for Linux are Smoke and Fire both are in the high 5 to low 6 digit price range. And both were only ported to Linux several years ago. If you want 'robust and mature' you want Avid, it was one of the first and it's still imo the best for the money. It does not, however, run on Linux.
The open source offerings are barely competing with Windows Movie Maker and iMovie.
Photoshop desperately needs some competition to force them to rethink their UI. CS3 is different, I haven't had time to look at it yet, but hopefully it's brand spanking new.
And for christ's sake how about CTRL + DRAG brush resizing... they're only the last major paint application to not implement it: Painter, Combustion etc...
P.S. as of the last update of Gimp I used, you couldn't resize brushes, you had to create a new brush at a different size. That = Garbage Bin alone. It might have changed by now.
Depends on what you define as whining.
The problem I've had with just about every single large Open Source project is it requires me to contribute. I don't want to contribute to it, I want to use it. If I had time to contribute I would be a software developer not an artist. This is why projects like Apache do very well in an Open Source environment. People who use it, contribute to it and make it better, because using it is improving it.
Yeah but he wasn't saying Linux is useless for professionals. He was saying this pack didn't include any of the useful tools for professionals that runs on linux:
Shake, Maya, XSI etc...