I'd stay tuned on this one - Apple has no reason to screw up 3rd party video editors and I certainly wouldn't build a conspiracy theory that its to boost their Video Rentals. Apple does have a reason to screw up 3rd party video editors, which is that Quicktime is an underlying component of a number of video editing rendering systems, including After Effects. When AE tries to render, it writes to a Quicktime file. The DRM system added to the new version of Quicktime somehow interferes with this process after ten minutes of rendering, locking After Effects out from writing the file and thus crashing the render. So it's not that they tried to break AE, they just changed their software without checking to see if this change would interfere with the other apps that use this software. I do very much enjoy the idea of Apple deciding to boost video rentals by preventing new movies from being made, I doubt that's what they had in mind.
I have to say, putting out a DRM scheme that completely fucks up After Effects is a new low for Apple. Ya, I know, I'm an idiot for installing the thing on my workstation last night without testing it somehow, but you know what? Apple markets these machines specifically as After Effects workstations. I think it's reasonable to expect that they test their software for compatibility with the applications they advertise their machines as being great for. Or if they're not willing to do that sort of testing, at least provide a readily available means of uninstall.
At least in New York City, which is (so far as I know) the only place in the country that is seriously considering implementing a congestion pricing scheme in the immediate future, the vast majority of the revenue from the congestion pricing scheme is specifically earmarked for upgrades to public transportation. This is meant to address exactly the concern you raise, that public transit is woefully inadequate in many places, and could become even more so as ridership increased due to congestion pricing. A very decent public transit system is basically a prerequisite-- the idea of congestion pricing is to both alleviate traffic, to make existing public transit systems an increasingly viable alternative to driving, and to give drivers an economic impetus to explore this alternative. Forcing drivers to pay a toll that benefits the public transit system they don't use seems like regressive tax, but the other popular method for raising money for public transit, hiking fares, is a lot more regressive. Public transit may not be an appealing option for you, but is is an option. It doesn't work the other way for people who do not own cars.
The other huge misconception about congestion pricing is that these measures are only being considered seriously for use in urban centers, not for metropolitan areas where you might be miles from the nearest public transit option. So in the case of New York, the congestion pricing scheme only applies to midtown and downtown Manhattan. If you lived 60 minutes away and didn't have good access to public transit, you could still drive to within 15 minutes of your office, pay to park, and take a subway. Since in the case of New York City you would almost surely need to pay for parking were you to drive into the congestion pricing zone anyhow, this could actually save you money and time, while reducing traffic in the urban center.
This is a really really good point, and seems to be the big unspoken truth in the HDTV industry right now. Any video editor who has worked with the 720 or 1080 standards will tell you that even a high-end computer is incapable of playing back a HD stream uncompressed, typically because it simply can't stream data off the hard drive fast enough. In fact, in practice most computers can't play back an uncompressed "480" (née NTSC D1) stream. There most certainly isn't a RAID 0 array in the typical TiVO, let alone the bandwidth to actually download this scale of content, so the solution cable providers and DVR manufacturers use is lossy compression.
Yep, and honestly, that's all this is: a bright as hell monitor. Which may be great, and may possess a "high dynamic range" but it doesn't display what we call HDR. HDR images are a series of exposures merged into one image such that a tonal range beyond the perception of a normal camera is captured. This can be a still or a still sequence (i.e. video). If you're digital compositor, this is tremendously useful, as you can take HDR images and tweak the exposure to match the lighting of the rest of the scene. That's why Industrial Light and Magic invented the Open EXR format for HDR images, so they could tweak exposure for their 3D renders to composite them into scenes shot with live actors (and hence lighting that can't be tweaked so much in post). But a super-bright monitor labeled "HDR" is just a marketing gimmick. Take a look at the demo image at the bottom of TFA, it's a great example. If that was HDR, you'd be able to see the detail of the mountains, because it would at once be displaying the sky underexposed relative to the scene's average exposure value (so you see the cloud details) and the mountains overexposed (so you see the details of the peaks, instead of just silhouettes). This would display just fine on a conventional monitor, albeit in a much more life-like manner on a super-bright one. Yes, it's true that humans can perceive a much greater luminance range then most displays can provide, but that's no reason to get sloppy with our terminology. HDR is a tool to streamline workflow for digital compositors and for photographers to create images impossible in a single exposure with conventional camera equipment. It's not a display technology.
Mod the parent up, this is spot-on. Colleges and universities are slacking on their own academic integrity policies and diluting the quality of education in the process. The threat of instantaneous, procedurally-mandated expulsion is the best deterrent a faculty member has to dissuade students from cheating. But, as the article states and I can attest, that's not happening. There's no reason why catching cheaters should be a technological arms race between students and faculty-- if a small handful of kids were expelled in the first semester for their first cheating offense, as those academic integrity pledges they all sign says will happen, chances are all but the most recalcitrant would refrain from cheating altogether.
I taught as adjunct faculty in a prestigious Masters-level program this summer and can attest that plagiarism is rampant. In my class of 14 students I caught two. One admitted to it, the other was caught red-handed thanks to Google. In theory both should have been expelled. I initiated academic integrity proceedings (most schools have a procedure in which faculty document suspected plagiarism and talk to the student, and then, if not satisfied with the student's excuse, report it, at which point it is out of the faculty member's hands) and failed both students. Lo and behold, the administration let them continue in the program. Now, that's frustrating as an instructor to have no authority to put your foot down, but the real losers here are the other students in the program. They see that, in fact, you can get away with plagiarism, meaning that the very worst students among them will probably do so themselves at some point (sabotaging their own education), and the very best students will be demoralized by the knowledge that the program isn't nearly as prestigious as it seems to be. There's no way professors can hold this problem in check when school administrations are working against them-- the problem isn't technology, it's greedy and shortsighted school administrations. Clearly dismissing large numbers of students is not a good thing by any means for a school as a whole. But how in the world did dismissing students who break academic integrity pledges become more problematic then graduating them? I mean, isn't the whole point of a degree to certify that you completed a set curriculum of coursework? Allowing these kids to pass defeats the whole notion of a degree as a signifier of a certain level of aptitude.
It is a common misconception that screen resolution and "pixel density" have something to do with one another. Digital images are measured in pixels, DPI is a measure of output resolution, calculated by dividing the pixel dimensions by the physical dimensions. On screen (be it a computer or a LCD TV) it actually makes no difference whether your images is 1 DPI or 1 million DPI-- it sill displays the same number of pixels. Try it- open an image in Photoshop and drop the DPI to 1 while keeping the pixel dimensions the same. There's no difference-- until you go to print it, at which point your 720x540 (NTSC D1 square, or standard TV) image is wanting to output 720 inches across. But you're right that whether ot not it's the final resolution jump goes right back to the output resolution question. 7680 x 4320 pixels is probably way beyond human perception across a 21" screen, but for wall-size projectors, people may try to muster more resolution yet-- assuming we can even capture images that big. The real question here is where in the world will this content come from? Even 35mm film, which is the higest res conventional moving picture medium in use today, is typically digitized in a format called Cineon 4k, which is a (measley) 3654 pixels across, half the resolution of this newfangled medium. Good thing it's 25 years off, we'll need that time to miniturize IMAX cameras or invent some 30 megapixel CCD in order to create content for this display technology.
...in the form of an alternate DNS. 202.27.184.3 and 202.27.184.5
Of course, I used their "chat" window to get that info, which rewarded me with a Dell text ad at the end of the session. I guess shoveling ads at subscribers is the new business model over at Earthlink.
good god no - that's just wrong
on
Geeks in Management?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I just wrapped up a year-long project as the creative (ie. non-technical or "normal") lead under a programmer-turned-project manager, who happened to also be an Army NCO. If you wanted a dictionary definition of how to f*ck up a project and piss off your subordinates, this guy's handling would make a great case study, and he pulled it off by doing EXACTLY what the parent post suggests: treating his subordinate "normals" firmly and unequivalently with a sense of military discipline.
Military leadership and overstucturing is COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE for the vast majority of jobs. Consider it. Military leadership techniques are designed to allow people to perform a finite range of tasks with zero chance of screw up, redundancy when necesary, and replacability. If you treat an employee like a soldier, you get minimal efficiency because you're discouraging creative thinking and self-direction. Perhaps more importantly, soldiers have something that employees lack: absolute dedication. If a solider hates the job he toughts it out, that's why they call it "service." You can shoot him if he flips and decides to leave. If an employee hates it, she will quit, or at least do the absolute minimum excepted and bitch about it. And you sure as hell can't cap her for it. "Normals" aren't really that different from geeks, they like to be treated with respect too, and work harder for bosses who "get it" and respect them (or at least seem to).
The parent does make one good point: ask why you were selected. Because if you're such a far-gone geek that you belive that all "normals" need "a firm structure," then clearly your bosses just f*cked up in a big way promoting you. You're a geek, that means you have great technical skills and perhaps a unusual point of view. That menas you have some skills to apply to management, but it doesn't mean you're some sort of Neitzchian ubermenche entitled to treat everyone like idiots.
Sorry to pounce all over that post, but my god did I have a bad experince with a manager who may as well have taken that exact same advice.
the parent post makes a very good point, let me add some firsthand experience. I've shared DSL with neighbors in my various apartments over the last couple years; here in NYC where high population density means a 10' patch cable or a single off-the-shelf access point is often all it takes to get your neighbor plugged in, there's no reason not to. After years of sharing DSL lines, I'm about to get a cable modem. The problem is that both my current neighbor and I are content creators of one sort or another, and thus need that upload bandwidth. Because DSL is asynchronous, the uploads DRAG for the uploader and the bandwith chokes for everyone else.
You might figure "hey, whatever, I have 800 up and X megs down, even if one user eats 400 up there's still plenty of bandwidth to go around." That's totally logical in terms of resource allocation, but DSL doesn't work that way: according to Verizon (who had to explain to me why my I wasn't getting my promised bandwidth) half your upload bandwidth is half your bandwidth period. That's why Bittorrent drags so badly on DSL unless you cap the upload with CarraFix or something of that nature. So far as I understand it, this is standard practice for the DSL industry.
So my advice to you is, if possible, share some other sort of connection, because DSL doesn't lend itself to this very well. If that's not possible, just be very clear with all your neighbors before asking them to chip in that this is primarily a down-only network and that upload-intensive activities like Bittorrent or freelance web development won't fly. You can compromise a bit by setting rules. At my last apartment with a shared DSL line, we all agreed that you had to take it easy on bandwidth durring the day so people could work, but that you could do whatever at night. That worked out OK. If you're feeling frisky no doubt you could configure a server or routing device to do this for you, but I lack that sort of expertise and initiative. Sharing broadband is a cool way to do something nice for your neighbors by letting people (including you) get fast web access on the cheap, but if you intend to furnish a connection for any sort of bandwidth-intensive activities, look away from DSL.
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I have to say, putting out a DRM scheme that completely fucks up After Effects is a new low for Apple. Ya, I know, I'm an idiot for installing the thing on my workstation last night without testing it somehow, but you know what? Apple markets these machines specifically as After Effects workstations. I think it's reasonable to expect that they test their software for compatibility with the applications they advertise their machines as being great for. Or if they're not willing to do that sort of testing, at least provide a readily available means of uninstall.
At least in New York City, which is (so far as I know) the only place in the country that is seriously considering implementing a congestion pricing scheme in the immediate future, the vast majority of the revenue from the congestion pricing scheme is specifically earmarked for upgrades to public transportation. This is meant to address exactly the concern you raise, that public transit is woefully inadequate in many places, and could become even more so as ridership increased due to congestion pricing. A very decent public transit system is basically a prerequisite-- the idea of congestion pricing is to both alleviate traffic, to make existing public transit systems an increasingly viable alternative to driving, and to give drivers an economic impetus to explore this alternative. Forcing drivers to pay a toll that benefits the public transit system they don't use seems like regressive tax, but the other popular method for raising money for public transit, hiking fares, is a lot more regressive. Public transit may not be an appealing option for you, but is is an option. It doesn't work the other way for people who do not own cars. The other huge misconception about congestion pricing is that these measures are only being considered seriously for use in urban centers, not for metropolitan areas where you might be miles from the nearest public transit option. So in the case of New York, the congestion pricing scheme only applies to midtown and downtown Manhattan. If you lived 60 minutes away and didn't have good access to public transit, you could still drive to within 15 minutes of your office, pay to park, and take a subway. Since in the case of New York City you would almost surely need to pay for parking were you to drive into the congestion pricing zone anyhow, this could actually save you money and time, while reducing traffic in the urban center.
This is a really really good point, and seems to be the big unspoken truth in the HDTV industry right now. Any video editor who has worked with the 720 or 1080 standards will tell you that even a high-end computer is incapable of playing back a HD stream uncompressed, typically because it simply can't stream data off the hard drive fast enough. In fact, in practice most computers can't play back an uncompressed "480" (née NTSC D1) stream. There most certainly isn't a RAID 0 array in the typical TiVO, let alone the bandwidth to actually download this scale of content, so the solution cable providers and DVR manufacturers use is lossy compression.
Yep, and honestly, that's all this is: a bright as hell monitor. Which may be great, and may possess a "high dynamic range" but it doesn't display what we call HDR. HDR images are a series of exposures merged into one image such that a tonal range beyond the perception of a normal camera is captured. This can be a still or a still sequence (i.e. video). If you're digital compositor, this is tremendously useful, as you can take HDR images and tweak the exposure to match the lighting of the rest of the scene. That's why Industrial Light and Magic invented the Open EXR format for HDR images, so they could tweak exposure for their 3D renders to composite them into scenes shot with live actors (and hence lighting that can't be tweaked so much in post). But a super-bright monitor labeled "HDR" is just a marketing gimmick. Take a look at the demo image at the bottom of TFA, it's a great example. If that was HDR, you'd be able to see the detail of the mountains, because it would at once be displaying the sky underexposed relative to the scene's average exposure value (so you see the cloud details) and the mountains overexposed (so you see the details of the peaks, instead of just silhouettes). This would display just fine on a conventional monitor, albeit in a much more life-like manner on a super-bright one. Yes, it's true that humans can perceive a much greater luminance range then most displays can provide, but that's no reason to get sloppy with our terminology. HDR is a tool to streamline workflow for digital compositors and for photographers to create images impossible in a single exposure with conventional camera equipment. It's not a display technology.
Mod the parent up, this is spot-on. Colleges and universities are slacking on their own academic integrity policies and diluting the quality of education in the process. The threat of instantaneous, procedurally-mandated expulsion is the best deterrent a faculty member has to dissuade students from cheating. But, as the article states and I can attest, that's not happening. There's no reason why catching cheaters should be a technological arms race between students and faculty-- if a small handful of kids were expelled in the first semester for their first cheating offense, as those academic integrity pledges they all sign says will happen, chances are all but the most recalcitrant would refrain from cheating altogether.
I taught as adjunct faculty in a prestigious Masters-level program this summer and can attest that plagiarism is rampant. In my class of 14 students I caught two. One admitted to it, the other was caught red-handed thanks to Google. In theory both should have been expelled. I initiated academic integrity proceedings (most schools have a procedure in which faculty document suspected plagiarism and talk to the student, and then, if not satisfied with the student's excuse, report it, at which point it is out of the faculty member's hands) and failed both students. Lo and behold, the administration let them continue in the program. Now, that's frustrating as an instructor to have no authority to put your foot down, but the real losers here are the other students in the program. They see that, in fact, you can get away with plagiarism, meaning that the very worst students among them will probably do so themselves at some point (sabotaging their own education), and the very best students will be demoralized by the knowledge that the program isn't nearly as prestigious as it seems to be. There's no way professors can hold this problem in check when school administrations are working against them-- the problem isn't technology, it's greedy and shortsighted school administrations. Clearly dismissing large numbers of students is not a good thing by any means for a school as a whole. But how in the world did dismissing students who break academic integrity pledges become more problematic then graduating them? I mean, isn't the whole point of a degree to certify that you completed a set curriculum of coursework? Allowing these kids to pass defeats the whole notion of a degree as a signifier of a certain level of aptitude.
It is a common misconception that screen resolution and "pixel density" have something to do with one another. Digital images are measured in pixels, DPI is a measure of output resolution, calculated by dividing the pixel dimensions by the physical dimensions. On screen (be it a computer or a LCD TV) it actually makes no difference whether your images is 1 DPI or 1 million DPI-- it sill displays the same number of pixels. Try it- open an image in Photoshop and drop the DPI to 1 while keeping the pixel dimensions the same. There's no difference-- until you go to print it, at which point your 720x540 (NTSC D1 square, or standard TV) image is wanting to output 720 inches across. But you're right that whether ot not it's the final resolution jump goes right back to the output resolution question. 7680 x 4320 pixels is probably way beyond human perception across a 21" screen, but for wall-size projectors, people may try to muster more resolution yet-- assuming we can even capture images that big. The real question here is where in the world will this content come from? Even 35mm film, which is the higest res conventional moving picture medium in use today, is typically digitized in a format called Cineon 4k, which is a (measley) 3654 pixels across, half the resolution of this newfangled medium. Good thing it's 25 years off, we'll need that time to miniturize IMAX cameras or invent some 30 megapixel CCD in order to create content for this display technology.
Of course, I used their "chat" window to get that info, which rewarded me with a Dell text ad at the end of the session. I guess shoveling ads at subscribers is the new business model over at Earthlink.
Military leadership and overstucturing is COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE for the vast majority of jobs. Consider it. Military leadership techniques are designed to allow people to perform a finite range of tasks with zero chance of screw up, redundancy when necesary, and replacability. If you treat an employee like a soldier, you get minimal efficiency because you're discouraging creative thinking and self-direction. Perhaps more importantly, soldiers have something that employees lack: absolute dedication. If a solider hates the job he toughts it out, that's why they call it "service." You can shoot him if he flips and decides to leave. If an employee hates it, she will quit, or at least do the absolute minimum excepted and bitch about it. And you sure as hell can't cap her for it. "Normals" aren't really that different from geeks, they like to be treated with respect too, and work harder for bosses who "get it" and respect them (or at least seem to).
The parent does make one good point: ask why you were selected. Because if you're such a far-gone geek that you belive that all "normals" need "a firm structure," then clearly your bosses just f*cked up in a big way promoting you. You're a geek, that means you have great technical skills and perhaps a unusual point of view. That menas you have some skills to apply to management, but it doesn't mean you're some sort of Neitzchian ubermenche entitled to treat everyone like idiots.
Sorry to pounce all over that post, but my god did I have a bad experince with a manager who may as well have taken that exact same advice.
You might figure "hey, whatever, I have 800 up and X megs down, even if one user eats 400 up there's still plenty of bandwidth to go around." That's totally logical in terms of resource allocation, but DSL doesn't work that way: according to Verizon (who had to explain to me why my I wasn't getting my promised bandwidth) half your upload bandwidth is half your bandwidth period. That's why Bittorrent drags so badly on DSL unless you cap the upload with CarraFix or something of that nature. So far as I understand it, this is standard practice for the DSL industry.
So my advice to you is, if possible, share some other sort of connection, because DSL doesn't lend itself to this very well. If that's not possible, just be very clear with all your neighbors before asking them to chip in that this is primarily a down-only network and that upload-intensive activities like Bittorrent or freelance web development won't fly. You can compromise a bit by setting rules. At my last apartment with a shared DSL line, we all agreed that you had to take it easy on bandwidth durring the day so people could work, but that you could do whatever at night. That worked out OK. If you're feeling frisky no doubt you could configure a server or routing device to do this for you, but I lack that sort of expertise and initiative. Sharing broadband is a cool way to do something nice for your neighbors by letting people (including you) get fast web access on the cheap, but if you intend to furnish a connection for any sort of bandwidth-intensive activities, look away from DSL.