But, I have to say I wouldn't be someone who would ever use this. I can see the merit for some stills, I can see some use for documentary, I can see the merit for amateurs wanting to capture a wedding, or for limited VFX scenes in motion pictures, but as a cinematographer this is pretty much the opposite of what I would ever want to achieve.
Give me chiaroscuro every time. You only have to look at the work of Conrad L Hall, Gordon Willis, Caleb Deschanel or Nestor Almendros to name but a few, to see how beautiful shadow, silhouette and darkness can be.
HDR gives far, far too much information, and produces very flat images for motion pictures, in my opinion.
But Google has this insanely profitable AdWords business, and therefore can fund a money-loser and work the ads in slowly... which is exactly what they did with YouTube. Look out phone companies, you're next.
That's true, sort of. If they had stuck with adwords that would have been completely fine. That's not, however, what they did. Over the course of a year Youtube has gone from being usable, to completely unusable for me. Flashing ads, ads that pop up over the video content, animated gifs and all sorts of other crap that make it near impossible to watch the actual video playing.
It's also no longer possible for me to load video at all in Firefox, I have to use Safari. I know it's probably some setting in adblock that's preventing the video loading. I could change this, but honestly it's easier just not to ever use Youtube again.
A BIG part of Google's do no evil mantra, was not having invasive ads. This has been completely thrown out with Youtube. Sure it's profitable, but it's no less evil than Yahoo and many others.
Personally, I'm not supporting it. I'm simply not using Youtube. I'm sure I am not alone. To my mind this is evil, and it's a sign that Google will compromise their values for profit.
That it gets abandoned, and a team of open source coders picks it up?
Vastly improves it, slims it down and it gains incredible usage -- only to then bloat it up again and effectively recreate all the bad things about Netscape... and so the cycle continues...
Evidently Mozilla learned nothing from the history of Netscape.
It's great that no-one in China reads/. or reads English, or would ever think to find out what's going on at the Usenix security conference.
No doubt this will completely fly under their radar and will be an huge success...
Oh wait...
Seriously, what -- exactly -- is the point of this software? It seems to be ridiculously easy to get around, especially as it's being fully advertised here on/. and other news sites.
There's an episode (Voyager, I think) where crew are handed out single letters from home on a PADD. Looks like their hard disks were really, really small.
"Marshall McLuhan said "The Medium is the Message" nearly half a century ago."
He also coined "Global Village", and the problem with twitter is that it makes you realize that there's one hell of a lot of village idiots in the village.
"that does it for all the movies and TV shows that display the FBI seal"
Movies and TV do not show the seal, they show something that looks very like it. If you pause the X-Files opening credits, you can see their FBI Badges have design differences and wording differences from an actual agents badges.
This is generally the case for any police force or military throughout the world represented in film or TV -- the art dept makes up things that look similar. This is common practice in film and TV.
Yes... but I'm not buying one, unless it comes in brown.
Seriously, MS's biggest Achilles Heel is it's whole Marketing / Design Dept. If they had better people there, they'd be a lot more successful, regardless of hardware or software.
It's effectively hiring 10 people to do a job and then only paying one of them (at most). It's basically using the fact that they're "Contests" to stiff 99% of the people in the business.
While that's true, it is also an established business model in many fields. For example, Advertising Agencies, or Architects, TV Pilots, or Engineering firms competing for tenders and contracts. Often they have to do a lot of the work, without ever knowing if they win the contract.
Bottom line though, is that the cream will always rise. If you are genuinely talented then you will succeed. In this particular case of graphics designers, they have been overcharging for decades, more competition will not hurt -- and this business model might help avoid things like the disastrous, overpriced logo for the London Olympics.
As the media outlets adjust to the new world and figure out ways to regulate, it's hard to see how this vision is anything but inevitable.
It cannot be. There's a massive logic gap.
If it is possible -- and it is -- for a TV network to raise billions in advertising dollars, even with a tiny market-share for some shows (comparable to the readership of a large newspaper), then it MUST be possible to gain enough revenue from advertising to sustain a newspaper. A newspaper has far far far less overheads than a TV channel.
Either TV advertising is VASTLY overrated (and it must be, to some degree at least). Or content providers and advertisers are VASTLY misunderstanding Internet advertising. Or likely -- a combination of both.
If you can fund shows that cost a million plus dollars per episode, reaching around 5 million people, then you can DEFINITELY fund a national newspaper with 3 centuries of branding. If you can fund a local radio station with advertising you can do that for a local newspaper too.
Especially since: there's no click-through on TV ads, most people either Tivo out the ads, get up and do something else, or change channel temporarily.
The problem is that newspapers have never understood the net, and the potential for advertising revenue is completely untapped. Advertisers don't understand the internet either. If they did, there wouldn't be flash ads, and measured click-through rates, and it would be much easier for small businesses to get ads online.
We in the UK pay for the BBC willingly because it is worth the price, and we don't for the Times because it's, well, who cares?
That's as far from the truth as could ever be. We pay for the BBC because it's a legal requirement of owning a TV set. There is no choice involved whatsoever (other than not owning a TV set, even if you only watch other channels).
Many people, probably most, would not pay for the BBC given the choice.
The computer is just a tool. I'd think it has no direct effect on education whatsoever. Smart kids with supportive parents will gain a great deal from having a computer. Dumb kids with dumber parents will spend hours on Youtube, twitter etc and learn nothing of consequence.
The UK has just announced a program to get everyone online. However, 20% of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Getting those people online isn't going to benefit anyone, in fact it'll just increase the amount of crap that's already on the Internet.
how can a 12 something button mice news is in idle, as if something irrelevant to/. ?
I suspect the answer is that samzenpus has no clue what he is doing. He regularly posts idle stories in the main/. sections. And now he posts a valid story in idle.
Samzenpus and Idle need to be cut loose as a separate website. I've generally no desire to ever read any of his submissions -- but since idle pollutes the RSS feed, it's near impossible to avoid them. That is the best solution for everyone -- those who want to read his submissions can, and those who don't, don't have to have the annoyance of them. It's only fair. This really, really needs to be fixed.
I think all content producers are generally looking forward to moving to HTML5 video. That doesn't mean that Flash is dead. It could potentially mean that in 3-5 years Flash will not be used for video.
That very much does mean Flash is dead. Other than video, there's no sane reason to use Flash as a developer.
Sure, you can use it for laying out websites -- but since a good, and growing, percentage of potential site visitors either can't use the site at all, or can only do so at risk of crashing their browser (all Mac users, for instance), you'll be getting less and less visitors as the days go on.
Certainly, if you are not developing a commercial site and the number of visitors/potential customers isn't important to you, you can go ahead and use Flash to ensure certain design components lay out the way you want. However, if you are looking to make money, millions of iPad users with cash in their pockets will never see your site. You don't need their money -- fine, go ahead and use Flash. Otherwise, learn to code, and design better (with the user in mind) and use alternatives. Flash has never had the user penetration and acceptance that developers thought it had. It's always had problems, and many people/firms just never installed the plugins. But the iPad/iPhone means millions more people not using it. Those are rich millions too. Sure, the iPhone has a small percentage of overall phone sales. However, in some circles there's a lot of iPhone users -- I work in the film industry, almost everyone has an iPhone. Rich, creative people -- none of whom will see a Flash site for most of the day.
Flash is currently useful for video, and some animations where perhaps a 360 of a product is needed. But HTML5 will replace that.
Other than for video, Flash has always been the tool of dictators. Developers who want to control how you see and hear how they want you to see it. It is not a technology of choice, nor freedom.
There is a reason why browsers have a back and forward button. But Flash developers hate you so much, they don't want you to use them. And that's why advertisers love Flash -- because it gives them a little piece of control of your computer.
Flash is dying. The sooner it's dead the better. Fuck Flash.
A lot of porn producers do use h264. Frankly, not supporting h264 is going to be the end of Firefox, not a reason not to use h264.
The thing most people developing with Flash seem to forget though, is that while 99% of browsers may theoretically support it... it runs like shit on any Mac, it's not available on iPad or iPhone, many business users don't install it in work systems, and many people deliberately don't install it on their home systems.
If you develop your site using a lot of Flash with no html alternative, there is a significant section of society (and in the case of Apple products, potential customers with high disposable income) who will not be able to use your website.
The writing is on the wall for Flash. It is time to stop using it on websites, because in a few years it will be as stone-cold-dead as Realplayer -- just as that was once as ubiquitous as Flash.
Oh and of course, I do realise that the left has much bias aswell. But R.M. does take it to a new level.
Bias isn't a reason not to trust a media source -- assuming you know they are biased. I completely trust Murduch's outlets, because I know they are biased and can read through it. That doesn't mean I agree with them, just that I know I can rely on the info to be biased in a certain way, and thus have an indication of truth, at the very least.
It's much, much harder with media that claims to be unbiased, but of course, is -- because all of them are. The BBC being the perfect example. They claim to be unbiased, but are very much not. It is, however, often hard to tell what their underlying spin is. Thus, I would never ever trust one single thing they say.
"But youtube (and several clones) are already in that spot. In fact, there are a lot of web "tv" series running in that media already for years now."
Well, no. That's not really the case. Youtube is near-useless for high quality work of any reasonable length, and the eyeburning adfest that it is now won't help that.
The fundamental problem for indie film or TV makers is NOT the medium. It's always been possible to put stuff up on Youtube (where, incidentally, Youtube then owns a big part of the rights -- a dealbreaker for most people), or to put it up on bit torrent, or amazon or itunes for that matter. That's easy. What is far, far, far from easy is getting anyone to find it there.
The bottleneck for all indie filmmakers is a means of promoting their film -- if a distributor won't pick it up. You will have no chance with the mainstream media, except maybe locally. Putting it up on the web somewhere will just get drowned out in all the garbage that is on youtube, all the stupid tag-spammed mashups and skateboarding dogs. There is no easy way to let your audience know your film or show is out there. Hollywood and TVland has that whole channel sewn-up.
This is a great idea, and I hope it works out for them. But they are the pioneers, and as with all things promotion-wise, it will be much harder for those that follow them. The yellow brick road to fame always rolls up behind you.
"When they figure out everyone is muting the game, and no one can hear their ads as a result, you can bet pressure will be applied on the stadiums to ban them."
That would be true, were it not for the fact that, unlike most US sports, there aren't many ad breaks in a soccer game. Also, in the UK many of the games are on the BBC, and the BBC doesn't openly advertise -- there's no actual commercial breaks, and all its advertising is done unethically, through covert product placement -- since it's forbidden from advertising. Not that that stops them.
If you must use windows, I totally fail to understand why you need to PAY to use anti-virus. There's plenty of free anti-virus software out there that is better than any of the racketeering paid-for versions. I would have thought every single reader of/. knows this.
Should this article be on/.? It seems more suited for some AOL support board.
They have to turn a profit. Look at how over-run youtube has become. It's pretty annoying, but they did it gradually which helped silent the complaints.
I'm surprised there's not been considerably much more outrage at Youtube actually. I find the Youtube site to be no longer usable. (In fact, it is actually completely impossible to use it with adblock and firefox -- does this mean I whitelist it? No, it means I use another video site.) While I understand that Google needs to raise revenue from youtube, the way they've done it does suggest they've lost sight of their users. It's like with the very huge public disaster that was the bing-style images on their homepage. Their entire success is built on the fact that the home page was minimal and their ads were contextual and non-intrusive. That formula made them billions -- now they're beginning to lose their way.
Twitter is different. It always has had a massive noise to signal ratio -- adding more noise in the way of advertising probably won't affect anyone much. It's core userbase has the attention span of a goldfish, they probably won't even notice the ads. Twitter was doomed from the second it launched -- it was always only a question of when, not if, it ceased to be the "next big thing". It's already peaked.
Slashdot Mirror
But, I have to say I wouldn't be someone who would ever use this. I can see the merit for some stills, I can see some use for documentary, I can see the merit for amateurs wanting to capture a wedding, or for limited VFX scenes in motion pictures, but as a cinematographer this is pretty much the opposite of what I would ever want to achieve.
Give me chiaroscuro every time. You only have to look at the work of Conrad L Hall, Gordon Willis, Caleb Deschanel or Nestor Almendros to name but a few, to see how beautiful shadow, silhouette and darkness can be.
HDR gives far, far too much information, and produces very flat images for motion pictures, in my opinion.
That's true, sort of. If they had stuck with adwords that would have been completely fine. That's not, however, what they did. Over the course of a year Youtube has gone from being usable, to completely unusable for me. Flashing ads, ads that pop up over the video content, animated gifs and all sorts of other crap that make it near impossible to watch the actual video playing.
It's also no longer possible for me to load video at all in Firefox, I have to use Safari. I know it's probably some setting in adblock that's preventing the video loading. I could change this, but honestly it's easier just not to ever use Youtube again.
A BIG part of Google's do no evil mantra, was not having invasive ads. This has been completely thrown out with Youtube. Sure it's profitable, but it's no less evil than Yahoo and many others.
Personally, I'm not supporting it. I'm simply not using Youtube. I'm sure I am not alone. To my mind this is evil, and it's a sign that Google will compromise their values for profit.
With a twist.
Vastly improves it, slims it down and it gains incredible usage -- only to then bloat it up again and effectively recreate all the bad things about Netscape... and so the cycle continues...
Evidently Mozilla learned nothing from the history of Netscape.
It's great that no-one in China reads /. or reads English, or would ever think to find out what's going on at the Usenix security conference.
/. and other news sites.
No doubt this will completely fly under their radar and will be an huge success...
Oh wait...
Seriously, what -- exactly -- is the point of this software? It seems to be ridiculously easy to get around, especially as it's being fully advertised here on
less space than a nomad... lame.
There's an episode (Voyager, I think) where crew are handed out single letters from home on a PADD. Looks like their hard disks were really, really small.
He also coined "Global Village", and the problem with twitter is that it makes you realize that there's one hell of a lot of village idiots in the village.
Hard to imagine anyone would make that mistake -- they are polar opposites. One is concerned with freedom of speech, the other very much isn't.
So, so ironic that their lawyer is called Godwin. You just couldn't make that up.
Movies and TV do not show the seal, they show something that looks very like it. If you pause the X-Files opening credits, you can see their FBI Badges have design differences and wording differences from an actual agents badges.
This is generally the case for any police force or military throughout the world represented in film or TV -- the art dept makes up things that look similar. This is common practice in film and TV.
Yes... but I'm not buying one, unless it comes in brown.
Seriously, MS's biggest Achilles Heel is it's whole Marketing / Design Dept. If they had better people there, they'd be a lot more successful, regardless of hardware or software.
For curbing "premature unnecessary debate", Australian Government, meet Barbara Streisand...
While that's true, it is also an established business model in many fields. For example, Advertising Agencies, or Architects, TV Pilots, or Engineering firms competing for tenders and contracts. Often they have to do a lot of the work, without ever knowing if they win the contract.
Bottom line though, is that the cream will always rise. If you are genuinely talented then you will succeed. In this particular case of graphics designers, they have been overcharging for decades, more competition will not hurt -- and this business model might help avoid things like the disastrous, overpriced logo for the London Olympics.
It cannot be. There's a massive logic gap.
If it is possible -- and it is -- for a TV network to raise billions in advertising dollars, even with a tiny market-share for some shows (comparable to the readership of a large newspaper), then it MUST be possible to gain enough revenue from advertising to sustain a newspaper. A newspaper has far far far less overheads than a TV channel.
Either TV advertising is VASTLY overrated (and it must be, to some degree at least). Or content providers and advertisers are VASTLY misunderstanding Internet advertising. Or likely -- a combination of both.
If you can fund shows that cost a million plus dollars per episode, reaching around 5 million people, then you can DEFINITELY fund a national newspaper with 3 centuries of branding. If you can fund a local radio station with advertising you can do that for a local newspaper too.
Especially since: there's no click-through on TV ads, most people either Tivo out the ads, get up and do something else, or change channel temporarily.
The problem is that newspapers have never understood the net, and the potential for advertising revenue is completely untapped. Advertisers don't understand the internet either. If they did, there wouldn't be flash ads, and measured click-through rates, and it would be much easier for small businesses to get ads online.
That's as far from the truth as could ever be. We pay for the BBC because it's a legal requirement of owning a TV set. There is no choice involved whatsoever (other than not owning a TV set, even if you only watch other channels).
Many people, probably most, would not pay for the BBC given the choice.
I think the brown zune was clear proof that counter-intelligence is often found in Microsoft.
The computer is just a tool. I'd think it has no direct effect on education whatsoever. Smart kids with supportive parents will gain a great deal from having a computer. Dumb kids with dumber parents will spend hours on Youtube, twitter etc and learn nothing of consequence.
The UK has just announced a program to get everyone online. However, 20% of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate and innumerate. Getting those people online isn't going to benefit anyone, in fact it'll just increase the amount of crap that's already on the Internet.
It was 1500 years ago, and yet the lesson has never been learned by many.
Manage by overextending, with long chains of command and a reliance on slave labor, and your empire will collapse.
Outsource, and you are simply counting the days until your business fails / is taken over.
I suspect the answer is that samzenpus has no clue what he is doing. He regularly posts idle stories in the main /. sections. And now he posts a valid story in idle.
Samzenpus and Idle need to be cut loose as a separate website. I've generally no desire to ever read any of his submissions -- but since idle pollutes the RSS feed, it's near impossible to avoid them. That is the best solution for everyone -- those who want to read his submissions can, and those who don't, don't have to have the annoyance of them. It's only fair. This really, really needs to be fixed.
That very much does mean Flash is dead. Other than video, there's no sane reason to use Flash as a developer.
Sure, you can use it for laying out websites -- but since a good, and growing, percentage of potential site visitors either can't use the site at all, or can only do so at risk of crashing their browser (all Mac users, for instance), you'll be getting less and less visitors as the days go on.
Certainly, if you are not developing a commercial site and the number of visitors/potential customers isn't important to you, you can go ahead and use Flash to ensure certain design components lay out the way you want. However, if you are looking to make money, millions of iPad users with cash in their pockets will never see your site. You don't need their money -- fine, go ahead and use Flash. Otherwise, learn to code, and design better (with the user in mind) and use alternatives. Flash has never had the user penetration and acceptance that developers thought it had. It's always had problems, and many people/firms just never installed the plugins. But the iPad/iPhone means millions more people not using it. Those are rich millions too. Sure, the iPhone has a small percentage of overall phone sales. However, in some circles there's a lot of iPhone users -- I work in the film industry, almost everyone has an iPhone. Rich, creative people -- none of whom will see a Flash site for most of the day.
Flash is currently useful for video, and some animations where perhaps a 360 of a product is needed. But HTML5 will replace that.
Other than for video, Flash has always been the tool of dictators. Developers who want to control how you see and hear how they want you to see it. It is not a technology of choice, nor freedom. There is a reason why browsers have a back and forward button. But Flash developers hate you so much, they don't want you to use them. And that's why advertisers love Flash -- because it gives them a little piece of control of your computer.
Flash is dying. The sooner it's dead the better. Fuck Flash.
A lot of porn producers do use h264. Frankly, not supporting h264 is going to be the end of Firefox, not a reason not to use h264.
The thing most people developing with Flash seem to forget though, is that while 99% of browsers may theoretically support it... it runs like shit on any Mac, it's not available on iPad or iPhone, many business users don't install it in work systems, and many people deliberately don't install it on their home systems.
If you develop your site using a lot of Flash with no html alternative, there is a significant section of society (and in the case of Apple products, potential customers with high disposable income) who will not be able to use your website.
The writing is on the wall for Flash. It is time to stop using it on websites, because in a few years it will be as stone-cold-dead as Realplayer -- just as that was once as ubiquitous as Flash.
Bias isn't a reason not to trust a media source -- assuming you know they are biased. I completely trust Murduch's outlets, because I know they are biased and can read through it. That doesn't mean I agree with them, just that I know I can rely on the info to be biased in a certain way, and thus have an indication of truth, at the very least.
It's much, much harder with media that claims to be unbiased, but of course, is -- because all of them are. The BBC being the perfect example. They claim to be unbiased, but are very much not. It is, however, often hard to tell what their underlying spin is. Thus, I would never ever trust one single thing they say.
Well, no. That's not really the case. Youtube is near-useless for high quality work of any reasonable length, and the eyeburning adfest that it is now won't help that.
The fundamental problem for indie film or TV makers is NOT the medium. It's always been possible to put stuff up on Youtube (where, incidentally, Youtube then owns a big part of the rights -- a dealbreaker for most people), or to put it up on bit torrent, or amazon or itunes for that matter. That's easy. What is far, far, far from easy is getting anyone to find it there.
The bottleneck for all indie filmmakers is a means of promoting their film -- if a distributor won't pick it up. You will have no chance with the mainstream media, except maybe locally. Putting it up on the web somewhere will just get drowned out in all the garbage that is on youtube, all the stupid tag-spammed mashups and skateboarding dogs. There is no easy way to let your audience know your film or show is out there. Hollywood and TVland has that whole channel sewn-up.
This is a great idea, and I hope it works out for them. But they are the pioneers, and as with all things promotion-wise, it will be much harder for those that follow them. The yellow brick road to fame always rolls up behind you.
That would be true, were it not for the fact that, unlike most US sports, there aren't many ad breaks in a soccer game. Also, in the UK many of the games are on the BBC, and the BBC doesn't openly advertise -- there's no actual commercial breaks, and all its advertising is done unethically, through covert product placement -- since it's forbidden from advertising. Not that that stops them.
If you must use windows, I totally fail to understand why you need to PAY to use anti-virus. There's plenty of free anti-virus software out there that is better than any of the racketeering paid-for versions. I would have thought every single reader of /. knows this.
/.? It seems more suited for some AOL support board.
Should this article be on
I'm surprised there's not been considerably much more outrage at Youtube actually. I find the Youtube site to be no longer usable. (In fact, it is actually completely impossible to use it with adblock and firefox -- does this mean I whitelist it? No, it means I use another video site.) While I understand that Google needs to raise revenue from youtube, the way they've done it does suggest they've lost sight of their users. It's like with the very huge public disaster that was the bing-style images on their homepage. Their entire success is built on the fact that the home page was minimal and their ads were contextual and non-intrusive. That formula made them billions -- now they're beginning to lose their way.
Twitter is different. It always has had a massive noise to signal ratio -- adding more noise in the way of advertising probably won't affect anyone much. It's core userbase has the attention span of a goldfish, they probably won't even notice the ads. Twitter was doomed from the second it launched -- it was always only a question of when, not if, it ceased to be the "next big thing". It's already peaked.