...for not coming up with more contemporary motion picture archival clips from the U.S. Civil War persiod (1861-1865) so that he didn't have to pan the camera across static photos on an animation stand. Oh, well.
Hmmmm...lack of material? I guess you never saw The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns. It's 11 hours of documentary. In fact, it's one of the longest documentaries I can recall since Victory at Sea. He's got so much stuff packed in to this ball of wax that the average TV viewer won't hold still for all of it nor digest the majority of it. I don't recall much fat to his narrative and at times, the pace of his following the thread of two sides interacting through complex battle scenarious leaves many viewers dazed. I found it exhilarating, but at times I think he could have in places used a bit more of the "Ken Burns Effect", lingered a tad longer on a few key photos and slowed down the storytelling to let us viewers catch our breaths and let the details sink in.
It's pretty simple. India is in Asia. Computer programming requires intelligence. And Asians are the most intelligent.
Except that, unfortunately for them, folks on the Indian subcontinent ("South Asians") are classified as Caucasian along with us laggardly Europeans; not the East Asian racial group referred to on the graph as "Asian" (later on in the article they clarify this by explicitly discussing East Asians versus other racial categories). Oh, well--we can't all be lucky enough to be born Mongolian!
A quote from Eolas found Michael Doyle, two years ago:
"We're in discussions with major players in the Linux world and are working on a plan to resolve the '906 patent issue with the entire Linux community," Eolas Founder Michael Doyle told eWEEK.com, referring in short hand to the patent's full number. "The solution will be supportive of the open-source community."
White skin tones have a pretty narrow range of recognizable values...
I don't know what planet you're from, but my planet has people in it exhibiting a range in skin tones from just-off-white to damned near black. Narrow range? Try a few million discreet possible CMYK color values on a 16-bit-per-color-plane image--even for "white" skin (I'll humor you here, but any good photographer or makeup artist can tell you that it's a completely meaningless term). But I guess you have all of these stored in your brain so you don't need to reference an image on a color-calibrated monitor or do a color check, do you? Never mind that the good ol' eyedropper tool can't predict for you how that color adjusment you just did off the top of your head will reproduce on different printing presses/paper stocks. Oops.
Years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we actally looked at CMYK values to do prepress work.
Years ago, you gave all your contone stuff to a HELL or Scitex operator to throw on his $200,000 scanner and process on his $1 mil mainframe which backed up the scanner (one of the shops I worked at). Or lacking that, you gave it to an experienced process camera operator with a separation filter set and the proper lighting and film-back screen-angling jig. At least, if you gave a damn about how good your skin tones came out.
I fixed an awful lot of color work done on PCs back then where the originator thought that they had done a splendid job, but when you looked at the work on a color-calibrated monitor or ran your Chromacheck, the skin tones had a wonderful greenish pall (too much cyan...and the Chromacheck, since it was pulled from the sep negs, is a very good indication of what will happen on press). The heck of it was, most of these people in the Graphics Dept. at the IBMs and General Dynamics and EDSs and American Airlines of this world went through life thinking that their output was hunky-dory when in fact some guy like me at the service bureau was correcting their color for them on another platform.
Same here. And I'm a guy who bucked the trend and did high-end CMYK color on Windows for 7 years before largely giving up on it (partner still uses Win2K, although she dual-boots Linux and is learning it now).
One of the big problems under Windows is the lack of a commonly-agreed-upon color management subsystem that all vendors utilize, like Apple has in Kodak's ColorSync (and Linux has in lcms). On Windows, you've got Microsoft's color system, which everybody happily ignores, then Adobe's system, along with others. One of my favorite Stupid Windows Tricks (under Win2K): Open a Corel product (CorelDraw, say) and an Adobe product (Photoshop), go to adjust the color settings in CorelDraw and get a sharing violation. Um, guys...ICC profiles are supposed to be shared system resources.
Another big problem: Microsoft just doesn't "get" Postscript. Microsoft's Windows XP Postscript drivers are so lousy that some consultants are advising clients to stick with, or downgrade to, Win2K. Symptom: I've got a client who has five software patents from a long programming career with Tandy, Gateway and others. This guy's no Luser. Yet, he absolutely cannot get an EPS out of Microsoft Publisher with the image oriented correctly to his page setup. Obviously, a lot of this is Publisher's fault, but you get all sorts of nonsense out of Windows using Microsoft's Postscript printer drivers and graphics software that the folks on a Mac or Linux never have to put up with.
I'm doing most all my stuff on Linux now. It ain't perfect, but all the major graphic apps I like for prepress have settled on lcms for color management, plus Scribus has PDF-X/3 output that's so good it's said to better Adobe's own products. Interesting factoid: Ghostscript (the default Postscript interpreter for Linux) follows Adobe's Red Book so closely that it bitches about Illustrator EPS files that don't conform: "Floating point bounding boxes are not allowed in Level 1 Postscript."
Ah...I just had the same thought. Went to Dirac's home page, downloaded the codec and patches for various players/encoding tools.
Apparently it's far enough along that you can start using it today.
As somebody who does a bit of video work presented on the Net now and then, I'm going to start experimenting with Dirac and using it if at all possible.
Gates and crew didn't create BASIC. According to my reading, a couple of profs and a bunch of students at Dartmouth created BASIC and released it to the public domain. So, where do the fine folks at Micro-Soft (as it was named at the time) get off taking essentially an Open Source effort done by students and doing their own implementation--and then getting hacked off when hobbyists treat their product in the same spirit as the product Gates and Allen ripped off?
Is it true that Gates & Co. stole computer time to develop Altair BASIC? I've read several sources that claim that the "victims" of this piracy themselves stole time on a PDP-10 at Harvard's Aiken Computation Laboratory to develop their product. One source says the PDP-10 was purchased by DARPA, which means that Gates stole from U.S. taxpayers.
My Konqueror 3.5.0-0.1.fc4 passes. Hmmm...interesting. Wonder if a library difference is responsible for your newer version of Konqueror just missing, while my slightly older version sails on through? Libpng, maybe? Is it possible to get a newer Konqueror and older KDElibs?
Because when I keep it on my desktop, all that light makes it hard to read my monitor.
* * * * * * * "I never met a Mu Meson I didn't like." --Will Rogers
* * * * * * * "Have you put on weight, or is that a Mu Meson in your back pocket?" --Stalin to Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, 1945
I'm 50 years old and you can't pry me off a desktop for the Internet and messaging (I don't even care for laptops, I'm that much of a desktop purist). A decade ago I was living in an "interesting" ethnically mixed neighborhood in Dallas (OK, Oak Cliff for those of you who know the area) and noticed a parallel trend among African-American and Hispanic kids among my acquaintances: Mom and Dad had the PC in the family, Junior had a cell phone instead. Phones were extremely popular (to the point of being a fashion statement) and I got the distinct feeling it tied in to the Gangsta culture, where cell phones and Tek-9s were the preferred tools and the local atmosphere was saturated with a worship of gangs and drug dealers. Owning a PC or laptop was acting too much like Whitey for this youth culture. I can think of very few families in the neighborhood where members under the age of, say, 30 owned a PC--although a sizeable percentage of the parents and grandparents did.
You can argue that this was due to the relative poverty of a disadvantaged urban area, rather than a youth culture turning its back on PCs, but I'm seeing the same thing here in a small, rural Texas town that is extremely wealthy and 90%+ white. Everybody owns a cell phone, but it seems like the number of folks under age 30 who are passionate about personal computers (the way my gang was back in the 80's) just isn't there anymore. I've worked on audio editing and CD cover art production for 3 local musical acts, all folks under age 25 or so (and 2 of the 3 are Hip Hop acts here in rural Texas, go figure), and it's striking that the kids come to me to do their computer work because they just don't want to be bothered with a PC. It's not like they're poverty-striken and can't afford the gear. These kids think nothing of dropping $5,000 on amps and instruments and mikes, etc. And you can bet your last dime that each and every one of them has a cell phone and depend on the things like you and I depend on air (an amazing number of them don't even have land lines), but a personal computer just isn't considered a necessary lifestyle/career enhancement. PCs seem to be Old School and the kids who are trendy and whom other kids look to as peer leaders just don't seem to desire them.
I would never have been able to predict this personally, because back in '86 or so everybody I hung with or worked with was drooling over the prospect of shelling out $3,500 for a Mac or a PC. You could do graphics on 'em, you could do your bookkeeping, if you were a musician or music producer, well, you just weren't in the Game unless you had a Mac set up to process MIDI from your keyboard.
Not anymore. I guess not only am I old, I'm Old School as well.:(
In South Korea, meanwhile, the government has institutionalized the death of the personal computer in a program call the Post PC Era Initiative (formally, the "IT839 Strategy"):
You can scoff and say that "well, that's fine for the Asians, but it will never catch on here." I said the same thing 20 years ago when I saw my first Japanese anime and manga stuff. "Nah...this stuff is too tied in to a completely foreign culture and lifestyle and is too out-of-context for kids in the West to relate to. Never catch on here." Now I have a 24-hour anime channel on cable--in rural Texas. Proving once again (as has been proven countless times over the past 40 years if I had been paying attention) that whatever it is that the Japanese youth are doing now, we in the U.S. will be doing in another decade.
Consider: That is about to change, since you won't be able to get PPC-based macs.
That won't change for at least 3 years. By that time, CELL will be out. Remember that Apple is only moving part of their line to Intel starting next year...the part that media producers like me don't really care about. Powerbooks? Minis? Blah.
Granted, IBM may put one out, but what OS is it going to run? Linux? That won't help with mainstream desktop publishing. It will only help a little bit with video, namely those people who use filmgimp.
Guess you've never heard of Scribus. Right now, my studio is doing over 60% of our publication work on it. It will run on PPC as well, but Linux/x86 is its main development platform and I'm moving my studio to Linux (only one Windows box left out of 4 previous, along with 4 Macs). And I'm getting a lot of interest and questions from colleagues in the industry. Oh, by the way--Scribus under Linux produces better PDF X/3 than even Adobe InDesign/Windows or QuarkXPress through Distiller. Go figure.
Guess you've never heard of Cinelerra, either, or Blender. Lots of folks in the less-than-huge-budget video production market (which is 95% of the market) are testing the waters with those apps as well. Along with Cinepaint and several other small but quite interesting projects.
And for my audio productions, I've already cut several radio spots in Audacity, and Stanford has a complete Fedora-based distro called Planet CCRMA with oodles of audio production apps. It's quite interesing.
You're damned straight that I'll be standing in line to buy a CELL-based workstation if it's as fast as everybody thinks it will be, especially at the price points I'm hearing about. Every media producer on this planet will be lined up for one of these things. Hell, you'll be competitively dead in the water if CELL is even a quarter as good as the hype predicts and you don't have one, in my industry.
Consider: despite the lost "mindshare" of PPC, it still dominates one of the planet's largest industries (publishing/commercial printing/graphic arts...said to be third-largest industrial category in the U.S.) and has completely stumped Microsoft there. PPC-based servers completely killed a nascent movement towards NT servers back when Apple's OSX server first came out.
Further consider: since 2001, the only two major desktop builders to consistently turn a profit: Apple and Dell. That's it. Wanna lose your shirt? Get into building Intel/AMD-based systems running Windows. You'll be bleeding piles of money in short order, joining Tandy, Compaq, Gateway, Fujitsu, Sony, IBM, Acer, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
An alternative scenario: IBM drags their feet just that little, itty bit on servicing Microsoft's Xbox development needs, makes MS's increasingly desparate attempts to break out of a stagnant PC market look pathetic, then WHAM! Playstation 3 shows up, making Xbox look like a doorstop; behind-the-back high fives between Big Blue and new best buddies Sony and Toshiba. Then the roundhouse: CELL enters, 8x the performance of any Windows box available and only runs: *NIX. Sony and Toshiba start producing CELL-based workstations for the high end (perhaps for media producers like me who have no attachments to Windows and can really use a box that's 8 times faster than anything I've currently got for pretty close to the same price) while IBM CELLs the datacenter, heading off Microsoft's ability to go upscale with Windows. Meanwhile, as all of developed Asia ditches desktops for 3G cell phones (don't laugh--today kids in Japan and Korea don't use and don't want a PC or laptop), MS's non-U.S. market dwindles and the Mobile division can't quite get the manufactures to stop using Symbian. Eventually, even the North American market collapses as U.S. home users (about 66% of MS's market, right?) discover that the 2 things they actually used a PC for (email and light-duty Web surfing) can be done just swell on their phones.
As you say, speculation is fun!:)
In case you haven't heard this...
on
Trustworthy Computing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...several thousand times already: Thanks for the patch!
Letterman (paraphrased): "Despite all the problems that we face in this great country of ours, I think we can all be proud that America is still the world's largest exporter of Amy Fischer TV movies."
Let's consider this carefully, shall we?
on
Marfa Lights Explained
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OK:
1. Photo at www.whattofix.com. No photographer credit on the photo, no history, no nothing. So we can't check its pedigree. I do photo manips, and I can whip you up, say, 200 of these to your specs, in a couple of hours. What colors would you like your lights? Would you like lens flare effects or even fog/haze effects? You name it, I and any of about 300 million other folks could have faked this photo for you. No photographer credit or documentation is always a great tipoff to a hoax.
2. Photo at www.rense.com. So, this was taken on Highway 67 "east of Marfa?" Highway 67 runs north/south through Marfa, not east/west. I'm already smelling hoax here, as the photographer can't even be bothered to do a map check and get his basic geographical facts down for his story. Oh, this is interesting...look at the pattern of lights in the photo. Looks like...erm...well, let's just say that there's an Air Force base in the region which loves to send B1-Bs on extremely low-level missions through the vast scrublands of west Texas/New Mexico where, if you happen to get it all wrong and auger in, you're unlikely to take out hundreds of civilians with you. I'll bet this photo wasn't even taken in Presidio County.
3. Photos at taskboy.com. Sure looks like car headlights or even sun reflecting off chrome at a great distance to me. If you live in Texas like I do and do a lot of driving around in the middle of nowhere, you've seen this a million times. I'm amazed that people can manage to misinterpret stuff like this. This fellow repeats the Robert Ellison myth, meaning that he didn't want to spend the 30 seconds of Googling to find out that the story is completely undocumented. You wanna see more lights like this? Drive north on State Road 4 out of Palo Pinto, Texas. Same deal as you get about 4 miles south of the "mountain" at the eastward bend of 4 near Grayson, on any clear evening. Its a wonderfully eerie effect, but its about as supernatural as kitty litter.
We have a local legend about a "ghost lights cemetary" just south of Springtown, Texas. I've taken a look and it is indeed caused by small particles in the tombstone material that is more reflective than the rest of the stone. It reflects the pale glow on the horizon of the nearby town's lights at night. Quite eerie the first time you see it and locals insist that supernatural things happen there but the phenomenon is easily explanable. Tombstones further away give the most interesting effect as the light seems to eminate away from any observable objects, as if floating in mid-air.
A bit more detective work reveals...
on
Marfa Lights Explained
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As I suspected, a bit more detective work reveals that early sightings were first reported well after the event and that folks digging for serious contemporary documentation can find none:
Turns out that Mr. Ellison never did mention the supposed 1883 sightings in his memoirs (written in 1937 when the man was in his 70's), according to local historian Cecilia Thompson.
In response to the perceived aggression from a U.S. company the nations of Japan, India, China, South Korea, Malaysia and New Jersey called their ambassadors home from their respective embassies in Washington, D.C. New Jersey Governor Richard Codey, having been alerted by his aides to the fact that New Jersey is part of the United States, further chose to close his Washington embassy, calling the move "yet another cost-cutting victory for the taxpayers of the Garden State."
At 9:15 PM East Coast U.S. Time Friday, Japanese Ambassador to the United States Ryozo Kato issued the following statement: "Itte mairimasu." U.S. State Department officials declined to translate or comment on Ambassador Kato's statement, mainly because nobody could be found who was fluent in Japanese.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm...lack of material? I guess you never saw The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns. It's 11 hours of documentary. In fact, it's one of the longest documentaries I can recall since Victory at Sea. He's got so much stuff packed in to this ball of wax that the average TV viewer won't hold still for all of it nor digest the majority of it. I don't recall much fat to his narrative and at times, the pace of his following the thread of two sides interacting through complex battle scenarious leaves many viewers dazed. I found it exhilarating, but at times I think he could have in places used a bit more of the "Ken Burns Effect", lingered a tad longer on a few key photos and slowed down the storytelling to let us viewers catch our breaths and let the details sink in.
Except that, unfortunately for them, folks on the Indian subcontinent ("South Asians") are classified as Caucasian along with us laggardly Europeans; not the East Asian racial group referred to on the graph as "Asian" (later on in the article they clarify this by explicitly discussing East Asians versus other racial categories). Oh, well--we can't all be lucky enough to be born Mongolian!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
* * * * * *
I hate everybody equally and fairly without regard to race, religion or national origin.
"We're in discussions with major players in the Linux world and are working on a plan to resolve the '906 patent issue with the entire Linux community," Eolas Founder Michael Doyle told eWEEK.com, referring in short hand to the patent's full number. "The solution will be supportive of the open-source community."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1437469,00.as p
I haven't heard anything more on this in the intervening time.
I don't know what planet you're from, but my planet has people in it exhibiting a range in skin tones from just-off-white to damned near black. Narrow range? Try a few million discreet possible CMYK color values on a 16-bit-per-color-plane image--even for "white" skin (I'll humor you here, but any good photographer or makeup artist can tell you that it's a completely meaningless term). But I guess you have all of these stored in your brain so you don't need to reference an image on a color-calibrated monitor or do a color check, do you? Never mind that the good ol' eyedropper tool can't predict for you how that color adjusment you just did off the top of your head will reproduce on different printing presses/paper stocks. Oops.
Years ago, you gave all your contone stuff to a HELL or Scitex operator to throw on his $200,000 scanner and process on his $1 mil mainframe which backed up the scanner (one of the shops I worked at). Or lacking that, you gave it to an experienced process camera operator with a separation filter set and the proper lighting and film-back screen-angling jig. At least, if you gave a damn about how good your skin tones came out.
I fixed an awful lot of color work done on PCs back then where the originator thought that they had done a splendid job, but when you looked at the work on a color-calibrated monitor or ran your Chromacheck, the skin tones had a wonderful greenish pall (too much cyan...and the Chromacheck, since it was pulled from the sep negs, is a very good indication of what will happen on press). The heck of it was, most of these people in the Graphics Dept. at the IBMs and General Dynamics and EDSs and American Airlines of this world went through life thinking that their output was hunky-dory when in fact some guy like me at the service bureau was correcting their color for them on another platform.
One of the big problems under Windows is the lack of a commonly-agreed-upon color management subsystem that all vendors utilize, like Apple has in Kodak's ColorSync (and Linux has in lcms). On Windows, you've got Microsoft's color system, which everybody happily ignores, then Adobe's system, along with others. One of my favorite Stupid Windows Tricks (under Win2K): Open a Corel product (CorelDraw, say) and an Adobe product (Photoshop), go to adjust the color settings in CorelDraw and get a sharing violation. Um, guys...ICC profiles are supposed to be shared system resources.
Another big problem: Microsoft just doesn't "get" Postscript. Microsoft's Windows XP Postscript drivers are so lousy that some consultants are advising clients to stick with, or downgrade to, Win2K. Symptom: I've got a client who has five software patents from a long programming career with Tandy, Gateway and others. This guy's no Luser. Yet, he absolutely cannot get an EPS out of Microsoft Publisher with the image oriented correctly to his page setup. Obviously, a lot of this is Publisher's fault, but you get all sorts of nonsense out of Windows using Microsoft's Postscript printer drivers and graphics software that the folks on a Mac or Linux never have to put up with.
I'm doing most all my stuff on Linux now. It ain't perfect, but all the major graphic apps I like for prepress have settled on lcms for color management, plus Scribus has PDF-X/3 output that's so good it's said to better Adobe's own products. Interesting factoid: Ghostscript (the default Postscript interpreter for Linux) follows Adobe's Red Book so closely that it bitches about Illustrator EPS files that don't conform: "Floating point bounding boxes are not allowed in Level 1 Postscript."
* * * * * * *
Heaven:
French Chefs
American Engineers
British Bobbies
Hell:
British Chefs
French Engineers
American Police
* * * * * * *
Most people are afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths.
--Stephen Wright
Apparently it's far enough along that you can start using it today.
As somebody who does a bit of video work presented on the Net now and then, I'm going to start experimenting with Dirac and using it if at all possible.
I never cease to be amazed.
Is it true that Gates & Co. stole computer time to develop Altair BASIC? I've read several sources that claim that the "victims" of this piracy themselves stole time on a PDP-10 at Harvard's Aiken Computation Laboratory to develop their product. One source says the PDP-10 was purchased by DARPA, which means that Gates stole from U.S. taxpayers.
My Konqueror 3.5.0-0.1.fc4 passes. Hmmm...interesting. Wonder if a library difference is responsible for your newer version of Konqueror just missing, while my slightly older version sails on through? Libpng, maybe? Is it possible to get a newer Konqueror and older KDElibs?
http://www.wwf.org.uk/news/n_0000001664.asp
* * * * * *
"I don't know...must be something in the water."
--Achaan Buddhadasa
* * * * * * *
"I never met a Mu Meson I didn't like." --Will Rogers
* * * * * * *
"Have you put on weight, or is that a Mu Meson in your back pocket?"
--Stalin to Churchill at the Potsdam Conference, 1945
You can argue that this was due to the relative poverty of a disadvantaged urban area, rather than a youth culture turning its back on PCs, but I'm seeing the same thing here in a small, rural Texas town that is extremely wealthy and 90%+ white. Everybody owns a cell phone, but it seems like the number of folks under age 30 who are passionate about personal computers (the way my gang was back in the 80's) just isn't there anymore. I've worked on audio editing and CD cover art production for 3 local musical acts, all folks under age 25 or so (and 2 of the 3 are Hip Hop acts here in rural Texas, go figure), and it's striking that the kids come to me to do their computer work because they just don't want to be bothered with a PC. It's not like they're poverty-striken and can't afford the gear. These kids think nothing of dropping $5,000 on amps and instruments and mikes, etc. And you can bet your last dime that each and every one of them has a cell phone and depend on the things like you and I depend on air (an amazing number of them don't even have land lines), but a personal computer just isn't considered a necessary lifestyle/career enhancement. PCs seem to be Old School and the kids who are trendy and whom other kids look to as peer leaders just don't seem to desire them.
I would never have been able to predict this personally, because back in '86 or so everybody I hung with or worked with was drooling over the prospect of shelling out $3,500 for a Mac or a PC. You could do graphics on 'em, you could do your bookkeeping, if you were a musician or music producer, well, you just weren't in the Game unless you had a Mac set up to process MIDI from your keyboard.
Not anymore. I guess not only am I old, I'm Old School as well. :(
http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1047257047.php
In South Korea, meanwhile, the government has institutionalized the death of the personal computer in a program call the Post PC Era Initiative (formally, the "IT839 Strategy"):
http://www.hardware-depot-online.com/xybernaut_est ablishes_korean_operations_to_benefit_from_post_pc _era_db.jspx
You can scoff and say that "well, that's fine for the Asians, but it will never catch on here." I said the same thing 20 years ago when I saw my first Japanese anime and manga stuff. "Nah...this stuff is too tied in to a completely foreign culture and lifestyle and is too out-of-context for kids in the West to relate to. Never catch on here." Now I have a 24-hour anime channel on cable--in rural Texas. Proving once again (as has been proven countless times over the past 40 years if I had been paying attention) that whatever it is that the Japanese youth are doing now, we in the U.S. will be doing in another decade.
That won't change for at least 3 years. By that time, CELL will be out. Remember that Apple is only moving part of their line to Intel starting next year...the part that media producers like me don't really care about. Powerbooks? Minis? Blah.
Granted, IBM may put one out, but what OS is it going to run? Linux? That won't help with mainstream desktop publishing. It will only help a little bit with video, namely those people who use filmgimp.
Guess you've never heard of Scribus. Right now, my studio is doing over 60% of our publication work on it. It will run on PPC as well, but Linux/x86 is its main development platform and I'm moving my studio to Linux (only one Windows box left out of 4 previous, along with 4 Macs). And I'm getting a lot of interest and questions from colleagues in the industry. Oh, by the way--Scribus under Linux produces better PDF X/3 than even Adobe InDesign/Windows or QuarkXPress through Distiller. Go figure.
Guess you've never heard of Cinelerra, either, or Blender. Lots of folks in the less-than-huge-budget video production market (which is 95% of the market) are testing the waters with those apps as well. Along with Cinepaint and several other small but quite interesting projects.
And for my audio productions, I've already cut several radio spots in Audacity, and Stanford has a complete Fedora-based distro called Planet CCRMA with oodles of audio production apps. It's quite interesing.
Consider: despite the lost "mindshare" of PPC, it still dominates one of the planet's largest industries (publishing/commercial printing/graphic arts...said to be third-largest industrial category in the U.S.) and has completely stumped Microsoft there. PPC-based servers completely killed a nascent movement towards NT servers back when Apple's OSX server first came out.
Further consider: since 2001, the only two major desktop builders to consistently turn a profit: Apple and Dell. That's it. Wanna lose your shirt? Get into building Intel/AMD-based systems running Windows. You'll be bleeding piles of money in short order, joining Tandy, Compaq, Gateway, Fujitsu, Sony, IBM, Acer, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
As you say, speculation is fun! :)
...several thousand times already: Thanks for the patch!
Letterman (paraphrased): "Despite all the problems that we face in this great country of ours, I think we can all be proud that America is still the world's largest exporter of Amy Fischer TV movies."
1. Photo at www.whattofix.com. No photographer credit on the photo, no history, no nothing. So we can't check its pedigree. I do photo manips, and I can whip you up, say, 200 of these to your specs, in a couple of hours. What colors would you like your lights? Would you like lens flare effects or even fog/haze effects? You name it, I and any of about 300 million other folks could have faked this photo for you. No photographer credit or documentation is always a great tipoff to a hoax.
2. Photo at www.rense.com. So, this was taken on Highway 67 "east of Marfa?" Highway 67 runs north/south through Marfa, not east/west. I'm already smelling hoax here, as the photographer can't even be bothered to do a map check and get his basic geographical facts down for his story. Oh, this is interesting...look at the pattern of lights in the photo. Looks like...erm...well, let's just say that there's an Air Force base in the region which loves to send B1-Bs on extremely low-level missions through the vast scrublands of west Texas/New Mexico where, if you happen to get it all wrong and auger in, you're unlikely to take out hundreds of civilians with you. I'll bet this photo wasn't even taken in Presidio County.
3. Photos at taskboy.com. Sure looks like car headlights or even sun reflecting off chrome at a great distance to me. If you live in Texas like I do and do a lot of driving around in the middle of nowhere, you've seen this a million times. I'm amazed that people can manage to misinterpret stuff like this. This fellow repeats the Robert Ellison myth, meaning that he didn't want to spend the 30 seconds of Googling to find out that the story is completely undocumented. You wanna see more lights like this? Drive north on State Road 4 out of Palo Pinto, Texas. Same deal as you get about 4 miles south of the "mountain" at the eastward bend of 4 near Grayson, on any clear evening. Its a wonderfully eerie effect, but its about as supernatural as kitty litter.
We have a local legend about a "ghost lights cemetary" just south of Springtown, Texas. I've taken a look and it is indeed caused by small particles in the tombstone material that is more reflective than the rest of the stone. It reflects the pale glow on the horizon of the nearby town's lights at night. Quite eerie the first time you see it and locals insist that supernatural things happen there but the phenomenon is easily explanable. Tombstones further away give the most interesting effect as the light seems to eminate away from any observable objects, as if floating in mid-air.
As I suspected, a bit more detective work reveals that early sightings were first reported well after the event and that folks digging for serious contemporary documentation can find none:
http://www.astronomycafe.net/weird/lights/marfa15. htm
Turns out that Mr. Ellison never did mention the supposed 1883 sightings in his memoirs (written in 1937 when the man was in his 70's), according to local historian Cecilia Thompson.
In response to the perceived aggression from a U.S. company the nations of Japan, India, China, South Korea, Malaysia and New Jersey called their ambassadors home from their respective embassies in Washington, D.C. New Jersey Governor Richard Codey, having been alerted by his aides to the fact that New Jersey is part of the United States, further chose to close his Washington embassy, calling the move "yet another cost-cutting victory for the taxpayers of the Garden State."
At 9:15 PM East Coast U.S. Time Friday, Japanese Ambassador to the United States Ryozo Kato issued the following statement: "Itte mairimasu." U.S. State Department officials declined to translate or comment on Ambassador Kato's statement, mainly because nobody could be found who was fluent in Japanese.