A class I am working with at Brown University is working with 3d scanners in conjunction with 3d fabricators, such as were discussed here (ABS plastic, wax, plaster, etc). The 3d copier idea seems funny, but as we've found out it's not nearly so simple. We have a blog about our work, if you are interested, and a general webpage too.
Well, okay, maybe not a.45 but be ready to inflict physical violence, since the feds are rarely helpful.
Scammers aren't the real problem in the world. People who think of physical violence as their first line of retribution are. Go ahead and show up on that guys doorstep with your gun. I hope he calls the cops on your neanderthal ass so we have one less idiot roaming the streets with such wonderful ideas about how to deal with their problems in life.
Well, pretty much every software manufacturer for video makes a nearly identical product for both Mac and Win
Sure they exist, but have you had much hands on experience with them? Adobe Premeire is limited on either platform. Avid's support and integration with the Macintosh platform is far superior to anything based under Windows, even with the recent release of ExpressDV (which is promising but still buggy). Final Cut Pro really seems to be gaining ground in the professional market, to the point that many of the big rental houses and shops are taking big strides toward ditching Avid and using FCP instead.
However, this is getting fairly far from my original point, which was that benchmarks obtained using non-video-specific applications (and I maintain that AE is a graphics app, not a video app) are ersatz at best when comparing digtial video editing systems. Furthermore, i'm not entirely certain that benchmarks are at all a reliable measure of one system's actual performance over another. Much of the good comparisons i've heard and seen are awfully subjective, but most professional editors I know work on a mac. Not necessarily because that's what they were trained on, but because they work better.
I think it's hardly accurate to term this a "Digital Video Comparison" when the apps being compared aren't really video applications, but graphics applications. While PCs sporting top of the line processors may smoke available Macs in raw benchmarks and speed comparisons, the fact is that Digital Video support is much more robust and integrated on the Macintosh platform than it is for PCs.
Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno or Fire. The Macintosh platform, and the software written for it, is a far better choice than ANY PC-based setup as far as dealing with video.
Even prosumer and amateur customers will find better support from the Apple end of things. Final Cut Pro and iMovie work far better than any PC equivalent. If you are a speed junkie, sure, get a PC, and then you can brag about how your benchmarks are higher than your mac-using friends. But don't be at all surprised when your actual output and workflow suffers because you aren't using the best tools for the job.
I went to smart camp when i was a youth, and in my physics class we spent an entire day playing with liquid nitrogen. You can actually hold it in your hand for quite awhile, provided you keep your hand open wide enough that your palm doesn't crease. As long as the LN doesn't get trapped between two folds of skin, you will be fine. Ditto for your mouth. You can hold a fair amount in your mouth, under your tounge with your tounge up and back. If you keep air flowing across it, you look like you're breathing smoke. When you spit it out, any remaining evaporates almost instantly.
We spent hours playing like this, and of the 20 of us in the class, not one was injured.
Childhood diabetes isn't currently seeing a huge increase. When you hear about diabetes incidence reaching epidemic proportions, most people don't realize that it is type II diabetes, prevalent in adults over 30, that is the problem.
Type II diabetes is directly linked to poor diet, especially those diets high in fats and sugars. These type of diets reduce the body's ability to process sugar, resulting in Type II diabetes.
Increased incidence of Big Mac and Frosty consumption is responsible for the increase in diabetes, not some mysterious environmental hazard.
I started using google news about a year ago (i think) when it was still one of those google projects that you had to be "in the know" to find out about (ala the image search when it first debuted). I liked it because it was extremely straightforward and streamlined - just a list of links, with brief summaries.
This new interface reminds of everything i hate about yahoo news - cluttered, too many colors, bad layout.
Granted the excessive use of red in the old version wasn't so hot either, but i did prefer it to this...
there are fewer than 50,000 possible distinct melodies in the Western musical scale
Man, I get so tired of seeing that quote (and I feel like i've seen it tossed about alot lately). It is just plain false. If you read the full statement, the author of the quote makes some assumptions about "melody" that are inherently false when applied to traditional notions of melody. To begin with, they state:
"a judge will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half)"
umm, I don't know what school of music this guy went to, but he is forgetting all about rests, whole notes, sixteenth notes, thirty second notes, etc. This increases the number of possible distance vectors between notes. But lets let the author's original assumption about distance vectors stand for a moment. The ultimate fallacy in his argument occurs when he says:
" Thus, there are 36 possible distance vectors from one note to the next, and 36^(n - 1) melodies of n notes. Now, 36 to the third power equals 46,656 distinct melodies. No other melodies are possible in the Western musical "
What I want to know is where on earth does it say that we are limited only to four note melodies??? I have personally played many eight note melodies, and if I count only eight note melodies, suddenly there are 78364164096 possible melodies. Never mind all of the seven note meldies, or 24 note melodies, or 2 note melodies.
78364164096 seems like many, many more than 46656.
I don't think this is about legislating morality (ala the prohibition in the 20s and laws regarding prostituion today) as much as it is trying to establish rules which will keep people from each others throats. I still disagree with the enactment of such laws, as social darwinism ought to stamp out those behaviors which society as a whole frowns upon.
Why then, is this cellphone thing still a problem? How many of you have let your phone ring in a public place? More than once? How many of you that kvetch about custom rings have one yourself, but justify it by stating things like "Oh, but mine is quiet" or "I always pick up on the first ring". How many of you stare blithely into space as your friends' phones play the first 64 bars of Fur Elise?
Problems like this will persist as long as individuals attempt to hold others to standards that they themselves don't adhere to. Laws regarding the problems will accomplish nothing (as seen in the case of jaywalking) - the problem ends once everyone who speaks out against a problem in public forums actually follows through with their rhetoric.
And it should be modded down, since no decent pro-quality video editor supports dinky web codecs like Real, or WMV. Final Cut Pro only supports Quicktime export, I think Premiere might do Real (and not very well), and Avid sure as heck doesn't support them. And yet, we see listed here the top 3 video editing apps available on the marketplace today.
Point is, there is no NEED for this app to support ANY of these codecs. That's what encoding applications like Media Cleaner are for.
Umm, the old guard is already clutching their avids, methinks. I've been using FCP since it's 1.2 release, and it's 3.0 rivals anything that avid has out right now. The only advantage avid has over the FCP setup is tight integration with hardware, especially the protools stuff (since avid owns digidesign now). But, i think that with apple's recent purchase of EMagic we'll start seeing much better audio support out of Final Cut. The recent release of Cinema Tools for final cut jumps final cut up from a DV toy to a full-fledge HD ready motion-picture editing beast.
AND there are a whole host of good hardware video and audio cards coming out that enable a bunch of good realtime effects and whatnot for finalcut. Bottom line, avid is old news, and I think we'll quickly see FCP as the broadcast standard inside of 3 years.
To my knowledge, no one is capable of editing web-enabled video like Real, or WMV. Most applications edit in an uncompressed format like avi or uncompressed
quicktime (depending on if you're on a Wintel machine or a Mac) and then allow you the option to export the completed cut as a Real or compressed Quicktime file. If not, there are plenty of third party apps that will do it for you.
There's good reason for this, in that users who have encoded video for the web probably don't want people to be able to pull it down and edit it, not to mention the processing overhead that would come with having to decompress codecs like real or sorrenson. Plus, you'd run into quality issues when trying to composite visual effects or transitions (wipes, fades, etc).
Final Cut Pro can't do it, and neither can Premiere. I certainly don't think this should be a strike against this fine looking application.
This looks like another attempt at hyping the public from a long list of people for whom it's financially helpful to do so. The RIAA is constantly throwing about ridiculous numbers about how the internet is driving them out of business. But the past year brought them more box office sales than any other year in history!
Media Executives need to wake up and realize that stirring up controversy where none should be had is simply going to come back and bite them later. Why not show us the real story from the get go?
Irony - if the theatre the TwoGuys were waiting in front of didn't end up showing Attack of the Clones.
Although from reading their comments on the Seattle Star Wars page, I imagine they'd twist that around so that the situation, like their current one, would be "art". Somebody on that end of the country has a really loose definition of art.
It seems like morse code would be up on the list...to take an almost arbitrary sequence of sounds, assign them to letters, find a way to transmit and recieve, and then make it a standard is pretty impressive....
Slashdot Mirror
in which Cory Doctorow reminds us that he, too, uses Ubuntu Linux.
a beowulf cluster of these.
A class I am working with at Brown University is working with 3d scanners in conjunction with 3d fabricators, such as were discussed here (ABS plastic, wax, plaster, etc). The 3d copier idea seems funny, but as we've found out it's not nearly so simple. We have a blog about our work, if you are interested, and a general webpage too.
Scammers aren't the real problem in the world. People who think of physical violence as their first line of retribution are. Go ahead and show up on that guys doorstep with your gun. I hope he calls the cops on your neanderthal ass so we have one less idiot roaming the streets with such wonderful ideas about how to deal with their problems in life.
Sure they exist, but have you had much hands on experience with them? Adobe Premeire is limited on either platform. Avid's support and integration with the Macintosh platform is far superior to anything based under Windows, even with the recent release of ExpressDV (which is promising but still buggy). Final Cut Pro really seems to be gaining ground in the professional market, to the point that many of the big rental houses and shops are taking big strides toward ditching Avid and using FCP instead.
However, this is getting fairly far from my original point, which was that benchmarks obtained using non-video-specific applications (and I maintain that AE is a graphics app, not a video app) are ersatz at best when comparing digtial video editing systems. Furthermore, i'm not entirely certain that benchmarks are at all a reliable measure of one system's actual performance over another. Much of the good comparisons i've heard and seen are awfully subjective, but most professional editors I know work on a mac. Not necessarily because that's what they were trained on, but because they work better.
Before you tell me i'm wrong, take a stroll through any of the big (or small) production and post-production shops in the world, and marvel at the fact that, with the exception of secretarial workstations, every machine in the office is some sort of macintosh, or else a highly specialized box like an SGI running Inferno or Fire. The Macintosh platform, and the software written for it, is a far better choice than ANY PC-based setup as far as dealing with video.
Even prosumer and amateur customers will find better support from the Apple end of things. Final Cut Pro and iMovie work far better than any PC equivalent. If you are a speed junkie, sure, get a PC, and then you can brag about how your benchmarks are higher than your mac-using friends. But don't be at all surprised when your actual output and workflow suffers because you aren't using the best tools for the job.
We spent hours playing like this, and of the 20 of us in the class, not one was injured.
Type II diabetes is directly linked to poor diet, especially those diets high in fats and sugars. These type of diets reduce the body's ability to process sugar, resulting in Type II diabetes.
Increased incidence of Big Mac and Frosty consumption is responsible for the increase in diabetes, not some mysterious environmental hazard.
This new interface reminds of everything i hate about yahoo news - cluttered, too many colors, bad layout.
Granted the excessive use of red in the old version wasn't so hot either, but i did prefer it to this...
Man, I get so tired of seeing that quote (and I feel like i've seen it tossed about alot lately). It is just plain false. If you read the full statement, the author of the quote makes some assumptions about "melody" that are inherently false when applied to traditional notions of melody. To begin with, they state:
"a judge will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half)"
umm, I don't know what school of music this guy went to, but he is forgetting all about rests, whole notes, sixteenth notes, thirty second notes, etc. This increases the number of possible distance vectors between notes. But lets let the author's original assumption about distance vectors stand for a moment. The ultimate fallacy in his argument occurs when he says:
" Thus, there are 36 possible distance vectors from one note to the next, and 36^(n - 1) melodies of n notes. Now, 36 to the third power equals 46,656 distinct melodies. No other melodies are possible in the Western musical "
What I want to know is where on earth does it say that we are limited only to four note melodies??? I have personally played many eight note melodies, and if I count only eight note melodies, suddenly there are 78364164096 possible melodies. Never mind all of the seven note meldies, or 24 note melodies, or 2 note melodies.
78364164096 seems like many, many more than 46656.
Why then, is this cellphone thing still a problem? How many of you have let your phone ring in a public place? More than once? How many of you that kvetch about custom rings have one yourself, but justify it by stating things like "Oh, but mine is quiet" or "I always pick up on the first ring". How many of you stare blithely into space as your friends' phones play the first 64 bars of Fur Elise?
Problems like this will persist as long as individuals attempt to hold others to standards that they themselves don't adhere to. Laws regarding the problems will accomplish nothing (as seen in the case of jaywalking) - the problem ends once everyone who speaks out against a problem in public forums actually follows through with their rhetoric.
Point is, there is no NEED for this app to support ANY of these codecs. That's what encoding applications like Media Cleaner are for.
AND there are a whole host of good hardware video and audio cards coming out that enable a bunch of good realtime effects and whatnot for finalcut. Bottom line, avid is old news, and I think we'll quickly see FCP as the broadcast standard inside of 3 years.
To my knowledge, no one is capable of editing web-enabled video like Real, or WMV. Most applications edit in an uncompressed format like avi or uncompressed quicktime (depending on if you're on a Wintel machine or a Mac) and then allow you the option to export the completed cut as a Real or compressed Quicktime file. If not, there are plenty of third party apps that will do it for you. There's good reason for this, in that users who have encoded video for the web probably don't want people to be able to pull it down and edit it, not to mention the processing overhead that would come with having to decompress codecs like real or sorrenson. Plus, you'd run into quality issues when trying to composite visual effects or transitions (wipes, fades, etc). Final Cut Pro can't do it, and neither can Premiere. I certainly don't think this should be a strike against this fine looking application.
Right - sorry. Meant the MPAA. Too many damn acronyms to keep up with
This looks like another attempt at hyping the public from a long list of people for whom it's financially helpful to do so. The RIAA is constantly throwing about ridiculous numbers about how the internet is driving them out of business. But the past year brought them more box office sales than any other year in history!
Media Executives need to wake up and realize that stirring up controversy where none should be had is simply going to come back and bite them later. Why not show us the real story from the get go?
Irony - if the theatre the TwoGuys were waiting in front of didn't end up showing Attack of the Clones.
Although from reading their comments on the Seattle Star Wars page, I imagine they'd twist that around so that the situation, like their current one, would be "art". Somebody on that end of the country has a really loose definition of art.
It seems like morse code would be up on the list...to take an almost arbitrary sequence of sounds, assign them to letters, find a way to transmit and recieve, and then make it a standard is pretty impressive....