I use an M-Audio Delta 1010LT, and it's worked flawlessly since I plugged it into my Linux box, no driver hassles whatsoever. Did I mention that it's quiet? My concern in your example situation would be the horrible environment (air conditioning, fans, neighbors, etc.) that most PC owners would be recording in.
That reminds me of my next laptop: LapStudio. It's definitely not cheap, but may be a forerunner of similar, cheaper systems. I've been using Linux for sound/music/video compositing for a while now...LMMS is also a pretty cool software package; you can see a little demo I uploaded to Youtube. It's been fun to work with.
Is this one of those multi-level marketing (a.k.a. pyramid) schemes? I cannot WAIT for my neighbor with the jacked up Humvee to scrape the "MONA VIE" crap off his back windshield and replace it with a bunch of l33t h4x0r jargon.:-)
Sorry, but you need to take my comment at its face value. I said I turn up my own noise; that's to drown out the neighbors. That's my solution in the end, which is even MORE polite than "speaking" to them.
When I call the cops - which is perfectly fine to do, mind you - it is because in my estimation, it would neither be safe nor wise for me to do what you call "speaking" to them, which makes it sound so normal and safe when in fact it is not. The fact that you really WEREN'T here to see it happen and are posting A/C is really "speaking" to me, too.
Yeah, I have neighbors who do the whole "BBQ" thing. They like to stay up "barbecuing" until about 4:30 a.m., and one of them in particular likes to rap an entire song's worth of memorized rap lyrics in a loud monotone for several minutes at a time.
Now, I don't want camouflaged police showing up, but when I call the cops and these guys demand to know "which neighbor was it?" and STILL don't shut up after the cops are gone, I have to think that somebody with a Facebook account and a field is probably driving his neighbors FREAKING insane.
Thank goodness for my linux box and synths that can play a nice loud PSHHHHHHTTTT sound, brown or pink as you like it. (Had to work linux in there somehow)
It's pretty amazing that (according to TFA) they've never laid anybody off. I mean, that feature is there for a reason. I find it hard to believe that they never hired some total incompetent jerk that they didn't want gone, so maybe they just pay those guys good money to quit. Or maybe they hire assassins.:)
Sure, proprietary software has its advantages. I'm aware of my needs, and I balance them against what I see as the reduced privilege level you pay for in a proprietary component.
Good plug for Indigo though; I wish you well in your endeavor...
The "Apollo 14," etc. images are not old versions of the new high-res pics, like you might think. Those are the new, "high-res" pictures of the old sites.
I feel guilty saying this, but a) high-res apparently means two different things depending on which (mars/moon) team you work for at NASA, and 2) for heaven's sakes, the actually low-resolution imagery of the landers themselves is just going to make conspiracy theorists go nuts. It looks like the result of about 5 minutes in GrafX2 and a basic knowledge of the gradient tool...
Well written, although here are my notes on your notes:
Many non-hobbyists don't need to push the hardware. You can get murdered for saying this on/., but the majority of people buy what they need and pocket the rest of the cash for a more interesting purchase. Many 3D professionals do not even own a renderfarm of any sort.
Displacement is expensive, period. Animators know lots of tricks to get around that, not the least of which would be popular alternatives like normal mapping or conversion of displacement-mapped surfaces into equivalent meshes.
A linear workflow can be a fantastic thing, but judicious animators have gotten along without linear workflows for years. As is the case with displacement mapping, cheats exist to work around this entire arena, if that's even necessary depending on the animation.
What kind of an idiot 3D "professional" would end up without a 64-bit OS with over 4GB RAM in his/her system? I would like to meet that person and suggest they stop hanging out on Slashdot.
If all you had was a crap GPU and were forced to use a GUI, you could still configure your 3D app's interactive display to be easy on the GPU. Like bounding-box display, which even at its worst would be better than the finest command-line summary.
The article touches on general bits of info that might have been time consuming to find. I live in a small town where commercials for clients like the local chamber of commerce are often put together in iMovie, and delivered in a rush. Recently I was approached by a local art director and was asked about moving from 3D stills (which I do occasionally) to 3D animation to be composited into commercial work (probably for bigger clients than the chamber...). I've determined that I can afford about 2-3 minutes of render time per frame before deadlines really start to get pushed out. So rendering infrastructure is very important.
My studio is unique in that I work with open source software, Blender, Lux, etc. And my clients dig it because many of them are into sustainability and see my philosophy as being similar to theirs. I've looked at outsourcing the animation projects to commercial renderfarms, but when you start to "Better Know a Linux Network," you move beyond "get it done" and start to take interest in your own little LAN. Next to my video compositing and 3D graphics books I have a big ol' fat Pro Linux System Administration book, and it's handy, and I like it that way.
The article points out that I can save $140 per node by not needing to buy Windows XP Pro 64 bit edition. This is actually great for me since I typically use the money I save on software to buy more hardware.
BTW, what's up with Slashdot javascript? I'm going to have to build a freaking/. renderfarm pretty soon, and I'll be sending my receipts to CmdrTaco.
Don't forget to install the firefox gnome support package along with it, or you'll have a browser that doesn't play nice with other apps. I had this problem and I'm not sure why gnome support wasn't a dependency, seeing how I had gnome installed already...
Please, be careful about this one. I am a graphic designer, and have taught graphic design, and what you call "padding" is one of the things that GNOME does right. Making it adjustable is fine, but most FOSS and FOSS-related websites are ridiculed by designer-types for exactly the reason that they ignore the principle of white space.
I submitted an annoying, but not critical, bug to 100 papercuts and someone submitted a fix within 12 hours. Within another week all the upstream/admin stuff was sorted and the fix was ready to go. Pretty amazing - I hope they do this again in the future. Seems like the Ubuntu team have a talent for shrugging off whatever problems critics attach to them.
Tell me about it. My terminal at Langley doesn't even HAVE a USB port. It's got a 3.5" floppy drive and this old 21" CRT. About the only perk is that I have the room all to myself and I get this cool chair that kind of swings out without touching the floor.
The n810 can act as a USB host. You just need to install the software offered through the application manager (host-something-or-other) and use a female-to-female USB adapter...thus helping you avoid paying $100 for a bluetooth keyboard:-)
Yeah, allowing people to manipulate what they see on their computer screen is a major blow to democracy. We shouldn't innovate or give them new tools if it threatens a profit model that is so easily broken. Protect the profit model so we can stay where we're at. I AM FINE WHERE I AM AT RIGHT NOW thank you. ~
I can't imagine why you wouldn't just buy a Mac and Final Cut Pro (or even Express if it meets your needs) and be done with it, if you're editing a lot of live footage?
If there's some urgency involved, and you're most comfortable with that setup, then by all means! Personally, I made a conscious decision to do business on an open platform where possible. This isn't out of ignorance or inexperience or inefficiency, but rather, it's my preference after using high-end Macs and Windows machines for years. I was sick of dinking around with proprietary software licenses, and I was starting to see that if I could make a Linux setup work, it would be a huge convenience for me, business-process-wise.
As it turns out, there are additional benefits, like more money left over to use on hardware items like faster hardware, camera lenses, and mics. And more money for higher rent at a nicer office.
Working with my colleagues is interesting, because they don't really understand just how my platform works, so I can ask them to use a non-proprietary file format for file interchange, and it just makes them more curious (it also helps that I'm not a jerk about it). They are using Macs and PC's that *have* to be faster and more expensive; they're paying a premium for not really wanting to know how video or graphics formats work. If I set them down in front of something like Cinelerra, they'd probably give up as soon as they couldn't work with FLV files, for example. So there's a premium that they pay for wanting to be sloppy and fast.
One documentary guy I work with right now is sending everything to me in FLV format, even though he knows I am still going to work with his video before it goes live. He read a book or attended a seminar that taught, "if you do video online, you've gotta work with FLV." He uses a very expensive setup, but when I throw him what he sees as a "curveball," like "can you send it in this other format instead," he'll need that explained over the phone. Twice.
As far as hardware support goes, I ask other Linux video pros (some of them *amazingly* knowledgeable about video) for recommendations. It's the old-school way: Rather than reading online reviews and running out to buy something, I do a the research and I know what it'll do when I plug it in.
It's a more deliberate business process, and it makes me look like I really care a lot about such little things, but that's exactly the reputation I want to build.
I felt the same way using IRIX back in the day. I was supposed to be practicing Video Special-FX fu, but instead I was spending my time wading through documentation. Somebody give me a Mac! Then some guy would come along and create incredibly polished work with very the same machine I was trying to use.
Years before that, the same thing happened with an Amiga 2000. I could barely use the thing. All I could do was stare at the pretty icons and hope to figure out what was going on, but here were people making a living off of it.
Nowadays, I do a fair bit of video editing on Linux. I even make a good profit off of it. The difference is, this time around, I'm the guy who learned the software and can use the system. My world is a mish-mash of command line applications, Nautilus scripts that will let me drag & drop a file from the client and do X,Y, or Z with it, Blender compositing noodles, and very occasionally a "proper" GUI-based video editor. I still have the "buy a Mac if you need to" clause, but I haven't had to do that yet, and I doubt I ever will.
BTW, you left out a lot of specifics that I would be interested in reading. Generalities help carry your argument, but reading between the lines, I'm wondering just how it all went down.
Windows is indeed a lot like an Escalade. An overpriced, bloated, and inefficient showcase of false beauty.
And I guess the iPhone is a lot like a John Deere riding mower, too. People buy it for the brand prestige, then get angry when their neighbor goes out and buys one the next day. Because everybody knows your neighbor is a jerk.
There was an awesome amount of amateur research on Geocities. Some of my favorite reference sites are therefore just about toast (most of them containing first-hand military history).
And just because someone asked, I saved all ~300 of my Youtube favorites to my HDD last weekend, when I realized how much I rely on them for my own hobby research projects, teaching classes, etc. Most of it was stuff that will never be on DVD. Some of it is stuff that the owners have *already* deleted in the last week, due to perfectionism or whatever.
I was a Boy Scout, and relying on some free service without thinking of contingencies just doesn't make sense.
Since when is the very path of one's profession & career considered "social standing?" You make it sound like he defended the RIAA from his mother's basement. Also, not sure where you got the idea that he's being excluded from a group (the definition of ostracizing). He's not being excluded from anything. He's ALREADY in, and if anything, we the people are the ones being ostracized / not recognized.
Slashdot Mirror
I use an M-Audio Delta 1010LT, and it's worked flawlessly since I plugged it into my Linux box, no driver hassles whatsoever. Did I mention that it's quiet? My concern in your example situation would be the horrible environment (air conditioning, fans, neighbors, etc.) that most PC owners would be recording in.
That reminds me of my next laptop: LapStudio. It's definitely not cheap, but may be a forerunner of similar, cheaper systems. I've been using Linux for sound/music/video compositing for a while now...LMMS is also a pretty cool software package; you can see a little demo I uploaded to Youtube. It's been fun to work with.
Is this one of those multi-level marketing (a.k.a. pyramid) schemes? I cannot WAIT for my neighbor with the jacked up Humvee to scrape the "MONA VIE" crap off his back windshield and replace it with a bunch of l33t h4x0r jargon. :-)
Sorry, but you need to take my comment at its face value. I said I turn up my own noise; that's to drown out the neighbors. That's my solution in the end, which is even MORE polite than "speaking" to them.
When I call the cops - which is perfectly fine to do, mind you - it is because in my estimation, it would neither be safe nor wise for me to do what you call "speaking" to them, which makes it sound so normal and safe when in fact it is not. The fact that you really WEREN'T here to see it happen and are posting A/C is really "speaking" to me, too.
Yeah, I have neighbors who do the whole "BBQ" thing. They like to stay up "barbecuing" until about 4:30 a.m., and one of them in particular likes to rap an entire song's worth of memorized rap lyrics in a loud monotone for several minutes at a time.
Now, I don't want camouflaged police showing up, but when I call the cops and these guys demand to know "which neighbor was it?" and STILL don't shut up after the cops are gone, I have to think that somebody with a Facebook account and a field is probably driving his neighbors FREAKING insane.
Thank goodness for my linux box and synths that can play a nice loud PSHHHHHHTTTT sound, brown or pink as you like it. (Had to work linux in there somehow)
I dunno, can you back that up with a juicy story or something?
It's pretty amazing that (according to TFA) they've never laid anybody off. I mean, that feature is there for a reason. I find it hard to believe that they never hired some total incompetent jerk that they didn't want gone, so maybe they just pay those guys good money to quit. Or maybe they hire assassins. :)
Sure, proprietary software has its advantages. I'm aware of my needs, and I balance them against what I see as the reduced privilege level you pay for in a proprietary component.
Good plug for Indigo though; I wish you well in your endeavor...
The "Apollo 14," etc. images are not old versions of the new high-res pics, like you might think. Those are the new, "high-res" pictures of the old sites.
I feel guilty saying this, but a) high-res apparently means two different things depending on which (mars/moon) team you work for at NASA, and 2) for heaven's sakes, the actually low-resolution imagery of the landers themselves is just going to make conspiracy theorists go nuts. It looks like the result of about 5 minutes in GrafX2 and a basic knowledge of the gradient tool...
Well written, although here are my notes on your notes:
/., but the majority of people buy what they need and pocket the rest of the cash for a more interesting purchase. Many 3D professionals do not even own a renderfarm of any sort.
Many non-hobbyists don't need to push the hardware. You can get murdered for saying this on
Displacement is expensive, period. Animators know lots of tricks to get around that, not the least of which would be popular alternatives like normal mapping or conversion of displacement-mapped surfaces into equivalent meshes.
A linear workflow can be a fantastic thing, but judicious animators have gotten along without linear workflows for years. As is the case with displacement mapping, cheats exist to work around this entire arena, if that's even necessary depending on the animation.
What kind of an idiot 3D "professional" would end up without a 64-bit OS with over 4GB RAM in his/her system? I would like to meet that person and suggest they stop hanging out on Slashdot.
If all you had was a crap GPU and were forced to use a GUI, you could still configure your 3D app's interactive display to be easy on the GPU. Like bounding-box display, which even at its worst would be better than the finest command-line summary.
Anyway, just sayin'.
The article touches on general bits of info that might have been time consuming to find. I live in a small town where commercials for clients like the local chamber of commerce are often put together in iMovie, and delivered in a rush. Recently I was approached by a local art director and was asked about moving from 3D stills (which I do occasionally) to 3D animation to be composited into commercial work (probably for bigger clients than the chamber...). I've determined that I can afford about 2-3 minutes of render time per frame before deadlines really start to get pushed out. So rendering infrastructure is very important.
/. renderfarm pretty soon, and I'll be sending my receipts to CmdrTaco.
My studio is unique in that I work with open source software, Blender, Lux, etc. And my clients dig it because many of them are into sustainability and see my philosophy as being similar to theirs. I've looked at outsourcing the animation projects to commercial renderfarms, but when you start to "Better Know a Linux Network," you move beyond "get it done" and start to take interest in your own little LAN. Next to my video compositing and 3D graphics books I have a big ol' fat Pro Linux System Administration book, and it's handy, and I like it that way.
The article points out that I can save $140 per node by not needing to buy Windows XP Pro 64 bit edition. This is actually great for me since I typically use the money I save on software to buy more hardware.
BTW, what's up with Slashdot javascript? I'm going to have to build a freaking
Don't forget to install the firefox gnome support package along with it, or you'll have a browser that doesn't play nice with other apps. I had this problem and I'm not sure why gnome support wasn't a dependency, seeing how I had gnome installed already...
What a shame...with that grammar in place, you were qualified to prepend "In Soviet Russia" to your joke.
>Get rid of all that excessive padding
Please, be careful about this one. I am a graphic designer, and have taught graphic design, and what you call "padding" is one of the things that GNOME does right. Making it adjustable is fine, but most FOSS and FOSS-related websites are ridiculed by designer-types for exactly the reason that they ignore the principle of white space.
I submitted an annoying, but not critical, bug to 100 papercuts and someone submitted a fix within 12 hours. Within another week all the upstream/admin stuff was sorted and the fix was ready to go. Pretty amazing - I hope they do this again in the future. Seems like the Ubuntu team have a talent for shrugging off whatever problems critics attach to them.
Tell me about it. My terminal at Langley doesn't even HAVE a USB port. It's got a 3.5" floppy drive and this old 21" CRT. About the only perk is that I have the room all to myself and I get this cool chair that kind of swings out without touching the floor.
brb, there's some sort of noise in the a/c duct
The n810 can act as a USB host. You just need to install the software offered through the application manager (host-something-or-other) and use a female-to-female USB adapter...thus helping you avoid paying $100 for a bluetooth keyboard :-)
My thoughts exactly...that really explains the awkward technical angle and the "contacting competitors" bit.
Yeah, allowing people to manipulate what they see on their computer screen is a major blow to democracy. We shouldn't innovate or give them new tools if it threatens a profit model that is so easily broken. Protect the profit model so we can stay where we're at. I AM FINE WHERE I AM AT RIGHT NOW thank you. ~
If there's some urgency involved, and you're most comfortable with that setup, then by all means! Personally, I made a conscious decision to do business on an open platform where possible. This isn't out of ignorance or inexperience or inefficiency, but rather, it's my preference after using high-end Macs and Windows machines for years. I was sick of dinking around with proprietary software licenses, and I was starting to see that if I could make a Linux setup work, it would be a huge convenience for me, business-process-wise.
As it turns out, there are additional benefits, like more money left over to use on hardware items like faster hardware, camera lenses, and mics. And more money for higher rent at a nicer office.
Working with my colleagues is interesting, because they don't really understand just how my platform works, so I can ask them to use a non-proprietary file format for file interchange, and it just makes them more curious (it also helps that I'm not a jerk about it). They are using Macs and PC's that *have* to be faster and more expensive; they're paying a premium for not really wanting to know how video or graphics formats work. If I set them down in front of something like Cinelerra, they'd probably give up as soon as they couldn't work with FLV files, for example. So there's a premium that they pay for wanting to be sloppy and fast.
One documentary guy I work with right now is sending everything to me in FLV format, even though he knows I am still going to work with his video before it goes live. He read a book or attended a seminar that taught, "if you do video online, you've gotta work with FLV." He uses a very expensive setup, but when I throw him what he sees as a "curveball," like "can you send it in this other format instead," he'll need that explained over the phone. Twice.
As far as hardware support goes, I ask other Linux video pros (some of them *amazingly* knowledgeable about video) for recommendations. It's the old-school way: Rather than reading online reviews and running out to buy something, I do a the research and I know what it'll do when I plug it in.
It's a more deliberate business process, and it makes me look like I really care a lot about such little things, but that's exactly the reputation I want to build.
I felt the same way using IRIX back in the day. I was supposed to be practicing Video Special-FX fu, but instead I was spending my time wading through documentation. Somebody give me a Mac! Then some guy would come along and create incredibly polished work with very the same machine I was trying to use.
Years before that, the same thing happened with an Amiga 2000. I could barely use the thing. All I could do was stare at the pretty icons and hope to figure out what was going on, but here were people making a living off of it.
Nowadays, I do a fair bit of video editing on Linux. I even make a good profit off of it. The difference is, this time around, I'm the guy who learned the software and can use the system. My world is a mish-mash of command line applications, Nautilus scripts that will let me drag & drop a file from the client and do X,Y, or Z with it, Blender compositing noodles, and very occasionally a "proper" GUI-based video editor. I still have the "buy a Mac if you need to" clause, but I haven't had to do that yet, and I doubt I ever will.
BTW, you left out a lot of specifics that I would be interested in reading. Generalities help carry your argument, but reading between the lines, I'm wondering just how it all went down.
He was talking about good file managers.
Windows is indeed a lot like an Escalade. An overpriced, bloated, and inefficient showcase of false beauty.
And I guess the iPhone is a lot like a John Deere riding mower, too. People buy it for the brand prestige, then get angry when their neighbor goes out and buys one the next day. Because everybody knows your neighbor is a jerk.
There was an awesome amount of amateur research on Geocities. Some of my favorite reference sites are therefore just about toast (most of them containing first-hand military history).
And just because someone asked, I saved all ~300 of my Youtube favorites to my HDD last weekend, when I realized how much I rely on them for my own hobby research projects, teaching classes, etc. Most of it was stuff that will never be on DVD. Some of it is stuff that the owners have *already* deleted in the last week, due to perfectionism or whatever.
I was a Boy Scout, and relying on some free service without thinking of contingencies just doesn't make sense.
Since when is the very path of one's profession & career considered "social standing?" You make it sound like he defended the RIAA from his mother's basement. Also, not sure where you got the idea that he's being excluded from a group (the definition of ostracizing). He's not being excluded from anything. He's ALREADY in, and if anything, we the people are the ones being ostracized / not recognized.