And yet somehow we have no problems tranporting oil to non-oil producing regions. A huge solar farm could produce massive amounts of hydrogen. And hydrogen transports just as easily as oil via the same infrastruture. Cheap, unlimited, nearly clean energy and all we have to do is build it. I bet (no figures nor money to back me up) that we could have built several solar farms for the cost of one war in Iraq --not that I'm getting the two issues confused ; )
If you're worried about the propietery format just strip the DRM. A Google search tells you how. Hint, you don't have to burn your purchases to cd and the re-rip to MP3. Or if you prefer, go from M4P to AIFF to FLAC or Apple Lossless. Again, no quality loss and no DRM.
Sometimes you have to look out for your own fair use rights.
I own 400 CDs; the vast majority I bought before my iPod which I've had for for 3 years. Post iPod I've bought 9 albums off of the iTunes music store. I'd buy more if there were some content worth buying. If I had $100 in iTunes gift certificates burning a whole in my digital pocket I honestly would have a damned hard time picking any music, even though it's free. Today's music just doesn't ring true with me. And for those who do like today's music, they now have the option of buying the one or two hit singles that otherwise compose an album of dreck.
Music sales are down because the music sucks. The songs that don't suck can be bought indvidually. Show me a great album I'll give you 9.99 for your DRM laden files. Otherwise I'll wait for it show up in the used bins. There's no way I'm paying the RIAA $16 for a new physical CD. I don't care how good it is.
Let's see, 103 million households in America. Number of iPods sold today is approximately 20 million. Let's say half of those were sold in America. If I were in the broadcast industry I'd see a potential threat.
I wasn't speaking of dye sub printers. I was speaking of RA4 printers, most which are 200 DPI. Regardless dye sub or RA4, the resolution is still inferior to a decent inkjet. The native resolution of a 2400 DPI printer is indeed 600 DPI. The 2400 results in much finer dithering thus giving the continuous tone appearence. The higher DPI results in much sharper high contrasts ares (think black and white text). Dye subs and RA4 no longer hold the continuous tone advantage.
For the serious hobbyist or pro, it's much more about control over the process than the cost. Grandma should take her snapshots of Billy's soccer game to the local Walmart. But, for me, photos from my 6 color inkjet have much better detail, gamut and accuracy. RA4 printers used to have such a huge advantage as they are continuous tone. But today's inkjets have such high DPI and small droplets that they are continuous tone except when viewed under a loupe.
I tried various on-line labs and found that the biggest problem is consistency. Even if I was pleased with the initial results (happened rarely) the re-prints or follow-up prints were often way off. The other problem is Gamut. My 6 color printer blows away the gamut of any RA4 printer. I'm guessing 8 color printers widen the advantage even more. Lastly, most of these printers are between two or three hundred DPI. My printer is 600 DPI. For very high contrast areas there is a huge difference.
With a monitor calibration, printer calibration and profiling I have controlled, reproducible results that are better than most labs. With generic inks and careful paper selection I've got my 4x6 prints at about 25 and 8x10s at around $1.
The idea that dePlume solicited employees and entices them to break NDA is what really pisses me off. I mean sure, it may be completely true. He may have gone up to engineers in a cloak and fedora as they were leaving the Apple campus and offered them insane amounts of money to give him the goodies. Or he may have gotten an anonymous email from some random Hotmail account. The point is that we don't know. The only way we can know is by forcing him to reveal his sources. Unless there is some specific evidence of him enticing people to break their NDAs I don't see how this judgment can stand.
We have hundreds of DDS4 tapes. We produce about fifteen 20GB tapes a month. We've calculate our failure rate at.05% which we think is unacceptable. We've been seriously evaluating hard drives as an alternative back up. The cost is comparable (sometimes cheaper) and the speed increase would help out a lot too. I just worry about the longevity.
We've looked at other tape media too (AIT) but we're just weary of tape.
What tapes are you using? In my experience with tapes (DDS), I've found them to more expensive than large hard drives. I also question how much more reliable tape is. I get failures all the time.
Part of my "killer idea" wasn't to ditch the gloss platic and polished metal and ALSO have a 1/10th of the capacity. But hey, I don't work at Apple: I'm just a Slashdot reader and history has shown that we know shit about real consumers.
So looking at the photos of these players it would seem that Apple has hired all the designers and engineers who understand interface, asthetics and functionality.
C'mon guys, give us something that's at worthy of competing with an iPod. I'll give you the first killer idea for free: make it just like the iPod but without the stupid glossy, scratch-prone plastic and polished metal.
Lawsuits have nothing to do with insurance rates or the cost of health care inflating. Instead, lawsuits are the justification that insurance companies use to raise prices for both malpractice insurance and procedures.
The real reason health care prices are outrageous is simply corporate greed. Malpractice lawsuits are a 1% expense for the insurance company. Corporations get richer and stock holders get happier while doctors and patients suffer.
So if India is cheaper (and probably better) it's only because India's insurance companies (assuming they have them) haven't learned how to be evil fuckers yet.
No, you were shocked by the quality of the textures, facial expressions and the lighting.
The animation itself sucked. I'd go so far as to say that Dreamworks should fire the animators. Compared to Pixar, the animation itself was far below par. All of the facial animation was in slow motion. The characters didn't move fluidly. The rigging was stilted. It wasn't pretty at all. I suggest you go back and watch it again.
Now, you are correct that it is better than the first Shrek. And the textures, faces and lighting were well done. But I can't applaud them on how the characters moved. It looked, well, sophomoric.
I was using it years before OS X had it. I love Apple. And would even support them protecting themselves with this patent. But there's prior art. No question.
If you looked at their earnings reports from last quarter (or indeed most of the previous quarters from the past years) you'll see that Apple's hardware offerings haven't been profitable at all. Most of the quarters that Apple reported profits were because of their portfolio (sale of ARM stock for instance).
46 million of profit on 1.9 billion isn't too good (2.35 percent). In fact were it not for the AMAZING sales of the iPod I don't think Apple would have reported a profit. If Apple hadn't been deversifying away from computer sales they'd be in big trouble right now. I find it odd that a computer hardware company is relying on a music player to make them profitable. It would be one thing if Apple were profitable on Mac sales and the iPod was icing, but for Apple to be dependent on the iPod is a little frightning.
For comparison, Adobe also had a good quarter. They generated a profit of 123 million on revenues of 423 million (29 percent)
Apple simply can't compete on PC hardware. Not at the volume they deliver. They have two long term options: 1, increase their volume. 2, get out of hardware.
Now I'm not saying that their current hardware isn't competitive, nor am I saying that their future hardware won't be competitive. I'm saying their hardware isn't profitable.
Apple has some great consumer and professional applications. They have the potential to deliver more. They have a world class operating system (that is very portable) and they have the best GUI/OS and store for portable music players. They also have a cash hoard that could fund a move away from hardware.
Let's put things into perspective. Adobe and Apple are about the same size in market capilization. Apple employs three time as many people and has 5 times the revenue that Adobe does. Yet Adobe is more than twice as profitable.
Who would you rather be, Adobe or Apple. Adobe isn't competing against every PC manufacturer for market share. In fact their business is healthy regardless of who wins the PC war. Apple could easily be in the same enviable position as Adobe with one significant differnece: Apple has two great operating systems too.
You have to ask yourself: is Apple chasing away developers because of their great software? Or is Apple filling a gaping whole that windows-centric developers are leaving open.
It is true that Adobe is scaling back some of their Mac operations. But apps like Premier and FrameMaker have been seriously neglected (four or more year w/o and update). So if these are the applications Apple risks losing because of their great software then so be it.
Avid/ProTools treats the Mac like a second class citizen so thankfully Apple has helped give them some competition. If it hadn't been for Apple who would have provide quality compositing, audio, video editing, DVD-authoring and now motion graphics software? Was Apple supposed to wait and hope that someone would come to the plate?
If anything, Apple is capable of producing great software. They will always be reliant on third parties with limited resources (or interest) for supporting great Mac hardware. Their strength is their software. It'd be great if Apple could get out their hardware sinkig ship and concentrate on bring great softare to different platforms.
Does this mean that Mac will get real video cards? I can't imagine Pixar moving to G5s and using paltry (by 3D animation standards) ATI 9800s. Powerful G5s are great and all but w/o a decent video card the poor animators will be stuck with lame flat shading or wireframe previews.
This could be the first time in history (feel free to correct me) that Macs had a cutting edge 3D card.
i think bob is missing something, until Mac OS Server 10.2 macs really weren't capable of doing everything a normal IT admin would need it to do. their AIX servers were great, but very un-mac like, their ASIP servers were great for serving Macs but nothing else. until OS X you couldn't run Apache on a mac server. this is the first time they've had a REAL serving OS.
sure, NOW an Xserve with OS X Server is price and performance competive and it's easier to maintain. but Apple has a decade of either lame performance, lame sever OS or too high pricing to erase from the minds of IT professionals. despite all of Apple's consumer "Mind Share" convincing an IT person to all of a sudden adopt a new product that used to suck isn't going to be easy.
that being said. OS X and an Xserve really is all that. people complaining that they're too expensive need to take a closer look.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet somehow we have no problems tranporting oil to non-oil producing regions. A huge solar farm could produce massive amounts of hydrogen. And hydrogen transports just as easily as oil via the same infrastruture. Cheap, unlimited, nearly clean energy and all we have to do is build it. I bet (no figures nor money to back me up) that we could have built several solar farms for the cost of one war in Iraq --not that I'm getting the two issues confused ; )
If you're worried about the propietery format just strip the DRM. A Google search tells you how. Hint, you don't have to burn your purchases to cd and the re-rip to MP3. Or if you prefer, go from M4P to AIFF to FLAC or Apple Lossless. Again, no quality loss and no DRM.
Sometimes you have to look out for your own fair use rights.
I own 400 CDs; the vast majority I bought before my iPod which I've had for for 3 years. Post iPod I've bought 9 albums off of the iTunes music store. I'd buy more if there were some content worth buying. If I had $100 in iTunes gift certificates burning a whole in my digital pocket I honestly would have a damned hard time picking any music, even though it's free. Today's music just doesn't ring true with me. And for those who do like today's music, they now have the option of buying the one or two hit singles that otherwise compose an album of dreck.
Music sales are down because the music sucks. The songs that don't suck can be bought indvidually. Show me a great album I'll give you 9.99 for your DRM laden files. Otherwise I'll wait for it show up in the used bins. There's no way I'm paying the RIAA $16 for a new physical CD. I don't care how good it is.
I thought the EXACT same thing. I was like: "Holy shit! Baby dinos." Now that I've studied the photo some I see it's just Garfield's tough cousin.
Let's see, 103 million households in America. Number of iPods sold today is approximately 20 million. Let's say half of those were sold in America. If I were in the broadcast industry I'd see a potential threat.
I wasn't speaking of dye sub printers. I was speaking of RA4 printers, most which are 200 DPI. Regardless dye sub or RA4, the resolution is still inferior to a decent inkjet. The native resolution of a 2400 DPI printer is indeed 600 DPI. The 2400 results in much finer dithering thus giving the continuous tone appearence. The higher DPI results in much sharper high contrasts ares (think black and white text). Dye subs and RA4 no longer hold the continuous tone advantage.
For the serious hobbyist or pro, it's much more about control over the process than the cost. Grandma should take her snapshots of Billy's soccer game to the local Walmart. But, for me, photos from my 6 color inkjet have much better detail, gamut and accuracy. RA4 printers used to have such a huge advantage as they are continuous tone. But today's inkjets have such high DPI and small droplets that they are continuous tone except when viewed under a loupe.
I tried various on-line labs and found that the biggest problem is consistency. Even if I was pleased with the initial results (happened rarely) the re-prints or follow-up prints were often way off. The other problem is Gamut. My 6 color printer blows away the gamut of any RA4 printer. I'm guessing 8 color printers widen the advantage even more. Lastly, most of these printers are between two or three hundred DPI. My printer is 600 DPI. For very high contrast areas there is a huge difference.
With a monitor calibration, printer calibration and profiling I have controlled, reproducible results that are better than most labs. With generic inks and careful paper selection I've got my 4x6 prints at about 25 and 8x10s at around $1.
The idea that dePlume solicited employees and entices them to break NDA is what really pisses me off. I mean sure, it may be completely true. He may have gone up to engineers in a cloak and fedora as they were leaving the Apple campus and offered them insane amounts of money to give him the goodies. Or he may have gotten an anonymous email from some random Hotmail account. The point is that we don't know. The only way we can know is by forcing him to reveal his sources. Unless there is some specific evidence of him enticing people to break their NDAs I don't see how this judgment can stand.
We have hundreds of DDS4 tapes. We produce about fifteen 20GB tapes a month. We've calculate our failure rate at .05% which we think is unacceptable. We've been seriously evaluating hard drives as an alternative back up. The cost is comparable (sometimes cheaper) and the speed increase would help out a lot too. I just worry about the longevity.
We've looked at other tape media too (AIT) but we're just weary of tape.
What tapes are you using? In my experience with tapes (DDS), I've found them to more expensive than large hard drives. I also question how much more reliable tape is. I get failures all the time.
Part of my "killer idea" wasn't to ditch the gloss platic and polished metal and ALSO have a 1/10th of the capacity. But hey, I don't work at Apple: I'm just a Slashdot reader and history has shown that we know shit about real consumers.
So looking at the photos of these players it would seem that Apple has hired all the designers and engineers who understand interface, asthetics and functionality.
C'mon guys, give us something that's at worthy of competing with an iPod. I'll give you the first killer idea for free: make it just like the iPod but without the stupid glossy, scratch-prone plastic and polished metal.
Lawsuits have nothing to do with insurance rates or the cost of health care inflating. Instead, lawsuits are the justification that insurance companies use to raise prices for both malpractice insurance and procedures.
The real reason health care prices are outrageous is simply corporate greed. Malpractice lawsuits are a 1% expense for the insurance company. Corporations get richer and stock holders get happier while doctors and patients suffer.
So if India is cheaper (and probably better) it's only because India's insurance companies (assuming they have them) haven't learned how to be evil fuckers yet.
I'll third the Spire recommendation. They cost three times what you want to spend, but they're worth it.
http://www.spireusa.com/products/backpacks.htm
Another great thing is that they don't look like computer bags. They don't scream "Please still me!"
No, you were shocked by the quality of the textures, facial expressions and the lighting.
The animation itself sucked. I'd go so far as to say that Dreamworks should fire the animators. Compared to Pixar, the animation itself was far below par. All of the facial animation was in slow motion. The characters didn't move fluidly. The rigging was stilted. It wasn't pretty at all. I suggest you go back and watch it again.
Now, you are correct that it is better than the first Shrek. And the textures, faces and lighting were well done. But I can't applaud them on how the characters moved. It looked, well, sophomoric.
http://www.kaleidoscope.net/greg/PowerWindows.html
I was using it years before OS X had it. I love Apple. And would even support them protecting themselves with this patent. But there's prior art. No question.
If you looked at their earnings reports from last quarter (or indeed most of the previous quarters from the past years) you'll see that Apple's hardware offerings haven't been profitable at all. Most of the quarters that Apple reported profits were because of their portfolio (sale of ARM stock for instance).
46 million of profit on 1.9 billion isn't too good (2.35 percent). In fact were it not for the AMAZING sales of the iPod I don't think Apple would have reported a profit. If Apple hadn't been deversifying away from computer sales they'd be in big trouble right now. I find it odd that a computer hardware company is relying on a music player to make them profitable. It would be one thing if Apple were profitable on Mac sales and the iPod was icing, but for Apple to be dependent on the iPod is a little frightning.
For comparison, Adobe also had a good quarter. They generated a profit of 123 million on revenues of 423 million (29 percent)
Apple simply can't compete on PC hardware. Not at the volume they deliver. They have two long term options: 1, increase their volume. 2, get out of hardware.
Now I'm not saying that their current hardware isn't competitive, nor am I saying that their future hardware won't be competitive. I'm saying their hardware isn't profitable.
Apple has some great consumer and professional applications. They have the potential to deliver more. They have a world class operating system (that is very portable) and they have the best GUI/OS and store for portable music players. They also have a cash hoard that could fund a move away from hardware.
Let's put things into perspective. Adobe and Apple are about the same size in market capilization. Apple employs three time as many people and has 5 times the revenue that Adobe does. Yet Adobe is more than twice as profitable.
Who would you rather be, Adobe or Apple. Adobe isn't competing against every PC manufacturer for market share. In fact their business is healthy regardless of who wins the PC war. Apple could easily be in the same enviable position as Adobe with one significant differnece: Apple has two great operating systems too.
You have to ask yourself: is Apple chasing away developers because of their great software? Or is Apple filling a gaping whole that windows-centric developers are leaving open.
It is true that Adobe is scaling back some of their Mac operations. But apps like Premier and FrameMaker have been seriously neglected (four or more year w/o and update). So if these are the applications Apple risks losing because of their great software then so be it.
Avid/ProTools treats the Mac like a second class citizen so thankfully Apple has helped give them some competition. If it hadn't been for Apple who would have provide quality compositing, audio, video editing, DVD-authoring and now motion graphics software? Was Apple supposed to wait and hope that someone would come to the plate?
If anything, Apple is capable of producing great software. They will always be reliant on third parties with limited resources (or interest) for supporting great Mac hardware. Their strength is their software. It'd be great if Apple could get out their hardware sinkig ship and concentrate on bring great softare to different platforms.
Yeah, it'd really suck if you could animate in real time with higher quality textures and more polygons. That kind of feedback would be really lame.
Does this mean that Mac will get real video cards? I can't imagine Pixar moving to G5s and using paltry (by 3D animation standards) ATI 9800s. Powerful G5s are great and all but w/o a decent video card the poor animators will be stuck with lame flat shading or wireframe previews.
This could be the first time in history (feel free to correct me) that Macs had a cutting edge 3D card.
Damnit, you know you laughed out loud when you read this. Mod it up. I don't even think it's politically incorrect to make fun of the commies.
i think bob is missing something, until Mac OS Server 10.2 macs really weren't capable of doing everything a normal IT admin would need it to do. their AIX servers were great, but very un-mac like, their ASIP servers were great for serving Macs but nothing else. until OS X you couldn't run Apache on a mac server. this is the first time they've had a REAL serving OS.
sure, NOW an Xserve with OS X Server is price and performance competive and it's easier to maintain. but Apple has a decade of either lame performance, lame sever OS or too high pricing to erase from the minds of IT professionals. despite all of Apple's consumer "Mind Share" convincing an IT person to all of a sudden adopt a new product that used to suck isn't going to be easy.
that being said. OS X and an Xserve really is all that. people complaining that they're too expensive need to take a closer look.
has anyone tried the UJ-815 in a powerbook? i wonder if this is the one the MCE is using.
i wonder UJ-815 (or MCE's for that matter) is bootable?
what is the brand/model that MCE is using and does anyone know where else it can be bought?
a 2x burner in a laptop would be sweet. and nearly unheard of.