When watching television, I rarely pay too much attention to the commercials, unless they catch my attention.I have seen the "Finally Fast.com" commercial. At first I was excited, finally a program to speed up my DSL speed. And the download was free. I could not believe my luck. Well, to my consternation, and after downloading the program, I find out, it just scans and shows you just how much junk and garbage you have on your computer. When you go to fix that junk --WHAM!!! you get - in order to continue, you must register. What a misleading commercial it was. Boy, was I pi____ed off. I hate commercials that blatently lie. This is just the first of my minions of blog listings I will be writing about that aggrevate the hell out of me. And probably many others, It it only the beginning.
Ok, to start, I've been reading about Shane's exploits for a long time on lafcpug here and now on his blog and he's had some interesting rigs involving rubberbands (i seem to remember that was you in a g5 with a rubberbanded set of drives) and now his latest macbeast.
Well i've had my mac pro since about a month or so before the octos came out. And Since then I've added a HDD a few times, which started first as a place to put media, than it was a third drive to put music and project files on. then it was another drive which i raided with the other 500 inside to create a 1tb raid 0 setup. I repartitioned 1 drive to install leopard on 1 part and keep music and projects on another.
So at this point I'm up to 4 drives, and 1 optical drive and the stock 2 gigs of ram (i know...i know)
this is in response to shane ross, who if you don't know, is a leader for FCP users here and several other major websites. he posted in my previous blog
I agree that FCP can work very very well but let me ask you the following questions:
Do your computer run on more than a gig of ram, a lot of the ones I work on at the computer labs I work at do not which is a problem.
Are your computers built and run to just do that kind of work, or do you have people doing flash, photo editing, scanning, script writing, fcp editing, dvd creation, etc on them?
I also wrote this a bit bitter about a lot of my day so it's pretty negative. And i'd be lieing if i said I didn't love it many times. but there are so many odd quirks and things that it's just hard to deal with some times.
I was reminded about our MacBook Air conversations (including the comments on a recent post from Walter) by seeing it as one of the minor stories on the cover of Laptop magazine. So I did some poking around the web to see what platform neutral and PC-oriented pubs had to say about Air.
...or so some observers believed in 2006! This was upon the news of the second laptop to include Blu-ray drives, this one from Dell. And why not? When Apple joined the Blu-ray Disc Association in 2005, they said they were committed to promoting the format. Seen anything to back that up since then? Anything?
I think Dell makes better computers than a lot of people think, and you certainly have them to thank for the idea of truly custom configurations and computer sales over the internet, both of which they practiced years before many others did. But their stuff is nothing next to Sony's. The VAIO line is pretty elegant, and introduced thin form factors, wide screens and 1920x1080 res back before the turn of the century.
This is something i wrote in another forum about "Phenomenon" apple's new compositor.
it's sad. i trouble shoot fcp daily...actually..a lot more than that. they do such a sh*t job of making apps. really they do. I have NO faith in any major app they release with the spotty work they have done since i got into their proapps
fcp 4.5 was THE most stable fcp ever, 5.0 went down the hole, 5.1 showed a resemblance of coming back to ok, and to say that i've been happy with fcs2 and all that has happened around that is an overstatement.
I run fcp in a few worlds. I have a boot drive for it running in tiger and it's pretty good in a hard core THis is an editing system environment.
So I have set my sites on jobs when I graduate. It's pretty clear I'm not going to be inducted to the orphanage as their newest lead compositor straight out of college, not that it hurts to dream mind you, but it certainly hurts to expect such things. So I've been focusing on a much more realistic vacancy: Roto Artist.
Well, I am still awaiting my MacPro. Everything else has arrived: Kona 3 with K-BOX, HD10AVA, RAM, X1900XT Graphics card...heck, I even bought the pieces to the desk I intend to build today. I am discussing the arrival of my machine on this thread on the Apple forums. Trying to build tension, and have fun discussions that aren't meant to solve issues.
I'll post desk pics when I get the thing together. I bought various pieces at Ikea, but the design will be unique.
(Freemont Street light show - I was in Vegas this weekend)
I am on the verge of buying a new edit system for my next project, so I thought that I'd take this opportunity to talk about setting up a good working system. Unfortunately I won't get into exact details on OS versions and QT versions, because that is information that I and others keep closely guarded as this is information we use for consulting. But I would like to explain the general steps and reasons for those steps.
Shane Ross hipped me to this. Until he posts his MacWorld ruminations, I'll tell you about it.
The Apple Cinema Display is just fine, thanks -- but here's a 30-inch monitor that's faster and brighter, with higher contrast and a wider viewing angle. It can be hardware calibrated - way way WAY overdue for ACD. (Professional monitor? Hmph.)
2560x1600 res, dual DVI including HDCP-encryption and analog inputs, 12-bit LUT...
Now throw in automatic backlighting and pixel-level adjustments to ensure uniform color across the screen and across time. Did I mention killah and crazy? It is.
Maybe these folks have stayed on your radar, but definitely not on mine. I was going to call this "Where are they now?" but the story is more "Behind the Music." Once you know they're alive it's easy enough to track them down, but unless you're really old yourself, somebody really old needs to explain what the big deal is.
Magma was one of the companies we saw as real live heroes back in 1997. This is the year that the Power Mac and its 6 PCI slots gave way to the G3 with, appropriately enough I suppose, 3 PCI slots.
...in, uhm, 2007. It really did make a huge splash at that show: in addition to MacWorld naming it best of show, I love this article from Ars Technica called "ModBook Rules MacWorld." It's easy to see why - this is the super cool thing that Apple should have released this year...if not last year...if not before. Yeah, yeah, laptops get all the buzz right now, but I'm telling you, tablets have been rocking the PC world for years because for a dramatic part of the laptop market, tablets work so much better. By such a long shot it's ridiculous.
Everyone is talking about the new MacBook Air that was announced by His Jobsness yesterday at Macworld 2008 in San Francisco. I think you'll find that the majority of people's initial reactions are not glowing and positive as is the buzz with most newly announced Apple products. Yesterday was a far cry from the fan fare surrounding the iPhone announcement last year at Macworld or even all-but-forgotten Mac Mini in '05.
