Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Frank,
Fiction?
As I noted elsewhere here it’s nothing more or less than a modern reflection of precisely what happened in the electronics industry in music playback through the 60s 70’s and 80s.
Big consoles were the form factor originally.
Then “components” took over. You selected your speakers, your reciever, etc. At the low end pre-configured “systems” dominated – at the high end the consumers with more specialized needs, budgets or just tastes assembled their “stereos” by mix and match.That’s all I’m envisioning here, and it can’t be a mere “fantasy” if it’s already happened in a very similar industry in reality.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Craig,
He either can’t see it or won’t see it.
I will say that my mailbox is getting constant inquiries from local editors clamoring for options to help them learn X, so I’m comfortable that we’re actually on to something here.
Sooner or later all the folks who come here to moan about how Apple has ruined their lives will go to the Premier and Avid boards to piss and moan about how badly they are being treated there – because complaining without proffering constructive alternatives is just a manifestation of the “victim” state of mind, nothing more.
This board is more about the future these days. That we still get the occasional “they’ve ruined EVERYTHING! Post will fade.
My 2 cents, anyway.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Walter Soyka] “I do still think it’d be a tragic loss to drop all Xeon-powered Macs for the i7 line. Why give up all that performance potential for a marginally smaller case?”
What’s wrong with we all buy the same keyboard, the display real-estate we need, then we buy the CPU box we want? Need a uber GPU or 10 for game development? Hang another box on the line. I get to have 2-6 i7s for the work I need. Walter gets to have 50 Xenon’s in his array. The cooling and the power supplies come matched to what each box requires? Isn’t that a whole lot more efficient than just building boxes of fixed stuff that lock you into a rigid system until it becomes dysfunctional? The big difference is that we’re not trying to stuff everything into the same case or even the same rack.
You pick OSX- or iOS as you like. Heck, with fast enough pipes, and global management capabilities like Grand Central and the Core Suites, run iOS on your iPad and OS-X on the “render box” next to your array as you need.
I’m sure there’s complexities I don’t understand here – but the “componantization” of the computer is really no different than what happened in Stereo systems in the 1970s. And that sold a WHOLE lot of great music playback systems for generations.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[David Roth Weiss] “Like it or not, the visual nature of tracked audio provides instant recognition and instant feedback for many who may never be able to get around it. The ultimate success or failure of FCPX may well prove to be dependent on this one aspect of Apple’s radical departure from the tracked standard.”
So then the next question that pops up for me is whether in the past, those who succeeded as “editors” were largely those who’s brains could be most comfortable in a “linear display of everything” mode – and those who were wired to naturally think differently found editing more frustrating than their “other wired” brethren.
I’m not making ANY value judgements about this. Not trying to shoehorn editors into a box, or even presume that someone “wired for linear display” (if anything even remotely like that exists) might have the same natural affinity to editing akin to how someone who genetically has a large physique and robust musculature might be attracted to sports.
I’m just broadly postulating whether having another approach to editing available might, in the longer run, make it more attractive to those who don’t quite so naturally “resonate” with the timeline approach we’ve had up to now.
Maybe this is totally “over thinking” things and it will turn out that like driving a car, nearly anyone can do it competently regardless of how their brain naturally functions.
And that this will reflect on not only the initial resistance of the “Legacy” trained editors, but eventually lead to their seeing that learning the new process embodied in X is actually no more difficult than learning, perhaps, to move from driving a manual transmission car, to a diesel truck. Most stuff the same, some things like double-clutching different, but on the whole, not as daunting as it looks at first glance up at that big cab – which actually has no more levers and buttons than a Mercades, but many of them DO have different functions and tasks attached.
That would go a tiny way to explain why there was such a large rapid hue and cry about the change to something that is actually such a small part of the entire process of competent digital storytelling.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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I’m not sure if this is funny…
Or depressingly accurate.
(Nice post regardless.)
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Walter Soyka] “Bill, maybe we’re just arguing out of habit now. I don’t disagree with you that computers should be no bigger than needed and should have modular expansion.
“You’re completely right about the “out of habit” deal.
I don’t actually see it as “arguing” – more just discussing the possibilities and clarifying thinking when you perceive that someone is taking what you’re writing the wrong way. It’s a difficulty in the world of instant written on-line communications – since without the benefit of “tone” a whole LOT of stuff in comes across as potentially “argumentative” when it likely often isn’t meant that way at all.
Peace.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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“Watson was built with server/workstation-class hardware.”
Absolutely, Walter.
What it WASN’T built with is a huge array of Towers, because the form factor is only smart for single purpose “closed” systems where you needed everything directly adjacent to the CPU to maximize throughput.
Watson clustered processors in the smallest physical continuity and attached the “clusters” of processors together using high speed, short pipes as you noted.
As Thunderbolt migrates from copper to optical – Intel’s proposed roadmap of speed capabilities increasingly makes a processor at one end of the “pipe” handle data FASTER than one in an “old style” box on an internal buss.
That’s the “tipping point” in computer design that makes the “tower” form-factor irrelevant.
Who cares if the CPU, the GPU, and the bank of memory modules are in one arbitrary box? Or in slots on a rack? Or in closets at different ends of the office? It’s meaningless if the result is a system that crunches the numbers, displays the result, and allows you to manipulate everything, at will, a hundred times faster than you can now?
(IIRC that was the Thundrerbolt spec for the version 3 (all optical) interation. 100 times the bandwidth of USB 3.0)
That changes EVERYTHING about computer form factor design, as I understand it.
So hanging on to the specter of a computer as a “box” with cards in slots isn’t in tune with where the hardware industry is clearly evolving.
To keep on topic for the forum, back when I started editing digital video, I dropped a lot of frames even working with 25Mbps DV on my Mac Quadra of the era.
Today, I NEVER drop frames editing HD-DSLR footage on my i7 MacBook Pro via FCP-X. That’s the point. Absolutely I can’t edit multiple streams of uncompressed RED footage on this same laptop right now, so I get those who still have to keep their brains “tower centric” and off-load stuff like video calculations to card-based sub-processors. But the writing is CLEARLY on the wall. That’s NOT going to be the case for very long.
So invest carefully. If you can’t “Section 179” it – maybe it’s not a great investment? Tho that’s obviously between you, your business model, and your accountant.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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“I’d be curious to learn what on earth Apple has to do to get on the bad side of some of these people.”
Perhaps stop their long successful march to the top of the modern business world?
(Just sayin’ )
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Not sure if I mentioned this in another thread, but I was shooting at a BioTech conference a few weeks ago and they had Watson (the computer that won Jeopardy) on display.
Looking backstage it was nothing but a bunch of racks of processor boxes. Each packed with cores – running in massively parallel arrays. The point is that this planetary class computer didn’t use a “big iron” monolithic approach. It was computing build around an array of processors modules each doing what they do best – with the simplest possible power distribution and IO necessary to enable them to do their job of crunching data fast.
The old “everything in one big tower” mode is dying out across the industry. The computer will increasingly be a string of task specific smaller modules – the sum of it’s parts rather than a big massive central “all in one” unit – all connected by fast I/O pipes.
Thunderbolt I/O enables that.
Today’s “laptop” is tomorrows “control surface.” The power will reside in what you hang off the busses – not what’s in any one big box.
It’s computer as “collection of things” – rather than the computer as A thing.
That’s my bet anyway.
We’ll see.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Todd,
I feel your pain.
My entire history seems to be chock full of once useful devices like your label printer that had became central to how I worked, right up to the day that some software “update” or interface “advance” killed them as regards my workflow.
Sometimes the new way was pretty compatible with the old process and maybe even better. Sometimes the hardware didn’t make it through an OS “update” or driver issue and suddenly a valuable device or process simply got impossible to continue to use.
Sucks, but it’s the price of “progress”, I suppose.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor