[Ron Lindeboom]

[jeff dobrow] “Also, lets not forget that Mr. Gates owns part of Apple,….and also ‘could in theory’ buy Apple 100 times over without missing a beat and do with it what he wanted,….think he cares about 3% of the market when he owns 97% of the PC OS sales?”

While some of your points hold water and I would agree with many of them, this one is laughable and were Bill Gates to even move a muscle to “buy Apple” and “do with it what he wanted,” the FTC and SEC would be all over him like piranha on a bloody piece of meat in the water.

Years back when Gil Amelio was at the helm of Apple and things looked very bleak, I remember arguing on the forums with people who were saying that Apple was dead, that before he’d let Apple disappear from the market, Bill Gates would spend his own money to help keep it alive. He did. This, as long as there’s an Apple, Bill Gates does not have a monopoly. Now, with Apple using Intel chips and having the dual-boot capacity to run both the Mac OS and the full Windows OS on a single machine, Apple not only perpetuates the Mac OS (and will no doubt increase market share because of the dual-boot) but now transforms itself into another customer of Microsoft. Freakin’ brilliant marketing, Steve.

At NAB 2002 I told one of the Intel product managers that I know that Apple would one day be their newest customer. Later at NAB 2002, Apple announced their deal with IBM to ship the new G5s with IBM’s PowerPC chips instead of Motorola’s PowerPC chips that had powered the G3s and G4s. After the announcement, I told him that the IBM/Apple marriage would end in divorce and Apple would still end up with Intel. Why? It was, to quote the irrepressible Mr. Spock, “simply logical.”

In one move, Apple has made itself into a company — the only one that I can think of — that will be making machines which can run both the Mac OS and Windows (not to forget even Linux, if you wish) in a single box. Not emulation, full OS system software. Instead of competing against the Wintel hegemony, Apple has just become one of Bill Gates’ biggest customers — this, as many Mac users who would have never bought a Windows machine will buy a box of Windows now to run in dual-boot mode to run their PC programs on their same box they can boot their Mac OS from to run all their Mac apps.

This guarantees that MacOffice will get full steam ahead (along with other areas where Microsoft had been lax with Mac development as they felt Apple more a necessary irritation than a partner) and also means that Adobe’s apps won’t have to be recoded for the Mac PowerPC as the calls necessary to run them on the Intel chipset will translate quite nicely to an Intel-based Mac, thank you.

Me, I think that companies like Dell have to be going “Oh, cow pies! We just stepped in a big one now!” This, as what are thet going to do when families look at a computer purchase and (as in the case of my son who is a building contractor and needs a PC to run his contractor’s software but his wife and kids love Macs) find that they no longer need to buy two computers. Apple’s power grows far stronger with just this one move and Dell and Gateway and others have to be in shock right about now…

With this move, Apple once again proves that they still have the foresight and pioneering spirit which has marked the company from Day One. “Dear God, ‘No!'”, you say? “Dear God, ‘Yes!’ And it’s about time!” says this old dairy kid.

One machine, booting up any of three major OSes — Mac, Windows or Linux. It’s a thing of damned beauty, I tell you. ;o)

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Carlton Mills] “…up till now Intel has dealt with grown ups – now they have to work with Apple.”

Yeah, grown ups — like all the gamers who outnumber those on the Mac by many, many, many times those on the Mac.

:o)

Boomer

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Chris Smith] “If it means I can have my dream of building a PC from scratch and running OSX instead of Windows, it sounds great to me.”

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that, Chris. I highly doubt that that is ever going to be the destination of all this. After all, Apple is a hardware company and there is plenty that they can do to insure that their OS requires a motherboard that no do-it-yourselfer is ever going to be able to build.

Sorry to throw water on your thoughts but I was around during the entire Mac-clone years and it was a lot less “open” than the term “clone” might imply. I do not think that using Intel procs is going to bring much of a change to the Mac world other than games will be far easier to port to the Mac and development of programs which heretofore have only been PC-centric, will find themselves over on the Mac OS far easier.

But that’s just my two cents.

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

[TobyStud] “Of course, you would earn the universal derision and condescension from 90% of the media professionals out there who eat, sleep, and dream nothing but MAC”

Most of the platform bashing that is done in this site — and I know because I get every single post that goes up in the Cow sent to my inbox — is from the 95% of the market who feel that anyone that doesn’t follow them is an idiot. Thankfully, most of our members are artists who realize that regardless of the brush you use, it’s the talent and determination behind the keyboard that really gets the job done.

Keep your platform bigotry and religiosity to the “Platform Warriors” forum — that’s where we quarantine useless posts like these.

Thanks,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hi Matt,

What I meant when I said “likely” this forum will be turned off is that it is highly likely that as system software updates make it tougher and tougher to use Commotion, there will get to be less and less traffic here. One day, there will be none.

One of the MAIN reasons that we have kept this forum alive is that we know what you personally, have put into it, Matt. We also know that Pinnacle isn’t supporting it and that’s another reason.

But when J Bills made a big deal out of turning off a dead forum that has a perfectly live forum going elsewhere, I guess I should have been more careful in my wording that I said to him.

We know that one day this forum will disappear but it’s not going to happen now and likely won’t until the day that the last one out turns out the lights.

Hell, we haven’t turned off Curious gFx either and it’s pretty dead. But the users have nowhere else to go…

Silhouette Roto was another topic altogether. There was simply no point to keeping that forum going.

Best always, Matt.

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hi All,

In the email we sent J Bills (that I posted in reply to his remarks), we referred to the possibility that the Commotion forum is likely to be deactivated. That is a possibility but we have NOT made any decision one way or the other. We have kept the Commotion forum alive over the years due to the fact that the product is gone and we wanted users to have somewhere to interact. It’s not a lot of traffic — hasn’t been for a long time now — and when it’s clear it is over, at that time we will deactivate the forum. But for now, people still post here and so we are not going to be deactivating the forum. When a month or two goes by without any traffic, then this one will be deactivated as well.

Just to clarify,

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hey J,

We DID write you. We *also* wrote you a second time and you didn’t even bother to dignify our rather long and in-detail email with even an acknowledgement. (See below for a reprint of the details.)

If you care to visit the Cow, please drop the ‘tude or we will be forced to close your account.

We are on forum #197 now and we have only 134 *active* forums. Many forums have not made it in the Cow and are removed from the list as we do not want to be like some sites which have 350+ forums of which only about 20 have any traffic of any consequence. We try to have *active* forums here at the Cow — ones which users actually benefit from. Dead forums are of no use to anyone.

Ron Lindeboom

Hi J,

We did write you. Perhaps your service provider is one
of the many IPs which subscribe to SpamCop and
automatically reject mail from the Cow.

This happens oftentimes whenever *any*one reports us to
SpamCop and then for a period of days we are in their
blacklist.

Therefore, I am writing you from Yahoo in hope that
you get this.

We deleted the forum as it has always been our policy
that dead forums are shut off. The roto forum had
gotten to the point that it was about dead. When we
visited the silhouette software site, we could see why
and it makes no sense to support a forum for a company
that is running its own forum and isn’t even linked to
the Cow. It is never going to work that way.

We are now up to forum #196 and yet we have only 134
active forums. We will be turning off a few more
really quick as we have been going through our site
and seeing what is working and what isn’t. We always
cull the herd and have done so since we started the
site — this, as we do not want to have a bunch of
dead forums.

The Commotion forum is one of the next round of forums
that will *likely* disappear as we have it slated for
deactivation. (likely means we’re not sure)

We really try to keep the Cow a place where the forums
are of a real value to users and when forums die, we
really hate to turn them off but it is far better to
do than to have users clicking a bunch of forums and
finding nothing there.

We really appreciate your efforts in trying to get the
roto forum going J, but unfortunately, it just did not
take off as we had hoped.

The best always,

Ron & Kathlyn

[Ron Lindeboom]

Now why did I know that you’d be about as happy this morning as a mouse in a cheese eatin’ contest ??? ;o)

Have fun, mighty Bart.

Boomer

[Ron Lindeboom]

Movieflo was a great piece of software and one which blew the doors off of Elastic Reality. Its sub-pixel interpolation and ability to lasso areas of an image and blend them without the kind of “seam artifacts” that Elastic Reality created, were legendary. Unfortunately, the market for tools like morphing and warping, roto, etc., have always been very fixed and finite and so these kinds of tools often fill their quota and fade from the market.

But if legend is correct and I think it is, Adobe — ever the ones to know something great when they see it — licensed the code from Valis Group to create some of the tools in After Effects.

Ron Lindeboom
(who paid $800 for his copy of Movieflo and loved it)

[Ron Lindeboom]

[MarkH] “Why so expensive? What does this card have over the Decklink?”

A lower level of customer support, in my opinion.

🙂

Ron Lindeboom