lorin schultz

To those bashing Consumer Reports for what they perceive to be flawed testing:

1. OF COURSE they disabled caching. It's a test of battery use while surfing. To make the test consistent and repeatable across multiple runs and various models, the test involves having the machines continuously load content from a fixed set of sources. There wouldn't be any point to the test if it only involved downloading the content once then storing it.

2. The results VARIED. This wasn't a case of an artificial test that doesn't reflect real-world usage making the battery life seem worse than it would be in actual use, it was a case of sometimes the battery lasting a long time and other times running dead very quickly. Since the test was the same every time, the huge variations in results were a legitimate cause for concern, REGARDLESS of the testing method.

3. According to APPLE, not CR, the problem is the result of a BUG, not the testing methodology per se. The testing method merely exposed it. How long would it have gone on unnoticed and unfixed if the test hadn't uncovered it? It may not have affected me or you, but obviously some people would suffer from it. This is a positive outcome.

4. Reports from others, including participants in this forum, outlining how their real-world use of the machines has resulted in excessive battery drain, show that the problem exists outside the circumstances imposed by CR's testing. CR did NOT run a flawed test and report erroneous findings. They reported, as have others, that there are still wrinkles to be ironed out.

5. CR didn't say it's a crappy machine. They said it's a great machine with a really big "something's not right here." They were absolutely CORRECT.

I'm lucky that I haven't had battery problems (so far, knock wood), but others obviously have, and depending on what's causing them, maybe it's only because I haven't yet done the things that cause the problem to surface and later WILL have a problem. I welcome any information that helps lead to a cure.

Mikeymike said:

pscooter63 said:

Disembarking is how you leave a transport vessel.

Debarking is a canine veterinary procedure.

Was going to say something similar.
I point of fact, correct term is "deplane".

Are you sure? I thought "deplane" is what Herve Villechaize did on Fantasy Island.

nht said:

No, they are not the exception.  Survey the list of successful directors and see how many attended film school.  This when making films was much harder than today.

I wouldn't know where to begin to find such information, but I'm not sure it would necessarily invalidate my position anyway. How many among those who would consider film school are likely to become big Hollywood directors compared to the number who will happily and unceremoniously toil in the crew trenches? For the vast majority of those who will work in the industry, formal training is important.

Even among successful directors who lack formal training, the ones I've worked with can be broken down into two categories:

1. Those who recognize there are things they don't know and listen to those on the team who have expertise in areas she/he doesn't.

2. Those who DON'T acknowledge gaps in their own knowledge who waste money pursuing impossible objectives or working inefficiently.

The latter may not be an impediment to critical or financial success, but it is bad for everyone around them. They succeed IN SPITE of their shortcomings, not because of them.

Regardless of outcomes, knowledge and understanding are almost never an impediment to productivity or success, whereas lack of them often is.

nht said:

Not going to film school isn't the same as not taking any training.

Then maybe we don't disagree. Maybe I'm just not understanding what you're saying. What kind of training do you think people who want to work in production or post SHOULD be getting? If you're saying "on the job" is enough, I disagree. There are some things that are better learned in the classroom, and some are things many self-taught "pros" still get wrong.

nht said:

And by necessity you learn a lot by doing.

Of course, and that's why the programs I've looked at include a lot of hands-on, jump-in-and-get-your-feet dirty practical training. The advantage is that the experience is gained with the added benefit of a guiding hand from someone with knowledge of the process.

nht said:

The guy that will be successful is the one that actually plays football a lot as opposed to sitting in a class and watching others play football and playing a game or two a semester.

I think it's important to have BOTH. Just playing football won't provide nearly as much benefit as having someone who knows the game critique my actions so that I do better next time, teach me strategy so I can plan my actions in advance, and provide an understanding of what OTHER players are doing so that my actions support theirs.

Some things are only learned by doing. Other things need to be taught in a classroom. Both are important. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to spend a large chunk of a very limited post schedule fixing bad audio that happened because the people in the field don't know anything about gain staging or how using their equipment differently would save time and money while also making the product better. They won't learn things like that in the field. That's book learnin'.

nht said:

Tell me...who teaches at film school?  Successful directors, DPs,, etc?  Folks who are actively working?  Or folks that aren't?  What practical training to they provide?

Like anything else, I would imagine it depends on the school. If the example is Vancouver Film School, then yes, it is people who already are or were successful in the industry before/during their stint as instructors. I imagine the salary requirements to persuade people like that to teach are part of what makes tuition so expensive. So does having current equipment for the students to use.

Even in cases where the faculty are not active participants in the industry, the degree to which it matters depends on what they're teaching. I know less than zero about what makes the difference between a crappy editor and a great one, but I am more than capable of teaching an editor -- newbie or experienced -- the dos and don'ts of good audio. Teaching story-telling and how to support the story with pictures and sound requires someone with expertise in that particular area, but knowing what various CODECs do and how various processes affect the material is stuff that can (and probably should) be learned from a techie, for whom extensive practical experience in the specific discipline is not particularly relevant.

nottylerdurden said:

This isn't a new idea. We've been running something like this in my department at a college for about 10 years. It's a usb screen that is mounted over the front of a 42" TV. Connecting the VGA input on the TV to a Mac, we turned it into a touchscreen computer.

The problem is the 3rd party drivers and keeping them current with Apple's OS. Development on the touchscreen stalled and we had to stop OS updates on the computer to keep the touchscreen working. It needed to be calibrated weekly and that part was a little flaky too.

We tried the infrared approach, like what's being described in this article, on a 103" Panasonic plasma. The challenge we had there was that the display bezel put the detection area about an inch away from the screen. That's enough to introduce parallax error with a screen that big. It worked perfectly at the eye level of whoever was using it, but when pointing to things above or below the user, they'd often miss. Of course, that wouldn't be a problem with a display that isn't the size of a living room wall with a typical bezel depth.

Ours also seemed to require periodic recalibration, but we never decided conclusively if it was actually drifting or if the perception of misalignment was the result of different users each approaching it differently.

ericthehalfbee said:

Apples advancements in their ARM processors are far ahead of what Intel has been doing.

I'm no silicon architect so I may be off base here, but I'm not sure it's a fair comparison.

If I'm building go-karts, there's lots of room for each iteration to be WAAAY better than the one before it. If I'm building F1 cars, this year's model is already so close to the limit of what's possible that next year's model will likely only manage small improvements. Thus one could argue that the the go-kart builder is advancing faster/better/more than the F1 team. It would be true, but only because there's so much more ROOM for improvement to the go-kart than there is to the F1 car.

At this point, I think it's a fair (if obviously exaggerated) comparison. Who knows if that will still be true in three years.