Imagine you can walk up to your favourite hardware store and tell the guy: “Give me the biggest, fastest, meanest laptop you have. Money is no issue”.
Let’s see what this would buy you in the (Belgian) Apple store:
Pimped-out MacBook Pro
2,4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
S-ATA disk 250 GB (4200 rpm)
17″ Glossy WUXGA (1920×1200)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, dual-link DVI, 256 MB GDDR3 SDRAM
SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote
AppleCare Protection plan: 3 years
Which would cost you around 3400 euro (excl taxes/transport).
Let’s now compare that to a fully expanded Dell Precision portable workstation from the Dell store:
Pimped-out Dell Precision M90
Intel® Core™2 Duo T7600 (2,33 GHz 4 MB L2-cache 667 MHz FSB)
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Windows® XP Professional, SP2 (NTFS)
3 jaar Business Support
3 jaar CompleteCare Accidental Damage Cover
17″ WUXGA (1920 x 1200) UltraSharp screen
NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 1500M, 256 MB RAM
100 GB harde schijf (7.200 rpm)
8x DVD+/-RW-station
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini-kaart (54 Mbps) Core2 Duo
Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth
Which will set you back … 3280 euro. Or wait, try this:
Pimped-out Dell Inspiron XPS M1710
Intel® Core™2 Duo T7600 Processor (2,33 GHz, 667 MHz, 4 MB L2-cache)
Windows Vista™ Home Premium
Premium XPS-service, 3 y
17″ UltraSharp WUXGA display, 1920 x 1200
4GB 667 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
160 GB S-ATA disk (7.200 rpm)
8x DVD+/-RW
512 MB DDR3 nVidia® GeForce™ Go 7950 GTX
Dell™ Wireless 355 Bluetooth 2.0
Intel® Pro Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g mini-PCI-kaart
At a staggering … 3280 euro, or just the same as the Precision.
I know, to some extent, it’s comparing Apples to oranges, but I’m just saying: for a high-end notebook, a MacBook Pro is not that excessively expensive.
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And this is what YouTube is developing as a new ‘beta’ version:
they got rid of the large banner (” Use Quicklists!”) which was basically a waste of space.
all clip info is now under the video instead of to the right. All info on and action on a video are now in one place. I like it.
Youtube likes you to check out other videos. Most newly freed space is dedicated to thumbnails of other (’related’/'promoted’) clips: you now see 13 of them on the frist page instead of 5.
What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Midland
(”Midland” is not necessarily the same thing as “Midwest”)
The default, lowest-common-denominator American accent that newscasters try to imitate. Since it’s a neutral accent, just because you have a Midland accent doesn’t mean you’re from the Midland.
I’ve had a number of requests from attendees of the Barcamp Brussels 3 event. “The speeches were recorded on Nokia N95 phones, right? How come we haven’t seen them yet on Youtube/Google? What’s taking so long?” Well, here’s the answer.
The reason is purely me. I received the N95 video’s (3DVDs, about 12GB in total) from Fré quite soon after the event. At the time, I was ‘just going to throw them’ on Google Video, maybe with a title image before the movie that included a Barcamp and Nokia logo. How hard would that be, right? Well, slightly harder than I thought. The files were huge, so had to be transcoded to something smaller, there were too many files to do things manually, so I needed to start scripting, and the tools I used for it, ImageMagick and FFMPEG are powerful but tricky. That combined with my tango activities, a holiday, a girlfriend abroad and the non-negligeable fact of having a day-time job made for this delay of over a month. Mea culpa. But the wait is over.
These are the first videos. Feedback on video, sound and other details are welcome! I will then proceed with the conversion of the other ones. I will also do a post on what tricks I used to do the video rendering of the title, the transcoding and the merging of video files.
I got an email from Gene Graham, who has just finished his first full-length documentary on the early days of Disco. Me being a fan of house and disco music, that is one movie I’d like to see!
The Godfather of Disco is a feature-length documentary based on Mel Cheren’s powerful autobiography: My Life and the Paradise Garage: Keep On Dancin’. Through a series of interviews with a who’s who of the dance music community, The Godfather of Disco follows the arc of Mel’s life to examine the early 70s musical and cultural currents that gave birth to disco; West End Records‘ contribution to that scene; and the rise of the Paradise Garage.
(…)
This documentary not only celebrates the foundation of the dance music scene, it contains interviews with some of todays biggest industry players like Louis Vega, Kevin Hedge, Tony Humphries, Louis Benedetti, Barbara Tucker, and Deli G to name a few.
Gene has already won the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2007 Minneapolis/St.Paul Internationla Film Festival. I wish him all the best for the other festivals where the movie will be shown, and I hope I get to see it eventually!
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