Maybe thats just me, but does anyone see any system requirements on anywhere? I read the press release, looked all over the company website and still could not find anything even remotely looking like system requirements anywhere.

I would guess that there is a Windows version and since it seems to integrate with Final Cut Pro, a Mac version seems likely as well, but there is no way to be sure and strangely, I could not find anything.

Also, it seems that Lightworks was only recently (August 2009) acquired by EditShare. Making it OpenSource now could mean that EditShare maybe was not able or willing to continue developing, selling and supporting the program and now tries to salvage something by open-sourcing it, hoping the community will pick up the slack.

"At the time, Jobs was still smarter than Gates. Still is. Just different games. Gates went for world domination, and got all the headaches an emperor hates. Jobs went for market domination, and is still leading in pretty much every area they care to develop in.

Except the PC market. According to Gartner's January 13 press release, the top five companies in PC sales worldwide in Q4 2009 were HP, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba.
The top five companies in PC sales the US in Q4 2009 were HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, and Apple."

This is really one of my points. Truth is, in computing, Apple doesn't really compete with HP, Dell, Lonovo, Acer, or Toshiba. They do their own thing, and it's the Apple experience. If they keep on, they are virtually immune to competition for their desktop business, and I think the Macbook business is also soundly locked up.

And while every other manufacturer is trying to out-netbook their competition, Apple may have nailed it with the iPad. I don't see a viable competitor yet - processors need to become super power-efficient, the OS needs to exploit that, and the interface will need be superb. Until then, Apple has re-defined the tablet into something fairly useful, and created a whole new market niche. I have a Lenovo X41 Tablet, and the shortcomings are glaring. I'm not buying an iPad, though, cause I am one of the few who won't be jumping on the bandwagon and paying even more money on content and connectivity. Just not worth it to me, and I AM a minority.

Or to put it another way, Apple has probably 7-10% of the U.S. personal computing market for the forseeable future, though they will have to exert themselves for that last 3%. As a friend once told me, he would be happy with .03% of the U.S. toothpaste market, and he got it. Apple has a great position - 'just 7%' that they pretty much have out to the horizon, or until Jobs retires for real. That's their weakness - their real product is Job's vision. Without him, they will struggle. But who know who runs Toshiba's PC business? Who cares?

Probably Windows Home Server is the best bet, especially if he's going with Windows clients anyway. I think there also may be parental control settings at the server level... but I may be remembering incorrectly.

I think this entire thread is obvious and irrelevant. I just thought I'd hop on the bandwagon with you.

You can tell GP is also of the "math isn't important" camp.

This is only factual in the strictest sense. The STATE's portion of the sales tax is only 6.5% but each county and municipality levies additional percentages, so ultimately the tax on sales WITHIN the state tends to be 8.6 to 9.0 % depending on where you are standing. I believe overall we have the second highest sales taxes in the nation, just behind New York. We also pay some of the highest taxes on liquor (only sold in state controlled stores), tobacco, and gasoline in the nation.

Also consider that King County (and others) levies a Business & Occupations tax for the "privilege" of doing business here, plus we have a corporate income tax (no personal income tax though) and extremely high property taxes. Additionally, the smoking ban effectively killed live music in Seattle, if you're a business, you can be fined hundreds of dollars for putting recyclables in the garbage (seriously), there's no alcohol allowed in strip clubs, we have the worst traffic in the entire country, and it rains about 260 days a year. In general, Washington is a shitty place to live and work.

I had a translation course where the prof accepted -- encouraged, in fact -- digital copies (PDF, DOC) and then returned the marked printouts during the next session. The only problem he seemed to have was that people didn't follow the instruction to name their files sensibly. Obviously this doesn't help save the environment, it's just more convenient for everybody, you don't have to go to uni just to hand in a paper etc.

Well, if you have software on your $400 laptop that can do the digital to analog / analog to digital just like you say, the solution is clear: hold one laptop up to each ear.

Gee thanks, now I have a terrible vision of a whole new level of sidetalkin ;-)

So, what you're saying is that anyone who doesn't share your exact opinions on what technology they want to buy is being coerced or tricked into spending money on junk?

I suppose it;s only natural though. You think we've been duped into buying Apple products, I think you have been duped into using a free, unpolished, clunky, maybe-it'll-work, operating system by RMS, but it's free so it doesn't matter!

*disclaimer, I also use Linux, but free free not to believe me since I am one of those "lemmings who buys things just because adverts say so".

You realise quicktime is not a single type of video right? It's a framework that plays back many different types of container with myriad different codecs. Hell, Quicktime on OS X plays back WMV (although not on the iPhone, since you need the [free] codec).

Point is, there's no "quicktime video" - there are just videos (in containers like .avi, .mkv, .mp4, .wmv, in various codecs like H.264, WMV and so on) that the quicktime framework plays back.

But with a real tablet computer and a stylus (e.g. Lenovo x-series tablets), in addition to erasing you also get a pencil that can cut & paste, resize, move, add space in the middle of the page, highlight, color, change the color of already written text, and annotate pdfs (in case the lecturer hands out slides in pdf format), and undo.

It's called Xournal. I frakking love it. Completely changed the way I work. Now I don't have to carry a backpack full of printed articles.

I also use Zotero. It's a bibliographic database add-on for firefox, and it will store full-text pdf's. If you set up xournal as your default pdf viewer, you can annotate and store the annotations for papers. So I no longer carry any printed paper or notes anymore.

If you're in science or engineering and deal in diagrams, equations, and journal articles, this beats the crap out of paper & pencil.

I hope to see more real tablet computers this year. Everyone has decided to stop manufacturing tablets with high-resolution screens, and use wide screens too, which means in portrait mode your tablet is blocky (can't read subscripts of equations) and too tall (because it's 16:10 rather than 4:3). So while the iPad sucks on all the above points, I hope it spurs some new & interesting tablets this year. Pen input (wacom) also needs improvement, especially near the edges of the screens where precision is lost.

I want notes to provide a condensed version of the lecture that I can study from. If the only way to revisit material from the lecture is to sit through the whole damn thing again on video then I've achieved little. Yes, yes, you can jump to a portion, but you're still left wading through a mass of material to find what you want. I want brief concise notes that hit the high points that are relevant to my understanding of the material (skip over bits I find easy, provide elaboration on parts I foubnd more challenging). That's the whole damn point of taking notes; and those notes are the whole damn point of going through the lecture.

I can type on my iTouch as fast as most people type on a computer (which is faster than most people write) so I'll be surprised if i cant do the same on an iPad. Get a stylus for your iPad (yeah it's a little annoying it isn't included but whatever) and draw diagrams and stuff and you're probably set. If you just can't type by muscle memory without having a touch keyboard then maybe add a bluetooth keyboard. Add in the ability to record the audio and you can probably get some pretty good notes. I don't buy the handwriting being better for memory. It's probably just whatever you're used to. I always type my notes on my laptop and I find it less distracting than writing. The diagram thing is a point but having a screen you can draw on would take care of it.