I've never seen GIMP used in a production environment. It's just not really there yet.

(Disclaimer: I've worked for a fair number of TV networks and on several features you've probably seen.)

If your intent is to move into professional production, learn Avid, FCP and Premiere - in that order. Though, truth be told, Premiere comes in a distant third. It's been gaining ground since the FCP X disaster, but doesn't quite have the same market penetration.

Honestly, almost no one is going to care about the content of your student projects. But they will care that you used them to learn how to work with different editing platforms.

This.

It annoys me to no end when people respond to those critiquing the nuclear power industry with childish replies like "OMG ATOMS!!!!" and the like.

I trust the science, but I sure as hell don't trust the public or private institutions involved.

How many times have we heard "Oh yeah, this terrible thing happened, and it nearly became this horrific thing, but it got covered-up"?

Nothing like going to one website on one occasion, only to have it come up first, every time you begin to type the URL for a site you visit every day.

Or, having an article you read three months ago appear in the drop-down, but not the one you called up three times that day.

DEFCON 11 would be a state of peaceful tranquility unlike anything the world has seen since the dawn of humanity.

You're looking for DEFCON 1.

If it had been a freeway, the property owners would have been told to take a walk.

I'll respectfully disagree, as I think the shift had more to do with the fact for most users, everything changed at home.

For years, most people had a cheap candy bar / flip phone, or at most, an expensive candy bar / flip phone. All phones were pretty dumb and very similar. Remember the RAZR? It was The Thing for a while, but looking back, it wasn't really that much different from everything else.

The hardware was sexy, but the software was horrible. Nobody liked the OS, nobody thought the phones were responsive, etc. It's essentially what the more vitriolic anti-Apple folks claim to be true with the iOS ecosystem. Except that in this case, it was true. There wasn't much to redeem the phones beyond the case. It was exactly the same garbage people had been force-fed for years.

At the same time, millions of people had BlackBerry phones provided by their employers. They offered email that worked and calendaring that wasn't a step below some CP/M program from 1980. (Seriously, did anyone actually use the calendar applications on those old consumer phones?)

While it was great to have email anywhere, it wasn't enough to shift the market away from the run-of-the-mill consumer devices and over to smartphones. At least not en masse.

Then the iPhone arrived. Suddenly people had phones that did a whole bunch of things people wanted to do and did them a whole lot better than their corporate-provided devices. While it had weak support for the features corporate IT demanded, it was immensely popular on the home front. The candy bars and flip phones got wiped out.

Customers went from owning a terrible phone for personal use and a fancy phone for the office, to owning a fancy phone at home and one at the office that seemed - quite suddenly - rather archaic. Rock solid, but... quaint.

Then Android hit the market. The iOS app store opened. The momentum had firmly shifted to the consumer side of things.

BlackBerry was lethargic in responding. Famously, they reacted to the iPhone launch with disbelief. They literally believed the feature list was a lie, so they didn't worry about it.

Even after reality hit them, BlackBerry's handsets were just more of the same. They admitted to not even knowing how many models they were making. Their tablet didn't even have email. In 2010. It made them look ridiculous. Especially in light of the fact email has always been BB's bread and butter.

Meanwhile, iOS and Android kept improving their corporate IT support and allowing third parties to rollout all kinds of management solutions without interference.

Executives carried iPhones and Androids and started wondering why they had to carry two phones.

Corporate IT people did the same. Sure, they were annoyed that they couldn't get the same crazy granularity in security on non-BB devices, but BlackBerries were looking more and more like the typewriter stuck in the corner of the office. It worked, but you didn't use it unless you needed to... and why was that thing still even around anyway?

BYOD was the final nail in the coffin. Penny-pinching execs eyes lit up when they saw the possibilities of not having to buy handsets anymore. Their iPhone and Android using employees could simply buy their own phone, with their own money!

BlackBerry's decline was due to a fundamental shift in the way people use phones and the failure of the market leader to recognize that fact until it was far too late. Had they mobilized on Day 1, I think they could have rolled-out BlackBerry 10 by the end of 2009. In which case, things probably would have been far, far different.

Honestly, it kind of reminds me of the home computing wars. The IBM PC arrived in 1981 and wiped out the entrenched CP/M market within a couple of years. Apple showed up in 1984 with an entirely different approach and snatched-up its own sizable segment. Commodore and Atari rolled out their own new platforms with strong niche appeal a bit later.

For years, Microsoft and Apple jostled for double-digit marketshare, while Commodore and Atari scrambled to claim whatever was left in their wake.

The smartphone market we ended up with Apple > Android > BlackBerry > Microsoft. The first two being incredibly strong, while the latter are struggling to justify their own existence.

The big difference here is that in the home computing wars, what people used at work eventually ended up being what they used at home. Here, it's the opposite.

But this is like telling you: "Since a lot of parents fail to account for the true cost of raising their future children, you have ten years to come up with every penny you'll spend for the first 18 years of their lives, their college tuition and their retirement. Anyway, congratulations on graduating high school!"

I have absolutely zero problem with forcing institutions to pre-fund their pension plans.

But Congress gave the USPS entirely unreasonable demands in an entirely unreasonable timeframe. Even 40 or 50 years in 10 would be far too much.

But all of this is beside the point and not the real issue here, as the whole purpose of the stipulation is to trigger the financial collapse of the USPS.

It's worse than that. The law gives the USPS 10 years to come up with 100% of the money needed to fund all of its pension requirements for the next 75 years.

It's designed to destroy the USPS so Republican lawmakers can bemoan how government has once again failed to deliver. Except that they're the ones who have failed us.

I assume this is what's behind going back and re-grading older films into teal and orange.

"Look, kids! It's just like that terrible blockbuster you saw in theaters three times!"

In New England, it's shorthand for "package store" aka "liquor store". The spelling is different, though.

i.e: "I'm gonna head down to the packie before the cookout."

Since moving away, I've had to mentally restrain myself from ever letting it slip. Not that I was ever really a fan of the term "package store".

I know people who worked on the A380 program and they're more than happy to fly on one and have their families fly on one. It's a fundamentally sound aircraft.

Link

...in 1971 the recently renamed Kelly Services ran a series of ads in The Office, a human resources journal, promoting the “Never-Never Girl,” who, the company claimed: “Never takes a vacation or holiday. Never asks for a raise. Never costs you a dime for slack time. (When the workload drops, you drop her.) Never has a cold, slipped disc or loose tooth. (Not on your time anyway!) Never costs you for unemployment taxes and Social Security payments. (None of the paperwork, either!) Never costs you for fringe benefits. (They add up to 30% of every payroll dollar.) Never fails to please. (If your Kelly Girl employee doesn’t work out, you don’t pay.)”

You're not a person. You're not an employee. You're not even worthy of respect.

I think warning systems are one of the best new technologies for dealing with earthquakes.

The technology is pretty straightforward. You network seismic sensors together and create a system that can detect oncoming (and usually unnoticed) P-waves which have a higher velocity than the destructive S-waves that follow anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds later.

The distributed nature of the system ensures that any result is the product of multiple sensors producing the same data.

30 to 90 seconds is a lot of time. You could deploy receivers set accept the existing SAME codes and automatically send building systems into "Earthquake Mode" via simple relays. Virtually everything that would need to happen is already part of the programming of each affected system. In a lot of cases, you wouldn't even need to modify them in any significant way as they already accept inputs from external relays.

Once the alert goes out:

- Emergency messages are sent to all cell phone users - This system exists and is used for other emergencies.
- Fire station doors roll-up. - Add a simple sounding device and momentary contact to the existing door-opening circuit and you're done.
- Earthquake alarms sound in homes and small businesses - Weather radios that accept SAME codes are already programmed to do this.
- Earthquake alarms sound in major buildings - Fire alarm systems with voice evac are already customized and can accept new initiating devices and announcements with a software update.
- Emergency generators and fire pumps spin-up. Smoke handling systems activate. Stairwells are pressurized. - See above.
- Elevators go into "Fire Mode". All cars go to their recall floor, hold the doors open and refuse input. - This programming exists in every elevator installed in the past few decades. Activating a building fire alarm system will trip this anyway.
- Gas main valves are closed. - This is cheap and simple tech.
- Halt surgery - Voice evac / weather radios that accept SAME codes.
- Shut down industrial processes - Some combination of the above.