joshmessmer

If it wasn't for U2's performance, I could have learned 4 more minutes worth of things about the iWatch.

Exactly my story.

For videos VLC is my favourite. Foobar 2000 is absolutely amazing and infinetly customizable for music. And I noticed YouTube is on the list of options so for streaming, YouTube and Netflix (and does Chromecast count?).

I use Ubuntu as it's the easiest to use so it saves me time. The moment that Adobe Creative Suite CS6 or higher is available on Linux without Wine, it'll be my daily driver.

Avid is the traditional digital editing tool. Premiere is used sometimes (Final Cut was used a lot more before Final Cut X), but more rarely. Lightworks is used a lot, is modular, and powerful - and free. It really depends on the editor though. Unlike most jobs in the film industry, where all the studios use either the same pinnacle software or their own exclusive in-house stuff, the video editor is usually left to his own devices. He/she works alone for the most part and uses whatever tool feels more comfortable to them. Just keep in mind, that film editing used to mean cutting physical rolls of film and then putting them back together. Hundreds of amazing films have been made this way. So as long as your editor can render out in high quality video formats, the only thing it needs to do is let you cut and re-arrange clips. The rest is dependent on what you feel you need to comfortably edit. If what you meant by editing is the Visual Effects, then that's a lot harder question. In general, studios will use their own in-house propreitary software. One application for modeling pieces (building a mesh), one for sculpting (building the shapes - usually things like faces), one for animating (the actual motion), one for rendering (loading lighting, textures, particles, physics, etc), and a couple for compiling the CGI into the live-action film and making it look realistic. For compiling the CGI, your best bet is Adobe After Effects. For modeling and animation, Auto-desk Maya is probably the most professional (I'm told it's similar to Pixar's software), but Auto-desk 3DS Max (used commonly for video game modeling) and Cinema4D (used a lot in commercials for car or device models). For sculpting, Z-Brush is the most powerful and the industry standard outside of in-house stuff. Auto-desk MudBox is pretty good too, and if you're going to use Maya, the two applications communicate well with each other. Then for rendering, you could use the built in renderer in Maya, 3DS Max, or Cinema 4D, or download any number of third-party plugins. Finally, Blender3D is free piece of 3D software that does all of these. It's best at the modeling side, but it also has pretty advanced sculpting and the animation is really solid. It has tons of the same capabilites as After Effects but is a LOT harder to use in that regard. Hopefully this helps! EDIT: Also, although Blender3D and After Effects can do motion tracking (figures out how the camera is moving so that you could add say a 3D car into the scene and it will move opposite to the camera movements so it appears to remain stationary in the scene) Mocha is a much more powerful. There's also colour correction (adjusting colours so all scene match and nothing is too blown out or dark etc, and helps blend VFX with live-action) and colour grading (stylizing the colours in the film to make it look as intending - like making the trees' green appear more yellow and dead, while making the sky's blue more saturated). Colour grading makes a huge difference as to the final look of the film. Adobe Premiere can do this, or better yet Blender3D or much better After Effects (especially with plugins). Most proffesionals use Davinci Resolve which is miles more advanced than the other options.

If I were to buy the phone and just leave it in a drawer, would it be cheaper than to pay for Prime a whole year?

Canada! This is great for TV in general, but it keeps the still inferior TV system alive. Although the cable companies will be making less, I think people will continue to have it for longer than if they still had to pay for bundles. Without this change, the masses would more quickly cancel their cable service and content creators would be forced to move to the internet faster, which would be better for everyone. So still good, but I wish we could just leave the model as is and let it die quickly.

The should have kept it and gotten rid of the nanos and shuffles and even touch. All the other iPods are inferior versions of the iPhone. The iPod classic is a completely different device. Like how you can read on a Nexus 7, but the Kindle which is for reading exclusively is argueably better and for a different market. It will be missed.

Buy-out, not merger.

While I totally agree for digital goods, there are actual distribution/shipping/storage issues that cause this for physical things like laptops/phones/360 and whatnot.

Good guy Microsoft. Although, it's hard to picture Facebook using Twitter.

First of all, the device looks great. Front-facing speakers FTW. BUT, what's with everyone trying to make hardware as thin as possible? Make it as thick as my leg and give me 1 week battery life instead!

Finally, a good first-party virtual desktop option. I also really like the new start menu. The one in windows 8 even was a good idea, just horribly executed. Widgets that are easily accessible though, and done in this new manner, where they're pinned to the side of the windows 7 start menu is awesome. Besides unifying Xbox (would should really be considered Windows TV), Windows Phone, and Desktop with a common UI element (in a better way, I think, than apple), the metro menu is super useful. I could quickly check weather, peek in on my RSS, or us to-do lists and whatnot. The new heirarchy on the start menu is nice too. Instead of having power/restart/sleep options at the bottom and my user setting at the top, both are positioned in the top left resembling a website with profile and sign out options. Colour palette and design asthetic are nice too. Both Microsoft and Google are doing a great job with making a flat design language with their own unique styles, where-as apple seems to be struggling. Can't wait for Windows 9 (which I heard might just be called Windows).