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Thursday, 14 March 2002 |
Now this is exactly what the doctor ordered, so far as great hardware to learn to build multimedia with. Clearly it is designed for use at secondary level, as neither of the three main components are top-end in their class, but I can think of a few colleges and university departments where something like this would be a huge improvement on their current equipment.
The iBook comes with some great software already—iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes—and then you just add more goodies as your knowledge, and ambition, grows.
10:22:16 PM 
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It’s The Powerplay, Not Good Money Management.
“Many IT managers favor befuddled users who are dependent on them. It’s only human nature, after all,” says Charles Haddad in his Byte of the Apple column in BusinessWeek Online.
He goes on to relate how many necessarily anonymous corporate IT managers have admitted to him that they would much prefer to be running Macintosh and Mac OS X computers on their networks instead of Windows machines.
11:24:39 AM
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Alias|Wavefront Screws The Pooch.
It seemed like a terrific and eminently sensible idea at the time it was announced.
Release a feature-limited but close to full version of high-end 3D modelling and animation product Maya under the name Maya Personal Learning Edition (PLE), in order to radically expand its currently tiny user base. Allow more people to fall in love with Maya than those already lucky enough to know about it, and help build a large pool of people qualified to use it for the inevitable coming big price drop in line with the other high-end 3D products like Electric Image Universe.
The idea clicked with 3D fans out there, and Alias|Wavefront’s servers ran so hot they were clogged for weeks afterwards. They’ve only just become accessible again.
But when you take a look at screenshots of the watermarks that Maya PLE whacks on top of not only your finished output but also the program’s modelling windows at the CG Channel’s first article (which requires registration to access it) then you have to wonder where the Alias|Wavefront crew’s brains were being kept in all this.
I was just about to begin the arduous process of downloading a copy of Maya PLE via my dial-up web connection when these screenshots made me think again. Even worse, I had been looking for a suitable free 3D product to recommend to a graphics college for, naturally enough, teaching their students 3D modelling and animation, and this seemed like just the thing.
Now there is no way I am going to tell anyone to download this version of Maya PLE, and nor am I going to give it a try. Not until Alias|Wavefront does something smart like removing the text that is all over the viewport windows, and makes the watermark on finished output less huge and ugly.
Meantime I am still looking for a free, or cheap, or time-limited demo version of a crossplatform Windows and Macintosh 3D modelling and animation application that can be used in this college. Any suggestions?
11:08:26 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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