First off - most people in any entertainment industry - music , books , comedy etc. are not making megabucks. Most of them earn somewhere between an ok wage and a pretty rubbish one.
However there are plenty of people experimenting like Louie C K is up and down the spectrum. I buy lots of stuff from people who are doing their own thing. To pick some random smaller examples - http://www.dgmlive.com - King Crimson and Robert Fripp, Matt Stevens http://www.mattstevensguitar.com and Richard Skelton http://www.sustain-release.co.uk/
Do they make megabucks? of course not but they are making a living.
The question actually is - are they getting more return for their work than if they used more traditional channels and I think all would argue that they are.
Not only is this approach sustainable - it's going to become essential for all but the most mainstream. Louie CK and Radio head possibly suggest that even the more mainstream will do better doing it on their own terms.
I wouldn't sasume it has been ruled out - people (myself included) sometimes get mentally stuck on one solution and fail to spot another obvious avenue.
Heh heh. When I learned about computer science in school it was punched cards, and then later on VAXs. The theory and the Unix stuff came in useful though.
Seriously though I left education 24 years ago and now looking back that was pretty much the period of lowest density learning I've ever had. Since I left education I have been learning constantly.
As an employer the main things I need you to come to me with from your education is: how to research things on your own, how to learn new stuff without being spoon fed and if possible some good solid and broad theoretical knowledge. You will pick up source control and all that stuff up from your co-workers.
I'm not sure that this actualy means anything. Just a pragmatic move while they get the pro features into FCPX.
I guess if there is any hidden message it might be that they are wanting to keep the pro's onside - which might be good news for the direction of FCP and Logic.
(also to note that there is nothing actually wrong with FCPX - I'm using it everyday working on some marketing materials right now. I can see that Pros are missing some features which is fair enough but it's an extremely usable application and I'm finding it very friction free to work in)
FCP X is more like "Aperture for video". It's a completely different app from the old FCP, which offered an editing paradigm in tune with the conventions of the TV/film post-production industry.
Editing video in FCP X feels a lot like manipulating photos in Aperture: it's great for quick adjustments, but doesn't allow the kind of meticulous control you'd get with Photoshop. Unfortunately Apple doesn't have that kind of control-oriented video product anymore, so those looking to move up from FCP X will have to go with either Avid or Adobe.
Aperture is a workflow management tool that allows you to do a ton of photo editing too. A photojournalist, for instance, wouldn't need any more power. FCP X, as you say, represents a similar approach.
But, the problem isn't that it isn't the video equivalent of photoshop — that's After Effects or (maybe) Motion. The problem is that FCP X is missing basic "Apeture" functionality like any kind of real audio editing, or the ability to export to another program.
>also to note that there is nothing actually wrong with FCPX - I'm using it everyday working on some marketing materials right now. I can see that Pros are missing some features which is fair
Just because it works for your use cases, does not mean there is "nothing actually wrong with [it]". Drawing that kind of conclusion is either ignorant of or disingenuous to the realities of software.
FCP X is nothing but iMovie Pro. It's completely, utterly unusable by professional editors. Even the key commands are not the same, and film/music editors live by key commands (see all the FCP/Media Composer keyboards on the market).
Do you know what - in my house I have a number of machines. They do things like cleaning clothes and dishes and making food hotter. They all have microprocessors in them and can do quite sophisticated stuff - but their interface - almost always a single dial. And that's great because I don't actually care how they do it I just want the job done. Yes I am technically capable of getting in their and reprograming the chips but why would I?
And this is the thing - there is no reason why half the things on my computer should be hard. When I am working with documents (text , video , music , etc) then I just want to easily open the document and work on it. I want backups to be trivial etc. etc. And what is more 99% of users want this and only this.
But the great thing about the mac is that if you look at the SDKs there is ever more sophistiation and "cool" stuff for us developers. Terminal had a lot of love this time round, Xcode might not have the greatest UI but it also gets a lot of attention - Apple take developers seriously
It doesn't bother me that my computer is powerful and easy to use. I don't think this is a bad thing and I also think all the people reading into this "oh the mac is going to just be for idiots" are idiots themselves: go and download the SDKs and XCode and then tell me that Apple are dumbing down
I do think that Apple are moving away from the "pro" market BTW - they have their sights on something much more interesting - the pervasive computing future when most of our computing needs are met by a cloud of little machines. I already love that I can walk into a room in my house and flick up stuff from my phone or ipad onto my TV or walk into another room and make music appear from said phone or iPad. There will come a day when your "computer" is a coming together of screen , processor unit and keyboard and when you get up taking the processor with you that computer is no longer physically there until next time you come past. We are going to see this in the video game world too - we aren't far from an ipad or iphone that is your portable gaming device and when you are near your TV is your console and when you are with your mates is your lan party (with or without screens and speakers) - and if Microsoft and Sony aren't paying attention they will loose the entire market overnight
The gap between turning a simple dial and having to code something up (even a bash script - and are the Mac APIs bash accessible?) is very deep, though, and lots of people don't have neither the time nor inclination to cross that gap. And frankly, why should them?
On the other hand, my washing machine does have about twenty buttons, so I may be the wrong person to talk about that.
1) dive in help her, pay up make it all good get good PR. BUT if they are thinking that this is going to be a common problem and going to happen a lot then they may be making rod for their own backs…
or
2) Ride the storm - which again you would only do if you thought this was going to be an ongoing issue
or
3) they are idiots and have no idea how to handle PR (just like I wouldn't hire a project manager who hadn't been on a serious failed project I wouldn't hire PR who hadn't weathered some sort of shit storm)
None of those choices speak well for Airbnb's value - either this is going to be a problem for their business model or they aren't experienced enough to run something like this…
to be fair if it's (3) I'm sure they are getting some pretty good learning in right now
I honestly think that there's three proper responses:
1. Work on your system to help prevent something like this doesn't happen again.
2. Add a couple dollars of "insurance" to the cost. If the PR statement is accurate and there's been "2 million nights stayed" before an incident like this, having a couple bucks per renter would have more than covered the cost of this theoretically isolated incident.
3, which is far more important, figure out a way to reimburse her. This is already far overdue, and I realize there's a couple lawyers that'll say "But it opens the door for a fault-based civil suit", but that's an issue for the lawyers. It seems like human decency here, and it would be a transparent PR tactic to have waited 5 weeks to do it, but it really does seem like it's something they'll have to do to recover from this, especially if she keeps blogging about it.
I would add onto 3--however the reimbursement is done, make sure she doesn't publish the actual numbers. One of the AirBnB guys blogged about this and included the maximum on his insurance policy for his east coast cabin. The first comment was "if you publish this number, everyone and anyone who sues will sue for this amount". Likewise with any future settlements.
I would guess there's some of (3), but I'm surprised that a company with their level of funding, in a market with this kind of potential risk, didn't already have someone on staff with expertise in handling such a contingency. I can accept that the founders aren't experts in what to do in such an event, but surely someone hireable is.
Maybe it's encouraging from one perspective, because it shows that even big startups are still pretty ad-hoc affairs, run by the founders without the kind of tight PR-management that big corporations do. But past some point, especially in some businesses, it probably does make sense to copy some of the BigCorp approach of having a dedicated crisis-management team who are experts in what to do about major negative events (i.e. the mixture of the substantive angles, legal angles, and PR angles).
Part of the reason I intrinsically trust start ups over BigCos is because they do not have such teams. Instead, I would expect the start up to be more personal, hands on, response and human. AirBNB, as much as I love them, seems to be falling flat on its face in this regard.
I tend to have the same view, yeah. I think there are situations where less bureaucracy in that regard can actually produce a more paralyzed response, though, depending on the personalities of all involved. For example, if you have a legal team but not a crisis-management team, the founders can be receiving far too cautious advice, and a not-legally-knowledgeable founder might not feel confident ignoring it. A good crisis-management advisor would instead give advice that balances legal risks with some sort of assessment of which of the legal risks are worth taking, while the legal department is more likely to tell you to avoid anything risky.
1) Does not have to involve taking on the whole burden, but it does have to involve drawing a line in the sand. "If this happens, we will do these steps" - steps might be provide proof that they've submitted information to the police (though privacy prevents the actual information, of course), provide case workers in serious cases like this that are familiar with social services in the area, and in this particular case, an admission that they've really dropped the ball, that they will go further in this case because they dropped the ball and didn't follow through, and add something about 'but in future the policy will be more realistic'. They can do something without doing everything (of course finalising any such policy needs legal eagles and fine tooth combs...). The author's problem seems not to be that airbnb was faceless, but that offers of assistance were only to secure good internet commentary.
I do get tired of these "recieved wisdom" nuggets as seen in the headline here - see also "ipad is for consuming only" and "linux not suitable for desktop" (although that one seems to have died a death) etc. etc. and of course the actual article is a rather mundane overview of one or two of the features
Since I'm here: is Lion turning into iOS - no. I'm finding it makes me even more effective - I fly round my Air like I can fly round my source code with Vim. I find the gestures and the trackpad make a mouse feel like a clumsy ancient thing, Launchpad is acutally not too bad sometimes - gesture tap is quicker than ctrl-space typing enter (I use launchbar now - switched from quicksilver when it was going through rough times). Mission control, or whatever it's called, is much better than spaces and expose - I love the re-arrange spaces so apps I alt-tab between are close to each other. I find that full screen and focusing on a single task is much better for my concentraion - and was something I've been trying to do since long before I got Lion.
this is actually a power users update whatever you might hear
This isn't really suprising. Even the large banks would do this if they could get away with it. Look at the Goldman Sachs high frequency trading stuff - even if it wasn't illegal they were sailing as close to the wind as they possibly could.
Trust is going to become a massive issue in the future - just as "privacy" and "digital rights" are at the moment if we have any desire to move away from the large institutions and governmental regulation that we currently use to "solve" these problems. Quotes because it's not a great solution - see Enron for example.
It's great that things like Bitcoin are being tried - but we should also be clear that this is the wild west. Dealing with banking and trading in a totally unregulated environment. I would hope that the lessons that the finance industries learned the hard way and that led to audits and regulation and other instruments can be leveraged. Otherwise we are doomed to reinvent the whole industry all over again....
However there are plenty of people experimenting like Louie C K is up and down the spectrum. I buy lots of stuff from people who are doing their own thing. To pick some random smaller examples - http://www.dgmlive.com - King Crimson and Robert Fripp, Matt Stevens http://www.mattstevensguitar.com and Richard Skelton http://www.sustain-release.co.uk/
Do they make megabucks? of course not but they are making a living.
The question actually is - are they getting more return for their work than if they used more traditional channels and I think all would argue that they are.
Not only is this approach sustainable - it's going to become essential for all but the most mainstream. Louie CK and Radio head possibly suggest that even the more mainstream will do better doing it on their own terms.