UN Envoy: Outbreak of 'Intense Violence' Possible in Darfur

"Sanctions are clearly still on table," said Mr. Danforth. "It's important for all parties in Darfur, the government and the rebels, to understand there is a limit to tolerance, and that the fact of sanctions is still something to be considered. Secondly, on the political front, the engagement of John Garang in the Darfur process is very important."

Glad to know that one can tolerate genocide, up to a point.

Spotted in a discussion over at Plastic re: 'the Tsunami of Indifference'.

Particularly worth reading are the argument's but a member called 'Laputan Machine'. To wit:

Conservatives were entirely, utterly opposed to intervention in Rwanda, just as they were opposed to the Kosovo war. All for the same reason: humanitarian wars are strategically meaningless to US interests, so they are not pursued.

Another goodie:

A natural disaster is no different than a genocidal army from the POV of a peasant.

They can be read here and here.

Final Touch HD

Someone out there may have read the chat that Mike of HD For Indies and I had regarding the future of shake, particularly in the context of a desktop DI tool. Well, it seems as if that workflow is mostly unnecessary now. A company called Silicon Colour has released a dedicated colouring system called Final Touch HD for US $5,000.

Mike has given it a bit of a once-over and it sounds MIGHTY impressive. To wit:

It will do realtime color correction of HD footage with multiple color correction effects,

-it will handle 10 bit footage

-all color correction is done in 32 bit per CHANNEL color space (floating point color correction)

-all color correction is done in RGB

-it can work with proxy files for lower throughput drive systems.

-you can have tracked soft matted color corrections with feathered color vignettes, primary and secondary color correction, and gaussian blur...ALL IN REAL TIME.

The killer is that its a USD$5,000 piece of software relying on the HOST machines processing power. Thats a big saving on the USD$100,000+ Nucoda system. Interestingly, Mike's snaps reveal that the system uses the exact same console interface of the Nucoda.

Wow. Seriously, fucking wow. I said in that early discussion that desktop DI was two years away. I'm seriously considering revising that to 1 year. If the G6s manage to come out (the 3ghz G5 was due SIX MONTHS AGO) then this system will kane it.

Fucking hell, the AFC needs to get its shit together. This is what we need to be putting our money into. We MUST make digital cinema a reality here, because I see no other way for our industry to survive. We simply can't compete dollar-for-dollar with the US, so we must learn to be faster, cheaper, better. Its that philosophy that has spearheaded our DoPs into Hollywood. Andrew Lesnie used to shoot 1000' of 16mm a week for Simon's Wonder World. He had none of the big resources and THATS why he's good.

In other news, I ordered an iPod Shuffle today. I already own an iPod 30gig (G3) but the 1gig iPod shuffle was $200. I was going to buy a 1 gig flash drive for $180, and this just makes so much more sense as a general purpose small device. It'll be good for running and cycling.

Oh, I've also been asked to write a comic for the extremely talented Alex Fry. Shall be very very very fun. Its on spec, of course, but I'm fairly confident will come up with something that can be published.

Steve Jobs on Television - From 1996

The problem is television?

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.