> the concept of compressing at least 6:1 compression
The level of bullshit that this industry gets away with is absolutely fascinating. I'm a gamer and I was part of the crowd who were galvanized by TotalBuiscuit, rest his soul. I am not alone, and part of an ever increasing amount of people, that seriously question the anti-consumerism (hence, anti-capitalist, if you're very patriotic) practices employed by the status quo. It's patently obvious to do so in hindsight, but I look at a lot more through that lens nowadays.
Red is that 6-times distilled, 10-times cold filtered, 50 times purified, embodiment of anti-consumer practices and it's maddening.
Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?
I'm not defending their IP practices, but this is not as stupid as it seems. Nikon knew about the patents when they designed their cameras. The patents were not dumb in 2007-2008.
Claims like the one excerpted are part of larger claim sets; if any claim gets invalidated, the rest that rely on it are useless. For the sake of being explicit, but also robust, lawyers will take a technical description and devolve it into a series of nested claims. Those individual claims, in isolation, sound dumb. But they're usually contingent on earlier claims that might reveal the novelty.
However, the product was/is okay-ishm but the fan boys are utterly toxic pricks.
the charged for everything, made special names for all sorts, and had tesla levels of bullshit when it came to deadlines and capabilities.
For example, the "RED ray" laser projector, which supposedly was a 4k native laser based projector, except that it wasn't, never ran at 4k during NAB and if I recall correctly at some point was replaced by a barco. (https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/126579-red-ray-4k-ci...)
They made "redrockets" that were supposedly super high tech decoding cards, but were in reality rebadged from another company. They were extra ordinarily fragile (I personally accidentally killed 3 in just one event) and fucking expensive (£4k each)
It was me, apparently that was the problem, not the design. In the same event I replaced graphics cards, a boat load of Fusion IoDrives, none of them died.
So yes, they were anti-consumer to a certain extent. However if they liked you, they'd invite you to the ranch, you'd hang out with other RED people and generally have a good time.
Yeah this is all accurate... there is a lot of marketing at that company, which is unsurprising given that it was founded by Jim Jannard, who made his money selling consumer fashion goods at Oakley.
> Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?
Really?
I think you know like everyone else here what consumer means in this context, it's not literally about consuming food, or the disease known as consumption, and that entities that aren't individual consumers in the nightly news sense of the word are called 'consumers' as well.
There's a conversation to be had about how much money Red is making from selling luxury goods to amateurs but this thread probably isn't the best place.
> if any claim gets invalidated, the rest that rely on it are useless.
This misunderstanding came up in another thread. If a dependent claim is invalidated, then it invalidates the claims it depends from, but not the other way around. For example, consider the following claims:
1. A method comprising steps A, B, and C.
2. The method of claim 1, further comprising step D.
If the prior art only teaches claim 1, then claim 2 could still be valid if the addition of step D is non-obvious over the prior art. If the prior art teaches claim 2, however, then claim 1 is also invalid.
> Red isn't a consumer company. How are they anti-consumer?
Everything is consumer these days. CNC machines, milling machines, soldering stations, tablesaws, planers, and, yes, high-end cinematic cameras.
You're no longer talking about Hollywood and maybe 4 or 5 other big studios leveraging this stuff. Marques Brownlee, Linus Tech Tips, Corridor, and tons of other Youtubers (and I'm sure many more from other platforms) eat these things like candy. If you or I wanted to get into this stuff, we reasonably could with a little financial discipline (and maybe bargaining with our significant other :D).
They are unimaginably vulnerable to someone coming along with a platform that accepts any, say, NVME, with some form of "works best with" certification system. That way, if your risk is low ( enthused hobbyist) go with your MLC dumpster diving special, if your risk is high then go with OEM, certified, or better (because there is better storage than what Red offers). Keep in mind that Red have supplanted a stupidly broken industry with a vastly less broken industry, but on the absolute scale they are still pretty fucking stupid. They are living on the time it takes for someone to realize that, given a huge amount of R&D into a sensor (because Red is likely the leading sensor), a more capitalist/competitive approach exists.
When did the consumer stop being the ones who consume the product?
I’m sure many farmers would consider John Deere’s practices regarding DIY repairs, anti-consumer, as they are the consumers. Any person who might reasonable be considered an end-user of a product, or might buy a type of product might be considered a consumer of that type of product.
Anti-consumerism and protectionism do not even require that you be a customer of the company in question, some practices extend beyond the product itself when the company seeks to stifle competition.
That line between "business" and "consumer" is becoming increasingly indistinct. This is the very nature of "influencers." We have every-day-joes/janes setting up multi-thousand dollar machines in their own (or rented) garage for their own, or followers', enjoyment.
> are not consumers but media businesses.
This idea of yours is extremely out of touch with reality, just like Red are. Those "media businesses" would be nowhere without an engaged audience. The modern audience are participators, not watchers. Commodity 3D printers have succeeded for a reason.
People aren't as one-dimensional as they used to be. They take their interests to an extreme degree. It might take a videography/cinematography enthusiast 2 years to save up for a Red, but they will.
Influencers are businesses, plain and simple. They buy the camera to make a profit.
Compare this to someone like me, who also owns expensive cameras, but I have them to take pictures and show my friends. I plan to make $0 from this endeavor. I'm a consumer, not a business.
Oh, I shoot stills on Sony equipment, so I just use good old SD cards. And film when I need high resolution ;)
I agree that RED is cost-prohibitive for individuals that aren't running a business because of things like the 500% markup on SSDs. That is always the risk of a proprietary ecosystem; kind of like how you can buy 128GB of RAM for your PC for a few hundred dollars, but the same RAM in an Apple computer is $1600. That's just the price of "we guarantee that it will work", and for business use, it makes a lot of sense. For consumers, it kind of sucks, because you feel so close to being able to afford something really cool, but you just can't make the math work.
I do understand the pushback; people want to pay for the impressive sensor and not the mind-numbingly-boring SSDs, but they want to make money on both. I am not sure that's strictly consumer unfriendly, but just how they do the financial engineering.
I read your post at least 3 times and still don't understand how those sentences fit together into a coherent thought.
What does TotalBiscuit have to do with video compression? What does anti-capitalism have to do with being patriotic? How is TotalBiscuit related to anti-consumerism?
The only thing that somehow makes sense is that Red employs some anti-consumer practices through overly broad patents, thus restricting innovation.
“I am not alone, and part of an ever increasing amount of people, that seriously question the anti-consumerism (hence, anti-capitalist, if you're very patriotic) practices employed by the status quo.”
this is one of the most bizarre sentences ever written
How many people on this forum, specifically, suggest that they use Apple devices because of, ultimately, good-will garnered by Apple? There should be no doubt that Apple manufactured the best laptop hardware on the planet, for the general use-case, between 2014 and 2020. Yet, many people continue to perceive Apple based on historic merits as opposed to current merits. You could always get much more than Apple for much less, but they had the quality nailed down: it is certainly not rare (especially on HN) to come across someone still using their MBP from 2014 and reluctantly considering an upgrade. Following the golden days of Apple hardware, we still have people defaulting to that prior perspective, even in the face of the the keyboard "don't use it in an environment with dust" problems of recent history.
Consumer psychology is extremely fascinating, and until you look at the overall behavior of consumers (which includes your own stupid self), you just don't realize how you've monkey brain has been exploited.
That sentence is only bizarre to people who haven't realized their own bizarre behavior.
Edit: I include myself in monkey-brain analogies, I am a human/stupid/exploitable just like you.
> Edit: I include myself in monkey-brain analogies, I am a human/stupid/exploitable just like you.
Yeah, I mean, kinda right back atcha here ;) A lot of people are still stuck in the "apple is dumb Jony Ives design with no ports and super bad performance and overheating" era too, despite Apple actually putting ports back on laptops and having an in-house ARM core that is far and away the most performant laptop you can buy with multiples of the battery life of similar x86 laptops too.
A more productive take on the topic is that a lot of times these things come down to values differences between various consumers: you value repairability and open ecosystem, Apple customers value high-quality OEM parts/service and the all-around build quality (other laptops have a few of the selling points, but it's hard to check all the boxes that Apple does). You highly value the keyboard, Apple customers are willing to tolerate it even if it's not ideal because of the rest of the package. Apple customers value the battery life, you are willing to tolerate plugging in more often even if it's not ideal because of the rest of the package. Etc etc. Those are values differences, not in the sense of moral differences but different customers have different needs and preferences and a lot of time is spent arguing about stuff that ultimately comes down to "I value different things than you do".
It's fairly rare that things actually come down to what I'll call "alternative facts" scenarios - sometimes it does, like the broad disagreement over how to interpret M1 performance numbers (but the differences in performance/battery life that people observe tend to lead to a pretty obvious conclusion imo). But it's generally a lot rarer than the "I like different stuff than you" spats.
I'm saying this as someone who has an x86 apple laptop for work and is not particularly pleased with it, but who is looking at the M1 as a prospect for a personal laptop, but also considering a few particular x86 laptops as well. People get super weird on the x86 side with the "nothing apple can ever be good" shit too, or the Android people getting super weird about how sideloading is a must-have feature (and ignore how that sidesteps the app-review process and leads to facebook/netflix/other must-have apps forcing their way to escalated privileges). It's generally a lot of values arguments, people value different things and that leads them one way or the other.
Of course marketing does play a key role in telling people what they should value, and I am no different from anyone else in that I am affected by marketing even when I think I'm making rational, logically-supported choices ;)
The level of bullshit that this industry gets away with is absolutely fascinating. I'm a gamer and I was part of the crowd who were galvanized by TotalBuiscuit, rest his soul. I am not alone, and part of an ever increasing amount of people, that seriously question the anti-consumerism (hence, anti-capitalist, if you're very patriotic) practices employed by the status quo. It's patently obvious to do so in hindsight, but I look at a lot more through that lens nowadays.
Red is that 6-times distilled, 10-times cold filtered, 50 times purified, embodiment of anti-consumer practices and it's maddening.