Archive for November 14, 2024

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac

Apple (MacRumors, MacStories):

In Final Cut Pro 11, editors can access two all-new AI-powered tools: Magnetic Mask and Transcribe to Captions. With Magnetic Mask, editors can effortlessly isolate people and objects in a video clip without the need for a green screen or more time-consuming rotoscoping. This powerful and precise automatic analysis provides additional flexibility to customize backgrounds and environments. Editors can also combine Magnetic Mask with color correction and video effects, allowing them to precisely control and stylize each project. And with Transcribe to Captions, closed captions can be automatically generated in the timeline using an Apple-trained large language model that transcribes spoken audio.

[…]

Spatial video allows users to capture life’s precious moments and relive them on Apple Vision Pro. Final Cut Pro 11 now supports spatial video editing, allowing editors to import their footage and add effects, make color corrections, and enhance their projects with titles.

[…]

Final Cut Pro for iPad 2.1 brings beloved features to the touch-first editing experience. Powered by Apple silicon, Enhance Light and Color is an intelligent way to improve color, color balance, contrast, and brightness in video or still images in one simple step, and is optimized for SDR, HDR, RAW, and Log-encoded media. With haptic feedback for Apple Pencil Pro and Magic Keyboard, users will feel a light pulse as they trim clips, move media, navigate the timeline, and resize viewer clips to snapping points.

Joe Rossignol:

The update also includes some smaller new features, changes, and bug fixes, as outlined in the full release notes on Apple’s website.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Honestly, I’m surprised Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac still hasn’t moved to subscription, nor has it moved to Apple-Silicon-only. I was fully expecting the next release to unify around the new distribution model they used for Final Cut Pro for iPad.

Jon Maddox:

Apple burned by no upgrade pricing mechanism 🤣

Karl Swanson:

I don’t think there is any subscription support in VPP yet. Would think they’d need a way to support that model for institutional customers.

Juli Clover:

Apple today released Logic Pro 11.1 for Mac and Logic Pro 2.1 for iPad, adding new features for songwriting, producing, and mixing.

Previously:

Update (2024-11-15): See also: Steven Aquino.

Sequoia Network Extension Memory Leak

Norbert Heger:

Unfortunately that’s another new bug in the Network Extension framework of macOS. It’s a memory leak in Apple’s framework, which developers must use to create a firewall for the Mac. This bug first occurred in macOS 15.0 Sequoia.

[…]

On macOS 14 Sonoma you may get a hand full of leaks with a total of a few Kilobytes. That’s OK (sort of). But on macOS 15 Sequoia this can easily grow to hundreds of Megabytes and more.

Previously:

Thomas Kurtz, RIP

Valley News (Hacker News):

Tom is well known as the co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language in 1964. A version of BASIC still exists today. John Kemeny and Tom had already developed a version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System, a method of sharing computer access allowing multiple students access to the computer at the same time. From 1966 to 1975, Tom served as the director of the Kiewit Computation Center at Dartmouth and as director of Academic Computing from 1975 to 1978. In 1979, he and former student Stephen J. Garland organized a professional master’s program in Computer and Information Sciences, CIS.

Computer History Museum:

After a few years of teaching, he and Kemeny developed the original version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System (DTSS), a method of sharing computer access across a network and a requirement for allowing multiple students access to BASIC. DTSS was the earliest successful, large-scale timesharing system, a remarkable achievement. General Electric, which had donated computers to Dartmouth, extended DTSS into the kernel of their online services, such as Genie. DTSS was unveiled on May 1, 1964, along with BASIC. By that fall, hundreds of students were exploring BASIC on the 20 terminals around campus.

[…]

In 1983, Kurtz joined Kemeny and three former Dartmouth students in forming True BASIC, Inc., whose purpose was to develop quality educational software and a platform-independent BASIC compiler.

Wikipedia:

The road to BASIC itself was a long one. Kemeny and Kurtz had forged DARSIMCO – Dartmouth Simplified Code – Dartmouth’s inaugural attempt at making a computing language in 1956; however DARSIMCO soon became obsolete when the language FORTRAN manifested itself. In 1962 Kemeny and a Dartmouth undergraduate, Sidney Marshall, created the language DOPE, Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, which was a direct predecessor of BASIC. DOPE itself was little used, and Kurtz preferred trying to implement successful languages such as FORTRAN and ALGOL. Kurtz’s experience with Dartmouth ALGOL 30 for the LGP-30 convinced him that devising subsets of these languages was not quite practical, and this led him to adopt Kemeny’s notion of creating a new language entirely.

Previously:

Update (2024-11-15): See also: Laurence Arnold and Dag Spicer (Hacker News).

Update (2024-11-18): See also: Kenneth R. Rosen.

Update (2024-11-22): See also: Valley News, Dartmouth, Washington Post.

Google Drive Blackout in Italy

Andy Maxwell (via Hacker News):

After blocking Cloudflare [link] to prevent IPTV piracy just a few months ago, on Saturday the rightsholders behind Piracy Shield ordered Italy's ISPs to block Google Drive. The subsequent nationwide blackout, affecting millions of Italians, wasn't just a hapless IP address blunder.

[…]

The domain/subdomain blocked in the image above is drive.usercontent.google.com; not only does this URL clearly identify Google as its owner, the Google product it serves is on full display too. With no prompting a 10-year-old could identify google.com as important on the internet. So, three broad explanations for how it ended up on the system (ticket below) before causing chaos.

[…]

A full twelve hours after the block was put in place, around 20% of the Italian population still had no access to their Google Drives due to the lingering IP address block that underpinned the domain-based blocking.

yunohn:

This feels very similar to the Indian government constantly blocking and unblocking GitHub’s “raw” content domain.