I don't know. Carphone are always delighted in telling investors and analysts how special are the deals they get, and I have perhaps believed too much.
Many phones in Europe are sold through stores belonging to the networks, and this works very similarly to how most phones are sold in the US. You go into a network store, sign a contract with that network (usually 12 or 18 months), they give you a new phone (usually at no upfront cost if you commit to a contract) and the phone you get is usually SIM locked to a particular network and has custom firmware from that network. You then pay your monthly bill.
However, there are also "independent retailers", the largest of which is Carphone Warehouse / The Phone House. The business model here is that the network pays a commission to the retailer when the retailer signs up a customer. This commission can be quite a lot ($800 is not unheard of in the UK, although it varies a lot from country to country). That retailer then usually purchases a phone (either directly from the manufacturer or through an intermediate distributor) out of the commission and then gives the phone to the customer (again usually for free) along with a SIM for the network. . The base profit of the retailer is the usually the difference between the commission and the cost of the phone.
The important issue here with respect to the iPhone is that the network is not involved in the choice or the purchase of the phone. A company like Carphone Warehouse buys the phone directly from the manufacturer and provides it directly to the customer. It is often possible to obtain a phone from Carphone Warehouse for (say) use on the Vodafone network that is not available directly from Vodafone. Also, phones obtained from Carphone or their competitors are generally not network locked and have the manufacturers standard firmware rather than special branded and crippled firmware from the networks.
The largest of the independent retailers in Europe are extremely powerful. They are larger customers of Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola than are the networks themselves. The networks do not like this, as they think commissions are too high, and they realise that the retailers have different interests to theirs. (Networks want customers to stay on the networks as long as possible. Retailers want customers to upgrade and generate them a new commission the moment they are out of contract). As a consequence, the networks have been opening more and more network branded stores. It is debatable how well this is working (networks are generally lousy at retail), but there is a fight going on.
So, what does this mean for the iPhone? Well, if an exclusive was given on it to a retailer like Carphone Warehouse rather than a network, that retailer could then offer it on a number of different networks. That retailer could simply accept commissions from networks using its existing deals with networks, customers would buy the iPhone from the retailer with a SIM from a network (and a 12 or 18 month contract), and Europeans could get the iPhone. Carphone Warehouse has stores in many more countries than does any individual phone company either - it is in all major markets besides Italy - and Apple could do a simple deal with one company.
The advantage of dealing with Carphone is that it is a much more aggressive company than the networks themselves, who are staid, conservative, and fearful of changing their business models. Carphone would be willing to accede to a great many of Apple demands in order to do a deal, as long as there was some money to be made. CEO Charles Dunstone certainly knows that getting the iPhone would give his business a lot of publicity and sales and would be a huge positive in his battle with the network owned stores, and I am sure he is going out of his way to explain this to Apple. Going with a retailer in Europe makes much more sense than going with a network, and my hunch is this is what will happen. The only issue is the visual voicemail. If this genuinely requires a network upgrade, then Apple is going to either have to not offer it in Europe, or redesign how it works so it does not require a network upgrade.
Microsoft has just added one piece of additional functionality to Windows XP, and that is Internet Explorer 7. Six months ago I thought that SP3 would basically consist of IE7, a couple of minor improvements here and there (better driver support for Bluetooth built into the OS was the one I was hoping for) plus all the patches since SP2 rolled up together. Put this on the install disc, and making a fresh install on a new or upgraded PC would at least become less painful than the "Install the OS, then install vast numbers of waves of patches, including rebooting the PC six times" process that we go through now.
But Microsoft didn't do this. Instead I suspect they want us to upgrade to Vista, and leaving XP installs more difficult, and not providing a service pack makes this more likely, I suppose. (IE7 is different, because we can all upgrade to Firefix instead).
What the Mac mini has is great design, and Apple actually sacrificed quite a bit of power to provide that great design. How? Well, to get the machine into a box that small, they put in a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive rather than a 3.5 inch desktop hard drive. These are more expensive than desktop drives, so the drive they put in as standard is only 40Gb and only runs at 4200rpm (although I have heard that some Mac minis come with 5400rpm drives, although it is pot luck whether you get one). If Apple had gone for a bigger case, they could have put in a 7200rpm drive of at least 80Gb and probably cut the price, but they didn't. They assumed that their market would want a small and stylish computer with less power rather than a large and less stylish one with a little more. So I don't think the comparison with a cheap Dell is quite right. The computers two computers are designed with slightly different things in mind.
(Where I think Apple did mess up a little was by providing only 256Mb of RAM as standard. With this little memory the machine is going to be swapping a lot and with that slow drive this is going to slow it down quite a bit. This is one case where paying for an extra 256Mb is going to be really worth the money.
Actually Apple needs to move up to 512Mb standard across its entire range of machines. They have just done this for Powerbooks, but they need to do it for everything else as well.
I've just followed a couple of the links here, and a couple of people mention similar problems for i series Thinkpads. This is interesting, because I had an i Series Thinkpad with very similar problems myself. (I bought it in October 2001, which started to behave strangely in about December 2002, and which I gave up for dead in November 2003). I thought the problem was some consequence of the extremely heavy wear that the machine received from me, but it looks like it may have actually been a manufacturing or design fault.
Interesting. (I replaced the Thinkpad with a Dell laptop about a year ago, and the Dell is good so far).
Well, DVD can technically do 480p, but at only 24 or 30 frames per second. This is fine with respect to film based material which shoots in 24fps anyway, but it is less good than the 60fps progressive format supported by the HDTV standards for 480p and 720p.
People often observe that the HDTV standards specify 1080i, 720p, and 480p, but there is actually more to it than this. The ATSC standard specifies these resolutions at 60Hz (where Hz here measures refreshes per second, which is the same thing as frames per second for progressive scan, twice the frame rate for interlacing), but it also specifies lower frame rates. In particular the standard actually specifies 1080 line progressive scan at 30fps (because that has the same bitrate as 1080i at 60Hz) and also at 24fps (because this has the same frame rate as movies and other production on film).
Lots of people in the independent film industry really want 24fps progressive (usually referred to as 24p), because video shot this way can be blown up onto 35mm film and shown in a cinema, and can ideally provide film quality for a much lower cost than actual film (and which can be digitally edited etc etc much more easily than stuff shot on film. They have at times gone out of their way to kludge something similar from consumer DV cameras in the past. Quite a few films have been shot by taking a PAL SDTV camera, getting it to output 576 line 25fps progressive, blowing it up onto film and then running the resulting film at 24fps. The playback speed is slightly slower than the filming speed, but it is close enough not to notice. (Just as an aside, the reverse of this is often done when movies are shown on European TV, which are filmed in 24fps and shown at 50Hz interlaced (ie 25fps) on PAL TV. This sometimes explains why films have slightly different running times on European and American TV, and some actors complain that their voices have a higher pitch when they watch their movies in Europe)
Now this camera does not support either of these 1080 line progressive scan modes, presumably because the CCD sensor in the camera would have to be different to do this. It can apparently film 1080i 60Hz and then fake 30fps or 24fps progressive from that, and I would be very interested to see how good this is. It is undoubtedly much better than the old PAL DV camera at 25fps trick, but how it compares with cameras that film 720 lines in genuine progressive scan remains to be seen. These 720p cameras have apparently been a big hit with film-makers, but a genuine 1080p camera for a few thousand dollars would be something special. It would mean that film-makers could rent a camera for a few hundred dollars that could produce something very close to genuine cinema quality, and they could make movies with it without the costs of film stock. Sony have been making 1080 line 24p cameras for professional use for a few years now ("Star Wars Episode 2", the "Spy Kids" movies, and no doubt a few others have been shot with them). This would change the independent film world, as the absolute minimum amount of money required to produce a feature film with decent picture quality would be reduced from a few tens of thousands of dollars to close to nothing.
I use SuSe 9.1 and even for free software, I can usually get an RPM. The software usually still isn't as easy to install on Windows, but it isn't hard. Except (and it's a big except) when there are issues with dependencies. Sometimes these can be a real nuisance.
>I am aghast at the some of the remarks to this news.
I'm not. In this comment section I have seen lots of people express that it is good news that Steve Jobs is likely to make a quick recovery, and lots of people wish him the best. (I will add to that. Get well soon Steve). And there is discussion of the actual illness, as well as lots of jokes comparing his cancer and the medical procedures to practices and products of Apple and the computer industry. Few if any of the jokes strike me as mean-spirited though. Life can be hard. One way you survive it is by being jocular about it, even at difficult times.
Well, my own desktop machine is at present merely running a 1.0GHz Athlon, and with 512Mb of RAM and a big (160Gb) hard drive the machine still works fine for a non-gamer like me. That said, I probably will put in a new motherboard sometime in the next year, and I will likely go for an socket 754 Athlon 64.
That's for me, though. I also from time to time build PCs for other people, and if someone who doesn't know a great deal about these things asks me to "Build me a nice new computer", I will at present probably build them an Athlon XP 3000 machine. If someone on a budget asks me to build me a cheap but decent computer, I will probably use about an XP 2400. For that low end machine, these new Semprons will be just fine. Losing the Barton core CPUs for the "nice" computer is a nuisance.
Yes, well what AMD is doing here is that they are tweaking with their lower to middle end Athlon XPs a little, giving them a bigger number, and phasing out the Athlon XPs. (I suspect that the prices will drop fast enough that that we won't genuinely be paying more for a Sempron than equivalent Athlon). It sounds also that the faster Barton core Athlon XPs are going to be phased out by the end of the year, so that those of us who have been buying them will have to migrate to Socket 754 based motherboards with either Athlon 64s or Semprons derived from them. (Apparently the die size for Barton based CPUs is too large for AMD to be all that keen on using it for Semprons).
Which is kind of a shame. There are a huge number of Socket A motherboards out there, and I like being able to build fairly powerful computers using them. For now there is less choice for Socket 754, and the motherboards are generally more expensive.
I had a problem with the screen of my Dell laptop earlier this year, and they asked me to remove "all removable parts, including the battery, power adaptor, CD/DVD drive, and hard drive". So I removed all those parts before sending it off. They returned my computer fixed within a few days.
I particularly appreciated the fact that my hard drive was in the drawer of my desk the whole time. That way there was no possible way that I could lose any files due to a mixup / mistake made by Dell.
Of course this policy relies on accurately figuring out what parts of the computer are definitely still okay before doing the service call. If the problem is with the hard drive then clearly it isn't going to work to ask the computer owner to remove his hard drive and keep it. (Dell got me too go through a troubleshooting list before they would take the computer and fix it under warranty. I knew that I had a real hardware problem and none of these things would work, but I went through the list for them anyway).
Macobserver has a <a href="http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/07/<nobr>1<wbr></wbr></nobr> 8.1.shtml"> few technical specs</a> of the new model. Apple claim that batterly life is improved by 50%, but I will believe that when I see it. The 20Gb model has been moved to the $299 price point, and the 40Gb model has been moved to the $399 price point, with the 15Gb model being phased out. My guess is that we will see a 60Gb model at the $499 price point when Apple is able to source a good number of the 60Gb 1.8" drives from Toshiba, but that's just a guess in my part.
If I genuinely wanted to steal corporate data from an office computer, I can think of a hundred ways to do it right now from an office of average levels of security, many of them either untraceable or hard to trace. Some involve things like portable storage devices, and some don't. (The simplest simply involves carrying laptop computers in and out of the office). I have three such portable storage devices with me now - digital camera, MP3 player and cell phone.
In most environments, stopping this kind of thing without also shutting down virtually your entire business seems pretty much impossible. (There are some environments where it is clearly necessary, such as the casino and defence situations mentioned by earlier people) but these are situations where every aspect of the business has a higher level of security. In a fairly normal office setting, give me a break.
Well, this may be one of those cases where the cost of charging for the service is actually greater than the cost of providing the service. In that case, the best business model genuinely is going to be bundling it with something else (ie you provide it to people who buy coffee in your cafe). There may also be niche markets for businessmen with expense accounts and things like that (as T-Mobile seems to have discovered) but these will be clearly niche markets.
Typically here in London I can go into an internet cafe for 1 pound per hour, or maybe 2 pounds maximum in expensive locations. For that the owner of the cafe gives me an internet connection, a place to sit, and the use of a PC for an hour.
If I bring my own laptop, I simply want the internet connection and maybe a place to sit. Providing this is much cheaper than providing me with a PC as well, and the cost to me should be cheaper.
If I go into Starbucks and order a coffee, then the place to sit is included in the price of the coffee. So all that I want is the internet access. If it costs anything, it should be cheaper than the cost of using an internet cafe, because it is so much cheaper for the provider to offer it to me. However, in Starbucks an hour costs something like 6 pounds (it works out cheaper per hour if I buy a "day pass" or something, but I genuinely don't want more than an hour).
While all this remains the case, for pay services aren't going to make money, and it is really that simple. There are circumstances where I will pay for convenience and reliability, but not this much.
NHK of Japan invented an analogue high definition television system called Muse in the 1970s and 1980s, which looked wonderful compared with standard definition at the time, but its bandwidth requirements were much too high, sets were too expensive, and by the time it got into production it was becoming clear that digital technologies using data compression and consequently that would work using much lower bandwidth and would provide much more in the way of interactive services were viable. So Muse was abandoned and digital services were rolled out.
For this new system to work, we need much larger bandwidth and/or much better compression than we have now, which in practice means more powerful CPUs than we have now. This will come, but I think this will be a decade or more off. (At that point, any system invented by the Japanese right now will be superceded by something newer invented in the mean time).
Personally, I like the idea of this new system in principle. It is the first television system I have seen that generates pictures as good or better as conventional film. It will look fabulous if used in a digital cinema. (Current digital cinema technology only uses 1000 lines or so, and this is seriously lacking compared to film)
As for viewing this in your living room, it is probably overkill, unless we have screens covering entire walls of rooms (which of course we may). The 1080 lines max of conventional HDTV probably is good enough for 40 inch screens and the like. Current generation screens do show various digital artifacts, but these are more to do with the inadequacies of the display technologies than the number of pixels on the screen. (Things like LCD and plasma displays are simply not is good as conventional CRTs in terms of picture quality). Increasing the number of lines in such circumstances will certainly improve the picture further and it will probably happen some day, but larger gains in picture quality can probably be more easily gained in other ways for the moment.
Well, the new 60GB drive is a two platter drive, just like the current 40GB drive, so the 60GB drive should feel pretty much exactly the same as the 40GB drive does now. (That's assuming that the speed is the same, but I would guess that it is. Normally new drives have either more capacity or faster speeds, but seldom both).
Presumably Toshiba will be releasing a 30GB single platter version of this drive too, which should be lighter and have less rotating mass than the present 40GB iPod or the last generation 30GB model.
(And presumably Sony will also release a new version of the TR series Vaio laptop with the 60GB drive, which will be pleasing, too).
I suspect that if Google announces that (for instance) gmail is not longer in beta, then they feel they have to offer it to everyone who wants it, which probably means they have millions of users who all want to register it at once, and their servers are suddenly overwhelmed by the demand. As it is, by saying it is in beta they can offer it to a few users at once, and carefully control the speed at which it is rolled out. (Those people who have gmail accounts are being given a certain number of invitations to invite other people every now and then). Even if it is a fully developed product, this is undoubtedly easier for them.
Amazon.com now acts as a broker for lots of third party sellers, and is probably now e-Bay's biggest competition. Amazon does involve itself in mediation between buyers and sellers, does kick consistently dishonest sellers off the site, and does provide a guarantee to buyers in the event that they cannot get a refund from the seller. I think their practice is exemplary on this matter. (I have never had a problem with a seller, however. Everything I have bought via a third party on Amazon has been exactly as described when I received it).
The "TD" in TD-CDMA refers to the duplexing. That is, time division is used for dividing the uplink from the downlink, but the same frequency band is used for both. One advantage of this is that uplink and downlink can be asymmetric and the percentage of resources devoted to uplink and downlink can be different and (more importantly) adjusted on the fly. This is much better suited to data services than are systems for which the percentages devoted to uplink and dowlink are fixed. (A disadvantage of TDD is that has certain problems when the user is moving fast, however).
Almost all cellular systems in existence (the one exception I know of being a Japanese system called PHS) have traditionally used frequency division duplexing (FDD), in which a different frequenty band is used for the uplink and the downlink.
On the other hand, the "TD" in TDMA refers to time division being used for the multiple access. That is, a given freqquency is divided into time slots, and these are allocated to different users. "TDMA" is used in the US to normally refer to the D-AMPS (IS-136) system, which is indeed on the way out, but GSM is also a TDMA system, and is also a long way from the state of the art (although it is less moribund than D-AMPS).
CDMA has actually clearly won the argument as the best system for handling multiple access, and all new systems (including UMTS/W-CDMA, the successor to GSM) use it. The question as to what is the best way of handling the duplexing is more open, however. (It may well be that it will be best for phones to support both, and use the best one given current network capacity and the applications being used).
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Only 1995? I read my first "Apple is dying, blah blah blah story in 1981, which was three years before the mac. It was the classic "Apple 2 sales will shrink because of IBM's greater market share and greater resources, and Apple's limited ability to produce another computer that would be competitive in the market". I have been hearing this ever since, and it has always sounded *exactly the same*. Apple is in a stronger position right now than it has been for quite a while, and its brand is suddenly valuable again. We will see what it does with this, but like everyone else I will just yawn when I see a headline like this.
No no no. What it actually said was "Michael Jennings is not a super agent". (Long ominous pause). "He's an engineer". For some reason I find this oddly disconcerting, but also kind of cool.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. Carphone are always delighted in telling investors and analysts how special are the deals they get, and I have perhaps believed too much.
Many phones in Europe are sold through stores belonging to the networks, and this works very similarly to how most phones are sold in the US. You go into a network store, sign a contract with that network (usually 12 or 18 months), they give you a new phone (usually at no upfront cost if you commit to a contract) and the phone you get is usually SIM locked to a particular network and has custom firmware from that network. You then pay your monthly bill.
However, there are also "independent retailers", the largest of which is Carphone Warehouse / The Phone House. The business model here is that the network pays a commission to the retailer when the retailer signs up a customer. This commission can be quite a lot ($800 is not unheard of in the UK, although it varies a lot from country to country). That retailer then usually purchases a phone (either directly from the manufacturer or through an intermediate distributor) out of the commission and then gives the phone to the customer (again usually for free) along with a SIM for the network. . The base profit of the retailer is the usually the difference between the commission and the cost of the phone.
The important issue here with respect to the iPhone is that the network is not involved in the choice or the purchase of the phone. A company like Carphone Warehouse buys the phone directly from the manufacturer and provides it directly to the customer. It is often possible to obtain a phone from Carphone Warehouse for (say) use on the Vodafone network that is not available directly from Vodafone. Also, phones obtained from Carphone or their competitors are generally not network locked and have the manufacturers standard firmware rather than special branded and crippled firmware from the networks.
The largest of the independent retailers in Europe are extremely powerful. They are larger customers of Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola than are the networks themselves. The networks do not like this, as they think commissions are too high, and they realise that the retailers have different interests to theirs. (Networks want customers to stay on the networks as long as possible. Retailers want customers to upgrade and generate them a new commission the moment they are out of contract). As a consequence, the networks have been opening more and more network branded stores. It is debatable how well this is working (networks are generally lousy at retail), but there is a fight going on.
So, what does this mean for the iPhone? Well, if an exclusive was given on it to a retailer like Carphone Warehouse rather than a network, that retailer could then offer it on a number of different networks. That retailer could simply accept commissions from networks using its existing deals with networks, customers would buy the iPhone from the retailer with a SIM from a network (and a 12 or 18 month contract), and Europeans could get the iPhone. Carphone Warehouse has stores in many more countries than does any individual phone company either - it is in all major markets besides Italy - and Apple could do a simple deal with one company.
The advantage of dealing with Carphone is that it is a much more aggressive company than the networks themselves, who are staid, conservative, and fearful of changing their business models. Carphone would be willing to accede to a great many of Apple demands in order to do a deal, as long as there was some money to be made. CEO Charles Dunstone certainly knows that getting the iPhone would give his business a lot of publicity and sales and would be a huge positive in his battle with the network owned stores, and I am sure he is going out of his way to explain this to Apple. Going with a retailer in Europe makes much more sense than going with a network, and my hunch is this is what will happen. The only issue is the visual voicemail. If this genuinely requires a network upgrade, then Apple is going to either have to not offer it in Europe, or redesign how it works so it does not require a network upgrade.
(And one other interestin
Microsoft has just added one piece of additional functionality to Windows XP, and that is Internet Explorer 7. Six months ago I thought that SP3 would basically consist of IE7, a couple of minor improvements here and there (better driver support for Bluetooth built into the OS was the one I was hoping for) plus all the patches since SP2 rolled up together. Put this on the install disc, and making a fresh install on a new or upgraded PC would at least become less painful than the "Install the OS, then install vast numbers of waves of patches, including rebooting the PC six times" process that we go through now.
But Microsoft didn't do this. Instead I suspect they want us to upgrade to Vista, and leaving XP installs more difficult, and not providing a service pack makes this more likely, I suppose. (IE7 is different, because we can all upgrade to Firefix instead).
No, he means Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping.
(And I even remember the days when that was a lot).
What the Mac mini has is great design, and Apple actually sacrificed quite a bit of power to provide that great design. How? Well, to get the machine into a box that small, they put in a 2.5 inch laptop hard drive rather than a 3.5 inch desktop hard drive. These are more expensive than desktop drives, so the drive they put in as standard is only 40Gb and only runs at 4200rpm (although I have heard that some Mac minis come with 5400rpm drives, although it is pot luck whether you get one). If Apple had gone for a bigger case, they could have put in a 7200rpm drive of at least 80Gb and probably cut the price, but they didn't. They assumed that their market would want a small and stylish computer with less power rather than a large and less stylish one with a little more. So I don't think the comparison with a cheap Dell is quite right. The computers two computers are designed with slightly different things in mind.
(Where I think Apple did mess up a little was by providing only 256Mb of RAM as standard. With this little memory the machine is going to be swapping a lot and with that slow drive this is going to slow it down quite a bit. This is one case where paying for an extra 256Mb is going to be really worth the money.
Actually Apple needs to move up to 512Mb standard across its entire range of machines. They have just done this for Powerbooks, but they need to do it for everything else as well.
I've just followed a couple of the links here, and a couple of people mention similar problems for i series Thinkpads. This is interesting, because I had an i Series Thinkpad with very similar problems myself. (I bought it in October 2001, which started to behave strangely in about December 2002, and which I gave up for dead in November 2003). I thought the problem was some consequence of the extremely heavy wear that the machine received from me, but it looks like it may have actually been a manufacturing or design fault.
Interesting. (I replaced the Thinkpad with a Dell laptop about a year ago, and the Dell is good so far).
Well, DVD can technically do 480p, but at only 24 or 30 frames per second. This is fine with respect to film based material which shoots in 24fps anyway, but it is less good than the 60fps progressive format supported by the HDTV standards for 480p and 720p.
(DVD also does 576p, 25fps for the PAL world).
People often observe that the HDTV standards specify 1080i, 720p, and 480p, but there is actually more to it than this. The ATSC standard specifies these resolutions at 60Hz (where Hz here measures refreshes per second, which is the same thing as frames per second for progressive scan, twice the frame rate for interlacing), but it also specifies lower frame rates. In particular the standard actually specifies 1080 line progressive scan at 30fps (because that has the same bitrate as 1080i at 60Hz) and also at 24fps (because this has the same frame rate as movies and other production on film).
Lots of people in the independent film industry really want 24fps progressive (usually referred to as 24p), because video shot this way can be blown up onto 35mm film and shown in a cinema, and can ideally provide film quality for a much lower cost than actual film (and which can be digitally edited etc etc much more easily than stuff shot on film. They have at times gone out of their way to kludge something similar from consumer DV cameras in the past. Quite a few films have been shot by taking a PAL SDTV camera, getting it to output 576 line 25fps progressive, blowing it up onto film and then running the resulting film at 24fps. The playback speed is slightly slower than the filming speed, but it is close enough not to notice. (Just as an aside, the reverse of this is often done when movies are shown on European TV, which are filmed in 24fps and shown at 50Hz interlaced (ie 25fps) on PAL TV. This sometimes explains why films have slightly different running times on European and American TV, and some actors complain that their voices have a higher pitch when they watch their movies in Europe)
Now this camera does not support either of these 1080 line progressive scan modes, presumably because the CCD sensor in the camera would have to be different to do this. It can apparently film 1080i 60Hz and then fake 30fps or 24fps progressive from that, and I would be very interested to see how good this is. It is undoubtedly much better than the old PAL DV camera at 25fps trick, but how it compares with cameras that film 720 lines in genuine progressive scan remains to be seen. These 720p cameras have apparently been a big hit with film-makers, but a genuine 1080p camera for a few thousand dollars would be something special. It would mean that film-makers could rent a camera for a few hundred dollars that could produce something very close to genuine cinema quality, and they could make movies with it without the costs of film stock. Sony have been making 1080 line 24p cameras for professional use for a few years now ("Star Wars Episode 2", the "Spy Kids" movies, and no doubt a few others have been shot with them). This would change the independent film world, as the absolute minimum amount of money required to produce a feature film with decent picture quality would be reduced from a few tens of thousands of dollars to close to nothing.
I use SuSe 9.1 and even for free software, I can usually get an RPM. The software usually still isn't as easy to install on Windows, but it isn't hard. Except (and it's a big except) when there are issues with dependencies. Sometimes these can be a real nuisance.
Well, given that iTunes in in a lot of ways just a nice front end for Quicktime, then iTunes must be like this if Quicktime is like this, I guess.
>I am aghast at the some of the remarks to this news.
I'm not. In this comment section I have seen lots of people express that it is good news that Steve Jobs is likely to make a quick recovery, and lots of people wish him the best. (I will add to that. Get well soon Steve). And there is discussion of the actual illness, as well as lots of jokes comparing his cancer and the medical procedures to practices and products of Apple and the computer industry. Few if any of the jokes strike me as mean-spirited though. Life can be hard. One way you survive it is by being jocular about it, even at difficult times.
Well, my own desktop machine is at present merely running a 1.0GHz Athlon, and with 512Mb of RAM and a big (160Gb) hard drive the machine still works fine for a non-gamer like me. That said, I probably will put in a new motherboard sometime in the next year, and I will likely go for an socket 754 Athlon 64.
That's for me, though. I also from time to time build PCs for other people, and if someone who doesn't know a great deal about these things asks me to "Build me a nice new computer", I will at present probably build them an Athlon XP 3000 machine. If someone on a budget asks me to build me a cheap but decent computer, I will probably use about an XP 2400. For that low end machine, these new Semprons will be just fine. Losing the Barton core CPUs for the "nice" computer is a nuisance.
Yes, well what AMD is doing here is that they are tweaking with their lower to middle end Athlon XPs a little, giving them a bigger number, and phasing out the Athlon XPs. (I suspect that the prices will drop fast enough that that we won't genuinely be paying more for a Sempron than equivalent Athlon). It sounds also that the faster Barton core Athlon XPs are going to be phased out by the end of the year, so that those of us who have been buying them will have to migrate to Socket 754 based motherboards with either Athlon 64s or Semprons derived from them. (Apparently the die size for Barton based CPUs is too large for AMD to be all that keen on using it for Semprons).
Which is kind of a shame. There are a huge number of Socket A motherboards out there, and I like being able to build fairly powerful computers using them. For now there is less choice for Socket 754, and the motherboards are generally more expensive.
I had a problem with the screen of my Dell laptop earlier this year, and they asked me to remove "all removable parts, including the battery, power adaptor, CD/DVD drive, and hard drive". So I removed all those parts before sending it off. They returned my computer fixed within a few days.
I particularly appreciated the fact that my hard drive was in the drawer of my desk the whole time. That way there was no possible way that I could lose any files due to a mixup / mistake made by Dell.
Of course this policy relies on accurately figuring out what parts of the computer are definitely still okay before doing the service call. If the problem is with the hard drive then clearly it isn't going to work to ask the computer owner to remove his hard drive and keep it. (Dell got me too go through a troubleshooting list before they would take the computer and fix it under warranty. I knew that I had a real hardware problem and none of these things would work, but I went through the list for them anyway).
Macobserver has a <a href="http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/07/<nobr>1<wbr></wbr></nobr> 8.1.shtml"> few technical specs</a> of the new model. Apple claim that batterly life is improved by 50%, but I will believe that when I see it. The 20Gb model has been moved to the $299 price point, and the 40Gb model has been moved to the $399 price point, with the 15Gb model being phased out. My guess is that we will see a 60Gb model at the $499 price point when Apple is able to source a good number of the 60Gb 1.8" drives from Toshiba, but that's just a guess in my part.
If I genuinely wanted to steal corporate data from an office computer, I can think of a hundred ways to do it right now from an office of average levels of security, many of them either untraceable or hard to trace. Some involve things like portable storage devices, and some don't. (The simplest simply involves carrying laptop computers in and out of the office). I have three such portable storage devices with me now - digital camera, MP3 player and cell phone.
In most environments, stopping this kind of thing without also shutting down virtually your entire business seems pretty much impossible. (There are some environments where it is clearly necessary, such as the casino and defence situations mentioned by earlier people) but these are situations where every aspect of the business has a higher level of security. In a fairly normal office setting, give me a break.
Well, this may be one of those cases where the cost of charging for the service is actually greater than the cost of providing the service. In that case, the best business model genuinely is going to be bundling it with something else (ie you provide it to people who buy coffee in your cafe). There may also be niche markets for businessmen with expense accounts and things like that (as T-Mobile seems to have discovered) but these will be clearly niche markets.
Typically here in London I can go into an internet cafe for 1 pound per hour, or maybe 2 pounds maximum in expensive locations. For that the owner of the cafe gives me an internet connection, a place to sit, and the use of a PC for an hour.
If I bring my own laptop, I simply want the internet connection and maybe a place to sit. Providing this is much cheaper than providing me with a PC as well, and the cost to me should be cheaper.
If I go into Starbucks and order a coffee, then the place to sit is included in the price of the coffee. So all that I want is the internet access. If it costs anything, it should be cheaper than the cost of using an internet cafe, because it is so much cheaper for the provider to offer it to me. However, in Starbucks an hour costs something like 6 pounds (it works out cheaper per hour if I buy a "day pass" or something, but I genuinely don't want more than an hour).
While all this remains the case, for pay services aren't going to make money, and it is really that simple. There are circumstances where I will pay for convenience and reliability, but not this much.
NHK of Japan invented an analogue high definition television system called Muse in the 1970s and 1980s, which looked wonderful compared with standard definition at the time, but its bandwidth requirements were much too high, sets were too expensive, and by the time it got into production it was becoming clear that digital technologies using data compression and consequently that would work using much lower bandwidth and would provide much more in the way of interactive services were viable. So Muse was abandoned and digital services were rolled out.
For this new system to work, we need much larger bandwidth and/or much better compression than we have now, which in practice means more powerful CPUs than we have now. This will come, but I think this will be a decade or more off. (At that point, any system invented by the Japanese right now will be superceded by something newer invented in the mean time).
Personally, I like the idea of this new system in principle. It is the first television system I have seen that generates pictures as good or better as conventional film. It will look fabulous if used in a digital cinema. (Current digital cinema technology only uses 1000 lines or so, and this is seriously lacking compared to film)
As for viewing this in your living room, it is probably overkill, unless we have screens covering entire walls of rooms (which of course we may). The 1080 lines max of conventional HDTV probably is good enough for 40 inch screens and the like. Current generation screens do show various digital artifacts, but these are more to do with the inadequacies of the display technologies than the number of pixels on the screen. (Things like LCD and plasma displays are simply not is good as conventional CRTs in terms of picture quality). Increasing the number of lines in such circumstances will certainly improve the picture further and it will probably happen some day, but larger gains in picture quality can probably be more easily gained in other ways for the moment.
Well, the new 60GB drive is a two platter drive, just like the current 40GB drive, so the 60GB drive should feel pretty much exactly the same as the 40GB drive does now. (That's assuming that the speed is the same, but I would guess that it is. Normally new drives have either more capacity or faster speeds, but seldom both).
Presumably Toshiba will be releasing a 30GB single platter version of this drive too, which should be lighter and have less rotating mass than the present 40GB iPod or the last generation 30GB model.
(And presumably Sony will also release a new version of the TR series Vaio laptop with the 60GB drive, which will be pleasing, too).
I suspect that if Google announces that (for instance) gmail is not longer in beta, then they feel they have to offer it to everyone who wants it, which probably means they have millions of users who all want to register it at once, and their servers are suddenly overwhelmed by the demand. As it is, by saying it is in beta they can offer it to a few users at once, and carefully control the speed at which it is rolled out. (Those people who have gmail accounts are being given a certain number of invitations to invite other people every now and then). Even if it is a fully developed product, this is undoubtedly easier for them.
Amazon.com now acts as a broker for lots of third party sellers, and is probably now e-Bay's biggest competition. Amazon does involve itself in mediation between buyers and sellers, does kick consistently dishonest sellers off the site, and does provide a guarantee to buyers in the event that they cannot get a refund from the seller. I think their practice is exemplary on this matter. (I have never had a problem with a seller, however. Everything I have bought via a third party on Amazon has been exactly as described when I received it).
The "TD" in TD-CDMA refers to the duplexing. That is, time division is used for dividing the uplink from the downlink, but the same frequency band is used for both. One advantage of this is that uplink and downlink can be asymmetric and the percentage of resources devoted to uplink and downlink can be different and (more importantly) adjusted on the fly. This is much better suited to data services than are systems for which the percentages devoted to uplink and dowlink are fixed. (A disadvantage of TDD is that has certain problems when the user is moving fast, however).
Almost all cellular systems in existence (the one exception I know of being a Japanese system called PHS) have traditionally used frequency division duplexing (FDD), in which a different frequenty band is used for the uplink and the downlink.
On the other hand, the "TD" in TDMA refers to time division being used for the multiple access. That is, a given freqquency is divided into time slots, and these are allocated to different users. "TDMA" is used in the US to normally refer to the D-AMPS (IS-136) system, which is indeed on the way out, but GSM is also a TDMA system, and is also a long way from the state of the art (although it is less moribund than D-AMPS).
CDMA has actually clearly won the argument as the best system for handling multiple access, and all new systems (including UMTS/W-CDMA, the successor to GSM) use it. The question as to what is the best way of handling the duplexing is more open, however. (It may well be that it will be best for phones to support both, and use the best one given current network capacity and the applications being used).
Only 1995? I read my first "Apple is dying, blah blah blah story in 1981, which was three years before the mac. It was the classic "Apple 2 sales will shrink because of IBM's greater market share and greater resources, and Apple's limited ability to produce another computer that would be competitive in the market". I have been hearing this ever since, and it has always sounded *exactly the same*. Apple is in a stronger position right now than it has been for quite a while, and its brand is suddenly valuable again. We will see what it does with this, but like everyone else I will just yawn when I see a headline like this.
No no no. What it actually said was "Michael Jennings is not a super agent". (Long ominous pause). "He's an engineer". For some reason I find this oddly disconcerting, but also kind of cool.
Michael.