We just went through months and months of iPhone discussions. Then we re-hashed half of those details in the way that the iPod Touch is a little disappointing. A lot of progress has been made in terms of getting unofficial 3rd party apps installed to the device. Do we really have to talk about this already?
Here's the thing: Apple, and Steve Jobs, will do exactly what they want and nothing more. We may get iChat support, we may get video at some point, but we're probably not getting an official SSH client. We're probably not getting VOIP, even though Apple has made obvious their disdain for the cell industry.
Once a product is launched, Apple tends to make small, incremental improvements. I don't see the iPhone 2.0 as a huge step up. In his "Steve Takes Europe" tour, the timelines for a 3G iPhone seem to be pointing more towards the end of next year, not sooner.
Be happy with your iPhone now. I won't be getting one, but that's okay. But I *am* done thinking about the iPhone, because for me it really is short of the mark. I'm in love with the interface, the form factor, and the degree to which Apple was able to think very differently than the rest of the industry. But, Apple's self-imposed product limitations are too annoying for me. It's just not going to be the device I really want.
..palm to be the biggest lame duck company in the tech industry in a long time. how many employees do they have? how many revisions of their product have they produced? what kind of product evolution has their core technology seen in the last 'n' iterations?
they seem to excel at pissing off their key employees, having those employees leave, buying them back, licensing out their core technology, licensing it back, etc.
someone should really, really just put the company out of its misery.
McCracken was a very long-time employee of PC World. The magazine got a new CEO. The CEO made a new request with respect to editorial policy. McCracken quit in protest.
Which probably means he hadn't been cowering to the advertisers for the previous 11 some-odd years he worked at PC World.
[I was at a social dinner that Harry was at about a month ago, though I didn't speak with him much.]
..did this "journal" post make it to the front page of Slashdot? Looking at the day's posts, apparently there's no a damn thing interesting happening in the world of "geeks".
And yes, I agree, our national health care system (hah) is non-existent and needs addressing. And there are plenty of discussions to be had among reasonable and intelligent people. But this post isn't the prod for that kind of conversation. It's half a thought, and literally ends on an ellipsis.
I said this back when Jobs announced the switch, and it was also why they didn't switch to AMD: I think Jobs wanted to take the "processor" issue off the table entirely. He never wanted to have another conversation about which processor line or architecture Apple should be running on. PowerPC made plenty of sense at the time they went with it, and as time went on, the cries for switch were loud, constant and correct. Choosing Intel means never having to hear it again, it's a blue chip decision to go with the Blue Chip supplier. It's the correct and defensible decision from a technical and business perspective.
i think it's a little of both, but if it was JUST about keeping employees working longer, i wouldn't expect their food service to be as quality/value oriented as it is. home-made food, using quality and organic ingredients..? it seems like they wanted to offer a certain standard of services, more than your local subway or marriot cafeteria service, and that is commendable.
Works for me. I don't like the idea of traditional "vacations", and I like involving far-flung places in my normal life. A vacation is a week or two or three (at most).. but if you want, you can go off for a month or two and really get into other places.
..managing Red Hat / Fedora systems in production and dev environments forever. Since the beginning.
For the first time in a long time I don't have to concern myself with that responsibility.
FC6 is an ugly mess. I've installed it on a few machines between work and home and none of them were totally clean. It's noticeably slower than it should be. Some of this is new blade hardware, some of this is years-old equipment that should still have good life left in it.
At home I installed Ubuntu a few days ago and things I got tired of messing with in FC6 installed the first time without a hitch. Ubuntu feels just a bit antiquated under the hood, but basic services that I've come to desire (yes, and I'm talking about copying my son's DVDs so that he can destroy them at will and I can burn him new copies of his favorite 'choo videos) in a desktop environment _just _work in Ubuntu.
If that's the middle ground of consumer oriented linux, then I'm happy someone like Canonical is championing it.
..to be MS-free 2-3 years down the road for any given company. Certainly for a start-up. Linux and OS X can easily take care of much of the market. MS should consider swaying customers to continue to be customers through positive reinforcement.
I literally haven't been in a tech/management meeting where there wasn't ouright begrudgement at the mention of MS and MS-technologies.
..how far off the cover presentation of the article is from the content of the article. J Allard, the edgy thinker at Microsoft? He couldn't save the Zune launch, he's had his chance. Getting rid of guys like him, and the kinds of binds that Sony has trouble shaking is gonna be the baseline requirement for Microsoft to find its way. They can't engineer their way out of anti-consumer corporate shackles.
..new people, it used to be fun to ask, "what's the latest CD(s) you've bought?"
Nowadays people often get a quizzical look on their face, or the conversation descends into a "who buys CDs anymore?" spiral.
The last three house parties I attended were DJed by iPods.
I'm quite partial to Rhapsody for "daily" music use, and spend my CD money on small label stuff (Aquarius in SF, Other Music in NYC, etc).
I hate to make gender-based..
on
School Bans 'Tag'
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
..generalizations, I do. But I have a 2.75 yo son and I take him to the playground 3-4 days per week (his mom, the rest of the time). There's a fairly significant divide between how men and women treat their children at the playground. Dads tend to hang back, contributing support and help as kids need them (and to be sure, too many fathers hang on the park bench the whole time and can't be bothered to participate at all). Mom's hover, ensuring the kid never suffers a risky moment.
Those kids tend to have less certain notions of what's possible, what isn't, and what's just plain stupid. Some of those kids certainly got it in the nature-equation - meaning those parents may, in fact, have some reason to be fearful. Plenty of other kids are developing much shallower skills with respect to falling and not falling.
So, to wrap up with another generalization, it's more likely a mother would feel relieved at this ridiculous development than a father.
If it gets back to the owner of the business and a conversation ensues about returning to WORD, don't cover the "behavior" verbally. Demonstrate it. Tell them that one Carriage Return anomoly can be a matter of adjusting expectations or shelling out ten grand.
I think you may see the Apple Intel machines in a particularly good spot here. If it's likely that Vista may run on an Apple machine at some point, some people (and certainly a lot of companies) can justify buying a Mac now and considering Vista "whenever". It's an attractive option.
First of all, I got it working fine at work on my Win XP laptop + Firefox 1.5.
I can't wait to try this at home, where my only machines are OS X and Linux.
I can live with the web interface, though I wish they didn't rely on a pop-up window for the player.
I'm a little disappointed they didn't use the web launch as an opportunity to include a few of my wishlist features:
instead of creating playlists, I wish I could just bookmark artists/albums. there are a lot lot lot of albums on rhapsody, and after a while it's a little annoying to have to rely on one's memories to put together a soundtrack for the given moment
i'm not sure i see a way to use the web interface to download tracks to the local machine. so, i still can't do that on my linux/osx laptop. i can do it on my winxp laptop though, which is still very nice.
i've become a fan of the subscription service because:
i'm reading a magazine, they reference an artist/album i'm not familiar with, i can go listen to the whole thing right then and right there
i can live with the subscription service for the more mainstream music i listen to. i'm happy to buy my india/small label music for posterity. there will always be a way to listen to my u2.
when i feel really random (solo gospel piano), i find scratch my itch instantly
when i'm listening to online radio and i hear a song i like, i can instantly go listen to the whole album
PDAs seem like a good idea when you value your work life enough to carry it around with you. PDAs showed up at a time when most people's data was centralized on their desktop's hard drive.
Two things happened: 1) the market crashed, everyone gave up on the idea that if they sacrificed their life to their job, and melded the disparate goals in their life to their corporate goals, they would get rich. to that end, everyone wanted to have their personal and corporate life in a sexy little device they could access at home, work and starbucks.
2) the data just isn't centralizable anymore. between corporate databases, ASPs, etc., synchronizing is almost impossible. you want your contacts? nobody gets excited about contacts anymore.
iPods are for lifestyle and play. Work isn't as much a lifestyle thing anymore. And good riddance.
Or, the upgrades finally make hte product worthwhile, but the originally spec'ed machines don't. So, I'm ready to buy a Mac Mini, but I want the upgraded VRAM and the faster drives. The difference isn't academic. This is stupid.. if they need to clear inventory, why mix the two products in the field?
Bloglines is the best interface for reading a lot of subscriptions quickly. I like being able to click on a site or category and getting, instantly, all the latest RSS feeds in one screen. I scroll through them, open the stuff I want to read in a new tab, move on.
Why do most rss-readers insist you look at each rss item one-at-a-time? I don't understand that at all.
Someone who's main point is games, and who can't use proper grammar, probably can't be trusted with a forecast opinion. Is their/there really that fucking hard?
Slashdot Mirror
We just went through months and months of iPhone discussions. Then we re-hashed half of those details in the way that the iPod Touch is a little disappointing. A lot of progress has been made in terms of getting unofficial 3rd party apps installed to the device. Do we really have to talk about this already?
Here's the thing: Apple, and Steve Jobs, will do exactly what they want and nothing more. We may get iChat support, we may get video at some point, but we're probably not getting an official SSH client. We're probably not getting VOIP, even though Apple has made obvious their disdain for the cell industry.
Once a product is launched, Apple tends to make small, incremental improvements. I don't see the iPhone 2.0 as a huge step up. In his "Steve Takes Europe" tour, the timelines for a 3G iPhone seem to be pointing more towards the end of next year, not sooner.
Be happy with your iPhone now. I won't be getting one, but that's okay. But I *am* done thinking about the iPhone, because for me it really is short of the mark. I'm in love with the interface, the form factor, and the degree to which Apple was able to think very differently than the rest of the industry. But, Apple's self-imposed product limitations are too annoying for me. It's just not going to be the device I really want.
They took Mail off the iPod Touch?
How long before someone figures out how to put that back on.
If it had shipped with Mail, I would have bought one this weekend.
..my biggest beef with the episode is that after 7 seasons of awesome musical choices, Chase goes out on Journey?
"Don't stop..."
..palm to be the biggest lame duck company in the tech industry in a long time. how many employees do they have? how many revisions of their product have they produced? what kind of product evolution has their core technology seen in the last 'n' iterations?
they seem to excel at pissing off their key employees, having those employees leave, buying them back, licensing out their core technology, licensing it back, etc.
someone should really, really just put the company out of its misery.
they're the borland of the new century.
..people are missing:
McCracken was a very long-time employee of PC World.
The magazine got a new CEO.
The CEO made a new request with respect to editorial policy.
McCracken quit in protest.
Which probably means he hadn't been cowering to the advertisers for the previous 11 some-odd years he worked at PC World.
[I was at a social dinner that Harry was at about a month ago, though I didn't speak with him much.]
..did this "journal" post make it to the front page of Slashdot? Looking at the day's posts, apparently there's no a damn thing interesting happening in the world of "geeks".
And yes, I agree, our national health care system (hah) is non-existent and needs addressing. And there are plenty of discussions to be had among reasonable and intelligent people. But this post isn't the prod for that kind of conversation. It's half a thought, and literally ends on an ellipsis.
I said this back when Jobs announced the switch, and it was also why they didn't switch to AMD: I think Jobs wanted to take the "processor" issue off the table entirely. He never wanted to have another conversation about which processor line or architecture Apple should be running on. PowerPC made plenty of sense at the time they went with it, and as time went on, the cries for switch were loud, constant and correct. Choosing Intel means never having to hear it again, it's a blue chip decision to go with the Blue Chip supplier. It's the correct and defensible decision from a technical and business perspective.
Uh, yeah, Sun thought of that.
The actual units come painted white. The black is just a marketing detail given its name.
The units also devote a significant portion of the space inside to a chilled water cooling system. In fact, the water has to be chilled to 55 degrees.
There's a tour online somewhere that has more details. Google it if you're interested.
i think it's a little of both, but if it was JUST about keeping employees working longer, i wouldn't expect their food service to be as quality/value oriented as it is. home-made food, using quality and organic ingredients..? it seems like they wanted to offer a certain standard of services, more than your local subway or marriot cafeteria service, and that is commendable.
and i'm a segregator.
Works for me. I don't like the idea of traditional "vacations", and I like involving far-flung places in my normal life. A vacation is a week or two or three (at most).. but if you want, you can go off for a month or two and really get into other places.
..managing Red Hat / Fedora systems in production and dev environments forever. Since the beginning.
For the first time in a long time I don't have to concern myself with that responsibility.
FC6 is an ugly mess. I've installed it on a few machines between work and home and none of them were totally clean. It's noticeably slower than it should be. Some of this is new blade hardware, some of this is years-old equipment that should still have good life left in it.
At home I installed Ubuntu a few days ago and things I got tired of messing with in FC6 installed the first time without a hitch. Ubuntu feels just a bit antiquated under the hood, but basic services that I've come to desire (yes, and I'm talking about copying my son's DVDs so that he can destroy them at will and I can burn him new copies of his favorite 'choo videos) in a desktop environment _just _work in Ubuntu.
If that's the middle ground of consumer oriented linux, then I'm happy someone like Canonical is championing it.
..to be MS-free 2-3 years down the road for any given company. Certainly for a start-up. Linux and OS X can easily take care of much of the market. MS should consider swaying customers to continue to be customers through positive reinforcement.
I literally haven't been in a tech/management meeting where there wasn't ouright begrudgement at the mention of MS and MS-technologies.
..how far off the cover presentation of the article is from the content of the article. J Allard, the edgy thinker at Microsoft? He couldn't save the Zune launch, he's had his chance. Getting rid of guys like him, and the kinds of binds that Sony has trouble shaking is gonna be the baseline requirement for Microsoft to find its way. They can't engineer their way out of anti-consumer corporate shackles.
..new people, it used to be fun to ask, "what's the latest CD(s) you've bought?"
Nowadays people often get a quizzical look on their face, or the conversation descends into a "who buys CDs anymore?" spiral.
The last three house parties I attended were DJed by iPods.
I'm quite partial to Rhapsody for "daily" music use, and spend my CD money on small label stuff (Aquarius in SF, Other Music in NYC, etc).
..generalizations, I do. But I have a 2.75 yo son and I take him to the playground 3-4 days per week (his mom, the rest of the time). There's a fairly significant divide between how men and women treat their children at the playground. Dads tend to hang back, contributing support and help as kids need them (and to be sure, too many fathers hang on the park bench the whole time and can't be bothered to participate at all). Mom's hover, ensuring the kid never suffers a risky moment.
Those kids tend to have less certain notions of what's possible, what isn't, and what's just plain stupid. Some of those kids certainly got it in the nature-equation - meaning those parents may, in fact, have some reason to be fearful. Plenty of other kids are developing much shallower skills with respect to falling and not falling.
So, to wrap up with another generalization, it's more likely a mother would feel relieved at this ridiculous development than a father.
If it gets back to the owner of the business and a conversation ensues about returning to WORD, don't cover the "behavior" verbally. Demonstrate it. Tell them that one Carriage Return anomoly can be a matter of adjusting expectations or shelling out ten grand.
I think you may see the Apple Intel machines in a particularly good spot here. If it's likely that Vista may run on an Apple machine at some point, some people (and certainly a lot of companies) can justify buying a Mac now and considering Vista "whenever". It's an attractive option.
I can't wait to try this at home, where my only machines are OS X and Linux.
I can live with the web interface, though I wish they didn't rely on a pop-up window for the player.
I'm a little disappointed they didn't use the web launch as an opportunity to include a few of my wishlist features:
i've become a fan of the subscription service because:
PDAs seem like a good idea when you value your work life enough to carry it around with you. PDAs showed up at a time when most people's data was centralized on their desktop's hard drive.
Two things happened:
1) the market crashed, everyone gave up on the idea that if they sacrificed their life to their job, and melded the disparate goals in their life to their corporate goals, they would get rich. to that end, everyone wanted to have their personal and corporate life in a sexy little device they could access at home, work and starbucks.
2) the data just isn't centralizable anymore. between corporate databases, ASPs, etc., synchronizing is almost impossible. you want your contacts? nobody gets excited about contacts anymore.
iPods are for lifestyle and play. Work isn't as much a lifestyle thing anymore. And good riddance.
Or, the upgrades finally make hte product worthwhile, but the originally spec'ed machines don't. So, I'm ready to buy a Mac Mini, but I want the upgraded VRAM and the faster drives. The difference isn't academic. This is stupid.. if they need to clear inventory, why mix the two products in the field?
Bloglines is the best interface for reading a lot of subscriptions quickly. I like being able to click on a site or category and getting, instantly, all the latest RSS feeds in one screen. I scroll through them, open the stuff I want to read in a new tab, move on.
Why do most rss-readers insist you look at each rss item one-at-a-time? I don't understand that at all.
Someone who's main point is games, and who can't use proper grammar, probably can't be trusted with a forecast opinion. Is their/there really that fucking hard?
Nevermind. I'm an idiot. It does in fact support photos...
...has a color screen, but if I'm reading the iPod spec page correctly, it doesn't support photo images. Argh!
Palm missed their big opportunity to buy out a like-mindedly ineffective company.