I have the same functionality as Tivo with my TV tuner video capture board and a
honking great hard drive (3x80Gb).
Unless you use one of the various pieces of software that will give you similar functionality to a tivo, you probably only have the video recording functionality of the tivo. For example, the tivo is always recording (and playing!), so you can always pause and replay tv that you're watching. On a computer without dedicated mpeg encoding hardware, the computer would be unusable if you tried this. You also miss out on things like automatic programming, easy and automatic disk space management, and just plain ease of use.
With Tivo I pay $400 for the box, then $10 per month for the 'service'.
You can also buy an entire package for $200 which gives you lifetime service. And the 30-hour boxes are actually $300 typically.
I can't upgrade the disk in the box and I can't use the satelite TV provider of my choice.
You can definitely upgrade the disk(s) in the box. You should also be able to use any satellite TV provider with the regular tivo. It's only with the DirecTiVo (which just writes the mpeg stream directly rather than having an encoder) that you can only use Directv.
Or if I'm a fan of original short films - shown periodically in the small hours, I'd have to really watch out without a TiVo or similar. It can benefit pretty much any TV viewer, but its benefit seems greatest to viewers of marginal interest shows - such as SF, Fantasy, Horror and Anime.
I find that the greatest time-saving use of the TiVo is for shows where you really are only interested in a small portion of the content. The best example of this is sports news shows like Sportscenter. Most people really are interested in a few of the sports which are shown on sportscenter, and everything else on it is a waste of time. Fast-forwarding through all the baseball is wonderful!
I suppose the aggregate data on this could be used by a sports news show to see which portions of the show are more popular, and they could adjust it accordingly. More power to them.
The critical factor remains price. How low can you go while still being acceptably usable. Palms are borderline acceptable (IMO) but also very cheap.
I don't think cost is the huge factor here. The market for these devices right now is primarily composed of people who could easily afford to pay more. Using your example, look at how many more people paid the ~$100 to get a Palm V rather than a functionally equivalent but larger/uglier Palm III. This identifies the market as one that places high value on form factor and appearance, and one that doesn't flinch at an extra $100.
IBM can fit a 1 GB drive into a compact flash card, which can be easily plugged into USB using a reader, and can even more easily be put into a PCMCIA slot using a simple adapter for size and wiring. There are also some (the Lexar ones) compact flash cards that come with cables to hook up directly to a USB port; the reader circuitry is built into the card. As far as i can tell, there is nothing technologically interesting in this "keyring".
USB storage is also far from a "universally accepted data medium". How many computers do you know that will boot off of a USB drive (Don't count Macs. They make everything too easy:). What percentage of Linux users even have USB support running? NT users?
Personally, if i needed this sort of storage, i'd go for the PC card route to avoid yet another dongle waiting to break off from the back of my computer.
One thing Apple users miss out on is the amount of little pieces of software (good IRC, FTP, or NNTP clients for instance) that users of other
platforms take for granted.
Although there certainly is not the quantity of IRC/FTP/NNTP clients as there are for windows, the quality of FTP and NNTP clients for MacOS are far superior to that of Windows. I've used most of the ones available for windows and Mac, and I've found Fetch and Anarchie (Mac only programs) to be the best FTP clients, and Newswatcher and its variants (Mac only) to be by far the best GUI newsreader. A big reason I keep my mac around is that I can't get similarly-capable programs on other platforms. I'm not so sure about a GUI IRC client; i haven't tried any in a while.
For command line, MacOS X runs emacs/gnus, trn, slrn, ncftp, lynx, IRCII just fine.
Pssst. The PS2 and Dreamcast have fans. Get used to it. You can't have powerful computes without them.
The Powermac G4 cube has no fan, and certainly has more CPU processing power than these machines.
Re:Freedom to innovate... new interfaces?
on
First Looks At XBox
·
· Score: 1
Easy removal is a *good* thing. Better to have the controller come out than to send the $400 console crashing (and the hard drive) to the floor when someone trips over the cable.
It's probably another one of those great microsoft methods to "create consumer value" by creating things that break more easily.
Apple wouldn't use a chip like the Athlon because the power consumption is too high. They'd wait for a version which runs efficiently enough to run in a system without a fan.
Can the P3s used in notebook PCs run fanless if used in a decently ventilated case?
Even if the MP3s were 5 times the size of a
128 (file sizes at 5 megs per minute of sound)
There's no point in using MP3 when you're at 600kbps. At that point, you can just take raw 1200kbps audio CD data and use lossless compression to get it to ~600kbps.
Ten years from now, few people will remember what mp3 was.
Mozilla definitely needs this feature, because other browsers such as MSIE (through security zones) and iCab already can selectively choose which sites or domains to use javascript (and other features). It's a rather simple feature which Netscape should have had long ago.
And your screen will look much better (well, better than other laptops that use 1024x768 screens), and you'll be able to use it on your lap without burning a hole in your clothes. Plus, it has a keyboard that you can actually use, and a pointing device that isn't a poor excuse for a nipple. And furthermore, you'll have built-in ethernet, so you won't have some cable sticking upwards out of the PC card slot or some dongle that you always lose. AND, you'll get support for multiple monitors (driving the internal and external separately).
It's not that the powerbooks are great, it's that other laptops suck badly...
The stock market is not at all like a slot machine. Slot machines (ideally) are random. Regardless of how badly or losing or winning you are, the chances of you winning or losing again are equal.
The stock market is more like a rubber band; when undervalued it will rise (for example, technology after october 1998), when overvalued it will fall (for example, internet companies after feb 2000).
The rich certainly require more the defense systems more than the poor, and generally require it at a greater rate than is proportional to income. If you're poor, you don't have nearly as much to lose. Most of your money goes into consumables (food and rent), rather than assets like property or savings or investments. There's far less to lose.
They seem to be VASTLY underestimating sales people.
What do they do? When the need or desire isn't there, they CREATE the need or desire.
Actually, the biggest boon to computer makers in the late 1990's has been Microsoft. By constantly increasing the bloat and hardware requirements of their OS, they have driven the hardware replacement cycle to 2 years.
Recently, there hasn't been much upgrading, with most consumers seeing no reason to go to ME, and most companies seeing no reason to go to win2000. Additionally, there haven't really been any killer end-user apps which require an expensive computer.
The only consumers upgrading these days are 3d gamers and graphics/video folks. Linux users tend to be on an even longer upgrade cycle (My pentium 166 works just fine) than "equivalent" windows users.
On the other hand, there is still plenty of demand for processing power and additional machines on the server side.
Consumer computer sales will pick up again when there are killer apps which require it. On the Mac side, OS X should bring about a lot of upgrades, since many Mac users have been waiting for a while. The PC side is a bit different since the PC has become a commodity--no one is going to make much money selling the same thing everyone else sells.
It is justification for some great open source projects, but that is it. Most of us could make Linux look like OSX any day.
Anyone can make an OS look like another, but can you make it work like another? Where are the innovations in the open-source in the area of usability? There are very few (eazel, helixcode), because open-source programmers tend to program for themselves. That's fine, but it's never going to get my grandmother to use the programs like Apple does.
I'd rather use a simple window manager like twm than install an ugly barely-usable windows-clone of a GUI. I still use twm and the X window setup i've been using for six years because there was no decent GUI for Unix. Apple has changed that.
Don't get me wrong, I love Macs, almost as much as I love OS/2, but consider what
needs to happen before OS X starts to matter to consumers.
The only thing that needs to happen is for Apple to start bundling OS X with all of its computers (the several million machines it sells every year). Consumers will be using OS X. Your grandmother will be using OS X.
This will have the rather frightening effect of making Apple #1 in unix OS sales.
Microsoft already has plans to release a box (Ultimate TV?) containing a directTV receiver, a digital video recorder (i.e. Tivo clone), and WebTV functionality. Supposedly it will be released this fall.
It makes logical sense that they would offer similar set of three options on the X-box.
Does this mean that anyone who can ping this host
(ie me) is on I2?
No. The schools will route I2 as well as regular internet traffic.
I had typical transfer rates of 5-6 Mbps late at night with I2 hosts at other schools. Of course, last time i was in school (2 years ago), I wasn't competing with all the Napster traffic...
Competition is good. However, there is a difference between competition and infighting. The current situation here between GNOME and KDE is infighting, not healthy competition. The problem is that they aren't binary compatible.
Competition isn't always good for standards (The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them, of course). For example, the US is behind Europe and Asia in cellphone technology usage because it's been stuck with multiple standards. Sure, the best one will probably win out, but in the meantime you have lost in the short-term. Sometimes this short-term loss puts you far behind enough that it hurts you more than just picking one standard and going with it.
Personally, i'm not especially impressed with either Gnome or KDE, which both only meet or fall short of the decade-old Mac and windows interfaces.
Access Control:
AFS: Allows user-controllable access control lists
NFS:/etc/groups
Scalability:
AFS: Thousands of volumes, users, and clients? Ok!
NFS: *choke*
AFS is great in that it works, and is really the only mature, well-tested large-scale file system out there. It is horrible in that IBM has killed development on it since it bought Transarc. It usually takes 6-12 months these days between when a new Solaris release is out and when Transarc ports the AFS client to it.
Maybe they figured that if they open source it, they can move those two contract programmers they have doing the ports elsewhere, and just have random AFS sysadmins do the work for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you use one of the various pieces of software that will give you similar functionality to a tivo, you probably only have the video recording functionality of the tivo. For example, the tivo is always recording (and playing!), so you can always pause and replay tv that you're watching. On a computer without dedicated mpeg encoding hardware, the computer would be unusable if you tried this. You also miss out on things like automatic programming, easy and automatic disk space management, and just plain ease of use.
With Tivo I pay $400 for the box, then $10 per month for the 'service'.
You can also buy an entire package for $200 which gives you lifetime service. And the 30-hour boxes are actually $300 typically.
I can't upgrade the disk in the box and I can't use the satelite TV provider of my choice.
You can definitely upgrade the disk(s) in the box. You should also be able to use any satellite TV provider with the regular tivo. It's only with the DirecTiVo (which just writes the mpeg stream directly rather than having an encoder) that you can only use Directv.
I find that the greatest time-saving use of the TiVo is for shows where you really are only interested in a small portion of the content. The best example of this is sports news shows like Sportscenter. Most people really are interested in a few of the sports which are shown on sportscenter, and everything else on it is a waste of time. Fast-forwarding through all the baseball is wonderful!
I suppose the aggregate data on this could be used by a sports news show to see which portions of the show are more popular, and they could adjust it accordingly. More power to them.
I don't think cost is the huge factor here. The market for these devices right now is primarily composed of people who could easily afford to pay more. Using your example, look at how many more people paid the ~$100 to get a Palm V rather than a functionally equivalent but larger/uglier Palm III. This identifies the market as one that places high value on form factor and appearance, and one that doesn't flinch at an extra $100.
USB storage is also far from a "universally accepted data medium". How many computers do you know that will boot off of a USB drive (Don't count Macs. They make everything too easy :). What percentage of Linux users even have USB support running? NT users?
Personally, if i needed this sort of storage, i'd go for the PC card route to avoid yet another dongle waiting to break off from the back of my computer.
Although there certainly is not the quantity of IRC/FTP/NNTP clients as there are for windows, the quality of FTP and NNTP clients for MacOS are far superior to that of Windows. I've used most of the ones available for windows and Mac, and I've found Fetch and Anarchie (Mac only programs) to be the best FTP clients, and Newswatcher and its variants (Mac only) to be by far the best GUI newsreader. A big reason I keep my mac around is that I can't get similarly-capable programs on other platforms. I'm not so sure about a GUI IRC client; i haven't tried any in a while.
For command line, MacOS X runs emacs/gnus, trn, slrn, ncftp, lynx, IRCII just fine.
The Powermac G4 cube has no fan, and certainly has more CPU processing power than these machines.
It's probably another one of those great microsoft methods to "create consumer value" by creating things that break more easily.
Can the P3s used in notebook PCs run fanless if used in a decently ventilated case?
There's no point in using MP3 when you're at 600kbps. At that point, you can just take raw 1200kbps audio CD data and use lossless compression to get it to ~600kbps.
Ten years from now, few people will remember what mp3 was.
Mozilla definitely needs this feature, because other browsers such as MSIE (through security zones) and iCab already can selectively choose which sites or domains to use javascript (and other features). It's a rather simple feature which Netscape should have had long ago.
It's not that the powerbooks are great, it's that other laptops suck badly...
Close. I know that Mortgage shows up higher, probably in the $2-$4 per click range.
The stock market is more like a rubber band; when undervalued it will rise (for example, technology after october 1998), when overvalued it will fall (for example, internet companies after feb 2000).
The rich certainly require more the defense systems more than the poor, and generally require it at a greater rate than is proportional to income. If you're poor, you don't have nearly as much to lose. Most of your money goes into consumables (food and rent), rather than assets like property or savings or investments. There's far less to lose.
Competition drives profits to the consumer. Competition is vital for a properly functioning economy.
You'd think that everyone would have learned the lesson from microsoft already...
Actually, the biggest boon to computer makers in the late 1990's has been Microsoft. By constantly increasing the bloat and hardware requirements of their OS, they have driven the hardware replacement cycle to 2 years.
Recently, there hasn't been much upgrading, with most consumers seeing no reason to go to ME, and most companies seeing no reason to go to win2000. Additionally, there haven't really been any killer end-user apps which require an expensive computer.
The only consumers upgrading these days are 3d gamers and graphics/video folks. Linux users tend to be on an even longer upgrade cycle (My pentium 166 works just fine) than "equivalent" windows users.
On the other hand, there is still plenty of demand for processing power and additional machines on the server side.
Consumer computer sales will pick up again when there are killer apps which require it. On the Mac side, OS X should bring about a lot of upgrades, since many Mac users have been waiting for a while. The PC side is a bit different since the PC has become a commodity--no one is going to make much money selling the same thing everyone else sells.
$10000: 25 mhz 030 cube
- $1000: iMac w/OSX + ram
--------
$9000
There's $9k missing here. Dammit!
Anyone can make an OS look like another, but can you make it work like another? Where are the innovations in the open-source in the area of usability? There are very few (eazel, helixcode), because open-source programmers tend to program for themselves. That's fine, but it's never going to get my grandmother to use the programs like Apple does.
I'd rather use a simple window manager like twm than install an ugly barely-usable windows-clone of a GUI. I still use twm and the X window setup i've been using for six years because there was no decent GUI for Unix. Apple has changed that.
You really only need 128MB if you're using the Classic environment. Running two OSs at the same time takes up memory.
The only thing that needs to happen is for Apple to start bundling OS X with all of its computers (the several million machines it sells every year). Consumers will be using OS X. Your grandmother will be using OS X.
This will have the rather frightening effect of making Apple #1 in unix OS sales.
VMware isn't an emulator. You'll have to get an x86 if you want windows with VMware. You haven't convinced anyone to get linux.
It makes logical sense that they would offer similar set of three options on the X-box.
No. The schools will route I2 as well as regular internet traffic.
I had typical transfer rates of 5-6 Mbps late at night with I2 hosts at other schools. Of course, last time i was in school (2 years ago), I wasn't competing with all the Napster traffic...
Competition isn't always good for standards (The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them, of course). For example, the US is behind Europe and Asia in cellphone technology usage because it's been stuck with multiple standards. Sure, the best one will probably win out, but in the meantime you have lost in the short-term. Sometimes this short-term loss puts you far behind enough that it hurts you more than just picking one standard and going with it.
Personally, i'm not especially impressed with either Gnome or KDE, which both only meet or fall short of the decade-old Mac and windows interfaces.
AFS: Allows user-controllable access control lists
NFS:
Scalability:
AFS: Thousands of volumes, users, and clients? Ok!
NFS: *choke*
AFS is great in that it works, and is really the only mature, well-tested large-scale file system out there. It is horrible in that IBM has killed development on it since it bought Transarc. It usually takes 6-12 months these days between when a new Solaris release is out and when Transarc ports the AFS client to it.
Maybe they figured that if they open source it, they can move those two contract programmers they have doing the ports elsewhere, and just have random AFS sysadmins do the work for them.