A "universal remote control" app that runs on the little screen could be fun. Hold it end-on, tell the screen display to rotate 90 degrees, put little stickers over the columns of keys for your fifty favourite tv channels...
Wouldn't it be better if the media center itself were a plain, small and silent box (like the Apple TV) to which this neat keyboard could be connected wirelessly?
They already do one!
The Eee Box is a small, plain, (almost) silent PC with wifi that comes with a mounting bracket so you can bolt it to the back of your flat monitor or TV via the four VESA mount holes.
Of course, if you're trying to be environmentally friendly, you'll take your star-shaped screwdriver and disassemble the whole drive during your coffee break. All the screws go into your "spare screws" pot, the platters get set to one side for later smashing, and once the chassis is completely stripped back to a bare aluminium block, that goes with all the other alu parts into your aluminium recycling bin.
You get a totally irrecoverable drive, a warm feeling about the amount of aluminium you just recycled, and a couple of cool high-power magnets to play with as a reward.
There's plenty of great product designers out there who can make products look cool - but they don't tend to work in the computer industry, because frankly, if you're a creative product designer, why the hell would you want to work with those people?;)
What Apple did right was recognising that if you want something to look cool, as if it's come out of a scifi movie, it's actually damned easy... because everything in those movies has been designed by a product designer who's alive and working right now. Hollywood hires them. Other people are allowed to hire them too.
What Apple did right was to recognise that they could buy in creative design work for their casing designs, and get better results than by using their own in-house people. The usual problem with doing that is that it's expensive, and your own in-house design guys then get alienated and leave (or at least the good ones do), and you find yourself with nobody in-house to do the everyday "boring" design work, so you end up dependent on expensive external talent for everything.
In Apple's case, because they only have a very limited number of products at any one time, and they all tend to be high-profile and high-markup, this isn't such a problem.
Having said that, you then also need someone with a good eye to reject those "wacky" designs that an outside designer might suggest but which simply aren't a good idea. I thought that those early coloured iBook G3 designs which looked like a cross between a lady's handbag and a set prop from a Disney mermaid cartoon looked bloody awful. Those most definitely didn't look like something from Star Trek!
Of course. The perception of being a "pro" platform sells a lot of Macs, but Apple have realised that the bigger market is people who like to make a statement about "being a creative type" by buying a Mac, but then just use it to websurf and watch movies.
Look at the music market. Apple tried to corner the music production market by buying emagic and shutting down the Windows version. At the time they were panicking that people didn't reckon that the Mac platform was any more "pro" than the PC plaform, and they wanted to change that perception by spending money on video editing and audio production tools.
But how much money did they actually make by doing that? What're the sales and profits for "Logic" (to people who make music) compared to the sales and profits for the iPods and for iTunes (for people who only listen to music). It's not going to be comparable, is it?
As far as I'm concerned, the iPod isn't a "pro" piece of kit, because it doesn't have an audio recording input (unlike, say, some of the older iRiver MP3 players). That means that it's essentially a mass-market consumer product (unless your profession involves listening to music). They could have given it useful "pro" features, but decided that it wasn't worth it.
I'd have loved to have seen an "iPod Pro" with recording features, but Apple obviously couldn't be arsed to make one (or maybe decided that if people could easily re-record their own vinyl colelctions, they might not buy so many tracks off iTunes).
Engineers at other companies were designing things like the iPhone for years. But the technology wasn't quite ready, or the buzz wasn't quite there.
Instead of trying for years to be the first people to market with a stream of unsuccessful niche products, Apple hung back and waited, and let the other companies do all the market research.
Then, when it looked as if a really flashy product might finally be possible, Apple designed one, engineered and priced it on the assumption that it was going to be a big seller, marketed it to hell, and launched it in such a way that the public thought that touch-screen phones were somehow an Apple invention.
The confidence paid off, and people bought it. Funny thing was, as a top-level phone, it was a bit substandard, but it was gadget of the year anyway.
Similarly with the miniMac, small manufacturers had been building and selling similar products on a small scale for years. What Apple did was to wait until they figured that the market was there to turn a niche "boutique" product that most people had never seen into a white "Apple-styled" product that had the potential to go major league.
The problem with being genuinely innovative is that it might take a product or two to get things right, by which time you're saddled with expensive legacy products to support or abandon (eg Apple Newton). Apple realised that you don't have to be first to be successful, with a powerful enough brand, and confident marketing and, you can step in when you think the time is right, launch a media blitz and take a market over, provided that the competition is weakened and the public perception is low.
"... so at Apple, we thought, what's the next step? Where does data storage go from here? And our engineers told us: Atoms! We're going to build the data directly into the molecular structure!"
"And here's what they gave us."
(Holds up object. Crowd ooohs, awestruck.)
(A spotlight high behind Jobs shines on Job's upraised right hand, gleaming off the surface of what appears to be a shiny black disclike object, hypnotising the crowd.)
"As you can see, the new product has no straight lines, and no corners. And for data registration purposes, it has (Jobs suddenly tilts the object, back, allowing the spotlight to pick out a gleaming white spot at the disk's centre)... a Hole!"
(crowd gasps)
"Notice how the Hole is at the EXACT centre of the disc. Not on the left. Not on the right. Our engineers told us that this placement was a critical feature for the playback process. So that's where we put it. Right in the middle."
(crowd cheers, until Jobs put up a hand signifying that he wants them to stop)
(hushed tones) "This is not just a nice looking object. This is a truly BEAUTIFUL object. You could hang this on your wall. Notice how the surface gleams. We could have made this out of cheap plastic... but no. We decided to manufacture this out of the finest carbon-blacked Vinyl."
(crowd whoops)
"Now, wait until you see this brand-new user interface. We place the "disc" onto the "turntable", and the disc rotates AUTOMATICALLY. We place the arm anywhere on the disc. Anywhere at all!"
(music plays)
(Jobs lists the arm and puts it down somewhere else.)
(music plays)
(Jobs repeats, looking up at the audience and grinning each time)
"Now, isn't that just the Coolest thing you ever saw?"
(Audience applauds wildly)
"Now, how'll we be selling these. Well, we'll be packaging them in a special two-layer format that we call a "sleeve"..."
Mobility, security, wallet-scale portability, use on embedded equipment (hifis, picture frames, etc.), use on non-networked home PC's, PC OS backups (that need to be on a format that a PC can boot directly from), shock-resistance, and backups of data that you want kept mechanically separate from your usual backup scheme.
And for archiving medium-ish amounts of data, where you don't actually know which data formats are going to last the longest, it doesn't hurt to use multiple physical formats. If you can fit an extra backup of all your most important family photos onto a 16 gig card and keep it in your wallet, then why not?
My local Poundland sell a transparent USB thumb drive that lets you pull the cap off the end, plug in an SD card and replace the cap.
So the SD card is in a sealed dustproof enclosure, you can still read the SD label, and you can plug the whole thing into a USB port.
It costs one pound.
I ended up buying a batch of them, and a batch of cheap SD cards, and colour-coding the cards, and I use them for stuff where I want access to the latest versions of files on multiple computers, without necessarily wanting those files stored permanently on certain machines. I back them up, of course, but I find that "SD-in-USB" is a good mobile transfer medium for working files. I have one for computer graphics (where I might be updating source code and rendering on different machines), one for job info and cvs, one that I was using for coursework, one for sales data and marketing info, and so on.
Also, my Mum has one of those Kodak picture frames (which can take one SD card and one USB drive), so an SD card in a USB enclosure gives maximum flexibility. And she's now got one of those ASUS Eee machines, which also has an SD slot & USB. And I just got an Eee Box bolted to the back of my monitor for wordprocessing and browsing, and that has an SD slot, too.
At some point, I'll probably get a new hifi with SD slot(s) rather than an optical drive. All my CDs are on MP3 anyway, and some of the recent digital radios can record direct to SD. Some SD-equipped players seem to have filesystem limitations, but it wouldn't be too much of a hardship to have different categories of music on their own cards.
So yes, it is quite possible to end up with a lot of SD cards, even if you don't have a camera or mobile that takes them (I don't).
I'm not using these things because of a lack of other options... I have a serious firewire-based multi-HD storage unit for backups and backups-of-backups... but I like to keep it switched off whenever possible, to reduce mechanical wear and tear (and the risk of accidents). I also usually choose not to network my "fast" PC, because I like to keep it running a minimal set of drivers and disconnected from the internet. I've also ended up with three mobile 2.5" HD caddies, which are handy and portable... but if anything, they hold too much data, and are too "delicate" to be treated casually. So for relatively small amounts of data, it's nice to have a format that's cheap and shockproof, runs on anything, and lets you take small datasets out and about without carrying a load of unnecessary info with you that amounts to a copy of your entire life history, and "sensitive" info.
I used to use the "normal" thumb drives for this, but it annoyed me that they were all different designs and shapes and colours, and had inconvenient capacities, and it was difficult to remember what was on what drive at any given time. So these little one-pound "see-through" SD USB enclosures have been great.
Craft shops sell multicoloured packs of A4 or A5 foam sheets, the same thickness as an SD card.
If you set a row of SD cards in a line, tilted at an angle, that gives you a template to cut around, where each card will fit snugly into the hole you cut in the foam sheet without rattling about.
So you cut out the holes with a sharp craft knife or scalpel, then glue the sheet to some sort of sheet, backing board or plate. Whether you then glue a second sheet of clear flexible plastic on top with suitable slits on top, or have rigid sheets of acrylic front-and back, or some other variation, depends on how and where the storage system is going to be used. Some people might want A4 storage sheets that will match their existing A4 negative storage-sheet system and binders, others might want a smaller format (A5 or Filofax). The smaller sizes would be useful if you're taking sheets of SD cards out into the wild.
There are credit-card-sized SD card holders available commercially that are great for carrying cards in your pocket, but not so good for filing.
If you buy a card that's four gig or more, it'll almost certainly be SDHC
Some manufacturers of gear with SD cards slots specify that their gear is only specified to be able to take cards up to one gig.
Although four gig "SD" cards tend to be SDHC nowadays, you can still get hold of non-SDHC versions if you look around. Memorybits.co.uk do a 'special' 4gb card that's non-SDHC.
Oh, I agree with you, wholeheartedly. I'm just saying that the state of the UK NHS dental heath system isn't a good indicator of the state of the rest of the NHS system.
Dentists often have a conflict between charging whatever they like for doing work privately, or allowing their patients to go though the NHS and only getting the NHS flat fee for the same work. Unsurprisingly, many decide to go for the money, and stop taking NHS patients.
"My 6-year-old's embedded software happily runs on kernel v2.4 on an XScale CPU...."
I thought, aaaah, he's built a robust linux PC for his kid. But isn't insisting that his kiddy's first PC has a bang-up-to-date GCC compiler a little extreme?
Then I re-read it. Oops. Makes much more sense now. Not as cute, though.
So Microsoft's internal control systems are breaking down, its task groups aren't getting a clear "stay alive" signal, are getting confused over their purpose and are self-destructing, and when the divisions then have these massive problems, it's the equivalent of multiple organ failure?
"Hey man, Looks! I just scoped this rilly cray-zee mo-fo Zooney bug!"
"Rilly? Wo-fo?"
"It's like, mental, man! It's this itty bit of code, and all it does is - get this - every four years, it adds a day!"
"No way!"
"Waaaay, man! 2008? This code gives it 366 days!"
"Mennnn-tal. That's just sick programming, man!"
"Tell me 'bout."
"Hey, I seen this 'fore! it's a fing I seen vose old wrinkly programmer dudes do. Vey add a day every four years. I fink it's like, sabotage. It's like, ver code goes wrong in four years 'nless the Boss hires 'em back to put it right. It's job security for wrinklies."
"Whoa. Dat's so out of order, man? Dey can't cut it no more, so dey mess up da code, delib?"
"Yeah. Well, WE's the Kings now, and WE's doin' a software update, and WE''s gonna NIX this mofo. No wrinklies HERE, man. Doosh. I just DELETED its ass. Back to 365."
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A "universal remote control" app that runs on the little screen could be fun. Hold it end-on, tell the screen display to rotate 90 degrees, put little stickers over the columns of keys for your fifty favourite tv channels ...
A remote control that you'd never lose!
Wouldn't it be better if the media center itself were a plain, small and silent box (like the Apple TV) to which this neat keyboard could be connected wirelessly?
They already do one!
The Eee Box is a small, plain, (almost) silent PC with wifi that comes with a mounting bracket so you can bolt it to the back of your flat monitor or TV via the four VESA mount holes.
You get a totally irrecoverable drive, a warm feeling about the amount of aluminium you just recycled, and a couple of cool high-power magnets to play with as a reward.
And who doesn't like high-powered magnets? :)
Mayebe they could ask Alan Sugar to help fund development?
What Apple did right was recognising that if you want something to look cool, as if it's come out of a scifi movie, it's actually damned easy ... because everything in those movies has been designed by a product designer who's alive and working right now. Hollywood hires them. Other people are allowed to hire them too.
What Apple did right was to recognise that they could buy in creative design work for their casing designs, and get better results than by using their own in-house people. The usual problem with doing that is that it's expensive, and your own in-house design guys then get alienated and leave (or at least the good ones do), and you find yourself with nobody in-house to do the everyday "boring" design work, so you end up dependent on expensive external talent for everything.
In Apple's case, because they only have a very limited number of products at any one time, and they all tend to be high-profile and high-markup, this isn't such a problem.
Having said that, you then also need someone with a good eye to reject those "wacky" designs that an outside designer might suggest but which simply aren't a good idea. I thought that those early coloured iBook G3 designs which looked like a cross between a lady's handbag and a set prop from a Disney mermaid cartoon looked bloody awful. Those most definitely didn't look like something from Star Trek!
Look at the music market. Apple tried to corner the music production market by buying emagic and shutting down the Windows version. At the time they were panicking that people didn't reckon that the Mac platform was any more "pro" than the PC plaform, and they wanted to change that perception by spending money on video editing and audio production tools.
But how much money did they actually make by doing that? What're the sales and profits for "Logic" (to people who make music) compared to the sales and profits for the iPods and for iTunes (for people who only listen to music). It's not going to be comparable, is it?
As far as I'm concerned, the iPod isn't a "pro" piece of kit, because it doesn't have an audio recording input (unlike, say, some of the older iRiver MP3 players). That means that it's essentially a mass-market consumer product (unless your profession involves listening to music). They could have given it useful "pro" features, but decided that it wasn't worth it.
I'd have loved to have seen an "iPod Pro" with recording features, but Apple obviously couldn't be arsed to make one (or maybe decided that if people could easily re-record their own vinyl colelctions, they might not buy so many tracks off iTunes).
Instead of trying for years to be the first people to market with a stream of unsuccessful niche products, Apple hung back and waited, and let the other companies do all the market research.
Then, when it looked as if a really flashy product might finally be possible, Apple designed one, engineered and priced it on the assumption that it was going to be a big seller, marketed it to hell, and launched it in such a way that the public thought that touch-screen phones were somehow an Apple invention.
The confidence paid off, and people bought it. Funny thing was, as a top-level phone, it was a bit substandard, but it was gadget of the year anyway.
Similarly with the miniMac, small manufacturers had been building and selling similar products on a small scale for years. What Apple did was to wait until they figured that the market was there to turn a niche "boutique" product that most people had never seen into a white "Apple-styled" product that had the potential to go major league.
The problem with being genuinely innovative is that it might take a product or two to get things right, by which time you're saddled with expensive legacy products to support or abandon (eg Apple Newton). Apple realised that you don't have to be first to be successful, with a powerful enough brand, and confident marketing and, you can step in when you think the time is right, launch a media blitz and take a market over, provided that the competition is weakened and the public perception is low.
"... so at Apple, we thought, what's the next step? Where does data storage go from here? And our engineers told us: Atoms! We're going to build the data directly into the molecular structure!"
"And here's what they gave us."
(Holds up object. Crowd ooohs, awestruck.)
(A spotlight high behind Jobs shines on Job's upraised right hand, gleaming off the surface of what appears to be a shiny black disclike object, hypnotising the crowd.)
"As you can see, the new product has no straight lines, and no corners. And for data registration purposes, it has (Jobs suddenly tilts the object, back, allowing the spotlight to pick out a gleaming white spot at the disk's centre) ... a Hole!"
(crowd gasps)
"Notice how the Hole is at the EXACT centre of the disc. Not on the left. Not on the right. Our engineers told us that this placement was a critical feature for the playback process. So that's where we put it. Right in the middle."
(crowd cheers, until Jobs put up a hand signifying that he wants them to stop)
(hushed tones) "This is not just a nice looking object. This is a truly BEAUTIFUL object. You could hang this on your wall. Notice how the surface gleams. We could have made this out of cheap plastic ... but no. We decided to manufacture this out of the finest carbon-blacked Vinyl."
(crowd whoops)
"Now, wait until you see this brand-new user interface. We place the "disc" onto the "turntable", and the disc rotates AUTOMATICALLY. We place the arm anywhere on the disc. Anywhere at all!"
(music plays)
(Jobs lists the arm and puts it down somewhere else.)
(music plays)
(Jobs repeats, looking up at the audience and grinning each time)
"Now, isn't that just the Coolest thing you ever saw?"
(Audience applauds wildly)
"Now, how'll we be selling these. Well, we'll be packaging them in a special two-layer format that we call a "sleeve" ..."
Maybe a paperclip...
" Spider-Steve, Spider-Steve, Does ev'ry thing that a Spider-Steve does ..."
Mobility, security, wallet-scale portability, use on embedded equipment (hifis, picture frames, etc.), use on non-networked home PC's, PC OS backups (that need to be on a format that a PC can boot directly from), shock-resistance, and backups of data that you want kept mechanically separate from your usual backup scheme.
And for archiving medium-ish amounts of data, where you don't actually know which data formats are going to last the longest, it doesn't hurt to use multiple physical formats. If you can fit an extra backup of all your most important family photos onto a 16 gig card and keep it in your wallet, then why not?
What an excellent idea! :) Mod him up, somebody!
So the SD card is in a sealed dustproof enclosure, you can still read the SD label, and you can plug the whole thing into a USB port.
It costs one pound.
I ended up buying a batch of them, and a batch of cheap SD cards, and colour-coding the cards, and I use them for stuff where I want access to the latest versions of files on multiple computers, without necessarily wanting those files stored permanently on certain machines. I back them up, of course, but I find that "SD-in-USB" is a good mobile transfer medium for working files. I have one for computer graphics (where I might be updating source code and rendering on different machines), one for job info and cvs, one that I was using for coursework, one for sales data and marketing info, and so on.
Also, my Mum has one of those Kodak picture frames (which can take one SD card and one USB drive), so an SD card in a USB enclosure gives maximum flexibility. And she's now got one of those ASUS Eee machines, which also has an SD slot & USB. And I just got an Eee Box bolted to the back of my monitor for wordprocessing and browsing, and that has an SD slot, too.
At some point, I'll probably get a new hifi with SD slot(s) rather than an optical drive. All my CDs are on MP3 anyway, and some of the recent digital radios can record direct to SD. Some SD-equipped players seem to have filesystem limitations, but it wouldn't be too much of a hardship to have different categories of music on their own cards.
So yes, it is quite possible to end up with a lot of SD cards, even if you don't have a camera or mobile that takes them (I don't).
I'm not using these things because of a lack of other options ... I have a serious firewire-based multi-HD storage unit for backups and backups-of-backups ... but I like to keep it switched off whenever possible, to reduce mechanical wear and tear (and the risk of accidents). I also usually choose not to network my "fast" PC, because I like to keep it running a minimal set of drivers and disconnected from the internet. I've also ended up with three mobile 2.5" HD caddies, which are handy and portable ... but if anything, they hold too much data, and are too "delicate" to be treated casually. So for relatively small amounts of data, it's nice to have a format that's cheap and shockproof, runs on anything, and lets you take small datasets out and about without carrying a load of unnecessary info with you that amounts to a copy of your entire life history, and "sensitive" info.
I used to use the "normal" thumb drives for this, but it annoyed me that they were all different designs and shapes and colours, and had inconvenient capacities, and it was difficult to remember what was on what drive at any given time. So these little one-pound "see-through" SD USB enclosures have been great.
So you cut out the holes with a sharp craft knife or scalpel, then glue the sheet to some sort of sheet, backing board or plate. Whether you then glue a second sheet of clear flexible plastic on top with suitable slits on top, or have rigid sheets of acrylic front-and back, or some other variation, depends on how and where the storage system is going to be used. Some people might want A4 storage sheets that will match their existing A4 negative storage-sheet system and binders, others might want a smaller format (A5 or Filofax). The smaller sizes would be useful if you're taking sheets of SD cards out into the wild.
There are credit-card-sized SD card holders available commercially that are great for carrying cards in your pocket, but not so good for filing.
Dentists often have a conflict between charging whatever they like for doing work privately, or allowing their patients to go though the NHS and only getting the NHS flat fee for the same work. Unsurprisingly, many decide to go for the money, and stop taking NHS patients.
UK dental's a bit different to the rest of UK healthcare. Different system, contracts, etc.
I thought, aaaah, he's built a robust linux PC for his kid. But isn't insisting that his kiddy's first PC has a bang-up-to-date GCC compiler a little extreme?
Then I re-read it. Oops. Makes much more sense now. Not as cute, though.
So Microsoft's internal control systems are breaking down, its task groups aren't getting a clear "stay alive" signal, are getting confused over their purpose and are self-destructing, and when the divisions then have these massive problems, it's the equivalent of multiple organ failure?
"Hey man, Looks! I just scoped this rilly cray-zee mo-fo Zooney bug!"
"Rilly? Wo-fo?"
"It's like, mental, man! It's this itty bit of code, and all it does is - get this - every four years, it adds a day!"
"No way!"
"Waaaay, man! 2008? This code gives it 366 days!"
"Mennnn-tal. That's just sick programming, man!"
"Tell me 'bout."
"Hey, I seen this 'fore! it's a fing I seen vose old wrinkly programmer dudes do. Vey add a day every four years. I fink it's like, sabotage. It's like, ver code goes wrong in four years 'nless the Boss hires 'em back to put it right. It's job security for wrinklies."
"Whoa. Dat's so out of order, man? Dey can't cut it no more, so dey mess up da code, delib?"
"Yeah. Well, WE's the Kings now, and WE's doin' a software update, and WE''s gonna NIX this mofo. No wrinklies HERE, man. Doosh. I just DELETED its ass. Back to 365."
"High-five, man?"
"Five!"
Google "isostatic rebound"
Third Law of Science: If in doubt, poke it with a stick.
Have you never seen a disaster movie? ;)
If it happens, and we lose California, it's now Officially Your Fault.
Plan Z: Faced with a cataclysmic event that would threaten to wipe out civilisation, the Government nukes its own population centres.
If so, does XP support get nuked when Win7 appears?