Most SEO companies don't bother fighting for 'search engine optimization' or 'SEO' simply because it's a pointless effort. Why pour the resources into a battle that doesn't have much benefit. Most clients that need SEO help don't know enough to search for help on the subject anyway. And then 'SEO', along with things like 'sex', and 'nude', is probably one of the most sought after keywords to be ranked for. Unless you have a great deal of time or money to invest it's not practical to get a placement on these keywords and to keep it. The only affordable way is to use naughty techniques and good SEO companies avoid those methods.
All good websites need to use proper search engine optimization to let search engines and users find them. There are two types of SEO: those which are valid and important parts of site design and those which are tactics designed to trick search engines. I always help my clients with the first while reminding them that trying to trick the search engines is a good way to get themselves blacklisted.
A lot of websites don't even say what they do. How is a user expected to find your website if it doesn't say what it does? Clearly state the purpose of your website and the purpose of every page so that users and search engines will know what to expect. How many websites don't even have titles or have poor titles on most of the pages? A lot.
Websites tend to use images or Flash where text would serve them better. Stating what you do in an image or Flash does nothing to help search engines find you. Often these sites contain so many images and fancy animations that users have trouble navigating them. Websites should remember the golden rule of user-interface design: keep it simple stupid. Text should be text and not an image or Flash. If you must use an image or Flash then you should use the proper alt and title tags and you should repeat the same text as text in your page.
Many websites don't tell anybody they exist. They post something great but nobody ever finds it because they don't create incoming links for themselves. When you make a website, or a major new page to your website, then tell people about it. Tell people on archived mailing lists you use, list it with directories such as dmoz, etc. I personally encourage my clients to create community sites around their product and to sponsor paid-links (not ad banners) on informational websites related to their product.
Most of the steps involved are completely legitimate things you should be doing for your website anyway. The best way to rise to the top is to provide good content and to act like a website is expected to act.
A lot of howto websites have problems in SEO. They post useful information telling us how to do useful things but because they haven't considered their users actually finding their site they tend to be hard to find. That's why when you search for something you tend to find the first couple pages filled with unrelated spam and links to forums and mailing list articles. I had this problem myself for a long time. It's only been in the past year that I've began making an effort to get my howto's to rank well when people search for information on those topics.
Tricking search engines is negative SEO. It may work for a while but when the search engines catch on it can seriously hurt your placement. You shouldn't need to do these things either. Some things such as creating links to and from your website are perfectly valid but are often abused by people who have the misimpression that spamming out thousands of links is going to help them. For a while it might but usually not for very long.
Strategic partnerships with appropiate cross-linking is the way to go. Think of the way Slashdot links to Newsforge, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, etc and they link back. THAT is the right way to do it. It's also not a bad idea to create rss feeds of your website that others can include into their own websites. THAT's a good way to get a lot of links back to your site.
Hopefully as awareness grows more websites will be properly optimized. Doing so will certainly make life easier for users Googling for what they want to know.
You're right, I guess translations would possibly still be illegal. Unlike releasing fill copies of altered movies though I think it'd have a lot larger chance of either being given the green light from the original distributor or being ruled fair use by a court. Unlike a book, a translation of a movie still requires you to buy the movie to get the benefit of having the movie. I think that'd be a strong argument for the legal defense of translating.
I don't see how this would be a problem for distributors at all. The original distributor (copyright holder) gets the benefit of their product being able to reach a much wider audience at little or no additional cost. For re-distributors like ADV they get to make the product easier to buy (locally available and region-encoded to the customers region) without having to go through the expense of translating everything themselves.
Also true, to make a new soundtrack either the original copyright holder would have to willingly participate or the subbers would have to recreate the entire soundtrack. There are ways to subtract voices from the soundtrack though. These don't always work but soemtimes they do. In this case it'd be possible to just replace the voices.
Making a DVD player that could skip undesirable material or use alternate material wouldn't require any special device. Just rip it and reencode it in the desirable format and it should play on a regular dvd player like any movie that's been edited. As for software for making easy applying those changes I'd imagine it already exists but it'd not be to hard to talk an opensource programmer into developing.
Rights exist if you fight for them and win them. If you never fight for them then they won't exist because other people will expand their own rights until yours no longer exist. Sure you have legal ground to fight for the right to alter movies you've legally purchases. First, it could be considered fair use. Second, you can always take the case to congress. The DMCA and similar efforts have not yet removed our ability to change the law. What we need is financial backing so that we can get the attention of politicians and raise popular support for our cause.
In the end though I think the fansub community needs to join with the opensource community and others to work towards fully open content. We can develop the software. We can create new subtitles and sound tracks. Somebody out there must be able to write scripts, create story boards, draw, etc. Put it all together and we can produce our own content from scratch as a community project. We don't have to replace the anime and movie industries - we only have to be successful enough to give them a reason not to alienate their fan base. A peer is a much more reasonable person to barter with than someone that feels they have you over a barrel.
When I was a teenager (some time ago) this was one of my stupid ideas that friends and I would bounce around. Eventually we decided it was stupid because people could (and probably would) abuse it for advertising and spam. We decided it was a bad idea - evidently the government didn't have that kind of insight.
C'mon! People don't want their sky filled with adverts. How long until we see skys filled with ads for porn and viagra? I like naked women as much as anyone but I don't want to see the entire sky filled with naked breasts.
Nothing wrong with that at all. I wish they'd create more subtitles, in every language, for movies and maybe even their own alternative soundtracks.
What I can't figure out is why they'd bother encoding the whole show and distributing it. Why not let the viewer buy the regular untranslated DVD and just download the alternative subtitles or soundtracks they want and let the player synchronize everything. It's not that hard.
I don't see how THAT could be considered illegal. And then people could remix the movie and burn it back to DVD for their own use.
I know a lot of people that'd be interested in alternative soundtracks of some movies just to remove the foul language and things like that. It's not hard to create a control file that tells the movie to blip out words or even skip frames (that might have nudity or whatever) and I could see some major support behind a group that did those kind of fan editing. Get a big pro-family organization to fund the legal battle to protect these rights.
The PT seems to have more back seat space. That settles it for me. It's impossible to 'park' here in Las Vegas. Everywhere you go they have security guards in the empty parking lots making sure nobody misbehaves. A large backseat with dark windows could help.
Re:Which computer are you talking about?
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Mac mini to PC Hack
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Oh! In that case I appoligize on that point. I thought before I'd read it had one but then this confussed me. So a few extra brownie points for the Mac Mini!
I don't quite buy the performance argument though. It does appear that the Mac Mini does fairly well against other Macs but you can buy a pretty nice PC for $500 (again if you don't want anything near as small). I expect that at some things the Mac Mini might outpace these PCs but that the speed comparison wouldn't be definitive. It's always seemed to me that the Mac was good at certain tasks, especially media related, but that it wasn't always equally fast at everything it did. This has seemed to be an issue from the earliest Macs up into the current time but we'll see.. maybe it won't be trye for the Mac Mini.
Again, I'm personally going to try one and might buy one but I'm not sure how big a market it'll have. The fact that it will come with a DVD drive though does convince me somewhat that it has a chance.
For me speed or a DVD drive wouldn't matter. I just need a new Mac to try out software I write on. I'd like to make sure everything I write would work on MacOS as well as on Windows and Linux.;) So I might buy one.
I didn't say that I didn't like it. I'm just not your typical consumer. I'm the type of person who would use a 24 hour computer store to go buy CPUs at 3am. Most of my friends are at least partly as geeky as I am. I can see most of us buying a Mac Mini.
That doesn't make up a large market though. The computer-stupid people who are my clients, and who make up the majority of the market, I can't see buying a Mac Mini though. The Mac Mini seems like a machine who's market will be a fringe of the existing Mac market which is itself fringe. It might get a few new buyers from the geeks and Mac-wannabes but probably that isn't a huge number of people.
For example, the iPod is a product that has wide mass appeal. Almost everyone listens to music and understands the concept of a portable music device. The iPod is the Porsche of portable audio devices. Do you really see anywhere near as large a market for the Mac Mini?
Dare I ask. If this thing sells for $500 then what is your discount price? Tell me it's $200 and half of Slashdot might be asking you to order them one too.;)
Re:Car analogies rarely work, however...
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Mac mini to PC Hack
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I've never especially had the feel that Apple was an innovator. They, like Microsoft, follow behind the bleeding edge and repackage and sell the slightly 'done' technology. The big difference is that Apple sees technology as a medium for expressing beauty whereas Microsoft sees technology as a medium for making bucks.
Likewise SFF computers have existed for a long time and some are even smaller than the Mac Mini. The SFF market would have gone where the Mac Mini is leading even if the Mac Mini hadn't came to market. So other companies aren't just copying the Apple product. They're copying the same products Apple is copying. Only Apple does such a good job that other companies have to compete with them so they have to borrow some of the features and style that Apple has. So, (whew!) yes, companies are copying Apple but Apple is not leading the pack either. Apple doesn't invent the product, Apple is redefining the product wherever it goes.
I'm sure the Mac Mini will sell. To those you listed as well as others. I just don't see it having a sizable target market. Which makes me wonder why they bothered. I think they have something more up their sleeve and THAT is what I'm really interested in.
Maybe Pippin never made it into a product line but that doesn't mean the ideas behind it were forgotten. Apple could reinvent the console now and I think the market is ripe for it. They could seriously challenge the XBox with a Net-aware set-top Mac that was iPod friendly. I'm still thinking they might use the Cell CPU like the Playstation 3 (possibly even being PS3 compatible) and that they could make a good deal by getting Nintendo to release it's trademark games for their platform. Apple has enough style to breakthrough into non-gamer markets. Sony would benefit from licensing technology and strengthening the support of the PS3 (why sell a loss-leader like a PS3 when you can license PS3 Inside to others). Nintendo would benefit from not being squished out of the market by Sony and Microsoft. A console that came with iTunes and that would run the huge library of game titles Sony and Nintendo could bring to offer.. it could crush the XBox.
Re:Who? Just about anyone wanting a new computer
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Without a built-in CD/DVD drive? As underpowered as it is? I just can't see that as a mainstream desktop computer.
For the geeks who want one in the entertainment center I can see it and even for geeks who just want a Mac to experiment with I can see it. I just don't see Ma & Pa America buying it.
To Ma & Pa America, $500 is a sizable investment. They're not going to spend that much on a computer without some assurance that it'll do everything they need and I don't see how Apple can sell the Mac Mini as the do-it-all throw-in-the-kitchen-sink cheapy computer that Dell sells. I think Apple could produce such a computer, and hope they do, but I don't think the Mac Mini is it.
That's cool. I never knew that. Did he have any hand in the new Bugs? I am actually quite impressed with the new Bugs. I'm tall (6'6) so finding a car with enough space that isn't a SUV is rather difficult. I took a Bug for a test drive and was rather impressed. I'd consider buying one if I was in the market. Luckily being as tall as I am I can drive a 'chick car' without people making to many comments.;)
The PT Cruiser is pretty cool too. It also has something of it's own look and is pretty spacey inside. I'd be more likely to buy it I think just because it does seem a little more macho. It'd depend on which one got the better gas milage probably though.
Mac OS is BSD with a fancy GUI on it. It's not vastly better designed than it's free cousins because it is virtually the same thing in most aspects. It may be more aesthetically pleasing, to some people, but that really varies from person to person. I've used Macs, Windows, Linux, and a bunch of other OSs for years and I've yet to see much in the way of good UI design out of any of them, Windows is just suck ass, Linux (KDE & GNome) has the illness of trying to copy the Windows and Mac OS UIs, and Mac OS likes to make things easier by hiding what's going on and covering it all with rose colored glasses (you'd think we were toddlers and it was our mother). So anyway.. Mac OS is good but it's not THAT good.
If you're wanting to put a brick through a computer screen it probably means you're tech support and are trying to help a user with their Windows box as they try to figure out why they get infected by a virus everytime they look at kinky-teenage-asian-chicks-with-mutant-barnyard-an imals-from-star-trek.com.;)
Sounds like a good plan for you but do you think that is really Apple's target audience? It's just a Mac for those emergency points when your 'real Mac' is in the shop? Macs are pretty reliable so that'd seem a small market segment.:)
They made this thing so either they have a target audience in mind or they are using it to test out a small form factor concept for something else they have in mind.
The mention the other day that Apple might do something with the new Cell processors that'll be in the PlayStation 3 gives me ideas. According to that article the Cell processor is part of the POWER family and will be available to Apple and other companies and they'll be much more powerful than anything currently on the market while staying at a low price point. If Apple could fit that into a Mac Mini form factor THEN they'd have something....Just some random thoughts on where Apple could be going with this concept.
The Mac Mini does not seem like a powerful machine. It is quite good for the form factor but compared to a comparable PC of similar price, of any size, it doesn't seem that great. I can't really see a very large market segment of Mac-wannabe users deciding to switch to such a system. Either they really want to go Mac and they'll shell out for the really cool systems or they'll go cheap/geek and go Linux on normal PC hardware or they'll wuss out and just stick to Windows on fairly cheap hardware.
Some people will try the cheap Mac but I don't really believe there will be a sizable market there unless the cheap Mac is comparable in power to a similar priced PC. Even if you take into account that MacOS makes more effecient use of resources than Windows on comparable hardware it's still pretty wimpy specs for a desktop machine. It doesn't appear to really be targeted at that market.
Macs always seemed more like VW Bugs than Porsches to me. Granted that the new Bugs are nice, as are Macs, but they're no Porsches. I think the computer world is still waiting for a contender that would be comparable with a Porsche.
The Mac Mini is kind of cool but it's still not that impressive. It's just another small form factor computer. I'd be surprised if we don't see a PC variant with better specs within a few months. The nano-itx form factor is supposed to be even smaller than the Mac Mini and if the mini-itx form factor is any guide then there will be lots of crazy companies trying to dump more power into the little amount of space available. As long as you use an external power supply, a laptop hdd, and no cd/dvd then fitting into this amount of space is no big deal. I'd one up the Mac Mini and leave out a hdd altogether and use a CompactFlash drive which is obviously a lot smaller as well as being more reliable. Perfect for a set top box or something like that.
One thing about the SFF community is that they're not that interested in the computing horsepower available so much as being small, reliable, cheap, low poer/heat, and being something of a fixed standard. SFF is great for hacking out interesting new products. Unless Apple is going to sell the Mac Mini motherboard without the extras (casing, hdd, etc)it's really not going to be that convient to build into other products.
Other than the SFF community who are they targeting? Are most Mac/PC users going to give up significant amounts of horsepower to save a couple inches of space? If they are then will they be willing to trade a little more horsepower in order to get the even smaller nano-itx systems?
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
The only idea I have is that they are going to try to produce their own set top box or game console but then I have to wonder why they're selling this as a stand-alone product. Apple could be an interesting player in the set top box and console market. They probably couldn't compete in the number of titles available or raw power but by intergrating such a unit with their iPod/iTunes franchise they could have a winner. A deal with Nintendo could be beneficial to both parties if they wanted to try that. Otherwise I fear the PlayStation 3 and XBox 2 will kill Nintendo as a console producing compay and that Apple would have little hope of competing with them.
I'm still more interested in human bodies with animal brains. How much better could life get than to have a pet that looks like a human but still is as loving as your cat or dog? Who needs a girlfriend?!;)
C'mon you know you want one! A sexy redhead girl that wants to sit on your lap and rub against you and who loves to lick. Why horny geek boy doesn't want that?
It'd be good for them to. You could take your pet to dinner. How often has your cat or dog been left at home while you went and had steak? Finally they could join in!
Hybrids should be legal both for research and for actual production. They'd be a boone to humanity. Humans could self-evolve by adding animal traits we haven't yet been gifted with by evolution. Animals could be more useful to us and their lifes could be improved. Finally the answer of "Are we alone in the Universe?" could be answered - by creating new intelligent species to join us.
Why not create hybrids? There is no reason a hybrid's life would be short and painful other than because small minded people feel threatened and would want to destroy them. As long as we protect hybrids from such abuse there is no reason they shouldn't exist. If anything research is where we should take the most care. We need to remember that these are living creatures, possibly human, and deserve our respect and care.
Evolution is part of nature and species have always helped create and destroy other species. This is nothing new. This is just the first time those new species could be created to precise specifications by a different species.
I do think there will be a radical change in how we treat both human and animal rights as hybrids become more mainstream. Overall I think animal rights will improve and the definition of human will expand. This should be good for everyone involved.
Coding isn't a linear thing. Sometimes it takes a lot longer to do one part than to do all the rest put together. Sometimes real life just comes up and you have to take a week off to do something else. Sometimes clients get so uptight with wanting to know every little thing that is going on that you spend more time answering email than coding. Also remember that unless you're paying your contractor fulltime that they may have other projects they're working on at the same time so yours may get pushed to the back burner for a few days. Try backing off a little and see if it helps. Nagging and threats should be left until you're pretty much sure the contractor has decided not to complete the job. Usually if they start the project they intend to finish it especially if they can't collect the total of the money until they've finished. Just don't pay more than half in advance.
Which part of OpenOffice is XUL not rich enough for? It works for all the UI elements of Firefox, Thunderbird, Classic Mozilla Suite, and several other apps. Web page content can be positioned very precisely and supports fully animated content, alpha transparency, etc. I'm sure improvements could be made but I don't see any reason it couldn't handle the job.
Other cross-platform toolkits are not as flexible as XUL. You can't use use CSS and Javascript to easily tweak Qt, Wx, etc apps. I personally like Wx a lot but I don't think OpenOffice, Firefox, etc would be better than XUL.
Porting to XUL would be profitable since future toolkit work could be shared between multiple projects. As opposed to using Aqua, etc which is basicly a wasted effort of a port. I thought OpenOffice should have worked with the Mozilla project on a common toolkit from the beginning but I guess they didn't see the benefits.
It still takes a layout engine to do something for the toolkit/platform. It's all one ball of wax. Regardless, my point is that OpenOffice should be ported to that toolkit/platform/engine/thingamabob.
Uhh Firefox, Thunderbird, etc is written using that engine. It isn't just an HTML engine. It's a general UI API that portable apps can be written in using common tools like HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, etc. Why not port OpenOffice to that platform.
They'd do good to do a port to the gecko engine used by Firefox and other Mozilla apps. That way the two projects could share resources for making the apps friendly for a wide-selection of platforms.
yawn - except the hot girls
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Some are pretty suck ass but that isn't uncommon. I live in Vegas so I get to lots of these shows. CES is bigger than most but it isn't especially anything special.
I for one was pretty bored. There was really nothing new at the show. No exciting new technology. This year seems to be rehashes of existing technology in various cute packages.
Take time to get your picture taken with all the cute girls working at various exhibits. That's about the only thing worth doing at this years CES. I especially liked a few of the hotties posing in the auto section and the alien girls at the Sapphire Tech exhibit. If you get pictures why not post the links here? I'll try to do likewise.
Slashdot Mirror
Most SEO companies don't bother fighting for 'search engine optimization' or 'SEO' simply because it's a pointless effort. Why pour the resources into a battle that doesn't have much benefit. Most clients that need SEO help don't know enough to search for help on the subject anyway. And then 'SEO', along with things like 'sex', and 'nude', is probably one of the most sought after keywords to be ranked for. Unless you have a great deal of time or money to invest it's not practical to get a placement on these keywords and to keep it. The only affordable way is to use naughty techniques and good SEO companies avoid those methods.
All good websites need to use proper search engine optimization to let search engines and users find them. There are two types of SEO: those which are valid and important parts of site design and those which are tactics designed to trick search engines. I always help my clients with the first while reminding them that trying to trick the search engines is a good way to get themselves blacklisted.
A lot of websites don't even say what they do. How is a user expected to find your website if it doesn't say what it does? Clearly state the purpose of your website and the purpose of every page so that users and search engines will know what to expect. How many websites don't even have titles or have poor titles on most of the pages? A lot.
Websites tend to use images or Flash where text would serve them better. Stating what you do in an image or Flash does nothing to help search engines find you. Often these sites contain so many images and fancy animations that users have trouble navigating them. Websites should remember the golden rule of user-interface design: keep it simple stupid. Text should be text and not an image or Flash. If you must use an image or Flash then you should use the proper alt and title tags and you should repeat the same text as text in your page.
Many websites don't tell anybody they exist. They post something great but nobody ever finds it because they don't create incoming links for themselves. When you make a website, or a major new page to your website, then tell people about it. Tell people on archived mailing lists you use, list it with directories such as dmoz, etc. I personally encourage my clients to create community sites around their product and to sponsor paid-links (not ad banners) on informational websites related to their product.
Most of the steps involved are completely legitimate things you should be doing for your website anyway. The best way to rise to the top is to provide good content and to act like a website is expected to act.
A lot of howto websites have problems in SEO. They post useful information telling us how to do useful things but because they haven't considered their users actually finding their site they tend to be hard to find. That's why when you search for something you tend to find the first couple pages filled with unrelated spam and links to forums and mailing list articles. I had this problem myself for a long time. It's only been in the past year that I've began making an effort to get my howto's to rank well when people search for information on those topics.
Tricking search engines is negative SEO. It may work for a while but when the search engines catch on it can seriously hurt your placement. You shouldn't need to do these things either. Some things such as creating links to and from your website are perfectly valid but are often abused by people who have the misimpression that spamming out thousands of links is going to help them. For a while it might but usually not for very long.
Strategic partnerships with appropiate cross-linking is the way to go. Think of the way Slashdot links to Newsforge, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, etc and they link back. THAT is the right way to do it. It's also not a bad idea to create rss feeds of your website that others can include into their own websites. THAT's a good way to get a lot of links back to your site.
Hopefully as awareness grows more websites will be properly optimized. Doing so will certainly make life easier for users Googling for what they want to know.
You're right, I guess translations would possibly still be illegal. Unlike releasing fill copies of altered movies though I think it'd have a lot larger chance of either being given the green light from the original distributor or being ruled fair use by a court. Unlike a book, a translation of a movie still requires you to buy the movie to get the benefit of having the movie. I think that'd be a strong argument for the legal defense of translating.
I don't see how this would be a problem for distributors at all. The original distributor (copyright holder) gets the benefit of their product being able to reach a much wider audience at little or no additional cost. For re-distributors like ADV they get to make the product easier to buy (locally available and region-encoded to the customers region) without having to go through the expense of translating everything themselves.
Also true, to make a new soundtrack either the original copyright holder would have to willingly participate or the subbers would have to recreate the entire soundtrack. There are ways to subtract voices from the soundtrack though. These don't always work but soemtimes they do. In this case it'd be possible to just replace the voices.
Making a DVD player that could skip undesirable material or use alternate material wouldn't require any special device. Just rip it and reencode it in the desirable format and it should play on a regular dvd player like any movie that's been edited. As for software for making easy applying those changes I'd imagine it already exists but it'd not be to hard to talk an opensource programmer into developing.
Rights exist if you fight for them and win them. If you never fight for them then they won't exist because other people will expand their own rights until yours no longer exist. Sure you have legal ground to fight for the right to alter movies you've legally purchases. First, it could be considered fair use. Second, you can always take the case to congress. The DMCA and similar efforts have not yet removed our ability to change the law. What we need is financial backing so that we can get the attention of politicians and raise popular support for our cause.
In the end though I think the fansub community needs to join with the opensource community and others to work towards fully open content. We can develop the software. We can create new subtitles and sound tracks. Somebody out there must be able to write scripts, create story boards, draw, etc. Put it all together and we can produce our own content from scratch as a community project. We don't have to replace the anime and movie industries - we only have to be successful enough to give them a reason not to alienate their fan base. A peer is a much more reasonable person to barter with than someone that feels they have you over a barrel.
When I was a teenager (some time ago) this was one of my stupid ideas that friends and I would bounce around. Eventually we decided it was stupid because people could (and probably would) abuse it for advertising and spam. We decided it was a bad idea - evidently the government didn't have that kind of insight.
C'mon! People don't want their sky filled with adverts. How long until we see skys filled with ads for porn and viagra? I like naked women as much as anyone but I don't want to see the entire sky filled with naked breasts.
Nothing wrong with that at all. I wish they'd create more subtitles, in every language, for movies and maybe even their own alternative soundtracks.
What I can't figure out is why they'd bother encoding the whole show and distributing it. Why not let the viewer buy the regular untranslated DVD and just download the alternative subtitles or soundtracks they want and let the player synchronize everything. It's not that hard.
I don't see how THAT could be considered illegal. And then people could remix the movie and burn it back to DVD for their own use.
I know a lot of people that'd be interested in alternative soundtracks of some movies just to remove the foul language and things like that. It's not hard to create a control file that tells the movie to blip out words or even skip frames (that might have nudity or whatever) and I could see some major support behind a group that did those kind of fan editing. Get a big pro-family organization to fund the legal battle to protect these rights.
The PT seems to have more back seat space. That settles it for me. It's impossible to 'park' here in Las Vegas. Everywhere you go they have security guards in the empty parking lots making sure nobody misbehaves. A large backseat with dark windows could help.
Oh! In that case I appoligize on that point. I thought before I'd read it had one but then this confussed me. So a few extra brownie points for the Mac Mini!
;) So I might buy one.
I don't quite buy the performance argument though. It does appear that the Mac Mini does fairly well against other Macs but you can buy a pretty nice PC for $500 (again if you don't want anything near as small). I expect that at some things the Mac Mini might outpace these PCs but that the speed comparison wouldn't be definitive. It's always seemed to me that the Mac was good at certain tasks, especially media related, but that it wasn't always equally fast at everything it did. This has seemed to be an issue from the earliest Macs up into the current time but we'll see.. maybe it won't be trye for the Mac Mini.
Again, I'm personally going to try one and might buy one but I'm not sure how big a market it'll have. The fact that it will come with a DVD drive though does convince me somewhat that it has a chance.
For me speed or a DVD drive wouldn't matter. I just need a new Mac to try out software I write on. I'd like to make sure everything I write would work on MacOS as well as on Windows and Linux.
I didn't say that I didn't like it. I'm just not your typical consumer. I'm the type of person who would use a 24 hour computer store to go buy CPUs at 3am. Most of my friends are at least partly as geeky as I am. I can see most of us buying a Mac Mini.
That doesn't make up a large market though. The computer-stupid people who are my clients, and who make up the majority of the market, I can't see buying a Mac Mini though. The Mac Mini seems like a machine who's market will be a fringe of the existing Mac market which is itself fringe. It might get a few new buyers from the geeks and Mac-wannabes but probably that isn't a huge number of people.
For example, the iPod is a product that has wide mass appeal. Almost everyone listens to music and understands the concept of a portable music device. The iPod is the Porsche of portable audio devices. Do you really see anywhere near as large a market for the Mac Mini?
Dare I ask. If this thing sells for $500 then what is your discount price? Tell me it's $200 and half of Slashdot might be asking you to order them one too. ;)
I've never especially had the feel that Apple was an innovator. They, like Microsoft, follow behind the bleeding edge and repackage and sell the slightly 'done' technology. The big difference is that Apple sees technology as a medium for expressing beauty whereas Microsoft sees technology as a medium for making bucks.
Likewise SFF computers have existed for a long time and some are even smaller than the Mac Mini. The SFF market would have gone where the Mac Mini is leading even if the Mac Mini hadn't came to market. So other companies aren't just copying the Apple product. They're copying the same products Apple is copying. Only Apple does such a good job that other companies have to compete with them so they have to borrow some of the features and style that Apple has. So, (whew!) yes, companies are copying Apple but Apple is not leading the pack either. Apple doesn't invent the product, Apple is redefining the product wherever it goes.
I'm sure the Mac Mini will sell. To those you listed as well as others. I just don't see it having a sizable target market. Which makes me wonder why they bothered. I think they have something more up their sleeve and THAT is what I'm really interested in.
Maybe Pippin never made it into a product line but that doesn't mean the ideas behind it were forgotten. Apple could reinvent the console now and I think the market is ripe for it. They could seriously challenge the XBox with a Net-aware set-top Mac that was iPod friendly. I'm still thinking they might use the Cell CPU like the Playstation 3 (possibly even being PS3 compatible) and that they could make a good deal by getting Nintendo to release it's trademark games for their platform. Apple has enough style to breakthrough into non-gamer markets. Sony would benefit from licensing technology and strengthening the support of the PS3 (why sell a loss-leader like a PS3 when you can license PS3 Inside to others). Nintendo would benefit from not being squished out of the market by Sony and Microsoft. A console that came with iTunes and that would run the huge library of game titles Sony and Nintendo could bring to offer.. it could crush the XBox.
Without a built-in CD/DVD drive? As underpowered as it is? I just can't see that as a mainstream desktop computer.
For the geeks who want one in the entertainment center I can see it and even for geeks who just want a Mac to experiment with I can see it. I just don't see Ma & Pa America buying it.
To Ma & Pa America, $500 is a sizable investment. They're not going to spend that much on a computer without some assurance that it'll do everything they need and I don't see how Apple can sell the Mac Mini as the do-it-all throw-in-the-kitchen-sink cheapy computer that Dell sells. I think Apple could produce such a computer, and hope they do, but I don't think the Mac Mini is it.
That's cool. I never knew that. Did he have any hand in the new Bugs? I am actually quite impressed with the new Bugs. I'm tall (6'6) so finding a car with enough space that isn't a SUV is rather difficult. I took a Bug for a test drive and was rather impressed. I'd consider buying one if I was in the market. Luckily being as tall as I am I can drive a 'chick car' without people making to many comments. ;)
The PT Cruiser is pretty cool too. It also has something of it's own look and is pretty spacey inside. I'd be more likely to buy it I think just because it does seem a little more macho. It'd depend on which one got the better gas milage probably though.
Mac OS is BSD with a fancy GUI on it. It's not vastly better designed than it's free cousins because it is virtually the same thing in most aspects. It may be more aesthetically pleasing, to some people, but that really varies from person to person. I've used Macs, Windows, Linux, and a bunch of other OSs for years and I've yet to see much in the way of good UI design out of any of them, Windows is just suck ass, Linux (KDE & GNome) has the illness of trying to copy the Windows and Mac OS UIs, and Mac OS likes to make things easier by hiding what's going on and covering it all with rose colored glasses (you'd think we were toddlers and it was our mother). So anyway.. Mac OS is good but it's not THAT good.
n imals-from-star-trek.com. ;)
If you're wanting to put a brick through a computer screen it probably means you're tech support and are trying to help a user with their Windows box as they try to figure out why they get infected by a virus everytime they look at kinky-teenage-asian-chicks-with-mutant-barnyard-a
Sounds like a good plan for you but do you think that is really Apple's target audience? It's just a Mac for those emergency points when your 'real Mac' is in the shop? Macs are pretty reliable so that'd seem a small market segment. :)
...Just some random thoughts on where Apple could be going with this concept.
They made this thing so either they have a target audience in mind or they are using it to test out a small form factor concept for something else they have in mind.
The mention the other day that Apple might do something with the new Cell processors that'll be in the PlayStation 3 gives me ideas. According to that article the Cell processor is part of the POWER family and will be available to Apple and other companies and they'll be much more powerful than anything currently on the market while staying at a low price point. If Apple could fit that into a Mac Mini form factor THEN they'd have something.
The Mac Mini does not seem like a powerful machine. It is quite good for the form factor but compared to a comparable PC of similar price, of any size, it doesn't seem that great. I can't really see a very large market segment of Mac-wannabe users deciding to switch to such a system. Either they really want to go Mac and they'll shell out for the really cool systems or they'll go cheap/geek and go Linux on normal PC hardware or they'll wuss out and just stick to Windows on fairly cheap hardware.
Some people will try the cheap Mac but I don't really believe there will be a sizable market there unless the cheap Mac is comparable in power to a similar priced PC. Even if you take into account that MacOS makes more effecient use of resources than Windows on comparable hardware it's still pretty wimpy specs for a desktop machine. It doesn't appear to really be targeted at that market.
Macs always seemed more like VW Bugs than Porsches to me. Granted that the new Bugs are nice, as are Macs, but they're no Porsches. I think the computer world is still waiting for a contender that would be comparable with a Porsche.
The Mac Mini is kind of cool but it's still not that impressive. It's just another small form factor computer. I'd be surprised if we don't see a PC variant with better specs within a few months. The nano-itx form factor is supposed to be even smaller than the Mac Mini and if the mini-itx form factor is any guide then there will be lots of crazy companies trying to dump more power into the little amount of space available. As long as you use an external power supply, a laptop hdd, and no cd/dvd then fitting into this amount of space is no big deal. I'd one up the Mac Mini and leave out a hdd altogether and use a CompactFlash drive which is obviously a lot smaller as well as being more reliable. Perfect for a set top box or something like that.
One thing about the SFF community is that they're not that interested in the computing horsepower available so much as being small, reliable, cheap, low poer/heat, and being something of a fixed standard. SFF is great for hacking out interesting new products. Unless Apple is going to sell the Mac Mini motherboard without the extras (casing, hdd, etc)it's really not going to be that convient to build into other products.
Other than the SFF community who are they targeting? Are most Mac/PC users going to give up significant amounts of horsepower to save a couple inches of space? If they are then will they be willing to trade a little more horsepower in order to get the even smaller nano-itx systems?
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
The only idea I have is that they are going to try to produce their own set top box or game console but then I have to wonder why they're selling this as a stand-alone product. Apple could be an interesting player in the set top box and console market. They probably couldn't compete in the number of titles available or raw power but by intergrating such a unit with their iPod/iTunes franchise they could have a winner. A deal with Nintendo could be beneficial to both parties if they wanted to try that. Otherwise I fear the PlayStation 3 and XBox 2 will kill Nintendo as a console producing compay and that Apple would have little hope of competing with them.
I'm still more interested in human bodies with animal brains. How much better could life get than to have a pet that looks like a human but still is as loving as your cat or dog? Who needs a girlfriend?! ;)
C'mon you know you want one! A sexy redhead girl that wants to sit on your lap and rub against you and who loves to lick. Why horny geek boy doesn't want that?
It'd be good for them to. You could take your pet to dinner. How often has your cat or dog been left at home while you went and had steak? Finally they could join in!
Hybrids should be legal both for research and for actual production. They'd be a boone to humanity. Humans could self-evolve by adding animal traits we haven't yet been gifted with by evolution. Animals could be more useful to us and their lifes could be improved. Finally the answer of "Are we alone in the Universe?" could be answered - by creating new intelligent species to join us.
Why not create hybrids? There is no reason a hybrid's life would be short and painful other than because small minded people feel threatened and would want to destroy them. As long as we protect hybrids from such abuse there is no reason they shouldn't exist. If anything research is where we should take the most care. We need to remember that these are living creatures, possibly human, and deserve our respect and care.
Evolution is part of nature and species have always helped create and destroy other species. This is nothing new. This is just the first time those new species could be created to precise specifications by a different species.
I do think there will be a radical change in how we treat both human and animal rights as hybrids become more mainstream. Overall I think animal rights will improve and the definition of human will expand. This should be good for everyone involved.
I just wanted to say that the way your xphox page looks is really cool. Did you use a special program to generate that?
Coding isn't a linear thing. Sometimes it takes a lot longer to do one part than to do all the rest put together. Sometimes real life just comes up and you have to take a week off to do something else. Sometimes clients get so uptight with wanting to know every little thing that is going on that you spend more time answering email than coding. Also remember that unless you're paying your contractor fulltime that they may have other projects they're working on at the same time so yours may get pushed to the back burner for a few days. Try backing off a little and see if it helps. Nagging and threats should be left until you're pretty much sure the contractor has decided not to complete the job. Usually if they start the project they intend to finish it especially if they can't collect the total of the money until they've finished. Just don't pay more than half in advance.
Which part of OpenOffice is XUL not rich enough for? It works for all the UI elements of Firefox, Thunderbird, Classic Mozilla Suite, and several other apps. Web page content can be positioned very precisely and supports fully animated content, alpha transparency, etc. I'm sure improvements could be made but I don't see any reason it couldn't handle the job.
Other cross-platform toolkits are not as flexible as XUL. You can't use use CSS and Javascript to easily tweak Qt, Wx, etc apps. I personally like Wx a lot but I don't think OpenOffice, Firefox, etc would be better than XUL.
Porting to XUL would be profitable since future toolkit work could be shared between multiple projects. As opposed to using Aqua, etc which is basicly a wasted effort of a port. I thought OpenOffice should have worked with the Mozilla project on a common toolkit from the beginning but I guess they didn't see the benefits.
It still takes a layout engine to do something for the toolkit/platform. It's all one ball of wax. Regardless, my point is that OpenOffice should be ported to that toolkit/platform/engine/thingamabob.
Uhh Firefox, Thunderbird, etc is written using that engine. It isn't just an HTML engine. It's a general UI API that portable apps can be written in using common tools like HTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, etc. Why not port OpenOffice to that platform.
They'd do good to do a port to the gecko engine used by Firefox and other Mozilla apps. That way the two projects could share resources for making the apps friendly for a wide-selection of platforms.
Some are pretty suck ass but that isn't uncommon. I live in Vegas so I get to lots of these shows. CES is bigger than most but it isn't especially anything special.
I for one was pretty bored. There was really nothing new at the show. No exciting new technology. This year seems to be rehashes of existing technology in various cute packages.
Take time to get your picture taken with all the cute girls working at various exhibits. That's about the only thing worth doing at this years CES. I especially liked a few of the hotties posing in the auto section and the alien girls at the Sapphire Tech exhibit. If you get pictures why not post the links here? I'll try to do likewise.