But the question left unasked as been, "Does 3G really improve the user experience dramatically?" Most pundits would reply...
Well, given that the author seems to have little or no experience with day to day 3G use I'd say this might be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Yes, wireless is as much about latency as it is bandwidth. Broadband wireless latency is not as good as it should be.
Here are some general real world metrics for 3G: latency ~ 300ms Download: 800 - 900 Kb/s Upload: 200 - 400 Kb/s data transfer from 100 - 200 KB/s
Typcial advertised connect speed: 3.6 Mbps
Given these stats the following tasks are highly useable: Web, IM, Streaming music or video, Skype Video, check e-mail, download larger files quickly.
EDGE allows for a reasonable user experience for e-mail and IM but that is about it. File transfer speeds are abysmal and downloading web sites is also pretty poor. It seems most sites have decided that it's OK to have a 300k home page. Streaming music is far from reliable and video is out of the question (although you tube has been able to decimate their clips enough for iPhone use).
His point about phones not being equipped to handle the additional data and subsequenct processing is well made. This is probably true for the vast majority of phones. In the context of the iPhone however, I think there are major benefits to having 3G. Further, defending Apple's decision is probably not the right way to go on this. The iPhone is the only phone on the market truly capable of exploiting a 3G connection - but lesser phones such as the nokia mentioned provide a faster connection. In addition, that poorly performing nokia phone will do just fine as a mobile broadband bridge.
The bottom line is that especially for laptop users, and a lesser extent phone users, 3G is a huge step up. It's as fast as a shared public wi-fi connection, and easier to access. The major difference is that an access point is not needed. 3G is a very liberating experience lol
The Mac is no longer a proprietary platform and it is certainly not a cell phone. In fact, other OS's run on Apple hardware. However if you want Apple hardware you still have to pay for the OS. I think there would be a serious issue if the roles were reveresed.
"Either you are full of crap or you've had a great deal of user errors."
Well at this point I can't even use iTunes as it does not install on Vista 64 ^ ^ As for ram, I'm not really full of crap as you have had a similar experience.
Basically the issue with GB of files was with iTunes was not cleaning up older copies of its files on redirected user folders on XP.
"Holy Super Atomic Hyperbole Batman! A 10% difference in price is a "rip off"?"
It's not actually a "rip off". My point seemed to have gotten lost in overly strong wording. It is basically this: Apple has of late had a few partners defecting over pricing issues. Apple would have us believe it is becuase they do not want to price out @ 99 cents. I guess I would assume that the new price is higher. One partner left and went to amazon. What we find however, is that the music is cheaper and unencumbered. Unencumbered music costs a premium on iTunes so it tells me that not all of Apples intentions are consumer favorable. In a competitive market Apple should be the first retailer able to pass on a cost savings to the consumer. Walmart anyone?
I'm not willing to put this one on Sony and BMG because as the retailer of music it is Apple's duty to compete on price. Walmart as the largest retailer uses their market dominance to squeeze suppliers. Apple is not doing the same apparently. Sure this may be a blip on the radar but I don't think it is. Ultimately this is going to get them into trouble. Selling vastly superior hardware is one thing and charging a premium and selling "commodity" items is not something that Apple has a great deal of experience with as a business.
Am I the only one that doesn't want other, unknown pc's on my network?
I mean, one of the nice aspects of having NAT and a "firewall" is additional security on your network. Now we are expected to let strangers with god knows what on their PC's connect to our networks and poke at our "special" ports.
I for one don't share my special ports with just anyone.
Of course for the really paranoid you can put a nat between your wifi router and the rest of your network, but that just seems to be a bit much.
Re:Microsostrich
on
ZOMG New Zunes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"It's the synergy of the player, the music, the store, the industrial design, the marketing and the ubiquity."
I used to think this is why the iPod was so great. However, the greatness of the iPod is diminishing imo.
iTunes was great at managing music. Then apple went and added movies, tv and video. The interface for managing that video was crap however. I was shocked that apple would realease a "video player" that could not play full screen. In addition the video files were useless unless you had a video iPod or your computer hooked up to your TV or Apple's lovely $300 movie player. You could not burn them either. None of this was disclosed at time of purchase which was diappointing.
Scalability is not in Apple's vocab. My library consists of 8000+ songs. Itunes on average uses in excess of 100 mb or ram. The music player beats out Outlook, Word, and Excel combined. Bloat anyone? Not to mention that it does not clean up it's temporary XML library files resulting in GB of litter after a year of usage.
iTunes is a rip off. Apple would have you believe that they are doing eveyone a favor of "fixing" the price of music at 99 cents. Yet, Amazon has just shown that in fact, the same music just doesn't need to cost that much. In addition, Amazons music is unencumbered. Although, I generally don't get how music can cost the same delivered virtually or physically regardless of who is selling it to me.
The iPod is nice to look at though!
But I'll be honest I own two iPods I don't use itunes anymore (winamp works nicely) and I buy my music elsewhere.
"the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
Or.... like every other user in the world - just turn, clippy, off.
What? Halo 3 is just another FPS. What is so deplorable about Halo? Actually - it might be a good thing to get MSFT's legal department rolling on crushing this retard.
I guess we see now why Vista was delayed as long as it was. How many more over engineered "features" were included with the OS?
In general this sort of feature needs to be configureable. You can't just go around arbitrarily knee capping peoples performance because of some scenario that only 15% of your user base is going to experience. I wonder if Microsoft even bothered to test this feature to find out which configurations it *was* really needed.
I have a Quad Core FX-70 with GbE. I get 107 MByte/s (peak) and 95 MByte/s (average) between one of our servers and my workstation. With audio playing, that goes down to about 12 MByte/s. My question is really, why on earth would Vista throttle anything on a machine like mine!? It just doesn't make any sense.
"On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update."
This has been going on for years now. You will note that the outage occurred on *Thursday* August 16th. Microsoft's patching schedule is every Tuesday. Typically computers reboot on Wednesday morning early in the AM. So it would seem unlikely that all of the computers that run Skype were rebooted Thursday morning. Also, not everyone leaves their computers on to download updates and reboot automatically. I would say that this explanation is suspect, at best.
"The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact."
Right - it had nothing to do with patches MS or otherwise it had everything to do with Skype not being able to service their supposed large number of logon requests.
Further though this DOES NOT explain *at all* why they were not able to service logon requests for *3* days. This level of outage is almost unheard of.
My only guess is something went terribly wrong and they don't want to own up to it.
"HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can both do this, though as far as I know none of the discs set the flag to have them do it yet. If they do, what happens is you get HD out over HDMI or DVI, but only if your display supports HDCP. If it doesn't, or if you use the component outputs, you get something that is right around SD."
As an owner of the Toshiba XA-2 DVD Player I can tell you with certainty that if you do not use HDMI w/HDCP you will get 480p out. It has nothing to do with the disc - this is the default and only behavior of the hardware regardless of the disc producers intentions.
I keep reading a bunch of comments about the larger packet sizes, address size pool and their implications. However we rarely hear of the potential benefits of using IPV6 - are there any? In my limited experience with it as an end user I find the addressing methodolgy to be extremely unfriendly. Perhaps I'll get accustomed to it in time.
Also, I'll ask the question: why are DNS and addressing not very closely tied? If you have a DNS outage - you mine as well unplug your datacenter. Seems to me that if we had to fix something and cause some disruption we mine as well take a stab at what is really broken.
That sucks about comcast - I switched recently to RCN and they have no ads in the interface. Though, their interface probably makes for better screen shots than it does an actual application.
As far as suggestions go - they just never worked well for me. I think maybe I'm in the minority. I usually watch movies as opposed to shows so that doens't help.
Support was a real pain for me. The first time I had to deal with them was over the wireless "g" adapter that was misrepresenting it's actually transfer speed. I called them and they confirmed that the TiVo wasn't as fast as the adapater. The second time was the music upgrade. I gave the feature a try but turns out they didn't support AAC (non-drm), so I couldn't play any of my music. Great. The final time was to cancel and it took 20 minutes+ and a small inquisition about why it was that I was leaving TiVO.
Holy crap! Look at all the articles I get with my magazine! And I'm actually paying for physical transportation on the subway.
With TiVo you pay for... what exactly? TV LISTINGS! It's a stupid file with 2 mb of data that gets updated a couple times a month. Honestly, what does that REALLY cost TiVO? www.notsomuch.com
Wow, someone who gets what I'm saying. Thanks for the support lol.
Yeah, those are some cool ideas. I think if TiVo offered more than suggestions and recording it might be pretty compelling. As you pointed out the future enhancements need to be tv focused and less self serving
Some of the features addded when I was a customer were ads, music, picture gallery and shopping. But alas TiVo couldn't actually play any of my music because it was stored in a real format (AAC). I had to call them about that. As for pictures, are you mad? I have a computer monitor for that. And shopping is just asanine. Have you tried entering credit card info with the remote? I think though that most of these were a problem because they aren't actually centered around what TiVo is good at - watching, and recording TV.
I don't exactly expect you to see my line of reasoning here, you after all spent 800 dollars on your series 3 box. lol.
I'm glad the handy recommendation feature worked well for you. I'm quite familiar with thumbs and made judicous use of them. However, TiVO and I just could never really get on the same page. Although one time it did record Duke of Hazard and Knight Rider and I was pretty happy about that. I still won't forgive it for screwing up the BSG recording schedule.
Overall, I just found TiVo not worth 800 bucks for a brick that won't work unless I continue paying for it.
Use case - your DVR is full (some suggestions and others flagged), and you are watching a show and you want to record it. Try to save and Tivo will tell you you don't have enough room and you'll need to delete things.
I also found that it would not record things on spec as frequently when your drive was nearly full.
Well, I'll be honest - the "reception" is a bit spotty both with Comcast and RCN. Seems like there are artifacts in the playback often. I have no idea if that is the DVR or the network delivery - probably both A and B. The DVR records shows when I ask it to. Only once have I had an issue with a show not being recorded in its entirety. Apart from that it has been fine.
As for interface speed - the TiVo series 2 was probably a scosh slower than my current dvr. The channel changing is def. faster.
Funny you mention BSG - I had a series recording for BSD this past year on TiVo. The time was moved from Firday night to Sunday. TiVo botched the change and I didn't get my epiosde.
Generally speaking I already think TV costs too much - somewhere along the line we forgot that the Advertisements were used to support the broadcast of the shows and got suckered into paying for the broadcast and being shown ads.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say that it wasn't possible. It is - but the end user experience is not that good. I was lumping streaming audio and video together.
YouTube is more of a file download than "streaming" in the truest sense of the word.
From the post...
But the question left unasked as been, "Does 3G really improve the user experience dramatically?" Most pundits would reply...
Well, given that the author seems to have little or no experience with day to day 3G use I'd say this might be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Yes, wireless is as much about latency as it is bandwidth. Broadband wireless latency is not as good as it should be.
Here are some general real world metrics for 3G: latency ~ 300ms Download: 800 - 900 Kb/s Upload: 200 - 400 Kb/s data transfer from 100 - 200 KB/s
Typcial advertised connect speed: 3.6 Mbps
Given these stats the following tasks are highly useable: Web, IM, Streaming music or video, Skype Video, check e-mail, download larger files quickly.
EDGE allows for a reasonable user experience for e-mail and IM but that is about it. File transfer speeds are abysmal and downloading web sites is also pretty poor. It seems most sites have decided that it's OK to have a 300k home page. Streaming music is far from reliable and video is out of the question (although you tube has been able to decimate their clips enough for iPhone use).
His point about phones not being equipped to handle the additional data and subsequenct processing is well made. This is probably true for the vast majority of phones. In the context of the iPhone however, I think there are major benefits to having 3G. Further, defending Apple's decision is probably not the right way to go on this. The iPhone is the only phone on the market truly capable of exploiting a 3G connection - but lesser phones such as the nokia mentioned provide a faster connection. In addition, that poorly performing nokia phone will do just fine as a mobile broadband bridge.
The bottom line is that especially for laptop users, and a lesser extent phone users, 3G is a huge step up. It's as fast as a shared public wi-fi connection, and easier to access. The major difference is that an access point is not needed. 3G is a very liberating experience lol
If you call them, they will unlock your phone for you.
I have a t-mobile dash and I used a 3rd party unlock. I was surprised to find out when I called them that they would have done it for free.
Perhaps the charge only applies if you unlock, then terminate.
That's not quite true anymore.
The Mac is no longer a proprietary platform and it is certainly not a cell phone. In fact, other OS's run on Apple hardware. However if you want Apple hardware you still have to pay for the OS. I think there would be a serious issue if the roles were reveresed.
Is the internet bad for ________ - insert latest thing here.
"Either you are full of crap or you've had a great deal of user errors."
Well at this point I can't even use iTunes as it does not install on Vista 64 ^ ^ As for ram, I'm not really full of crap as you have had a similar experience.
Basically the issue with GB of files was with iTunes was not cleaning up older copies of its files on redirected user folders on XP.
"Holy Super Atomic Hyperbole Batman! A 10% difference in price is a "rip off"?"
It's not actually a "rip off". My point seemed to have gotten lost in overly strong wording. It is basically this: Apple has of late had a few partners defecting over pricing issues. Apple would have us believe it is becuase they do not want to price out @ 99 cents. I guess I would assume that the new price is higher. One partner left and went to amazon. What we find however, is that the music is cheaper and unencumbered. Unencumbered music costs a premium on iTunes so it tells me that not all of Apples intentions are consumer favorable. In a competitive market Apple should be the first retailer able to pass on a cost savings to the consumer. Walmart anyone?
I'm not willing to put this one on Sony and BMG because as the retailer of music it is Apple's duty to compete on price. Walmart as the largest retailer uses their market dominance to squeeze suppliers. Apple is not doing the same apparently. Sure this may be a blip on the radar but I don't think it is. Ultimately this is going to get them into trouble. Selling vastly superior hardware is one thing and charging a premium and selling "commodity" items is not something that Apple has a great deal of experience with as a business.
Am I the only one that doesn't want other, unknown pc's on my network?
I mean, one of the nice aspects of having NAT and a "firewall" is additional security on your network. Now we are expected to let strangers with god knows what on their PC's connect to our networks and poke at our "special" ports.
I for one don't share my special ports with just anyone.
Of course for the really paranoid you can put a nat between your wifi router and the rest of your network, but that just seems to be a bit much.
"It's the synergy of the player, the music, the store, the industrial design, the marketing and the ubiquity."
I used to think this is why the iPod was so great. However, the greatness of the iPod is diminishing imo.
iTunes was great at managing music. Then apple went and added movies, tv and video. The interface for managing that video was crap however. I was shocked that apple would realease a "video player" that could not play full screen. In addition the video files were useless unless you had a video iPod or your computer hooked up to your TV or Apple's lovely $300 movie player. You could not burn them either. None of this was disclosed at time of purchase which was diappointing.
Scalability is not in Apple's vocab. My library consists of 8000+ songs. Itunes on average uses in excess of 100 mb or ram. The music player beats out Outlook, Word, and Excel combined. Bloat anyone? Not to mention that it does not clean up it's temporary XML library files resulting in GB of litter after a year of usage.
iTunes is a rip off. Apple would have you believe that they are doing eveyone a favor of "fixing" the price of music at 99 cents. Yet, Amazon has just shown that in fact, the same music just doesn't need to cost that much. In addition, Amazons music is unencumbered. Although, I generally don't get how music can cost the same delivered virtually or physically regardless of who is selling it to me.
The iPod is nice to look at though!
But I'll be honest I own two iPods I don't use itunes anymore (winamp works nicely) and I buy my music elsewhere.
"the flexibility of open source would have allowed us to free ourselves from Clippy, the world's most despised paperclip, by changing a single line of code."
Or.... like every other user in the world - just turn, clippy, off.
Code changes are not always a solution.
Ha ha - that's hilarious!
What? Halo 3 is just another FPS. What is so deplorable about Halo? Actually - it might be a good thing to get MSFT's legal department rolling on crushing this retard.
1.6 is very high. A more practical estimate is between 800W and 1.2kW.
If this is in fact true - and I have my doubts that it is, please cite the specific federal regulations that prohibit this kind of setup.
Thx
Ooh, I don't know about that. It might be like putting a turkey wrapped in tin foil in the microwave... Let me know how it works out for you!
Then that is to say, because you find transitions and animated effects to be bothersome they should not be available for other users to use?
I guess we see now why Vista was delayed as long as it was. How many more over engineered "features" were included with the OS?
In general this sort of feature needs to be configureable. You can't just go around arbitrarily knee capping peoples performance because of some scenario that only 15% of your user base is going to experience. I wonder if Microsoft even bothered to test this feature to find out which configurations it *was* really needed.
I have a Quad Core FX-70 with GbE. I get 107 MByte/s (peak) and 95 MByte/s (average) between one of our servers and my workstation. With audio playing, that goes down to about 12 MByte/s. My question is really, why on earth would Vista throttle anything on a machine like mine!? It just doesn't make any sense.
Very insightful. Perhaps the only logical explanation given the duration of service outage.
"On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update."
This has been going on for years now. You will note that the outage occurred on *Thursday* August 16th. Microsoft's patching schedule is every Tuesday. Typically computers reboot on Wednesday morning early in the AM. So it would seem unlikely that all of the computers that run Skype were rebooted Thursday morning. Also, not everyone leaves their computers on to download updates and reboot automatically. I would say that this explanation is suspect, at best.
"The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact."
Right - it had nothing to do with patches MS or otherwise it had everything to do with Skype not being able to service their supposed large number of logon requests.
Further though this DOES NOT explain *at all* why they were not able to service logon requests for *3* days. This level of outage is almost unheard of.
My only guess is something went terribly wrong and they don't want to own up to it.
"HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can both do this, though as far as I know none of the discs set the flag to have them do it yet. If they do, what happens is you get HD out over HDMI or DVI, but only if your display supports HDCP. If it doesn't, or if you use the component outputs, you get something that is right around SD."
As an owner of the Toshiba XA-2 DVD Player I can tell you with certainty that if you do not use HDMI w/HDCP you will get 480p out. It has nothing to do with the disc - this is the default and only behavior of the hardware regardless of the disc producers intentions.
I keep reading a bunch of comments about the larger packet sizes, address size pool and their implications. However we rarely hear of the potential benefits of using IPV6 - are there any?
In my limited experience with it as an end user I find the addressing methodolgy to be extremely unfriendly. Perhaps I'll get accustomed to it in time.
Also, I'll ask the question: why are DNS and addressing not very closely tied? If you have a DNS outage - you mine as well unplug your datacenter. Seems to me that if we had to fix something and cause some disruption we mine as well take a stab at what is really broken.
I think IPV6 needs an advocte, anyone?
That sucks about comcast - I switched recently to RCN and they have no ads in the interface. Though, their interface probably makes for better screen shots than it does an actual application.
As far as suggestions go - they just never worked well for me. I think maybe I'm in the minority. I usually watch movies as opposed to shows so that doens't help.
Support was a real pain for me. The first time I had to deal with them was over the wireless "g" adapter that was misrepresenting it's actually transfer speed. I called them and they confirmed that the TiVo wasn't as fast as the adapater. The second time was the music upgrade. I gave the feature a try but turns out they didn't support AAC (non-drm), so I couldn't play any of my music. Great. The final time was to cancel and it took 20 minutes+ and a small inquisition about why it was that I was leaving TiVO.
Holy crap! Look at all the articles I get with my magazine! And I'm actually paying for physical transportation on the subway.
With TiVo you pay for... what exactly? TV LISTINGS! It's a stupid file with 2 mb of data that gets updated a couple times a month. Honestly, what does that REALLY cost TiVO? www.notsomuch.com
Wow, someone who gets what I'm saying. Thanks for the support lol.
Yeah, those are some cool ideas. I think if TiVo offered more than suggestions and recording it might be pretty compelling. As you pointed out the future enhancements need to be tv focused and less self serving
Some of the features addded when I was a customer were ads, music, picture gallery and shopping. But alas TiVo couldn't actually play any of my music because it was stored in a real format (AAC). I had to call them about that. As for pictures, are you mad? I have a computer monitor for that. And shopping is just asanine. Have you tried entering credit card info with the remote? I think though that most of these were a problem because they aren't actually centered around what TiVo is good at - watching, and recording TV.
You should send your suggestions to TiVo.
I don't exactly expect you to see my line of reasoning here, you after all spent 800 dollars on your series 3 box. lol.
I'm glad the handy recommendation feature worked well for you. I'm quite familiar with thumbs and made judicous use of them. However, TiVO and I just could never really get on the same page. Although one time it did record Duke of Hazard and Knight Rider and I was pretty happy about that. I still won't forgive it for screwing up the BSG recording schedule.
Overall, I just found TiVo not worth 800 bucks for a brick that won't work unless I continue paying for it.
Use case - your DVR is full (some suggestions and others flagged), and you are watching a show and you want to record it. Try to save and Tivo will tell you you don't have enough room and you'll need to delete things.
I also found that it would not record things on spec as frequently when your drive was nearly full.
Well, I'll be honest - the "reception" is a bit spotty both with Comcast and RCN. Seems like there are artifacts in the playback often. I have no idea if that is the DVR or the network delivery - probably both A and B. The DVR records shows when I ask it to. Only once have I had an issue with a show not being recorded in its entirety. Apart from that it has been fine.
As for interface speed - the TiVo series 2 was probably a scosh slower than my current dvr. The channel changing is def. faster.
Funny you mention BSG - I had a series recording for BSD this past year on TiVo. The time was moved from Firday night to Sunday. TiVo botched the change and I didn't get my epiosde.
Generally speaking I already think TV costs too much - somewhere along the line we forgot that the Advertisements were used to support the broadcast of the shows and got suckered into paying for the broadcast and being shown ads.