That's what I use my TiVo for more than anything else. I record prime-time shows, but I usually watch them in prime time. I usually watch a show within a day of it's airtime.
That was the thing that confused me in the article. I skimmed it, and it looked like a media researcher was saying "When people aren't forced to watch at 9:00 PM, more people watch. It's counter-intuitive, but the data shows it's real." I saw that and I'm thinking... huh?
Let's take the recent Fox show Sit Down, Shut up. I've been enjoying it, and the later episodes got better. It ran out it's run in the last few weeks on Saturdays at 2 AM or such. I was able to keep watching it.
When shows are available to watch at additional times, more people watch them. It's a great boon to Discovery that they re-air shows 3/6 hours later. I know it's due to east coast/west coast and lack of programming, but it makes it so easy to watch the show. When I've got something on at 7:00, I don't have to worry about missing MythBusters, I know I can watch it at 10:00. My Tivo can record the midnight new episode of Stargate: The Re-gatening because it's there. If it was only aired at 8:00, I wouldn't be able to watch it because I like Law & Order: SVU more.
Shows that don't do this, usually network shows, I'm more likely to stop watching. If it's hard for me to get a copy/watch the show. I won't watch.
Counter-intuitive, but my data shows it!
It's like that recent MPAA thing about Star Trek piracy. If it was available for rental day one, how many of those people would have pirated it? How many people were basically time/placeshifiting the movie the only way they could?
That's one of my favorite things. But I have my TiVo record shows that I'm middling about, or half interested in, and I watch them later with partial attention. For those kind of things, I usually don't care enough to skip commercials unless they are really obnoxious (like hearing it for the 10th time).
For new shows that I really like, I'll often check something on my computer during commercial breaks, so I don't bother fast forwarding unless they are obnoxious.
Really it depends on what I'm watching. After years of using a TiVo, I'm settled on some sort of mental annoyance factor to commercials, and it's not as high as it used to be. I used to skip EVERY commercial. I don't bother as much any more.
Thin Client: A minimal client that relies on the server to do most of its processing
A TiVo isn't a thin client, it does all the work. The service is only used to get updated schedules and suggestions. All the processing (like figuring which of 20 shows to schedule when, on two tuners, across 5 airings...) is done on the box.
I've been sitting here trying to think of a thin client that's in use. Cable companies wanted to use thin-client DVRs, but were sued out of it (until a recent court decision). Cell phones and video game consoles aren't thin clients.
I agree. I've been a TiVo user for years. I do skip a fair number of commercials, but there is a good reason for that.
Some commercials are very good, entertaining. I don't mind them. I may stop to watch them. Apple's ads usually do this. Many commercials are generic, and I don't care that much. I'll often just let them play and avoid them.
The problem is getting torn out of the program when I'm really watching. I enjoy watching the latest episode of HOUR_LONG_SHOW, but I hate watching the same commercial once per commercial break. Let's say I record 2 or 3 hours of television off a cable channel. It's very common for me to be given 8-10 chances to see one ad. Over. And over. And over.
By the 3rd view, I really don't care. By the 6th, I want to kill you. You're not helping yourself at that point. It's probably better I do skip the ad at that point.
When commercials are funny/cute/interesting/catchy you can easily get me to watch. When it's like hearing a 2 year old say "Yes! I'm the hemorrhoid lady!" for the 40th time, I jump for the remote.
OK, this is a somewhat random idea. There are a few games that use speech input (some have already been mentioned), but they are usually very finicky for someone without any speech problems, so I would think they would be very frustrating for people who have trouble.
So let me try a semi-random idea: what about Rosetta Stone?
Everyone's pronunciation sucks when they start learning a new language. If you could find one they are interested in for whatever reason (French, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, whatever) they could learn that language. Not only would that be a useful skill, but they would have to work at the new pronunciations. As they get better at those, they will improve their ability to pronounce those same sounds in English. Actually, a language that sounds rather different from English may be better as everything they say, right or wrong, will sound "foreign" and thus be less likely to trigger embarrassment.
The more of the language they learn, the more useful it becomes to them as they could talk to other people, watch TV/movies from a country that speaks that language, etc.
I got quite a lot of reading practice from video games as a kid. If they are the kind that might be motivated to learn a new language, it could really work.
By the time they decide "this is stupid", perhaps their speech will have improved enough for them to see it's worth while.
Um... wow. That doesn't fit my recollection at all.
No (sane) person claimed Jobs invented the iPod. Jobs didn't invent the Macintosh either. He directed the final product to what it was, but he didn't start the process saying "this is exactly what we're building".
iTunes took off because of the iPod. The iTunes Music Store and DRM didn't come until years after the iPod had been out. MS screwed up with FairPlay, but they didn't have the market share to compete with the iPod at that point, so I'm sure it would have succeeded even if they hadn't scrapped it to make the Zune.
The iPhone wasn't a sales disaster. People lined up for the thing. People loved the thing. It was never going to capture 100% of the market at $500/$600, but for what it had, it wasn't a horrible price. High end smart phones often cost $300 or $400. The iPhone just didn't have the subsidy.
But it sold.
But Apple didn't keep it there, they dropped the price pretty quickly. The price probably helped keep the shortage from being worse. Either way, people were certainly willing to pay the premium, so economics says it wasn't a disaster. I don't know where you got "slow niche seller". It sold very well, and it's niche was "high end smart phone". It sold better when the 3G came out, but by then it had a year of people raving about how nice it was. If I was one of the other phone makers, I would have started shaking when Apple started selling the 3G at $99 this year. If Sprint/Verizon customers weren't locked out of getting the iPhone, do you really think they'd have sold so many of their "iPhone killer" phones in the last 2 years? I doubt it.
Is it really surprising Apple wants you to buy an Apple product to develop for the Apple platform? MS used to make you do the same thing.
Actually, at this point in your rant you seem to have switched from "Jobs got lucky over and OVER and OVER again" to "insert random Apple complaint here."
Then at the end, you go close to fanboy mode. You switch from Apple is evil and doesn't know what it's doing and is only succeeding because everyone else is screwing up to "Apple makes very good stuff, you should buy it".
Let's just pretend that Apple did get lucky over and over and over again. Lots of companies get lucky over and over and over again. Very few repeatedly capitalize on it, especially as well as Apple.
Either Apple knows what they are doing, or they know how to take advantage of everyone else not knowing what they are doing.
The first iMac could have been luck. People in the industry said it was, that it was Apple's last breath. They've managed to hold that breath for a long time now.
Nothing on this page (as I type) talks about zero packet loss, except you. That means you read the article.
Of course, the article says that AT&T has set their buffers large enough to prevent packet loss due to congestion in transit, not that they expect no radio packet loss. The problem is that TCP/IP needs packet loss to tell it when it's going too fast and AT&T's decision causes this to fail spectacularly at times.
Because those people if they dislike the network enough, will leave eventually.
This is the problem. Thanks to the competitive barriers (such as the inability to move phones between all but two of the top four networks, and none of the top 3) moving can take a long time (2 year contract must expire) before someone can move networks unless they want to pay a large fee.
And then, you probably lose your phone. So even if you like it, you have to buyer either a different phone from the new provider, or the same one in their version. Both will cost you even more money, unless you're willing to be stuck on another 2 year contract.
The US system is very well setup, as far as carrier lock in goes.
It's rather amazing how many people go to AT&T for the iPhone. I think they said about 1/3 of their iPhone customers are coming from other networks. I wonder how many more people would get iPhones if it wasn't for their current contract? That's a big reason for many people I've talked to. The rest who want an iPhone are in the "I'd love it but I'm not touching AT&T again" camp.
The 3G is fixed focus, and not great for stuff close to the lens. The 3GS is variable focus, and the reviews I saw (I'm a 3G owner), it's camera is head and shoulders better than the 3G.
The 3G camera is OK. With lots of light, it takes some pretty good pictures, especially color wise. But with lower light levels (such as room lighting, often) or things closer than 2 feet or so... it's just a cell phone camera.
The 3G takes better pictures that most camera phones, about the same as or slightly better than many smart phones (from last year or so). But it's still a cell phone with a camera. It won't compete with a $150 point and shoot.
One of the most interesting features added to Intel’s GM45 chipset was switchable graphics—a hybrid technology consisting of an integrated graphics chipset and a discrete GPU. [...] The potential savings was supposed to equal up to roughly an hour of battery life. Unfortunately, Lenovo and Fujitsu were the only two builders to take advantage of switchable graphics.
Isn't that what Apple introduced earlier this year on the MacBook Pros? The ability to switch off the high power GPU when it's not needed and fall back to a lower quality integrated GPU? I realize that Apple used an nVidia solution instead of an Intel, but that still seems a little disingenuous.
What if this is to prevent labels from dumping crud into the iTunes store and making iTunes LP look like a joke? By forcing the studios to commit at least so much money to the project, they may only do it for bigger bands and when they can do a good job, instead of just putting 20 images together and just saying "Look! It's an LP" for everything in their catalog.
Basically, this may be a way to help with initial quality control.
The question is if it continues or not. Whether it's adjusted up or down, how it starts to work with indie labels, that will be the question.
It needs a partition other than the boot partition. You can repartition your drive and use it as a backup against user error (accidental deletion, etc.). I've done this on my parent's Mac. Obviously, if the drive fails you're in no better shape than if you didn't use time machine. To get the "oops I didn't mean to delete that" function, you have to repartition at minimum. To get the "my drive blew up" function, you need a second drive. Macs have neither of those out of the box, at least in the default configuration.
But then again, that's why you're supposed to buy a Time Capsule now, isn't it? That's probably Apple's solution.
I'd really love to see checksumming too. Lay them down when the file is written, check them when the file is re-loaded. I've been annoyed enough with silent corruption over the years that I'd be willing to put up with the bandwidth hit.
Time Machine could do it too, some sort of random check, or based on file size or something.
Since I've got a laptop, the only time my Mac is attached to my external drive is when I plug it in and leave it over night. That's plenty of time to go check all my files once a week or so.
Time Machine is pretty great though. I'd like to be able to see a diff between backups (can be done though the command line or 3rd party utilities), but it's so easy to use and works very well.
funny thing is....a friend of mine later found out that the backup utility (Time Machine) failed the last backup (aka..."set it and forget it" is flawed).
That's why time machine has a little icon you can show in your menu bar that shows if the last backup failed.
an average user is more likely to get hit by it as they are more likely to have the Guest account "feature" active
From what I've read, this only happens with guest accounts created under Leopard, not guest accounts created under Snow Leopard. You'd have to upgrade, which last I read only 20% of users had. Then you take the percentage that uses guest accounts....
I really like Time Machine, but I do have two faults with it. The fact that it requires a separate drive is something of a joke. "Every mac comes with automatic backup software that takes care of everything for you, *tinyfont* once you buy an extra drive */tinyfont*'.
Second, Time Machine is always scanning my drive checking if it needs to back things up. I'd really like it to try to scan for silent corruption while doing that. If a file changed, but the fileystem data says it hasn't been modified... I'd like a way to see that or be warned.
On the subject of the article though... yeah... this is a pretty nasty bug, especially since any unprivileged user (the definition of a guest) could trigger it if your system was vulnerable.
I noticed this a while ago when I went to post a story. Mostly, it's rather nice, but I do miss one feature:
Can it be made so that my link points to something other than my email address? I used to change it on every submission to point to my website, and actually I'd like to set that as the default.
Was there a reason that choice was removed, or was it an unintended effect/feature without priority?
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That's what I use my TiVo for more than anything else. I record prime-time shows, but I usually watch them in prime time. I usually watch a show within a day of it's airtime.
That was the thing that confused me in the article. I skimmed it, and it looked like a media researcher was saying "When people aren't forced to watch at 9:00 PM, more people watch. It's counter-intuitive, but the data shows it's real." I saw that and I'm thinking... huh?
Let's take the recent Fox show Sit Down, Shut up. I've been enjoying it, and the later episodes got better. It ran out it's run in the last few weeks on Saturdays at 2 AM or such. I was able to keep watching it.
When shows are available to watch at additional times, more people watch them. It's a great boon to Discovery that they re-air shows 3/6 hours later. I know it's due to east coast/west coast and lack of programming, but it makes it so easy to watch the show. When I've got something on at 7:00, I don't have to worry about missing MythBusters, I know I can watch it at 10:00. My Tivo can record the midnight new episode of Stargate: The Re-gatening because it's there. If it was only aired at 8:00, I wouldn't be able to watch it because I like Law & Order: SVU more.
Shows that don't do this, usually network shows, I'm more likely to stop watching. If it's hard for me to get a copy/watch the show. I won't watch.
Counter-intuitive, but my data shows it!
It's like that recent MPAA thing about Star Trek piracy. If it was available for rental day one, how many of those people would have pirated it? How many people were basically time/placeshifiting the movie the only way they could?
Could this be the Streisand effect? Lots of new people suddenly learned about free movies when the news media talked about it for a few days.
That's one of my favorite things. But I have my TiVo record shows that I'm middling about, or half interested in, and I watch them later with partial attention. For those kind of things, I usually don't care enough to skip commercials unless they are really obnoxious (like hearing it for the 10th time).
For new shows that I really like, I'll often check something on my computer during commercial breaks, so I don't bother fast forwarding unless they are obnoxious.
Really it depends on what I'm watching. After years of using a TiVo, I'm settled on some sort of mental annoyance factor to commercials, and it's not as high as it used to be. I used to skip EVERY commercial. I don't bother as much any more.
A TiVo isn't a thin client, it does all the work. The service is only used to get updated schedules and suggestions. All the processing (like figuring which of 20 shows to schedule when, on two tuners, across 5 airings...) is done on the box.
I've been sitting here trying to think of a thin client that's in use. Cable companies wanted to use thin-client DVRs, but were sued out of it (until a recent court decision). Cell phones and video game consoles aren't thin clients.
I agree. I've been a TiVo user for years. I do skip a fair number of commercials, but there is a good reason for that.
Some commercials are very good, entertaining. I don't mind them. I may stop to watch them. Apple's ads usually do this. Many commercials are generic, and I don't care that much. I'll often just let them play and avoid them.
The problem is getting torn out of the program when I'm really watching. I enjoy watching the latest episode of HOUR_LONG_SHOW, but I hate watching the same commercial once per commercial break. Let's say I record 2 or 3 hours of television off a cable channel. It's very common for me to be given 8-10 chances to see one ad. Over. And over. And over.
By the 3rd view, I really don't care. By the 6th, I want to kill you. You're not helping yourself at that point. It's probably better I do skip the ad at that point.
When commercials are funny/cute/interesting/catchy you can easily get me to watch. When it's like hearing a 2 year old say "Yes! I'm the hemorrhoid lady!" for the 40th time, I jump for the remote.
OK, this is a somewhat random idea. There are a few games that use speech input (some have already been mentioned), but they are usually very finicky for someone without any speech problems, so I would think they would be very frustrating for people who have trouble.
So let me try a semi-random idea: what about Rosetta Stone?
Everyone's pronunciation sucks when they start learning a new language. If you could find one they are interested in for whatever reason (French, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, whatever) they could learn that language. Not only would that be a useful skill, but they would have to work at the new pronunciations. As they get better at those, they will improve their ability to pronounce those same sounds in English. Actually, a language that sounds rather different from English may be better as everything they say, right or wrong, will sound "foreign" and thus be less likely to trigger embarrassment.
The more of the language they learn, the more useful it becomes to them as they could talk to other people, watch TV/movies from a country that speaks that language, etc.
I got quite a lot of reading practice from video games as a kid. If they are the kind that might be motivated to learn a new language, it could really work.
By the time they decide "this is stupid", perhaps their speech will have improved enough for them to see it's worth while.
Um... wow. That doesn't fit my recollection at all.
No (sane) person claimed Jobs invented the iPod. Jobs didn't invent the Macintosh either. He directed the final product to what it was, but he didn't start the process saying "this is exactly what we're building".
iTunes took off because of the iPod. The iTunes Music Store and DRM didn't come until years after the iPod had been out. MS screwed up with FairPlay, but they didn't have the market share to compete with the iPod at that point, so I'm sure it would have succeeded even if they hadn't scrapped it to make the Zune.
The iPhone wasn't a sales disaster. People lined up for the thing. People loved the thing. It was never going to capture 100% of the market at $500/$600, but for what it had, it wasn't a horrible price. High end smart phones often cost $300 or $400. The iPhone just didn't have the subsidy.
But it sold.
But Apple didn't keep it there, they dropped the price pretty quickly. The price probably helped keep the shortage from being worse. Either way, people were certainly willing to pay the premium, so economics says it wasn't a disaster. I don't know where you got "slow niche seller". It sold very well, and it's niche was "high end smart phone". It sold better when the 3G came out, but by then it had a year of people raving about how nice it was. If I was one of the other phone makers, I would have started shaking when Apple started selling the 3G at $99 this year. If Sprint/Verizon customers weren't locked out of getting the iPhone, do you really think they'd have sold so many of their "iPhone killer" phones in the last 2 years? I doubt it.
Is it really surprising Apple wants you to buy an Apple product to develop for the Apple platform? MS used to make you do the same thing.
Actually, at this point in your rant you seem to have switched from "Jobs got lucky over and OVER and OVER again" to "insert random Apple complaint here."
Then at the end, you go close to fanboy mode. You switch from Apple is evil and doesn't know what it's doing and is only succeeding because everyone else is screwing up to "Apple makes very good stuff, you should buy it".
Let's just pretend that Apple did get lucky over and over and over again. Lots of companies get lucky over and over and over again. Very few repeatedly capitalize on it, especially as well as Apple.
Either Apple knows what they are doing, or they know how to take advantage of everyone else not knowing what they are doing.
The first iMac could have been luck. People in the industry said it was, that it was Apple's last breath. They've managed to hold that breath for a long time now.
Apple isn't just lucky.
It's how the state balanced their budget.
Wow. This is kind of amazing.
Nothing on this page (as I type) talks about zero packet loss, except you. That means you read the article.
Of course, the article says that AT&T has set their buffers large enough to prevent packet loss due to congestion in transit, not that they expect no radio packet loss. The problem is that TCP/IP needs packet loss to tell it when it's going too fast and AT&T's decision causes this to fail spectacularly at times.
The trolls read the articles. Weird.
This is the problem. Thanks to the competitive barriers (such as the inability to move phones between all but two of the top four networks, and none of the top 3) moving can take a long time (2 year contract must expire) before someone can move networks unless they want to pay a large fee.
And then, you probably lose your phone. So even if you like it, you have to buyer either a different phone from the new provider, or the same one in their version. Both will cost you even more money, unless you're willing to be stuck on another 2 year contract.
The US system is very well setup, as far as carrier lock in goes.
It's rather amazing how many people go to AT&T for the iPhone. I think they said about 1/3 of their iPhone customers are coming from other networks. I wonder how many more people would get iPhones if it wasn't for their current contract? That's a big reason for many people I've talked to. The rest who want an iPhone are in the "I'd love it but I'm not touching AT&T again" camp.
They already have, to a degree. In Snow Leopard, you have to choose to specifically install Rosetta. If you don't, you can't run PPC programs.
If you try, OS X will prompt you to install Rosetta (which it will do at the press of a button), but it's not there any more by default.
The 3G is fixed focus, and not great for stuff close to the lens. The 3GS is variable focus, and the reviews I saw (I'm a 3G owner), it's camera is head and shoulders better than the 3G.
The 3G camera is OK. With lots of light, it takes some pretty good pictures, especially color wise. But with lower light levels (such as room lighting, often) or things closer than 2 feet or so... it's just a cell phone camera.
The 3G takes better pictures that most camera phones, about the same as or slightly better than many smart phones (from last year or so). But it's still a cell phone with a camera. It won't compete with a $150 point and shoot.
Actually, my name is Edison Carter. Max is something of a clone of mine, sort of... actually...
You know what? It's a long story. Never mind. I have to go watch some blipverts.
Just what I need. My own personal Max Headroom telling me I have email
Isn't that what Apple introduced earlier this year on the MacBook Pros? The ability to switch off the high power GPU when it's not needed and fall back to a lower quality integrated GPU? I realize that Apple used an nVidia solution instead of an Intel, but that still seems a little disingenuous.
PS: Emphasis was mine
I never said. I was referring to the quality of the initial iTunes LP content, not the quality of the music.
LP. Long Play. Synonymous with record albums; you know the big black CD like things that you read with needles.
It refers to iTunes songs with bonus content like pictures, lyrics, stories, video clips, etc attached instead of just bare music.
I can.
What if this is to prevent labels from dumping crud into the iTunes store and making iTunes LP look like a joke? By forcing the studios to commit at least so much money to the project, they may only do it for bigger bands and when they can do a good job, instead of just putting 20 images together and just saying "Look! It's an LP" for everything in their catalog.
Basically, this may be a way to help with initial quality control.
The question is if it continues or not. Whether it's adjusted up or down, how it starts to work with indie labels, that will be the question.
It needs a partition other than the boot partition. You can repartition your drive and use it as a backup against user error (accidental deletion, etc.). I've done this on my parent's Mac. Obviously, if the drive fails you're in no better shape than if you didn't use time machine. To get the "oops I didn't mean to delete that" function, you have to repartition at minimum. To get the "my drive blew up" function, you need a second drive. Macs have neither of those out of the box, at least in the default configuration.
But then again, that's why you're supposed to buy a Time Capsule now, isn't it? That's probably Apple's solution.
I'd really love to see checksumming too. Lay them down when the file is written, check them when the file is re-loaded. I've been annoyed enough with silent corruption over the years that I'd be willing to put up with the bandwidth hit.
Time Machine could do it too, some sort of random check, or based on file size or something.
Since I've got a laptop, the only time my Mac is attached to my external drive is when I plug it in and leave it over night. That's plenty of time to go check all my files once a week or so.
Time Machine is pretty great though. I'd like to be able to see a diff between backups (can be done though the command line or 3rd party utilities), but it's so easy to use and works very well.
That's why time machine has a little icon you can show in your menu bar that shows if the last backup failed.
From what I've read, this only happens with guest accounts created under Leopard, not guest accounts created under Snow Leopard. You'd have to upgrade, which last I read only 20% of users had. Then you take the percentage that uses guest accounts....
I really like Time Machine, but I do have two faults with it. The fact that it requires a separate drive is something of a joke. "Every mac comes with automatic backup software that takes care of everything for you, *tinyfont* once you buy an extra drive */tinyfont*'.
Second, Time Machine is always scanning my drive checking if it needs to back things up. I'd really like it to try to scan for silent corruption while doing that. If a file changed, but the fileystem data says it hasn't been modified... I'd like a way to see that or be warned.
On the subject of the article though... yeah... this is a pretty nasty bug, especially since any unprivileged user (the definition of a guest) could trigger it if your system was vulnerable.
I don't think that's the market. This seems targeted purely at enthusiasts and early adopters. This computer fills a very limited role.
Wow. 12 years. It's about time for them to give up that weird fad langauge (Perl) and use a real one that will last (COBOL).
I noticed this a while ago when I went to post a story. Mostly, it's rather nice, but I do miss one feature:
Can it be made so that my link points to something other than my email address? I used to change it on every submission to point to my website, and actually I'd like to set that as the default.
Was there a reason that choice was removed, or was it an unintended effect/feature without priority?
Does it fix the problems with Windows 7? After reading this review of a pre-release download, I'm a bit hesitant to use it.