Given that Winamp is starting to make inroads as a solid media sync utility for Android phones - and can do so via wireless - Winamp isn't quite as dead as you think.
Nero, Acid, Sound Forge, Vegas, Mixmeister (new versions have lots of stability issues on OSX), Mediashout (Again, OSX versions are unstable), Anything by Acronis, Cyberlink, or Corel, lots of non-Valve games (Mass Effect, Crysis, Unreal series). My copy of Adobe Production Studio CS4 for Windows doesn't magically run on OSX, and Adobe has been pretty stingy about cross-platform licensing. Microsoft has, to my knowledge, never offered cross platform licensing for Office, and the business grade licenses can cost a couple hundred bucks a clip. This doesn't account for niche applications, like financial recordkeeping (for businesses with finance departments for whom Quickbooks doesn't cut the mustard), proprietary software that compliments specialized hardware (a client of mine has a printer that cuts sign paper using EPS files as inputs), or any number of other software titles that I can't even think of.
The world runs on a whole lot more than software made by Adobe.
Sony made some pretty impressive machines back in the day. My former youth pastor had a Sony Vaio back in 2001ish I believe that had an innovative multi-slot. It came with accessories for a number pad, a floppy drive (remember there was still a viable need at the time), or a subwoofer that was an incredible piece of kit. Back then they even did some awesomeness like having legit, non-bloatware applications like Screenblast Sound Forge (Sound Forge Audio Studio by any other name), ACID (with fewer than normal effects, no MIDI support, and no MP3 encoding), Photoshop Elements, Movieshaker (an awesome auto-editor that made some surprisingly good stuff out of a group of clips), and Premiere 6.5 LE, right out of the box. The thing was solidly built and survived dozens of retreats, missions trips, and summer camps.
Now, they're just the king of useless bloatware, have just as much plastic as Acer, and still command the premium price tag. It's not worth buying a Vaio for any reason other than the form factor - it's like Sony thinks they're Apple except haven't taken note of the fact that product announcement keynotes don't generate any buzz.
A few quick examples; I typed this out already then my tab crashed >.
-I saw an ad for Sprint on TV. While it didn't immediately prompt a purchase, it was relevant to me as a soon-to-be T-Mobile refugee. I didn't lay any money out, but I did look at their website for a phone and schedule some time to stop at a retail store to get additional information. It's not that I didn't know that Sprint existed, but it did bring the company to the forefront of my mind at an opportune time.
-My dad and I were considering going to the movies last night. While I wasn't aware of anything I wanted to see, he suggested a film that looked interesting and I ended up really liking. He knew about it because of an ad he saw that I did not.
Most level-headed, reasonable marketers (I know, I know) aren't blind to the fact that an ad will only generate a few immediate sales as a direct result of the ad. Few companies who run TV ads are completely unknown to the people watching them. GoDaddy doesn't have their famous Super Bowl commercials to get the Slashdot crowd to buy a domain or hosting account, they run them so that they're the only web hosting company the average person thinks of when they think of their service. Ford doesn't run commercials to let people know they exist or to generate a sale from a person who isn't car shopping, but they do intend to make it an overall part of a larger campaign where Ford is at the forefront of the person's mind when they *do* find themselves car shopping, or so that someone looking to replace their car next month will take a serious look at Ford as opposed to simply buying the Nissan they were originally planning on getting.
But it wasn't the whole puzzle. Sure, T-Mobile lost some customers to the iPhone over the years, but so did Verizon. The problem is that they were impacted more because they had a smaller number of customers to begin with.
T-Mobile had a particular niche that they served better than anyone else - the deaf community. Rag on the Sidekick all you want, but not only did they work better for the deaf community through pervasive TTY services, they had a specific plan for it, too. They just killed that service, effectively making enemies of some of their most fiercely loyal customers. Similarly, T-Mobile was known for not putting pressure on the handset OEMs to provide Android updates; it's among the most common complaints of Samsung owners.
T-Mobile tried competing with AT&T on the same merits that AT&T used to compete with Verizon. This was foundationally problematic, because they didn't stick to their strengths. "No data overage fees, ever" - that's all they had to say, and they would have had PLENTY of people who have had the pleasure of disputing $300-$800 of data overages. They could have implemented a spending cap to prevent outrageous bills, better advertised their international wi-fi calling, better advertised their bring-your-own-phone programs, and done something like "If you don't love us in 60 days, we'll refund every dime and help you go back to your old service, no questions asked". While I've heard a bad customer service story here and there for T-Mobile, my eight years of being a customer there have been an absolute pleasure. If they advertised that aspect of it, they might have been able to change some minds instead of trying to say "we can do what the iPhone does too"
It probably wouldn't have hurt to make it known that all the handsets they featured in their commercials run Android, just like the Verizon handsets, because lots of people think Android==Droid==Verizon Exclusive.
The fine article is correct in saying that T-Mobile couldn't compete with the iPhone at the hip-handset level. It fails to mention that there were plenty of other places where T-Mobile could have competed against AT&T and Verizon and won out, but didn't.
#While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years.
I can see that happening. Sprint continues to hemorrhage customers and money for 18 months. Both AT&T and Verizon bid to buy it. Verizon screams anti-trust concerns and blocks AT&T bid. Verizon walks away with Sprint for pennies on the dollar. Verizon wins.
Sprint is going to be a big wild card here. Many, MANY people I know on T-Mo are customers precisely because they don't want to be on AT&T or Verizon. Sprint is the natural choice for these customers, so the carrier will likely experience higher-than-normal growth once the deal goes through as they register new accounts from long time T-Mobile customers who see them as the least corrupt. If a third of T-Mobile's customer base goes to Sprint, they'll still be in third place, but it could be a minority respectable enough to make a buyout either extremely expensive, or yield such market share that buying out the DoJ becomes prohibitively expensive for either Big Red or Ma Bell.
Interim spectrum. Ultimately, that's what this is about.
1.) AT&T buys T-Mobile, issues new 3G handsets to present subscribers (or lets die-hards stick to EDGE). 2.) AT&T&T kills the HSPA+ network, starts work on LTE on the formerly HSPA+ network. 3.) AT&T&T now has 3G on their present frequencies, 4G on the T-Mobile spectrum they bought, no downtime in the interim, more customers, and fewer competition. 4.) Profit!!! 5.) Repeat steps 1-4 for 5G.
That's a problem. If you can't show strong sales out of the gate (which both iPhone and Android did)
The iPhone did...but it also had the benefit of having plenty of pre-announcement hype along with the installed base of iPods. The original iPhone could best be described as a touch screen feature phone with an iPod. It got all kinds of initial sales because of that fact. Note that the first year or so of its release, the 'apps' were all in the browser - over EDGE.
Android, on the other hand, had a very different road to the market. It took them nearly seven months to sell a million of HTC G1's. Android's more mainstream success took place when Verizon spent a cool billion advertising the Motorola Droid, billing it as an iPhone replacement, and targeted that ad campaign to people who had some iPhone lust but were too loyal to the Verizon network to jump to AT&T's ship, which by then had plenty of bad press of its own. For some time there, having a Droid had a decent amount of caché, and really raised sea level for Android handsets for Sprint and T-Mobile as well.
HTC and Samsung didn't sit on their laurels and watch Motorola beat them at their own game, either. All three companies have released handset after handset running the OS, on every carrier (including prepaids), and all have had plenty of carrier support (All three companies have been featured in various carrier adverts), so android's got the quantity aspect running for them.
My point is that the two platforms took very different roads to their respective success. But you're right in that Microsoft has to do better with their ecosystem to entice users. The Zune music/video store looks pretty good, but the iTunes lock-in is very similar to the Windows lock-in. Many of my friends have some pretty meticulously curated iTunes libraries, complete with ratings, playlists, categories, and all that other data that is, in many cases, just as valuable as the audio tracks themselves. Finally, long-time iPod touch/iPhone/Android owners likely have a few tens of dollars worth of apps that won't be compatible with the new system. What Microsoft could do here is to entice/coerce/subsidize developers that have cross-platform applications to provide free copies of paid apps on other platforms. Microsoft is playing this the way Apple did, trying to leverage users of one product (iTunes/iPod) to seamlessly migrate to their phone offering. Zune never achieved a sufficient critical mass to make Zune users their best early adopting crowd, Windows Mobile 6.5 veterans like myself would be quick to miss all the WM6.5 features we use frequently (Swype, Mass Storage, Remote Desktop, Desktop Outlook sync, apps purchased for *that* platform), and desktop Windows has no more leverage for WP7 than Android or iOS do, leaving them with Sharepoint (a business subset that's likely already locked into RIM) and Xbox, which is the closest they've got, but still an uphill battle to leverage if the teenage crowd is also iTunes locked in and the phones have a mandatory $30/month data plan that mom and dad likely won't want to pay and the teens themselves probably don't want to part with that much of their allowance to pay for.
The OS has potential. it CAN work if MS treats it as if they're breaking new ground and have nothing to leverage - but THAT is an attitude that they're a bit out of practice having.
You lack creativity and have too much compassion. The correct way to deal with the situation is to subject all RIAA/MPAA lawyers to a continual stream of the very movies and music they're responsible for 'protecting' via legislation.
the worst part of Winzip is that Corel got their hands on it. IMO I'd almost say that their best move would have been to drag MS to court over integrated zip file handling in the same way Netscape did, especially since Corel had case law on their side to boot. Instead, they attempted to keep enticing upgraders with release after release that just did more and more useless stuff. Now, it's essentially turned into Norton Utilities.
WinDVD is the same way, and they don't really offer a 'lite' version either. ugh. I'm convinced that Corel can't churn out efficient code to save its life.
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with those things. We have three of them at work, while I have a BuffaloTech WZR-300NH at home.
While I'm a fan of installable, offline applications for roughly 98% of circumstances, router configs are def a task best left to a browser. Apple routers require an installable application to be used. I've had issues with the client connecting to a misconfigured router, and the trick of forcing it to connect to an IP is known by half the applecare reps I spoke to (admittedly a sample size of two).
At the same time,the client is REALLY nice in that it makes exporting and importing configuration profiles real quick work. When I wanted to set up the third AP, I dialed into router 2, downloaded the config, imported it to the new unit, changed the name, and I was done in less than 90 seconds.
The transceivers in those things are incredibly powerful, so w00tness to that. They're generally low maintenance, and their color coded LED is generally easier to figure out the status from further away than the more standard lineup of LEDs whose labels can't be read further than half an arm's length away.
On the flip side, the Buffalotech router allows for USB printer and hard disk sharing, has an official, Buffalo-supported DD-WRT upgrade path, has an integrated bittorrent client (though only on the stock firmware, not dd-wrt unless you install deluge via SSH), and about a dozen other fun widgets, and costs a little over 1/3 the price of the Apple gear.
I like them both. I still think the Airport needs a browser config though.
I watched most of the video, though admittedly I did scrub a bit around the 12 minute mark. Here's what I took from it in no particular order...
-The presenter shows an old school Linksys router as an example of complicated networking. Interesting choice, since I remember those things being literally plug and play, without so much as a driver install required. Admittedly it wasn't SECURE out of the box, but they did work. By contrast, the new Valet routers and other things designed to make wireless networking simpler appear to make it even more complicated by requiring a software installation and making the browser interface even more annoying to parse. Call me biased by my muscle memory, but the concept of "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler" seems to have been lost on this gentleman. IMO I think the better example of this would have been Windows Home Server, which was a great idea that was simply leaned far too much closer to 'server' than 'home for most people...but the most widely available ones were HP Mediasmart Servers, so showing them off would have been a better idea technologically, but not from the presenter's POV.
-I, for one, think that having Fossil make the watch and it having a more traditional look is a GOOD thing. In 2011, the only reason why people wear wristwatches anymore are as fashion accessories. Telling time is done by the 1,001 other devices that have clocks on them, e.g. every other device in the product photo. I also think that this is a better choice than the phone because if they can get the battery life to be where it needs to be, you're much more likely to have a charged watch than a charged phone, and the phone doesn't have to have its processor backgrounding all the sync work that would be the death wish for actually making calls, especially since there seemed to be an ever-so-subtle nod that the phone will be responsible for providing internet connectivity to the rest of the PAN. If you're running a vertical HP stack, it makes sense to make the watch target the board room instead of the server room. The gen pop at Slashdot has no issue beating devices into synchronization if we care enough to do it. Getting board room execs to start fawning over HP kit instead of Apple kit is ultimately what they appear to be after, but I'll touch on Apple envy in a bit.
-The presenter discusses the issue of syncing all your devices together and that the Metal Watch is the point of contact for them. This sounds good in the tone of the overall broad vision he's casting, but the nuts and bolts get complicated VERY quickly. Metal Watch might run a complete software stack, but you can't make it as simple as he claims. How do you assign a watch to its owner? Browser config? great! How do you assign devices to the watch? More browser config? a bit chicken-and-egg there, but it's either that or the just-as-fun process of doing a Bluetooth sync between devices. If the watch is the key to the whole thing, how do you protect it, since it will likely be a prime target for theft if it can re-sync everything to new devices? If it's not, then what's the point? If a watch is damaged, how does one migrate all the aggregate data from each of the devices to the new watch? More browser config? Does the watch literally sync everything it can find? Either HP Labs have figured out how to put Deep Thought onto a wrist, or at some point, the user must tell the watch what to do. He talks about computers making smarter decisions, and I think they will ultimately be able to do so, but I for one am NOT a fan of relinquishing control to a computer just yet.
-As was brought up before, how does one charge the watch? What if it dies mid-day? I'd think that at least one quick solution would be to have an 'emergency juice cable' that can charge any device from any other device - powering the watch from a laptop or using the tablet as a jumper cable to make an emergency call from a dead phone would be an excellent feature to have, but it must be considered since there's no way that a watch battery is
Does that mean the government will bail out Facebook to protect our memories?
If I were the tin foil hat type, my answer would be the following:
No, they'll bail Facebook out to protect the single simplest means of protecting their ability to aggregate data about the population that has ever existed.
Don't forget the slim body and the tiny power brick that, for reasons I'll never understand, hasn't been copied by the rest of the industry.
At least a part of that is likely because they require somewhat more wattage. My last several laptops have required more wattage in them than the Macbook adapters are putting out. I would agree that there's less of an excuse for the thin-and-light segment where the power requirements are comparable.
The system isn't really that old - we bought it in 2003. What made the thing so stupidly expensive is that it's a matrix switcher - it takes twelve inputs and routes them between eight outputs. We use that in conjunction with a Panasonic MX-50 video mixer which we also bought around that time.
Did *your* laptop have an HDMI output in 2003? few, if any, did until closer to 2007 or 2008, which is NOT the same as waiting a week or two to get a bit more RAM. As I said in some other reply, it was simply a matter of bad timing for a set of investments of that magnitude.
The thing is that plenty of things need to be replaced ANYWAY...
-The projectors have always had a slightly bluish-purple hue to it. No one raised a stink except for us tech people, so we've toughed it out for the past five years with them.
-the video mixer we have has half its channels working in black-and-white mode only. It needs to be replaced.
-None of our cameras are capable of genlocking or outputting to anything above component. Our broadcast-grade camera only outputs composite.
Mix it all together and my laptop is merely the straw that broke the camel's back to get the conversation going once we realized that we were stuck using a two-year-old laptop instead of my brand new Core i7 machine to run our media presentation software which greatly benefits from higher end hardware, simply because mine didn't have the correct output.
With regards to the sanctuary computer, it's only two years old and was a $1,200 custom build at the time. 4GB of RAM, the highest end Core 2 Duo available at the time, three hard disks,dual DVD burners, dual Geforce 8700s...the thing can still hold its own today, so there's no real need to replace it. The other machines we use on a mostly-permanent basis fit the bill here as well, but things get REALLY complicated when cameras and real-time mixing are brought into the picture for the special events we do.
I do, in fact, want DisplayPort. It simply wasn't an option on my Origin Eon 17 laptop. I also wasn't going to make it a dealbreaking criterion, either. Besides, standardizing on HDMI is a much better idea than DisplayPort - HDMI is more widely used, adapters are more diverse, and hundred-foot cable runs are 1.) possible and 2.) aren't impossible to find.
Honestly, Why do churches try to get into multimedia and then fail to budget for it?
Behold, the sentiments of everyone on the tech crew, and the people who have to deal with us. The problem is that all the bean counters in the accounting office see is that a $12,000 investment only lasted them 5 years, leading them to believe that such funds are better spent elsewhere. It didn't help that our major investments in this regard happened RIGHT before HD video had hit critical mass.
A VGA->RCA converter is what we're presently using - we've got a rack-mounted switcher/scaler in the main sanctuary that does this, and a more portable, old-but-quite-usable Grand Ultraview that we use for out-of-building events. It's the present setup, but I've had laptops come through the doors that only had an HDMI output. While our tech crew has always been resilient in finding workarounds, the increasing number of cases like these are leading us to start pressuring for a proper, more modern system.
From what I understand (i.e. what i read the last time this technology was discussed on Slashdot), what makes Lightpeak so interesting is that you can run basically anything else over it. I'm running mad looking for an HDMI-to-RCA downscaler - my laptop has HDMI and DVI outputs, but my church's $12,000 switching/scaling system only does composite. Since replacing literally every piece of gear in the chain would be required to plug in an HDMI natively and the church isn't looking to spend around $100,000 for HDMI/SDI cameras, projectors, switchers, mixers, scalers, and cable runs at the moment, it makes more sense to scale down the laptop instead. From what I understand about Lightpeak, it'd be possible to use one of these $30 adapters to turn a Lightpeak connector into an RCA output instead of having to use a $700 downscaler. Yeah, i can def dig that.
While Apple may go lightpeak-or-bust, the PC side hasn't completely ditched everything else for USB - I still have firewire, HDMI, DVI, and Ethernet. Other laptops in my immediate vicinity have VGA and Expresscard available as well.
I use one quite frequently to get files from my storage server at home. Nothing I'm transferring is THAT sensitive that I need the encryption layer, plus it's easy as hell to implement with Filezilla Server.
Actually, I had an interesting case a few weeks ago where a client of mine was FINALLY ditching their Windows 98 machine in lieu of a much newer machine - Core i7, 8GB of RAM, 2TBytes of storage, the works. Anyway, their Win98 machine has been beyond repair for months, and BSODs at basically anything, including using a garden variety Samba share. It was pretty convenient to use the Filezilla client/server combo to migrate their data off the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that Winamp is starting to make inroads as a solid media sync utility for Android phones - and can do so via wireless - Winamp isn't quite as dead as you think.
Nero, Acid, Sound Forge, Vegas, Mixmeister (new versions have lots of stability issues on OSX), Mediashout (Again, OSX versions are unstable), Anything by Acronis, Cyberlink, or Corel, lots of non-Valve games (Mass Effect, Crysis, Unreal series). My copy of Adobe Production Studio CS4 for Windows doesn't magically run on OSX, and Adobe has been pretty stingy about cross-platform licensing. Microsoft has, to my knowledge, never offered cross platform licensing for Office, and the business grade licenses can cost a couple hundred bucks a clip. This doesn't account for niche applications, like financial recordkeeping (for businesses with finance departments for whom Quickbooks doesn't cut the mustard), proprietary software that compliments specialized hardware (a client of mine has a printer that cuts sign paper using EPS files as inputs), or any number of other software titles that I can't even think of.
The world runs on a whole lot more than software made by Adobe.
Sony made some pretty impressive machines back in the day. My former youth pastor had a Sony Vaio back in 2001ish I believe that had an innovative multi-slot. It came with accessories for a number pad, a floppy drive (remember there was still a viable need at the time), or a subwoofer that was an incredible piece of kit. Back then they even did some awesomeness like having legit, non-bloatware applications like Screenblast Sound Forge (Sound Forge Audio Studio by any other name), ACID (with fewer than normal effects, no MIDI support, and no MP3 encoding), Photoshop Elements, Movieshaker (an awesome auto-editor that made some surprisingly good stuff out of a group of clips), and Premiere 6.5 LE, right out of the box. The thing was solidly built and survived dozens of retreats, missions trips, and summer camps.
Now, they're just the king of useless bloatware, have just as much plastic as Acer, and still command the premium price tag. It's not worth buying a Vaio for any reason other than the form factor - it's like Sony thinks they're Apple except haven't taken note of the fact that product announcement keynotes don't generate any buzz.
A few quick examples; I typed this out already then my tab crashed >.
-I saw an ad for Sprint on TV. While it didn't immediately prompt a purchase, it was relevant to me as a soon-to-be T-Mobile refugee. I didn't lay any money out, but I did look at their website for a phone and schedule some time to stop at a retail store to get additional information. It's not that I didn't know that Sprint existed, but it did bring the company to the forefront of my mind at an opportune time.
-My dad and I were considering going to the movies last night. While I wasn't aware of anything I wanted to see, he suggested a film that looked interesting and I ended up really liking. He knew about it because of an ad he saw that I did not.
Most level-headed, reasonable marketers (I know, I know) aren't blind to the fact that an ad will only generate a few immediate sales as a direct result of the ad. Few companies who run TV ads are completely unknown to the people watching them. GoDaddy doesn't have their famous Super Bowl commercials to get the Slashdot crowd to buy a domain or hosting account, they run them so that they're the only web hosting company the average person thinks of when they think of their service. Ford doesn't run commercials to let people know they exist or to generate a sale from a person who isn't car shopping, but they do intend to make it an overall part of a larger campaign where Ford is at the forefront of the person's mind when they *do* find themselves car shopping, or so that someone looking to replace their car next month will take a serious look at Ford as opposed to simply buying the Nissan they were originally planning on getting.
But it wasn't the whole puzzle. Sure, T-Mobile lost some customers to the iPhone over the years, but so did Verizon. The problem is that they were impacted more because they had a smaller number of customers to begin with.
T-Mobile had a particular niche that they served better than anyone else - the deaf community. Rag on the Sidekick all you want, but not only did they work better for the deaf community through pervasive TTY services, they had a specific plan for it, too. They just killed that service, effectively making enemies of some of their most fiercely loyal customers. Similarly, T-Mobile was known for not putting pressure on the handset OEMs to provide Android updates; it's among the most common complaints of Samsung owners.
T-Mobile tried competing with AT&T on the same merits that AT&T used to compete with Verizon. This was foundationally problematic, because they didn't stick to their strengths. "No data overage fees, ever" - that's all they had to say, and they would have had PLENTY of people who have had the pleasure of disputing $300-$800 of data overages. They could have implemented a spending cap to prevent outrageous bills, better advertised their international wi-fi calling, better advertised their bring-your-own-phone programs, and done something like "If you don't love us in 60 days, we'll refund every dime and help you go back to your old service, no questions asked". While I've heard a bad customer service story here and there for T-Mobile, my eight years of being a customer there have been an absolute pleasure. If they advertised that aspect of it, they might have been able to change some minds instead of trying to say "we can do what the iPhone does too"
It probably wouldn't have hurt to make it known that all the handsets they featured in their commercials run Android, just like the Verizon handsets, because lots of people think Android==Droid==Verizon Exclusive.
The fine article is correct in saying that T-Mobile couldn't compete with the iPhone at the hip-handset level. It fails to mention that there were plenty of other places where T-Mobile could have competed against AT&T and Verizon and won out, but didn't.
#While I'm making armchair predictions, Verizon will buy Sprint within the next two years.
I can see that happening. Sprint continues to hemorrhage customers and money for 18 months. Both AT&T and Verizon bid to buy it. Verizon screams anti-trust concerns and blocks AT&T bid. Verizon walks away with Sprint for pennies on the dollar. Verizon wins.
Sprint is going to be a big wild card here. Many, MANY people I know on T-Mo are customers precisely because they don't want to be on AT&T or Verizon. Sprint is the natural choice for these customers, so the carrier will likely experience higher-than-normal growth once the deal goes through as they register new accounts from long time T-Mobile customers who see them as the least corrupt. If a third of T-Mobile's customer base goes to Sprint, they'll still be in third place, but it could be a minority respectable enough to make a buyout either extremely expensive, or yield such market share that buying out the DoJ becomes prohibitively expensive for either Big Red or Ma Bell.
http://androidforums.com/lounge/82363-why-cdma-better-than-gsm.html
Admittedtly a forum post, but quite informative and worth saying "hrm...maybe CDMA did a thing or two right".
Interim spectrum. Ultimately, that's what this is about.
1.) AT&T buys T-Mobile, issues new 3G handsets to present subscribers (or lets die-hards stick to EDGE).
2.) AT&T&T kills the HSPA+ network, starts work on LTE on the formerly HSPA+ network.
3.) AT&T&T now has 3G on their present frequencies, 4G on the T-Mobile spectrum they bought, no downtime in the interim, more customers, and fewer competition.
4.) Profit!!!
5.) Repeat steps 1-4 for 5G.
It's going to take a while to find traction.
That's a problem. If you can't show strong sales out of the gate (which both iPhone and Android did)
The iPhone did...but it also had the benefit of having plenty of pre-announcement hype along with the installed base of iPods. The original iPhone could best be described as a touch screen feature phone with an iPod. It got all kinds of initial sales because of that fact. Note that the first year or so of its release, the 'apps' were all in the browser - over EDGE.
Android, on the other hand, had a very different road to the market. It took them nearly seven months to sell a million of HTC G1's. Android's more mainstream success took place when Verizon spent a cool billion advertising the Motorola Droid, billing it as an iPhone replacement, and targeted that ad campaign to people who had some iPhone lust but were too loyal to the Verizon network to jump to AT&T's ship, which by then had plenty of bad press of its own. For some time there, having a Droid had a decent amount of caché, and really raised sea level for Android handsets for Sprint and T-Mobile as well.
HTC and Samsung didn't sit on their laurels and watch Motorola beat them at their own game, either. All three companies have released handset after handset running the OS, on every carrier (including prepaids), and all have had plenty of carrier support (All three companies have been featured in various carrier adverts), so android's got the quantity aspect running for them.
My point is that the two platforms took very different roads to their respective success. But you're right in that Microsoft has to do better with their ecosystem to entice users. The Zune music/video store looks pretty good, but the iTunes lock-in is very similar to the Windows lock-in. Many of my friends have some pretty meticulously curated iTunes libraries, complete with ratings, playlists, categories, and all that other data that is, in many cases, just as valuable as the audio tracks themselves. Finally, long-time iPod touch/iPhone/Android owners likely have a few tens of dollars worth of apps that won't be compatible with the new system. What Microsoft could do here is to entice/coerce/subsidize developers that have cross-platform applications to provide free copies of paid apps on other platforms. Microsoft is playing this the way Apple did, trying to leverage users of one product (iTunes/iPod) to seamlessly migrate to their phone offering. Zune never achieved a sufficient critical mass to make Zune users their best early adopting crowd, Windows Mobile 6.5 veterans like myself would be quick to miss all the WM6.5 features we use frequently (Swype, Mass Storage, Remote Desktop, Desktop Outlook sync, apps purchased for *that* platform), and desktop Windows has no more leverage for WP7 than Android or iOS do, leaving them with Sharepoint (a business subset that's likely already locked into RIM) and Xbox, which is the closest they've got, but still an uphill battle to leverage if the teenage crowd is also iTunes locked in and the phones have a mandatory $30/month data plan that mom and dad likely won't want to pay and the teens themselves probably don't want to part with that much of their allowance to pay for.
The OS has potential. it CAN work if MS treats it as if they're breaking new ground and have nothing to leverage - but THAT is an attitude that they're a bit out of practice having.
Kill them with fire!!!
You lack creativity and have too much compassion. The correct way to deal with the situation is to subject all RIAA/MPAA lawyers to a continual stream of the very movies and music they're responsible for 'protecting' via legislation.
the worst part of Winzip is that Corel got their hands on it. IMO I'd almost say that their best move would have been to drag MS to court over integrated zip file handling in the same way Netscape did, especially since Corel had case law on their side to boot. Instead, they attempted to keep enticing upgraders with release after release that just did more and more useless stuff. Now, it's essentially turned into Norton Utilities.
WinDVD is the same way, and they don't really offer a 'lite' version either. ugh. I'm convinced that Corel can't churn out efficient code to save its life.
This video is about the best description of the problem I've seen. If you can't read the fine article, watch the fine video.
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with those things. We have three of them at work, while I have a BuffaloTech WZR-300NH at home.
While I'm a fan of installable, offline applications for roughly 98% of circumstances, router configs are def a task best left to a browser. Apple routers require an installable application to be used. I've had issues with the client connecting to a misconfigured router, and the trick of forcing it to connect to an IP is known by half the applecare reps I spoke to (admittedly a sample size of two).
At the same time,the client is REALLY nice in that it makes exporting and importing configuration profiles real quick work. When I wanted to set up the third AP, I dialed into router 2, downloaded the config, imported it to the new unit, changed the name, and I was done in less than 90 seconds.
The transceivers in those things are incredibly powerful, so w00tness to that. They're generally low maintenance, and their color coded LED is generally easier to figure out the status from further away than the more standard lineup of LEDs whose labels can't be read further than half an arm's length away.
On the flip side, the Buffalotech router allows for USB printer and hard disk sharing, has an official, Buffalo-supported DD-WRT upgrade path, has an integrated bittorrent client (though only on the stock firmware, not dd-wrt unless you install deluge via SSH), and about a dozen other fun widgets, and costs a little over 1/3 the price of the Apple gear.
I like them both. I still think the Airport needs a browser config though.
I watched most of the video, though admittedly I did scrub a bit around the 12 minute mark. Here's what I took from it in no particular order...
-The presenter shows an old school Linksys router as an example of complicated networking. Interesting choice, since I remember those things being literally plug and play, without so much as a driver install required. Admittedly it wasn't SECURE out of the box, but they did work. By contrast, the new Valet routers and other things designed to make wireless networking simpler appear to make it even more complicated by requiring a software installation and making the browser interface even more annoying to parse. Call me biased by my muscle memory, but the concept of "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler" seems to have been lost on this gentleman. IMO I think the better example of this would have been Windows Home Server, which was a great idea that was simply leaned far too much closer to 'server' than 'home for most people...but the most widely available ones were HP Mediasmart Servers, so showing them off would have been a better idea technologically, but not from the presenter's POV.
-I, for one, think that having Fossil make the watch and it having a more traditional look is a GOOD thing. In 2011, the only reason why people wear wristwatches anymore are as fashion accessories. Telling time is done by the 1,001 other devices that have clocks on them, e.g. every other device in the product photo. I also think that this is a better choice than the phone because if they can get the battery life to be where it needs to be, you're much more likely to have a charged watch than a charged phone, and the phone doesn't have to have its processor backgrounding all the sync work that would be the death wish for actually making calls, especially since there seemed to be an ever-so-subtle nod that the phone will be responsible for providing internet connectivity to the rest of the PAN. If you're running a vertical HP stack, it makes sense to make the watch target the board room instead of the server room. The gen pop at Slashdot has no issue beating devices into synchronization if we care enough to do it. Getting board room execs to start fawning over HP kit instead of Apple kit is ultimately what they appear to be after, but I'll touch on Apple envy in a bit.
-The presenter discusses the issue of syncing all your devices together and that the Metal Watch is the point of contact for them. This sounds good in the tone of the overall broad vision he's casting, but the nuts and bolts get complicated VERY quickly. Metal Watch might run a complete software stack, but you can't make it as simple as he claims. How do you assign a watch to its owner? Browser config? great! How do you assign devices to the watch? More browser config? a bit chicken-and-egg there, but it's either that or the just-as-fun process of doing a Bluetooth sync between devices. If the watch is the key to the whole thing, how do you protect it, since it will likely be a prime target for theft if it can re-sync everything to new devices? If it's not, then what's the point? If a watch is damaged, how does one migrate all the aggregate data from each of the devices to the new watch? More browser config? Does the watch literally sync everything it can find? Either HP Labs have figured out how to put Deep Thought onto a wrist, or at some point, the user must tell the watch what to do. He talks about computers making smarter decisions, and I think they will ultimately be able to do so, but I for one am NOT a fan of relinquishing control to a computer just yet.
-As was brought up before, how does one charge the watch? What if it dies mid-day? I'd think that at least one quick solution would be to have an 'emergency juice cable' that can charge any device from any other device - powering the watch from a laptop or using the tablet as a jumper cable to make an emergency call from a dead phone would be an excellent feature to have, but it must be considered since there's no way that a watch battery is
Does that mean the government will bail out Facebook to protect our memories?
If I were the tin foil hat type, my answer would be the following:
No, they'll bail Facebook out to protect the single simplest means of protecting their ability to aggregate data about the population that has ever existed.
do we have a word for distributed local back-ups yet? Crowd-storage sounds kind of lame
Bittorrent tracker?
Don't forget the slim body and the tiny power brick that, for reasons I'll never understand, hasn't been copied by the rest of the industry.
At least a part of that is likely because they require somewhat more wattage. My last several laptops have required more wattage in them than the Macbook adapters are putting out. I would agree that there's less of an excuse for the thin-and-light segment where the power requirements are comparable.
The system isn't really that old - we bought it in 2003. What made the thing so stupidly expensive is that it's a matrix switcher - it takes twelve inputs and routes them between eight outputs. We use that in conjunction with a Panasonic MX-50 video mixer which we also bought around that time.
Did *your* laptop have an HDMI output in 2003? few, if any, did until closer to 2007 or 2008, which is NOT the same as waiting a week or two to get a bit more RAM. As I said in some other reply, it was simply a matter of bad timing for a set of investments of that magnitude.
The thing is that plenty of things need to be replaced ANYWAY...
-The projectors have always had a slightly bluish-purple hue to it. No one raised a stink except for us tech people, so we've toughed it out for the past five years with them.
-the video mixer we have has half its channels working in black-and-white mode only. It needs to be replaced.
-None of our cameras are capable of genlocking or outputting to anything above component. Our broadcast-grade camera only outputs composite.
Mix it all together and my laptop is merely the straw that broke the camel's back to get the conversation going once we realized that we were stuck using a two-year-old laptop instead of my brand new Core i7 machine to run our media presentation software which greatly benefits from higher end hardware, simply because mine didn't have the correct output.
With regards to the sanctuary computer, it's only two years old and was a $1,200 custom build at the time. 4GB of RAM, the highest end Core 2 Duo available at the time, three hard disks,dual DVD burners, dual Geforce 8700s...the thing can still hold its own today, so there's no real need to replace it. The other machines we use on a mostly-permanent basis fit the bill here as well, but things get REALLY complicated when cameras and real-time mixing are brought into the picture for the special events we do.
I do, in fact, want DisplayPort. It simply wasn't an option on my Origin Eon 17 laptop. I also wasn't going to make it a dealbreaking criterion, either. Besides, standardizing on HDMI is a much better idea than DisplayPort - HDMI is more widely used, adapters are more diverse, and hundred-foot cable runs are 1.) possible and 2.) aren't impossible to find.
I was looking at it for that reason; I intend on doing further research into its potential. Thanks for the reminder.
Honestly, Why do churches try to get into multimedia and then fail to budget for it?
Behold, the sentiments of everyone on the tech crew, and the people who have to deal with us. The problem is that all the bean counters in the accounting office see is that a $12,000 investment only lasted them 5 years, leading them to believe that such funds are better spent elsewhere. It didn't help that our major investments in this regard happened RIGHT before HD video had hit critical mass.
A VGA->RCA converter is what we're presently using - we've got a rack-mounted switcher/scaler in the main sanctuary that does this, and a more portable, old-but-quite-usable Grand Ultraview that we use for out-of-building events. It's the present setup, but I've had laptops come through the doors that only had an HDMI output. While our tech crew has always been resilient in finding workarounds, the increasing number of cases like these are leading us to start pressuring for a proper, more modern system.
From what I understand (i.e. what i read the last time this technology was discussed on Slashdot), what makes Lightpeak so interesting is that you can run basically anything else over it. I'm running mad looking for an HDMI-to-RCA downscaler - my laptop has HDMI and DVI outputs, but my church's $12,000 switching/scaling system only does composite. Since replacing literally every piece of gear in the chain would be required to plug in an HDMI natively and the church isn't looking to spend around $100,000 for HDMI/SDI cameras, projectors, switchers, mixers, scalers, and cable runs at the moment, it makes more sense to scale down the laptop instead. From what I understand about Lightpeak, it'd be possible to use one of these $30 adapters to turn a Lightpeak connector into an RCA output instead of having to use a $700 downscaler. Yeah, i can def dig that.
While Apple may go lightpeak-or-bust, the PC side hasn't completely ditched everything else for USB - I still have firewire, HDMI, DVI, and Ethernet. Other laptops in my immediate vicinity have VGA and Expresscard available as well.
I use one quite frequently to get files from my storage server at home. Nothing I'm transferring is THAT sensitive that I need the encryption layer, plus it's easy as hell to implement with Filezilla Server.
Actually, I had an interesting case a few weeks ago where a client of mine was FINALLY ditching their Windows 98 machine in lieu of a much newer machine - Core i7, 8GB of RAM, 2TBytes of storage, the works. Anyway, their Win98 machine has been beyond repair for months, and BSODs at basically anything, including using a garden variety Samba share. It was pretty convenient to use the Filezilla client/server combo to migrate their data off the machine.