If Apple fucks over creatives, we're leaving and not coming back.
That's funny. I worked in advertising for 13 years, Apple has been reaming creatives for years. At first it was the shitty pre-G3 CPU machines and operating system which were slower than Intel and froze all the time.
Once they went G3, it was still the crummy MacOS with its fake multitasking which crashed and froze all the time.
Then they fucked them over with a couple of beta releases (10.0, 10.1, 10.2) of OS X where printing didn't work reliably and you still had problems with app crashes and other instability.
Once THAT was fixed, they were still flogging end users with slow processors that weren't competitive with Intel CPUs.
Then they switched to Intel CPUs and have done decent job of late, but it seems pretty apparent to me that they don't really care too much about the desktop side of the business, it's really an iPhone/iPad company. So the fucking returns.
This isn't apparent with things like the iPad because it's a tightly controlled and heavily curated experience.
It's entirely apparent on the iPad with sites that are very heavy with Javascript.
When typing a reader response on my iPad on NYTimes.Com the iPad 3 can barely keep up thanks to a shit ton of Javascript running. Netflix.com is even worse and barely usable (the native app doesn't allow you to manage your disc queue).
What's kind of funny is that when I got the iPad 3 it replaced a 1 and these kinds of sites seemed faster than they are today. I'm not sure if its the change from iPad 1 to 3, or if iPad 3s finally hit some critical mass among web developers and they figured they could crank up the amount of Javascript they throw at iPads.
I wonder if Apple figured that the Mini would be going predominantly to people who:
1) Own an iPhone but not an iPad 2) Previous version iPad owners looking for a smaller device upgrade 3) iDevice completists who want to own one or more of each
Each of these groups will buy less content over time because they already have a lot of apps and other content on their other devices; the Mini simply becomes yet another consumption device and they will not be buying more content specifically for the mini, hence the margin is higher than it would otherwise be for 'primary' devices.
I own an iPhone and iPad 3 but had little interest in the Mini due to hardware specs and lack of a reason to own one outside of curiosity. However, had they included telephony (with the option to take my iPhone 5 SIM...) I might have been interested as it would have been an interesting compromise device when traveling or away from home when the Phone would be too tedious for books or movies and an iPad would have been too big/fragile.
I don't use any GPS navigation and generally only used the old Maps app for the "last mile" location of someplace new and obscure. It worked well enough but occasionally didn't get addresses right or couldn't find an address for some new office park-type development.
Since the change, I've started using turn-by-turn to see how "bad" it is. Every time I've done so, the directions have been perfect, down to the side of the road where a location was.
I used it the other day (actually kind of relying on it) to find a specific business in one of those awful suburban shopping areas where you have 10 different strip malls all connected by a maze of weird streets, some one-way. Perfect.
About the only gripe I've had is that it seems to prefer to call roads that have a numeric designation by a road name that nobody uses. US 169 in Chaska was referred to as "Johnson Memorial Highway" (which I think it is, but there's little if any signage that uses this) and MN 41 was called "Chestnut Street" when the signage mostly refers to it as MN 41.
I'm kind of baffled by the relentless complaints about it. A friend in NYC complained about the transit info, but based on my last trip there Google's subway info was not very good compared to that of a dedicated app tied into MTA info (iTrans NYC, which was so good it would tell you what subway entrances and exits were best suited to your overall trip).
Me too, I'd kind of like them to stay in business at least for continuing firmware updates on my six month old 70" Aquos. There were two updates in the last month, and I'm sure the second was to fix issues in the first, but I never noticed.
I don't really use the "smart" features of the TV (although I do have it networked) since I have so many other "smart" devices (Tivo, AppleTV, etc).
But I'd hate for something major to happen like some HDMI protocol change that newer boxes started using that my TV didn't understand.
It really all boils down to some fat fuck in management or ownership and only gives a shit about how much cash he can wring out of the operation.
They keep the browser at some old version because their application doesn't work in newer browsers and licensing a new version or doing the development on a new version would cost money.
I would assume vacuum sealing would be key, since by definition a sealed container with a strong vacuum would not leak any airborne particles, or at least do so only extremely slowly. I have a consumer vacuum sealer and I've noticed that if I do it right and am sealing something dry (which results in better seal) that it appears to retain the vacuum for YEARS (I have some leather goods I don't use that I sealed to keep from dry rotting) with no apparent loss of vacuum. I would assume a commercial vacuum sealer or a high-end retail one that can both seal better and draw a stronger vacuum.
I figure the process would be:
Wearing rubber gloves, seal items in vacuum bag. Place bag in temporary holding bag.
Dispose of gloves. Wash work surface with soap and water and then alcohol.
Wearing new gloves, remove sealed bag and dispose of temporary hold bag. Wash sealed bag with soap and water. Dry. Dispose of gloves, wear new gloves. Wipe cleaned bag with alcohol. Place in new temporary holding bag, wear new gloves and re-wash work surface as above.
Dispose and wear new gloves. Seal existing bag in new vacuum bag with the same cleaning regime.
I think with the bag outside washed and double-vacuumed it'd be hard to see how a dog could detect anything inside. There may be some benefit to triple sealing as a safety measure or lining the inside of the second bag with activated charcoal as an absorbent.
It seems do-able if you're willing and able to put effort into it, but probably not practical for somebody who just wants to bring something to a concert or something.
I caught part of a Mythbusters where they were trying to trick a sniffer dog and they failed to (the only part I saw involved the target stashed in a diaper bag with dirty diapers).
Are they good enough to beat vacuum sealing? Is there a scent that they find repulsive enough they will avoid it?
What about ultrasonics? I head a story from an ex-Navy guy who flew on an E2-D Hawkeye (a kind of AWACS plane).
He said whenever they would land at an airbase, they would run drug dogs around the plane. But there was one side of the plane that had a turbine that ran when the plane was parked to keep the air conditioning and computers functioning. He said the dogs always avoided getting close to the turbine because the whine produced noise they didn't like.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
We don't believe that anyone has to "invent" these rights -- we are BORN possessing them. That's why we chose to be citizens and you guys chose to instead be "subjects" whose rights and liberties are those granted to you by your monarch.
This is a very significant difference. Enjoy your Orwellian surveillance state.
I think it depends on how exclusively the dog was trained.
Our scout troop just had a local city police dog & handler in for a show-and-tell (show-and-smell?). This dog was trained for all manner of work -- search, catch-the-runner, and drug detection (among other things).
My suspicion is that a dog trained exclusively for drug (or bomb or whatever) detection would also get a lot of training in distraction avoidance because after the dog got good at drug detection in a controlled environment they would continually ratchet up the distraction level as they kept training the detection skills. Basically the dog becomes an expert at detection and at ignoring distractions.
Whereas a dog trained for a broader amount of tasks may be more easily distracted because the breadth of training required doesn't permit them to make the dog really good at detection AND distraction avoidance simultaneously. I can see where this type of dog could be thrown off balance if enough distraction was thrown at it.
That would work, but it runs into the class system at most companies, where it's a nearly iron-clad rule that your place on the org chart is a key determinant of your salary, not your skill. So companies stop giving salary increases to people really good at their jobs and instead require them to get promoted in order to earn more money.
You could have some employee X who is really good at their job, is highly knowledgeable, reliable, long term of service but "can't" pay that person more money because they would then be earning more than their manager.
So you end up with a system where people who are really good at their jobs are more or less forced to "go into management" to continue to get salary increases beyond the middling COLAs most companies offer.
IMHO, there's a lot of pretty ridiculous and toxic ideas tied up in this. It seems to imply that the workers, regardless of their talents, really aren't responsible for their work and that their boss is somehow responsible for everything. This of course trickles up which is why you have CEOs telling you how indispensable they are, as if one person was responsible for getting everything of value done at a multinational corporation.
I don't understand why they don't use hard chrome or even nickel plating.
Both materials stand up well when used on firearms and the wear and tear resistance on barrels, breeches and chambers is outstanding, especially hard chrome.
...because you'd sound pretty fucking crazy sitting in a flying airplane denying Newtonian physics and most every man-made object in the modern world relies on chemistry to make it -- plastics, composites, even metals.
Those two fields start out so far ahead in working, every day examples of their basic truths that challenging their more exotic variants seems risky and many of them are too complex for the drooling religious zealots to even begin to criticize.
Evolution doesn't have those kind of concrete, hands-on examples in every day life (well, OK it does, but...). To most people it's been distilled down to MAN USED TO BE A MONKEY AND GOD DIDN'T CREATE HIM BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD AND THAT MEANS GAY MARRIAGE IS OK and they just can't accept that.
The problem with these kinds of ethanol stories isn't that they claim they can replace all the energy -- you're right, they never make this claim outright.
The problem is that they perpetuate the fiction that ethanol is any kind of an energy solution outside of some post-apocalyptic story where some last-man-on-Earth type runs a wood-fired still to produce tiny quantities of alcohol for his last-motorbike-on-Earth.
The ethanol industry wants to keep inundating us with all this "free" stuff that can be turned into ethanol so that they can keep alive the idea that it using more energy to make energy makes sense and show some kind of dollar-cost advantage (it's NEVER shown to be energy positive) over oil.
I do hope that if the Surface succeeds on some level it will be partly due to the removable storage and the peripheral support via USB.
I really like my iPad (bought a 1 when they came out, bought a 3 this summer) but I find putting content on it, regardless of the source, clumsy if the only way to do is either via wifi (through GoodReader, or other similar apps that let you load data this way) or via iTunes. Support for external storage in some manner or other would be a lot more convenient -- I could stick a dozen movies on a 64 GB usb stick or SD card and not have to worry about draining all my internal storage.
I can almost buy into the party line of no USB ports for peripherals. Almost, but not quite. I'd like to see at least allowing in-app support for USB peripherals.
I get it (which is sad, kind of) for general purpose iPad apps (home screen, Apple apps, etc) but it'd be really nice as a controller for RDP/VNC/X apps and make a lot of games more playable on the iPad.
With a BT keyboard and mouse, I could really get a lot of shit done with RDP and my iPad. It's kind of OK with just a BT keyboard, but having to touch the screen for mousing is super inefficient.
True, but I'm starting my 11th year with a Tivo, and I seldom watch anything "live" except for those rare times when my wife wants to invite people over for sports (which we never watch ourselves...) or when she insists on watching something we already record "live".
When she does that, I can't even get her to start with a 15 minute delay so we can at least FF through about half the commercial breaks before we catch up to real time.
Personally, I kind of wish there was something like Tivo for broadcast TV & cable that enabled you to record any program on any channel without a monthly subscription but that was "pay-per-view", so I only paid for actually watching a specific episode or show.
Over the long haul, I probably can't manage more than about 6 hours of TV viewing anyway, regardless of the source, due to time conflicts with the kids and other activities. Even at iTunes current season per episode pricing, I'd at least feel like I was getting my money's worth and I would probably not watch some of the marginal network shows like Revolution and watch more HBO/Showtime type shows that I otherwise wade through on my 2-disc-at-a-time Netflix account.
If you watch 8 episodes of current TV via iTunes per week you're talking $24 per week, which is $96, about what I pay for whatever digital-plus-without-premium package my wife signed us up for,
If saving money was the goal, you'd probably be better off to limiting yourself to 2-3 episodes of current TV and beefing up a Netflix subscription to 4 discs at a time.
Usually with DVDs and BluRays it's all tied in with licensing the name "DVD" or "BluRay" and being issued a key capable of decrypting the content. In order to do those things (the key being most important...) you have to agree to all the other shit they want (ie, Macrovision on analog ports, etc).
You can buy machines without these features, but they're usually systems with hacked firmware or total low-end Chinese junk.
VMware would solve a lot of their own problems and probably streamline support if they would support vCenter as a canned Linux appliance installable as a VM or on bare metal.
I can't imagine the development overhead they must have to deal with to come up with all those Windows binaries, especially when they don't bother to leverage IIS or other inbuilt Windows services.
And then there is the support factor in dealing with brain damaged broken platforms people try to run vCenter on.
It's not pretty, but I've seen Exchange 2010 with a small userbase run in what would probably be a "large instance". With a three year commitment plus upfront costs, it looks like that would run you about $4000.
Even if you called it $8000, that's still not a bad price relative to what $8000 would buy you in terms of physical PC hardware, internet connectivity and stability and reliability (of infrastructure, not Exchange) over a three year period.
A colleague was pricing new blades for an HP BladeCenter and they were nearly $20k.
I was surprised to read the Wikipedia blurb on EC2 to find they supported booting Windows 2008 images, I had assumed it was an "app engine" for some kind of web serving, and not the kind of virtualization you normally associate with VMware.
Does this mean that a company could theoretically run AD/Exchange from EC2? Skip over the usual hosting option and run it straight from there? I'm sure the pricing wouldn't be as good as a "pure" hosted Exchange solution per se, but you'd have the horsepower of Amazon.
Are people actually using it this way or is it generally only for hosting web servers?
How much innovation do you want on a per-release basis? I think they did a lot -- newer, larger screen, thinner design, completely new interface port (with zero adapters available until some started shipping YESTERDAY), completely new mapping system.
That's a lot of "innovation" even if it doesn't necessarily translate into new, glitzy things you want or substantial, obvious changes. An MMC slot would have been nice, but Apple really doesn't/hasn't supported external storage as a matter of policy/design philosophy. It's purposeful, not because they don't know how.
And they have to balance substantial changes against consumer desire -- if the 4/4S was very popular, it's a reach to assume that Apple could sell a radically different physical device or one with some other radical change.
IMHO, smartphones generally are kind of running out of obvious, low-hanging fruit without some substantial leaps technology and functionality wise. The thing I'm waiting for is a wireless (NOT 802.11) display protocol that enables touch functionality on a larger, external display.
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I haven't owned a 2 so I can't say, but I know its much faster than the 1 I had before, which seemed too slow not long after I got it.
I would think that 2x RAM and better CPU would give it some performance advantage, but I don't know for sure.
If Apple fucks over creatives, we're leaving and not coming back.
That's funny. I worked in advertising for 13 years, Apple has been reaming creatives for years. At first it was the shitty pre-G3 CPU machines and operating system which were slower than Intel and froze all the time.
Once they went G3, it was still the crummy MacOS with its fake multitasking which crashed and froze all the time.
Then they fucked them over with a couple of beta releases (10.0, 10.1, 10.2) of OS X where printing didn't work reliably and you still had problems with app crashes and other instability.
Once THAT was fixed, they were still flogging end users with slow processors that weren't competitive with Intel CPUs.
Then they switched to Intel CPUs and have done decent job of late, but it seems pretty apparent to me that they don't really care too much about the desktop side of the business, it's really an iPhone/iPad company. So the fucking returns.
And yet the creatives keep coming back...
This isn't apparent with things like the iPad because it's a tightly controlled and heavily curated experience.
It's entirely apparent on the iPad with sites that are very heavy with Javascript.
When typing a reader response on my iPad on NYTimes.Com the iPad 3 can barely keep up thanks to a shit ton of Javascript running. Netflix.com is even worse and barely usable (the native app doesn't allow you to manage your disc queue).
What's kind of funny is that when I got the iPad 3 it replaced a 1 and these kinds of sites seemed faster than they are today. I'm not sure if its the change from iPad 1 to 3, or if iPad 3s finally hit some critical mass among web developers and they figured they could crank up the amount of Javascript they throw at iPads.
I wonder if Apple figured that the Mini would be going predominantly to people who:
1) Own an iPhone but not an iPad
2) Previous version iPad owners looking for a smaller device upgrade
3) iDevice completists who want to own one or more of each
Each of these groups will buy less content over time because they already have a lot of apps and other content on their other devices; the Mini simply becomes yet another consumption device and they will not be buying more content specifically for the mini, hence the margin is higher than it would otherwise be for 'primary' devices.
I own an iPhone and iPad 3 but had little interest in the Mini due to hardware specs and lack of a reason to own one outside of curiosity. However, had they included telephony (with the option to take my iPhone 5 SIM...) I might have been interested as it would have been an interesting compromise device when traveling or away from home when the Phone would be too tedious for books or movies and an iPad would have been too big/fragile.
I don't use any GPS navigation and generally only used the old Maps app for the "last mile" location of someplace new and obscure. It worked well enough but occasionally didn't get addresses right or couldn't find an address for some new office park-type development.
Since the change, I've started using turn-by-turn to see how "bad" it is. Every time I've done so, the directions have been perfect, down to the side of the road where a location was.
I used it the other day (actually kind of relying on it) to find a specific business in one of those awful suburban shopping areas where you have 10 different strip malls all connected by a maze of weird streets, some one-way. Perfect.
About the only gripe I've had is that it seems to prefer to call roads that have a numeric designation by a road name that nobody uses. US 169 in Chaska was referred to as "Johnson Memorial Highway" (which I think it is, but there's little if any signage that uses this) and MN 41 was called "Chestnut Street" when the signage mostly refers to it as MN 41.
I'm kind of baffled by the relentless complaints about it. A friend in NYC complained about the transit info, but based on my last trip there Google's subway info was not very good compared to that of a dedicated app tied into MTA info (iTrans NYC, which was so good it would tell you what subway entrances and exits were best suited to your overall trip).
Me too, I'd kind of like them to stay in business at least for continuing firmware updates on my six month old 70" Aquos. There were two updates in the last month, and I'm sure the second was to fix issues in the first, but I never noticed.
I don't really use the "smart" features of the TV (although I do have it networked) since I have so many other "smart" devices (Tivo, AppleTV, etc).
But I'd hate for something major to happen like some HDMI protocol change that newer boxes started using that my TV didn't understand.
It really all boils down to some fat fuck in management or ownership and only gives a shit about how much cash he can wring out of the operation.
They keep the browser at some old version because their application doesn't work in newer browsers and licensing a new version or doing the development on a new version would cost money.
I see this all the time in consulting.
It'd be interesting to try simply as an exercise.
I would assume vacuum sealing would be key, since by definition a sealed container with a strong vacuum would not leak any airborne particles, or at least do so only extremely slowly. I have a consumer vacuum sealer and I've noticed that if I do it right and am sealing something dry (which results in better seal) that it appears to retain the vacuum for YEARS (I have some leather goods I don't use that I sealed to keep from dry rotting) with no apparent loss of vacuum. I would assume a commercial vacuum sealer or a high-end retail one that can both seal better and draw a stronger vacuum.
I figure the process would be:
Wearing rubber gloves, seal items in vacuum bag. Place bag in temporary holding bag.
Dispose of gloves. Wash work surface with soap and water and then alcohol.
Wearing new gloves, remove sealed bag and dispose of temporary hold bag. Wash sealed bag with soap and water. Dry. Dispose of gloves, wear new gloves. Wipe cleaned bag with alcohol. Place in new temporary holding bag, wear new gloves and re-wash work surface as above.
Dispose and wear new gloves. Seal existing bag in new vacuum bag with the same cleaning regime.
I think with the bag outside washed and double-vacuumed it'd be hard to see how a dog could detect anything inside. There may be some benefit to triple sealing as a safety measure or lining the inside of the second bag with activated charcoal as an absorbent.
It seems do-able if you're willing and able to put effort into it, but probably not practical for somebody who just wants to bring something to a concert or something.
I caught part of a Mythbusters where they were trying to trick a sniffer dog and they failed to (the only part I saw involved the target stashed in a diaper bag with dirty diapers).
Are they good enough to beat vacuum sealing? Is there a scent that they find repulsive enough they will avoid it?
What about ultrasonics? I head a story from an ex-Navy guy who flew on an E2-D Hawkeye (a kind of AWACS plane).
He said whenever they would land at an airbase, they would run drug dogs around the plane. But there was one side of the plane that had a turbine that ran when the plane was parked to keep the air conditioning and computers functioning. He said the dogs always avoided getting close to the turbine because the whine produced noise they didn't like.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
We don't believe that anyone has to "invent" these rights -- we are BORN possessing them. That's why we chose to be citizens and you guys chose to instead be "subjects" whose rights and liberties are those granted to you by your monarch.
This is a very significant difference. Enjoy your Orwellian surveillance state.
I think it depends on how exclusively the dog was trained.
Our scout troop just had a local city police dog & handler in for a show-and-tell (show-and-smell?). This dog was trained for all manner of work -- search, catch-the-runner, and drug detection (among other things).
My suspicion is that a dog trained exclusively for drug (or bomb or whatever) detection would also get a lot of training in distraction avoidance because after the dog got good at drug detection in a controlled environment they would continually ratchet up the distraction level as they kept training the detection skills. Basically the dog becomes an expert at detection and at ignoring distractions.
Whereas a dog trained for a broader amount of tasks may be more easily distracted because the breadth of training required doesn't permit them to make the dog really good at detection AND distraction avoidance simultaneously. I can see where this type of dog could be thrown off balance if enough distraction was thrown at it.
That would work, but it runs into the class system at most companies, where it's a nearly iron-clad rule that your place on the org chart is a key determinant of your salary, not your skill. So companies stop giving salary increases to people really good at their jobs and instead require them to get promoted in order to earn more money.
You could have some employee X who is really good at their job, is highly knowledgeable, reliable, long term of service but "can't" pay that person more money because they would then be earning more than their manager.
So you end up with a system where people who are really good at their jobs are more or less forced to "go into management" to continue to get salary increases beyond the middling COLAs most companies offer.
IMHO, there's a lot of pretty ridiculous and toxic ideas tied up in this. It seems to imply that the workers, regardless of their talents, really aren't responsible for their work and that their boss is somehow responsible for everything. This of course trickles up which is why you have CEOs telling you how indispensable they are, as if one person was responsible for getting everything of value done at a multinational corporation.
I don't understand why they don't use hard chrome or even nickel plating.
Both materials stand up well when used on firearms and the wear and tear resistance on barrels, breeches and chambers is outstanding, especially hard chrome.
...because you'd sound pretty fucking crazy sitting in a flying airplane denying Newtonian physics and most every man-made object in the modern world relies on chemistry to make it -- plastics, composites, even metals.
Those two fields start out so far ahead in working, every day examples of their basic truths that challenging their more exotic variants seems risky and many of them are too complex for the drooling religious zealots to even begin to criticize.
Evolution doesn't have those kind of concrete, hands-on examples in every day life (well, OK it does, but...). To most people it's been distilled down to MAN USED TO BE A MONKEY AND GOD DIDN'T CREATE HIM BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD AND THAT MEANS GAY MARRIAGE IS OK and they just can't accept that.
The problem with these kinds of ethanol stories isn't that they claim they can replace all the energy -- you're right, they never make this claim outright.
The problem is that they perpetuate the fiction that ethanol is any kind of an energy solution outside of some post-apocalyptic story where some last-man-on-Earth type runs a wood-fired still to produce tiny quantities of alcohol for his last-motorbike-on-Earth.
The ethanol industry wants to keep inundating us with all this "free" stuff that can be turned into ethanol so that they can keep alive the idea that it using more energy to make energy makes sense and show some kind of dollar-cost advantage (it's NEVER shown to be energy positive) over oil.
I do hope that if the Surface succeeds on some level it will be partly due to the removable storage and the peripheral support via USB.
I really like my iPad (bought a 1 when they came out, bought a 3 this summer) but I find putting content on it, regardless of the source, clumsy if the only way to do is either via wifi (through GoodReader, or other similar apps that let you load data this way) or via iTunes. Support for external storage in some manner or other would be a lot more convenient -- I could stick a dozen movies on a 64 GB usb stick or SD card and not have to worry about draining all my internal storage.
I can almost buy into the party line of no USB ports for peripherals. Almost, but not quite. I'd like to see at least allowing in-app support for USB peripherals.
Won't Apple allow bluetooth mouse functionality?
I get it (which is sad, kind of) for general purpose iPad apps (home screen, Apple apps, etc) but it'd be really nice as a controller for RDP/VNC/X apps and make a lot of games more playable on the iPad.
With a BT keyboard and mouse, I could really get a lot of shit done with RDP and my iPad. It's kind of OK with just a BT keyboard, but having to touch the screen for mousing is super inefficient.
True, but I'm starting my 11th year with a Tivo, and I seldom watch anything "live" except for those rare times when my wife wants to invite people over for sports (which we never watch ourselves...) or when she insists on watching something we already record "live".
When she does that, I can't even get her to start with a 15 minute delay so we can at least FF through about half the commercial breaks before we catch up to real time.
Personally, I kind of wish there was something like Tivo for broadcast TV & cable that enabled you to record any program on any channel without a monthly subscription but that was "pay-per-view", so I only paid for actually watching a specific episode or show.
Over the long haul, I probably can't manage more than about 6 hours of TV viewing anyway, regardless of the source, due to time conflicts with the kids and other activities. Even at iTunes current season per episode pricing, I'd at least feel like I was getting my money's worth and I would probably not watch some of the marginal network shows like Revolution and watch more HBO/Showtime type shows that I otherwise wade through on my 2-disc-at-a-time Netflix account.
I always wonder about that.
If you watch 8 episodes of current TV via iTunes per week you're talking $24 per week, which is $96, about what I pay for whatever digital-plus-without-premium package my wife signed us up for,
If saving money was the goal, you'd probably be better off to limiting yourself to 2-3 episodes of current TV and beefing up a Netflix subscription to 4 discs at a time.
Usually with DVDs and BluRays it's all tied in with licensing the name "DVD" or "BluRay" and being issued a key capable of decrypting the content. In order to do those things (the key being most important...) you have to agree to all the other shit they want (ie, Macrovision on analog ports, etc).
You can buy machines without these features, but they're usually systems with hacked firmware or total low-end Chinese junk.
VMware would solve a lot of their own problems and probably streamline support if they would support vCenter as a canned Linux appliance installable as a VM or on bare metal.
I can't imagine the development overhead they must have to deal with to come up with all those Windows binaries, especially when they don't bother to leverage IIS or other inbuilt Windows services.
And then there is the support factor in dealing with brain damaged broken platforms people try to run vCenter on.
I guess it all depends on what you needed to do.
It's not pretty, but I've seen Exchange 2010 with a small userbase run in what would probably be a "large instance". With a three year commitment plus upfront costs, it looks like that would run you about $4000.
Even if you called it $8000, that's still not a bad price relative to what $8000 would buy you in terms of physical PC hardware, internet connectivity and stability and reliability (of infrastructure, not Exchange) over a three year period.
A colleague was pricing new blades for an HP BladeCenter and they were nearly $20k.
Or is it merely "web application" virtualization?
I was surprised to read the Wikipedia blurb on EC2 to find they supported booting Windows 2008 images, I had assumed it was an "app engine" for some kind of web serving, and not the kind of virtualization you normally associate with VMware.
Does this mean that a company could theoretically run AD/Exchange from EC2? Skip over the usual hosting option and run it straight from there? I'm sure the pricing wouldn't be as good as a "pure" hosted Exchange solution per se, but you'd have the horsepower of Amazon.
Are people actually using it this way or is it generally only for hosting web servers?
How much innovation do you want on a per-release basis? I think they did a lot -- newer, larger screen, thinner design, completely new interface port (with zero adapters available until some started shipping YESTERDAY), completely new mapping system.
That's a lot of "innovation" even if it doesn't necessarily translate into new, glitzy things you want or substantial, obvious changes. An MMC slot would have been nice, but Apple really doesn't/hasn't supported external storage as a matter of policy/design philosophy. It's purposeful, not because they don't know how.
And they have to balance substantial changes against consumer desire -- if the 4/4S was very popular, it's a reach to assume that Apple could sell a radically different physical device or one with some other radical change.
IMHO, smartphones generally are kind of running out of obvious, low-hanging fruit without some substantial leaps technology and functionality wise. The thing I'm waiting for is a wireless (NOT 802.11) display protocol that enables touch functionality on a larger, external display.
Playing audio is worthless without controls and only marginally more useful without dash display of artist/song/etc.