I had a Cube on my desk at work for several years -- perks of middle management -- and I have to say even running OS9 it was remarkably stable considering all the crap I ran on it. Typical load of running apps: Lotus Notes (notoriously fickle), Explorer, Quark, PageSpinner, Word, NewsEdit (a newspaper text editor) and some shareware mock dock I forget the name of. Maybe crashed once every couple of weeks, usually just a single app.
As they unplugged my Cube, I thought to myself "Farewell Aquarius, and we thank you..."
When I upgraded to OSX on a G4 tower, I pitched a fit to keep the cool 17-inch studio CRT monitor, the one with the clear plastic case, that came with the Cube. It's still the first thing anyone comments on when the come into my office. Best CRT Apple every made, and apparently the last.
On the issue of choice for consumers, what's to stop another company from building an online music store that uses AAC+Fairplay? Wouldn't those files play on an iPod? Wouldn't that be a great way for a new player in this space to access the 30% market share of iPods? Same for the player: If you pay Dolby for AAC and Veridisc for Fairplay, couldn't you build a player that played AAC+Fairplay files, be they from iTMS or another store that uses the same format? Wouldn't that be a great way to hook into the 70% marketshare for legal downloads? Apple would have every reason not to stand in the way of more AAC+Fairplay vendors, and it could trust that iTMS (70% market share) and iPod (already beating lower-cost players) would still compete very well on usability.
The fact that Apple is the only one that currently uses AAC+Fairplay doesn't mean it's a proprietary lock-in like WMA, unless Dolby and Veridisc have licensed their codec and DRM exclusively, which wouldn't make sense for either company.
It just depends on what standard the market coalesces around. Right now, the market is tending to coalesce around AAC+Fairplay via iTMS, because Apple has provided the hands-down best user experience at the purchase and player level. And that pisses of Microsoft and glorified Windows resellers like Dell because they have this grand strategy of interconnected, interdependent formats that promote lock-in. All it means for them is monopoly: it benefits me not one bit if my music files use the same uber-codec as my video, so why not shouldn't I have the CHOICE to use an audio codec other than WMA?
As far as networking kitchen appliances goes, this has the potential of being exceedingly silly, the bullshit net-ization of something just for the hell of it.
The idea of remote-controlled ovens makes me nervous. These just aren't the kind of things you leave unattended. Automatic drip coffee makers, which have been around for a couple of decades, are acceptable because you're at home, and the device is really just heating and pumping water on a timer; little chance of burning a pyrex pot of Yuban. It's cool to think of leaving a frozen dinner in the oven in the morning and having the oven start cooking it at 6:00 pm for when you get home. But if I forget about it and go to Taco Bell, or if I'm late, the thing better call or e-mail me, and it better be able to reliably turn itself off. In the end, though, no labor is saved, and I have to plan the meal and program the oven.
I don't know why we still don't have the most obvious network-enabled kitchen appliance: microwaves with bar-code scanners that set cooking times automatically. It's a ready-made metadata tagging schema, all it takes is an updated library of cooking times for a given SKU, pegged to the specific wattage of your unit and updated at night like a TiVo program guide. This is perfect for the kind of quick, unplanned meal that microwaves were made for. And how may times have you smelled burnt popcorn in the office because someone screwed up the cooking time? Hello, we went to the moon three decade ago! Bonus revenue stream: Agree to let the manufacturer track what you cook and eat, and you get some targeted marketing and coupons.
Connecting my toaster oven to my home network shouldn't involve anything more than it alerting me that the Hungry Man is done without having to set an alarm. But you know where this is headed: Pop a DVD into your media PC, and a Microsoft wizard pops up and says "Looks like you're watching a movie. Would you like me to cook some popcorn?" Or if my wife has programmed it: "That's your third serving of hot wings this week you're about to cook. What about your diet?" And the f*&^&%$g thing calls her, too.
My favorite thing about the whole article is they give 5 reasons that the iPod isn't the best and then each reason shows different music players that could replace the iPod. Notice however that there is no player that will fill all 5 roles by itself, in order to get all these "features" you would need to buy 5 different players.
I think this idea (or mistake) is common to a lot of PC-Mac comparisons, combining benefits in a way that are self-contradictory. Yes, PCs are cheaper and there's more game software. But you can't really play the hottest games on the cheapest (lower-powered) PCs. Yes, PCs tend to have higher MHz chips, but not the cheapest ones. You can also expand a typical PC more than a Mac but, again, it ends up not being cheaper when you pay to put all those things in that Macs come with out of the box.
The truth is that for a definable constituency, Macs do hit the sweet spot of price/performance/usability. A mod-addicted "Doom" fanatic is never going to stomach a $400 eMachine, and your granny isn't going to want a $3K Alienware.
Looks to me like it wouldn't so much massage you as make you itch. Its random movement and light weight would probably feel more like a big cockroach, hardly my idea of relaxing, more like a torture device. And and I don't want that thing trying to give me a "happy ending" either...
BTW, if that thing goes out of control, do I have to call this guy to come blow it up?
The Los Angeles metro area where I live is pretty well served by competing DSL services (although they all ultimately lease their lines from Pac Bell), and most of the region's cable companies now have cable modem service. I've had the latter through Charter Communications for about a year and a half how, picking up a preexisting Earthlink account, and bundled with digital TV service (basic tier plus more than 50 digital-only channels, DVD-quality premium channels, 50 channels of CD-quality music, and they just added 2 HD channels and video-on-demand). I have to say the cable-modem service has worked flawlessly and consistently, whereas I've heard nothing but horror stories from people who've gotten DSL. What outtages and DNS drop-outs there are are much rare than at the T1 line in my office, so infrequent I hardly notice it, and I'm online all night long. I've heard people say they've waited weeks and months for DSL service. I called on a Friday and they came out Sunday morning to hook me up. The guy who installed it had to rewire the cable connection from the pole to the building since it was barely adequate, but that was it. He didn't even know how to set it up on my Mac, but it was a simple switch from PPP to DHCP in a control panel, and away I went. My throughput has dropped a little since it first began, but is still in the neighborhood of 10 times as fast as my old 56k modem. (I live in a poor immigrant neighborhood, so maybe there's not as much bandwidth competition.) My vote would be to avoid DSL like the plague. Who wants to buy more services from the ^%$%@# phone company?
The eMac will be a good choice for people like me who want a faster G4, want an all-in-one form factor, don't need a tower and just don't like flat-panel monitors.
One question: It looks as if the eMac meets the specs for Quartz Extreme. Am I right?
Well I for one am an example of successful product placement in a videogame. Back when WipeoutXL for the original PlayStation first came out, on several of the tracks (and I think on the intro movies) I kept seeing "billboard" ads for something called Red Bull. (By then, of course, Red Bull was well established in Europe, and WipeoutXL was produced by Sony's U.K. unit, Psygnosis). So when I saw it in the store, I bought one just to see what it was. And I still drink the occassional bottle. So it can work.
The basic approach that Prime Image uses to "microedit" television programming to compress time has been around for at least a few years. Prime may have a new, patented way to do it, but it's not really news, just an overactive publicist who shoehorned a Tech TV writer into a visit.
And BTW, you CAN see this effect, and it is very annoying. Look for it on broadcasts of older series re-runs or movies on local stations. Watch the image closely when there's (otherwise) smooth horizontal movement, like when a camera is panning left or right or when people are walking back and forth. I can see tiny clips in the movement from time to time, not as bad as a badly buffered videostream, but noticable. I've never noticed an effect on the audio.
Still, considering it's only used by cheap-ass local stations whose NTSC signal is shite compared to a nice, pure digital cable/satellite channel anyway, and occurs only on movie re-runs that are probably clipped for content and blown up to fill the TV frame anyway, it's probably going overboard to bitch too much. Things like this will have a self-limiting effect, because the more "free" broadcasters deteriorate the quality of their programming in ways like this, the more people will flock to alternatives, even paid ones.
How they handle the computer world in "Tron 2.0" will be an interesting challenge, because when you think about the first film was very much of its time. The CGI was for then pretty advanced, and yet because of its limitations it was abstract enough that it clearly stood apart from the "real world." Now it's 2001 and we live with an expectation of full-screen, photorealistic CGI. Interesting, too how the arcade videogames that informed the first film are now underpowered compared to my PS2, and that the first film was made well before any public understanding of the nascent Internet. The whole idea of a story about unconnected computers seems quaint today.
Of course, you could argue that a sequel to "Tron" has already been made: "The Matrix," also a story about people projected into computers battling the computer intelligences that run that world, albeit with its very '90s sensibilities of being wired and how powerful CGI can get.
There are so many technological, philosophical and dramatic threads that could be picked up on that it's a shame they don't opt for a television series instead of blowing their wad on one take on the whole equation. An ongoing TV show would have room to breathe and explore all the inherint possibilities and address a lot of different viewpoints.
In the meantime, Disney should get off its ass and release an audio CD of the Wendy Carlos' excellent soundtrack for the first film.
BTW, if you want to have fun with the "Tron" DVD that's already been released, try watching it to the French audio track. Somehow it makes more sense...
If there's no liquid on the surface of Mars, water or otherwise, then what is this stuff?. People examining the high-res surface pictures coming back from Global Surveyor have found literally hundreds of "stains" that sure look like current or recent liquid flows. And suprise!, they are clustered around the equator in an area of upthrust called the Tharsis Rise.
Doesn't work well -- and that's a good thing
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Image search engines are only as reliable as the image metadata they query, and without consistent schema for decribing images beyond file type, they will never really work. And a workable schema of that kind would either take an eternity to type in or be inconsistent and probably both. The inability of a computer to truly make associations between visual images on anything like a real-world level is a key reason why we will NEVER, EVER get a computer with the (humanlike) intelligence and verisimilitude of HAL 9000 or Haley Joel Osment in "A.I." Computers are deaf and blind; always have been.
In the meantime, I love the inefficiencies of image search engines, because it let's you play an oftentimes hilarious random association game. Because Google's engine relies on text info including file names and nearby captions and other content, the mix of things it thinks applies to your search term can be inadvertently very entertaining.
This kind of remote-access energy management might seem a tad geeky, but it would go over VERY well right now here in energy-starved California. I'd love to be able to log in and switch on the AC when I leave work and have the apartment nice and cool when I get there, rather than wastefully cold for hours when I'm not there. I know X-10 and other similar technologies have been around for awhile to turn lights on and off, but given the nationwide problem of energy prices, the need might finally have arrived to justify the means.
Speaking of Web-enabled appliances, when is someone going to put 2 and 2 together and put a CueCat-style scanner into the side of my microwave linked to a DB of cooking times?!? We put a guy on the moon 30 frickin' years ago. It's about time I can just wave the pot pie box at my microwave, drop the tray in and close the door. My new Sharp "iMac"-style microwave has pre-programmed 1-touch buttons for microwave popcorn. Can't someone "embrace and extend" this... I mean, NO! LEAVE IT THE WAY IT IS!!!
According to the updated CNN story, the NEAR craft is transmitting from the surface and they may even be able to get it to lift off again.
I want these guys to build my next car.
Hey, Capt. Kirk did it!
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You can't get much more wacked out than an idea from a "Star Trek" movie. As I recall (and IMDB confirms), Capt. Kirk skydived from orbit in an opening scene that was cut from "Star Trek: Generations." Though the scene wasn't in the movie, they sold dolls of Capt. Kirk with the high-tech chute. A friend of mine bought one with the absolute geek certitude that it would have even more value for being from a cut scene.
Of course, the good old Mac OS has no root level access, so as off-the-shelf systems go is pretty damn secure. It also happens to be the easiest to use off-the-shelf OS going.... Of course, Apple is shucking both ease of use and security with OSX. But then again, OSX is what you all said you wanted, wasn't it?
"Dune" will play repeatedly on Sci-Fi Channel, adding up commercial revenue each time. (They played each episode three times in a row the first three nights.) And the huge ratings will be a big selling point in the European markets, where the bankability of all those Euro actors like Uwe Oschenknecht and Saskia Reeves will also come into play. (The miniseries was shot in Europe with lots of backing from European media companies, which probably made it a requirement to have all those Euro actors.) With big TV events and films, a lot of money will have already been paid in "presales" for the rights to broadcast in overseas markets. It may even play theatrically. Add to that the home video revenue, and the producers have probably already seen a tidy profit... even if the whole thing did kinda suck. Still, the success of "Dune" augers well for more such projects, on Sci-Fi and elsewhere.
Microsoft has built huge businesses out of controlling the Windows desktop. If this X-Box DVR story is true, I'll bet it's because they smell an even meatier "desktop": the on-screen input menus for DVR channel listings. If the X-Box does become a popular game machine/DVR, it would put Microsoft in a position to control the pipe leading into the television and get their way on interactive TV and even cable modem service, assuming they add those to the X-Box's innards as well: it's simple enough to handle all the digital TV extras as a virtual software machine on a souped-up nVidia chip that isn't handling a game at that precise moment, since it doesn't involve decoding the live video stream, only the attendant datacasting. If everything else is plugged into the damn thing, why not your coaxial cable, especially if the box looks coooooool. The cable industry bent over backwards to ensure that Microsoft wouldn't control the specs for the next generation of digital set-top boxes that they sell, but X-Box could be an end-run around that.
I wonder how much the ratings for MSNBC will suddenly spike when all those X-Boxes start recording "Time and Again" by default because users can't get past the talking paper clip (or will it be a talking "couch" potato?) that's "helping" them choose shows. "Hey, where's my 'Dukes of Hazzard' wizard?!"
Gentlemen, start your pocket protectors... Regarding the pros and cons of going CGI to do R@-D2. I write about special effects for The Hollywood Reporter, so here's my $0.02 from an "insider's" perspective.
First of all, I'm not sure how much on-set actor interaction you'll lose with a CGI R2, which some people fear will lessen the performance value. He/it is, after all, a very non-anthropomorphic, trash-can shaped character who moves and emotes entirely differently than everything around it. (Keep in mind the sound effects come later.) And given the complexity of dealing with the props and Anthony Daniel's C3PO costume, the droid scenes are probably heavily scripted, with no improvisation, and thus necessarily limited. Aside from timing the slap of Daniels' hand on R2's head, there's no real reason to have Baker on set, although you could still have him be his own stand-in (like Ahmed Best did for Jar-Jar) and just erase him from the shots. I don't mean to keep dumping on Kenny, but if the radio-controlled R2 version were good enough, he would have been out of that suit years ago.
If there's one thing CGI does well, it's smooth metal surfaces, so it'll look fine. And while I hope we won't see R2 flying or jumping rope, going CG would allow him to move a little bit more. As it is he usually just stands and beeps. In fact, aside from the classic whimpering pass-out after he gets shot by the Jawas, he/it hasn't exactly been giving Robert De Niro a run for his money (and even that performance was more about the sound effect than Kenny Baker taking a fall).
Finally, if I'm not mistaken, we've already seen a CGI R2 several times. The new X-Wing Death Star attack flyby in the Star Wars special edition, with R2 in the back seat, was all CGI (done on a Mac, by the way). And I'm pretty sure the shots from "Phantom Menace" where R2 is working on the outside of that chrome Jedi ship were also CG.
You have to understand how these things evolve in a film production. It's far from diabolical. Here's my theory: Someone probably produced a very good CGI model of an R2-style droid for use in a background scene, or to populate a flock of droids. That file could have been picked up and used for the Episode 2 "animatics," the detailed low-rez version of the film used to plan shots and effects. Somewhere along the line, someone decided why not go CGI.
All in all, I'd say if you were going to safely go CGI with any "Star Wars" character, it'd have to be R2, though you could make a strong case for doing Yoda CG, since the muppet version looks odd these days. And in that case you could easily give Frank Oz the digital inputs that would allow him to perform a CG Yoda completely. It would look BETTER than any physical puppet.
We can certainly debate whether Apple SHOULD be suing media outlets over leaks and what this is doing to the good will of their customers.(I for one think Jobs is being a little too controlling, but I'm not about to second-guess a CEO who has pulled such a transforming turnaround.) But they absolutely have a legal right to do so. Press freedom has been repeatedly shown not to extend to interfering with lawful contractural arrangements, and this includes NDA agreements. (This is what kept CBS from initially running the Jeffry Wigand tobacco story, because they interviewed him about things covered by his RJR NDA contract. Courts, on the other hand, can compel testimony regardless of the terms of private, civil contracts.) The press have no more right to ask, force or participate in the breaking of an NDA (by running the results) than they do to run a story they know is false or should have known is false. (This is why Matt Drudge is being sued by Sidney Blumenthal, a snake who has a perfectly valid case because Drudge disseminated a rumor about Blumenthal that constituted a libelous charge.)
Steve Jobs and Apple exist in the real world, where trademarks and legal contracts have meaning and the considered, timely dissemination of information has value. You can argue that nothing was lost, that fewer G4 Cube sales will not result because of what AppleInsider and other sites did by posting insider information. But the protection of NDAs and all legal agreements is just as slippery a slope as freedom of speech, and if Steve Jobs can't protect Apple in this small instance, than there would be no legal basis to defend it from rampant patent infringement and intellectual property crime -- the latter of which is exactly what the John Doe's in the case are guilty of. Appleinsider's editors can refuse to name their sources and play the role of ethical journalist if they want, but like the real journalists who have tried this for the last 100 years or so, they can sit on their ass in a county jail cell until they cooperate with the court.
Ummm... it's kinda hard to see in the posted jpg's, but that screenshot on the flyer sure looks like a Mac version of Internet Explorer. The title bar looks much more like the grey default of the Mac than the blue bar of Windows. Can someone with the original article take a peek and confirm? The irony of what Microsoft means by "innovation" would be too much to grasp...
A swirling pattern seems oddly two-dimensional for a black hole, which I would think pulls in mattter from every direction. Even weirder, the pattern reminds me of the black hole as whirlpool in the 1979 Disney movie "The Black Hole." (Check out this picture from the film)
Actually the "cut off their air supply" argument won't work in console games, because MS has no beachhead, no lock on OS licenses to leverage control over standards and resulting dominance of software through insider API hooks. Console games are so stable, in part, because they are so immutable: data is locked on carts or compact discs, and the OS is locked away on ROMs and ASICs. Hard drives imply rewritten data, which means instability (leaving aside the fragility of a console with a hard drive in it, being played by highly caffeinated sub-teen boys). And if Bill wants to start selling "service packs" and pushing upgrades down modem lines, his box will be one unstable bastard.
M$ has never been able to compete on quality, and that's all they'll have to sell. I think their experience in the console game market will mirror their failure in the handheld arena.
Since no one else has raised this particular tempest, let me be the first: Is the AOL 5.0 an imbroglio for everyone, or just PC users? Something tells me if I installed on my Mac, I wouldn't have nearly the same problems, given that the MacOS lets me select Internet app settings myself, rather than trying to fight, a la Windows, any rival app that gets installed.
Anonymous Coward is absolutely right. Is his score of "0" punishment for being anonymous, or spite over cutting through all the crap? There is NO reason for more computing power on-board the Hubble, just NASA's usual triple-redundant sets of simple systems. The network is the computer, guys -- remember? All the computing muscle is at JSC and JPL, where it belongs.
But it took five long screens of prattle about Beowulf clustering and space-based IP and 486 floating point calcs and NASA-branded BIOS and space-Kelvan overclocking to get to the point that the Hubble is just an appliance: in effect a scanner with the ability to point itself very precisely in three dimensions.
It's the world's biggest hot-synched Palm. It doesn't need Windows. It doesn't even need -- perish the thought -- Linux.
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I had a Cube on my desk at work for several years -- perks of middle management -- and I have to say even running OS9 it was remarkably stable considering all the crap I ran on it. Typical load of running apps: Lotus Notes (notoriously fickle), Explorer, Quark, PageSpinner, Word, NewsEdit (a newspaper text editor) and some shareware mock dock I forget the name of. Maybe crashed once every couple of weeks, usually just a single app.
As they unplugged my Cube, I thought to myself "Farewell Aquarius, and we thank you..."
When I upgraded to OSX on a G4 tower, I pitched a fit to keep the cool 17-inch studio CRT monitor, the one with the clear plastic case, that came with the Cube. It's still the first thing anyone comments on when the come into my office. Best CRT Apple every made, and apparently the last.
On the issue of choice for consumers, what's to stop another company from building an online music store that uses AAC+Fairplay? Wouldn't those files play on an iPod? Wouldn't that be a great way for a new player in this space to access the 30% market share of iPods? Same for the player: If you pay Dolby for AAC and Veridisc for Fairplay, couldn't you build a player that played AAC+Fairplay files, be they from iTMS or another store that uses the same format? Wouldn't that be a great way to hook into the 70% marketshare for legal downloads? Apple would have every reason not to stand in the way of more AAC+Fairplay vendors, and it could trust that iTMS (70% market share) and iPod (already beating lower-cost players) would still compete very well on usability.
The fact that Apple is the only one that currently uses AAC+Fairplay doesn't mean it's a proprietary lock-in like WMA, unless Dolby and Veridisc have licensed their codec and DRM exclusively, which wouldn't make sense for either company.
It just depends on what standard the market coalesces around. Right now, the market is tending to coalesce around AAC+Fairplay via iTMS, because Apple has provided the hands-down best user experience at the purchase and player level. And that pisses of Microsoft and glorified Windows resellers like Dell because they have this grand strategy of interconnected, interdependent formats that promote lock-in. All it means for them is monopoly: it benefits me not one bit if my music files use the same uber-codec as my video, so why not shouldn't I have the CHOICE to use an audio codec other than WMA?
As far as networking kitchen appliances goes, this has the potential of being exceedingly silly, the bullshit net-ization of something just for the hell of it.
The idea of remote-controlled ovens makes me nervous. These just aren't the kind of things you leave unattended. Automatic drip coffee makers, which have been around for a couple of decades, are acceptable because you're at home, and the device is really just heating and pumping water on a timer; little chance of burning a pyrex pot of Yuban. It's cool to think of leaving a frozen dinner in the oven in the morning and having the oven start cooking it at 6:00 pm for when you get home. But if I forget about it and go to Taco Bell, or if I'm late, the thing better call or e-mail me, and it better be able to reliably turn itself off. In the end, though, no labor is saved, and I have to plan the meal and program the oven.
I don't know why we still don't have the most obvious network-enabled kitchen appliance: microwaves with bar-code scanners that set cooking times automatically. It's a ready-made metadata tagging schema, all it takes is an updated library of cooking times for a given SKU, pegged to the specific wattage of your unit and updated at night like a TiVo program guide. This is perfect for the kind of quick, unplanned meal that microwaves were made for. And how may times have you smelled burnt popcorn in the office because someone screwed up the cooking time? Hello, we went to the moon three decade ago! Bonus revenue stream: Agree to let the manufacturer track what you cook and eat, and you get some targeted marketing and coupons.
Connecting my toaster oven to my home network shouldn't involve anything more than it alerting me that the Hungry Man is done without having to set an alarm. But you know where this is headed: Pop a DVD into your media PC, and a Microsoft wizard pops up and says "Looks like you're watching a movie. Would you like me to cook some popcorn?" Or if my wife has programmed it: "That's your third serving of hot wings this week you're about to cook. What about your diet?" And the f*&^&%$g thing calls her, too.
My favorite thing about the whole article is they give 5 reasons that the iPod isn't the best and then each reason shows different music players that could replace the iPod. Notice however that there is no player that will fill all 5 roles by itself, in order to get all these "features" you would need to buy 5 different players.
I think this idea (or mistake) is common to a lot of PC-Mac comparisons, combining benefits in a way that are self-contradictory. Yes, PCs are cheaper and there's more game software. But you can't really play the hottest games on the cheapest (lower-powered) PCs. Yes, PCs tend to have higher MHz chips, but not the cheapest ones. You can also expand a typical PC more than a Mac but, again, it ends up not being cheaper when you pay to put all those things in that Macs come with out of the box.
The truth is that for a definable constituency, Macs do hit the sweet spot of price/performance/usability. A mod-addicted "Doom" fanatic is never going to stomach a $400 eMachine, and your granny isn't going to want a $3K Alienware.
BTW, if that thing goes out of control, do I have to call this guy to come blow it up?
The Los Angeles metro area where I live is pretty well served by competing DSL services (although they all ultimately lease their lines from Pac Bell), and most of the region's cable companies now have cable modem service. I've had the latter through Charter Communications for about a year and a half how, picking up a preexisting Earthlink account, and bundled with digital TV service (basic tier plus more than 50 digital-only channels, DVD-quality premium channels, 50 channels of CD-quality music, and they just added 2 HD channels and video-on-demand). I have to say the cable-modem service has worked flawlessly and consistently, whereas I've heard nothing but horror stories from people who've gotten DSL. What outtages and DNS drop-outs there are are much rare than at the T1 line in my office, so infrequent I hardly notice it, and I'm online all night long. I've heard people say they've waited weeks and months for DSL service. I called on a Friday and they came out Sunday morning to hook me up. The guy who installed it had to rewire the cable connection from the pole to the building since it was barely adequate, but that was it. He didn't even know how to set it up on my Mac, but it was a simple switch from PPP to DHCP in a control panel, and away I went. My throughput has dropped a little since it first began, but is still in the neighborhood of 10 times as fast as my old 56k modem. (I live in a poor immigrant neighborhood, so maybe there's not as much bandwidth competition.) My vote would be to avoid DSL like the plague. Who wants to buy more services from the ^%$%@# phone company?
The eMac will be a good choice for people like me who want a faster G4, want an all-in-one form factor, don't need a tower and just don't like flat-panel monitors.
One question: It looks as if the eMac meets the specs for Quartz Extreme. Am I right?
Well I for one am an example of successful product placement in a videogame. Back when WipeoutXL for the original PlayStation first came out, on several of the tracks (and I think on the intro movies) I kept seeing "billboard" ads for something called Red Bull. (By then, of course, Red Bull was well established in Europe, and WipeoutXL was produced by Sony's U.K. unit, Psygnosis). So when I saw it in the store, I bought one just to see what it was. And I still drink the occassional bottle. So it can work.
The basic approach that Prime Image uses to "microedit" television programming to compress time has been around for at least a few years. Prime may have a new, patented way to do it, but it's not really news, just an overactive publicist who shoehorned a Tech TV writer into a visit.
And BTW, you CAN see this effect, and it is very annoying. Look for it on broadcasts of older series re-runs or movies on local stations. Watch the image closely when there's (otherwise) smooth horizontal movement, like when a camera is panning left or right or when people are walking back and forth. I can see tiny clips in the movement from time to time, not as bad as a badly buffered videostream, but noticable. I've never noticed an effect on the audio.
Still, considering it's only used by cheap-ass local stations whose NTSC signal is shite compared to a nice, pure digital cable/satellite channel anyway, and occurs only on movie re-runs that are probably clipped for content and blown up to fill the TV frame anyway, it's probably going overboard to bitch too much. Things like this will have a self-limiting effect, because the more "free" broadcasters deteriorate the quality of their programming in ways like this, the more people will flock to alternatives, even paid ones.
How they handle the computer world in "Tron 2.0" will be an interesting challenge, because when you think about the first film was very much of its time. The CGI was for then pretty advanced, and yet because of its limitations it was abstract enough that it clearly stood apart from the "real world." Now it's 2001 and we live with an expectation of full-screen, photorealistic CGI. Interesting, too how the arcade videogames that informed the first film are now underpowered compared to my PS2, and that the first film was made well before any public understanding of the nascent Internet. The whole idea of a story about unconnected computers seems quaint today.
Of course, you could argue that a sequel to "Tron" has already been made: "The Matrix," also a story about people projected into computers battling the computer intelligences that run that world, albeit with its very '90s sensibilities of being wired and how powerful CGI can get.
There are so many technological, philosophical and dramatic threads that could be picked up on that it's a shame they don't opt for a television series instead of blowing their wad on one take on the whole equation. An ongoing TV show would have room to breathe and explore all the inherint possibilities and address a lot of different viewpoints.
In the meantime, Disney should get off its ass and release an audio CD of the Wendy Carlos' excellent soundtrack for the first film.
BTW, if you want to have fun with the "Tron" DVD that's already been released, try watching it to the French audio track. Somehow it makes more sense...
Image search engines are only as reliable as the image metadata they query, and without consistent schema for decribing images beyond file type, they will never really work. And a workable schema of that kind would either take an eternity to type in or be inconsistent and probably both. The inability of a computer to truly make associations between visual images on anything like a real-world level is a key reason why we will NEVER, EVER get a computer with the (humanlike) intelligence and verisimilitude of HAL 9000 or Haley Joel Osment in "A.I." Computers are deaf and blind; always have been.
In the meantime, I love the inefficiencies of image search engines, because it let's you play an oftentimes hilarious random association game. Because Google's engine relies on text info including file names and nearby captions and other content, the mix of things it thinks applies to your search term can be inadvertently very entertaining.
This kind of remote-access energy management might seem a tad geeky, but it would go over VERY well right now here in energy-starved California. I'd love to be able to log in and switch on the AC when I leave work and have the apartment nice and cool when I get there, rather than wastefully cold for hours when I'm not there. I know X-10 and other similar technologies have been around for awhile to turn lights on and off, but given the nationwide problem of energy prices, the need might finally have arrived to justify the means.
... I mean, NO! LEAVE IT THE WAY IT IS!!!
Speaking of Web-enabled appliances, when is someone going to put 2 and 2 together and put a CueCat-style scanner into the side of my microwave linked to a DB of cooking times?!? We put a guy on the moon 30 frickin' years ago. It's about time I can just wave the pot pie box at my microwave, drop the tray in and close the door. My new Sharp "iMac"-style microwave has pre-programmed 1-touch buttons for microwave popcorn. Can't someone "embrace and extend" this
According to the updated CNN story, the NEAR craft is transmitting from the surface and they may even be able to get it to lift off again.
I want these guys to build my next car.
You can't get much more wacked out than an idea from a "Star Trek" movie. As I recall (and IMDB confirms), Capt. Kirk skydived from orbit in an opening scene that was cut from "Star Trek: Generations." Though the scene wasn't in the movie, they sold dolls of Capt. Kirk with the high-tech chute. A friend of mine bought one with the absolute geek certitude that it would have even more value for being from a cut scene.
Of course, the good old Mac OS has no root level access, so as off-the-shelf systems go is pretty damn secure. It also happens to be the easiest to use off-the-shelf OS going. ... Of course, Apple is shucking both ease of use and security with OSX. But then again, OSX is what you all said you wanted, wasn't it?
Microsoft has built huge businesses out of controlling the Windows desktop. If this X-Box DVR story is true, I'll bet it's because they smell an even meatier "desktop": the on-screen input menus for DVR channel listings. If the X-Box does become a popular game machine/DVR, it would put Microsoft in a position to control the pipe leading into the television and get their way on interactive TV and even cable modem service, assuming they add those to the X-Box's innards as well: it's simple enough to handle all the digital TV extras as a virtual software machine on a souped-up nVidia chip that isn't handling a game at that precise moment, since it doesn't involve decoding the live video stream, only the attendant datacasting. If everything else is plugged into the damn thing, why not your coaxial cable, especially if the box looks coooooool. The cable industry bent over backwards to ensure that Microsoft wouldn't control the specs for the next generation of digital set-top boxes that they sell, but X-Box could be an end-run around that.
I wonder how much the ratings for MSNBC will suddenly spike when all those X-Boxes start recording "Time and Again" by default because users can't get past the talking paper clip (or will it be a talking "couch" potato?) that's "helping" them choose shows. "Hey, where's my 'Dukes of Hazzard' wizard?!"
Gentlemen, start your pocket protectors... Regarding the pros and cons of going CGI to do R@-D2. I write about special effects for The Hollywood Reporter, so here's my $0.02 from an "insider's" perspective.
First of all, I'm not sure how much on-set actor interaction you'll lose with a CGI R2, which some people fear will lessen the performance value. He/it is, after all, a very non-anthropomorphic, trash-can shaped character who moves and emotes entirely differently than everything around it. (Keep in mind the sound effects come later.) And given the complexity of dealing with the props and Anthony Daniel's C3PO costume, the droid scenes are probably heavily scripted, with no improvisation, and thus necessarily limited. Aside from timing the slap of Daniels' hand on R2's head, there's no real reason to have Baker on set, although you could still have him be his own stand-in (like Ahmed Best did for Jar-Jar) and just erase him from the shots. I don't mean to keep dumping on Kenny, but if the radio-controlled R2 version were good enough, he would have been out of that suit years ago.
If there's one thing CGI does well, it's smooth metal surfaces, so it'll look fine. And while I hope we won't see R2 flying or jumping rope, going CG would allow him to move a little bit more. As it is he usually just stands and beeps. In fact, aside from the classic whimpering pass-out after he gets shot by the Jawas, he/it hasn't exactly been giving Robert De Niro a run for his money (and even that performance was more about the sound effect than Kenny Baker taking a fall).
Finally, if I'm not mistaken, we've already seen a CGI R2 several times. The new X-Wing Death Star attack flyby in the Star Wars special edition, with R2 in the back seat, was all CGI (done on a Mac, by the way). And I'm pretty sure the shots from "Phantom Menace" where R2 is working on the outside of that chrome Jedi ship were also CG.
You have to understand how these things evolve in a film production. It's far from diabolical. Here's my theory: Someone probably produced a very good CGI model of an R2-style droid for use in a background scene, or to populate a flock of droids. That file could have been picked up and used for the Episode 2 "animatics," the detailed low-rez version of the film used to plan shots and effects. Somewhere along the line, someone decided why not go CGI.
All in all, I'd say if you were going to safely go CGI with any "Star Wars" character, it'd have to be R2, though you could make a strong case for doing Yoda CG, since the muppet version looks odd these days. And in that case you could easily give Frank Oz the digital inputs that would allow him to perform a CG Yoda completely. It would look BETTER than any physical puppet.
We can certainly debate whether Apple SHOULD be suing media outlets over leaks and what this is doing to the good will of their customers.(I for one think Jobs is being a little too controlling, but I'm not about to second-guess a CEO who has pulled such a transforming turnaround.) But they absolutely have a legal right to do so. Press freedom has been repeatedly shown not to extend to interfering with lawful contractural arrangements, and this includes NDA agreements. (This is what kept CBS from initially running the Jeffry Wigand tobacco story, because they interviewed him about things covered by his RJR NDA contract. Courts, on the other hand, can compel testimony regardless of the terms of private, civil contracts.) The press have no more right to ask, force or participate in the breaking of an NDA (by running the results) than they do to run a story they know is false or should have known is false. (This is why Matt Drudge is being sued by Sidney Blumenthal, a snake who has a perfectly valid case because Drudge disseminated a rumor about Blumenthal that constituted a libelous charge.)
Steve Jobs and Apple exist in the real world, where trademarks and legal contracts have meaning and the considered, timely dissemination of information has value. You can argue that nothing was lost, that fewer G4 Cube sales will not result because of what AppleInsider and other sites did by posting insider information. But the protection of NDAs and all legal agreements is just as slippery a slope as freedom of speech, and if Steve Jobs can't protect Apple in this small instance, than there would be no legal basis to defend it from rampant patent infringement and intellectual property crime -- the latter of which is exactly what the John Doe's in the case are guilty of. Appleinsider's editors can refuse to name their sources and play the role of ethical journalist if they want, but like the real journalists who have tried this for the last 100 years or so, they can sit on their ass in a county jail cell until they cooperate with the court.
M$ has never been able to compete on quality, and that's all they'll have to sell. I think their experience in the console game market will mirror their failure in the handheld arena.
Anonymous Coward is absolutely right. Is his score of "0" punishment for being anonymous, or spite over cutting through all the crap? There is NO reason for more computing power on-board the Hubble, just NASA's usual triple-redundant sets of simple systems. The network is the computer, guys -- remember? All the computing muscle is at JSC and JPL, where it belongs.
But it took five long screens of prattle about Beowulf clustering and space-based IP and 486 floating point calcs and NASA-branded BIOS and space-Kelvan overclocking to get to the point that the Hubble is just an appliance: in effect a scanner with the ability to point itself very precisely in three dimensions.
It's the world's biggest hot-synched Palm. It doesn't need Windows. It doesn't even need -- perish the thought -- Linux.