I've given an iPod to people utterly unfamiliar with gadgetry of any kind and they were up and using the iPod in under a minute (after they got over how cool it looked). THAT is the Apple difference and why they sell products.
Really?
I watched an newbie explore an iPod Mini only last week. His first question was "how do I turn it off?" (and was incredulous at the two answers: "hold down play", and "you don't need to"). Then I challenged him to find the volume control, which he was unable to do.
(Admittedly the volume control challenge is a bit of a cheat: the volume control is hardest to find when you're actually looking for it, because when you're searching for it you're continually pressing buttons. If you stop pushing buttons for a couple of seconds, the scroll wheel turns into a volume wheel.)
RFID is a dumb way of sending the information, anyway, because so little data is carried.
The article says the RFID tag only contains a handle. The actual data is transferred over a traditional network.
Better to slap a USB key drive on an arrow. Or maybe just a rolled up piece of paper with a URL scrawled on it.
But, nooo. RFID is "hot", so they mentioned it instead.
No, the whole point of using RFID is that you just wave the dart near your receiver.
This is an exercise in "physical user interfaces" (the article's phrase, not mine).
I think that's a rich seam for research. For example, I'm not finding scrolling through lists to be an ideal way to choose MP3s. At home, I'd love to be able to vaguely wave a CD jewel case at my stereo, and have the appropriate playlist kick off.
It's likely that a multiplex would screen the same film on two different screens with overlapping times, so would require more than 1 copy of the film anyway.
In fact some multiplexes have systems where the film comes off the reel, through a projector, onto a clever buffer reel, through another projector, then onto the takeup reel. This way they can show the same film on two screens, with overlapping times and a time offset to make the most efficient use of the lobby.
There's a working exhibit of one at the Museum of the Moving Image in London.
With digital, though: well, why not have one copy on one server, with multiple projectors running off it?
The tone of the article suggested that the idea of this was non-mainstream short films and documentaries though: stuff that doesn't have the selling power for traditional distribution. They won't be filling multiple screens in one building with this stuff!
When the film breaks, it can be fixed- for the most part. But when a drive crashes, you'd think that it would be at least 8 hours before a new copy of the move could be express-shipped to the theater.
Drives crash far less often than film breaks, but even then, TFA indicates that theatres would copy the data to their own system before showing it. It seems reasonable to either have RAID 5 on these systems, or just have a hot backup.
I'd hate to have our inside geek joke be revealed to the world. It's always been sort of a secret code, if you knew what it meant, then you belonged to the tribe.
Hmm, that may be true in the US. In Britain the TV series has been repeated so many times, and the books are so popular, I reckon at least 25% of people would know what The Answer is (which I'd consider high: something like 40% don't know what town Jesus was born in).
It wouldn't surprise me to find decent $100 OSX macs on say craigslist now or very soon. That's a real easy way to try it out without plonking down $500.
This is excellent advice, and similar to my own instinct, which was to wait for a flood of used Minis to appear on eBay, from those who "sucked and saw" and decided it wasn't for them.
I'll be watching used prices carefully: at the moment a Mini is £320. A used eMac is £400 + tax here. I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the Apple product range to tell for sure, but price for performance these don't look like better value than the Mini. (This supplier may not have the keenest pricing of course).
What percentage of closed-source software is crap? Remember to include all that shovelware on those rotating stands in Walmart, and the entire contents of every shareware library.
I guess that's neat and all, but why wouldn't I just install X11 for whatever apps I run that need it, and run everything through OS X?
Maybe you just don't get on with the Mac UI. Such people do exist. I understand that if you want focus-follows-mouse in Mac OS X, you either get a compromise where it only works on X apps, or you have to spend $40 on third party virtual desktop software.
Mac Mini is definitely a cuter form factor than anything else out there right now.
I'm tempted to get a Mini just in order to try out Mac OS X, but I'm dubious enough about Mac OS that having the option to replace it with Linux if I don't like it is a selling point for the hardware.
If you haven't already, check out the "SeaDragon" mapping technology at SandCodex.
Click Technology -> Demos to see it in action; liquid-smooth continuous zooming, into thousands of square miles.
W00T. Streaming video of a canned demo running on who knows what hardware. Map24 has an applet based smooth scrolling map application, covering North America (Canada in lower detail than the USA) and Europe which you can use for free, right now.
If that's what floats your boat.
Google's is sort of fun though: it's neat that it's in DHTML instead of needing Java. Map24 has the better functionality today.
There seem to be a lot of misinformed, or partially informed views of what Podcasting is or is not. Allow me to try and clear it up:
From a "broadcaster's" perspective: you record a show to MP3, you make that available via some URL-accessible protocol (typically http or bittorrent), then you add an item to an RSS feed which includes that URL as an enclosure.
From a consumer's perspective: you run an application (e.g. iPodder). You give the application a set of RSS feeds. The application polls these feeds, and when it finds a new item that points to an enclosure, it downloads the media. What happens then is application-dependent, but what iPodder does is use the iTunes API to import the new media into the iTunes library.
Podcasting receiver applications like iPodder are meant to be "set up and forget". Once it's going, then assuming you dock your MP3 player every day or so, you are automagically going to find new content on your player whenever it becomes available. (I'm hoping that future versions will also automatically delete stale media).
For the consumer, this is better than streaming because:
- you can listen to it when you're disconnected from a network - e.g. on the bus, in the car
- skipping, rewinding etc. is easy
- being on a slow network (e.g. dialup) is not a problem
- timeshifting is inherent. The user experience is very like having a radio TiVo, except there is no option to listen to live programming.
Sure, it doesn't lend itself to live phone-ins, up-to-the-minute news bulletins, etc. -- but that's not what it's for.
For the producer, the costs scale very nicely, and if you go for bittorrent, you could distribute a very popular show very cheaply indeed.
So that's what it is. Here's what it is not:
Podcasting is not just for iPods. It's a shame the name implies it. This is because it was invented by Mac-heads. Fortunately they're standards-centric Mac-heads.
Podcasting is not just for no-budget audio equivalents of the personal blog or personal homepage. The BBC's trial of podcasting the excellent In Our Time series was by all accounts a great success.
The absence of DRM means it may be difficult for some material to get cleared for podcasting, which may dissuade professional broadcasters from podcasting in some cases.
The cheapness of podcasting means there's an awful lot of shovelware out there: like the middling days of mp3.com, when there was probably good, free music on there, but who was going to wade through the chaff and sort out the wheat?
isn't going to work. Since each sound card will have a slightly different version of 44.1-kHz, none of the rooms will match. It won't take long for the songs to get out of sync. Ethernet is also no isochronous, meaning it can't gaurantee the arrival time of packets...
Thanks everyone who mentioned this -- that seems to be close to what I need (if a little over featured!)
But it's always better to code by hand, since you usually can't make semathically correct code in a WYSIWYG editor. (though for design some of them are usable.)
I know what you mean, but I don't quite agree. One can perfectly easily envisage a GUI semantic editor -- LyX comes close.
With Composer you could edit with a CSS style that explicitly shows you the semantics you're coding - I note that NVU has a pulldown for class...
(I was a bit worried for second -- I thought "no class" was the software making a judgement on me:) )
Now we have Firefox, the only time I load up Mozilla is when I want to use Composer. It's far from perfect (that poxy
$lt;br> problem!) but it's a free WYSYWIG HTML editor withoout too many frills or complexities, and it throws out reasonably tidy HTML which can be cleaned up by hand much more easily than (say) Frontpage output.
So what's the future for Composer? I'd love to have it either as a standalone alongside Firefox and Thunderbird, or as an extension to Firefox.
I notice that Thunderbird contains vestiges of Composer (e.g. CSS styles for display modes no longer available)...
So why oh why does apple sell a 500 dollars computer with 2 year old components.
To meet a price point, while retaining the build quality they want.
It has occurred to me that making it so tiny DOES make it desirable, but it must push the price up. Would I be as tempted by a $400 Mac which is slightly larger than the Mini, about as powerful, with a cheaper full-size HDD?
My head says yes: all I want is a cheap way to try out Mac OS (because although I don't expect to like it, I'd like to have an informed opinion).
My heart says no: it's appealing because it's so small.
I'm keeping an eye on iPod Linux because I think eventually Podzilla could become a better MP3 collection browser than the Apple firmware. Apple aren't going to fix it: they already have my money.
Someone is paying for that bandwidth, right? I mean, I "share" my bandwidth and that ISP doesnt need to pay for this bandwidth. But what about my ISP? Doesnt it pay for it?
If the set of BT clients handling this particular file is large enough, it's likely that for any given chunk, someone is serving it from a system closer to you than the original seed.
You don't need to be all that lucky for that system to be using the same ISP as you. It's possible for that chunk to have passed over your ISPs expensive link to the rest of the Internet once, but for any number of clients to end up with that chunk as a result.
This is good for you, and good for the ISP. It's the same reason ISPs like it when customers use their cacheing proxies, and the same reason many ISPs pay Akamai to let them host Akamai servers: intra-ISP traffic is cheaper than inter-ISP traffic.
If the data you're fetching isn't popular enough to reach this critical mass of BT clients, then on the one hand, you don't see the same benefits, but on the other hand, who cares? BT isn't designed to handle unpopular files.
Even in the PC universe, PS/2 is getting increasingly rare: pretty much everything you'll see on the shops is USB now. My ThinkPad has no PS/2 socket either. Here's an example of a $25 PS2/USB convertor. I expect you could get cheaper. It only takes up one USB port too: neat.
The DVI->VGA adapter DOES come in the box, like you ask.
If you already own a KVM switcher, you're right, the migration away from PS/2 is a pain: but USB/VGA KVMs appear to be the basic choice in mainstream outlets now, from my brief investigations.
I can definitely say, you don't need a *book* to learn how to use this thing. You probably won't even need the tiny manual that comes with it.
Even my less-technical friends and family can use it without being told anything more than "this button chooses items, and the rest should be self-explanatory"
I disagree. I consider myself to be a techie. It took me hours to work out how to adjust the iPod's volume (without the remote) -- the reason being that I kept exploring the interface in vain, instead of waiting for the menu system to time out to the "now playing" screen. None of this is self explanatory or intuitive.
Maybe iPod uses idioms that are so ingrained in Mac users (I'm not one) that they *seem* intuitive.
Slashdot Mirror
I've given an iPod to people utterly unfamiliar with gadgetry of any kind and they were up and using the iPod in under a minute (after they got over how cool it looked). THAT is the Apple difference and why they sell products.
Really?
I watched an newbie explore an iPod Mini only last week. His first question was "how do I turn it off?" (and was incredulous at the two answers: "hold down play", and "you don't need to"). Then I challenged him to find the volume control, which he was unable to do.
(Admittedly the volume control challenge is a bit of a cheat: the volume control is hardest to find when you're actually looking for it, because when you're searching for it you're continually pressing buttons. If you stop pushing buttons for a couple of seconds, the scroll wheel turns into a volume wheel.)
RFID is a dumb way of sending the information, anyway, because so little data is carried.
The article says the RFID tag only contains a handle. The actual data is transferred over a traditional network.
Better to slap a USB key drive on an arrow. Or maybe just a rolled up piece of paper with a URL scrawled on it.
But, nooo. RFID is "hot", so they mentioned it instead.
No, the whole point of using RFID is that you just wave the dart near your receiver.
This is an exercise in "physical user interfaces" (the article's phrase, not mine).
I think that's a rich seam for research. For example, I'm not finding scrolling through lists to be an ideal way to choose MP3s. At home, I'd love to be able to vaguely wave a CD jewel case at my stereo, and have the appropriate playlist kick off.
It's likely that a multiplex would screen the same film on two different screens with overlapping times, so would require more than 1 copy of the film anyway.
In fact some multiplexes have systems where the film comes off the reel, through a projector, onto a clever buffer reel, through another projector, then onto the takeup reel. This way they can show the same film on two screens, with overlapping times and a time offset to make the most efficient use of the lobby.
There's a working exhibit of one at the Museum of the Moving Image in London.
With digital, though: well, why not have one copy on one server, with multiple projectors running off it?
The tone of the article suggested that the idea of this was non-mainstream short films and documentaries though: stuff that doesn't have the selling power for traditional distribution. They won't be filling multiple screens in one building with this stuff!
When the film breaks, it can be fixed- for the most part. But when a drive crashes, you'd think that it would be at least 8 hours before a new copy of the move could be express-shipped to the theater.
Drives crash far less often than film breaks, but even then, TFA indicates that theatres would copy the data to their own system before showing it. It seems reasonable to either have RAID 5 on these systems, or just have a hot backup.
Imagine a better iTunes
Ah if only!
I was a little taken aback by TFA's implicit assertion that iTunes is an example of a great data exploration application.
iTunes doesn't fit the way my brain works at all, and neither does the mSpace classical music demo.
What's six times seven?
(SPOILER)
I think it was "what's six times nine" but, I don't have the book to hand. This implies that either Earth or (less likely) Deep Thought was buggy.
When did you last see a trailer that truly reflected the nature of the film?
I expect the jokes will rely on context, such that they can't make it intact into the short span of a trailer.
(on Ford Prefect being a black American)
As we all know, no single black person lives in England.
Indeed, and futhermore there are no Americans in Guildford.
I'd hate to have our inside geek joke be revealed to the world. It's always been sort of a secret code, if you knew what it meant, then you belonged to the tribe.
Hmm, that may be true in the US. In Britain the TV series has been repeated so many times, and the books are so popular, I reckon at least 25% of people would know what The Answer is (which I'd consider high: something like 40% don't know what town Jesus was born in).
Obviously, far fewer would know The Question...
It wouldn't surprise me to find decent $100 OSX macs on say craigslist now or very soon. That's a real easy way to try it out without plonking down $500.
This is excellent advice, and similar to my own instinct, which was to wait for a flood of used Minis to appear on eBay, from those who "sucked and saw" and decided it wasn't for them.
I'll be watching used prices carefully: at the moment a Mini is £320. A used eMac is £400 + tax here. I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the Apple product range to tell for sure, but price for performance these don't look like better value than the Mini. (This supplier may not have the keenest pricing of course).
If that's what you like, more power to you, but don't expect those who like OS X to care too much.
Except that on the evidence of this discussion, lots of people care an awful lot. Peculiar, I know.
"Maybe you just don't get on with the Mac UI"
Then don't buy a Mac. Go to PC World, get a beige box put Linux on that where it belongs.
But I repeat: "Mac Mini is definitely a cuter form factor than anything else out there right now."
We have the opportuntity to run the OS we want, on a box that's not ugly. Is that so hard to understand?
90% of the open source stuff is crap
Do you have research to prove it?
What percentage of closed-source software is crap? Remember to include all that shovelware on those rotating stands in Walmart, and the entire contents of every shareware library.
I guess that's neat and all, but why wouldn't I just install X11 for whatever apps I run that need it, and run everything through OS X?
Maybe you just don't get on with the Mac UI. Such people do exist. I understand that if you want focus-follows-mouse in Mac OS X, you either get a compromise where it only works on X apps, or you have to spend $40 on third party virtual desktop software.
Mac Mini is definitely a cuter form factor than anything else out there right now.
I'm tempted to get a Mini just in order to try out Mac OS X, but I'm dubious enough about Mac OS that having the option to replace it with Linux if I don't like it is a selling point for the hardware.
If you haven't already, check out the "SeaDragon" mapping technology at SandCodex.
Click Technology -> Demos to see it in action; liquid-smooth continuous zooming, into thousands of square miles.
W00T. Streaming video of a canned demo running on who knows what hardware. Map24 has an applet based smooth scrolling map application, covering North America (Canada in lower detail than the USA) and Europe which you can use for free, right now.
If that's what floats your boat.
Google's is sort of fun though: it's neat that it's in DHTML instead of needing Java. Map24 has the better functionality today.
There seem to be a lot of misinformed, or partially informed views of what Podcasting is or is not. Allow me to try and clear it up:
From a "broadcaster's" perspective: you record a show to MP3, you make that available via some URL-accessible protocol (typically http or bittorrent), then you add an item to an RSS feed which includes that URL as an enclosure.
From a consumer's perspective: you run an application (e.g. iPodder). You give the application a set of RSS feeds. The application polls these feeds, and when it finds a new item that points to an enclosure, it downloads the media. What happens then is application-dependent, but what iPodder does is use the iTunes API to import the new media into the iTunes library.
Podcasting receiver applications like iPodder are meant to be "set up and forget". Once it's going, then assuming you dock your MP3 player every day or so, you are automagically going to find new content on your player whenever it becomes available. (I'm hoping that future versions will also automatically delete stale media).
For the consumer, this is better than streaming because:
- you can listen to it when you're disconnected from a network - e.g. on the bus, in the car
- skipping, rewinding etc. is easy
- being on a slow network (e.g. dialup) is not a problem
- timeshifting is inherent. The user experience is very like having a radio TiVo, except there is no option to listen to live programming.
Sure, it doesn't lend itself to live phone-ins, up-to-the-minute news bulletins, etc. -- but that's not what it's for.
For the producer, the costs scale very nicely, and if you go for bittorrent, you could distribute a very popular show very cheaply indeed.
So that's what it is. Here's what it is not:
Podcasting is not just for iPods. It's a shame the name implies it. This is because it was invented by Mac-heads. Fortunately they're standards-centric Mac-heads.
Podcasting is not just for no-budget audio equivalents of the personal blog or personal homepage. The BBC's trial of podcasting the excellent In Our Time series was by all accounts a great success.
The absence of DRM means it may be difficult for some material to get cleared for podcasting, which may dissuade professional broadcasters from podcasting in some cases.
The cheapness of podcasting means there's an awful lot of shovelware out there: like the middling days of mp3.com, when there was probably good, free music on there, but who was going to wade through the chaff and sort out the wheat?
isn't going to work. Since each sound card will have a slightly different version of 44.1-kHz, none of the rooms will match. It won't take long for the songs to get out of sync. Ethernet is also no isochronous, meaning it can't gaurantee the arrival time of packets...
Squeezebox / Slimserver seems to manage it.
Well there is NVU.
Thanks everyone who mentioned this -- that seems to be close to what I need (if a little over featured!)
But it's always better to code by hand, since you usually can't make semathically correct code in a WYSIWYG editor. (though for design some of them are usable.)
I know what you mean, but I don't quite agree. One can perfectly easily envisage a GUI semantic editor -- LyX comes close.
With Composer you could edit with a CSS style that explicitly shows you the semantics you're coding - I note that NVU has a pulldown for class...
(I was a bit worried for second -- I thought "no class" was the software making a judgement on me
$lt;br> problem!) but it's a free WYSYWIG HTML editor withoout too many frills or complexities, and it throws out reasonably tidy HTML which can be cleaned up by hand much more easily than (say) Frontpage output.
So what's the future for Composer? I'd love to have it either as a standalone alongside Firefox and Thunderbird, or as an extension to Firefox.
I notice that Thunderbird contains vestiges of Composer (e.g. CSS styles for display modes no longer available)...
So why oh why does apple sell a 500 dollars computer with 2 year old components.
To meet a price point, while retaining the build quality they want.
It has occurred to me that making it so tiny DOES make it desirable, but it must push the price up. Would I be as tempted by a $400 Mac which is slightly larger than the Mini, about as powerful, with a cheaper full-size HDD?
My head says yes: all I want is a cheap way to try out Mac OS (because although I don't expect to like it, I'd like to have an informed opinion).
My heart says no: it's appealing because it's so small.
The only thing I want to do with my iPod is play music -- but the iPod software is nowhere near as usable as I'd like it to be.
(I've written about it -- it's something of an obsession.)
I'm keeping an eye on iPod Linux because I think eventually Podzilla could become a better MP3 collection browser than the Apple firmware. Apple aren't going to fix it: they already have my money.
Someone is paying for that bandwidth, right?
I mean, I "share" my bandwidth and that ISP doesnt need to pay for this bandwidth. But what about my ISP? Doesnt it pay for it?
If the set of BT clients handling this particular file is large enough, it's likely that for any given chunk, someone is serving it from a system closer to you than the original seed.
You don't need to be all that lucky for that system to be using the same ISP as you. It's possible for that chunk to have passed over your ISPs expensive link to the rest of the Internet once, but for any number of clients to end up with that chunk as a result.
This is good for you, and good for the ISP. It's the same reason ISPs like it when customers use their cacheing proxies, and the same reason many ISPs pay Akamai to let them host Akamai servers: intra-ISP traffic is cheaper than inter-ISP traffic.
If the data you're fetching isn't popular enough to reach this critical mass of BT clients, then on the one hand, you don't see the same benefits, but on the other hand, who cares? BT isn't designed to handle unpopular files.
Even in the PC universe, PS/2 is getting increasingly rare: pretty much everything you'll see on the shops is USB now. My ThinkPad has no PS/2 socket either. Here's an example of a $25 PS2/USB convertor. I expect you could get cheaper. It only takes up one USB port too: neat.
The DVI->VGA adapter DOES come in the box, like you ask.
If you already own a KVM switcher, you're right, the migration away from PS/2 is a pain: but USB/VGA KVMs appear to be the basic choice in mainstream outlets now, from my brief investigations.
Why on earth would your monitor care whether you were playing a 3D game or a 2D game?
I can definitely say, you don't need a *book* to learn how to use this thing. You probably won't even need the tiny manual that comes with it.
Even my less-technical friends and family can use it without being told anything more than "this button chooses items, and the rest should be self-explanatory"
I disagree. I consider myself to be a techie. It took me hours to work out how to adjust the iPod's volume (without the remote) -- the reason being that I kept exploring the interface in vain, instead of waiting for the menu system to time out to the "now playing" screen. None of this is self explanatory or intuitive.
Maybe iPod uses idioms that are so ingrained in Mac users (I'm not one) that they *seem* intuitive.