At the time there was very little precedent for enforcing intellectual property laws against what we know as a gui and Xerox had no protectible rights to grant that Apple was interested in:
Trademarks - created and maintained by usage; not having a shipping product would have been problematic trying even if they had tried to trademark terms like "mouse".
Copyright - Original text, images, and media were used for the Lisa/Mac.
Patents - The two tours were superficial demos of end goals. Part of Apple's innovation came from misunderstanding what they saw (e.g. Bill Atkinson's impression that they used overlapping windows when they did not). Patents cover a method, not a goal (or at least they did back then).
Trade Secrets - This covers a great deal of intellectual property, but since Apple exchanged stock for their two demo trips it's clearly not 'stealing'. And once trade secrets become public, they are no longer protectible.
This will make fewer people buy the 1st gen, and instead wait for the 2nd gen. Nobody wants to have to pay for an entirely new console to get the HD-DVD functionality. Unless they somehow release an upgrade to the 1st gen boxes, this is REALLY dumb.
If the goal is the establish the "HD-DVD" standard to win over "Blu-Ray" then it makes sense. Unlike for a personal computer, both movie players and entertainment consoles are entertainment related and people don't seem to be as careful about issues such as forward compatability or even value for their money. Some people will be duped into buying these boxes because they'll see it as a way to get the new Xbox without being forced into getting HD-DVD as well.
Don't criticize Microsoft too harshly for this move though, they have a few billion they need to blow on dumb moves before they really feel they have to be competititve again.
Television flicker will trigger my seizures in some circumstances if I'm sitting too close, but I've been told by my doctors that what counts as "too close" changes depending on:
Altitude
Lack of sleep
Alcohol, perscription, or illicit drugs
If I'm not taking my brain numbing antiseizure meds
What has been good about LCD's are that the crappy high flicker displays are less common in stores, restaurants, and other places where you often don't have much choice whether you want to watch or not.
I recently went on an overnight trip on two planes (eighteen hours total). We were shown Bridget Jones Diary II. Apart from the almost seizure inducing pain of watching that movie once, one couldn't turn off the displays in one's seat. You could change the channel. but not turn it off. I bet that the lack of sleep, closeness to the screen, and high altitude would have caused a seziure had that screen had a 60hz flicker.
As a person succeptible to flicker induced seizures, I find this move outright evil.
As you say, they're going to reintroduce a major annoyance for many (and a very real health concern for me), to appear like they've solved the ghosting problem? It doesn't really even sound like they're solving the ghosting issues but just relying on the average person's afterimages to give that perception. I'm sure we'll see a huge return of strange, unquantified headaches that were a common ergonomics complaint back during the late nineties when truly crappy CRT displays were bundled with people's cheap computers (and some crappy speakers too!)
There must be some other advantage to a monitor manufacturer if they see it as a worthwhile risk to RE-INTRODUCE what could be a major health concern. Could they have made LCD monitors too reliable? Perhaps the rapid on and off of the LCD cause more rapid pixel death; and thus promotes a more rapid purchase cycle for new LCD's.
I'm sure there are some new designs, form factors, and technology innovations designed, tested, and ready to go in Apple's labs. But Apple has two threats hanging over it, right now:
Investors wary of an "Osborne effect"
A desire to force most upgrades only after the Intel transition
Until the Intel transition we'll ONLY see smaller price reductions or simple spec increases to drive sales. Apple has no incentive to bring out a radical new form factor such as a tablet or wide screen iBook. That'd only make people more likely to hang on to the older PowerPC tech.
What I find somewhat amazing is that Apple hasn't felt the need to really drop its prices on its professional gear. There are a few "bundles" and rebates, but my guess is that Apple intends to set Intel Macs near these same price points and don't want the move to Intel to look like a major price increase. What's even more likely is that Apple and Apple geeks are experienced with the "Mac OS 9" effect and thus see the time to the Intel transition as their "last chance" to buy the current tech they are familiar with. And until there's a sharp drop in sales figures we aren't going to see any price cuts.
Personally, I'm doing my best to wait for the Intel macs that will almost certainly have new Ive cases and new tech innovations besides "just" an Intel chip. I'm running an ancient TiBook so I'm drooling over current Macs in almost all form factors, but since I don't really need the speed I'm trying to make do with small spec upgrades until the major revisions of their whole line. Sounds kind of like the strategy Apple is using:-)
These sorts of lawsuits usually end with a press release announcing an "amicable settlement" between the two companies along with one side doing a voluntary name change, suspicions of equity changing hands, and huge unstated settlements for the lawyers.
Microsoft doesn't normally give in if they've made an announcement already, but I still fail to see the attraction of a name like "Microsoft Windows Vista ____ Edition SP#". It sounds like an unneeded add-on or "plus" pack rather than a new baseline for operating systems.
Being in the Mac OS X world, there's a big chasm between the practices of tab-delimiting and space-aligning data.
Unix originated the idea of the tab-delimited file as a simple way to delimit fields and records (with a character that was unusable in the field data). But it quickly fell from favor because text editors were inconsistent when 1-byte of data did not equal 1 space on-screen. The tools failed them so they abandoned tab-delimited file formats.
Oddly enough, the ancient Mac OS (pre-OS X) users had big problems with columnar-aligned, fixed length formats for file formats, mailing lists, and database dumps because the users didn't realize that the proportional fonts weren't properly aligning the data. The tools failed them so they adopted tab delimited file formats.
Now that Mac OS and Unix have sort of come together, I find the quality of tools on both sides could use some improvement. I've found a wealth of data editiing tools that make make editing columnar, tab-delimited, or XML data a pleasure to work with.
The real answer is to spend time to improve the tools if you're not the one in control of the formats.
I'm just glad we are out of the 0.X realm. That was really hurting Firefox's street cred to be below 1.0 --- I'm for the rapid growth of Firefox's version number. We gotta catch up IE7 and Opera 8.
I disagree with rapid, meaningless version number bumping in general. But I am glad that 1.5 is being touted because many non-geek muggles don't get that 1.1 is greater, newer, and better than the very popular 1.0.4 release that's out there. Considering the huge improvements to auto-updates, I was expecting that it'd motivate firefox to really do something "attention getting" to its version number.
I'm also glad that many companies keep bumping their version number for marketing reasons and almost imperceptible changes. Enough of these are going to make them wonder what the upgrade benefit is. They'll either move toward free software or they'll find some other way to evaluate their need for an upgrade.
Just as Agnes Moorehead didn't want to be remembered only as "the witch", I think it's kind of insulting to James Doohan just to encapsulate remberences of him solely as his most well-known character. Can anyone out there comment on his other roles? (e.g. Star Commander of Jason?) his military service? or his long, long life?
We all know he had a fun, fake Scottish accent and was unparalleled in delivering technobabble in just the right doses for a good episode of Trek, but I'd love to hear the stories of this man that aren't penned by Rodenberry or copyrighted by Viacom.
RSS subscription is one of the few techniques that can make people interested in subscribing to press releases or offer up enough order to the large amount of self-promotoion, spam, and junk mail that marketing departments churn out on a daily basis like used toilet paper.
The only people interested in the scatter-shot "show me everything from this company's PR department" are the people who are absurdly interested in the company.
Zealots/Fanatics - For example, Apple fans (of which I'm probably one)
Investors/Day Traders - Watching every scrap of news for the signal to buy or sell
Directors/Managers - The people evaluating the PR department's efforts with an untrained eye
RSS feeds the fans only if the business has fans and zealots already. While Hasbro, Apple, and Starbucks have a disturbingly large group of fans who would be intereseted in every PR droplet released, I doubt the Clorox company would pick up a similar RSS fanbase.
Personally, I see this as a way for PR departments to demand for budget money to pave a new yellow brick road for their company. This kind of threat to CFO's worked well prior to Y2K to demand budget expansions on this new "web" thing. It worked back in the 80's when desktop publishing made every company put out "Newsletters" even for the most absurd of businesses. Now RSS is the new technique that will be used to justify expanded technical budgets and more money for writing even more useless content and masturbatory articles of self-promotion.
I am undecided on whether Karl Rove was the leak of information or not, but I do not see that this article is anything more than use of hindsight determining confirming already revealed conclusions.
He uses google? Well, I'm sure many amateurs using google and searching on Valerie Plame Wilson would probably raise the relevancy of the findings. "Leaks can snowball" should be pretty obvious. I just fail to see the
As an aside, whoever leaked this information was both well trusted (to have that level of information) and very willing to sacrifice someone's life. In such a situation, regardless of who it is, I think a conviction of treason (the only capital federal crime) is the only "appropriate" punishment for treating someone else's life so nonchalantly.
Many Americans seem to have a great deal of trust in science and scientific studies even though it is based on trust rather than personal experience and knowledge.
I recall my church minister about ten years ago having a real problem with this and that he saw "trust" as a zero sum game. People were trusting science more than they were trusting the church.
While I can't say what the motivation behind this study way, I wouldn't doubt for a moment if the same people who fight about evolution having no scientific proof being also motivated to try and knife the trust in science. Why does this come to mind? Because of similar studies I've heard like this before they aren't touted as headline news to the general news media (where they only detract from attention in further reports rather than improve their quality) and because the majority of it was summarized in simple statistics rather than describe breakdowns of the depth and scale of the errors.
I'd recently read Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming and having particularly enjoyed his "case studies" where he'd describe the rationale behind a file format or protocol I was looking for a book that would go into this both wider in subject area and deeper in explanation.
A friend recommended to me the book the Advanced Unix book, and I actually saw this book last week while browsing but was hesitant to purchase it. First because the Dilbert comic strip on the front made me wary that the content was superficial. And second because the extreme length suggested that the book was probably "dumped" from PDFs, man pages, and source listings rather than "written" with insight and an analytical mindset.
The book is a significant size so it will not fit comfortably into my lunch and bedtime reading routine, but if the binding on book of this size looks like it will physically hold up for me to read the parts that interest me then I'll likely shell out the money for it.
Putting a part that's subject to significant wear and tear into the printer itself suggests to me that their goal is making the printer a disposable device that's consumed and replaced just like printer cartridges are.
The photolithography tech in the printer sounds interesting (and probably heavily protected with patents) but it sounds like the value to a consumer like me may not be significant when all costs for purchase and replacement are considered over a three year term (or thereabout).
"Question: How do you make sure your favorite feature gets included in the next version of Windows?"
"Convince an Apple engineer to put it in."
This joke was "old" in 1998, but it's still just as cynical and applicable today:-)
While we know every GUI maker will try to copy the good things from other GUI's, what's a bit suprising are the number of bad things MS is going to copy from some of the mistakes that Apple made. The new interface looks very slick so far and it will be very impressive when we can see the new 3d motion effects, but already I can see a few mistakes in design that are going to get lots of complaints if they remain unchanged.
From the screenshots of the "recycle bin" that's hard to tell, but with the new transparency on the recycle bin it looked like one of those shiny plastic 8oz. transparent water cups (Dixie? Solo?) that some restaurants give out.
Along the bottom of the cup, it appears to have a small layer of white milk or something along the bottom. Perhaps the empty cup represents the amount of free user space the user has, and the level of "milk" represents how much space the trash documents are taking up. As either the trash increases or the empty user space decreases the milk level goes up. When the trash is emptied, the milk cup is emptied as well.
The help icon that looks like a fancy headache or heartburn liqui-gel tab seems to go along with this visual metaphor of the item to drink and the cup of milk to wash it down with right above it.
Whether this metaphor makes logical sense (milk = trash?) I'm not as certain, but it does have a bit more artistic elegance than say the mini icon of the folder on its side that looks like a middle-finger digit salute (where the "files" are hanging out of the folder).
I would go into some other suggestions of what some of these things look like, but I'd rather not be giving Microsoft free advice on redesigning the look and feel of their OS. Show me the money:-)
i dont think so. Pixar moved to mainly apple gear for their workstations a while ago while rendering is a combination of macs and x86 PC's.
in the video world only a handful of applications remain available only for IRIX, chief among them products from Discreet/Autodesk. And even those are poised to shift to Linux on x86...
I disagree a bit.
First, there are patents and intellectual property of SGI that any animation and computer graphics company would love to own (or at least keep a competitor from monopolizing).
Second, you do occasionally catch glimpses of SGI stuff in the special features documentaries on The Incredibles DVD so it does look like there's an occasional machine still in use there.
Third, RenderMan Artist Tools 6.0 is only supported on Red Hat Linux 7.x, 9.0, SGI® IRIX® 6.5, and Windows® XP Pro, 2000 Pro (SP2+). Since it doesn't even have Mac OS X support yet, I'm sure this list will change, but there'd be only a minor directional correction if Pixar saw something worthwhile in an SGI technology they could acquire or continue to provide.
If you're thinking about companies that'll buy up SGI rather than just kill them off, don't forget that other Jobs' company with a focus on software rendering products. They've been known to also be big consumers of SGI stuff when they're putting together a new demo reel every couple of years.
Let's hope that no GTA characters come near an orphanage or adoption program for abused children. We might see similar arguments.:-)
I'm certainly not going to argue that violence is ok and [adoption] is not, however [adoption] does carry with it certain responsibilities. The fear in parents is that their children will be attracted to unsafe and irresponsible [adoption]. Also that [adoption] won't be associated with love but rather just used in a physical manner
Unprotected [adoption] can lead to disease including [typhoid, rabies, hepatitis C, and mad cow disease] which will change your life forever and kill you. Unprotected [adoption] can also lead to [another mouth to feed] which in a lot of ways is worse than disease as it impacts an entirely new life. [Sex] has a dramatic physchological impact and can't be considered an "easy" solution to [adoption].
Now I'm all for more [adoption] and less violence and I don't consider the [orphaned] human body something sinful. The fact is though, that depicting [adoption] should also educate about the possible dangers. Maybe virtual [adoption] needs virtual [adoption agencies]. After all your GTA character gets fat if he eats too much junk food and doesn't exercise. Maybe he should come down with a [child transmitted disease] if he [adopts] every [abused and neglected child] in the neighborhood. Or maybe he can be have his cash taken away to support the kid he [adopted].
A member's only club has now accused a non-member for walking in front of their automatic door and opening it. "The scum was stealing our air conditioned oxygen." When asked why the club didn't put a common card lock, hand scanner, or security guard nearby, the owner replied "We aren't the thieves. We shouldn't have to go to extra trouble to secure our door!" Though the accused did not steal (anything other than the oxygen), it was his presence at the door that unnerved the owners. He has been arrested and will be spending his next 10 years near many auto-closing doors.
What I hopping to see is lots of cheap old good obscure not mainstream movies. Those movies are hard to find in local video stores and expensive to buy.
You'll probably get 100 people flaming you saying that the big budget recent releases is where it will be most profitable. (slashdot users know what's profitable?)
That is probably the case where they'll make huge amounts of money, but your point shouldn't be discounted completely. I recall reading a report about which genres of music saw the biggest spike from being made available on the iTunes store versus their sales in conventional CD outlets and the survey said that it was Polka. I thought that was a joke, but thinking about it made sense. The genre is practically dead in regular CD outlets and the simplicity of the iTunes interface makes even a grandmother able to figure things out. I bet they probably get a LOT of impulse buys from people who are fans of obscure artists or genres.
There are a lot of things I think the iTunes music store could improve, but this ability to provide obscure music is a unique service. Let's hope a movie model like this can do something similalry worthwhile.
The article just barely touches on Intel's involvement in this project:
Intel spokesman Bill Calder said Intel had been working for several years with Freeman, setting up "digital home" technology in his studio and doing a long-range wireless demo at the Sundance film festival.
"It fits into our whole digital home strategy," Calder said of the investment. "One of the things we've always said is content is key."
Other than the strategy involves a multimedia PC hooked up to a TV, Intel's only part in the rest of the article is a big Uncle Penny Bags that could have equally been filled by Nabisco, Hustler, or some other big company.
It sounds like they intend to DRM this tech heavily, but it baffles me a bit how they intend to do this. The download format will be encrypted, but if it is decrypted for display there are a lot of ways to record that stream. What do they intend to do? Put intel chips in televisions themselves? Degrade the signal so any additional lossy compression will render it as unwatchable? Junk it up with video bugs to identify the original source? Maybe they just assume that Joe User will be able to steal 3 or 4 movies, but he'll soon give up if he fills up his hard disk and decides it's just easier to stream them all the time.
Any speculation or additional articles on what this plan intends to implement?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't criticize Microsoft too harshly for this move though, they have a few billion they need to blow on dumb moves before they really feel they have to be competititve again.
- Altitude
- Lack of sleep
- Alcohol, perscription, or illicit drugs
- If I'm not taking my brain numbing antiseizure meds
What has been good about LCD's are that the crappy high flicker displays are less common in stores, restaurants, and other places where you often don't have much choice whether you want to watch or not. I recently went on an overnight trip on two planes (eighteen hours total). We were shown Bridget Jones Diary II. Apart from the almost seizure inducing pain of watching that movie once, one couldn't turn off the displays in one's seat. You could change the channel. but not turn it off. I bet that the lack of sleep, closeness to the screen, and high altitude would have caused a seziure had that screen had a 60hz flicker.As you say, they're going to reintroduce a major annoyance for many (and a very real health concern for me), to appear like they've solved the ghosting problem? It doesn't really even sound like they're solving the ghosting issues but just relying on the average person's afterimages to give that perception. I'm sure we'll see a huge return of strange, unquantified headaches that were a common ergonomics complaint back during the late nineties when truly crappy CRT displays were bundled with people's cheap computers (and some crappy speakers too!)
There must be some other advantage to a monitor manufacturer if they see it as a worthwhile risk to RE-INTRODUCE what could be a major health concern. Could they have made LCD monitors too reliable? Perhaps the rapid on and off of the LCD cause more rapid pixel death; and thus promotes a more rapid purchase cycle for new LCD's.
I hope this effort fails miserably.
- Investors wary of an "Osborne effect"
- A desire to force most upgrades only after the Intel transition
Until the Intel transition we'll ONLY see smaller price reductions or simple spec increases to drive sales. Apple has no incentive to bring out a radical new form factor such as a tablet or wide screen iBook. That'd only make people more likely to hang on to the older PowerPC tech.What I find somewhat amazing is that Apple hasn't felt the need to really drop its prices on its professional gear. There are a few "bundles" and rebates, but my guess is that Apple intends to set Intel Macs near these same price points and don't want the move to Intel to look like a major price increase. What's even more likely is that Apple and Apple geeks are experienced with the "Mac OS 9" effect and thus see the time to the Intel transition as their "last chance" to buy the current tech they are familiar with. And until there's a sharp drop in sales figures we aren't going to see any price cuts.
Personally, I'm doing my best to wait for the Intel macs that will almost certainly have new Ive cases and new tech innovations besides "just" an Intel chip. I'm running an ancient TiBook so I'm drooling over current Macs in almost all form factors, but since I don't really need the speed I'm trying to make do with small spec upgrades until the major revisions of their whole line. Sounds kind of like the strategy Apple is using :-)
These sorts of lawsuits usually end with a press release announcing an "amicable settlement" between the two companies along with one side doing a voluntary name change, suspicions of equity changing hands, and huge unstated settlements for the lawyers.
Microsoft doesn't normally give in if they've made an announcement already, but I still fail to see the attraction of a name like "Microsoft Windows Vista ____ Edition SP#". It sounds like an unneeded add-on or "plus" pack rather than a new baseline for operating systems.
Unix originated the idea of the tab-delimited file as a simple way to delimit fields and records (with a character that was unusable in the field data). But it quickly fell from favor because text editors were inconsistent when 1-byte of data did not equal 1 space on-screen. The tools failed them so they abandoned tab-delimited file formats.
Oddly enough, the ancient Mac OS (pre-OS X) users had big problems with columnar-aligned, fixed length formats for file formats, mailing lists, and database dumps because the users didn't realize that the proportional fonts weren't properly aligning the data. The tools failed them so they adopted tab delimited file formats.
Now that Mac OS and Unix have sort of come together, I find the quality of tools on both sides could use some improvement. I've found a wealth of data editiing tools that make make editing columnar, tab-delimited, or XML data a pleasure to work with.
The real answer is to spend time to improve the tools if you're not the one in control of the formats.
I'm also glad that many companies keep bumping their version number for marketing reasons and almost imperceptible changes. Enough of these are going to make them wonder what the upgrade benefit is. They'll either move toward free software or they'll find some other way to evaluate their need for an upgrade.
Just as Agnes Moorehead didn't want to be remembered only as "the witch", I think it's kind of insulting to James Doohan just to encapsulate remberences of him solely as his most well-known character. Can anyone out there comment on his other roles? (e.g. Star Commander of Jason?) his military service? or his long, long life?
We all know he had a fun, fake Scottish accent and was unparalleled in delivering technobabble in just the right doses for a good episode of Trek, but I'd love to hear the stories of this man that aren't penned by Rodenberry or copyrighted by Viacom.
Anyone have any?
The only people interested in the scatter-shot "show me everything from this company's PR department" are the people who are absurdly interested in the company.
- Zealots/Fanatics - For example, Apple fans (of which I'm probably one)
- Investors/Day Traders - Watching every scrap of news for the signal to buy or sell
- Directors/Managers - The people evaluating the PR department's efforts with an untrained eye
RSS feeds the fans only if the business has fans and zealots already. While Hasbro, Apple, and Starbucks have a disturbingly large group of fans who would be intereseted in every PR droplet released, I doubt the Clorox company would pick up a similar RSS fanbase.Personally, I see this as a way for PR departments to demand for budget money to pave a new yellow brick road for their company. This kind of threat to CFO's worked well prior to Y2K to demand budget expansions on this new "web" thing. It worked back in the 80's when desktop publishing made every company put out "Newsletters" even for the most absurd of businesses. Now RSS is the new technique that will be used to justify expanded technical budgets and more money for writing even more useless content and masturbatory articles of self-promotion.
He uses google? Well, I'm sure many amateurs using google and searching on Valerie Plame Wilson would probably raise the relevancy of the findings. "Leaks can snowball" should be pretty obvious. I just fail to see the
As an aside, whoever leaked this information was both well trusted (to have that level of information) and very willing to sacrifice someone's life. In such a situation, regardless of who it is, I think a conviction of treason (the only capital federal crime) is the only "appropriate" punishment for treating someone else's life so nonchalantly.
Many Americans seem to have a great deal of trust in science and scientific studies even though it is based on trust rather than personal experience and knowledge.
I recall my church minister about ten years ago having a real problem with this and that he saw "trust" as a zero sum game. People were trusting science more than they were trusting the church.
While I can't say what the motivation behind this study way, I wouldn't doubt for a moment if the same people who fight about evolution having no scientific proof being also motivated to try and knife the trust in science. Why does this come to mind? Because of similar studies I've heard like this before they aren't touted as headline news to the general news media (where they only detract from attention in further reports rather than improve their quality) and because the majority of it was summarized in simple statistics rather than describe breakdowns of the depth and scale of the errors.
What I want to know is what color these protective covers are. It could give a whole new meaning to the term Windows Blue Screen of Death.
A friend recommended to me the book the Advanced Unix book, and I actually saw this book last week while browsing but was hesitant to purchase it. First because the Dilbert comic strip on the front made me wary that the content was superficial. And second because the extreme length suggested that the book was probably "dumped" from PDFs, man pages, and source listings rather than "written" with insight and an analytical mindset.
The book is a significant size so it will not fit comfortably into my lunch and bedtime reading routine, but if the binding on book of this size looks like it will physically hold up for me to read the parts that interest me then I'll likely shell out the money for it.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Putting a part that's subject to significant wear and tear into the printer itself suggests to me that their goal is making the printer a disposable device that's consumed and replaced just like printer cartridges are.
The photolithography tech in the printer sounds interesting (and probably heavily protected with patents) but it sounds like the value to a consumer like me may not be significant when all costs for purchase and replacement are considered over a three year term (or thereabout).
"Convince an Apple engineer to put it in."
This joke was "old" in 1998, but it's still just as cynical and applicable today :-)
While we know every GUI maker will try to copy the good things from other GUI's, what's a bit suprising are the number of bad things MS is going to copy from some of the mistakes that Apple made. The new interface looks very slick so far and it will be very impressive when we can see the new 3d motion effects, but already I can see a few mistakes in design that are going to get lots of complaints if they remain unchanged.
From the screenshots of the "recycle bin" that's hard to tell, but with the new transparency on the recycle bin it looked like one of those shiny plastic 8oz. transparent water cups (Dixie? Solo?) that some restaurants give out.
:-)
Along the bottom of the cup, it appears to have a small layer of white milk or something along the bottom. Perhaps the empty cup represents the amount of free user space the user has, and the level of "milk" represents how much space the trash documents are taking up. As either the trash increases or the empty user space decreases the milk level goes up. When the trash is emptied, the milk cup is emptied as well.
The help icon that looks like a fancy headache or heartburn liqui-gel tab seems to go along with this visual metaphor of the item to drink and the cup of milk to wash it down with right above it.
Whether this metaphor makes logical sense (milk = trash?) I'm not as certain, but it does have a bit more artistic elegance than say the mini icon of the folder on its side that looks like a middle-finger digit salute (where the "files" are hanging out of the folder).
I would go into some other suggestions of what some of these things look like, but I'd rather not be giving Microsoft free advice on redesigning the look and feel of their OS. Show me the money
First, there are patents and intellectual property of SGI that any animation and computer graphics company would love to own (or at least keep a competitor from monopolizing).
Second, you do occasionally catch glimpses of SGI stuff in the special features documentaries on The Incredibles DVD so it does look like there's an occasional machine still in use there.
Third, RenderMan Artist Tools 6.0 is only supported on Red Hat Linux 7.x, 9.0, SGI® IRIX® 6.5, and Windows® XP Pro, 2000 Pro (SP2+). Since it doesn't even have Mac OS X support yet, I'm sure this list will change, but there'd be only a minor directional correction if Pixar saw something worthwhile in an SGI technology they could acquire or continue to provide.
If you're thinking about companies that'll buy up SGI rather than just kill them off, don't forget that other Jobs' company with a focus on software rendering products. They've been known to also be big consumers of SGI stuff when they're putting together a new demo reel every couple of years.
A member's only club has now accused a non-member for walking in front of their automatic door and opening it. "The scum was stealing our air conditioned oxygen." When asked why the club didn't put a common card lock, hand scanner, or security guard nearby, the owner replied "We aren't the thieves. We shouldn't have to go to extra trouble to secure our door!" Though the accused did not steal (anything other than the oxygen), it was his presence at the door that unnerved the owners. He has been arrested and will be spending his next 10 years near many auto-closing doors.
That is probably the case where they'll make huge amounts of money, but your point shouldn't be discounted completely. I recall reading a report about which genres of music saw the biggest spike from being made available on the iTunes store versus their sales in conventional CD outlets and the survey said that it was Polka. I thought that was a joke, but thinking about it made sense. The genre is practically dead in regular CD outlets and the simplicity of the iTunes interface makes even a grandmother able to figure things out. I bet they probably get a LOT of impulse buys from people who are fans of obscure artists or genres.
There are a lot of things I think the iTunes music store could improve, but this ability to provide obscure music is a unique service. Let's hope a movie model like this can do something similalry worthwhile.
It sounds like they intend to DRM this tech heavily, but it baffles me a bit how they intend to do this. The download format will be encrypted, but if it is decrypted for display there are a lot of ways to record that stream. What do they intend to do? Put intel chips in televisions themselves? Degrade the signal so any additional lossy compression will render it as unwatchable? Junk it up with video bugs to identify the original source? Maybe they just assume that Joe User will be able to steal 3 or 4 movies, but he'll soon give up if he fills up his hard disk and decides it's just easier to stream them all the time.
Any speculation or additional articles on what this plan intends to implement?