Microsoft were never, really, fully committed though, were they? Otherwise we would have seen an HD-DVD player actually *in* the XBox 360 (and both the format and console wars would now be over).
They'll bail, don't you worry. And there'll be a cheap BD drive for the XBox by the end of the year.
Yeah, I'm a Django guy and while I studiously avoid being mean about rails, the "400 restarts a day" certainly drew my interest. Like, I had heard it wasn't *as* stable but... sheesh, 400 a day?
Right, so Yahoo are bad for grassing up the online activities of a Chinese dissident to their government, but AT&T are good for spying on Americans for their government. This, presumably, is because the US government has a squeaky clean human rights record.
This should be a clue for those.NET and upcoming SilverLight lovers too.
Don't worry, there aren't any upcoming silverlight lovers. Oh, sure, the really determined fanboy holdouts will still wet their pants over it and I think the people who make the (famously crashing) displays in airports will have fun with it. But flash is far too widely distributed for Microsoft to be able to even dent it. Anyway, it's Microsoft - it won't take off and in six months time they'll quietly obsolete it and hype the shit out of whatever the next big thing is.
It doesn't matter how many people click on it, it's how many people see it, period.
This is precisely the point that many marketers miss. Some people are just trying to create traffic to their website - and they are served well by adsense etc. But others, particularly those in retail, are just trying to create a subconscious connection to a brand. Are Nike trainers actually any better? How do you know? It's not even brand cachet because other people don't see your shoes. Branding, all of it.
Here's an experiment - next time you're at a supermarket look at the toilet paper. Which one are you going to buy? Why? Why do you think that particular wrapper contains better arse paper than the one next to it? It all happens at a subconscious level.
Google will eventually be subverted and have to play by the old-boy rules.
You mean like how Microsoft eventually conceeded that it had to behave like IBM told it to? Or the eventual victory of the sheet music publishers over these new fangled phonographs? Or how every last square inch of the earth is now a part of the British empire?
No. They don't have to play by anyone else's rules.
Sony really think about what made their PS2 a huge seller.
They did, it had a DVD player in it. Critically the PS2 came out and was cheaper than a DVD player, meaning that guys like me could get approval from the domestic commandant with the words "but you wanted a DVD player, right". So they thought they'd pull the same trick again - make the PS3 cheaper than a standalone BluRay player and you either get a free games console with your BR player, or a free BR player with your games console... depending on how you look at it.
As far as I can see it, Sony have made two big mistakes with the PS3:
* Nobody wants a BluRay player. * Nobody wants a PS3 either.
Because both value propositions only make sense if you drop $2k on a new telly at the same time. Furthermore, where the PS2 was a giant leap from the PS1 and where DVD was a giant leap from VHS, the same cannot be said of this new generation. Consequently they're stuffed.
FWIW after the dead 360 debacle it's becoming clear that the only winner from this round is Nintendo. Who'dve thunk it?
Agreed. I don't know if it's on purpose or not but it's increasingly looking like the PS2 is Sony's best defence against the Wii. The PS3, ironically (after the delays) is beginning to look like a machine whose time has not yet come.
We do need a category "incorrect", but it would just turn into a shitfight with everything being downmodded all the time. It would be nice if the community in general were able to use the "-1 Incorrect" button responsibly but, well, we're not... are we?
Still, what would I know? I still don't understand why i can't mod you up *and* reply to the post.
You're right about CD-ROM's. I remember discovering how big they were and thinking (as seemed obvious at the time) how it was clear that optical would always be ahead. I guess not. For the same impact BluRay needed to ship at about a terabyte - a tad larger than the largest available drive.
this is why I'm pissing my pants laughing here watching the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray race.
I actually think the HD-DVD/BluRay thing has some considerable legs. Not right now, maybe in a years' time (when HD TV's actually support HD, for instance, and HDMI works properly), and definitely in two years time. The reason is this: I have, on a hard disk, right now, a whole shitload of ripped movies. They encoded at just about real time, take up about a gig each, and are just about good enough quality. Just about. It takes f*cking ages to send one across the internet and really quite a while to dump a dozen or so onto a USB drive to take over to a mates' house.
If BluRay and HDTV was commonplace then they would be a fabulous advert for their own BluRay equivalents. And while we might be able to decode the data from a BluRay it's still, what, fifty gig? The price of the media alone makes it almost worthwhile. *And* you need something that can decode a H264 at 1920x1080x25fps without burping which, I guarantee you, your modded XBox media centre is not going to manage. Although my MacBook Pro might:)
I do feel for the people with n*100 DVD's sitting on a shelf though and I think the transparency with which the movie industry is merely trying to sell these people's collections to them again (a third time in some cases) is just a little sickening.
At least they are starting to listen on iPod's - big improvement on WalMart boomboxes any day. I'm even starting to find some people smart enough to bin the crap headphones.
Vinyl mixed by the right engineers and played on the right (and not totally ludicrously expensive) kit sounds a whole shitload more like live music than CD's do. This may be because CD's lose resolution as sounds get quieter, or because they lose resolution as sounds get higher frequencies, or because there is no headroom whatsoever, or because producers these days drop shitloads of compressor on and lose dynamic range... while simultaneously stopping me from turning the volume UP to where it BELONGS!! I don't know why it is, but it is.
Blues albums suffer the most. Something that is supposed to be played by four depressed men in a nasty looking bar in Louisiana comes out sounding like it's been played on general midi.
Like it or not, something has been lost from music. The good news is that it's still there in live gigs and with totally rampant piracy (if we're honest) and thieving bastard record industry executives it seems that the only hope for the bands themselves is to play live more often. Hurrah!
Anyone have some insights on how this development will put money in the bank at Apple?
I installed Safari 3 on both my MacBook Pro (dual core 2.16GHz, 2GB) and an admittedly troubled (a year or so since rebuild) Windows XP box (2GHz Athlon 64, 1GB) and it seemed obvious straight away. Safari/XP is an advert for Macs. It's saying "your everyday computing experience could look like this, but not suck". Safari 3 on the Mac is fast fast fast. On XP it's... not.
Again, disclaimer, this is a troubled XP box... but between spending all fucking day rebuilding the shitter and just buying SWMBO a Mac, it's looking more and more like a Mac Mini would be a great idea. Ironically I'm right in the target market for a Vista upgrade - it's a reasonably powerful box with a good graphics card (GeForce 6800), we have some Windows specific apps that we need to keep running, I game on the machine and the license is... ummm... not exactly mine. I have the money to go "legit" and would quite like some better driver support, particularly around installation, and the enormous number of patches and drivers I'm going to have to download and install to rebuild XP just fills me with dread. But I hear nothing but pain from Vista users and really don't feel the urge to part with a number of hundreds of dollars to join them.
4. Wall warts. I know they serve a purpose, but do they really need to be on the end of the cord, where they take up three spots on the power strip? How about placing them in the middle of the cord, so I can use more than three plugs on my six-outlet strip.
Apple ones are really narrow. *And* come with a cable so you can have them in the middle.
My phone sings loudly, and does it half a dozen times as the 'battery low' situation gets gradually worse. Of course, starting at 3am this is simply wonderful, especially if you don't know where you've put it.
Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
Exactly. Asterisk is the new sendmail. Crap, but mostly reliable, and everything else is far worse. And just like sendmail what Asterisk proves is that there's a huge opportunity for someone to make one that works - OSS or no.
Re:you mean... like we have had for years?
on
Death of the UMPC?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The real question is why there is all this hoopla over the iPhone
Because the whole "Pocket PC" industry is, at it's core, derived from the Palm Pilot. Which, apart from being a spectacular double entendre, is a non-sexy product. It's not cool, it's not funky, and at no point were there colourful adverts with people dancing around while entering phone numbers into a spectacularly expensive piece of consumer electronics. When they then lost.
The iPhone, on the other hand, extends both the iPod and the "OSX era" mac. Both are funky and cool things. Also both things for a reputation for actually working, unlike Redmond's recent products. Besides, you saw the demos, right? Doesn't WinCE look... well... sort of Russian after that? Like how Window 3 and green screen terminals looked next to each other.
My point is, I think, that it has nothing to do with practicality.
Dave
Re:Another lame MS idea crashes & burns
on
Death of the UMPC?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Exactly. Somebody has sat around in a board meeting and said "well, it's not small enough to sit in your pocket, but it's not big enough to be useful as a PC. We need to give up on the PC idea" and sooner or later they'll conclude that:
* It needs to have the full face be a screen and * It needs to integrate with cellphone data networks and * While you're at it you might as well make calls on it and * Put in a web browser and * Connect via 802.11 to the rest of the world.
Finally they'll make it look like arse and put WinCE on it. It'll come out a year after the iPhone and will suck. Shit, if we're lucky it'll be called Zune UMPC.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Put Android on a pure touchscreen phone and the *best* you can hope for is mobile BeOS.
Microsoft were never, really, fully committed though, were they? Otherwise we would have seen an HD-DVD player actually *in* the XBox 360 (and both the format and console wars would now be over).
They'll bail, don't you worry. And there'll be a cheap BD drive for the XBox by the end of the year.
Dave
Yeah, I'm a Django guy and while I studiously avoid being mean about rails, the "400 restarts a day" certainly drew my interest. Like, I had heard it wasn't *as* stable but ... sheesh, 400 a day?
Right, so Yahoo are bad for grassing up the online activities of a Chinese dissident to their government, but AT&T are good for spying on Americans for their government. This, presumably, is because the US government has a squeaky clean human rights record.
Aha. OK. You can put me on your list now.
Dave
I own an N800 (bought it when the fixed the firmware a couple of months back) and I've played with an iPhone.
The iPhone blows the N800 into little tiny irrelevant pieces that look like Gnome running on a P90. The iPod Touch is cheaper, too. I'm pissed.
Dave
I'm lost. Why would I need 64 bit flash?
Don't worry, there aren't any upcoming silverlight lovers. Oh, sure, the really determined fanboy holdouts will still wet their pants over it and I think the people who make the (famously crashing) displays in airports will have fun with it. But flash is far too widely distributed for Microsoft to be able to even dent it. Anyway, it's Microsoft - it won't take off and in six months time they'll quietly obsolete it and hype the shit out of whatever the next big thing is.
Dave
This is precisely the point that many marketers miss. Some people are just trying to create traffic to their website - and they are served well by adsense etc. But others, particularly those in retail, are just trying to create a subconscious connection to a brand. Are Nike trainers actually any better? How do you know? It's not even brand cachet because other people don't see your shoes. Branding, all of it.
Here's an experiment - next time you're at a supermarket look at the toilet paper. Which one are you going to buy? Why? Why do you think that particular wrapper contains better arse paper than the one next to it? It all happens at a subconscious level.
Dave
You mean like how Microsoft eventually conceeded that it had to behave like IBM told it to? Or the eventual victory of the sheet music publishers over these new fangled phonographs? Or how every last square inch of the earth is now a part of the British empire?
No. They don't have to play by anyone else's rules.
Dave
Putting a value on your time? You must be lost, this is slashdot
Dave
They did, it had a DVD player in it. Critically the PS2 came out and was cheaper than a DVD player, meaning that guys like me could get approval from the domestic commandant with the words "but you wanted a DVD player, right". So they thought they'd pull the same trick again - make the PS3 cheaper than a standalone BluRay player and you either get a free games console with your BR player, or a free BR player with your games console
As far as I can see it, Sony have made two big mistakes with the PS3:
* Nobody wants a BluRay player.
* Nobody wants a PS3 either.
Because both value propositions only make sense if you drop $2k on a new telly at the same time. Furthermore, where the PS2 was a giant leap from the PS1 and where DVD was a giant leap from VHS, the same cannot be said of this new generation. Consequently they're stuffed.
FWIW after the dead 360 debacle it's becoming clear that the only winner from this round is Nintendo. Who'dve thunk it?
Dave
Agreed. I don't know if it's on purpose or not but it's increasingly looking like the PS2 is Sony's best defence against the Wii. The PS3, ironically (after the delays) is beginning to look like a machine whose time has not yet come.
We do need a category "incorrect", but it would just turn into a shitfight with everything being downmodded all the time. It would be nice if the community in general were able to use the "-1 Incorrect" button responsibly but, well, we're not ... are we?
Still, what would I know? I still don't understand why i can't mod you up *and* reply to the post.
Dave
You're right about CD-ROM's. I remember discovering how big they were and thinking (as seemed obvious at the time) how it was clear that optical would always be ahead. I guess not. For the same impact BluRay needed to ship at about a terabyte - a tad larger than the largest available drive.
this is why I'm pissing my pants laughing here watching the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray race.
:)
I actually think the HD-DVD/BluRay thing has some considerable legs. Not right now, maybe in a years' time (when HD TV's actually support HD, for instance, and HDMI works properly), and definitely in two years time. The reason is this: I have, on a hard disk, right now, a whole shitload of ripped movies. They encoded at just about real time, take up about a gig each, and are just about good enough quality. Just about. It takes f*cking ages to send one across the internet and really quite a while to dump a dozen or so onto a USB drive to take over to a mates' house.
If BluRay and HDTV was commonplace then they would be a fabulous advert for their own BluRay equivalents. And while we might be able to decode the data from a BluRay it's still, what, fifty gig? The price of the media alone makes it almost worthwhile. *And* you need something that can decode a H264 at 1920x1080x25fps without burping which, I guarantee you, your modded XBox media centre is not going to manage. Although my MacBook Pro might
I do feel for the people with n*100 DVD's sitting on a shelf though and I think the transparency with which the movie industry is merely trying to sell these people's collections to them again (a third time in some cases) is just a little sickening.
Dave
At least they are starting to listen on iPod's - big improvement on WalMart boomboxes any day. I'm even starting to find some people smart enough to bin the crap headphones.
Dave
No, you're missing the point.
... while simultaneously stopping me from turning the volume UP to where it BELONGS!! I don't know why it is, but it is.
Vinyl mixed by the right engineers and played on the right (and not totally ludicrously expensive) kit sounds a whole shitload more like live music than CD's do. This may be because CD's lose resolution as sounds get quieter, or because they lose resolution as sounds get higher frequencies, or because there is no headroom whatsoever, or because producers these days drop shitloads of compressor on and lose dynamic range
Blues albums suffer the most. Something that is supposed to be played by four depressed men in a nasty looking bar in Louisiana comes out sounding like it's been played on general midi.
Like it or not, something has been lost from music. The good news is that it's still there in live gigs and with totally rampant piracy (if we're honest) and thieving bastard record industry executives it seems that the only hope for the bands themselves is to play live more often. Hurrah!
Dave
Never any mod points when you need them, are there?
Anyone have some insights on how this development will put money in the bank at Apple?
... not.
... but between spending all fucking day rebuilding the shitter and just buying SWMBO a Mac, it's looking more and more like a Mac Mini would be a great idea. Ironically I'm right in the target market for a Vista upgrade - it's a reasonably powerful box with a good graphics card (GeForce 6800), we have some Windows specific apps that we need to keep running, I game on the machine and the license is ... ummm ... not exactly mine. I have the money to go "legit" and would quite like some better driver support, particularly around installation, and the enormous number of patches and drivers I'm going to have to download and install to rebuild XP just fills me with dread. But I hear nothing but pain from Vista users and really don't feel the urge to part with a number of hundreds of dollars to join them.
I installed Safari 3 on both my MacBook Pro (dual core 2.16GHz, 2GB) and an admittedly troubled (a year or so since rebuild) Windows XP box (2GHz Athlon 64, 1GB) and it seemed obvious straight away. Safari/XP is an advert for Macs. It's saying "your everyday computing experience could look like this, but not suck". Safari 3 on the Mac is fast fast fast. On XP it's
Again, disclaimer, this is a troubled XP box
Dave
Apple ones are really narrow. *And* come with a cable so you can have them in the middle.
My phone sings loudly, and does it half a dozen times as the 'battery low' situation gets gradually worse. Of course, starting at 3am this is simply wonderful, especially if you don't know where you've put it.
Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
Exactly. Asterisk is the new sendmail. Crap, but mostly reliable, and everything else is far worse. And just like sendmail what Asterisk proves is that there's a huge opportunity for someone to make one that works - OSS or no.
Dave
I take it you don't have a mother in law then?
The real question is why there is all this hoopla over the iPhone
... well ... sort of Russian after that? Like how Window 3 and green screen terminals looked next to each other.
Because the whole "Pocket PC" industry is, at it's core, derived from the Palm Pilot. Which, apart from being a spectacular double entendre, is a non-sexy product. It's not cool, it's not funky, and at no point were there colourful adverts with people dancing around while entering phone numbers into a spectacularly expensive piece of consumer electronics. When they then lost.
The iPhone, on the other hand, extends both the iPod and the "OSX era" mac. Both are funky and cool things. Also both things for a reputation for actually working, unlike Redmond's recent products. Besides, you saw the demos, right? Doesn't WinCE look
My point is, I think, that it has nothing to do with practicality.
Dave
Exactly. Somebody has sat around in a board meeting and said "well, it's not small enough to sit in your pocket, but it's not big enough to be useful as a PC. We need to give up on the PC idea" and sooner or later they'll conclude that:
* It needs to have the full face be a screen and
* It needs to integrate with cellphone data networks and
* While you're at it you might as well make calls on it and
* Put in a web browser and
* Connect via 802.11 to the rest of the world.
Finally they'll make it look like arse and put WinCE on it. It'll come out a year after the iPhone and will suck. Shit, if we're lucky it'll be called Zune UMPC.
Dave