Include the advertisements in the shows, and track how many people download them.
Ads can be fast-forwarded (well, most of the time) or shrunk to invisibility. A better idea, at least IMO, is to take the approach HomestarRunner and RedVsBlue use: offer the episodes for free, keep a complete archive on the site, and use the site traffic to sell merchandise at a profitable mark-up.
There's no chance that the IPod won't morph into something else in the future...
It's already doing so. iPods with screens let you view a calendar, set alarms for events, read short text files, and display your contacts. It's half of a v1.0 Palm Pilot, the missing half of course being the ability to modify those contacts and events....
Then, of course, there's the iPod Photo, which is gradually replacing the white iPod entirely, which adds photo browsing and slideshows plus the ability to copy photos directly to the iPod from a camera with a separate adapter.
So Apple's been "amping up" iPod for quite some time now, but none of those added features come close to being the main reason for buying one. They're just reasons (for certain people) not to buy a Palm-style handheld instead.
So, in order to use this wonderful technology I still have to buy a piece of plastic with the bits on it?
You mean a credit card? Yes, and you need one of those to buy music on iTMS, too.
IMHO it is environmentally and logistically dumb to have to fill my shelves with plastic if the only thing I want is bits that I could store on a hard drive.
If you've waited this long to back up your important data, music, etc. on CD-R or DVD-R, you have my sympathies.
pro-Apple: This is great! Apple's getting their bug fixes out to their customers within only a few weeks after release! Let's see M$ try and release a service pack that fast, ha-ha!
anti-Apple: This is ridiculous! If Apple can release a major set of bug fixes this soon after releasing the OS, why didn't they just put off the release date a few weeks so they could sell it with the fixed bugs?
I hear many people complain about OpenOffice.org not opening their MS documents with correct formatting, but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats.
Be that as it may, 99.9% of all (editable) word processing documents on and off the Internet are in some kind of Word.doc format, 99.9% of all spreadsheets are in Excel, etc. So for any office suite to even pretend to compete with MS Office, it NEEDS to be able to open those existing documents.
If it can't, there's no real reason for people to replace MS Office with OpenOffice. And why keep two software packages around if you're perfectly happy with the one that does everything you need?
Music artists and the RIAA are seen as hypocrites hawking anti-establishment messages and then looking for special rights, powers, and protection from the establishment to maintain their empire.
I never realized how fundamental this is to the RIAA's "problems" of the day. On one hand, they actively record, promote and profit from gangsta rap which doesn't just talk about killing policemen and living the "bling-bling" life, it's practically propaganda for it.
And then they expect us to listen when they tell us not to steal copies of music? That's like Merimac Caverns at midnight calling the kettle black.
It's puzzling, to me, that Card (a writer whom I respect greatly, BTW) spends his entire column arguing that the "Star Trek" series(es) should be cancelled because ST:TOS was a bad show.
Why should that even matter? ST:TNG was (by the third season, anyway) a far better series, and DS9 was better still, despite stealing ideas left and right from "Babylon 5". It's the last twenty years of Trek that's being cancelled, not the first three.
Postscript: Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print. If only....
Let me think a bit... (note: this is coming from a non-gamer, who only hears about the Next Big Thing when it's already reached critical mass.)
The most recent "sleeper hit" in gaming I can think of is Katamari Damacy (sp?), which is in essence a puzzle game but really is more a "let's have fun" type game. It's replay value seems to be limited but everyone who plays it seems to suffer what I'll call the Tetris Effect.
I think the last big "revolution" in gaming would be Dance Dance Revolution (pun sort-of intended), which actually has something in common with Katamari Damacy--people play it for the sheer enjoyment rather than to get the best possible score, and players strive for style and admiration of their audience more than anything else. It's partly evolved from the kinetic sports arcade games (jet-ski racers, et.al.), but more than any other game it's found a way to combine the fun of video games with the physical satisfaction of a good short workout.
Then there's the whole phenomenon of networked gameplay, which is mostly divided between deathmatch-style games and MMORPGs. Both these genres existed before, but before the Internet made them easy to play with dozens of other humans they weren't quite the same. No new genres there, but the ability to play on a network has revolutionized a whole chunk of the gaming industry.
I agree with the other posters -- there may not be much that's new as far as genres, but there's a whole lot that's been happening within them.
it's the thousands of dollars in support they will spend not only repairing potentially wonky modems but also fielding tech support calls over dialing into the internet, connection issues once dialed-in, etc.
That's a silly argument, isn't it? Only the people who need to use the modem will have those tech support issues, and those people will be installing them anyway. (I think it's unlikely that a modem in a PowerMac could be causing problems if nobody uses it for anything.) So Apple wouldn't be saving any money that way--only on the cost of the hardware itself.
I noticed an oddity on the linked page to Apple's store: the older 1.8 GHz dual had a built-in modem, but the new ones did not. Sure enough, if you actually order one of the newer PowerMacs you find that built-in modems are now a $29 option.
I suppose nearly everyone who buys these machines is using them in a networked office or can afford broadband at home, and the not-so-recent advent of internet faxing has made the other role of the built-in modem obsolete.
Still, it's an interesting omission. Like the floppy disk, Apple's opinion now is that the POTS modem is sufficiently obsolete to remove it entirely and free up space inside the box, rather than leave it in and lose the $10 OEM or whatever it actually costs them.
Tablets have their place -- scribbling pictures, taking notes when space is limited, etc. However, there are some jobs that a keyboard is simply better suited to do.
Don't think of it as half-a-tablet, think of it as a useful hybrid. When you factor in the hard drive, CD burner, and a little space to cool the components inside the case, there's not much space added by the keyboard. May as well leave it there for the jobs that demand it.
The only good reason to remove the keyboard completely is if you want to make a half-tablet PC -- about the size of the cover of a hardcover novel, which would be too small for typing on comfortably but just large enough to be easy to read. Before you do that, OS providers need to improve the handwriting recognition a bit further. And like you said, you'll probably see more of those being designed when and if the tablet form factor is widely embraced.
You skillfully missed the point. Usability-wise, it would make sense to have the power cable and the USB or FireWire cable that connects to the CPU in the back, and the rest of the ports in the front.
...they messed up on one thing. The majority of the USB and FireWire ports should be in the FRONT of the box, not behind it. If you're going to market your hardware as a port expander, the least you should do is make those ports easier to access than the ones already on the CPU box.
There's isn't the slightest shred of evidence that Microsoft has even thought of buying Macromedia. Dvorak says so himself.
I don't think the article ever stated or implied that this was the case. Rather, it suggested that Microsoft's interest in web content creation (as evidenced by FrontPage, ASP.Net, and so on) compelled Adobe to buy Macromedia (Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, and so on) in order to outflank MS.
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Adobe's products are too dead-tree oriented.
True. However, he correctly points out that the recent lawsuit between Adobe and Macromedia over tabbed palettes created considerable ill will between the two, making the merger more difficult than it otherwise would be.
Macromedia has a lot of expertise they need and don't have.
Why does Adobe need their expertise? Their flagship products are doing just fine, Freehand isn't close to beating Illustrator in the market, and GoLive--the only product MM competes with and exceeds--has never been key to Adobe's portfolio anyway. Adobe has been turning a profit nicely without MM under their control.
On the other hand, MM's products are so different from Adobe's that embracing and improving them would require a major change of mindset at Adobe. Frankly, they're more likely to damage Dreamweaver and Flash than build upon them.
The risk really wasn't worth $3.4 billion, is Dvorak's opinion. Mine as well.
That does seem to be what Adobe is doing to its full product line lately, adding all kinds of DRM. Hmm.
I don't understand. Are you referring to the way Adobe allows watermarks and other identifiers to be added to content created in Photoshop et.al.? If so, how is this a problem? DRM isn't Instant Evil, as you seem to imply--and watermarks don't even qualify as DRM, more like a fingerprint so you can identify copies without actually stopping them from doing so.
RSS is nice on the desktop. RSS is invaluable on the handheld.
Y'know, this is really what phone users AND web developers ought to be worried about in this area. Many web site front pages are not just graphics-heavy, they're text-heavy. Like a newspaper, they put a little of everything new and interesting on the front page at once, hoping at least something will catch your eye and draw you inside. No handheld or phone, no matter how elegantly designed, is going to be able to display that much text at once in a way that humans can process it. Period.
RSS is a perfect solution. It gives you just the headlines and/or first few lines of the article, with no graphics and only the most important text. Then you can either scroll to the next one or ask for more information. There's a zillion RSS clients for desktops, but really it's the handhelds and phones that should be embracing it.
Does every news site out there use RSS? No, but I'm willing to bet it's a much higher number than the number of sites with small-screen versions. Besides, RSS is a one-way device--if you want to search for information, you need a web form, and that's a little more work to design. But for cryin' out loud, I'd rather wait for a phone-sized version of a search engine than try to use a desktop-sized one.
This stuff is really cool and has applications outside of just re-coloring black and white.
Industry applications are interesting, but nothing new -- the industry has been using this technology for a long time when it was more labor-intensive, because they can afford to.
The REAL impact of this technology will come when you see it migrate into new versions of iPhoto and Photoshop Elements. In Photoshop, recoloring a part of a photo is relatively easy, but it still involves a mildly complicated process of selecting the color range, specifying the hue you want to shift it to, checking and re-checking.
This, however, is something Apple could roll into iPhoto with relative ease. No more selecting pixels, ranges, or hues -- just select a shade from the color picker, scribble it over the area desired, and hit "apply". Don't like it? Undo and try again.
The industry will use this because it's faster, but I know professionals will still need and want tools to fine-tune their adjustments. Consumers will use this exclusively.
Slashdot Mirror
...but at least Opportunity herself is keeping in touch through her LiveJournal blog.
Include the advertisements in the shows, and track how many people download them.
Ads can be fast-forwarded (well, most of the time) or shrunk to invisibility. A better idea, at least IMO, is to take the approach HomestarRunner and RedVsBlue use: offer the episodes for free, keep a complete archive on the site, and use the site traffic to sell merchandise at a profitable mark-up.
There's no chance that the IPod won't morph into something else in the future...
It's already doing so. iPods with screens let you view a calendar, set alarms for events, read short text files, and display your contacts. It's half of a v1.0 Palm Pilot, the missing half of course being the ability to modify those contacts and events....
Then, of course, there's the iPod Photo, which is gradually replacing the white iPod entirely, which adds photo browsing and slideshows plus the ability to copy photos directly to the iPod from a camera with a separate adapter.
So Apple's been "amping up" iPod for quite some time now, but none of those added features come close to being the main reason for buying one. They're just reasons (for certain people) not to buy a Palm-style handheld instead.
what is linux going to offer over OS X since you get OS X with a Mini anyway?
Someone asks this question every single time "Linux on a Mac" is posted, and the answer is always the same: because you can.
I mean, geez, you can't even call yourself a geek if you have to ask that one....
So, in order to use this wonderful technology I still have to buy a piece of plastic with the bits on it?
You mean a credit card? Yes, and you need one of those to buy music on iTMS, too.
IMHO it is environmentally and logistically dumb to have to fill my shelves with plastic if the only thing I want is bits that I could store on a hard drive.
If you've waited this long to back up your important data, music, etc. on CD-R or DVD-R, you have my sympathies.
but when, oh when, will Steve Jobs let me buy music from somewhere other than the Apple iTunes store and put it on my iPod?
They do. They're called CDs. You still sell music on those, right?
pro-Apple: This is great! Apple's getting their bug fixes out to their customers within only a few weeks after release! Let's see M$ try and release a service pack that fast, ha-ha!
anti-Apple: This is ridiculous! If Apple can release a major set of bug fixes this soon after releasing the OS, why didn't they just put off the release date a few weeks so they could sell it with the fixed bugs?
I hear many people complain about OpenOffice.org not opening their MS documents with correct formatting, but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats.
.doc format, 99.9% of all spreadsheets are in Excel, etc. So for any office suite to even pretend to compete with MS Office, it NEEDS to be able to open those existing documents.
Be that as it may, 99.9% of all (editable) word processing documents on and off the Internet are in some kind of Word
If it can't, there's no real reason for people to replace MS Office with OpenOffice. And why keep two software packages around if you're perfectly happy with the one that does everything you need?
Music artists and the RIAA are seen as hypocrites hawking anti-establishment messages and then looking for special rights, powers, and protection from the establishment to maintain their empire.
I never realized how fundamental this is to the RIAA's "problems" of the day. On one hand, they actively record, promote and profit from gangsta rap which doesn't just talk about killing policemen and living the "bling-bling" life, it's practically propaganda for it.
And then they expect us to listen when they tell us not to steal copies of music? That's like Merimac Caverns at midnight calling the kettle black.
It's puzzling, to me, that Card (a writer whom I respect greatly, BTW) spends his entire column arguing that the "Star Trek" series(es) should be cancelled because ST:TOS was a bad show.
Why should that even matter? ST:TNG was (by the third season, anyway) a far better series, and DS9 was better still, despite stealing ideas left and right from "Babylon 5". It's the last twenty years of Trek that's being cancelled, not the first three.
Postscript: Now we finally have first-rate science fiction film and television that are every bit as good as anything going on in print. If only....
Make a better double-sized Mac Mini now!
What would that be called... a Mac maxi? I can just see female Slashdotters falling over themselves in laughter at that one...
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
PHOBOS
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
Let me think a bit... (note: this is coming from a non-gamer, who only hears about the Next Big Thing when it's already reached critical mass.)
The most recent "sleeper hit" in gaming I can think of is Katamari Damacy (sp?), which is in essence a puzzle game but really is more a "let's have fun" type game. It's replay value seems to be limited but everyone who plays it seems to suffer what I'll call the Tetris Effect.
I think the last big "revolution" in gaming would be Dance Dance Revolution (pun sort-of intended), which actually has something in common with Katamari Damacy--people play it for the sheer enjoyment rather than to get the best possible score, and players strive for style and admiration of their audience more than anything else. It's partly evolved from the kinetic sports arcade games (jet-ski racers, et.al.), but more than any other game it's found a way to combine the fun of video games with the physical satisfaction of a good short workout.
Then there's the whole phenomenon of networked gameplay, which is mostly divided between deathmatch-style games and MMORPGs. Both these genres existed before, but before the Internet made them easy to play with dozens of other humans they weren't quite the same. No new genres there, but the ability to play on a network has revolutionized a whole chunk of the gaming industry.
I agree with the other posters -- there may not be much that's new as far as genres, but there's a whole lot that's been happening within them.
it's the thousands of dollars in support they will spend not only repairing potentially wonky modems but also fielding tech support calls over dialing into the internet, connection issues once dialed-in, etc.
That's a silly argument, isn't it? Only the people who need to use the modem will have those tech support issues, and those people will be installing them anyway. (I think it's unlikely that a modem in a PowerMac could be causing problems if nobody uses it for anything.) So Apple wouldn't be saving any money that way--only on the cost of the hardware itself.
When Steve Jobs first announced the G5 chip, Jobs said they'd be at 3GHz by August 2004. Where's the Gigs?
He was optimistic. Instead, we got two 1.8 GHz processors which add to 3.6 GHz -- even if the actual performance doesn't compute that way.
I noticed an oddity on the linked page to Apple's store: the older 1.8 GHz dual had a built-in modem, but the new ones did not. Sure enough, if you actually order one of the newer PowerMacs you find that built-in modems are now a $29 option.
I suppose nearly everyone who buys these machines is using them in a networked office or can afford broadband at home, and the not-so-recent advent of internet faxing has made the other role of the built-in modem obsolete.
Still, it's an interesting omission. Like the floppy disk, Apple's opinion now is that the POTS modem is sufficiently obsolete to remove it entirely and free up space inside the box, rather than leave it in and lose the $10 OEM or whatever it actually costs them.
Tablets have their place -- scribbling pictures, taking notes when space is limited, etc. However, there are some jobs that a keyboard is simply better suited to do.
Don't think of it as half-a-tablet, think of it as a useful hybrid. When you factor in the hard drive, CD burner, and a little space to cool the components inside the case, there's not much space added by the keyboard. May as well leave it there for the jobs that demand it.
The only good reason to remove the keyboard completely is if you want to make a half-tablet PC -- about the size of the cover of a hardcover novel, which would be too small for typing on comfortably but just large enough to be easy to read. Before you do that, OS providers need to improve the handwriting recognition a bit further. And like you said, you'll probably see more of those being designed when and if the tablet form factor is widely embraced.
why is this particular one on the front page? It's basically unknown outside of mathematical circles
Slashdot is "News for Nerds." What part of that did you fail to understand?
So mount it backwards.
You skillfully missed the point. Usability-wise, it would make sense to have the power cable and the USB or FireWire cable that connects to the CPU in the back, and the rest of the ports in the front.
...they messed up on one thing. The majority of the USB and FireWire ports should be in the FRONT of the box, not behind it. If you're going to market your hardware as a port expander, the least you should do is make those ports easier to access than the ones already on the CPU box.
There's isn't the slightest shred of evidence that Microsoft has even thought of buying Macromedia. Dvorak says so himself.
I don't think the article ever stated or implied that this was the case. Rather, it suggested that Microsoft's interest in web content creation (as evidenced by FrontPage, ASP.Net, and so on) compelled Adobe to buy Macromedia (Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, and so on) in order to outflank MS.
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Adobe's products are too dead-tree oriented.
True. However, he correctly points out that the recent lawsuit between Adobe and Macromedia over tabbed palettes created considerable ill will between the two, making the merger more difficult than it otherwise would be.
Macromedia has a lot of expertise they need and don't have.
Why does Adobe need their expertise? Their flagship products are doing just fine, Freehand isn't close to beating Illustrator in the market, and GoLive--the only product MM competes with and exceeds--has never been key to Adobe's portfolio anyway. Adobe has been turning a profit nicely without MM under their control.
On the other hand, MM's products are so different from Adobe's that embracing and improving them would require a major change of mindset at Adobe. Frankly, they're more likely to damage Dreamweaver and Flash than build upon them.
The risk really wasn't worth $3.4 billion, is Dvorak's opinion. Mine as well.
That does seem to be what Adobe is doing to its full product line lately, adding all kinds of DRM. Hmm.
I don't understand. Are you referring to the way Adobe allows watermarks and other identifiers to be added to content created in Photoshop et.al.? If so, how is this a problem? DRM isn't Instant Evil, as you seem to imply--and watermarks don't even qualify as DRM, more like a fingerprint so you can identify copies without actually stopping them from doing so.
The movie has been in the works for a while. The (probable) director's name is the news.
RSS is nice on the desktop. RSS is invaluable on the handheld.
Y'know, this is really what phone users AND web developers ought to be worried about in this area. Many web site front pages are not just graphics-heavy, they're text-heavy. Like a newspaper, they put a little of everything new and interesting on the front page at once, hoping at least something will catch your eye and draw you inside. No handheld or phone, no matter how elegantly designed, is going to be able to display that much text at once in a way that humans can process it. Period.
RSS is a perfect solution. It gives you just the headlines and/or first few lines of the article, with no graphics and only the most important text. Then you can either scroll to the next one or ask for more information. There's a zillion RSS clients for desktops, but really it's the handhelds and phones that should be embracing it.
Does every news site out there use RSS? No, but I'm willing to bet it's a much higher number than the number of sites with small-screen versions. Besides, RSS is a one-way device--if you want to search for information, you need a web form, and that's a little more work to design. But for cryin' out loud, I'd rather wait for a phone-sized version of a search engine than try to use a desktop-sized one.
This stuff is really cool and has applications outside of just re-coloring black and white.
Industry applications are interesting, but nothing new -- the industry has been using this technology for a long time when it was more labor-intensive, because they can afford to.
The REAL impact of this technology will come when you see it migrate into new versions of iPhoto and Photoshop Elements. In Photoshop, recoloring a part of a photo is relatively easy, but it still involves a mildly complicated process of selecting the color range, specifying the hue you want to shift it to, checking and re-checking.
This, however, is something Apple could roll into iPhoto with relative ease. No more selecting pixels, ranges, or hues -- just select a shade from the color picker, scribble it over the area desired, and hit "apply". Don't like it? Undo and try again.
The industry will use this because it's faster, but I know professionals will still need and want tools to fine-tune their adjustments. Consumers will use this exclusively.