My only problem is that I have a 10 gig HD in my iBook. Is it possible to upgrade the iBook hard drive?
Absolutely! I've bought a few drives from Other World Computing, and I've been blissfully happy. You can get 2.5" drives for your iBook for about $100 for 20 GB all the way up to 60 GB for almost $400.
Their web site is at macsales.com. Don't let their crappy site put you off; they're worth doing business with.
I know this may be an ignorant question, but... why?
I have about 400 CDs at home, but six months or so ago I ripped 'em all to MP3 at 160 Kbit-- small enough to be reasonable, big enough to sound find through the stereo system I have wired up in my house. They're occupying about 15 GB on my iMac at home, and when I want music I fire up iTunes and play 'em. I can't think of anything about this setup that I'd change.
What is there about Ogg that I don't know yet that would make me say, ``Yeah, that's way better than MP3?'' Is it technically better, somehow? Can I squeeze that 15 GB music collection into 1 GB with no noticable loss of sound quality, or something?
I don't mean to detract from anybody's work or achievement, but I guess I just don't understand why this is cool. Somebody please educate me.
Okay, guy, take a deep breath and repeat after me: ``It is okay that I not be able to make digital copies of television broadcasts.'' I know that this isn't going to be a popular opinion on Slashdot, but I figured I burn a few karma points to advocate reasonable compromise.
On the one hand, you have the Bad Old Days of VHS recorders that blinked 12:00 all the time. If you could remember to program your VCR and keep the tapes in order, you could make copies of your recordings to your heart's content.
On the other hand, we have the current crop of digital video recorders that have no data I/O, only video in and out. Recording is a breeze, but you can't archive the things you record.
Considered on balance, the status quo is by far the better of the two situations. Don't go pissing in the soup just because you don't care for the pot.
Don't sound so shocked; this is already happening, at least in AT&T Broadband country. I recently moved into a new house, so I thought I'd give AT&T's digital cable a try. Boy, was that a mistake.
The on-screen guide, which is supplied to AT&T by TV Guide, has ads on it. Hit the guide button, and there are two or three ads taking up half your screen. Hit the channel-up button and in addition to the channel number and program name, BAM, there's a square ad about 200 pixels on a side trying to sell me on RCA or some damn thing.
I was pretty disgusted. I mean, I don't use any sort of channel guide except my TiVo's, but these on-screen ads are so obtrusive that they really got on my nerves. They lingered on the screen for about twenty seconds, far longer than ordinary on-screen guide displays have any right to. Drove me crazy.
So I fired AT&T and signed up with DirecTV instead. No ads, and better PQ (picture quality) to boot.
The Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8000 home entertainment server can help you
fight DBS, reduce churn, and generate revenues.
(That's from the product page, not the one you gave, but the non-login one posted in response to your message. Emphasis mine.)
I guess that really sums it up: cable providers want to keep subscribers, and direct-broadcast satellite providers like DirecTV and Dish Network are their competition. I wonder how much, if at all, DirecTiVo (the combination DirecTV receiver and TiVo unit) has affected DBS subscription rates. Are cable companies losing market share to DirecTV thanks to DirecTiVo?
There's no such thing as HD S-video. Your choices in HD video are component analog (YUV or RGB), DVI, or FireWire. Digital is superior, of course, but with consumer equipment it's really, really hard to tell the difference between digital and YUV component analog.
We're back to post hoc ergo propter hoc again. That guy was an asshole. That guy was using a cell phone. All guys who use cell phones are assholes.
If you can't drive while talking on the phone, then don't. Myself, I can walk and chew gum at the same time, so I'm not worried. As for other drivers, there are always going to be good ones and bad ones, no matter what you do. Some of them will have cell phones. Some of them will be getting hummers from their girlfriends. Some of them will be changing the radio. Some of them will just be lousy drivers. And you have to deal with this fact, or stick to buses and trains. Don't gripe at me about it.
Again, you're arguing a point that I haven't said anything about. We're talking past each other. If you want the last word on the subject, have at it. I can't see any benefit coming from discussing this further.
Yes I agree Real is not a very good codec and closed. But the same thing could be said about quicktime before Version 6 and the mp4 codec.
Except for the part about it being not very good. The Sorensen codecs (which is what everybody is really talking about when they complaing about QuickTime being proprietary) are the best low-bit-rate codecs out there, hands down. Proprietary isn't automatically bad.
Stuff that's proprietary but good is okay (Sorensen). Stuff that's open but not as good can sometimes be okay, too (MPEG-4). Stuff that's open and sucks... sucks (DiVX). And stuff that's proprietary and sucks also sucks (Real).
There's a GSM sleeve-thingy for the iPaq that turns your PDA into a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone with Bluetooth. It's expensive, but it works. When I looked at it the first time, I though, ``That's way too bulky to be practical. I'd hate to hold that up to my ear.'' Then I realized that it would stay in my backpack all the time, while I just wore the wireless headset in my ear. It's technically a phone, but a different sort from anything I've used before.
My friend in the next office has one. He's in a meeting right now, so I can't get the details.
I just get annoyed with the whole Microsofty feel of the thing. (I mean my iPaq now.) I wish Apple would release an embedded version of Darwin specifically for things like PDAs. Put an Aqua UI on it, and Rendezvous and Bluetooth in it, then a GSM adapter, and I'd be in heaven. No more of that ugly ``Pocket PC'' user interface.
Admittedly, Bluetooth is way more popular overseas than it is in the US. I think some of this has to do with the US's cellular phone networks. The rest of the world-- mostly-- uses GSM, while the US uses two other, different nets; their acronyms escape me.
If you're Ericsson or Nokia and you can roll out a new, and moderately expensive, technology, would you do it on your GSM phones that sell tons and tons and tons of units worldwide, or your US-only phones that sell relatively few units?
I don't know this for sure; it's just a theory. But it seems to fit the facts.
Bluetooth is definitely catching on in the US, though. I saw a Bluetooth inkjet printer-- an HP, I believe-- in a CompUSA about two weeks ago. Since I knew what it was all about I didn't really pay much attention, but I remember noticing that it was there.
Since there's a certain amount of movement in the US to build GSM networks-- VoiceStream is a GSM provider, and the rumor is that they're going to be absorbed into AT&T soon-- maybe the availability of Bluetooth gadgets will increase over the next few months.
Once you get hooked, though, it's hard to go back. I desperately want Bluetooth headphones for my iPod. Wires suck.
And I'm sure Apple will continue releasing important bugfixes for 10.1, just as they have for OS 9. The crux of the matter lies in one's definition of ``important.''
Hmm. It seems from your post that you might not know exactly what Bluetooth is. It's not about your computer showing you who's calling on your cell phone.
I have a Bluetooth cell phone. It's an Ericsson something-or-other; don't recall the specific model number. It has a phone book in it, like all cell phones. If I want to store a number in it, I have to key it in, and then key in the name, and then save it. Mildly annoying.
Instead of doing that, I just Bluetooth contacts from my PDA over to the phone. It's wireless, so there's nothing to carry around. And it works between the PDA (an iPaq) and the phone (an Ericsson) with no special setup or anything. If I have a contact in my PDA, I can put it in my cell phone in about three seconds.
But there's more. I also have a Bluetooth headset. It sits in my ear and I can talk on my cell phone, without dangly wires. It's a pain in the ass to get in your car while you're on a cell phone, because you have to thread the wired headset through the seat belt just right, or risk getting all tangled up. Me, I just carry my phone in my pocket, no muss, no fuss.
I also use Bluetooth to sync my PDA to my laptop. No more serial cables or cradles to mess with.
My friend has a Bluetooth inkjet printer for his PC. He lives in Sydney, so I don't know if that stuff is available here in the US or not. But I was there when I bought it. Pull it out of the box, plug it into the wall socket for power. About three clicks and the PC found it, and two clicks later he was printing. It was amazingly cool, and useful too!
As a short-range peripheral interconnect, Bluetooth has a lot going for it. Bluetooth support under Windows is great when it works, but it requires third-party software and isn't as transparent as it could be. I'm really looking forward to iSync, because it'll let me extend my little Bluetooth LAN to include my iBook (my laptop of choice; the ThinkPad belongs to my employer) and my iMac at home.
Don't poo-poo Bluetooth, or any other new technology, out of hand just because you don't know anybody personally who uses it. Just as you're saying that it isn't automatically cool, I'm saying that it isn't automatically useless, either.
Good christ, why am I being modded down as a TROLL?
Because you're trying to pick a fight. No company can stay in business by continuing to fix flaws in software that people bought and paid for long ago. At some point, you have to draw the line and say, ``Okay, OS X 10.1 is finished. It's time to move on to 10.2.'' Every software company does this. There's no practical alternative to this practice. So you're just complaining for the sake of complaining. That's trolling, and some people don't appreciate it.
If I'd seen your post before I posted myself, you would have gotten a Troll point from me, too.
I don't know what to tell you except ``nuh-uh.'' There's something wrong with your system. You might check to see that your DNS stuff is configured correctly; maybe you're running into lookupd timeouts or something like that. Make sure the settings under the Network pane of System Preferences are all correct.
Also, are you using NFS? I've seen the Finder lock up as you describe when trying to contact an AWOL NFS server.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that this is simply not a common problem.
Great! All 4 bluetooth users can take advantage of it.
You mean that right this second I'm looking at the only people in the world who use Bluetooth! Wow!
Furthermore, where is the rhetoric now? There is always outrage about MS integrating applications with the OS. I haven't seen one REAL OS related update here. It's all new versions (or completely new) of the bundled software.
You couldn't read the list at http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/morefeatures.ht ml for some reason? There are tons of new features built into the OS in 10.2. I'm excited about improved Japanese input, because I use Kotoeri almost every day. The Slashdot crowd will probably appreciate stuff like IPv6 support, SASL, AMD, PAM, and support for filesystems larger than 1 TB. Read the list before bitching next time, AC.
Um. I have a 3-year-old iMac at home. It's got 256 MB of RAM in it, and it runs OS X 10.1.5. I use it for surfing and email, of course, using OmniWeb and Mail.app, but I also run iTunes and iPhoto almost every day. I wouldn't want to edit movies on it, of course, but for everything else I want, it works very well. I'm looking forward to iChat, iSync, and (especially) iCal in the next few months, 'cause I'm sure those will all run perfectly well, too.
So I really don't know what the hell you think you're talking about.
Your experience is not typical. I work with many Macs, all running 10.1.4 or 10.1.5, and I don't see the ``spinning beachball'' problem that you're describing. It used to happen in 10.0.n, but I haven't seen it for a long time.
I think you might look into what's wrong with your system before you jump to the conclusion that the OS must be faulty.
Re:WRONG WRONG, no, and WRONG.
on
Mac PVR Coming Soon
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So... after I tried to explain, without ambiguity, that I have nothing to say about the EyeTV thingy specifically, you decided to just hop up and down on the same point again? That's no fun.
Let me just put the last nail in this particular coffin. I don't know everything, but I work with broadcast video every day, so I have some working knowledge at least. We're talking about the width of the pipe, here, and that's all. I have seen a USB hard drive sustain reads of about 900 KB per second for an hour, so it's clear that USB is capable, in the most literal sense, of sustaining transfers in excess of 10 Mbps. Since you can squeeze an awful lot of broadcast-quality video into 10 Mbps, USB is therefore not inherently unsuited to compressed video transport.
You seem to be arguing-- for reasons that baffle me-- that the fact that the video must be compressed outside the computer sucks and that only internal, software-based compression is okay. Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab at the office, I'd have to call ``bullshit'' on that assertion. As I've said before, I have never seen a professional application of a software-based real-time MPEG-2 encoder, so I can't really form an opinion. But they're conspicuous by their absence, I think.
I mean, let's put this in perspective. There are two kinds of compressed video: broadcast quality, and horseshit. On that scale, everything I've ever seen south of a Minerva VNP is horseshit, and that includes both USB encoders and consumer PCI cards.
You find the variety of horseshit compressed video you can squeeze out of your PC to be acceptable, but you find the kind you can get out of the EyeTV widget to be unacceptable. That's a valid opinion, and I respect it. But don't let that develop into a superiority complex. It's still horseshit.
First of all, you're being kind of an asshole. There's no need at all to use phrases like ``ill-educated nonsense,'' particularly when you know that's not the case.
But what's worse, you didn't even understand my post. The assertion was made that USB isn't good enough for a video device. I refuted that idea, completely. SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.
As for the device in question, I have no opinion at all. Never seen it, don't know. That said, I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time, so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.
If you want to throw more bits at the problem, go right ahead. It's your money. Hell, if you can find a way to get SDI to your house, you can store 270 Mbps of raw data, if you want. But don't take an extreme position and then argue that everybody else's position sucks. That's just annoying.
You know what I think? I think *all* compressed video kinda sucks. I don't enjoy watching sports in OTA HD as much as I wish I could because I can see the compression artifacts. Dealing with uncompressed HD on an Inferno all day makes it hard to come home and watch HDNET at 15 Mbps. But just take a deep breath and repeat after me: It's just television. It doesn't matter.
There's no good reason for all this proprietary Sorensen nonsense.
Um... except that Sorensen is, far and away, the best low-bit-rate codec. Period. The MPEG-4 examples I've seen are okay-- pretty good, in fact-- but they still can't come close to what you can pull off with Sorensen. That's why the trailers on Apple's movie trailer site are all encoded with Sorensen: quality.
Of course the video would be compressed. By some standards, 8 Mbps MPEG-2 is broadcast quality (for SD, of course), so the 12 Mbps bandwidth of the USB connection is way overkill.
And as for DV, at 25 Mbps it's about five times the bandwidth that a consumer piece of gear should have to deal with. If it weren't 4:1:1*, it'd be better than DVD in a lot of ways.
An inexpensive consumer PVR really only needs to deal with MPEG-2, at bit rates around and below 4 Mbps. Anything more than that is too dang much.
* This notation refers to the number of samples taken from each color component channel. TV is expressed in the YUV color space, meaning one channel of luminance (a black-and-white signal, essentially) and two channels of color. It's not like RGB where each color is a primary hue, so don't bother trying to think of it that way. The very best way to sample is 4:4:4, or four samples per cycle of each channel. A good compromise is 4:2:2, or twice as many luminance samples as color samples. This maintains both good image resolution and good color resolution. DV samples at 4:1:1, which means the colors are ``squashed.'' Two shades that are close to one another on the uncompressed video will come out of the DV process as the same hue. So DV, despite its high bit rate, isn't quite good enough for broadcast work. At least, that's the prevailing opinion among the folks I work with.
Maybe this is an ignorant question, but why not just de-interlace the video before compressing it? De-interlacing NTSC-resolution video is a fairly trivial task in the digital realm, although I admit I would have no idea how to go about it with an analog signal.
My point, which should have been obvious, is that most PC owners don't upgrade their computers in any way that's different from the way Mac users upgrade theirs: adding RAM, and in some cases a graphics card. Putting quotation marks around a sentence and implying that I said it in order to make your point isn't a very sociable thing to do, you know.
Apple don't ramp their prices down as the hardware gets out-of-date, you know.
On the one hand, why should they? Just because the G4 iMac has been shipping for umpty months now doesn't mean that the one you buy today is any less functional or capable than the first one sold way back when.
On the other hand, you're wrong. Apple has a track record of releasing newer, faster models (``speed bumps'') at the same price point, or even a lower one, than the previous models. I remember not too long ago when the latest Power Mac G4s came out. One day, a machine of googledy-squat specification would cost you $3,000. The next day, you could get the same basic system for $1,500, because the product line had been uniformly ``bumped.''
Maybe what's bothering you is the fact that Apple doesn't keep selling their old designs after they release their new ones. In other words, the entry-level Power Mac has been about $1,500 for several years now, despite the fact that the capability of that $1,500 machine has risen dramatically. Maybe that's what's bugging you.
When you get rid of that crufty old PC, buy a new PC and get value-for-money. Mac owners are just paying for the name, the flashy case, and the clique-membership.
Man, you sure sound bitter. Feeling left out, maybe?
This is a commonly expressed opinion, and it's still as meaningless as ever. A Mac is worth more than the sum of the street prices of its individual components. The last time I bought a Mac desktop-- an iMac, about two years ago-- I had it out of the box and surfing the Internet and burning CDs in about ten minutes after I got it home. When I got an iPod last year, I had it connected to my iMac somewhat faster than that, and a couple of minutes later I was listening to my favorite record on it. Ditto my digital camcorder that I bought myself for Christmas, last.
I'm a busy guy, and I don't want to spend my time making the various bits and pieces of electronics in my life all talk to each other in just the right way. With a PC, I'd have to do that, but when I bought my Macs, I paid for the privilege of saving all that wasted time.
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My only problem is that I have a 10 gig HD in my iBook. Is it possible to upgrade the iBook hard drive?
Absolutely! I've bought a few drives from Other World Computing, and I've been blissfully happy. You can get 2.5" drives for your iBook for about $100 for 20 GB all the way up to 60 GB for almost $400.
Their web site is at macsales.com. Don't let their crappy site put you off; they're worth doing business with.
I know this may be an ignorant question, but... why?
I have about 400 CDs at home, but six months or so ago I ripped 'em all to MP3 at 160 Kbit-- small enough to be reasonable, big enough to sound find through the stereo system I have wired up in my house. They're occupying about 15 GB on my iMac at home, and when I want music I fire up iTunes and play 'em. I can't think of anything about this setup that I'd change.
What is there about Ogg that I don't know yet that would make me say, ``Yeah, that's way better than MP3?'' Is it technically better, somehow? Can I squeeze that 15 GB music collection into 1 GB with no noticable loss of sound quality, or something?
I don't mean to detract from anybody's work or achievement, but I guess I just don't understand why this is cool. Somebody please educate me.
Okay, guy, take a deep breath and repeat after me: ``It is okay that I not be able to make digital copies of television broadcasts.'' I know that this isn't going to be a popular opinion on Slashdot, but I figured I burn a few karma points to advocate reasonable compromise.
On the one hand, you have the Bad Old Days of VHS recorders that blinked 12:00 all the time. If you could remember to program your VCR and keep the tapes in order, you could make copies of your recordings to your heart's content.
On the other hand, we have the current crop of digital video recorders that have no data I/O, only video in and out. Recording is a breeze, but you can't archive the things you record.
Considered on balance, the status quo is by far the better of the two situations. Don't go pissing in the soup just because you don't care for the pot.
Don't sound so shocked; this is already happening, at least in AT&T Broadband country. I recently moved into a new house, so I thought I'd give AT&T's digital cable a try. Boy, was that a mistake.
The on-screen guide, which is supplied to AT&T by TV Guide, has ads on it. Hit the guide button, and there are two or three ads taking up half your screen. Hit the channel-up button and in addition to the channel number and program name, BAM, there's a square ad about 200 pixels on a side trying to sell me on RCA or some damn thing.
I was pretty disgusted. I mean, I don't use any sort of channel guide except my TiVo's, but these on-screen ads are so obtrusive that they really got on my nerves. They lingered on the screen for about twenty seconds, far longer than ordinary on-screen guide displays have any right to. Drove me crazy.
So I fired AT&T and signed up with DirecTV instead. No ads, and better PQ (picture quality) to boot.
I guess that really sums it up: cable providers want to keep subscribers, and direct-broadcast satellite providers like DirecTV and Dish Network are their competition. I wonder how much, if at all, DirecTiVo (the combination DirecTV receiver and TiVo unit) has affected DBS subscription rates. Are cable companies losing market share to DirecTV thanks to DirecTiVo?
There's no such thing as HD S-video. Your choices in HD video are component analog (YUV or RGB), DVI, or FireWire. Digital is superior, of course, but with consumer equipment it's really, really hard to tell the difference between digital and YUV component analog.
S-video, or YC, isn't an option for HDTV signals.
We're back to post hoc ergo propter hoc again. That guy was an asshole. That guy was using a cell phone. All guys who use cell phones are assholes.
If you can't drive while talking on the phone, then don't. Myself, I can walk and chew gum at the same time, so I'm not worried. As for other drivers, there are always going to be good ones and bad ones, no matter what you do. Some of them will have cell phones. Some of them will be getting hummers from their girlfriends. Some of them will be changing the radio. Some of them will just be lousy drivers. And you have to deal with this fact, or stick to buses and trains. Don't gripe at me about it.
Again, you're arguing a point that I haven't said anything about. We're talking past each other. If you want the last word on the subject, have at it. I can't see any benefit coming from discussing this further.
Yes I agree Real is not a very good codec and closed. But the same thing could be said about quicktime before Version 6 and the mp4 codec.
Except for the part about it being not very good. The Sorensen codecs (which is what everybody is really talking about when they complaing about QuickTime being proprietary) are the best low-bit-rate codecs out there, hands down. Proprietary isn't automatically bad.
Stuff that's proprietary but good is okay (Sorensen). Stuff that's open but not as good can sometimes be okay, too (MPEG-4). Stuff that's open and sucks... sucks (DiVX). And stuff that's proprietary and sucks also sucks (Real).
I'd draw a little ASCII-art graph, but I'm lazy.
There's a GSM sleeve-thingy for the iPaq that turns your PDA into a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone with Bluetooth. It's expensive, but it works. When I looked at it the first time, I though, ``That's way too bulky to be practical. I'd hate to hold that up to my ear.'' Then I realized that it would stay in my backpack all the time, while I just wore the wireless headset in my ear. It's technically a phone, but a different sort from anything I've used before.
My friend in the next office has one. He's in a meeting right now, so I can't get the details.
I just get annoyed with the whole Microsofty feel of the thing. (I mean my iPaq now.) I wish Apple would release an embedded version of Darwin specifically for things like PDAs. Put an Aqua UI on it, and Rendezvous and Bluetooth in it, then a GSM adapter, and I'd be in heaven. No more of that ugly ``Pocket PC'' user interface.
Admittedly, Bluetooth is way more popular overseas than it is in the US. I think some of this has to do with the US's cellular phone networks. The rest of the world-- mostly-- uses GSM, while the US uses two other, different nets; their acronyms escape me.
If you're Ericsson or Nokia and you can roll out a new, and moderately expensive, technology, would you do it on your GSM phones that sell tons and tons and tons of units worldwide, or your US-only phones that sell relatively few units?
I don't know this for sure; it's just a theory. But it seems to fit the facts.
Bluetooth is definitely catching on in the US, though. I saw a Bluetooth inkjet printer-- an HP, I believe-- in a CompUSA about two weeks ago. Since I knew what it was all about I didn't really pay much attention, but I remember noticing that it was there.
Since there's a certain amount of movement in the US to build GSM networks-- VoiceStream is a GSM provider, and the rumor is that they're going to be absorbed into AT&T soon-- maybe the availability of Bluetooth gadgets will increase over the next few months.
Once you get hooked, though, it's hard to go back. I desperately want Bluetooth headphones for my iPod. Wires suck.
And I'm sure Apple will continue releasing important bugfixes for 10.1, just as they have for OS 9. The crux of the matter lies in one's definition of ``important.''
Hmm. It seems from your post that you might not know exactly what Bluetooth is. It's not about your computer showing you who's calling on your cell phone.
I have a Bluetooth cell phone. It's an Ericsson something-or-other; don't recall the specific model number. It has a phone book in it, like all cell phones. If I want to store a number in it, I have to key it in, and then key in the name, and then save it. Mildly annoying.
Instead of doing that, I just Bluetooth contacts from my PDA over to the phone. It's wireless, so there's nothing to carry around. And it works between the PDA (an iPaq) and the phone (an Ericsson) with no special setup or anything. If I have a contact in my PDA, I can put it in my cell phone in about three seconds.
But there's more. I also have a Bluetooth headset. It sits in my ear and I can talk on my cell phone, without dangly wires. It's a pain in the ass to get in your car while you're on a cell phone, because you have to thread the wired headset through the seat belt just right, or risk getting all tangled up. Me, I just carry my phone in my pocket, no muss, no fuss.
I also use Bluetooth to sync my PDA to my laptop. No more serial cables or cradles to mess with.
My friend has a Bluetooth inkjet printer for his PC. He lives in Sydney, so I don't know if that stuff is available here in the US or not. But I was there when I bought it. Pull it out of the box, plug it into the wall socket for power. About three clicks and the PC found it, and two clicks later he was printing. It was amazingly cool, and useful too!
As a short-range peripheral interconnect, Bluetooth has a lot going for it. Bluetooth support under Windows is great when it works, but it requires third-party software and isn't as transparent as it could be. I'm really looking forward to iSync, because it'll let me extend my little Bluetooth LAN to include my iBook (my laptop of choice; the ThinkPad belongs to my employer) and my iMac at home.
Don't poo-poo Bluetooth, or any other new technology, out of hand just because you don't know anybody personally who uses it. Just as you're saying that it isn't automatically cool, I'm saying that it isn't automatically useless, either.
Good christ, why am I being modded down as a TROLL?
Because you're trying to pick a fight. No company can stay in business by continuing to fix flaws in software that people bought and paid for long ago. At some point, you have to draw the line and say, ``Okay, OS X 10.1 is finished. It's time to move on to 10.2.'' Every software company does this. There's no practical alternative to this practice. So you're just complaining for the sake of complaining. That's trolling, and some people don't appreciate it.
If I'd seen your post before I posted myself, you would have gotten a Troll point from me, too.
Hundreds? That sounds like an exaggeration. Can you back that up in any way?
I don't know what to tell you except ``nuh-uh.'' There's something wrong with your system. You might check to see that your DNS stuff is configured correctly; maybe you're running into lookupd timeouts or something like that. Make sure the settings under the Network pane of System Preferences are all correct.
Also, are you using NFS? I've seen the Finder lock up as you describe when trying to contact an AWOL NFS server.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that this is simply not a common problem.
Great! All 4 bluetooth users can take advantage of it.
t ml for some reason? There are tons of new features built into the OS in 10.2. I'm excited about improved Japanese input, because I use Kotoeri almost every day. The Slashdot crowd will probably appreciate stuff like IPv6 support, SASL, AMD, PAM, and support for filesystems larger than 1 TB. Read the list before bitching next time, AC.
You mean that right this second I'm looking at the only people in the world who use Bluetooth! Wow!
Furthermore, where is the rhetoric now? There is always outrage about MS integrating applications with the OS. I haven't seen one REAL OS related update here. It's all new versions (or completely new) of the bundled software.
You couldn't read the list at http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/morefeatures.h
Um. I have a 3-year-old iMac at home. It's got 256 MB of RAM in it, and it runs OS X 10.1.5. I use it for surfing and email, of course, using OmniWeb and Mail.app, but I also run iTunes and iPhoto almost every day. I wouldn't want to edit movies on it, of course, but for everything else I want, it works very well. I'm looking forward to iChat, iSync, and (especially) iCal in the next few months, 'cause I'm sure those will all run perfectly well, too.
So I really don't know what the hell you think you're talking about.
Your experience is not typical. I work with many Macs, all running 10.1.4 or 10.1.5, and I don't see the ``spinning beachball'' problem that you're describing. It used to happen in 10.0.n, but I haven't seen it for a long time.
I think you might look into what's wrong with your system before you jump to the conclusion that the OS must be faulty.
So... after I tried to explain, without ambiguity, that I have nothing to say about the EyeTV thingy specifically, you decided to just hop up and down on the same point again? That's no fun.
Let me just put the last nail in this particular coffin. I don't know everything, but I work with broadcast video every day, so I have some working knowledge at least. We're talking about the width of the pipe, here, and that's all. I have seen a USB hard drive sustain reads of about 900 KB per second for an hour, so it's clear that USB is capable, in the most literal sense, of sustaining transfers in excess of 10 Mbps. Since you can squeeze an awful lot of broadcast-quality video into 10 Mbps, USB is therefore not inherently unsuited to compressed video transport.
You seem to be arguing-- for reasons that baffle me-- that the fact that the video must be compressed outside the computer sucks and that only internal, software-based compression is okay. Based on the rack of SD and HD MPEG-2 encoding gear in my lab at the office, I'd have to call ``bullshit'' on that assertion. As I've said before, I have never seen a professional application of a software-based real-time MPEG-2 encoder, so I can't really form an opinion. But they're conspicuous by their absence, I think.
I mean, let's put this in perspective. There are two kinds of compressed video: broadcast quality, and horseshit. On that scale, everything I've ever seen south of a Minerva VNP is horseshit, and that includes both USB encoders and consumer PCI cards.
You find the variety of horseshit compressed video you can squeeze out of your PC to be acceptable, but you find the kind you can get out of the EyeTV widget to be unacceptable. That's a valid opinion, and I respect it. But don't let that develop into a superiority complex. It's still horseshit.
First of all, you're being kind of an asshole. There's no need at all to use phrases like ``ill-educated nonsense,'' particularly when you know that's not the case.
But what's worse, you didn't even understand my post. The assertion was made that USB isn't good enough for a video device. I refuted that idea, completely. SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.
As for the device in question, I have no opinion at all. Never seen it, don't know. That said, I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time, so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.
If you want to throw more bits at the problem, go right ahead. It's your money. Hell, if you can find a way to get SDI to your house, you can store 270 Mbps of raw data, if you want. But don't take an extreme position and then argue that everybody else's position sucks. That's just annoying.
You know what I think? I think *all* compressed video kinda sucks. I don't enjoy watching sports in OTA HD as much as I wish I could because I can see the compression artifacts. Dealing with uncompressed HD on an Inferno all day makes it hard to come home and watch HDNET at 15 Mbps. But just take a deep breath and repeat after me: It's just television. It doesn't matter.
There's no good reason for all this proprietary Sorensen nonsense.
Um... except that Sorensen is, far and away, the best low-bit-rate codec. Period. The MPEG-4 examples I've seen are okay-- pretty good, in fact-- but they still can't come close to what you can pull off with Sorensen. That's why the trailers on Apple's movie trailer site are all encoded with Sorensen: quality.
Of course the video would be compressed. By some standards, 8 Mbps MPEG-2 is broadcast quality (for SD, of course), so the 12 Mbps bandwidth of the USB connection is way overkill.
And as for DV, at 25 Mbps it's about five times the bandwidth that a consumer piece of gear should have to deal with. If it weren't 4:1:1*, it'd be better than DVD in a lot of ways.
An inexpensive consumer PVR really only needs to deal with MPEG-2, at bit rates around and below 4 Mbps. Anything more than that is too dang much.
* This notation refers to the number of samples taken from each color component channel. TV is expressed in the YUV color space, meaning one channel of luminance (a black-and-white signal, essentially) and two channels of color. It's not like RGB where each color is a primary hue, so don't bother trying to think of it that way. The very best way to sample is 4:4:4, or four samples per cycle of each channel. A good compromise is 4:2:2, or twice as many luminance samples as color samples. This maintains both good image resolution and good color resolution. DV samples at 4:1:1, which means the colors are ``squashed.'' Two shades that are close to one another on the uncompressed video will come out of the DV process as the same hue. So DV, despite its high bit rate, isn't quite good enough for broadcast work. At least, that's the prevailing opinion among the folks I work with.
Maybe this is an ignorant question, but why not just de-interlace the video before compressing it? De-interlacing NTSC-resolution video is a fairly trivial task in the digital realm, although I admit I would have no idea how to go about it with an analog signal.
My point, which should have been obvious, is that most PC owners don't upgrade their computers in any way that's different from the way Mac users upgrade theirs: adding RAM, and in some cases a graphics card. Putting quotation marks around a sentence and implying that I said it in order to make your point isn't a very sociable thing to do, you know.
Apple don't ramp their prices down as the hardware gets out-of-date, you know.
On the one hand, why should they? Just because the G4 iMac has been shipping for umpty months now doesn't mean that the one you buy today is any less functional or capable than the first one sold way back when.
On the other hand, you're wrong. Apple has a track record of releasing newer, faster models (``speed bumps'') at the same price point, or even a lower one, than the previous models. I remember not too long ago when the latest Power Mac G4s came out. One day, a machine of googledy-squat specification would cost you $3,000. The next day, you could get the same basic system for $1,500, because the product line had been uniformly ``bumped.''
Maybe what's bothering you is the fact that Apple doesn't keep selling their old designs after they release their new ones. In other words, the entry-level Power Mac has been about $1,500 for several years now, despite the fact that the capability of that $1,500 machine has risen dramatically. Maybe that's what's bugging you.
When you get rid of that crufty old PC, buy a new PC and get value-for-money. Mac owners are just paying for the name, the flashy case, and the clique-membership.
Man, you sure sound bitter. Feeling left out, maybe?
This is a commonly expressed opinion, and it's still as meaningless as ever. A Mac is worth more than the sum of the street prices of its individual components. The last time I bought a Mac desktop-- an iMac, about two years ago-- I had it out of the box and surfing the Internet and burning CDs in about ten minutes after I got it home. When I got an iPod last year, I had it connected to my iMac somewhat faster than that, and a couple of minutes later I was listening to my favorite record on it. Ditto my digital camcorder that I bought myself for Christmas, last.
I'm a busy guy, and I don't want to spend my time making the various bits and pieces of electronics in my life all talk to each other in just the right way. With a PC, I'd have to do that, but when I bought my Macs, I paid for the privilege of saving all that wasted time.
I consider it to be a bargain.