I know you're trolling, but here's a question for you.
What hard drive controllers are you using in each machine?
If both machines are using ATA-33 or ATA-66 controllers, it's a fair comparison. If the PPro box is using an upgraded controller but the Mac is still using its stock SCSI (which, admittedly, isn't all that great compared to modern ATA, but we ARE talking about a Mac from 1996 here), then this is obviously a very UNfair comparison.
Also, you don't say what OS you're running, but the disk drivers from early PPC Mac OS versions are horribly slow. If the drivers haven't ever been updated since the machine was new, I'm not the least bit surprised that you're seeing very slow disk copies.
I suspect it's mostly a wireless issue, and if you're building a mini-cluster, you'd probably rather use Ethernet to connect them anyway, and you probably won't be using Bluetooth. Either way, at least the top machine would have antenna access, so if you absolutely needed BT/802.11 you could have one of them do wireless and relay to the rest over Ethernet.
Uh, The 13th Warrior (the movie) was based on Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead. So, uh, it's not exactly "based on the real writings of a travling muslim cleric."
Crichton's novel was loosely based on the epic poem Beowulf, but it's not trying to be terribly true to the original.
The point is that the iPod occasionally skips, and it's designed with a relatively huge cache to AVOID this. The Mini (currently) isn't even designed for that, and these laptop hard drives don't have a big enough cache to handle throwing full-screen video constantly.
Go download a full-screen Star Wars movie trailer and play it on a 12" iBook. Now do that three straight times and tell me it never noticeably dropped frames or skipped slightly.
In that scenario, why wouldn't I just go out and buy the DVD in the first place? I get all the DVD extras, I get a nice case, and I get liner notes.
If it's a replacement for rentals, well, that's what pay-per-view is for. If I decide the movie is crappy, I won't WANT to record it, and if the movie is good, I'm going to buy the DVD anyway.
Like I've said, right now, there's no way to do for movies what the iTMS has done for music. Maybe in five years, but not now.
I saw a pundit somewhere -- might have been Cringely -- refer to an iMovie Video Store, like the iTMS for video. Cringely, among others, seems pretty set on the idea that it'll happen.
I'm not buying it.
Look at what makes the iTMS, and downloadable music in general, so great:
1) more convenient than buying a CD 2) downloads in less time than it takes to buy a CD 3) cheaper (in many cases) than buying a CD 4) saves the additional step of ripping a CD to a compressed, portable format 5) even the most extreme music collections will fit on $300-400 worth of hard drive space
Now, how would an iMVS stack up?
1) more convenient... check. 2) faster purchase... uh, definitely not. 3) cheaper... if the movie studios allow it to be. 4) saves a step... only if you're planning to take the video with you somewhere, which I don't see becoming particularly commonplace until those cool little LCD "VR" goggles come down to headphone prices, and... 5) stores cheaply... absolutely not. I already own enough DVDs -- and I don't own all that many compared to most of my friends -- to fill a decent-sized hard disk. Portable video? Fuhgeddaboutit, at least until someone can make an iPod-sized device that holds at least 10 whole DVDs AND doesn't cost more than $600. Music CDs cost about $30/gig. DVDs cost about $4/gig. Hard disk space costs about $1/GB for fairly large SATA drives. It's going to need to come down to about $0.15/GB before storing DVD content on a hard drive becomes as viable as storing CD content has.
An iMovie Video Store is not going to be a practical reality until problems 2 and 5 are solved. Number 5 might happen within the next two years. Number 2 very likely won't. Remember, the driving force behind the iTMS is the proliferation of broadband Internet access. Consumer bandwidth needs *at least* to increase by an order of magnitude to make downloaded movies practical. This simply isn't going to happen in the US without an overhaul of existing telecom infrastructure. Fiber would be a good start.
I dunno about you, but I'd like to keep these videos around longer than 48 hours. I don't "rent" songs on the iTMS, and I wouldn't want to be "renting" movies on the iMVS, either, unless it were a LOT cheaper.
Streaming is fine for the latter, but we already have infrastructure for this. It's called your pay-per-view channel, and it's available in HD. (It's too bad the Onion doesn't have old archives on-line any more, or I'd take this opportunity to link to their classic "Gateway Introduces $5000 Computer That Plays Real-Time TV Broadcasts" article.) Remember, just because you CAN figure out a way to use a computer to do something doesn't mean that doing it that way is better.
You make an excellent point about Internet access speeds; downloading one of these is NOT going to be trivial in terms of time. The comment about the hard disk was targeted more at local playback. I'm assuming the end user wants to view the video more than once, which means it needs to be stored. Music playback from an iPod hard disk is not entirely skip-free, and playback of a movie from a 4200 RPM laptop hard disk won't be, either. My DVD player doesn't skip. My VCR doesn't skip. Cable or satellite TV doesn't skip. The consumer is NOT going to accept a video playback device that skips occasionally when skip-free alternatives are already out there.
Basically, the Mac mini is as fast as or faster than every consumer Mac except the iMac G5, and the iMac G5 only wins on a few specific tasks. For the money, there's no question but what the mini is the fastest Mac there is.
In addition, I do believe that you can no longer download a stand-along quicktime from apple, that it only exists as part of the current release of itunes.
Took about three seconds on Apple's site to shoot a big hole in THAT theory:
At least, that hard drive in there isn't. It's a 4200 RPM laptop drive.
Also, maybe it's just me, but doesn't 40 GB or 80 GB seem awfully small for the storage of feature-length HD video? We're talking what, 10-20 movies at best?
For there to be a true digital DVD library device, hard disk storage prices are going to have to come down to a fraction of what they are now. Time will provide this, but right now, it doesn't seem like the hardcore movie buffs -- who seem like the target market for something like a digital DVD library -- would be satisfied with the comparatively tiny amount of storage available in the 2.5" hard disk form factor. A Mini with an external terabyte of storage would be better, but that's going to more than double its price.
Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I really think Cringely missed the boat on this one.
Creative is scared out of their collective minds. Have you seen the giant piece of FUD the Creative CEO is trying to spread?
If Creative still *exists* in 18 months, I'll be surprised. Then where will your precious Zen users go for support? (Hint: they'll just buy an iPod if something goes wrong.)
Quite frankly, if this is a design that isn't "stuck in 2002", uh, I'll remain stuck in 2002 for as long as possible, thanks. It's really hard to go wrong with a piece of white/chrome computer gear. As someone else said, the souped-up ricer-dashboard motif gets old fast.
Tangentially related question: why the hell does Creative's server want to set a cookie just so I can view that image? (Rejected, you cookie-sneak bastards!)
Anyway, your points are pretty much spot-on. And those "nipples" are very funny. That thing looks like a cell fone. Maybe Creative should be looking at, uh, "other markets," to put it politely, since they're obviously about to get their asses handed to them in the flash/low-end market now, too.
Honestly, how many Mac users would bother with the perpetually vapourware Aqua OOo when they could get iWork? Free software (both senses) is great, but there are some times when it's worth it to pay. Once iWork adds a spreadsheet component, there won't be much reason to think about using OpenOffice stuff on a Mac.
The fewer people on the Internet who are too ignorant or apathetic to solve (fairly simple) problems like this, and the better off the Internet as a whole will be.
Think about how many viruses you've received in e-mail in the last year. Now, for those of you who are interested in such things, think about how many different IP addresses these viruses came from. In my case, the latter is much less than the former, and I got literally hundreds of viruses from a mere handful of IP addresses. If a couple of those people got so frustrated that they gave up on "that Internet thing," that's good news for the rest of us, because that's maybe 10-20% of my annual virus load gone right there.
Similarly, how much of your spam came from pwn3d Windoze boxen on American cable/DSL subnets? How much of your blog spam? If these users get frustrated and quit the Internet, great! It leaves two categories of people on the 'net: those who care enough to fix the problem, and those who aren't a problem anyway. The people who are a problem are giving up!
That would require Mac OS to be designed to allow such sneaky software. To believe that market share has anything to do with this is to fall for the same fallacy the trolls use against you. It isn't about market share; it's about how secure the OS is from the ground up, and how the OS presents new applications for installation.
For what it's worth, you aren't required by any law to swear on a Bible when you take an oath in court, nor is the President required to swear his oath of office on a Bible. The book is to be of your choosing, if it's even required, and most courts do not require it any longer. You simply raise your right hand.
Fun trivia: LBJ swore the Oath of Office on a thin Catholic prayer book that happened to look like a Bible. (Someone either grabbed the wrong book or couldn't find JFK's Bible.)
But keep in mind the motivation of the people demanding that these stickers be placed there. This is why there are no similar stickers for gravitation or mechanics. Neither gravity nor motion poses a conflict to the very essence of their being. The idea that the Bible is not a literal document, however, does. Ergo, as others have aptly stated, the stickers are biased toward a certain religion, and are unconstitutional.
Science can be proven in the labs. Creationism is not science.
You and all your fellow crusaders could stand to remember those two statements next time you try to dictate what should or should not be taught in a science class.
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I know you're trolling, but here's a question for you.
What hard drive controllers are you using in each machine?
If both machines are using ATA-33 or ATA-66 controllers, it's a fair comparison. If the PPro box is using an upgraded controller but the Mac is still using its stock SCSI (which, admittedly, isn't all that great compared to modern ATA, but we ARE talking about a Mac from 1996 here), then this is obviously a very UNfair comparison.
Also, you don't say what OS you're running, but the disk drivers from early PPC Mac OS versions are horribly slow. If the drivers haven't ever been updated since the machine was new, I'm not the least bit surprised that you're seeing very slow disk copies.
Finally, how much RAM does the PPro have?
p
Actually, Apple says not to do that.
I suspect it's mostly a wireless issue, and if you're building a mini-cluster, you'd probably rather use Ethernet to connect them anyway, and you probably won't be using Bluetooth. Either way, at least the top machine would have antenna access, so if you absolutely needed BT/802.11 you could have one of them do wireless and relay to the rest over Ethernet.
p
How about you stop trolling with the same comments in every Mac mini story on /. ?
Get a life.
Uh, The 13th Warrior (the movie) was based on Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead. So, uh, it's not exactly "based on the real writings of a travling muslim cleric."
Crichton's novel was loosely based on the epic poem Beowulf, but it's not trying to be terribly true to the original.
p
The point is that the iPod occasionally skips, and it's designed with a relatively huge cache to AVOID this. The Mini (currently) isn't even designed for that, and these laptop hard drives don't have a big enough cache to handle throwing full-screen video constantly.
Go download a full-screen Star Wars movie trailer and play it on a 12" iBook. Now do that three straight times and tell me it never noticeably dropped frames or skipped slightly.
p
In that scenario, why wouldn't I just go out and buy the DVD in the first place? I get all the DVD extras, I get a nice case, and I get liner notes.
If it's a replacement for rentals, well, that's what pay-per-view is for. If I decide the movie is crappy, I won't WANT to record it, and if the movie is good, I'm going to buy the DVD anyway.
Like I've said, right now, there's no way to do for movies what the iTMS has done for music. Maybe in five years, but not now.
p
I saw a pundit somewhere -- might have been Cringely -- refer to an iMovie Video Store, like the iTMS for video. Cringely, among others, seems pretty set on the idea that it'll happen.
... check. ... uh, definitely not. ... if the movie studios allow it to be. ... only if you're planning to take the video with you somewhere, which I don't see becoming particularly commonplace until those cool little LCD "VR" goggles come down to headphone prices, and ... ... absolutely not. I already own enough DVDs -- and I don't own all that many compared to most of my friends -- to fill a decent-sized hard disk. Portable video? Fuhgeddaboutit, at least until someone can make an iPod-sized device that holds at least 10 whole DVDs AND doesn't cost more than $600. Music CDs cost about $30/gig. DVDs cost about $4/gig. Hard disk space costs about $1/GB for fairly large SATA drives. It's going to need to come down to about $0.15/GB before storing DVD content on a hard drive becomes as viable as storing CD content has.
I'm not buying it.
Look at what makes the iTMS, and downloadable music in general, so great:
1) more convenient than buying a CD
2) downloads in less time than it takes to buy a CD
3) cheaper (in many cases) than buying a CD
4) saves the additional step of ripping a CD to a compressed, portable format
5) even the most extreme music collections will fit on $300-400 worth of hard drive space
Now, how would an iMVS stack up?
1) more convenient
2) faster purchase
3) cheaper
4) saves a step
5) stores cheaply
An iMovie Video Store is not going to be a practical reality until problems 2 and 5 are solved. Number 5 might happen within the next two years. Number 2 very likely won't. Remember, the driving force behind the iTMS is the proliferation of broadband Internet access. Consumer bandwidth needs *at least* to increase by an order of magnitude to make downloaded movies practical. This simply isn't going to happen in the US without an overhaul of existing telecom infrastructure. Fiber would be a good start.
p
I dunno about you, but I'd like to keep these videos around longer than 48 hours. I don't "rent" songs on the iTMS, and I wouldn't want to be "renting" movies on the iMVS, either, unless it were a LOT cheaper.
Streaming is fine for the latter, but we already have infrastructure for this. It's called your pay-per-view channel, and it's available in HD. (It's too bad the Onion doesn't have old archives on-line any more, or I'd take this opportunity to link to their classic "Gateway Introduces $5000 Computer That Plays Real-Time TV Broadcasts" article.) Remember, just because you CAN figure out a way to use a computer to do something doesn't mean that doing it that way is better.
You make an excellent point about Internet access speeds; downloading one of these is NOT going to be trivial in terms of time. The comment about the hard disk was targeted more at local playback. I'm assuming the end user wants to view the video more than once, which means it needs to be stored. Music playback from an iPod hard disk is not entirely skip-free, and playback of a movie from a 4200 RPM laptop hard disk won't be, either. My DVD player doesn't skip. My VCR doesn't skip. Cable or satellite TV doesn't skip. The consumer is NOT going to accept a video playback device that skips occasionally when skip-free alternatives are already out there.
p
This should give you a pretty good idea of how current consumer-level Mac systems stack up to each other:
Macintouch Performance Comparison
Basically, the Mac mini is as fast as or faster than every consumer Mac except the iMac G5, and the iMac G5 only wins on a few specific tasks. For the money, there's no question but what the mini is the fastest Mac there is.
p
In addition, I do believe that you can no longer download a stand-along quicktime from apple, that it only exists as part of the current release of itunes.
Took about three seconds on Apple's site to shoot a big hole in THAT theory:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qt/
QuickTime 6.5.2 download, or standalone installer. Take your pick.
p
And that ad would be selling...what, exactly?
Oh, that's right, nothing. Because no product exists that matches the description you just gave.
Small, feature-laden, inexpensive.
Pick any two.
p
At least, that hard drive in there isn't. It's a 4200 RPM laptop drive.
Also, maybe it's just me, but doesn't 40 GB or 80 GB seem awfully small for the storage of feature-length HD video? We're talking what, 10-20 movies at best?
For there to be a true digital DVD library device, hard disk storage prices are going to have to come down to a fraction of what they are now. Time will provide this, but right now, it doesn't seem like the hardcore movie buffs -- who seem like the target market for something like a digital DVD library -- would be satisfied with the comparatively tiny amount of storage available in the 2.5" hard disk form factor. A Mini with an external terabyte of storage would be better, but that's going to more than double its price.
Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I really think Cringely missed the boat on this one.
p
How much did Creative pay you to write that ad?
Creative is scared out of their collective minds. Have you seen the giant piece of FUD the Creative CEO is trying to spread?
If Creative still *exists* in 18 months, I'll be surprised. Then where will your precious Zen users go for support? (Hint: they'll just buy an iPod if something goes wrong.)
Quite frankly, if this is a design that isn't "stuck in 2002", uh, I'll remain stuck in 2002 for as long as possible, thanks. It's really hard to go wrong with a piece of white/chrome computer gear. As someone else said, the souped-up ricer-dashboard motif gets old fast.
p
Tangentially related question: why the hell does Creative's server want to set a cookie just so I can view that image? (Rejected, you cookie-sneak bastards!)
Anyway, your points are pretty much spot-on. And those "nipples" are very funny. That thing looks like a cell fone. Maybe Creative should be looking at, uh, "other markets," to put it politely, since they're obviously about to get their asses handed to them in the flash/low-end market now, too.
p
In Soviet Korea, a Beowulf cluster of our new Texas Instruments overclocking overlords welcomes naked, petrified old people in hot grits.
p
Honestly, how many Mac users would bother with the perpetually vapourware Aqua OOo when they could get iWork? Free software (both senses) is great, but there are some times when it's worth it to pay. Once iWork adds a spreadsheet component, there won't be much reason to think about using OpenOffice stuff on a Mac.
p
...and we're better off for it.
The fewer people on the Internet who are too ignorant or apathetic to solve (fairly simple) problems like this, and the better off the Internet as a whole will be.
Think about how many viruses you've received in e-mail in the last year. Now, for those of you who are interested in such things, think about how many different IP addresses these viruses came from. In my case, the latter is much less than the former, and I got literally hundreds of viruses from a mere handful of IP addresses. If a couple of those people got so frustrated that they gave up on "that Internet thing," that's good news for the rest of us, because that's maybe 10-20% of my annual virus load gone right there.
Similarly, how much of your spam came from pwn3d Windoze boxen on American cable/DSL subnets? How much of your blog spam? If these users get frustrated and quit the Internet, great! It leaves two categories of people on the 'net: those who care enough to fix the problem, and those who aren't a problem anyway. The people who are a problem are giving up!
p
That would require Mac OS to be designed to allow such sneaky software. To believe that market share has anything to do with this is to fall for the same fallacy the trolls use against you. It isn't about market share; it's about how secure the OS is from the ground up, and how the OS presents new applications for installation.
p
For what it's worth, you aren't required by any law to swear on a Bible when you take an oath in court, nor is the President required to swear his oath of office on a Bible. The book is to be of your choosing, if it's even required, and most courts do not require it any longer. You simply raise your right hand.
Fun trivia: LBJ swore the Oath of Office on a thin Catholic prayer book that happened to look like a Bible. (Someone either grabbed the wrong book or couldn't find JFK's Bible.)
p
On its face, sure.
But keep in mind the motivation of the people demanding that these stickers be placed there. This is why there are no similar stickers for gravitation or mechanics. Neither gravity nor motion poses a conflict to the very essence of their being. The idea that the Bible is not a literal document, however, does. Ergo, as others have aptly stated, the stickers are biased toward a certain religion, and are unconstitutional.
p
Well, you got one thing right.
Science can be proven in the labs. Creationism is not science.
You and all your fellow crusaders could stand to remember those two statements next time you try to dictate what should or should not be taught in a science class.
p
...they've been ordered to cover them with these!
p
He'll need the traffic to pay the bandwidth bill he just brought upon himself...site's down.
p
The Netherlands and Belgium?
C'mon, if it's supposed to be a PC for grandparents, Korea was the obvious choice...
p
the radiation effect is always negative?
Because that sure seems to be the case with all the wonderful doomsday pseudoscientists. First power lines, then cell fones. Riiiiiiiiight.
Three words for those folks:
Non
Ionising
Radiation
Look it up sometime.
p