I get so tired of people misunderstanding QuickTime.
QuickTime is not a codec. It's a media architecture. The MOV file format can theoretically embed arbitrary numbers of tracks (of audio, video, 3D, animated sprites, vector graphics) in any format, and QuickTime supports several dozen formats of various sorts out of the box. ALAC, like every other codec Apple implements on OS X, is just a QuickTime plugin.
Not much of the QuickTime content you find around the web uses it, though, so I don't see how this is going to help QuickTime movie playback on Linux much. But Apple is really pushing MPEG-4 these days, so if Linux has a good MPEG-4 implementation, compatibility problems should go away eventually.
ALAC can be encoded or decoded in any application that uses QuickTime, which means pretty much any media application on the Mac. That makes it a very useful format for moving lossless data around.
There is a FLAC plug-in for QuickTime, but I think it only does decoding so far.
I seriously doubt Apple has the slightest interest in suing over this. Unlike Real's attempt to sell copy-protected music that worked on the iPod, this is not an attempt by a commercial competitor to cash in on Apple's success, nor is it likely to hurt Apple's revenues or profits in any conceivable way.
Actually, I suspect if you dropped a Dell tower on a Mac mini, you'd probably end up with some small scratches on the mini, and a big dent in the bottom of the Dell. The mini is constructed of fairly thick aluminum and polycarbonate (the stuff that makes bullet-proof glass bullet-proof). The Dell is constructed of sheet metal and rather cheap plastic.
Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11) [GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> 2**256 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269 984665640564039457584007913129639936L >>>
Does is really make sense do design your server infrastructure to handle massively inflated traffic which only occurs for a couple of hours a year? Maybe if you're selling ad impressions or something. I don't think it makes much sense for Apple. If people can't order their cool Apple stuff today, they'll come back and their order cool Apple stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile, the "So many people are ordering cool Apple stuff that their server is down!" stories are a nice but of free marketing.
$2K per node price differnce? A dual 2.3 GHz Xserve cluster node is $2999. I'm not sure where you're getting dual Xeon nodes for $999. (Of course you'll need more RAM for both machines, probably, but that's the same price for either platform.)
California Digital offers pre-configured Mac and Intel clusters. Turns out an Xserve cluster will cost you less per flop than a Xeon cluster. And their performance figures are using the 2 GHz Xserve models, which were replaced with 2.3 GHz models last week at the same price.
I find all sorts of useful stuff in blogs, particularly tech blogs. They should probably be searched separately from other types of sites, but that's true for a lot of things. Ever try to search for a real review of something, and just get back hundreds of useless 'buyer review' pages from shopping sites?
I don't think you can open Final Cut Pro files in Premier, but that's not Apple's fault:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/extensible.html
Final Cut Pro HD supports XML interchange format, which describes every aspect of a program from edits and transitions to effects, color correction settings and keyframe data. Using XML interchange format, you can seamlessly share project, bin, sequence, clip and media data generated by Final Cut Pro HD with any other application or system that supports XML, including other nonlinear editors, database systems and broadcast servers. Support for media-attached metadata is available by combining XML and QuickTime, enabling media elements to be tracked throughout the production process. And because XML interchange format is open and extensible, you can use Final Cut Pro HD to create fully integrated applications and build a customized post-production pipeline.
Professionals in creative fields tend to be a lot less tolerant than most users about file format lock-in, because for them, when you tell them they can't move their work between apps, you're basically telling them that you're trying to put your bottom line ahead of their creative freedom. That doesn't fly.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
on
Upbeat on E-books
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· Score: 1
I've also got a Palm Tungsten E, and I do as much of my book reading as I can on it. I've gotten so used to sitting in the dark reading off its backlit screen that occasionally I'll lie down in bed with a dead tree book in front of me, open it, and reach over and turn out the light, before I cleverly realize that you can't read dead tree books in the dark.
Try the Mac OS X version. It's a single self-contained application bundle; one icon, drag-and-drop install.
It still doesn't quite look like a fully native OS X app yet though. But it looks like they've replaced a lot of the dialogs with Cocoa versions already. If they keep that up, and they improve the icons a bit (many of them don't seem to be antialiased), they'll have a really nice OS X app in fairly short order.
You might be able to cope, but how efficient will you be? It drives me nuts when I'm on a Windows machine that, for instance, the usual OS X shortcuts for navigating within a text field don't work. They're totally ingrained in my muscle memory.If I used multiple systems on a daily basis, I rather suspect I'd have trained myself by now to just not use those shortcuts, which wouldn't be a good thing for my productivity.
Of course, you have to expect some of this going between operating systems. But it definitely should never be true when going between different apps on the same desktop... which is one of the problems with the proliferation of widget toolkits in the open source world.
Actually, there is a business model that justifies paying for the infrastructure: install fiber to the premises and undercut everyone's prices for everything. You will lose lots of money upfront, but that fiber you installed will allow you to offer arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth to your customers basically forever; you'll just have to upgrade your switching equipment every now and then, which is much cheaper than anything that requires digging ditches. You will make back your money in the long run, many, many, many times over.
Now, there aren't that many companies which can afford those upfront costs, but there are a few. Verizon is one, and as has been mentioned here before, they are now rolling out fiber to the premisses. Not everywhere, but that's just a matter of time (well, unless you live way in the boondocks; some government subsidies might be needed there).
Multiple forms of broadband are available at virtually any NYC address. I've had DSL in Manhattan for a bit over five years now. And yes, installing new communications infrastructure in NYC does cost an absolute fortune, but during the dotcom boom when it seemed like the cash would never run out, companies were ripping up the streets like mad in many areas, laying fiber to the curb -- which is why we've now got nice things like video-on-demand.
I don't know what the figures are for broadband penetration in New York, but if they're not higher, it's not because the infrastructure isn't there.
It doesn't make much sense to compare operating temperature differences between machines with different cooling systems. There's a much easier way to figure out how much heat a processor generates: just look at how much power it consumes. An Opteron at 2.2 GHz sucks 89W. A PPC 970fx at 2.5 GHz uses around 50W.
Yes, but the major manufacturers make panels at a lot of different quality levels. With a customer as large as Dell, they may even make special models to specific specs. So, the fact that the screen might have been made by a company which is known for making good displays doesn't necessarily tell you anything. The Dell specs could have been something along the lines of "Give us the cheapest display you can that still looks good when you're reading the spec sheet."
I don't think you really understand why Apple sells so many iPods. It's not because it's the best music player in the world, although when all factors are considered it might be. It's because Apple has managed to build an extremely valuable brand. People don't want a music players with the capabilities of the iPod. They want iPods. They want to be seen walking around with those little white earbuds -- which, incidentally, might be part of the reason HP decided to ditch the HP-branded blue iPods we saw when this deal was announced.
Then there's the iTunes Music Store. Could HP duplicate the technology behind that? Sure. Could HP make the same deals that Apple has with record labels? Maybe, maybe not. HP hasn't got Steve Jobs to capture record company execs under a Reality Distortion Field, and HP hasn't got nearly as much credibility as Apple in the music industry, because it isn't HP's computers that are sitting on the desks of most professional musicians. Even if HP could negotiate deals to get as much content as Apple has managed to get under similar licensing terms, it would probably take many months. And a lot of independent labels would probably just ignore them, because, again, they just haven't got Apple's image.
All in all, it's really pretty easy to see why HP would rather resell the iPod (presumably on very favorable terms, in exchange for bundling iTunes) than compete with it. Just think of how many 'iPod killers' have come and gone without putting a dent in the iPod's meteoric rise.
But the fact that software is licensed under the GPL may in some cases prevent companies from using software at all, which could reduce contributions. For instance, look at what Apple has done with Safari. Apple has created a proprietary browser and a proprietary rendering framework for OS X. Because the KHTML rendering engine was released under the LGPL rather than the GPL, Apple could leverage all of that code in that proprietary software. And in return, Apple has made massive contributions to KHTML. If it had been impossible for Apple to use KHTML without open-sourcing everything, it's easily possible Apple would have looked elsewhere for a rendering engine, and KHTML would have lost out on all that new code.
No, Rendezvous comes built into the operating system and pre-enabled, so you don't have to install or configure anything. And it's not a serious security threat, because it runs with no privileges. (It runs as 'nobody' on OS X.)
Content indexing has been in OS X from the start. There are several new twists with Tiger. First, the content index gets updated automatically in the background as files are changed and created, rather than just at scheduled indexing times (I think). But content indexing is only really useful for text files (and Word docs, PDFs, etc.). It's not much good for movies, or image files or whatever. So, in Tiger there is also a metadata indexing system. This system searches out metadata in a wide variety of file types and indexes it. So, for instance, EXIF data from your JPEGs and ID3 data from your MP3 files gets indexed. But searching at the level of entire files doesn't always make sense. For example, e-mail programs usually store many messages in a single file. So, Tiger also provides the ability to search specialized types of information, like e-mail or contacts or appointments, and have the results presented sensibly.
All of this is integrated into a single search interface. So, if you search for "cows" you'll get back all of your text-like documents containing information about cows, based on a full content keyword search, as well as all of your image files and MP3 files which have cows mentioned in their metadata, as well as all of your e-mail messages and appointments related to cows. And all of this happens in real-time, in a list that updates as you type your query. You can also save a query, and re-execute it at any time with a click. Basically, this is a bit like the iTunes "smart playlist" feature, but it's system-wide.
All of this collectively comprises the search technology that Apple is calling "Spotlight". This is a major new feature that many users are probably going to use dozens of times a day.
Re:Players with 60Gb drives have been out for a wh
on
60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Right, but none of the existing 60 GB players use 1.8" hard drives, because until now there weren't any. Have you seen one of those Nomad players next to an iPod? "Chunky" is a good word to use.
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I get so tired of people misunderstanding QuickTime.
QuickTime is not a codec. It's a media architecture. The MOV file format can theoretically embed arbitrary numbers of tracks (of audio, video, 3D, animated sprites, vector graphics) in any format, and QuickTime supports several dozen formats of various sorts out of the box. ALAC, like every other codec Apple implements on OS X, is just a QuickTime plugin.
Not much of the QuickTime content you find around the web uses it, though, so I don't see how this is going to help QuickTime movie playback on Linux much. But Apple is really pushing MPEG-4 these days, so if Linux has a good MPEG-4 implementation, compatibility problems should go away eventually.
ALAC can be encoded or decoded in any application that uses QuickTime, which means pretty much any media application on the Mac. That makes it a very useful format for moving lossless data around.
There is a FLAC plug-in for QuickTime, but I think it only does decoding so far.
I seriously doubt Apple has the slightest interest in suing over this. Unlike Real's attempt to sell copy-protected music that worked on the iPod, this is not an attempt by a commercial competitor to cash in on Apple's success, nor is it likely to hurt Apple's revenues or profits in any conceivable way.
Um, no. Apple is a major backer of MPEG-4, and has adopted, promoted or created many other standards, from FireWire to ZeroConf to LDAP.
Anyway, how does ALAC lock in customers? iTunes can convert files encoded with it to AAC, MP3 or AIFF.
The iTunes "Party Shuffle" feature can be set to take ratings into account.
Actually, I suspect if you dropped a Dell tower on a Mac mini, you'd probably end up with some small scratches on the mini, and a big dent in the bottom of the Dell. The mini is constructed of fairly thick aluminum and polycarbonate (the stuff that makes bullet-proof glass bullet-proof). The Dell is constructed of sheet metal and rather cheap plastic.
Does is really make sense do design your server infrastructure to handle massively inflated traffic which only occurs for a couple of hours a year? Maybe if you're selling ad impressions or something. I don't think it makes much sense for Apple. If people can't order their cool Apple stuff today, they'll come back and their order cool Apple stuff tomorrow. Meanwhile, the "So many people are ordering cool Apple stuff that their server is down!" stories are a nice but of free marketing.
$2K per node price differnce? A dual 2.3 GHz Xserve cluster node is $2999. I'm not sure where you're getting dual Xeon nodes for $999. (Of course you'll need more RAM for both machines, probably, but that's the same price for either platform.)
California Digital offers pre-configured Mac and Intel clusters. Turns out an Xserve cluster will cost you less per flop than a Xeon cluster. And their performance figures are using the 2 GHz Xserve models, which were replaced with 2.3 GHz models last week at the same price.
I find all sorts of useful stuff in blogs, particularly tech blogs. They should probably be searched separately from other types of sites, but that's true for a lot of things. Ever try to search for a real review of something, and just get back hundreds of useless 'buyer review' pages from shopping sites?
I don't think you can open Final Cut Pro files in Premier, but that's not Apple's fault:
l
http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/extensible.htm
Final Cut Pro HD supports XML interchange format, which describes every aspect of a program from edits and transitions to effects, color correction settings and keyframe data. Using XML interchange format, you can seamlessly share project, bin, sequence, clip and media data generated by Final Cut Pro HD with any other application or system that supports XML, including other nonlinear editors, database systems and broadcast servers. Support for media-attached metadata is available by combining XML and QuickTime, enabling media elements to be tracked throughout the production process. And because XML interchange format is open and extensible, you can use Final Cut Pro HD to create fully integrated applications and build a customized post-production pipeline.
Professionals in creative fields tend to be a lot less tolerant than most users about file format lock-in, because for them, when you tell them they can't move their work between apps, you're basically telling them that you're trying to put your bottom line ahead of their creative freedom. That doesn't fly.
I've also got a Palm Tungsten E, and I do as much of my book reading as I can on it. I've gotten so used to sitting in the dark reading off its backlit screen that occasionally I'll lie down in bed with a dead tree book in front of me, open it, and reach over and turn out the light, before I cleverly realize that you can't read dead tree books in the dark.
Try the Mac OS X version. It's a single self-contained application bundle; one icon, drag-and-drop install.
It still doesn't quite look like a fully native OS X app yet though. But it looks like they've replaced a lot of the dialogs with Cocoa versions already. If they keep that up, and they improve the icons a bit (many of them don't seem to be antialiased), they'll have a really nice OS X app in fairly short order.
You might be able to cope, but how efficient will you be? It drives me nuts when I'm on a Windows machine that, for instance, the usual OS X shortcuts for navigating within a text field don't work. They're totally ingrained in my muscle memory.If I used multiple systems on a daily basis, I rather suspect I'd have trained myself by now to just not use those shortcuts, which wouldn't be a good thing for my productivity.
Of course, you have to expect some of this going between operating systems. But it definitely should never be true when going between different apps on the same desktop... which is one of the problems with the proliferation of widget toolkits in the open source world.
Actually, there is a business model that justifies paying for the infrastructure: install fiber to the premises and undercut everyone's prices for everything. You will lose lots of money upfront, but that fiber you installed will allow you to offer arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth to your customers basically forever; you'll just have to upgrade your switching equipment every now and then, which is much cheaper than anything that requires digging ditches. You will make back your money in the long run, many, many, many times over.
Now, there aren't that many companies which can afford those upfront costs, but there are a few. Verizon is one, and as has been mentioned here before, they are now rolling out fiber to the premisses. Not everywhere, but that's just a matter of time (well, unless you live way in the boondocks; some government subsidies might be needed there).
Multiple forms of broadband are available at virtually any NYC address. I've had DSL in Manhattan for a bit over five years now. And yes, installing new communications infrastructure in NYC does cost an absolute fortune, but during the dotcom boom when it seemed like the cash would never run out, companies were ripping up the streets like mad in many areas, laying fiber to the curb -- which is why we've now got nice things like video-on-demand.
I don't know what the figures are for broadband penetration in New York, but if they're not higher, it's not because the infrastructure isn't there.
Ashcroft only read the Constitution to look for loopholes. That doesn't count.
It doesn't make much sense to compare operating temperature differences between machines with different cooling systems. There's a much easier way to figure out how much heat a processor generates: just look at how much power it consumes. An Opteron at 2.2 GHz sucks 89W. A PPC 970fx at 2.5 GHz uses around 50W.
Yes, but the major manufacturers make panels at a lot of different quality levels. With a customer as large as Dell, they may even make special models to specific specs. So, the fact that the screen might have been made by a company which is known for making good displays doesn't necessarily tell you anything. The Dell specs could have been something along the lines of "Give us the cheapest display you can that still looks good when you're reading the spec sheet."
I don't think you really understand why Apple sells so many iPods. It's not because it's the best music player in the world, although when all factors are considered it might be. It's because Apple has managed to build an extremely valuable brand. People don't want a music players with the capabilities of the iPod. They want iPods. They want to be seen walking around with those little white earbuds -- which, incidentally, might be part of the reason HP decided to ditch the HP-branded blue iPods we saw when this deal was announced.
Then there's the iTunes Music Store. Could HP duplicate the technology behind that? Sure. Could HP make the same deals that Apple has with record labels? Maybe, maybe not. HP hasn't got Steve Jobs to capture record company execs under a Reality Distortion Field, and HP hasn't got nearly as much credibility as Apple in the music industry, because it isn't HP's computers that are sitting on the desks of most professional musicians. Even if HP could negotiate deals to get as much content as Apple has managed to get under similar licensing terms, it would probably take many months. And a lot of independent labels would probably just ignore them, because, again, they just haven't got Apple's image.
All in all, it's really pretty easy to see why HP would rather resell the iPod (presumably on very favorable terms, in exchange for bundling iTunes) than compete with it. Just think of how many 'iPod killers' have come and gone without putting a dent in the iPod's meteoric rise.
But the fact that software is licensed under the GPL may in some cases prevent companies from using software at all, which could reduce contributions. For instance, look at what Apple has done with Safari. Apple has created a proprietary browser and a proprietary rendering framework for OS X. Because the KHTML rendering engine was released under the LGPL rather than the GPL, Apple could leverage all of that code in that proprietary software. And in return, Apple has made massive contributions to KHTML. If it had been impossible for Apple to use KHTML without open-sourcing everything, it's easily possible Apple would have looked elsewhere for a rendering engine, and KHTML would have lost out on all that new code.
No, Rendezvous comes built into the operating system and pre-enabled, so you don't have to install or configure anything. And it's not a serious security threat, because it runs with no privileges. (It runs as 'nobody' on OS X.)
And the Palm search technology is remarkably similar to what the Newton provided several years previously.
Content indexing has been in OS X from the start. There are several new twists with Tiger. First, the content index gets updated automatically in the background as files are changed and created, rather than just at scheduled indexing times (I think). But content indexing is only really useful for text files (and Word docs, PDFs, etc.). It's not much good for movies, or image files or whatever. So, in Tiger there is also a metadata indexing system. This system searches out metadata in a wide variety of file types and indexes it. So, for instance, EXIF data from your JPEGs and ID3 data from your MP3 files gets indexed. But searching at the level of entire files doesn't always make sense. For example, e-mail programs usually store many messages in a single file. So, Tiger also provides the ability to search specialized types of information, like e-mail or contacts or appointments, and have the results presented sensibly.
All of this is integrated into a single search interface. So, if you search for "cows" you'll get back all of your text-like documents containing information about cows, based on a full content keyword search, as well as all of your image files and MP3 files which have cows mentioned in their metadata, as well as all of your e-mail messages and appointments related to cows. And all of this happens in real-time, in a list that updates as you type your query. You can also save a query, and re-execute it at any time with a click. Basically, this is a bit like the iTunes "smart playlist" feature, but it's system-wide.
All of this collectively comprises the search technology that Apple is calling "Spotlight". This is a major new feature that many users are probably going to use dozens of times a day.
Right, but none of the existing 60 GB players use 1.8" hard drives, because until now there weren't any. Have you seen one of those Nomad players next to an iPod? "Chunky" is a good word to use.