They claim to ship bundled a 2.4G wireless controller, which would be a great addition to the standard box of any console. Wireless controllers have gotten much better than the ol' Atari with an antenna.
The distribution of games seens overly ambition, but it's an interesting concept. It'd be like getting the Playstation Underground demo disc automatically as soon as a game is released...instant demo for all games. And purchases would be relatively immediate as well, no need to go to the store and actually shop. Add the possibility of rental and consolidation of MMORPG payments into that, and there is some potential for continuous sales and income.
Maybe it is a really big MAME box...or more like Citrix hooked up to a really big MAME box. Technology rarely pushes the success of a console faster than quality titles and developers, so it's likely this will become vaporware due to lack of developers rather than the failure of a broadband box. But if this has the potential to pull more game sales into the homes of gamers (like Xbox's project that every xbox sold will purchase 9 games) than other consoles, it might just be crazy enough to work.
Mark Sobell should be shipping his next book, A Practical Guide to Red Hat 8, by the end of the month. I'm hoping it updates his previous tome, A Practical Guide to Linux, which was published in 1997, with some newer information as well as Red Hat specific tasks.
Still, A Practical Guide to Linux is about as good as you can get for introductions without worrying about the forboding sense O'Reilly sometimes gives you with technical writing.
Re:What do you expect?
on
Newton Won't Die
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually Jobs wasn't a driving force behind the Newton.
John Scully championed the early PDA as the CEO of Apple during its introduction. Michael Tchao, Steve Capps, and Walter Smith were among the team members who worked with the OS and Stepan Pachikov developed the cursive recognition technology know then as Calligrapher.
Spam marketers and the larger companies who help them have adopted the exact mindset used by the giants of direct mail marketing.
The president of one of these companies was once asked if he cared about all the junk mail being forced through a person's postbox. The response was "There's no such thing as junk mail. There is such a thing as a junk customer."
Getting your name pulled off 3 of the major lists in the US can drop the amount of credit card applications, free catalogs, and other junk mail by around 80%. Such a thing needs to exist in the spam world, rather than useless "unsubscribe here" links that fail to have any real affect.
Now that Apple's offering a higher-end software that can compete against some of the bigger players, I wonder if they'll be offering some type of demo. Many of the others like Discreet who sell compositing software--especially the one's you usually purchase through a distributor or licensed reseller--will gladly give in-house demos of their hardware or software to try and lure new business. An artist will usually want to feel comfortable with a toolset before plunking down the purchase price.
I hope this happens in some form...whether via Apple or via the retailers. It'd show a solid desire to grow this market, and boost Shake's appeal to those who are looking for something similar to Combustion (and to some extend After Effects) but with full OS X support.
Actually, the upgrade price of $19.95 is for people who have purchased a Mac after today that came with OS X 10.1. The Apple stores will probably be selling the most current versions right away but other distributers have that surplus of boxes sitting in the warehouse.
Current 10.1 users on old machines are stuck with the $129 price.
Seems rather odd they're actually making you pay for upgrading something new you've just bought. Usually Apple floats a 3 month grace period. Figure if you're buying a new machine, the OS should be new as well. Guess not.
It's great that Suse's finished work on 8.0 and will sell me it for $40-80...but are they putting it on ftp sites yet for download in the spirit of Linux distros?
I've always had a bit of a pain downloading 7.3 and it'd be great if they included some.iso files with 8.0 to make a truly easy install.
Yes the site and the program have some shelf-life. Riley's stated that version 0.8 will released "any day now" and has been in testing for the past few weeks. It should include a global hotkey which may make swapping between these desktops amazingly easy.
I'm getting a little sick of this trend where director's recut their new movies for DVD, forcing more sales (kinda like the theater re-release trick when the movie less than a year old). Sure Scott is a talented director and I'd like to see what new stuff he adds, but how REALLY different can this new Bladerunner be?
At most you figure there should be three versions of a movie...the theater release, the "director's cut" which allows one to do what the studios wouldn't allow, and the "everything found on the cutting room floor" version. Shouldn't the stuff that wasn't right or didn't work the first time around hold true today as well? Just because a scene didn't fit or was crappy 20 years ago doesn't make it magically better today because it's being played back on DVD. Completeness is one thing but inability to actually finish a film is somewhere between greed and ignorance.
So if I type James Bond or X-Files in Amazon, doesn't that give me every available in perfect digital quality right at my fingertips??
The money being exchanged to purchase these almost seems to balance out with me based on the price of my monthly Tivo subscription over several years vs. Amazon's item cost.
We best be careful or these magic book collections called encyclopedias will give us access to every bit of standardized history at our fingertips as well.
Information gathering of this sort, assuming they stick to their posted privacy policy, isn't really such a bad thing. Advertisers work in odd and mysterious ways, and basing a campaign or new product on what works in "testing" seems far less correct than judging it on actual viewing habits.
Testing works by essentially shoving groups of 12 people or so in remote cities in Wisconsin (or wherever represents a demographic mix) into a room and interviewing them, very very precisely. These people get a snack lunch and some money. Advertisers feel they get an accurate view of how the public will view a spot. I've seen plenty of commercials killed in testing (after all they money has been spent to make them) and it really pisses of the company and the ad agency.
They don't get mad at themselves, the usually get mad at the public. After all, all their previous research said this new potato chip would be huge...so it can't be their fault.
Tivo's ability to gather data on a individual and group level (like the whole zip code of that town in Wisconsin) is far faster than Nielsen ratings, more specific to an individual TV event like commercials or programming, and most likely useful to advertisers and programmers in general.
Sure...it's a tape format. And sure there "may" be encryption issues. But D-VHS stands to be the first solid, consumer/prosumer format available to print HDTV into the real world.
Blue laser DVDs have yet to approach the $2000 level, so we'll count them out for at least over a year. Also, they'll suffer the same flaw as the early DVD crop of being record only. If you just want to watch movies, that's great.
But D-VHS offers a way to not only playback but also record high-def. D-VHS is the tape (yes...it's a tape format, but it's a digital tape format which makes all the difference) but the deck offers Firewire as possible I/O. Currently, the IEEE 1394 works great to pass compressed HD signals. Within a year or so, the spec should be up to handling a full 1.5 Gb/sec, which will allow it to pass uncompressed HD on consumer-grade equipment.
Home PC based editing software (like Final Cut Pro) is quite capable right now of working in High-Def resolutions...the downside is the inability to export this to anything but a file format. Push it through firewire, layoff to D-VHS, and you've got a whole new reach.
To one who doesn't actively use a Microsoft OS, I can't help but wonder how many operating systems they plan to support and host. How long was the active lifespan on ME? I think it seemed less than a year. It makes me wish MS would use version numbers to imply upgrades or changes rather than XP one day and Longhorn the next. The Linux and Apple folk have never really had this problem.
TechTV's report makes it sound interesting, but there's a few flaws with it. In order to "gather" enough frames for a 30 second commercial, you need 900 frames. 900 is a lot of frames. Most television shows don't even have 900 cuts in them. Especially sitcom shows might average 300-400, but longer scenes can run than number a lot lower.
Secondly, there isn't 30 minutes of television to subtract from. You've already got an average (and a growing average) of 8 minutes of advertising/network promos/whatever in the 30 minute slot, leaving you with about 22 minutes of prime time. This floats based on shows or networks, but it's almost 1/3 the program. And I'd be rather certain NO advertiser is going to allow 1 frame to be trimmed from their commercial. They want 900 frames. They paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to create those 900 frames.
As for the premise of duplicate frames...well, in NTSC American television, there isn't a duplicate frame. Each frame actually consists of two fields which each fill half the screen with video. 1/60 second each equals the 30 frames a second. Every couple frames, assuming a show has been shot on film, you end up getting one field from the previous frame and one from the next. It's called interlacing. There is no true duplication of the frame, just a residual mixed with the next field.
TV viewers are very used to this look, and that's why news footage looks different than many network shows. Footage without interlacing that's comprised of solid frames (some commercials are using this look) looks rather awkward and forced.
Finally, viewers probably aren't going to notice losing frames. But they are going to notice an additional 30 seconds of commercial time. If you start stretching these breaks towards and beyond the 5 minute mark, this will have an effect. You may be able to hide the subtraction of time, but you can't hide the addition of a commercial.
Gimme my Tivo and the fast-forward button. At least I can control how many frames I'm missing that way.
Online retailers have dodged yet another bullet by having mandatory state sales tax postponed yet again, but when this shoe falls, e-commerce fans might find themselves thinking really hard about buying stuff they can get elsewhere.
For a lot of items, especially computer items, it's a lot more convenient to get what you want without having to find it in the store. When's the last time you actually bought software off the shelf or from a catalog? These are niche items that aren't commonly shelved.
For most department store items...they aren't worth the shipping and sales tax and state sales tax which could one day face all online retail, when you can easily find these things at retailers.
For some folk, a LCD actually isn't the way to go. Color printing folk will admit the LCD looks pretty, but you're not going to want to try to judge any sort of output on it for press.
Also, while the Final Cut Pro demo was nice, many video pros wouldn't dream of trying to run media off only Firewire harddrives. Gimme IDE, gimme SCSI, and gimme about 5 of them in a RAID 0.
That's not going to work well at all with the iMac.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's where you can go to sign up to be one of these lucky developers! Get them resumes ready!
Infinium Labs
5380 Gulf of Mexico
Suite 409
Longboat Key, FL 34228
jobs@infiniumlabs.com
They claim to ship bundled a 2.4G wireless controller, which would be a great addition to the standard box of any console. Wireless controllers have gotten much better than the ol' Atari with an antenna.
The distribution of games seens overly ambition, but it's an interesting concept. It'd be like getting the Playstation Underground demo disc automatically as soon as a game is released...instant demo for all games. And purchases would be relatively immediate as well, no need to go to the store and actually shop. Add the possibility of rental and consolidation of MMORPG payments into that, and there is some potential for continuous sales and income.
Maybe it is a really big MAME box...or more like Citrix hooked up to a really big MAME box. Technology rarely pushes the success of a console faster than quality titles and developers, so it's likely this will become vaporware due to lack of developers rather than the failure of a broadband box. But if this has the potential to pull more game sales into the homes of gamers (like Xbox's project that every xbox sold will purchase 9 games) than other consoles, it might just be crazy enough to work.
SBC Yahoo DSL told me that I might like salsa music. My wife didn't even know that I liked salsa music.
How often are you going to actually run out and buy some socks? Never. Just look at 'em. They're probably raggy and in pathetic shape right now.
Socks. The Christmas gift I once hated but now hate to buy for myself.
Mark Sobell should be shipping his next book, A Practical Guide to Red Hat 8, by the end of the month. I'm hoping it updates his previous tome, A Practical Guide to Linux, which was published in 1997, with some newer information as well as Red Hat specific tasks.
Still, A Practical Guide to Linux is about as good as you can get for introductions without worrying about the forboding sense O'Reilly sometimes gives you with technical writing.
Actually Jobs wasn't a driving force behind the Newton.
John Scully championed the early PDA as the CEO of Apple during its introduction. Michael Tchao, Steve Capps, and Walter Smith were among the team members who worked with the OS and Stepan Pachikov developed the cursive recognition technology know then as Calligrapher.
Spam marketers and the larger companies who help them have adopted the exact mindset used by the giants of direct mail marketing.
The president of one of these companies was once asked if he cared about all the junk mail being forced through a person's postbox. The response was "There's no such thing as junk mail. There is such a thing as a junk customer."
Getting your name pulled off 3 of the major lists in the US can drop the amount of credit card applications, free catalogs, and other junk mail by around 80%. Such a thing needs to exist in the spam world, rather than useless "unsubscribe here" links that fail to have any real affect.
Now that Apple's offering a higher-end software that can compete against some of the bigger players, I wonder if they'll be offering some type of demo. Many of the others like Discreet who sell compositing software--especially the one's you usually purchase through a distributor or licensed reseller--will gladly give in-house demos of their hardware or software to try and lure new business. An artist will usually want to feel comfortable with a toolset before plunking down the purchase price.
I hope this happens in some form...whether via Apple or via the retailers. It'd show a solid desire to grow this market, and boost Shake's appeal to those who are looking for something similar to Combustion (and to some extend After Effects) but with full OS X support.
Actually, the upgrade price of $19.95 is for people who have purchased a Mac after today that came with OS X 10.1. The Apple stores will probably be selling the most current versions right away but other distributers have that surplus of boxes sitting in the warehouse.
Current 10.1 users on old machines are stuck with the $129 price.
Seems rather odd they're actually making you pay for upgrading something new you've just bought. Usually Apple floats a 3 month grace period. Figure if you're buying a new machine, the OS should be new as well. Guess not.
It's great that Suse's finished work on 8.0 and will sell me it for $40-80...but are they putting it on ftp sites yet for download in the spirit of Linux distros?
.iso files with 8.0 to make a truly easy install.
I've always had a bit of a pain downloading 7.3 and it'd be great if they included some
Yes the site and the program have some shelf-life. Riley's stated that version 0.8 will released "any day now" and has been in testing for the past few weeks. It should include a global hotkey which may make swapping between these desktops amazingly easy.
How's the kid going to be able to unlock and take off the watch for gym class?
I'm getting a little sick of this trend where director's recut their new movies for DVD, forcing more sales (kinda like the theater re-release trick when the movie less than a year old). Sure Scott is a talented director and I'd like to see what new stuff he adds, but how REALLY different can this new Bladerunner be?
At most you figure there should be three versions of a movie...the theater release, the "director's cut" which allows one to do what the studios wouldn't allow, and the "everything found on the cutting room floor" version. Shouldn't the stuff that wasn't right or didn't work the first time around hold true today as well? Just because a scene didn't fit or was crappy 20 years ago doesn't make it magically better today because it's being played back on DVD. Completeness is one thing but inability to actually finish a film is somewhere between greed and ignorance.
For the power of the G4 mixed with linux and stacked serves or a rack mount option, Yellow Dog Linux makes the briQ.
/ br iQ.shtml
It runs on amazing little power and you can cram 8 of them in a 4U rack.
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ
So if I type James Bond or X-Files in Amazon, doesn't that give me every available in perfect digital quality right at my fingertips??
The money being exchanged to purchase these almost seems to balance out with me based on the price of my monthly Tivo subscription over several years vs. Amazon's item cost.
We best be careful or these magic book collections called encyclopedias will give us access to every bit of standardized history at our fingertips as well.
Lemme just rewind and watch that aga...ACK! Eject button by mistake! No!
::sob::
Information gathering of this sort, assuming they stick to their posted privacy policy, isn't really such a bad thing. Advertisers work in odd and mysterious ways, and basing a campaign or new product on what works in "testing" seems far less correct than judging it on actual viewing habits.
Testing works by essentially shoving groups of 12 people or so in remote cities in Wisconsin (or wherever represents a demographic mix) into a room and interviewing them, very very precisely. These people get a snack lunch and some money. Advertisers feel they get an accurate view of how the public will view a spot. I've seen plenty of commercials killed in testing (after all they money has been spent to make them) and it really pisses of the company and the ad agency.
They don't get mad at themselves, the usually get mad at the public. After all, all their previous research said this new potato chip would be huge...so it can't be their fault.
Tivo's ability to gather data on a individual and group level (like the whole zip code of that town in Wisconsin) is far faster than Nielsen ratings, more specific to an individual TV event like commercials or programming, and most likely useful to advertisers and programmers in general.
Sure...it's a tape format. And sure there "may" be encryption issues. But D-VHS stands to be the first solid, consumer/prosumer format available to print HDTV into the real world.
Blue laser DVDs have yet to approach the $2000 level, so we'll count them out for at least over a year. Also, they'll suffer the same flaw as the early DVD crop of being record only. If you just want to watch movies, that's great.
But D-VHS offers a way to not only playback but also record high-def. D-VHS is the tape (yes...it's a tape format, but it's a digital tape format which makes all the difference) but the deck offers Firewire as possible I/O. Currently, the IEEE 1394 works great to pass compressed HD signals. Within a year or so, the spec should be up to handling a full 1.5 Gb/sec, which will allow it to pass uncompressed HD on consumer-grade equipment.
Home PC based editing software (like Final Cut Pro) is quite capable right now of working in High-Def resolutions...the downside is the inability to export this to anything but a file format. Push it through firewire, layoff to D-VHS, and you've got a whole new reach.
I didn't realize that Apple was currently planning another new OS for Microsoft to use as their template...
To one who doesn't actively use a Microsoft OS, I can't help but wonder how many operating systems they plan to support and host. How long was the active lifespan on ME? I think it seemed less than a year. It makes me wish MS would use version numbers to imply upgrades or changes rather than XP one day and Longhorn the next. The Linux and Apple folk have never really had this problem.
TechTV's report makes it sound interesting, but there's a few flaws with it. In order to "gather" enough frames for a 30 second commercial, you need 900 frames. 900 is a lot of frames. Most television shows don't even have 900 cuts in them. Especially sitcom shows might average 300-400, but longer scenes can run than number a lot lower.
Secondly, there isn't 30 minutes of television to subtract from. You've already got an average (and a growing average) of 8 minutes of advertising/network promos/whatever in the 30 minute slot, leaving you with about 22 minutes of prime time. This floats based on shows or networks, but it's almost 1/3 the program. And I'd be rather certain NO advertiser is going to allow 1 frame to be trimmed from their commercial. They want 900 frames. They paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to create those 900 frames.
As for the premise of duplicate frames...well, in NTSC American television, there isn't a duplicate frame. Each frame actually consists of two fields which each fill half the screen with video. 1/60 second each equals the 30 frames a second. Every couple frames, assuming a show has been shot on film, you end up getting one field from the previous frame and one from the next. It's called interlacing. There is no true duplication of the frame, just a residual mixed with the next field.
TV viewers are very used to this look, and that's why news footage looks different than many network shows. Footage without interlacing that's comprised of solid frames (some commercials are using this look) looks rather awkward and forced.
Finally, viewers probably aren't going to notice losing frames. But they are going to notice an additional 30 seconds of commercial time. If you start stretching these breaks towards and beyond the 5 minute mark, this will have an effect. You may be able to hide the subtraction of time, but you can't hide the addition of a commercial.
Gimme my Tivo and the fast-forward button. At least I can control how many frames I'm missing that way.
How meny inkorrect keys r actualley pressed?
That would be interesting to see. Possible to if you could record and check to see the most popular key pressed right before the backspace.
Online retailers have dodged yet another bullet by having mandatory state sales tax postponed yet again, but when this shoe falls, e-commerce fans might find themselves thinking really hard about buying stuff they can get elsewhere.
For a lot of items, especially computer items, it's a lot more convenient to get what you want without having to find it in the store. When's the last time you actually bought software off the shelf or from a catalog? These are niche items that aren't commonly shelved.
For most department store items...they aren't worth the shipping and sales tax and state sales tax which could one day face all online retail, when you can easily find these things at retailers.
For some folk, a LCD actually isn't the way to go. Color printing folk will admit the LCD looks pretty, but you're not going to want to try to judge any sort of output on it for press.
Also, while the Final Cut Pro demo was nice, many video pros wouldn't dream of trying to run media off only Firewire harddrives. Gimme IDE, gimme SCSI, and gimme about 5 of them in a RAID 0.
That's not going to work well at all with the iMac.
The design on this thing is going to revolutionize the desk lamp industry!