Actually, most available statistics suggest that Apple's iPod has between 25% and 35% market penetration in the HDD-based portable audio player market.
WOW, you know, they don't get statistics for sales of players by doing an informal survey. You live in a fascinating little world if you think that way.
There are hard numbers as to how many devices are shipped, just as there are in computers, and IDG tracks those hard numbers and reports them.
"My Dad downloaded some songs for me from iTunes music store but I can't play them on my computer."
You forgot to add "without entering the account information it asks for when it pops up the authorisation dialog"
Dude, we ALL know how it works. iTMS songs don't just "not work" you get the authorisation dialog that pretty clearly tells you what to do to get it to play.
Don't forget this has other uses. For example you could mount your LCD on a swivel stand or on your wall in portrait mode, then use function to make the screen "right side up".
Which I did as soon as I got my QA version of Tiger. It don't look so good, the visibility plane in LCDs is designed around a horizontal plane. Also you need to turn off subpixel font rendering to get decent looking text.
Quicktime streaming isn't any better than any other streaming technology I've seen.
I think QuickTime streams look better than Real and WMA and you're either on crack or deaf if you're going to tell me that Real and WMA audio sound better than AAC. Oh, and btw, QuickTime Streaming Server is open source as Darwin Streaming Server. To me, if as you claim it is no better or no worse quality than Real or WMA, then being free automatically makes it better.
The Mac Mini isn't really powerful enough to playback HDTV video in realtime on it's CPU, and it only has hardware support for MPEG-2 playback.
No, the Mac mini does not have hardware support for MPEG-2 unless you consider an AltiVec plug-in hardware support. Apple is touting the hell out of the scalability of H.264. No doubt they will stream the version your hardware/network can support just like they do now. You think they built Xsan for fun?
TV shows will come before movies due to size and bandwidth. Downloading the Batman Begins trailer in 1080p at 2.24 minutes comes in at 148MB. If we assume TV shows will be in 480p at 20 minutes I am gonna extrapolate and assume that a TV show will fit on a CD in 480p HD at 650MB (just a rough guess, no research). I believe it's critical that the shows fit on a CD if they want consumers to go for this.
That's not bad but that's still a long time to download a TV show from even a fast server, not that the average person won't do it but I don't think we're gonna be downloading gigabytes worth of movies from Apple anytime soon.
I'd say for most people, its not worth paying $400 dollars for a TV of any size or picture quality. Especially when you consider for all intensive purposes, there isn't much on teevee worth watching in HDTV.
For all intents and purposes we're talking about $400 for a 40" television which is cheaper than it is now for a 40". Your opinion about nothing worth watching in HDTV is just that, opinion. I have a 65" Mitsubishi RPTV and HDTV makes SDTV look like ass, doesn't matter what I am watching.
You fail to grasp the concept of everything HDTV offers, it's not just higher resolution, it's colour information as well. No more "rainbows" when you are looking at any image where the contrast changes dramatically (such as a checkerboard or black and white stripes). I can see the wood grain on Discovery HD when they are doing Trading Spaces. I can see the film grain when they show movies on TNTHD, I can see the fabric weave on Conan O'Brien's tie on Late Night.
The sooner everything goes HD the better. I just think they should have done more than increase the resolution by 2.25.
So call them, say it, and hang up. If it's important, they'll call back and use up their minutes.
WOW! What kind of cool plan do you have that you get free minutes if you don't initiate the call? I need to be on that one because neither Cingular nor T-mobile have that plan.
I've always wondered, would a program like Photoshop, benefite from 512 Video RAM?
If the card manufacturer writes a hardware plug-in for Photoshop to use it, which I've never seen one outside of Radius (not for RAM but for processing).
On a side note, my office computer is a Dual 2.8 Ghz P4 machine, and I don't see a difference in normal day-today office stuff.
There's a very good reason for that and it's called throttles.
When Apple went from Motorola 68040 to PowerPC they discovered that scrolling was too fast, people would scroll from one end to the other of a document/window in around a second, so they instituted throttles.
Certain operations need to be at a slow enough speed for the user to gauge what is happening. If certain tasks were performed so fast that you didn't see them happen you would question whether or not it happened.
It sounds like Longhorn is taking the next step in combating reboots by allowing you to update drivers without a reboot. This is something you can't even always do with Linux today (consider updating the X driver for a video card -- you have to restart X to use it, which is equivalent to a reboot in Windows)
Yes, I agree that to restart the window manager in Windows you have to reboot, but I fail to see how restarting X is like shutting down all your non-gui processes and cycling power and then waiting for the kernel to reload.
What really struck me about the Longhorn demo was the idea that resolution doesn't really matter anymore. Running at 1600 by 1200, but Calculator's too small?
I'm pretty sure it never mattered to IRIX. Was IRIX ever bitmap based? Anyone?
BTW, Mac OS X Tiger already has support built-in for developers to create resolution independent applications, it's just not a user feature yet.
I really don't know how they've gotten away with QuickTime, iTunes and the iPod though.
It was not until they started selling music through iTMS that problems arose. The reason why they were able to get into QuickTime, iTunes and iPod is because they were not selling music, which is what Apple Records does. Incidentally, Apple Computer holds the trademark on "Apple Computer" and the logo, NOT on the word "Apple", it's increasingly frustrating to see people's lack of knowledge on what businesses actually have trademarked.
One of the things I like about OS X is that I don't have to reboot to use most software. Some OS level upgrades do require a reboot though.
Which is increasingly becoming annoying to me as these installers are requiring admin privileges but can't relaunch the Finder? I get installers telling me I need to reboot for no reason. They're not installing anything that gets loaded only at boot time.
Mac OS X includes a kextload command. If your kernel extension is going to cause problems you need to label it beta. If not, then the installer needs to run a kextload script.
Why is an installer telling me I need to reboot when i just need to log out and log back in? That's another gripe.
More than not, it's the developers that aren't following spec or procedure that make things difficult, not the OS. Since most Windows applications refuse to use MSI (when almost all Mac OS X programs use Installer) I'm sure there will still be dozens of cases where the installer tells you to reboot just as VICE installers on Mac OS X occasionally force-quit all applications for no apparent reason (like we're still in Mac OS 9 land).
Really, I think past Win2k performance has been really excellent (*ducks*).
yeah, now instead of the kernel constantly going down we have all the systems on top of it constantly crashing. If you haven't already destroyed the screen from all the incessant pop-ups "You plugged something in. Did you know you plugged something in? Were you aware that you just plugged something in? Did you notice that you were just plugging something in?"
I've never seen an operating system so excited over every minute detail the user performs.
But, in my opinion (and I don't know the economics of the posted article's site, nor do I know slashdot's), the fee requested or charged seems modest and I'm guessing it barely covers the cost of providing the systems, the bandwidth, etc. to support the forum.
The revenue model for a website is very similar to that of a magazine. It's all about your subscription base and circulation with magazines and it's all about hits and active members on a website.
Subscriptions to magazines are just a fraction of the cover price for a reason. Magazines make ALL their money on ad revenue. You're basically just paying for the shipping and handling, you're not even paying for the materials. The lifeblood of ad revenue is the hard numbers you can show advertisers. There are this many subscribers and this many in such and such demographic.
The actual cost any website portion a magazine offers is entirely offset by the ad revenue they generate. The website is basically another way to increase subscriptions and a way to offer value to advertisers. They now have two mediums to advertise with you.
This to me is like paying for a cable station only to also have commercials on it.
If you set up your AOL account with a Macintosh, AOL lets you connect to their servers with any IMAP client. I can set up rules in Mail.app that will take anyone out of AOL's Spam folder that should not be there.
First they came for the sex offenders
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a sex offender.
Then they came for the brown immigrants
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a brown immigrant.
Then they came for the dissidents
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't dissident.
Then they came for me
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iPod will also happily play Audible, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless and AAC.
WOW, you know, they don't get statistics for sales of players by doing an informal survey. You live in a fascinating little world if you think that way.
There are hard numbers as to how many devices are shipped, just as there are in computers, and IDG tracks those hard numbers and reports them.
Because Apple has high profit margins.
You forgot to add "without entering the account information it asks for when it pops up the authorisation dialog"
Dude, we ALL know how it works. iTMS songs don't just "not work" you get the authorisation dialog that pretty clearly tells you what to do to get it to play.
Oh, don't forget "and use come craptastic Jukebox software" since the iRiver doesn't work with iTunes.
Total package, man, total package. Apple's always been about it.
Which I did as soon as I got my QA version of Tiger. It don't look so good, the visibility plane in LCDs is designed around a horizontal plane. Also you need to turn off subpixel font rendering to get decent looking text.
I think QuickTime streams look better than Real and WMA and you're either on crack or deaf if you're going to tell me that Real and WMA audio sound better than AAC. Oh, and btw, QuickTime Streaming Server is open source as Darwin Streaming Server. To me, if as you claim it is no better or no worse quality than Real or WMA, then being free automatically makes it better.
No, the Mac mini does not have hardware support for MPEG-2 unless you consider an AltiVec plug-in hardware support. Apple is touting the hell out of the scalability of H.264. No doubt they will stream the version your hardware/network can support just like they do now. You think they built Xsan for fun?
That's not bad but that's still a long time to download a TV show from even a fast server, not that the average person won't do it but I don't think we're gonna be downloading gigabytes worth of movies from Apple anytime soon.
Nintendo has gone on record saying that none of their video game systems have been sold at a loss.
For all intents and purposes we're talking about $400 for a 40" television which is cheaper than it is now for a 40". Your opinion about nothing worth watching in HDTV is just that, opinion. I have a 65" Mitsubishi RPTV and HDTV makes SDTV look like ass, doesn't matter what I am watching.
You fail to grasp the concept of everything HDTV offers, it's not just higher resolution, it's colour information as well. No more "rainbows" when you are looking at any image where the contrast changes dramatically (such as a checkerboard or black and white stripes). I can see the wood grain on Discovery HD when they are doing Trading Spaces. I can see the film grain when they show movies on TNTHD, I can see the fabric weave on Conan O'Brien's tie on Late Night.
The sooner everything goes HD the better. I just think they should have done more than increase the resolution by 2.25.
They do.
WOW! What kind of cool plan do you have that you get free minutes if you don't initiate the call? I need to be on that one because neither Cingular nor T-mobile have that plan.
If the card manufacturer writes a hardware plug-in for Photoshop to use it, which I've never seen one outside of Radius (not for RAM but for processing).
There's a very good reason for that and it's called throttles.
When Apple went from Motorola 68040 to PowerPC they discovered that scrolling was too fast, people would scroll from one end to the other of a document/window in around a second, so they instituted throttles.
Certain operations need to be at a slow enough speed for the user to gauge what is happening. If certain tasks were performed so fast that you didn't see them happen you would question whether or not it happened.
Mac OS X Tiger loves graphics RAM. Check out the Ars Technica article to understand why on a Mac, more VRAM is always better.
Yes, I agree that to restart the window manager in Windows you have to reboot, but I fail to see how restarting X is like shutting down all your non-gui processes and cycling power and then waiting for the kernel to reload.
I'm pretty sure it never mattered to IRIX. Was IRIX ever bitmap based? Anyone?
BTW, Mac OS X Tiger already has support built-in for developers to create resolution independent applications, it's just not a user feature yet.
It was not until they started selling music through iTMS that problems arose. The reason why they were able to get into QuickTime, iTunes and iPod is because they were not selling music, which is what Apple Records does. Incidentally, Apple Computer holds the trademark on "Apple Computer" and the logo, NOT on the word "Apple", it's increasingly frustrating to see people's lack of knowledge on what businesses actually have trademarked.
Which is increasingly becoming annoying to me as these installers are requiring admin privileges but can't relaunch the Finder? I get installers telling me I need to reboot for no reason. They're not installing anything that gets loaded only at boot time.
Mac OS X includes a kextload command. If your kernel extension is going to cause problems you need to label it beta. If not, then the installer needs to run a kextload script.
Why is an installer telling me I need to reboot when i just need to log out and log back in? That's another gripe.
More than not, it's the developers that aren't following spec or procedure that make things difficult, not the OS. Since most Windows applications refuse to use MSI (when almost all Mac OS X programs use Installer) I'm sure there will still be dozens of cases where the installer tells you to reboot just as VICE installers on Mac OS X occasionally force-quit all applications for no apparent reason (like we're still in Mac OS 9 land).
yeah, now instead of the kernel constantly going down we have all the systems on top of it constantly crashing. If you haven't already destroyed the screen from all the incessant pop-ups "You plugged something in. Did you know you plugged something in? Were you aware that you just plugged something in? Did you notice that you were just plugging something in?"
I've never seen an operating system so excited over every minute detail the user performs.
That fits with Microsoft's new slogan change from "Where do you want to go today?" to "You're coming with us!"
Damn, that's so recursive it made my head hurt.
The revenue model for a website is very similar to that of a magazine. It's all about your subscription base and circulation with magazines and it's all about hits and active members on a website.
Subscriptions to magazines are just a fraction of the cover price for a reason. Magazines make ALL their money on ad revenue. You're basically just paying for the shipping and handling, you're not even paying for the materials. The lifeblood of ad revenue is the hard numbers you can show advertisers. There are this many subscribers and this many in such and such demographic.
The actual cost any website portion a magazine offers is entirely offset by the ad revenue they generate. The website is basically another way to increase subscriptions and a way to offer value to advertisers. They now have two mediums to advertise with you.
This to me is like paying for a cable station only to also have commercials on it.
If you set up your AOL account with a Macintosh, AOL lets you connect to their servers with any IMAP client. I can set up rules in Mail.app that will take anyone out of AOL's Spam folder that should not be there.
First they came for the sex offenders
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a sex offender.
Then they came for the brown immigrants
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a brown immigrant.
Then they came for the dissidents
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't dissident.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak up for me.