According to my e-mail inbox, I can get all the descramblers I want for any cable system for only $50, anyways!
And we all know that if an offer comes via e-mail, it must be legit...
In the long term, anything could happen, but...
on
Intel Inside For Apple?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't see this as likely, especially in Neff's timeframe. Here's why. The G4 processor doesn't have the legs that the P4 has right now, but Moto is known to be making at least 1.4 GHz parts right now.
Apple also has a policy of running duallys at the high end, and given XServe, we know they have a motherboard/chipset in-house that supports reasonably modern features like DDR and ATA-100. And unless all the rumor sites are wrong, there's a new PowerMac due no later than Seybold in about a month - possibly this month.
So I figure a high-end Mac with dual 1.4 GHz G4 processors, DDR PC2100 RAM, and ATA-100 support is in the cards shortly. That's going to be a reasonably competitive machine for a while, though not quite up to bleeding-edge Wintel specs. There's also likely a little bit more leg in the G4, at least enough to get up around 2 GHz.
Beyond that, Apple's got some options. They can go to quad processors pretty easily, or by next spring they have a good shot of being up on G5 processors, which are reputedly now in sampling. Should they be making the move to G5, that'll probably carry them another couple of years, so we're talking 2005 at the outside before they have to have the next stop in mind.
A lot can happen in that time. The likeliest thing is that they jump to a 64-bit contender that emerges by then - possibly AMD but who knows? Migrating to the IBM POWER processors would be another logical move because minimal work would be required and the additional volume would drive IBM's own costs down significantly. Remember, Apple sells more RISC systems in a year than Sun, SGI (though they don't control MIPS anymore), and IBM do combined - yet all those companies see it as worthwhile to continue investing in alternative architectures. If Apple decided to move their volume systems to a slightly scaled-down version of one of these workstation chips it would have a major impact on cost.
Or Motorola could get serious and start working hand-in-hand with IBM again - IBM's fab capabilities are way beyond Moto's, and IBM could probably build the same G4 as Moto at a higher clock rate with better yields. There is one key reason, though, why Apple doesn't have to worry too much about PowerPC dying - it's huge in the embedded marketplace. Versions of PowerPC are used in all sorts of devices, and I believe it's pretty popular in automotive and networking. That gets your volumes up, too.
I can't personally speak to Sprint, as I've never used them myself. Two of my employees who live in southern New Hampshire use Sprint and I believe they are satisfied - as do my parents (they live in CT). I know the Globe tests had Verizon coming in first, almost everyone else bunched up behind them, and Voicestream bringing up the rear by a little bit.
One worry with Sprint plans is their roaming costs - the roaming is outrageously expensive. My folks had Sprint show them how to turn off roaming entirely because they couldn't always tell when they were in a home area or not.
The services I've used over the last decade or so include Nextel (I used them for work in '97-'98 at my old company), Verizon (both analog and digital), and now Voicestream. Nextel coverage back when I used them was pretty good, but given their pricing and feature set I'm not sure I'd use one as a private citizen rather than professionally. Our company's Claims department uses them heavily to keep all the adjusters in contact.
Verizon's coverage is outstanding in the Boston area - probably the best of any of the providers. Their price plans kind of blew, though. I like Voicestream's plans the best, and their coverage so far has been fine. I haven't been to Allston/Brighton with my phone to date (I only got the first one in April), but I have been across the river with it and had good signal. I originally had the Nokia 3390, but I've given it to my wife and now I'm using the Motorola T193. The one thing I like about GSM is the SIM cards - When I switched phones with her I just swapped my SIM card between phones.
Here in Boston, the Boston Globe did an excellent comparison recently of services and coverage. I wouldn't be surprised if the major papers in other cities did the same.
As for resources, the letstalk.com and howardchui.com sites mentioned elsewhere are good resources. Consumer Reports magazine has occasionally hit the topic as well. Another thing you can generally do in many states is pick up the phone you expect to sign up for and sign the contract - in MA and many others there's a right to return it for a couple of days if you find that it sucks.
As for me, I just switched to VoiceStream (soon to be T-Mobile) after about 5 years with Verizon, even though I'm a CDMA bigot. With a newborn, I decided my wife and I should both have cell phones, and I liked their family plan the best. I also have a couple of friends on the VoiceStream network, and calls to/from other VoiceStream customers are free on most of their plans. Coverage has so far been excellent in most places I've been with one exception - I was returning some unused shoes at the local Macy's for my wife and I couldn't get a signal at the counter. With that one exception, I've gotten very good coverage everywhere else, plus they cover the areas where we typically travel.
I always used to weasel a block of tickets to the Ingram party at the Museum of Science every year back when I ran a Mac network for a living. Now that was the place to hold a party! Free booze, free food, live music, and all sorts of nerd attractions since the exhibits were open.
I particularly remember the year that Casady & Greene (at least that's who I think released it) came out with a commercial version of the old Talking Moose, and had a fellow dressed up in a moose suit walking the floor of the show handing out demos.
At the party that night, the moose showed up in costume, and was out on the dance floor when he toppled over from heat exhaustion. What a sight...
It was kind of funny seeing a bunch of geeks carrying the moose off the floor.
When Chimera is ready for prime time, I'll probably switch. But for now, Mozilla gets to live on my Powerbook, but I use IE first (despite the occasional crashes and that damned rendering glitch that sometimes leaves the page blank until you do a "Cmd-A" and then click away). The biggest argument pro-Mozilla (for day-to-day use, besides the politics of it) is the pop-up stopping control, but there's a neat 3rd party pop-up killer now for IE that I use and happily paid the $10 for.
What NASA's been able to do over the last decade or so since starting up on this new philosophy is accomplish a whole lot of useful science on a significantly lower budget than they had in the cold war, race to the moon era. Unfortunately, in this era Big Science is just economically impractical.
Sure, they've had mission failures, but on average they've gotten a whole lot of stuff done at a relatively low cost. It's more a "faster, cheaper, more" that NASA does nowadays (with the exception of the still-running Shuttle and the ISS).
There was a thread about Geek Cookery on Ars recently, and out of it came the Ars Technica Cookbook of Bachelor Chow - it's a nifty PDF file with a lot of recipes and such in it. I figured it was germane to this discussion.
As for Good Eats - it's a regular on my Tivo at least once a week. In fact, between Good Eats, Iron Chef, A Cook's Tour, and Mario Eats Italy, I probably just ought to leave the darned thing on Food Network all the time!
A lot of Wintel boxes (especially laptops) only have a 4-pin variant of the Firewire port, that doesn't provide power to the bus. All Macs use the full 6-pin version that powers the bus and recharges the iPod directly.
So an adapter's needed for the Windows version else they may not be able to connect.
- iPod upgrades and price cuts. - iPod for Windows - Jaguar before Labor Day - All the new software tools - Wide-screen iMac! - Price cut on the old Superdrive iMac (though that's the original price pre-hike) - iSync - way cool -.Mac - nice new features
Bad:
- The new iMac is still PC100/800 MHz - No "upgrade edition" of Jaguar. A $49 or around that version of Jaguar that would only install over an existing MacOS X install would be good. I should get some bonus for being an early user. -.Mac pricing. There should be a scaled-back free edition, like the other services providers offer. I expounded on this in a comment on the initial.Mac thread earlier today. - No support for either USB 2.0 or Firewire 2 yet. Introducing the new iMac with that would have been nice.
Indifferent:
- The iPod accessory kits (pretty much all available in the 3rd party market already) - The pricing of the new iMac - The lack of changes to the other price points (I was expecting across-the-board iMac price cuts, but no biggie)
Were Apple smarter (they usually are, so someone here was tone-deaf on this issue), they'd have preserved a basic iTools account as a freebie and then turned.Mac into the premium alternative.
It would have made sense like this, for instance:
iTools (free): -mac.com e-mail address with 5mb storage (or no storage and free redirection to your real address) -iDisk space with 10-20mb storage -Bandwidth limitation on the iDisk webspace (they already do this)
.Mac ($100/year): -mac.com address with 25mb storage and user-configurable spam filtering. -Webmail access and IMAP access -100MB iDisk, with no bandwidth limitations (provided their AUP is met) -Streaming support -Usenet access through a web interface (they could always license DRN from Newsguy or something like that)
It's not that the $100/year is a lot of money (it's $8.33 per month), but not having a free entry-level version and forcing all the existing members onto the new plan with 2 months' notice is doing the Wrong Thing. A lot of Mac.com users are only using it in a minimal fashion - the ones who depend on the e-mail address may stay but a lot of them will be bitter about it. Apple does not need bitter users.
I have a Mac.com address now (I signed up at the beginning), and I really don't know yet if I'll keep it or not. I'll have to think real hard about it.
I have a 27" set that's fed by my Tivo, and it's a pretty good set, though older. What we're looking at here, though, is a relatively inexpensive product designed for the casual user. IIRC, MPEG-2 encoding is fairly computationally expensive, and would require more horses in their box. That will bring up the cost. Sure, MPEG-2 is better, but MPEG-1 should be Good Enough.
A basic NTSC signal is a big steaming pile of $#!+, but the nicer sets nowadays can play all sorts of neat tricks to make the picture look pretty. You also have the advantage in a digital cable/satellite setup of virtually no static loss or noise in the picture. A good analog system isn't too bad, but not as nice (OTOH, analog signals don't give you the encoding artifacts that sometimes show up in MPEG streams).
MPEG-2 over Firewire would be ideal, but I don't think it'll be cheap enough to be a "what the hell" buy like this one could be.
I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all), but I'm not nuts about using USB for yet another device. I've already got enough USB devices, and some play nicely with a hub and some don't. USB is almost the second coming of SCSI as far as voodoo goes.
Just as an example, on my TiBook 667 I have 2 USB ports. On them are:
Port 1 - a MacAlly external keyboard and MS optical Intellimouse. Port 2 - Belkin 7-port powered USB hub.
Then, attached to the hub I have a Palm USB adapter, one of those Griffin iKnobbie things (it's useless, but cool) a Microtech Smartmedia/CF reader, and a gamepad. But I also have several devices that'll ONLY work when either hooked up to the free port on the keyboard or directly attached to the PowerBook:
-DiskOnKey (128MB) -Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX -Olympus D-3000 digital camera -Compaq iPaq 3765
So not only are my USB ports pretty darned busy, but I have devices that'll only work in a particular order and/or port. OTOH my Firewire port has only two devices that I connect, and then only when needed: an external hard drive and a Canon DV camcorder. And I could always get a Firewire hub if I needed one.
In general, most people are using their Firewire ports less, and if/when El Gato attacks the PC market there's a decent (and growing) number of PC's with that port (or you can add one for about $30). For their application, I think Firewire would have been a better choice.
She has an old iMac running MacOS 9.1. It works, it's stable, and it's virus-free (she gloats about that to her Wintel friends all the time). She's a reasonably competent user and wonders why anyone ever uses Windows. She hates it.
And she is seriously considering a flat-panel iMac because she thinks they look cool and she likes OS X.
So she's got no interest at all in running Linux, but she's not a Windows drone by any means. And at least MacOS X is a Unix at heart. She won't be hanging around the CLI like I do, but she'll be a Unix user soon enough.
When we revamped our company's public site a couple of years ago, I gave the developers the following targets:
-Must look the same in all browsers -No Flash (they wanted to do a Flash intro, which I rejected in favor of an animated GIF) -No complicated HTML
So after a while, the ad agency that developed it gave us final code to load, and we checked it internally and put it on-line. I called my mom (the ultimate tester), and asked her to look at the site with her old version of Netscape on her iMac. She reported some major display glitches - so I confirmed it on my Mac later that day and we got in touch with the designers to holler about it.
They said "you didn't say you wanted it to work with Macs."
The (paraphrased) reply from our head of marketing: "We didn't say it shouldn't work with them - now fix it!"
It's not like the Hollywood studios "get it", either. The reason the DVD format is booming is because it actually delivers reasonably good value at a reasonable price. Most CD's do not. It's also a lot more trivial to rip tunes than it is to rip a movie - and as a playback device the computer today is well-suited to MP3 playback but today is only really a movie playback device for the truly hardcore geek.
Remember, in many cases the record companies _are_ the movie companies (Sony, AOLTW, etc.). It's not like they've seen the light or anything. These are the people who fund the MPAA (MPAA vs. 2600, anyone?). They just got lucky with DVD and hit a consumer sweet spot. For now.
The girl in Milwaukee vanished while out of the house. Sadly, that happens all the time. A story in the same vein was the Molly Bish story two years ago - a teenager was snatched right after being dropped off for her summer job as a lifeguard outside of Boston. it got big play in New England, nowhere near as much nationally.
The Smart story strikes a vein that makes it especially newsworthy. She was taken from her house in the middle of the night. To have someone stolen in your own home like that strikes a nerve in virtually everyone.
Whenever I hear a "vanished child" story, regardless of the details it bugs me. But my wife and I just had our first child a little while ago (ask gorbie, he's seen the pics). The Smart story is the kind of thing that creates a primal fear in every parent. The home is supposed to be the one place that's secure. When it's not, that, sadly, makes it more newsworthy. I don't relate to what happened to Alexis Patterson the way I relate to Elizabeth Smart. It's not because Alexis is black, or because she's from an inner city. It's because I have a home, and I have a child. And one of the biggest fears I can imagine is waking up in the middle of the night to find your child missing and a window open.
To get much scarier than that, you'd need to be living a Steven King novel.
I don't think he predicted this exact scheme, but he was spot-on about the general idea, I think.
Remember, IE wasn't the "standard" until one day we all woke up and Netscape's market share had vanished thanks to bundling. If MS makes every Windows client behave just a little bit differently from the norm and pushes it out there, one day we'll wake up and the entire Internet will be a MS-only world.
It's the same with hardware. When your software drives over 90% of the desktops in the world, if you build software that is symbiotic with validated "trusted" hardware the hardware vendors will design for it. Your typical motherboard vendor could care less if Linux runs or not - they want the portion of the market that runs Windows. They'll do what it takes to get that vaunted Windows seal on their box.
The headline was provocative, but...
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 2
The article itself was reasonable, fair, and pretty well-balanced. Reality is that Linux isn't a mainstream desktop platform right now - Windows is. Linux is improving and becoming viable as a desktop, and the article reflects that. It also pays more than lip service to Linux's strength in the server arena, and it talks about the Linux/open development model with only minimal oversimplification for the non-techie audience.
I really wouldn't call it FUD at all. The only thing that I see in the article that's even near being a goof is how GUI's for Linux are a recent development. They've been around for years, though only recent versions of KDE and GNOME have become good enough to keep users almost entirely from the CLI.
The reality is that Linux is a great server OS, a great desktop OS for the hardcore techie, a barely acceptable OS for the mainstream desktop, and a thoroughly mediocre OS for the average home user. It's improving constantly in all these areas, but Linux won't be replacing Windows in the mainstream market anytime soon, if ever. No matter how many of we/. regulars say so.
The 4-pin FireWire port is perfectly compatible with iPod (or any other FireWire/1394 device, for that matter) - it just lacks the power leads that the larger port provides. So your Gateway notebook can't charge the iPod, but will be otherwise fine. Some devices (but not iPod) might require that power come from the FireWire bus, in which case you'd probably need a repeater with A/C power in.
All Macs have the 6-pin port that provides bus power. Add-in PCI FireWire cards do, too.
Just as a side note - all the DV camcorders I've seen (including my Canon ZR40) use the 4-pin variant - it takes up less space.
There has to be a catch - every bit of news about the recording industry that has come out over the last several years has gone to prove that they just Don't Get It. And now they're doing someting that seems clueful?
I don't like it. The other shoe must be ready to drop and it'll be mind-bogglingly stupid of them - it has to be, or I just might have to start changing my mind about the labels and giving them my business again!
Seriously - if the major labels will release music in a high-quality digital format, sell it to me for a reasonable price, and then let me burn it to my heart's content, I will be more than willing to buy it. Most of the music I've grabbed off Gnutella is the occasional single of something that's catchy, but just not worth buying a whole album for, or stuff I have already on LP. If you charge me a reasonable price, I'm actually happy to pay for it instead. No problem.
Right now the ridiculous economic and distribution model the RIAA member companies rely on encourages piracy. Make it cheap and easy to buy music and do what you want with it, and most consumers will be honest. The only danger I see is that these companies fought unrestricted music so long and so hard that consumers have started to see P2P networks of music as a resonable response. It'll be interesting to see if folks change their habits.
One - get a bigger place! If you have a truly mammoth geek habit, you must be drowning in equipment.
Two (and a more practical one) - If you truly must have connectivity everywhere in the house, use 802.11b. But be very careful before putting a PC in the bathroom. If a PC must go in the bathroom full-time, consider getting one of those old i-Openers that are hacked into PC's. They show up on eBay all the time. It can be wall-mounted easily and takes up little space. However, this will almost certainly cause relationship issues. Avoid surfing in the can.
Three - Make sure she has a computer of her own. Keep it safe, secure, and reasonably well-equipped, then leave it alone. Let her do as she wishes with it.
Four - What do you really need to spend? High-speed is great and generally worthwhile, but you should be doing most of your home gear as cheaply as possible.
Five - Earn enough money to justify the inconvenience to her.
Now, for my $.02 - we have an old Victorian house that I wired up, and there are computers in a large portion of the house. I've been able to work with my wife on this because of a few ground rules we established:
First off, I'm expected to be responsible in my tech gear. I try not to buy too much stuff.
Secondly, I try to keep my buying to things that are relevant to my work skills. That way I can get some writeoffs for it.
Third, our house technology is kept mainly under wraps, except for her iMac in the bedroom. I keep all my servers and networking gear either in the cellar or in a spare bedroom I use as an ofice. She pretty much gets to do what she wants with the rest of the house.
We basically have an understanding - my tech skills pay the bills and allow her to stay home with our newborn. But I need to spend some money, time, and space on the tools that I use to maintain my skills. Fortunately, I enjoy it, so it's also fun for me.
In exchange, she gets the freedom to be a mom (which is the job she really wanted) and to handle the rest of the house as she sees fit. I get to veto projects if we can't afford them at that point in time - I keep better track of the finances than she does. But we do everything she wants at some point or another - I only manage the pace.
I can say one thing though - we have no PC in our bathroom. It might not be as easy for us to have this arrangement if we had a PC there.
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According to my e-mail inbox, I can get all the descramblers I want for any cable system for only $50, anyways!
And we all know that if an offer comes via e-mail, it must be legit...
I don't see this as likely, especially in Neff's timeframe. Here's why. The G4 processor doesn't have the legs that the P4 has right now, but Moto is known to be making at least 1.4 GHz parts right now.
Apple also has a policy of running duallys at the high end, and given XServe, we know they have a motherboard/chipset in-house that supports reasonably modern features like DDR and ATA-100. And unless all the rumor sites are wrong, there's a new PowerMac due no later than Seybold in about a month - possibly this month.
So I figure a high-end Mac with dual 1.4 GHz G4 processors, DDR PC2100 RAM, and ATA-100 support is in the cards shortly. That's going to be a reasonably competitive machine for a while, though not quite up to bleeding-edge Wintel specs. There's also likely a little bit more leg in the G4, at least enough to get up around 2 GHz.
Beyond that, Apple's got some options. They can go to quad processors pretty easily, or by next spring they have a good shot of being up on G5 processors, which are reputedly now in sampling. Should they be making the move to G5, that'll probably carry them another couple of years, so we're talking 2005 at the outside before they have to have the next stop in mind.
A lot can happen in that time. The likeliest thing is that they jump to a 64-bit contender that emerges by then - possibly AMD but who knows? Migrating to the IBM POWER processors would be another logical move because minimal work would be required and the additional volume would drive IBM's own costs down significantly. Remember, Apple sells more RISC systems in a year than Sun, SGI (though they don't control MIPS anymore), and IBM do combined - yet all those companies see it as worthwhile to continue investing in alternative architectures. If Apple decided to move their volume systems to a slightly scaled-down version of one of these workstation chips it would have a major impact on cost.
Or Motorola could get serious and start working hand-in-hand with IBM again - IBM's fab capabilities are way beyond Moto's, and IBM could probably build the same G4 as Moto at a higher clock rate with better yields. There is one key reason, though, why Apple doesn't have to worry too much about PowerPC dying - it's huge in the embedded marketplace. Versions of PowerPC are used in all sorts of devices, and I believe it's pretty popular in automotive and networking. That gets your volumes up, too.
I can't personally speak to Sprint, as I've never used them myself. Two of my employees who live in southern New Hampshire use Sprint and I believe they are satisfied - as do my parents (they live in CT). I know the Globe tests had Verizon coming in first, almost everyone else bunched up behind them, and Voicestream bringing up the rear by a little bit.
One worry with Sprint plans is their roaming costs - the roaming is outrageously expensive. My folks had Sprint show them how to turn off roaming entirely because they couldn't always tell when they were in a home area or not.
The services I've used over the last decade or so include Nextel (I used them for work in '97-'98 at my old company), Verizon (both analog and digital), and now Voicestream. Nextel coverage back when I used them was pretty good, but given their pricing and feature set I'm not sure I'd use one as a private citizen rather than professionally. Our company's Claims department uses them heavily to keep all the adjusters in contact.
Verizon's coverage is outstanding in the Boston area - probably the best of any of the providers. Their price plans kind of blew, though. I like Voicestream's plans the best, and their coverage so far has been fine. I haven't been to Allston/Brighton with my phone to date (I only got the first one in April), but I have been across the river with it and had good signal. I originally had the Nokia 3390, but I've given it to my wife and now I'm using the Motorola T193. The one thing I like about GSM is the SIM cards - When I switched phones with her I just swapped my SIM card between phones.
Here in Boston, the Boston Globe did an excellent comparison recently of services and coverage. I wouldn't be surprised if the major papers in other cities did the same.
As for resources, the letstalk.com and howardchui.com sites mentioned elsewhere are good resources. Consumer Reports magazine has occasionally hit the topic as well. Another thing you can generally do in many states is pick up the phone you expect to sign up for and sign the contract - in MA and many others there's a right to return it for a couple of days if you find that it sucks.
As for me, I just switched to VoiceStream (soon to be T-Mobile) after about 5 years with Verizon, even though I'm a CDMA bigot. With a newborn, I decided my wife and I should both have cell phones, and I liked their family plan the best. I also have a couple of friends on the VoiceStream network, and calls to/from other VoiceStream customers are free on most of their plans. Coverage has so far been excellent in most places I've been with one exception - I was returning some unused shoes at the local Macy's for my wife and I couldn't get a signal at the counter. With that one exception, I've gotten very good coverage everywhere else, plus they cover the areas where we typically travel.
I always used to weasel a block of tickets to the Ingram party at the Museum of Science every year back when I ran a Mac network for a living. Now that was the place to hold a party! Free booze, free food, live music, and all sorts of nerd attractions since the exhibits were open.
I particularly remember the year that Casady & Greene (at least that's who I think released it) came out with a commercial version of the old Talking Moose, and had a fellow dressed up in a moose suit walking the floor of the show handing out demos.
At the party that night, the moose showed up in costume, and was out on the dance floor when he toppled over from heat exhaustion. What a sight...
It was kind of funny seeing a bunch of geeks carrying the moose off the floor.
When Chimera is ready for prime time, I'll probably switch. But for now, Mozilla gets to live on my Powerbook, but I use IE first (despite the occasional crashes and that damned rendering glitch that sometimes leaves the page blank until you do a "Cmd-A" and then click away). The biggest argument pro-Mozilla (for day-to-day use, besides the politics of it) is the pop-up stopping control, but there's a neat 3rd party pop-up killer now for IE that I use and happily paid the $10 for.
What NASA's been able to do over the last decade or so since starting up on this new philosophy is accomplish a whole lot of useful science on a significantly lower budget than they had in the cold war, race to the moon era. Unfortunately, in this era Big Science is just economically impractical.
Sure, they've had mission failures, but on average they've gotten a whole lot of stuff done at a relatively low cost. It's more a "faster, cheaper, more" that NASA does nowadays (with the exception of the still-running Shuttle and the ISS).
There was a thread about Geek Cookery on Ars recently, and out of it came the Ars Technica Cookbook of Bachelor Chow - it's a nifty PDF file with a lot of recipes and such in it. I figured it was germane to this discussion.
As for Good Eats - it's a regular on my Tivo at least once a week. In fact, between Good Eats, Iron Chef, A Cook's Tour, and Mario Eats Italy, I probably just ought to leave the darned thing on Food Network all the time!
All 6-pin ports are powered, so you won't need the adapter except on the road.
A lot of Wintel boxes (especially laptops) only have a 4-pin variant of the Firewire port, that doesn't provide power to the bus. All Macs use the full 6-pin version that powers the bus and recharges the iPod directly.
So an adapter's needed for the Windows version else they may not be able to connect.
Good:
.Mac - nice new features
.Mac pricing. There should be a scaled-back free edition, like the other services providers offer. I expounded on this in a comment on the initial .Mac thread earlier today.
- iPod upgrades and price cuts.
- iPod for Windows
- Jaguar before Labor Day
- All the new software tools
- Wide-screen iMac!
- Price cut on the old Superdrive iMac (though that's the original price pre-hike)
- iSync - way cool
-
Bad:
- The new iMac is still PC100/800 MHz
- No "upgrade edition" of Jaguar. A $49 or around that version of Jaguar that would only install over an existing MacOS X install would be good. I should get some bonus for being an early user.
-
- No support for either USB 2.0 or Firewire 2 yet. Introducing the new iMac with that would have been nice.
Indifferent:
- The iPod accessory kits (pretty much all available in the 3rd party market already)
- The pricing of the new iMac
- The lack of changes to the other price points (I was expecting across-the-board iMac price cuts, but no biggie)
It would have made sense like this, for instance:
iTools (free):
-mac.com e-mail address with 5mb storage (or no storage and free redirection to your real address)
-iDisk space with 10-20mb storage
-Bandwidth limitation on the iDisk webspace (they already do this)
-mac.com address with 25mb storage and user-configurable spam filtering.
-Webmail access and IMAP access
-100MB iDisk, with no bandwidth limitations (provided their AUP is met)
-Streaming support
-Usenet access through a web interface (they could always license DRN from Newsguy or something like that)
It's not that the $100/year is a lot of money (it's $8.33 per month), but not having a free entry-level version and forcing all the existing members onto the new plan with 2 months' notice is doing the Wrong Thing. A lot of Mac.com users are only using it in a minimal fashion - the ones who depend on the e-mail address may stay but a lot of them will be bitter about it. Apple does not need bitter users.
I have a Mac.com address now (I signed up at the beginning), and I really don't know yet if I'll keep it or not. I'll have to think real hard about it.
I have a 27" set that's fed by my Tivo, and it's a pretty good set, though older. What we're looking at here, though, is a relatively inexpensive product designed for the casual user. IIRC, MPEG-2 encoding is fairly computationally expensive, and would require more horses in their box. That will bring up the cost. Sure, MPEG-2 is better, but MPEG-1 should be Good Enough.
A basic NTSC signal is a big steaming pile of $#!+, but the nicer sets nowadays can play all sorts of neat tricks to make the picture look pretty. You also have the advantage in a digital cable/satellite setup of virtually no static loss or noise in the picture. A good analog system isn't too bad, but not as nice (OTOH, analog signals don't give you the encoding artifacts that sometimes show up in MPEG streams).
MPEG-2 over Firewire would be ideal, but I don't think it'll be cheap enough to be a "what the hell" buy like this one could be.
It's the Griffin PowerMate, but at the time I couldn't remember the name of it (and I'm at work, so it isn't in front of me).
I thought iKnobbiething was a good stand-in under the circumstances... In fact, maybe there's a market for a device with that kind of name!
I think for the design goal, MPEG-1 should be fine (it's just a cruddy NTSC signal, after all), but I'm not nuts about using USB for yet another device. I've already got enough USB devices, and some play nicely with a hub and some don't. USB is almost the second coming of SCSI as far as voodoo goes.
Just as an example, on my TiBook 667 I have 2 USB ports. On them are:
Port 1 - a MacAlly external keyboard and MS optical Intellimouse.
Port 2 - Belkin 7-port powered USB hub.
Then, attached to the hub I have a Palm USB adapter, one of those Griffin iKnobbie things (it's useless, but cool) a Microtech Smartmedia/CF reader, and a gamepad. But I also have several devices that'll ONLY work when either hooked up to the free port on the keyboard or directly attached to the PowerBook:
-DiskOnKey (128MB)
-Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX
-Olympus D-3000 digital camera
-Compaq iPaq 3765
So not only are my USB ports pretty darned busy, but I have devices that'll only work in a particular order and/or port. OTOH my Firewire port has only two devices that I connect, and then only when needed: an external hard drive and a Canon DV camcorder. And I could always get a Firewire hub if I needed one.
In general, most people are using their Firewire ports less, and if/when El Gato attacks the PC market there's a decent (and growing) number of PC's with that port (or you can add one for about $30). For their application, I think Firewire would have been a better choice.
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She has an old iMac running MacOS 9.1. It works, it's stable, and it's virus-free (she gloats about that to her Wintel friends all the time). She's a reasonably competent user and wonders why anyone ever uses Windows. She hates it.
And she is seriously considering a flat-panel iMac because she thinks they look cool and she likes OS X.
So she's got no interest at all in running Linux, but she's not a Windows drone by any means. And at least MacOS X is a Unix at heart. She won't be hanging around the CLI like I do, but she'll be a Unix user soon enough.
When we revamped our company's public site a couple of years ago, I gave the developers the following targets:
-Must look the same in all browsers
-No Flash (they wanted to do a Flash intro, which I rejected in favor of an animated GIF)
-No complicated HTML
So after a while, the ad agency that developed it gave us final code to load, and we checked it internally and put it on-line. I called my mom (the ultimate tester), and asked her to look at the site with her old version of Netscape on her iMac. She reported some major display glitches - so I confirmed it on my Mac later that day and we got in touch with the designers to holler about it.
They said "you didn't say you wanted it to work with Macs."
The (paraphrased) reply from our head of marketing: "We didn't say it shouldn't work with them - now fix it!"
They did. Quickly.
It's not like the Hollywood studios "get it", either. The reason the DVD format is booming is because it actually delivers reasonably good value at a reasonable price. Most CD's do not. It's also a lot more trivial to rip tunes than it is to rip a movie - and as a playback device the computer today is well-suited to MP3 playback but today is only really a movie playback device for the truly hardcore geek.
Remember, in many cases the record companies _are_ the movie companies (Sony, AOLTW, etc.). It's not like they've seen the light or anything. These are the people who fund the MPAA (MPAA vs. 2600, anyone?). They just got lucky with DVD and hit a consumer sweet spot. For now.
The girl in Milwaukee vanished while out of the house. Sadly, that happens all the time. A story in the same vein was the Molly Bish story two years ago - a teenager was snatched right after being dropped off for her summer job as a lifeguard outside of Boston. it got big play in New England, nowhere near as much nationally.
The Smart story strikes a vein that makes it especially newsworthy. She was taken from her house in the middle of the night. To have someone stolen in your own home like that strikes a nerve in virtually everyone.
Whenever I hear a "vanished child" story, regardless of the details it bugs me. But my wife and I just had our first child a little while ago (ask gorbie, he's seen the pics). The Smart story is the kind of thing that creates a primal fear in every parent. The home is supposed to be the one place that's secure. When it's not, that, sadly, makes it more newsworthy. I don't relate to what happened to Alexis Patterson the way I relate to Elizabeth Smart. It's not because Alexis is black, or because she's from an inner city. It's because I have a home, and I have a child. And one of the biggest fears I can imagine is waking up in the middle of the night to find your child missing and a window open.
To get much scarier than that, you'd need to be living a Steven King novel.
I don't think he predicted this exact scheme, but he was spot-on about the general idea, I think.
Remember, IE wasn't the "standard" until one day we all woke up and Netscape's market share had vanished thanks to bundling. If MS makes every Windows client behave just a little bit differently from the norm and pushes it out there, one day we'll wake up and the entire Internet will be a MS-only world.
It's the same with hardware. When your software drives over 90% of the desktops in the world, if you build software that is symbiotic with validated "trusted" hardware the hardware vendors will design for it. Your typical motherboard vendor could care less if Linux runs or not - they want the portion of the market that runs Windows. They'll do what it takes to get that vaunted Windows seal on their box.
The article itself was reasonable, fair, and pretty well-balanced. Reality is that Linux isn't a mainstream desktop platform right now - Windows is. Linux is improving and becoming viable as a desktop, and the article reflects that. It also pays more than lip service to Linux's strength in the server arena, and it talks about the Linux/open development model with only minimal oversimplification for the non-techie audience.
/. regulars say so.
I really wouldn't call it FUD at all. The only thing that I see in the article that's even near being a goof is how GUI's for Linux are a recent development. They've been around for years, though only recent versions of KDE and GNOME have become good enough to keep users almost entirely from the CLI.
The reality is that Linux is a great server OS, a great desktop OS for the hardcore techie, a barely acceptable OS for the mainstream desktop, and a thoroughly mediocre OS for the average home user. It's improving constantly in all these areas, but Linux won't be replacing Windows in the mainstream market anytime soon, if ever. No matter how many of we
The 4-pin FireWire port is perfectly compatible with iPod (or any other FireWire/1394 device, for that matter) - it just lacks the power leads that the larger port provides. So your Gateway notebook can't charge the iPod, but will be otherwise fine. Some devices (but not iPod) might require that power come from the FireWire bus, in which case you'd probably need a repeater with A/C power in.
All Macs have the 6-pin port that provides bus power. Add-in PCI FireWire cards do, too.
Just as a side note - all the DV camcorders I've seen (including my Canon ZR40) use the 4-pin variant - it takes up less space.
A grandson, just three weeks ago. He doesn't want anything else.
(However, I did make a nice print of him holding the baby and put it in a frame for him)
There has to be a catch - every bit of news about the recording industry that has come out over the last several years has gone to prove that they just Don't Get It. And now they're doing someting that seems clueful?
I don't like it. The other shoe must be ready to drop and it'll be mind-bogglingly stupid of them - it has to be, or I just might have to start changing my mind about the labels and giving them my business again!
Seriously - if the major labels will release music in a high-quality digital format, sell it to me for a reasonable price, and then let me burn it to my heart's content, I will be more than willing to buy it. Most of the music I've grabbed off Gnutella is the occasional single of something that's catchy, but just not worth buying a whole album for, or stuff I have already on LP. If you charge me a reasonable price, I'm actually happy to pay for it instead. No problem.
Right now the ridiculous economic and distribution model the RIAA member companies rely on encourages piracy. Make it cheap and easy to buy music and do what you want with it, and most consumers will be honest. The only danger I see is that these companies fought unrestricted music so long and so hard that consumers have started to see P2P networks of music as a resonable response. It'll be interesting to see if folks change their habits.
One - get a bigger place! If you have a truly mammoth geek habit, you must be drowning in equipment.
Two (and a more practical one) - If you truly must have connectivity everywhere in the house, use 802.11b. But be very careful before putting a PC in the bathroom. If a PC must go in the bathroom full-time, consider getting one of those old i-Openers that are hacked into PC's. They show up on eBay all the time. It can be wall-mounted easily and takes up little space. However, this will almost certainly cause relationship issues. Avoid surfing in the can.
Three - Make sure she has a computer of her own. Keep it safe, secure, and reasonably well-equipped, then leave it alone. Let her do as she wishes with it.
Four - What do you really need to spend? High-speed is great and generally worthwhile, but you should be doing most of your home gear as cheaply as possible.
Five - Earn enough money to justify the inconvenience to her.
Now, for my $.02 - we have an old Victorian house that I wired up, and there are computers in a large portion of the house. I've been able to work with my wife on this because of a few ground rules we established:
First off, I'm expected to be responsible in my tech gear. I try not to buy too much stuff.
Secondly, I try to keep my buying to things that are relevant to my work skills. That way I can get some writeoffs for it.
Third, our house technology is kept mainly under wraps, except for her iMac in the bedroom. I keep all my servers and networking gear either in the cellar or in a spare bedroom I use as an ofice. She pretty much gets to do what she wants with the rest of the house.
We basically have an understanding - my tech skills pay the bills and allow her to stay home with our newborn. But I need to spend some money, time, and space on the tools that I use to maintain my skills. Fortunately, I enjoy it, so it's also fun for me.
In exchange, she gets the freedom to be a mom (which is the job she really wanted) and to handle the rest of the house as she sees fit. I get to veto projects if we can't afford them at that point in time - I keep better track of the finances than she does. But we do everything she wants at some point or another - I only manage the pace.
I can say one thing though - we have no PC in our bathroom. It might not be as easy for us to have this arrangement if we had a PC there.