I'm sure that an exception could be made for computers used for entertainment purposes only, if the DoD supplies anything like that. Or soldiers/units could pick up some non-DoD computers in Iraq just for that purpose.
I think downloads will win if network infrastructure can support it. Why buy movies you'll only watch 1-5 times in your life when you can just let Netflix store it for you? You'll never have to worry about the kids ruining or just plain losing the disc, and you'll never have to deal with being the only person in the house that is willing to put the discs back in the case and then back on the shelf. Think about how much neater your family room will look without shelves full of DVDs you no longer watch.
And downloads are (more or less) obsolescence proof. If 1080p MPEG4 is no longer good enough in 10 years you can just upgrade your player hardware and wait for Netflix/Apple/whomever to upgrade the content library.
The possible downside are the obscure titles, but if the players can be standardized so that streaming content can be sourced from multiple providers there will be some that specialize in the deeply obscure back catalog stuff.
Another thing that hurts Usenet is that News Client and NNTP access are pretty easy to cut off in the workplace, while many folks can and do spend all day websurfing on forum sites. So a lot of productive people don't use Usenet for their social networking
I think it's more likely that a marketing executive quietly explained the situation to Bill offline. I see the conversation going something like this: "Bill, what are you smoking? We don't give a crap about the end-user. Our customer is the CIO and we keep him well greased. The CIO doesn't want technical support to be easy. Far from it, he wants it obfuscated and frustrating to maintain job security. You taught us this yourself."
A large part of this is really just the TSA doing what the airlines want to support their business practices. They like to sell nonrefundable tickets at low prices, betting on a percentage of those passengers having to change their flight arrangements and then paying more or simply not flying, allowing the airline to sell the same seat twice. If people sell those plane tickets on Ebay or Craigslist instead the airlines lose money. So the TSA rules require that your ID matches the name on the ticket, not just that your ID matches your face.
Sumantec Endpoint Protection also threw up the red flag on two items that the page downloaded. It then deleted them both after a bit of analysis. Serves me right for reading it with IE 7.
CMYK isn't that big a deal. Only folks that publish magazines really need to worry much about CMYK. But 16 bit depth support and better color management are serious shortfalls in GIMP. The latest GIMP I tried (2.4 release candidate) used sRGB as a default color space and that's ridiculous. sRGB is the least common denominator of color spaces. The recommended approach for color management is to work in a very wide-gamut color space (eg. ProPhoto RGB) while editing an image then export to a target color space as a final step before printing/uploading/delivering the image. Using sRGB internally makes GIMP only suitable for web graphics. Any other application will benefit from a wider gamut and better targeted color space.
Lets wait and see. There is always the jailbreak route to get stuff loaded. Maybe it'll be nothing more than a one time $20 charge for all the applications you can fit, or a $10 yearly subscription, or something.
I'd love to see a 41 series reissue. That was my college calculator. Of course it'd have to have a new battery module. I haven't seen N type batteries since that calculator went bye-bye. These days you'd use a cell phone battery that'd last a month on one charge.
I think the lack of ATSC tuners is because most of the market segment that has gone to HDTV is already using cable or satellite service and doesn't need an OTA tuner. Maybe in the next few years that'll change as HDTV or Digital TV in general goes down market but I'm not sure if it'll result in a decent market for ATSC tuners. It might result in a market for cheap ATSC tuners with only a standard definition output.
And bad design means being locked out of making the right choices. On my Windows XP machine at work Windows Media Player will automatically play.WMV or.MPG files in full screen mode on my 2nd monitor. Or it did until it broke. Now it tries to switch the 2nd monitor to a resolution that the monitor doesn't support, and proceeds to play them there. It also plays them at 100% zoom on my primary display, except that it decided that the pixels aren't square on my primary so the video is compressed horizontally at about a 2:1 ratio.
Now, this would be OK if I could dive down into the Tools->Options settings panel and configure everything right. But there just isn't anything there that controls these display options. There is something that seems to acknowledge the pixel aspect ratio problem but it dowsn't have any effect on the problem. The 2nd monitor trick is completely unconfigurable.
If the police can get probable cause for a search on the basis of one incoming e-mail containing kiddie porn then our right to privacy is gone. The police/political dirty tricks team/your angry co-workers will send you kiddie porn through an anonymizer and trigger an investigation. The police will find that one Tracy Lords mpeg in your stash and you're busted, or just make it embarrassingly public that you keep "megabytes" of porn on your computer and return it to you 3 years and $30000 in legal fees later with the disk wiped clean.
I think you have to turn the question around and ask yourself: What can Apple meet the demand for now? This makes the product rollout a little more sensible. Apple probably couldn't sell an Intel iBook laptop for $1299 right from the start and meet the demand. They definitely couldn't do that with a $499 Mac mini. But the pro laptop will sell to anyone that has a PowerMac G5 for their heavy CPU work on legacy apps that aren't yet in a Universal binary. And a consumer desktop will sell because most consumer desktop users don't install much more than the already bundled iLife and maybe Office and some games.
But they aren't new Powerbooks, they're MacBook Pros (or something like that). The Power- prefix has been expunged. Intel duo core laptops are coming in february. Intel iMacs are available "now". No iBook or Mac mini announcments at all, and this is what the rumors sites had predicted as the first Mactel products. Looks like Apple has plugged its leaks, or is leaking false info to flood the rumor channels.
It seems to me that a lot of people who own cell phones talk on them just to be seen talking on them. "Hey everybody, look at me! I have a cell phone. I'm important! The person on the phone is more important to talk to than the other people I'm with!" Obviously, it's not the case with everybody. My wife has a cell phone (I do not), and we typically only use it for minor emergencies. Has this been others' experience?
It's the convenience of using a cell phone that makes me use it more than the land line. There are several ways it's more convenient:
It's always right there.
It stores phone numbers in a semi-convenient menu system. It can speed dial many of them.
It remembers my recent calls for an easy redial.
Now, if only it would let me play video games and talk to my wife at the same time.
I think this was one of his best points too. But local papers shouldn't do this like my local TV news does it, which is to take the hot national news event of the day and find some hopelessly lame local angle to the story. The local news should be the local news. And the local news should let me drill down through several layers of increasingly localized events until I find out what my local planning board is doing.
It's probably hopeless unless it's a little machine from Gaggia or Rancilio. If it's a steam-driven machine it's definitely hopeless. If it's a cheap pump driven machine like a Krups then you might have some luck with a fresh can of pre-ground Illy coffee. The first step to good espresso is a first rate grinder, like a Rancilio Rocky ($300 or so). Then you'll want a good espresso machine like a Rancilio Silvia or Gaggia Classic (I have a Gaggia, but the Rancilio might be a bit better). Then you'll want a coffee roaster or a source for really fresh roasted coffee. I have an i-Roast coffee roaster. You're looking at an investment of close to $1000 US. At the end you may find you really prefer press pot coffee most of the time like I do.:-)
Starbucks really is trying to improve their coffee. They're putting out a lot more single country of origin and even plantation specific coffee offerings in their retail stores. Now if they'd just learn to roast a little lighter, especially on the origins that tend to work better than way (East Africa, Central America).
Re:Starbucks is good coffee
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think you're missing something here. If you pull a long shot of espresso to make an Americano you're doing it wrong and you'll get dishwater since you're overextracting the coffee in your group head. To get a good Americano you pull a normal espresso, then pour it into a larger cup and add hot water. This gives you something with some of the flavor of a good espresso, diluted for someone who likes big gulps.
Re:Robust == Robust flavor? This is incorrect
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever seen coffee beans being roasted, or roasted your own? Coffee beans are decaffeinated while they are green, and they turn a shade of brown in the process. When you roast them they get darker still, darker than normal beans for the same final roasting temperature (as measured by a thermal probe in the roaster). So you could say that a dark looking decaf bean was roasted the same amount as your normal bean, it just looks different.
Another thing about decafs is that they have a lower shelf life than normal beans. But what is this about only getting it preground? All of my local supermarkets have bean dispensers with a few whole bean decafs in stock. They're stale of course, as are all of the beans at the supermarket, but they're decaf.
To me, this is a ripoff. Particularly for shows like Lost and Housewives, where the stories are serial and build on previous episodes.
Shows like Lost and Housewives are great for iTunes specifically because they are serial and build on previous episodes. Folks miss first run broadcasts of shows all the time. Even folks with PVRs miss shows when the disk fills up, power goes out or they just forget to set up a recording. Until now you had to wait at least half a year for a DVD or a re-run, or hunt down a torrent. Now you can legally buy just that episode you missed where the crazy French lady kidnapped the Iraqi guy.
I think the hardware competition is mostly irrelevent. The real competition that I think Apple is prepping for is Mac OS X vs. MS Longhorn. And I think Apple could really win this one, unless I'm just snowed by the/. perspective on Longhorn.
There is also a time sensitivity issue that makes a difference. You can get a BitTorrent of the latest episode of your favorite show within hours after it airs, while you'll have to wait until next season for this year's season DVD set to be published. Having the torrent out so much faster than the publisher can put out the DVD set will kill some potential sales.
But on the other hand, by the time the DVD set is out torrent seeds of episode rips off the air will have become scarce so there will still be a market at the time the DVD ships for an easy way to get the episodes, plus all the DVD extras.
Apple knows very well how to design a case for memory upgrades. They must've made it so hard to open by design, and not just to soak folks on that memory upgrade. My guess is that Robert Cringely has the future plan for the mini nailed. It's the iPod for your HDTV and part of an iTunes Music Store for movies and television. The unserviceable case is part of the data rights management security package.
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I'm sure that an exception could be made for computers used for entertainment purposes only, if the DoD supplies anything like that. Or soldiers/units could pick up some non-DoD computers in Iraq just for that purpose.
I think downloads will win if network infrastructure can support it. Why buy movies you'll only watch 1-5 times in your life when you can just let Netflix store it for you? You'll never have to worry about the kids ruining or just plain losing the disc, and you'll never have to deal with being the only person in the house that is willing to put the discs back in the case and then back on the shelf. Think about how much neater your family room will look without shelves full of DVDs you no longer watch.
And downloads are (more or less) obsolescence proof. If 1080p MPEG4 is no longer good enough in 10 years you can just upgrade your player hardware and wait for Netflix/Apple/whomever to upgrade the content library.
The possible downside are the obscure titles, but if the players can be standardized so that streaming content can be sourced from multiple providers there will be some that specialize in the deeply obscure back catalog stuff.
Another thing that hurts Usenet is that News Client and NNTP access are pretty easy to cut off in the workplace, while many folks can and do spend all day websurfing on forum sites. So a lot of productive people don't use Usenet for their social networking
I think it's more likely that a marketing executive quietly explained the situation to Bill offline. I see the conversation going something like this: "Bill, what are you smoking? We don't give a crap about the end-user. Our customer is the CIO and we keep him well greased. The CIO doesn't want technical support to be easy. Far from it, he wants it obfuscated and frustrating to maintain job security. You taught us this yourself."
A large part of this is really just the TSA doing what the airlines want to support their business practices. They like to sell nonrefundable tickets at low prices, betting on a percentage of those passengers having to change their flight arrangements and then paying more or simply not flying, allowing the airline to sell the same seat twice. If people sell those plane tickets on Ebay or Craigslist instead the airlines lose money. So the TSA rules require that your ID matches the name on the ticket, not just that your ID matches your face.
Sumantec Endpoint Protection also threw up the red flag on two items that the page downloaded. It then deleted them both after a bit of analysis. Serves me right for reading it with IE 7.
CMYK isn't that big a deal. Only folks that publish magazines really need to worry much about CMYK. But 16 bit depth support and better color management are serious shortfalls in GIMP. The latest GIMP I tried (2.4 release candidate) used sRGB as a default color space and that's ridiculous. sRGB is the least common denominator of color spaces. The recommended approach for color management is to work in a very wide-gamut color space (eg. ProPhoto RGB) while editing an image then export to a target color space as a final step before printing/uploading/delivering the image. Using sRGB internally makes GIMP only suitable for web graphics. Any other application will benefit from a wider gamut and better targeted color space.
Lets wait and see. There is always the jailbreak route to get stuff loaded. Maybe it'll be nothing more than a one time $20 charge for all the applications you can fit, or a $10 yearly subscription, or something.
I'd love to see a 41 series reissue. That was my college calculator. Of course it'd have to have a new battery module. I haven't seen N type batteries since that calculator went bye-bye. These days you'd use a cell phone battery that'd last a month on one charge.
I think the lack of ATSC tuners is because most of the market segment that has gone to HDTV is already using cable or satellite service and doesn't need an OTA tuner. Maybe in the next few years that'll change as HDTV or Digital TV in general goes down market but I'm not sure if it'll result in a decent market for ATSC tuners. It might result in a market for cheap ATSC tuners with only a standard definition output.
And bad design means being locked out of making the right choices. On my Windows XP machine at work Windows Media Player will automatically play .WMV or .MPG files in full screen mode on my 2nd monitor. Or it did until it broke. Now it tries to switch the 2nd monitor to a resolution that the monitor doesn't support, and proceeds to play them there. It also plays them at 100% zoom on my primary display, except that it decided that the pixels aren't square on my primary so the video is compressed horizontally at about a 2:1 ratio.
Now, this would be OK if I could dive down into the Tools->Options settings panel and configure everything right. But there just isn't anything there that controls these display options. There is something that seems to acknowledge the pixel aspect ratio problem but it dowsn't have any effect on the problem. The 2nd monitor trick is completely unconfigurable.
If the police can get probable cause for a search on the basis of one incoming e-mail containing kiddie porn then our right to privacy is gone. The police/political dirty tricks team/your angry co-workers will send you kiddie porn through an anonymizer and trigger an investigation. The police will find that one Tracy Lords mpeg in your stash and you're busted, or just make it embarrassingly public that you keep "megabytes" of porn on your computer and return it to you 3 years and $30000 in legal fees later with the disk wiped clean.
I think you have to turn the question around and ask yourself: What can Apple meet the demand for now? This makes the product rollout a little more sensible. Apple probably couldn't sell an Intel iBook laptop for $1299 right from the start and meet the demand. They definitely couldn't do that with a $499 Mac mini. But the pro laptop will sell to anyone that has a PowerMac G5 for their heavy CPU work on legacy apps that aren't yet in a Universal binary. And a consumer desktop will sell because most consumer desktop users don't install much more than the already bundled iLife and maybe Office and some games.
But they aren't new Powerbooks, they're MacBook Pros (or something like that). The Power- prefix has been expunged. Intel duo core laptops are coming in february. Intel iMacs are available "now". No iBook or Mac mini announcments at all, and this is what the rumors sites had predicted as the first Mactel products. Looks like Apple has plugged its leaks, or is leaking false info to flood the rumor channels.
- It's always right there.
- It stores phone numbers in a semi-convenient menu system. It can speed dial many of them.
- It remembers my recent calls for an easy redial.
Now, if only it would let me play video games and talk to my wife at the same time.I think this was one of his best points too. But local papers shouldn't do this like my local TV news does it, which is to take the hot national news event of the day and find some hopelessly lame local angle to the story. The local news should be the local news. And the local news should let me drill down through several layers of increasingly localized events until I find out what my local planning board is doing.
It's probably hopeless unless it's a little machine from Gaggia or Rancilio. If it's a steam-driven machine it's definitely hopeless. If it's a cheap pump driven machine like a Krups then you might have some luck with a fresh can of pre-ground Illy coffee. The first step to good espresso is a first rate grinder, like a Rancilio Rocky ($300 or so). Then you'll want a good espresso machine like a Rancilio Silvia or Gaggia Classic (I have a Gaggia, but the Rancilio might be a bit better). Then you'll want a coffee roaster or a source for really fresh roasted coffee. I have an i-Roast coffee roaster. You're looking at an investment of close to $1000 US. At the end you may find you really prefer press pot coffee most of the time like I do. :-)
Starbucks really is trying to improve their coffee. They're putting out a lot more single country of origin and even plantation specific coffee offerings in their retail stores. Now if they'd just learn to roast a little lighter, especially on the origins that tend to work better than way (East Africa, Central America).
I think you're missing something here. If you pull a long shot of espresso to make an Americano you're doing it wrong and you'll get dishwater since you're overextracting the coffee in your group head. To get a good Americano you pull a normal espresso, then pour it into a larger cup and add hot water. This gives you something with some of the flavor of a good espresso, diluted for someone who likes big gulps.
Have you ever seen coffee beans being roasted, or roasted your own? Coffee beans are decaffeinated while they are green, and they turn a shade of brown in the process. When you roast them they get darker still, darker than normal beans for the same final roasting temperature (as measured by a thermal probe in the roaster). So you could say that a dark looking decaf bean was roasted the same amount as your normal bean, it just looks different.
Another thing about decafs is that they have a lower shelf life than normal beans. But what is this about only getting it preground? All of my local supermarkets have bean dispensers with a few whole bean decafs in stock. They're stale of course, as are all of the beans at the supermarket, but they're decaf.
I think the hardware competition is mostly irrelevent. The real competition that I think Apple is prepping for is Mac OS X vs. MS Longhorn. And I think Apple could really win this one, unless I'm just snowed by the /. perspective on Longhorn.
There is also a time sensitivity issue that makes a difference. You can get a BitTorrent of the latest episode of your favorite show within hours after it airs, while you'll have to wait until next season for this year's season DVD set to be published. Having the torrent out so much faster than the publisher can put out the DVD set will kill some potential sales.
But on the other hand, by the time the DVD set is out torrent seeds of episode rips off the air will have become scarce so there will still be a market at the time the DVD ships for an easy way to get the episodes, plus all the DVD extras.
Apple knows very well how to design a case for memory upgrades. They must've made it so hard to open by design, and not just to soak folks on that memory upgrade. My guess is that Robert Cringely has the future plan for the mini nailed. It's the iPod for your HDTV and part of an iTunes Music Store for movies and television. The unserviceable case is part of the data rights management security package.