MPEG-4, like the Quicktime format it is based on, is simply a container. You can use just about any type of encoding within that container. You can read a detailed analysis of MPEG-4 here, but take a look at this relevant quote from that page:
The MPEG-4 systems layer allows codecs according to existing (MPEG) standards, e.g. MPEG-2 AAC, to be used.
This essentially means that MPEG-4 will be at least as good as MPEG-2, and could be much better as better codecs are made.
With MPEG-4 you have the new format which can "replace DVD", because MPEG-4 can do all of the things needed on a DVD and more. You can interact with the stream, layer elements on the stream, do transformations on the stream, etc. It is a very robust format and should prove to have a long life, given its extensibility.
In short, there is no need for WMF. Microsoft has just introduced this format for the sole purpose of trying to muddy the waters and gain control of yet another segment of the consumer electronic world. They will continue to depreciate other technologies while attempting to push their alternatives wherever possible. I'm sure that the inclusion of WMF in the DVD player chipsets is part of some deal Microsoft has made with the chip manufacturers. This is one definite case where it would be better for all if the formats converged on a standard such as MPEG-4, rather than catering to a proprietary format such as WMF.
iCab is pretty cool. It has the most features of any browser I've ever used. The only problem is that I can't use it after using OmniWeb, the way it displays the fonts look so much worse than OmniWeb. I hope iCab improves, it was my only true browser before I went over to MacOS X and found OmniWeb.
It's called pirating because that's what the original people who started it called themselves - software pirates. This is unlike the word hacker, which has been twisted and distorted by the media to include crackers - criminals who break into other people's systems.
Pirating is not a good thing. Take a look at music. If you pirate your favorite artist then that's one less sale for the artist. If enough people do this, then the artist's sales drop so low the label drops them. Since they can no longer clothe and feed themselves making music, they stop and go on to other careers. Before you know it all that's left is crappy elevator music that only fu-fu rich people buy.
I agree that some pieces of software are priced way too high, but the answer is not to pirate them. Instead find a similar product and buy that. Then the high-priced product will lose sales and the reasonable one will gain sales. Even better, start up your own open-source version of the program and let everyone use it for free!
There is also OmniWeb, if you are using MacOS X. OmniWeb is by far the most beautiful web browser I have ever seen. It uses MacOS X's Quartz Engine to produce very clear anti-aliased text and crisp graphics. It's lacking very little, needs a bit more work on CSS and InScript/JavaScript but it's very usable for 99% of the web sites out there.
I would say that if you use MacOS X then you should be using OmniWeb. OmniWeb can masquerade as Internet Exploiter to fool sites which "require" you to be using IE so you will only need IE for the few sites which are broken for any browser except IE.
Lol, I think my favorite line from that whole this is this:
It utilizes a two-pass bit-sieve to first remove all unimportant data from the data set. Lzip implements this quiet effectively by eliminating all of the 0's.
Oh, I think that there are a bunch of better offerings than Windows. Take MacOS X, BeOS, AmigaOS, the various Linux/Unix windowing environments. All of these have much to offer and are viable alternatives. In a truly free market at least 2 or 3 of these would have significant market share, especially if they all had compatibility environments for each other.
The problem is that Windows is not only pushed by Microsoft, but also that it now has such a huge slice of the market it is virtually impossible for other products to compete. This is not against the law - any company can get as large as they want as long as they aren't practicing anti-competitive methods. It is a shame, however, since innovation is stifled. Can you imagine where we'd be if IBM didn't push Apple, Apple didn't push Microsoft, Amiga didn't push Macintosh, etc.? I don't think we'd have progressed much beyond simple command line environments.
Competition is a good and vital thing. This has been proven throughout history. It needs to be returned to the computer world. If it isn't then we will simply be living in the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks...
And the reason is that they force computer manufacturers to bundle Windows whether or not the users want it. They also have been shown to dump software to undercut competitors, break software running under Windows that competes with other Microsoft offerings, use FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to depreciate competition, and use embrace-and-extend tactics to warp standards, among many other dirty dealings.
I have no problem with a business as large as Microsoft. What I have a problem with is the anti-competitive practices that Microsoft uses. In a totally open market there would be the possibility of a better product emerging to challenge Microsoft. In the current market this is next to impossible.
I used iTunes to rip about 150 songs. It was beautiful - quick, easy, no keypresses, automatically tagged them. The icing on the cake is that iTunes manages the music beautifully and synchs up with my iPod automatically. It's such a sweet combination.
Yeah, I see a consistent rate of VBR encoding of around 14x on my dual 533 G4 MacOS X 10.1.1. That's even with other stuff running in the background. Maybe iTunes is Altivec-optimized and that gives it a good boost in encoding?
Here is a pretty detailed analysis of what would be needed in order to terraform Mars, including the types of plants which would be the most likely to be added first. Take a look, it's good reading.
I'm sure that if we were around during the beginning of an ice age, we would've freaked out then too. Probably would've been told by our global governments to go start fires etc... to try to warm things up
Actually, I believe that there are some climatologists who feel that we are in the beginning of a minor ice age, but that the global warming of our past greenhouse emissions has been able to stave it off. I can't remember where I read this, but it was in a reputable science news source - it may have been Science News (the print edition of it).
That said, your assumption seems silly to me. You act as though there were no force in the universe which could counter the inertia which governs the universe's current expansion. I'm no astrophysicist, but I can name two off the top of my head: Friction, and Gravity.
Absolutely, gravity will affect whether or not the universe keeps on expanding or not. Friction is a bit more nebulous since it is really an agglomeration of effects, but it will have some bearing on the matter, however small. The real question is: are these effects strong enough to cause the eventual collapse?
The problem is that we have observed the universe expanding at a certain rate, presumably due to the Big Bang but possibly due to other causes. Gravitational attraction is based on mass density, that is mass and the distances it is spread over. If the amount of mass in the universe is over a certain amount then the total gravitational attraction of all the bits of matter will eventually reverse the expansion and draw them all back together. If it is below this amount then the gravitational attraction between the pieces will not be enough counteract the expansion. If they are exactly equal then the universe will stop expanding at some point and will not contract after that.
It's a bit like escape velocity. If you are traveling under the escape velocity for the Earth (11.2 km/s) then you will eventually fall back to Earth, providing nothing else intervenes. If you are traveling over 11.2 km/s then you will travel away from Earth forever, again providing nothing else intervenes. If you go exactly 11.2 km/sec away from Earth then you will end up in an orbit around the Earth. (This is all a generalization, of course. There are many other intervening factors involved in orbital mechanics.)
By our current best measurements the universe falls short of the calculated critical amount of matter to cause a collapse. One problem with our measurements is that we may not be observing all of the matter for various reasons. This theoretical unobserved matter is known as dark matter. Does it exist? Well, we can be sure that our estimates are short by some amount and we will find more matter by means such as observing the gravitational effects of this dark matter. We can't be sure that it will be enough to cause the collapse, however.
One thing is for certain, although we have figured out many things about where the universe has been and where it is going, we still don't know everything about the universe. In fact, we will probably never be able to know everything about it, we can only try to boil down the vastness of the universe into some sets of rules that allow us to have some grasp of it.
Why does the Slashdot community automatically tear apart everything Apple does?
Actually, aside from a few Windows trolls and knee-jerk, reactionary, anti-corporate drones, I've found the Slashdot community to be fairly supportive of Apple, MacOS X and Macintoshes in general. Articles get posted which are mostly unbiased, except when they are rants against the corporate aspects of Apple. Comments are made by people who seem to mostly appreciate Apple's efforts in the open-source world. There are also admissions made that Apple does have some really cool hardware.
Personally, I don't mind the critics of Apple. If the criticism is fair, unbiased, and open then it is welcome because only good can come from it. On the other hand rants, trolls, and baseless accusations are not welcome, since they are clearly inflammatory and don't contribute anything to the discussion other than to turn people off of the point the poster was trying to make.
What would be really cool would be for some enterprising hacker to put in water tubes with bubbles in them, like the jukeboxes of the 50's. Have them inside the transparent plastics and loop around the outlines of the iMac.
I know there's already some people out there who have hacked florescent light strips inside their iMacs, making for some really cool effects.
At $1200 the current iMac is pretty pricey for a so-called "low end" machine.
There is a $799, low-end iMac. There are several levels of iMac, adding speed and features at every level. The most expensive iMac is $1499 and it is considerably faster and has more features than the low-end iMac. The PowerMac towers, on the other hand, range from $1699 to $3499. They basically start where the iMacs leave off and are more expandable than the iMacs.
Apple has a pretty good product matrix. They have all levels covered very well, maybe a bit too well at times. A flat-panel, high-end iMac would be a very good thing to differentiate the iMac line a bit more, making the top end more attractive while still allowing a inexpensive CRT model to sell to those who want an inexpensive machine.
Quicktime is not just a player, it's a very useful file format that holds tons of extras, such as alternate soundtracks, multimedia compositing, text tracts, midi tracks, meta data to direct the combining of layers, etc. It is simply amazing what you can do inside a Quicktime file, as opposed to a simple video file.
around 90% of the computing world runs M$ software
And around 100% of the Mac computing world also runs Microsoft software. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, WiMP, etc. The fact is that you can get just as much real-world computer experience with a Mac as you can with a Windows computer.
Sure, Windows machines have tons of software that has been developed for them. Let me ask you one thing: how many programs do you typically use? 10? 20? I bet that for just about all of the programs you use there are either similar programs on the Mac, or there is the same exact program available!
Not to mention that since MacOS X is out and doing very well, there are a ton of developers scrambling to produce programs for it. Another thing is that BSD is built-in to MacOS X. Can you say "huge world of open-source software with just a simple compile"? I knew you could.
Macs do cost a bit more than a similar IBM-clone, but they also have a ton of added-value in the extras and attention to detail which comes with the platform. More and more people have been realizing this and have been trying Macintosh and loving it. This is a good thing, since with competition all of us benefit. Would you want to be the one to advocate giving the remaining 10% of the computing world to Microsoft without a fight? I didn't think so...
Although you could swap out stuff on the ADB bus when the computer was on, it was dangerous with all Macs. The ADB bus would re-negotiate the device on the fly and the chances were that the device would work just fine, however the problem was that voltage transients could occur if you did this. There was always the remote chance that you would plug in a device, get a large drain at the start, and fry the ADB controller. I've actually seen someone do it on a PowerMac 9500. He had to get an add-in ADB board in order to regain that functionality. Apple had all sorts of warnings and cautions about hot-swapping but I know that didn't stop people from doing it anyways.
Um, Quicktime has little to do with the compression format. It uses other people's compression algorithms to store the compressed video. The person who sets up the video can choose any number of compression formats.
I know there are some people out there who are annoyed that Linux is unable to read some Quicktime files out there. That's not Apple's fault at all, rather it is the fault of the compression format used. Most of the Quicktime files are compressed using the Sorenson codec, because of the superior quality and great compression it offers. The problem is that Sorenson holds the patent on the codec and they have only produced a decoder for Windows and MacOS. In order for Linux users to play those Quicktime movies which use the Sorenson codec, Sorenson would have to produce a Linux version of the decoder. There are a few programs out there that can play Quicktime movies, but only the movies that use codecs supported by Linux.
The same thing has happened with AVI on the Mac. There are a few Intel codecs that are used by AVI files which have no Mac version of a decoder. Thus, viewing an AVI on a Mac is kind of a crap shoot. I'm sure that this is a planned thing by Intel. Fortunately AVI seems to be dying a slow death as better formats are appearing.
That being said, Quicktime fully supports mpg. In fact, there are only a few odd or proprietary formats that Quicktime can't or doesn't support.
Apple Desktop Bus. It's a bus-connect technology used to connect devices to computers, such as mice, keyboards, etc. It abstracted the device from the port so all a manufacturer needed to do was use some bridging electronics and a software driver to get a device connected. It preceded USB by a number of years and it was only in use by Apple as far as I know.
As a technology it was far ahead of its time. Although it didn't allow hot-swapping, it did allow you to daisy-chain a ton of devices off of one ADB port. I know that there were security "dongles" to protect your computer from being accessed, modems, trackpads, joysticks, mice, and tons of other cool electronics that were available to it.
MPEG-4 is based on a file format championed by Apple and used in Quicktime. The problem is that the MPEG-4 standard is not yet complete. What WiMP (Windows Media Player) and the others are using is a corrupted form of the incomplete standard. It's the usual embrace-and-extend attack from Microsoft: adopt a standard and then modify it so that it becomes so corrupted and muddled that people have to use your version to do anything.
Once again we see that Microsoft has managed to grab market share through bundling, while the better product doesn't get as much exposure. Quicktime is such a polished product that supports some of the best compression algorithms for video out there, it's a shame that it is not used more.
Slashdot Mirror
MPEG-4, like the Quicktime format it is based on, is simply a container. You can use just about any type of encoding within that container. You can read a detailed analysis of MPEG-4 here, but take a look at this relevant quote from that page:
This essentially means that MPEG-4 will be at least as good as MPEG-2, and could be much better as better codecs are made.
With MPEG-4 you have the new format which can "replace DVD", because MPEG-4 can do all of the things needed on a DVD and more. You can interact with the stream, layer elements on the stream, do transformations on the stream, etc. It is a very robust format and should prove to have a long life, given its extensibility.
In short, there is no need for WMF. Microsoft has just introduced this format for the sole purpose of trying to muddy the waters and gain control of yet another segment of the consumer electronic world. They will continue to depreciate other technologies while attempting to push their alternatives wherever possible. I'm sure that the inclusion of WMF in the DVD player chipsets is part of some deal Microsoft has made with the chip manufacturers. This is one definite case where it would be better for all if the formats converged on a standard such as MPEG-4, rather than catering to a proprietary format such as WMF.
iCab is pretty cool. It has the most features of any browser I've ever used. The only problem is that I can't use it after using OmniWeb, the way it displays the fonts look so much worse than OmniWeb. I hope iCab improves, it was my only true browser before I went over to MacOS X and found OmniWeb.
It's called pirating because that's what the original people who started it called themselves - software pirates. This is unlike the word hacker, which has been twisted and distorted by the media to include crackers - criminals who break into other people's systems.
Pirating is not a good thing. Take a look at music. If you pirate your favorite artist then that's one less sale for the artist. If enough people do this, then the artist's sales drop so low the label drops them. Since they can no longer clothe and feed themselves making music, they stop and go on to other careers. Before you know it all that's left is crappy elevator music that only fu-fu rich people buy.
I agree that some pieces of software are priced way too high, but the answer is not to pirate them. Instead find a similar product and buy that. Then the high-priced product will lose sales and the reasonable one will gain sales. Even better, start up your own open-source version of the program and let everyone use it for free!
There is also OmniWeb, if you are using MacOS X. OmniWeb is by far the most beautiful web browser I have ever seen. It uses MacOS X's Quartz Engine to produce very clear anti-aliased text and crisp graphics. It's lacking very little, needs a bit more work on CSS and InScript/JavaScript but it's very usable for 99% of the web sites out there.
I would say that if you use MacOS X then you should be using OmniWeb. OmniWeb can masquerade as Internet Exploiter to fool sites which "require" you to be using IE so you will only need IE for the few sites which are broken for any browser except IE.
Lol, I think my favorite line from that whole this is this:
Very nice, and effective to boot! Heh...
Oh, I think that there are a bunch of better offerings than Windows. Take MacOS X, BeOS, AmigaOS, the various Linux/Unix windowing environments. All of these have much to offer and are viable alternatives. In a truly free market at least 2 or 3 of these would have significant market share, especially if they all had compatibility environments for each other.
The problem is that Windows is not only pushed by Microsoft, but also that it now has such a huge slice of the market it is virtually impossible for other products to compete. This is not against the law - any company can get as large as they want as long as they aren't practicing anti-competitive methods. It is a shame, however, since innovation is stifled. Can you imagine where we'd be if IBM didn't push Apple, Apple didn't push Microsoft, Amiga didn't push Macintosh, etc.? I don't think we'd have progressed much beyond simple command line environments.
Competition is a good and vital thing. This has been proven throughout history. It needs to be returned to the computer world. If it isn't then we will simply be living in the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks...
And the reason is that they force computer manufacturers to bundle Windows whether or not the users want it. They also have been shown to dump software to undercut competitors, break software running under Windows that competes with other Microsoft offerings, use FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to depreciate competition, and use embrace-and-extend tactics to warp standards, among many other dirty dealings.
I have no problem with a business as large as Microsoft. What I have a problem with is the anti-competitive practices that Microsoft uses. In a totally open market there would be the possibility of a better product emerging to challenge Microsoft. In the current market this is next to impossible.
does anyone know of a case that allows you to mount cd drives, floppy drives etc on the back of the machine?
Sure, it's called FireWire, iLink, or IEEE 1394...
Ahh, thanks. I've been to Kuro5hin before, the "k5" reference just didn't click. I'll take a look at Half-Empty and see what it's all about.
Hey, I'd love to read k5 to compare it to Slashdot. One question, however: what is k5? A link might be nice, or even a regular URL.
I used iTunes to rip about 150 songs. It was beautiful - quick, easy, no keypresses, automatically tagged them. The icing on the cake is that iTunes manages the music beautifully and synchs up with my iPod automatically. It's such a sweet combination.
Yeah, I see a consistent rate of VBR encoding of around 14x on my dual 533 G4 MacOS X 10.1.1. That's even with other stuff running in the background. Maybe iTunes is Altivec-optimized and that gives it a good boost in encoding?
Here is a pretty detailed analysis of what would be needed in order to terraform Mars, including the types of plants which would be the most likely to be added first. Take a look, it's good reading.
I'm sure that if we were around during the beginning of an ice age, we would've freaked out then too. Probably would've been told by our global governments to go start fires etc... to try to warm things up
Actually, I believe that there are some climatologists who feel that we are in the beginning of a minor ice age, but that the global warming of our past greenhouse emissions has been able to stave it off. I can't remember where I read this, but it was in a reputable science news source - it may have been Science News (the print edition of it).
That said, your assumption seems silly to me. You act as though there were no force in the universe which could counter the inertia which governs the universe's current expansion. I'm no astrophysicist, but I can name two off the top of my head: Friction, and Gravity.
Absolutely, gravity will affect whether or not the universe keeps on expanding or not. Friction is a bit more nebulous since it is really an agglomeration of effects, but it will have some bearing on the matter, however small. The real question is: are these effects strong enough to cause the eventual collapse?
The problem is that we have observed the universe expanding at a certain rate, presumably due to the Big Bang but possibly due to other causes. Gravitational attraction is based on mass density, that is mass and the distances it is spread over. If the amount of mass in the universe is over a certain amount then the total gravitational attraction of all the bits of matter will eventually reverse the expansion and draw them all back together. If it is below this amount then the gravitational attraction between the pieces will not be enough counteract the expansion. If they are exactly equal then the universe will stop expanding at some point and will not contract after that.
It's a bit like escape velocity. If you are traveling under the escape velocity for the Earth (11.2 km/s) then you will eventually fall back to Earth, providing nothing else intervenes. If you are traveling over 11.2 km/s then you will travel away from Earth forever, again providing nothing else intervenes. If you go exactly 11.2 km/sec away from Earth then you will end up in an orbit around the Earth. (This is all a generalization, of course. There are many other intervening factors involved in orbital mechanics.)
By our current best measurements the universe falls short of the calculated critical amount of matter to cause a collapse. One problem with our measurements is that we may not be observing all of the matter for various reasons. This theoretical unobserved matter is known as dark matter. Does it exist? Well, we can be sure that our estimates are short by some amount and we will find more matter by means such as observing the gravitational effects of this dark matter. We can't be sure that it will be enough to cause the collapse, however.
One thing is for certain, although we have figured out many things about where the universe has been and where it is going, we still don't know everything about the universe. In fact, we will probably never be able to know everything about it, we can only try to boil down the vastness of the universe into some sets of rules that allow us to have some grasp of it.
Why does the Slashdot community automatically tear apart everything Apple does?
Actually, aside from a few Windows trolls and knee-jerk, reactionary, anti-corporate drones, I've found the Slashdot community to be fairly supportive of Apple, MacOS X and Macintoshes in general. Articles get posted which are mostly unbiased, except when they are rants against the corporate aspects of Apple. Comments are made by people who seem to mostly appreciate Apple's efforts in the open-source world. There are also admissions made that Apple does have some really cool hardware.
Personally, I don't mind the critics of Apple. If the criticism is fair, unbiased, and open then it is welcome because only good can come from it. On the other hand rants, trolls, and baseless accusations are not welcome, since they are clearly inflammatory and don't contribute anything to the discussion other than to turn people off of the point the poster was trying to make.
15 to 1 says it's got some sort of water cooling.
What would be really cool would be for some enterprising hacker to put in water tubes with bubbles in them, like the jukeboxes of the 50's. Have them inside the transparent plastics and loop around the outlines of the iMac.
I know there's already some people out there who have hacked florescent light strips inside their iMacs, making for some really cool effects.
At $1200 the current iMac is pretty pricey for a so-called "low end" machine.
There is a $799, low-end iMac. There are several levels of iMac, adding speed and features at every level. The most expensive iMac is $1499 and it is considerably faster and has more features than the low-end iMac. The PowerMac towers, on the other hand, range from $1699 to $3499. They basically start where the iMacs leave off and are more expandable than the iMacs.
Apple has a pretty good product matrix. They have all levels covered very well, maybe a bit too well at times. A flat-panel, high-end iMac would be a very good thing to differentiate the iMac line a bit more, making the top end more attractive while still allowing a inexpensive CRT model to sell to those who want an inexpensive machine.
Quicktime is not just a player, it's a very useful file format that holds tons of extras, such as alternate soundtracks, multimedia compositing, text tracts, midi tracks, meta data to direct the combining of layers, etc. It is simply amazing what you can do inside a Quicktime file, as opposed to a simple video file.
Not to mention that the Quicktime Streaming Server is open source and free, in all senses of the word.
please let them be loaded with MacOS X
All Macs being produced right now come pre-loaded with MacOS X, ain't that a wonderful thing? :)
around 90% of the computing world runs M$ software
And around 100% of the Mac computing world also runs Microsoft software. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, WiMP, etc. The fact is that you can get just as much real-world computer experience with a Mac as you can with a Windows computer.
Sure, Windows machines have tons of software that has been developed for them. Let me ask you one thing: how many programs do you typically use? 10? 20? I bet that for just about all of the programs you use there are either similar programs on the Mac, or there is the same exact program available!
Not to mention that since MacOS X is out and doing very well, there are a ton of developers scrambling to produce programs for it. Another thing is that BSD is built-in to MacOS X. Can you say "huge world of open-source software with just a simple compile"? I knew you could.
Macs do cost a bit more than a similar IBM-clone, but they also have a ton of added-value in the extras and attention to detail which comes with the platform. More and more people have been realizing this and have been trying Macintosh and loving it. This is a good thing, since with competition all of us benefit. Would you want to be the one to advocate giving the remaining 10% of the computing world to Microsoft without a fight? I didn't think so...
Although you could swap out stuff on the ADB bus when the computer was on, it was dangerous with all Macs. The ADB bus would re-negotiate the device on the fly and the chances were that the device would work just fine, however the problem was that voltage transients could occur if you did this. There was always the remote chance that you would plug in a device, get a large drain at the start, and fry the ADB controller. I've actually seen someone do it on a PowerMac 9500. He had to get an add-in ADB board in order to regain that functionality. Apple had all sorts of warnings and cautions about hot-swapping but I know that didn't stop people from doing it anyways.
Um, Quicktime has little to do with the compression format. It uses other people's compression algorithms to store the compressed video. The person who sets up the video can choose any number of compression formats.
I know there are some people out there who are annoyed that Linux is unable to read some Quicktime files out there. That's not Apple's fault at all, rather it is the fault of the compression format used. Most of the Quicktime files are compressed using the Sorenson codec, because of the superior quality and great compression it offers. The problem is that Sorenson holds the patent on the codec and they have only produced a decoder for Windows and MacOS. In order for Linux users to play those Quicktime movies which use the Sorenson codec, Sorenson would have to produce a Linux version of the decoder. There are a few programs out there that can play Quicktime movies, but only the movies that use codecs supported by Linux.
The same thing has happened with AVI on the Mac. There are a few Intel codecs that are used by AVI files which have no Mac version of a decoder. Thus, viewing an AVI on a Mac is kind of a crap shoot. I'm sure that this is a planned thing by Intel. Fortunately AVI seems to be dying a slow death as better formats are appearing.
That being said, Quicktime fully supports mpg. In fact, there are only a few odd or proprietary formats that Quicktime can't or doesn't support.
Apple Desktop Bus. It's a bus-connect technology used to connect devices to computers, such as mice, keyboards, etc. It abstracted the device from the port so all a manufacturer needed to do was use some bridging electronics and a software driver to get a device connected. It preceded USB by a number of years and it was only in use by Apple as far as I know. As a technology it was far ahead of its time. Although it didn't allow hot-swapping, it did allow you to daisy-chain a ton of devices off of one ADB port. I know that there were security "dongles" to protect your computer from being accessed, modems, trackpads, joysticks, mice, and tons of other cool electronics that were available to it.
Isn't MPEG4 based on quicktime?
MPEG-4 is based on a file format championed by Apple and used in Quicktime. The problem is that the MPEG-4 standard is not yet complete. What WiMP (Windows Media Player) and the others are using is a corrupted form of the incomplete standard. It's the usual embrace-and-extend attack from Microsoft: adopt a standard and then modify it so that it becomes so corrupted and muddled that people have to use your version to do anything.
Once again we see that Microsoft has managed to grab market share through bundling, while the better product doesn't get as much exposure. Quicktime is such a polished product that supports some of the best compression algorithms for video out there, it's a shame that it is not used more.