I read the headline on this article and practically had to be resuscitated. All these years Apple has clung to the classic one-button - it is practically an institution. It is almost as if Apple is saying that maybe they were wrong all those years. What's next?
It is exactly this sort of thing that bothers me regarding media acquisitions.
So if this is indeed true, to me it is both a suprise and yet not. I had a feeling that Comcast was buying their competition only to gut them. I've not seen the G4 channel, but from what I read, it's less than fabulous.
It's sad to think that the TechTV folks I know and love (especially the Screen Savers crew) are likely going to be out of a job. But for the moment, I'll give Comcast the benefit of a doubt.
At any rate, though, it is somewhat irresponsible to fire employees of a acquired company en masse even if it is to allow renegotiation of contracts and force them to move. These folks are, I would assume, settled very well in San Francisco (I know I would be) and forcing them to move to keep their job - under a new contract - is irresponsible.
On a side note, I can't help but wonder what would have become of Disney had Comcast's bid panned out.
I'm no astronomer, but it really isn't the bands of meteorites that we really need to worry about - they're washed up meteors that have been busted up by the Justice Department of the universe. It's mostly space junk. It is the large, unbroken chunks flying in trajectories which we don't know that we need to worry about.
...I can get reasonably priced bandwidth? I'm too far from a CO to get [A]DSL, the houses are strung out far enough that the cable companies have never run cable through, so I'm stuck on a dial-up line running over copper twice as old as I am. It's pretty good copper, though, as long as the Verizon guys get the tap boxes shut good after working on them. I digress, though.
My problem doesn't seem that different from many others. The only way I will be able to get any sort of bandwidth is to drag it kicking and screaming at a very high cost. As the technology of high-bandwidth connections proliferates into wide use in backbones, can any of us expect the price of bandwidth to drop into affordibility or should we not hold our breath and expect telcos to keep their strangle-hold on old analog lines? Can we expect this sort of technology to lower the cost of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) that Verizon has pleged to install? Or will this glut of bandwidth be let out drop by drop by telcos to squeeze every last penny out of the folks who crave bandwidth, progress be damned?
I can't say I'm suprised by ATI's move to stay closed source. I've never been happy with anything ATI and most likely won't buy anything ATI. I've had a very bad experience with my ATI TV Wonder - sure they've updated their WinXP drivers, but the new drivers are a 2MB download, Multimedia Center (of which I only want the TV) is a 24MB download, and on top of that, you need Microsoft's Data Access Objects (a 17MB download) to make the parts of MMC that I don't even want to work. I've never gotten this combination to work, so I'm using the new drivers with an old version of MMC which mostly works, but doesn't respond well to Right-Clicks on the display area of the TV. I don't even dare to request tech support because they'll tell me to download the newest software and will be little help beyond that (which was the run-around I got when I was trying to make the card work in Win2k). Simply put, I love ATI's hardware, but their drivers are simply awful and for those of us who don't want the fluff, we still have to download the whole package and try to figure out how to install just what we want and still have everything work.
Isn't it amazing what happens when folks slam atoms together at amazing speeds in a supercollider? For as amazingly advanced as civilization has become, we're still taking baby steps in discovering how the subatomic world really works.
And I don't understand much more than a quark of it.
I can't say that I blame them. I haven't had RealPlayer on any of my PCs for ages. I went to fetch the most recent incarnation a few days ago and was completely blown away that what ought to be a relatively simple audio/video streaming client had grown to be more than 14MB.
As much as it doesn't sit well with me, Media Player is included with Windows. It requires no downloads, it doesn't bombard me with ads, and it seems to work pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the headline on this article and practically had to be resuscitated. All these years Apple has clung to the classic one-button - it is practically an institution. It is almost as if Apple is saying that maybe they were wrong all those years. What's next?
I wish Verizon would concentrate more on rolling out the FiOS than selling access to their network.
It is exactly this sort of thing that bothers me regarding media acquisitions.
So if this is indeed true, to me it is both a suprise and yet not. I had a feeling that Comcast was buying their competition only to gut them. I've not seen the G4 channel, but from what I read, it's less than fabulous.
It's sad to think that the TechTV folks I know and love (especially the Screen Savers crew) are likely going to be out of a job. But for the moment, I'll give Comcast the benefit of a doubt.
At any rate, though, it is somewhat irresponsible to fire employees of a acquired company en masse even if it is to allow renegotiation of contracts and force them to move. These folks are, I would assume, settled very well in San Francisco (I know I would be) and forcing them to move to keep their job - under a new contract - is irresponsible.
On a side note, I can't help but wonder what would have become of Disney had Comcast's bid panned out.
I'm no astronomer, but it really isn't the bands of meteorites that we really need to worry about - they're washed up meteors that have been busted up by the Justice Department of the universe. It's mostly space junk. It is the large, unbroken chunks flying in trajectories which we don't know that we need to worry about.
...I can get reasonably priced bandwidth? I'm too far from a CO to get [A]DSL, the houses are strung out far enough that the cable companies have never run cable through, so I'm stuck on a dial-up line running over copper twice as old as I am. It's pretty good copper, though, as long as the Verizon guys get the tap boxes shut good after working on them. I digress, though.
My problem doesn't seem that different from many others. The only way I will be able to get any sort of bandwidth is to drag it kicking and screaming at a very high cost. As the technology of high-bandwidth connections proliferates into wide use in backbones, can any of us expect the price of bandwidth to drop into affordibility or should we not hold our breath and expect telcos to keep their strangle-hold on old analog lines? Can we expect this sort of technology to lower the cost of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) that Verizon has pleged to install? Or will this glut of bandwidth be let out drop by drop by telcos to squeeze every last penny out of the folks who crave bandwidth, progress be damned?
Just a thought.
...but I think it'd be best to save it for when my state decides to tax my home LAN.
Would that be a kilochicken?
Hey! This driver seems pretty cool - even mostly works with the ATI TV program! Thanks!
I can't say I'm suprised by ATI's move to stay closed source. I've never been happy with anything ATI and most likely won't buy anything ATI. I've had a very bad experience with my ATI TV Wonder - sure they've updated their WinXP drivers, but the new drivers are a 2MB download, Multimedia Center (of which I only want the TV) is a 24MB download, and on top of that, you need Microsoft's Data Access Objects (a 17MB download) to make the parts of MMC that I don't even want to work. I've never gotten this combination to work, so I'm using the new drivers with an old version of MMC which mostly works, but doesn't respond well to Right-Clicks on the display area of the TV. I don't even dare to request tech support because they'll tell me to download the newest software and will be little help beyond that (which was the run-around I got when I was trying to make the card work in Win2k). Simply put, I love ATI's hardware, but their drivers are simply awful and for those of us who don't want the fluff, we still have to download the whole package and try to figure out how to install just what we want and still have everything work.
Prescott? I'm still holding on with my 486/66 waiting for Quantum Computing.
That is the downside. *Sigh*
Isn't it amazing what happens when folks slam atoms together at amazing speeds in a supercollider? For as amazingly advanced as civilization has become, we're still taking baby steps in discovering how the subatomic world really works.
And I don't understand much more than a quark of it.
I can't say that I blame them. I haven't had RealPlayer on any of my PCs for ages. I went to fetch the most recent incarnation a few days ago and was completely blown away that what ought to be a relatively simple audio/video streaming client had grown to be more than 14MB.
As much as it doesn't sit well with me, Media Player is included with Windows. It requires no downloads, it doesn't bombard me with ads, and it seems to work pretty well.