So is it such a slow news day that there's literally nothing to post but personal insults? I mean really, that's what this is. There's no "news for nerds" here, no "stuff that matters". Just a story about a guy who's clueless about his personal laptop. Big deal. "Ha ha! Look at this dork with his goofy thing that he has!" Sheesh. Different people like different things, not everybody is an Apple lover, and not everybody has good taste; get over it. This is certainly not front page news.
not being backwards compatible will just push everyone to playstation. Hopefully, the playstation 3 will still play playstation 1 games. sure, those games won't look as cool as the newest games, but being able to play them is the point in having a game system.
Being able to play PS1 games is the reason for having a PS3? Sorry, I don't buy it - I think being able to play PS3 games is the reason for having a PS3. Backwards compatibility is extremely overrated, and the only reason people think about it at all is because of the PS2 - which would have been successful with or without it. In fact, the only reason Sony included it is because they could - not because they had to. It just so happened that they could manage to use a PS1 CPU for the I/O functions of the PS2, which made backward compatibility very easy to include. Otherwise, they wouldn't have done it.
There has only been one other home console I can think of offhand with backward compatibility built in: the Atari 7800. And we all know what a great success that system was. Mind you, this is in an industry that now has nearly a 30 year history, and has seen upwards of 100 programmable home console systems (both major and minor) released in various territories.
If MS can lower costs and include better functionality in the Xbox 2 at the expense of backward compatibility, they should do it. People with short memories and/or attention spans always look at whatever's successful in the current generation and automatically think it's suicide if every other company doesn't follow the exact same template - this industry has never worked that way. There's no such thing as a "standard feature" in the game console industry and even if there was, with only two major systems to have it, backward compatibility wouldn't even come close to being one of those standards.
greed - the posting was way over the top for something that is old news. If you own a Tivo and didn't know this was taking place, then you haven't been paying attention.
Wouldn't surprise me if that's the problem - the original poster not owning a TiVo, and commenting on something he therefore knows little about. Everybody I know that owns a TiVo, as well as TiVo owners I've talked to on various message boards (such as at tivocommunity.com, seems to know and be perfectly fine with this practice.
And speaking as a TiVo owner myself, I have absolutely no problem with it. In fact, I tried to sign up to have my data collected non-anonymously - a service TiVo allows their customers to provide optionally (their web site wouldn't accept my TiVo model # when I tried to sign up). People complain constantly about the poor state of television in this country - this is how you go about changing that. If a show sucks, you don't watch it, and TiVo knows it and will tell the networks. I want TiVo to know that my viewing consists primarily of Antiques Roadshow, Once and Again reruns, The Office, Survivor and Mystery Science Theater 3000. And I want the added leverage (however small) of having an actual name attached to that data when it reaches the networks. I am not concerned in the slightest with how the networks plan to use this information, but if you're that embarrassed about your TV viewing habits that you can't bear the thought of anybody else knowing about them, then either just stay anonymous or don't buy TiVo. But they're not trying to hide anything - they post their privacy policy all over the place when you sign up.
That article lost me the minute the guy started talking about how his camera was too technologically advanced because it had options to force the flash or set long exposure times.
These are options that have been available on cameras for approximately 100 years.
I mean, we have gotten to the point where if technology does not simplify our lives to a ridiculous degree, we blame the technology, even if technology is giving us the same exact features we've always had! What was fine before suddenly becomes burdensome simply because it's digital and our expectations are different. Do we expect to have fewer features in digital products than we did in analog, simply because we're too stupid or impatient to read a damn manual? It seems that way.
I'd like to keep my long exposure, manual focus, forced flash and aperture modes, thanks. I am happy camera makers are continuing to provide these as options on some models and are even filtering them down to less expensive consumer cameras. Not every product needs to pander to the lowest common denominator.
1) There is still a "digital divide". Not everyone has or wants a computer with web access at home; unfortunately this is usually for financial reasons. Netflix is not a viable option for them.
This is true, but the numbers you'd be talking about are exceedingly small and getting smaller all the time. Everybody has access to a computer somewhere, even if it's at their local library (even that's extreme, though; most people have PC's at work, at least). And Netflix is very low-maintenance once you've used it the first time - you seem to be under the impression that you need to be constantly picking out movies. You don't. Even new releases can be ordered months in advance (often while they're still in theaters), and Netflix will just ship them to you as soon as they get them.
2) People want to be able to pick up a movie on the way home from work on Friday night. They don't want to have to plan spontaneous movie night a week in advance (to account for shipping time).
I can tell from this that you haven't used Netflix. If you want a particular movie on a particular date, then yes, you have to ask for it in advance. But the whole point of Netflix is that you always have movies to watch. They send you three, you watch them whenever you want, you send them back whenever you want and they instantly send you more depending on what you've queued up. The only time you get stuck without a movie on the weekend is if you're too lazy to drop your already watched discs in the mailbox - which is less effort than going to Blockbuster on Friday.
For most working people I know, this means they watch a couple movies on the weekend, send them back on Monday, and usually by Wednesday they have new movies to watch, without doing anything at all but opening up the cover of a mailbox and dropping a couple envelopes in.
3) New releases can be had the day of release at Blockbuster. With Netflix, you're lucky to get it a week later. Not a big deal for the patient, but some people want it ASAP.
More like a day later. Which means the same weekend, since new releases generally come out on Tuesday. I've never had a problem getting any new release I want from Netflix (granted, I'm not usually big on new releases; I don't really care that much... so I'm not saying you'd never have a problem, just that I haven't personally).
4) Not everyone rents enough movies every month to make the $20 worthwhile.
This is really the only thing you've mentioned that I think would be valid for any real quantity of potential customers. But I don't think those people are really better served by Blockbuster anyway, because they're not the kind of people that make it a habit of going to the video store - which means they'll probably rack up late fees on any movies they do rent. This is what ultimately convinced me - I'd rent like one movie a month and rack up the rental fee ($4.32 with tax) plus usually about $10 in late fees. I figured, one movie for $15, I may as well either just buy it, or go with Netflix and spend another $5 to get 10-15 more movies. I now watch a hell of a lot more movies and pay hardly any more money.
It's no coincidence, I think, that Blockbuster's really losing money lately while Netflix has turned profitable. It's really a great service that works exactly the way I'd want a DVD rental service to work. And it made EZD's obsolete before they even hit the market.
Those 601s are a very nice chip, and quite underestimated at what they can do at low clock speeds. If the RAD6000 is anywhere similar, I can understand why it was picked.
I doubt it, because it probably had little to do with performance. I read an article a while back (tried to Google it now, couldn't find it) that said NASA is generally about ten years behind consumer PC's in terms of the CPU speeds they send into space. These things have to go through so much testing for reliability, etc. that it often takes that long to certify a CPU for space flight. When they do find a CPU they can certify, they'll often continue using it for years. They won't just stick the latest PPC chip in a vehicle, assuming it's the same as the last one, only faster. That's the quickest way I can think of to disaster.
Not much CPU power is really needed for space flight, though, and there's not really much point in taking along more than you need. We went to the moon using slide rules. We can make it to Mars on 20mhz chips - and I'll bet the only reason we even need that much power is for the scientific experiments on the surface. Speed is not really the primary concern on space missions.
The above system in Hamburg looks like the Maerklin trains.
Or as we call them in the US, "Marklin" trains:)
Not sure which is more technically correct - it's an "a" with an umlaut over it, which is just too hard to type on an English keyboard/OS!
They have a digital control system where by you don't have to have any blocks to control your trains. You put out full voltage onto the rails at all times and then the engines know what direction they should go and how fast to go. It is a much better system and more realistically approximates the way real trains work.
Marklin has no copyright or trademark on this. It's called Digital Command Control and it's what most model railroaders the world over use today. See here. Nearly all current model locomotives made and/or marketed in the US (and Europe and Japan, for that matter) are now DCC-ready.
btw, Marklin trains are some high-quality trains, alright (my brother deals almost exclusively with them)... but so are a lot of other makes. There's always somewhat of a debate on who makes the best equipment, but I think most model railroaders agree that it really depends these days on the specific car/locomotive being modeled - one company may make a better looking and running ICE, another may make a better looking and running SD40-2, another may make a better looking and running Hudson J2E. All of the major manufacturers in HO and N (Kato, Tomix, Walthers, Atlas, Marklin, etc.) maintain at least a basic standard of quality - they're all at least good, all the time.
Oh, and if you're wondering, metal is not better than plastic! At least not as a rule. It's nearly impossible to get the same level of precision and detail in die-cast as in plastic, and while brass is still fairly popular, it's also extremely expensive and extremely fragile (relegating brass trains mainly to display duty these days - nobody wants to derail a $5,000 train and see it go tumbling to the floor, pieces breaking off all the way down!).
I've always presumed such layouts are not attempts to faithfully duplicate the layout of the rail line but to represent the scenery through which a traveler would pass. That is, there's no attempt to duplicate or scale "Then this spur goes east for 24 miles before it turns north for three more..." just do something like "and after we pass through the pine forest here near the bedroom door, we hit the town of Pidegeonville, which I placed next to the window..."
You are correct. There are actual scale model railroads (there's a museum in Chicago with a real scale model railroad of the Chicago area, for example - it's really impressive!), but they're rare. Most model railroaders attempt to model the "spirit" of a railroad, along with maybe some of its individually distinctive features, but they'll drastically shorten the "dead" areas of a railroad and/or combine the less distinctive features. The point is to capture the highlights of a railroad. Of course, many people don't bother modeling real railroads because they don't want to burden themselves with questions of accuracy - they just build whatever they think looks nice.
Same is actually true for the trains themselves. There's a segment of model railroaders who are derisively called "rivet counters" by the rest - these are people who are absolute sticklers for train model accuracy down to the last rivet. Most model railroaders, though, will accept some inaccuracies in their trains, and one of the main areas of inaccuracies is in the consists. Like layouts themselves, this is to save space - in HO scale, a typical passenger train made up of three or four locomotives and 17 or 18 85' cars could be 21-22 feet long! Most model railroaders do not run accurate trains; they run representations of them, featuring one or at the most two of every type of car in a passenger train, or simply shortened freight trains (many of which are just long and monotonous in real life anyway, IMO).
Of course, choosing a smaller scale will let you model more in the same space, but sometimes in less detail. In the US, HO scale is most popular because it still generally offers the best balance between detail level and space savings (vs. the original O scale). In Japan, N scale is the most popular because of the small size of many dwellings there - and I also think because Japanese model railroading is more fixed-consist passenger-oriented (vs. mixed freight here), so to model a train that looks remotely realistic you have to run fairly long trains. N scale has also improved dramatically in detail level over the past 20 or so years, so I expect if this hobby survives there will be a gradual increase in the popularity of N scale in this country, leading to somewhat more realistically-sized layouts.
It's a hobby still in slow decline in the US, though, going hand in hand with the decline of passenger trains in general (and the rise of other pastimes such as video and computer games - kids who in generations past would grow up with train sets are now growing up with PlayStations instead). Which is a shame - many of these layouts really are true historical documents, in the same way any museum diorama is. And they're fun, too!
I can buy one at the Japanese market down the street from me for $119. They do exist in the US, you just have to know where to look. Of course, a wide variety of web sites sell them too.
It's moot in terms of this discussion, though, because CSS has nothing to do with region coding. My player's region free but it's still CSS-protected - you can't make a digital copy of DVD's even if you could somehow connect a PC to it. My old Apex player would remove the CSS protection but as far as I know there was nothing you could really do with the resulting data (unless someone did eventually invent a cable and connector to do it... but then why not just use a DVD-ROM drive to begin with?).
My point? I have no point. Well, maybe just that we should clarify what CSS really does before talking about what the removal of it can do for us. Using DeCSS is not going to remove region coding on your DVD player (not like you could use it on a standalone player anyway), nor is it going to do it for you on a DVD-ROM drive (though other commonly-available firmware utilities will).
Get yourself a Model M - I found mine at a salvage yard for $5 (not including the PS/2 it was attached to). Loudest most satisfying keyboard I have ever owned. Guaranteed to keep the housemates awake and sharpening their bowie knives.
You'll find lots of Model M stalwarts out there, including myself. This is a keyboard that harkens back to a time when keyboards were considered honest to goodness peripherals, not just little flimsy bits included in the box when you buy your PC and best not thought about. The Model M is not the only high quality, tank-like mechanical keyboard to ever come out, but it's by far the cheapest if you want to go that route now (you can still buy Northgate keyboards marketed under the Avant name, for example, but they cost more than $100).
You know you're old-school when you have to make sure you avoid the full DIN connector model when purchasing.
As for the PS/2/USB debate (yeah, not sure how else to write that), I'm sticking with PS/2 until somebody invents something better. USB ain't it, at least not for keyboards and mice. 125hz vs. 200hz? No thanks. You also can't even use your keyboard until the USB driver has loaded - same goes for the mouse. This means if you get stuck in DOS for whatever reason (or, say, at the Recovery Console), you're basically screwed. Same is true for anyone using Linux - I tried a USB keyboard on a Linux box, and every time I screwed something up I'd just have to go and connect my Model M up anyway. I'll say the opposite of what someone else said: it's always better to have a dedicated connector intended to do one thing and one thing only. The PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports on your PC are only intended for the keyboard and mouse and because of that they work better with those devices than any other port your PC has.
...to stay on their toes. It's the original un-Microsoft, long before Linux rolled round. And the non-Intel trend keeps them innovating too.
I don't have an Apple and I don't have any Intel chips in my PC...
Apple was not the "original un-Microsoft". In fact, Apple was excited that MS would be porting their software to the original Mac (as they still are now). I'm not sure when you first started using computers but there was a time when there were many OS's on the market, all of which filled their own niche, some of which competed more or less equally against each other. I personally owned an Apple II which ran Apple's own DOS, or various other OS's that you could buy. Commodore had their own OS. IBM had PC-DOS. MS had MS-DOS. Atari had various OS's for their 8 bit and 16 bit machines.
No OS gained real dominance until Windows. And Windows was released after the Mac (and probably because of it). So really, it's more accurate to say MS is the original "un-Apple" than the other way around. MS took what Apple did and turned it against them, something they do very well with all of their products - which raises the interesting question, "would MS be as dominant now if Apple didn't exist?" My guess would be yes, but who really knows? IBM was dominant then and might still be today, and we could be using Linux or OS/2 on our workplace PC's instead of Windows.
3. Apple made lots of mistakes early on. They did not almost go out of business because Microsoft had a superior product.
Lots of people (not just you) seem to be doing a bit of history revision here - the original battle in 1984 was not between Apple and MS, it was between Apple and IBM. Read the article if you don't believe it, but I also recall this clearly and it was even the subject of Apple's famous 1984 SuperBowl ad ("Big Brother" was represented by IBM, not Microsoft).
In 1984, IBM still had a stranglehold on the corporate market. This was, in all honesty, the market the Mac was originally intended for. It was designed as an easier computer for non-technical company drones to use - rather than spending weeks training on how to use an IBM PC, they just sit down and start clicking around with their mouse. The Apple II line was expected (initially) to continue as Apple's home machine. Design work (which would become Apple's main niche later on) was not even a consideration back then - no desktop computer was powerful enough to handle it. There was no "Think Different" campaign back then - the idea of the Mac was not to enable creativity, it was about letting accountants work with spreadsheets more easily.
In the end, Apple never did gain the corporate foothold that they wanted, and both Apple and IBM were eventually overwhelmed in the desktop market by MS. Apple didn't see this coming at all when they released the Mac, and neither, obviously, did IBM. MS turned PC's into commodities - it didn't matter anymore whether you had an IBM PC or a clone, because the clones would run IBM-compatible operating systems just as well. (Don't forget that IBM had their own competing OS - PC DOS - that MS-DOS was a clone of, and this was what was generally installed on clone machines.)
Both Apple and IBM continuously lost market share through the 1980s and 1990s to cheaper IBM-compatible clone machines running MS software. Apple quickly discontinued the Apple II line and put all their egges in one basket with the Mac (Jobs considered the Apple II to be largely Steve Wozniak's machine, and I still believe the discontinuation of the line was partly a personal decision - at that point in time the Apple II line was actually more powerful and more expandable than the Mac, with more software and hardware add-ons available). If they had not hit on the strategy of pitching Macs for creative work (which didn't happen until at least the late 80's or early 90's), there is no question Apple would have been out of business. They had no other market, and had failed in all of their efforts at retaining market share both at home and in the workplace (not to mention schools, for that matter). The major slide started, btw, when Jobs was still leading the company. I always smirk when I read Mac fans acting as if Jobs is the savior of Apple; in fact, he pretty well drove the company into the ground with his early strategies, but to his credit he seems to have learned a lot over the years about how to run a company.
Anyway, so the initial enemy was IBM, who were thought of back then in much the same way many people think of MS now. It's one of the biggest ironies in the history of the computing industry that at this moment, the only major internal part that separates Apple architecture from (IBM-compatible) PC architecture is a CPU that's co-produced and designed by IBM.
Anime character typically have exagerated traits, most notably the proportions of the legs, and most obviously the large eyes.
Those concept art pictures depict normal humans with proportions that actually occur in nature and not just on paper. The kind of humans that are likely to actually show up for casting.
Way to generalize. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's character designs on Evangelion were purposely made more realistic than typical anime - the eyes and faces are in more or less correct proportion, and except for some too-perfect bodies on the adults, the overall proportions are pretty much right as well. No, you don't generally see chicks walking around in real life with blue hair and red eyes (well, unless you live in the East Village in NYC, as I used to), but for the most part the characters in Evangelion look pretty plausible. At least as plausible as any characters you'd see on western animations like The Family Guy or King of the Hill; just more in fitting with Japanese body types than American.
And yes, I do think the characters in these concept sketches look "dumpy". Part of it's the difference in cultures - it's a fact that average heights, weights, and body fat percentages (not to mention obesity rates) are lower in Japan than in the west. People are just shorter and thinner. I always thought Asuka looked a bit too thin in the series (her character grew up in Germany) but there's no reason that Rei, for one example, would be anything but the perfect ideal of what a young teenage girl should look like. That's actually a big part of the plot.
Also, I don't know when the last time was that some of you visited your local high school and looked at the freshman class. They're small. Really small. Shockingly small, considering the fact that most people seem to consider high school the age when children become adults (hence their use in Evangelion). This is irregardless of culture. Last time I visited my high school I couldn't believe how young and little these kids looked; I remember thinking I was a big man back then.
So I guess I do have a problem with some of these designs. And I don't think it's an excuse to say "the kind of humans that are likely to show up for casting" - that's a cop-out. Find some actors and actresses that fit the plot; that's the whole point of casting. These kids have to be small and thin to fit inside the plugs - there's not supposed to be a lot of room in there.
To be honest, I think that China is doing it right. The USA is afraid of making an investment into this, yet it is killing us not to do so. We use the roads, but our traffic is at 60 Miles/hour (100 kph) which is actually damn slow today. If we built one of these, we would see the advantage of it and move rapidly to it.
If the government could get past their hog trough, they would realize that the best place to put is from New York to milwaukee via pit, detroit, and chicago. The airlines, ships, buses, rail, and trucks make more money on this route than any other going (save NY to LA). Yet it is a small route.
I don't think you quite understand what you yourself are saying.
We move at 60mph on our roads, which is slow, yet the airlines make buckets of money on the route you're proposing. These two statements are at once contradictory and also illustrative of the reason we don't have, nor do we need, a maglev on this route (or probably anywhere else). It would still take longer to travel via maglev from New York to Detroit than it would to fly, and it would be much more expensive to boot. Those who do not care about speed will drive or take existing trains - there is no market that is not currently being served by some mode of existing transportation.
Don't think I am against mass transit or trains in particular. If nothing else in life, I'm a massive rail buff. But, as others have pointed out, regular old high speed rail works perfectly well enough for the purpose that maglev was developed for, and it's much, much, much cheaper. We in the US have been developing high speed rail at a too-slow pace, but we do have it to an extent in the Northeast Corridor and have had off-and-on plans to build it elsewhere. This can be accomplished by simply upgrading existing track, signaling and catenary wires, giving you about 75% of the overall capability of maglev for about 1/10 the cost. I think this is a no-brainer.
I'm not convinced maglev will be successful in China. It certainly will not take the place of airlines. It's definitely not necessary in Japan or parts of Europe where regular high-speed rail is already a reality, and I'd call it more of a pork-barrel project than anything else in any country with an existing rail system of any sort.
I do agree that we spend far too little on rail in general in this country; especially on heavily traveled corridors such as the NEC and California corridor where there is clearly a demand for high speed rail service. Even the NEC, which does have high speed rail, is woefully undermaintained (and the Acela Express therefore limited to running well below its rated speed most of the time). Our priorities in this country are pretty out of whack when it comes to transit, but that doesn't mean maglev is a good idea for us.
Re:actually Apple is MAKING them
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No WMA for HP iPod
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Points to HP for bucking the trend and using standards instead of the Microsoft assigned format.
Oh come on. As the parent (or grandfather) says, this is a war of two monopolies. Neither one is using standards. I can't play iTunes files on my computer even though I have half a dozen players that will play, rip, and burn AAC files, because of Apple's DRM. I can't play them on my portable player either. DRM may be considered a necessary evil for these companies but it also means that all of these formats are proprietary. Stick DRM on a Vorbis or MP3 file and that renders it proprietary as well.
HP said they "chose the most popular format", not that they "chose a standard", because they didn't choose a standard. They just chose one proprietary format over another. (Of course, the iPod also plays MP3's - but this is technically a proprietary format as well, albeit a pretty universal one. The point, though, is that you can't buy songs off Wal-Mart or Napster or whatever and play them on the HP iPod, just like Napster player owners can't buy songs off iTunes and play them.)
I think it's important to point out in discussions like this, because they still get turned into David (Apple) vs. Goliath (MS) arguments more often than not. The fact is in terms of music it's at best two Goliaths. Neither of these companies believes in standards, except the ones they set themselves and then expect the rest of the world to follow whether the world likes it or not.
Me, I'm sticking with buying and ripping my own CD's until someone gives me a real standard format for download. Which will never happen, because the music industry won't allow it. I guess I'm stuck with my own private digital revolution.
Looking at the raw images, it almost appears that they take three separate monocrhome images when they want a color photo - one for each channel. This would make perfect sense, and would probably be easy enough to verify (just download and combine in Photoshop; see what you get). This isn't "colorizing" if that's the case; this is the best way to get the most accurate color. There are a few reasons it's generally not done in commercially available digital cameras; for one, you'd need a perfectly stable tripod, and the time to take three pictures.
I am inclined not to believe that NASA doctored these color photos. If they did, I am inclined not to care. There's no scientific sleight of hand going on here, as these are publicity photos, and the raw photos are the ones that will be studied.
"But hey, I could be wrong, and we could all be getting $99 hPods next December. "
It seems obvious that part of the licensing deal would stipulate that HP cannot undercut Apple's pricing. I would be shocked to see any HP models with anything but the same capacities as Apple's at the same prices. And if anything, they'll be physically bigger, or won't look as nice. Apple's going to keep the high ground somehow.
"The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S."
Did she actually say that? Being highly skilled and not being willing to work for below minimum wage is a *problem*? I'm speechless. I don't know what to say. My mouth is currently agape.
This is certainly not a company I would want to work for at any price, if this is how they think of their employees. She probably thinks her employees owe *her* money for hiring them!
Time shifting is both obvious and trivial, and hence any patent issued is invalid.
It is neither obvious nor trivial. Tell me who did real-time time shifting of TV shows (including watching the beginning of a show while the end of that same show is still recording) prior to TiVo. You couldn't do that with a VCR, and nobody was using PC's to time-shift at that time (and if they were, they didn't patent that feature - TiVo did).
The fact that it seems obvious and trivial now is a testament to how DVR's have changed our lives. There was nothing obvious or trivial about what they did when they were first invented, and that's the whole point of patents. DVR's are a major advance, an incredible invention, and one of the things that makes them so unique is the very feature TiVo is trying to protect.
All TiVo is asking for is a proper licensing deal, which it seems they're due, and which many other companies have with them already. This is not an SCO-like case. TiVo is not trying to claim something like they invented the hard drive and any device that uses a hard drive violates their copyright. They're saying their business is largely based on a particular feature of a particular device that they did patent before anybody else, and they're just trying to protect that patent and get Echostar to sign a licensing agreement with them, which Echostar should have done in the first place if their legal dept. was paying attention (it's very easy to look up a patent ahead of time). They're not claiming a generic feature of PC's as their own, or of any particular OS, and they're not claiming a patent on something that existed before they did. And they've owned this patent for a long time.
This is the sort of thing patent law was designed for. If you don't like patents in general, then you can argue against it on that position, though TiVo would likely be out of business without it. You can't argue, as I see it, against this specific patent, though. It's a perfectly reasonable sounding patent. Of course, IANAL.
It is smaller and lighter. iPods are already small. Many consumers value smallness hugely. To a consumer who cares more about unit size, than hard disk size, the mini iPod is better and cheaper.
To an extent I agree with you, but we've reached the point of diminishing returns IMO. First, I think we can all acknowledge that there comes a point at which smaller is just smaller, not better (no jokes, please!). I mean at some point it actually becomes a detriment to usability - the buttons have to be too small, it's hard to keep track of in your pocket (or wherever you keep it), it's more prone to damage, not as comfortable to hold in the hand, or whatever. Where that point is I'm sure varies a bit from person to person, but it exists for everybody - for example, nobody would be able to use an iPod the size of a Tic Tac, and almost everybody who tried would probably lose it within a week of buying one.
The regular iPod is already small - probably as small as a lot of people would want something like this to be (certainly not everybody, but a lot of people - just to head off some of the "it's not small enough for me!" responses). The iPod fits in your pocket but you never can forget it's there. It's light but has a nice, quality heft. It looks nice. People can easily see that you're using one (honestly, I think this is important to a lot of iPod users). And it's approximately the same size as a lot of other electronic gadgets we're used to - PDA's, cell phones, etc.
Now, according to Jobs, Apple is targeting the iPod Mini at the "Flash player market". If this is true, it's not going to work. People buy flash-based players because they're cheap, not because they're small. I would guess the current market share of players $200 and up in this category is exceedingly tiny - frankly, if you have more than $200 to spend on an MP3 player, you're going to get an iPod anyway (or some equivalent). So, now people have the choice of two iPods at approximately that price, one of which has more than three times the storage space - at best you've just split the iPod market without adding any new customers. At worst you've got a money-losing new product that doesn't sell.
I have no doubt there will be a flurry of initial orders for this thing from the Apple faithful - there are a lot of wealthy gadget lovers out there who also happen to be Mac-heads, and they buy pretty much everything Apple releases. Beyond that, though, I'm not sure. I don't see how this product opens the iPod up to any new customers it didn't have before.
2GB for $100 would have really hit a sweet spot, though, and probably would have absolutely destroyed the flash player market in one fell swoop. It would have opened up the iPod line to a vast new customer base and no doubt would have made buckets of money for Apple in the long-term (maybe not the short term due to cost, but if Apple ends up basically monopolizing the entire mp3 market, that can only be good for the bottom line over time). I don't really see the reasoning for what we got instead.
It might be ok to once in a while show some video to somebody, but if the device has to be large, then nobody will want to carry it. This seems to be another case of gee-whiz over what people really want.
Sounds like somebody has never heard of pr0n! All your downloaded pr0n files "in hand" on one device!
It's interesting that the act doesn't allow you to send unsolicited ads from a computer to a fax machine, but doesn't go as far as prohibiting sending them from a computer to a computer (even if it was receiving faxes).
Yes it does. Read the law itself, part of which says:
"The term ``telephone facsimile machine'' means equipment which has the capacity (A) to transcribe text or images, or both, from paper into an electronic signal and to transmit that signal over a regular telephone line, or (B) to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper."
Case law has established that this includes PC's capable of receiving faxes, and as you can see, it works in both directions.
I'm sure it will all wind up being digital, but there will be those die-hard people that will never change. (Like Charlie Chaplan refused to use films with sound, and didn't think it was an appropriate art form.) However, the nature of a print totally changes. It's a big deal to have an original print of a photo, one that's done from the negative. How is this going to effect the monetary value of the photos? For the record, I didn't RTFA. It might be answered in the article. (At least I'm honest.)
I'll just say that a true professional uses whatever tools are most appropriate for the job. If it's digital, it's digital. If it's analog, it's analog. Different photographers (or professionals in any field, really) do get used to working a certain way, and learn various tricks and techniques that they fear won't transfer over to a new medium, but it just then becomes a case where the advantages need to outweigh the hardship involved in learning a new system.
I don't think any true pro like Ansel Adams would be blindly loyal to one camera format or another (and that's all digital is; just another format in the grand scheme of things). If he didn't want to change, it wouldn't be because he was some sort of "die-hard" that refused to embrace new technology. It would only be because he didn't believe the advantages in the new format (convenience, ease of use, lightness of the equipment - which can be a big deal to a pro photographer) yet outweighed the disadvantages (lower resolution, lower sensitivity, less accurate color reproduction) or the difficulty in learning how to do the things you know how to do in one format on another.
In other words, it would only be because he felt that digital had not yet reached the quality of film - which is still true. But as digital improves, it's catching up fairly rapidly, and eventually I think he would have made the switch as will most current pros. I would bet that most pro landscape photographers already carry around a little point and shoot digital camera when they are not on formal shoots - as small and light as digital cameras are these days, and as good as the quality's getting, there's really no reason for a true photographer to ever be without one anymore. You never know when a great shot is going to present itself, and you're not always going to have your large-format film camera with you to capture it.
(Of course, a point and shoot film camera is just as small and light, but I do think in that segment of the market digital really pretty much has gotten to the point where the convenience eclipses any lingering resolution or color accuracy issues, and I think a lot of photographers are starting to realize that. A 5 megapixel point and shoot is good enough for the purposes of capturing quick shots that you'd otherwise miss, and with no worrying about running out of film or whether you actually got the shot afterwards.)
Diebold's attitudes toward their voting machines make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines were demonstrated to be.
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So is it such a slow news day that there's literally nothing to post but personal insults? I mean really, that's what this is. There's no "news for nerds" here, no "stuff that matters". Just a story about a guy who's clueless about his personal laptop. Big deal. "Ha ha! Look at this dork with his goofy thing that he has!" Sheesh. Different people like different things, not everybody is an Apple lover, and not everybody has good taste; get over it. This is certainly not front page news.
not being backwards compatible will just push everyone to playstation. Hopefully, the playstation 3 will still play playstation 1 games. sure, those games won't look as cool as the newest games, but being able to play them is the point in having a game system.
Being able to play PS1 games is the reason for having a PS3? Sorry, I don't buy it - I think being able to play PS3 games is the reason for having a PS3. Backwards compatibility is extremely overrated, and the only reason people think about it at all is because of the PS2 - which would have been successful with or without it. In fact, the only reason Sony included it is because they could - not because they had to. It just so happened that they could manage to use a PS1 CPU for the I/O functions of the PS2, which made backward compatibility very easy to include. Otherwise, they wouldn't have done it.
There has only been one other home console I can think of offhand with backward compatibility built in: the Atari 7800. And we all know what a great success that system was. Mind you, this is in an industry that now has nearly a 30 year history, and has seen upwards of 100 programmable home console systems (both major and minor) released in various territories.
If MS can lower costs and include better functionality in the Xbox 2 at the expense of backward compatibility, they should do it. People with short memories and/or attention spans always look at whatever's successful in the current generation and automatically think it's suicide if every other company doesn't follow the exact same template - this industry has never worked that way. There's no such thing as a "standard feature" in the game console industry and even if there was, with only two major systems to have it, backward compatibility wouldn't even come close to being one of those standards.
greed - the posting was way over the top for something that is old news. If you own a Tivo and didn't know this was taking place, then you haven't been paying attention.
Wouldn't surprise me if that's the problem - the original poster not owning a TiVo, and commenting on something he therefore knows little about. Everybody I know that owns a TiVo, as well as TiVo owners I've talked to on various message boards (such as at tivocommunity.com, seems to know and be perfectly fine with this practice.
And speaking as a TiVo owner myself, I have absolutely no problem with it. In fact, I tried to sign up to have my data collected non-anonymously - a service TiVo allows their customers to provide optionally (their web site wouldn't accept my TiVo model # when I tried to sign up). People complain constantly about the poor state of television in this country - this is how you go about changing that. If a show sucks, you don't watch it, and TiVo knows it and will tell the networks. I want TiVo to know that my viewing consists primarily of Antiques Roadshow, Once and Again reruns, The Office, Survivor and Mystery Science Theater 3000. And I want the added leverage (however small) of having an actual name attached to that data when it reaches the networks. I am not concerned in the slightest with how the networks plan to use this information, but if you're that embarrassed about your TV viewing habits that you can't bear the thought of anybody else knowing about them, then either just stay anonymous or don't buy TiVo. But they're not trying to hide anything - they post their privacy policy all over the place when you sign up.
Instead of actually doing something useful, they sit around and argue over the right font to use.
And we sit around arguing over their arguments. Which is worse?
That article lost me the minute the guy started talking about how his camera was too technologically advanced because it had options to force the flash or set long exposure times.
These are options that have been available on cameras for approximately 100 years.
I mean, we have gotten to the point where if technology does not simplify our lives to a ridiculous degree, we blame the technology, even if technology is giving us the same exact features we've always had! What was fine before suddenly becomes burdensome simply because it's digital and our expectations are different. Do we expect to have fewer features in digital products than we did in analog, simply because we're too stupid or impatient to read a damn manual? It seems that way.
I'd like to keep my long exposure, manual focus, forced flash and aperture modes, thanks. I am happy camera makers are continuing to provide these as options on some models and are even filtering them down to less expensive consumer cameras. Not every product needs to pander to the lowest common denominator.
1) There is still a "digital divide". Not everyone has or wants a computer with web access at home; unfortunately this is usually for financial reasons. Netflix is not a viable option for them.
This is true, but the numbers you'd be talking about are exceedingly small and getting smaller all the time. Everybody has access to a computer somewhere, even if it's at their local library (even that's extreme, though; most people have PC's at work, at least). And Netflix is very low-maintenance once you've used it the first time - you seem to be under the impression that you need to be constantly picking out movies. You don't. Even new releases can be ordered months in advance (often while they're still in theaters), and Netflix will just ship them to you as soon as they get them.
2) People want to be able to pick up a movie on the way home from work on Friday night. They don't want to have to plan spontaneous movie night a week in advance (to account for shipping time).
I can tell from this that you haven't used Netflix. If you want a particular movie on a particular date, then yes, you have to ask for it in advance. But the whole point of Netflix is that you always have movies to watch. They send you three, you watch them whenever you want, you send them back whenever you want and they instantly send you more depending on what you've queued up. The only time you get stuck without a movie on the weekend is if you're too lazy to drop your already watched discs in the mailbox - which is less effort than going to Blockbuster on Friday.
For most working people I know, this means they watch a couple movies on the weekend, send them back on Monday, and usually by Wednesday they have new movies to watch, without doing anything at all but opening up the cover of a mailbox and dropping a couple envelopes in.
3) New releases can be had the day of release at Blockbuster. With Netflix, you're lucky to get it a week later. Not a big deal for the patient, but some people want it ASAP.
More like a day later. Which means the same weekend, since new releases generally come out on Tuesday. I've never had a problem getting any new release I want from Netflix (granted, I'm not usually big on new releases; I don't really care that much... so I'm not saying you'd never have a problem, just that I haven't personally).
4) Not everyone rents enough movies every month to make the $20 worthwhile.
This is really the only thing you've mentioned that I think would be valid for any real quantity of potential customers. But I don't think those people are really better served by Blockbuster anyway, because they're not the kind of people that make it a habit of going to the video store - which means they'll probably rack up late fees on any movies they do rent. This is what ultimately convinced me - I'd rent like one movie a month and rack up the rental fee ($4.32 with tax) plus usually about $10 in late fees. I figured, one movie for $15, I may as well either just buy it, or go with Netflix and spend another $5 to get 10-15 more movies. I now watch a hell of a lot more movies and pay hardly any more money.
It's no coincidence, I think, that Blockbuster's really losing money lately while Netflix has turned profitable. It's really a great service that works exactly the way I'd want a DVD rental service to work. And it made EZD's obsolete before they even hit the market.
Those 601s are a very nice chip, and quite underestimated at what they can do at low clock speeds. If the RAD6000 is anywhere similar, I can understand why it was picked.
I doubt it, because it probably had little to do with performance. I read an article a while back (tried to Google it now, couldn't find it) that said NASA is generally about ten years behind consumer PC's in terms of the CPU speeds they send into space. These things have to go through so much testing for reliability, etc. that it often takes that long to certify a CPU for space flight. When they do find a CPU they can certify, they'll often continue using it for years. They won't just stick the latest PPC chip in a vehicle, assuming it's the same as the last one, only faster. That's the quickest way I can think of to disaster.
Not much CPU power is really needed for space flight, though, and there's not really much point in taking along more than you need. We went to the moon using slide rules. We can make it to Mars on 20mhz chips - and I'll bet the only reason we even need that much power is for the scientific experiments on the surface. Speed is not really the primary concern on space missions.
The above system in Hamburg looks like the Maerklin trains.
:)
Or as we call them in the US, "Marklin" trains
Not sure which is more technically correct - it's an "a" with an umlaut over it, which is just too hard to type on an English keyboard/OS!
They have a digital control system where by you don't have to have any blocks to control your trains. You put out full voltage onto the rails at all times and then the engines know what direction they should go and how fast to go. It is a much better system and more realistically approximates the way real trains work.
Marklin has no copyright or trademark on this. It's called Digital Command Control and it's what most model railroaders the world over use today. See here. Nearly all current model locomotives made and/or marketed in the US (and Europe and Japan, for that matter) are now DCC-ready.
btw, Marklin trains are some high-quality trains, alright (my brother deals almost exclusively with them)... but so are a lot of other makes. There's always somewhat of a debate on who makes the best equipment, but I think most model railroaders agree that it really depends these days on the specific car/locomotive being modeled - one company may make a better looking and running ICE, another may make a better looking and running SD40-2, another may make a better looking and running Hudson J2E. All of the major manufacturers in HO and N (Kato, Tomix, Walthers, Atlas, Marklin, etc.) maintain at least a basic standard of quality - they're all at least good, all the time.
Oh, and if you're wondering, metal is not better than plastic! At least not as a rule. It's nearly impossible to get the same level of precision and detail in die-cast as in plastic, and while brass is still fairly popular, it's also extremely expensive and extremely fragile (relegating brass trains mainly to display duty these days - nobody wants to derail a $5,000 train and see it go tumbling to the floor, pieces breaking off all the way down!).
I've always presumed such layouts are not attempts to faithfully duplicate the layout of the rail line but to represent the scenery through which a traveler would pass. That is, there's no attempt to duplicate or scale "Then this spur goes east for 24 miles before it turns north for three more..." just do something like "and after we pass through the pine forest here near the bedroom door, we hit the town of Pidegeonville, which I placed next to the window..."
You are correct. There are actual scale model railroads (there's a museum in Chicago with a real scale model railroad of the Chicago area, for example - it's really impressive!), but they're rare. Most model railroaders attempt to model the "spirit" of a railroad, along with maybe some of its individually distinctive features, but they'll drastically shorten the "dead" areas of a railroad and/or combine the less distinctive features. The point is to capture the highlights of a railroad. Of course, many people don't bother modeling real railroads because they don't want to burden themselves with questions of accuracy - they just build whatever they think looks nice.
Same is actually true for the trains themselves. There's a segment of model railroaders who are derisively called "rivet counters" by the rest - these are people who are absolute sticklers for train model accuracy down to the last rivet. Most model railroaders, though, will accept some inaccuracies in their trains, and one of the main areas of inaccuracies is in the consists. Like layouts themselves, this is to save space - in HO scale, a typical passenger train made up of three or four locomotives and 17 or 18 85' cars could be 21-22 feet long! Most model railroaders do not run accurate trains; they run representations of them, featuring one or at the most two of every type of car in a passenger train, or simply shortened freight trains (many of which are just long and monotonous in real life anyway, IMO).
Of course, choosing a smaller scale will let you model more in the same space, but sometimes in less detail. In the US, HO scale is most popular because it still generally offers the best balance between detail level and space savings (vs. the original O scale). In Japan, N scale is the most popular because of the small size of many dwellings there - and I also think because Japanese model railroading is more fixed-consist passenger-oriented (vs. mixed freight here), so to model a train that looks remotely realistic you have to run fairly long trains. N scale has also improved dramatically in detail level over the past 20 or so years, so I expect if this hobby survives there will be a gradual increase in the popularity of N scale in this country, leading to somewhat more realistically-sized layouts.
It's a hobby still in slow decline in the US, though, going hand in hand with the decline of passenger trains in general (and the rise of other pastimes such as video and computer games - kids who in generations past would grow up with train sets are now growing up with PlayStations instead). Which is a shame - many of these layouts really are true historical documents, in the same way any museum diorama is. And they're fun, too!
from well, anywhere but the US? :)
I can buy one at the Japanese market down the street from me for $119. They do exist in the US, you just have to know where to look. Of course, a wide variety of web sites sell them too.
It's moot in terms of this discussion, though, because CSS has nothing to do with region coding. My player's region free but it's still CSS-protected - you can't make a digital copy of DVD's even if you could somehow connect a PC to it. My old Apex player would remove the CSS protection but as far as I know there was nothing you could really do with the resulting data (unless someone did eventually invent a cable and connector to do it... but then why not just use a DVD-ROM drive to begin with?).
My point? I have no point. Well, maybe just that we should clarify what CSS really does before talking about what the removal of it can do for us. Using DeCSS is not going to remove region coding on your DVD player (not like you could use it on a standalone player anyway), nor is it going to do it for you on a DVD-ROM drive (though other commonly-available firmware utilities will).
Get yourself a Model M - I found mine at a salvage yard for $5 (not including the PS/2 it was attached to). Loudest most satisfying keyboard I have ever owned. Guaranteed to keep the housemates awake and sharpening their bowie knives.
You'll find lots of Model M stalwarts out there, including myself. This is a keyboard that harkens back to a time when keyboards were considered honest to goodness peripherals, not just little flimsy bits included in the box when you buy your PC and best not thought about. The Model M is not the only high quality, tank-like mechanical keyboard to ever come out, but it's by far the cheapest if you want to go that route now (you can still buy Northgate keyboards marketed under the Avant name, for example, but they cost more than $100).
You know you're old-school when you have to make sure you avoid the full DIN connector model when purchasing.
As for the PS/2/USB debate (yeah, not sure how else to write that), I'm sticking with PS/2 until somebody invents something better. USB ain't it, at least not for keyboards and mice. 125hz vs. 200hz? No thanks. You also can't even use your keyboard until the USB driver has loaded - same goes for the mouse. This means if you get stuck in DOS for whatever reason (or, say, at the Recovery Console), you're basically screwed. Same is true for anyone using Linux - I tried a USB keyboard on a Linux box, and every time I screwed something up I'd just have to go and connect my Model M up anyway. I'll say the opposite of what someone else said: it's always better to have a dedicated connector intended to do one thing and one thing only. The PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports on your PC are only intended for the keyboard and mouse and because of that they work better with those devices than any other port your PC has.
I don't have an Apple and I don't have any Intel chips in my PC...
Apple was not the "original un-Microsoft". In fact, Apple was excited that MS would be porting their software to the original Mac (as they still are now). I'm not sure when you first started using computers but there was a time when there were many OS's on the market, all of which filled their own niche, some of which competed more or less equally against each other. I personally owned an Apple II which ran Apple's own DOS, or various other OS's that you could buy. Commodore had their own OS. IBM had PC-DOS. MS had MS-DOS. Atari had various OS's for their 8 bit and 16 bit machines.
No OS gained real dominance until Windows. And Windows was released after the Mac (and probably because of it). So really, it's more accurate to say MS is the original "un-Apple" than the other way around. MS took what Apple did and turned it against them, something they do very well with all of their products - which raises the interesting question, "would MS be as dominant now if Apple didn't exist?" My guess would be yes, but who really knows? IBM was dominant then and might still be today, and we could be using Linux or OS/2 on our workplace PC's instead of Windows.
3. Apple made lots of mistakes early on. They did not almost go out of business because Microsoft had a superior product.
Lots of people (not just you) seem to be doing a bit of history revision here - the original battle in 1984 was not between Apple and MS, it was between Apple and IBM. Read the article if you don't believe it, but I also recall this clearly and it was even the subject of Apple's famous 1984 SuperBowl ad ("Big Brother" was represented by IBM, not Microsoft).
In 1984, IBM still had a stranglehold on the corporate market. This was, in all honesty, the market the Mac was originally intended for. It was designed as an easier computer for non-technical company drones to use - rather than spending weeks training on how to use an IBM PC, they just sit down and start clicking around with their mouse. The Apple II line was expected (initially) to continue as Apple's home machine. Design work (which would become Apple's main niche later on) was not even a consideration back then - no desktop computer was powerful enough to handle it. There was no "Think Different" campaign back then - the idea of the Mac was not to enable creativity, it was about letting accountants work with spreadsheets more easily.
In the end, Apple never did gain the corporate foothold that they wanted, and both Apple and IBM were eventually overwhelmed in the desktop market by MS. Apple didn't see this coming at all when they released the Mac, and neither, obviously, did IBM. MS turned PC's into commodities - it didn't matter anymore whether you had an IBM PC or a clone, because the clones would run IBM-compatible operating systems just as well. (Don't forget that IBM had their own competing OS - PC DOS - that MS-DOS was a clone of, and this was what was generally installed on clone machines.)
Both Apple and IBM continuously lost market share through the 1980s and 1990s to cheaper IBM-compatible clone machines running MS software. Apple quickly discontinued the Apple II line and put all their egges in one basket with the Mac (Jobs considered the Apple II to be largely Steve Wozniak's machine, and I still believe the discontinuation of the line was partly a personal decision - at that point in time the Apple II line was actually more powerful and more expandable than the Mac, with more software and hardware add-ons available). If they had not hit on the strategy of pitching Macs for creative work (which didn't happen until at least the late 80's or early 90's), there is no question Apple would have been out of business. They had no other market, and had failed in all of their efforts at retaining market share both at home and in the workplace (not to mention schools, for that matter). The major slide started, btw, when Jobs was still leading the company. I always smirk when I read Mac fans acting as if Jobs is the savior of Apple; in fact, he pretty well drove the company into the ground with his early strategies, but to his credit he seems to have learned a lot over the years about how to run a company.
Anyway, so the initial enemy was IBM, who were thought of back then in much the same way many people think of MS now. It's one of the biggest ironies in the history of the computing industry that at this moment, the only major internal part that separates Apple architecture from (IBM-compatible) PC architecture is a CPU that's co-produced and designed by IBM.
Anime character typically have exagerated traits, most notably the proportions of the legs, and most obviously the large eyes.
Those concept art pictures depict normal humans with proportions that actually occur in nature and not just on paper. The kind of humans that are likely to actually show up for casting.
Way to generalize. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's character designs on Evangelion were purposely made more realistic than typical anime - the eyes and faces are in more or less correct proportion, and except for some too-perfect bodies on the adults, the overall proportions are pretty much right as well. No, you don't generally see chicks walking around in real life with blue hair and red eyes (well, unless you live in the East Village in NYC, as I used to), but for the most part the characters in Evangelion look pretty plausible. At least as plausible as any characters you'd see on western animations like The Family Guy or King of the Hill; just more in fitting with Japanese body types than American.
And yes, I do think the characters in these concept sketches look "dumpy". Part of it's the difference in cultures - it's a fact that average heights, weights, and body fat percentages (not to mention obesity rates) are lower in Japan than in the west. People are just shorter and thinner. I always thought Asuka looked a bit too thin in the series (her character grew up in Germany) but there's no reason that Rei, for one example, would be anything but the perfect ideal of what a young teenage girl should look like. That's actually a big part of the plot.
Also, I don't know when the last time was that some of you visited your local high school and looked at the freshman class. They're small. Really small. Shockingly small, considering the fact that most people seem to consider high school the age when children become adults (hence their use in Evangelion). This is irregardless of culture. Last time I visited my high school I couldn't believe how young and little these kids looked; I remember thinking I was a big man back then.
So I guess I do have a problem with some of these designs. And I don't think it's an excuse to say "the kind of humans that are likely to show up for casting" - that's a cop-out. Find some actors and actresses that fit the plot; that's the whole point of casting. These kids have to be small and thin to fit inside the plugs - there's not supposed to be a lot of room in there.
To be honest, I think that China is doing it right. The USA is afraid of making an investment into this, yet it is killing us not to do so. We use the roads, but our traffic is at 60 Miles/hour (100 kph) which is actually damn slow today. If we built one of these, we would see the advantage of it and move rapidly to it.
If the government could get past their hog trough, they would realize that the best place to put is from New York to milwaukee via pit, detroit, and chicago. The airlines, ships, buses, rail, and trucks make more money on this route than any other going (save NY to LA). Yet it is a small route.
I don't think you quite understand what you yourself are saying.
We move at 60mph on our roads, which is slow, yet the airlines make buckets of money on the route you're proposing. These two statements are at once contradictory and also illustrative of the reason we don't have, nor do we need, a maglev on this route (or probably anywhere else). It would still take longer to travel via maglev from New York to Detroit than it would to fly, and it would be much more expensive to boot. Those who do not care about speed will drive or take existing trains - there is no market that is not currently being served by some mode of existing transportation.
Don't think I am against mass transit or trains in particular. If nothing else in life, I'm a massive rail buff. But, as others have pointed out, regular old high speed rail works perfectly well enough for the purpose that maglev was developed for, and it's much, much, much cheaper. We in the US have been developing high speed rail at a too-slow pace, but we do have it to an extent in the Northeast Corridor and have had off-and-on plans to build it elsewhere. This can be accomplished by simply upgrading existing track, signaling and catenary wires, giving you about 75% of the overall capability of maglev for about 1/10 the cost. I think this is a no-brainer.
I'm not convinced maglev will be successful in China. It certainly will not take the place of airlines. It's definitely not necessary in Japan or parts of Europe where regular high-speed rail is already a reality, and I'd call it more of a pork-barrel project than anything else in any country with an existing rail system of any sort.
I do agree that we spend far too little on rail in general in this country; especially on heavily traveled corridors such as the NEC and California corridor where there is clearly a demand for high speed rail service. Even the NEC, which does have high speed rail, is woefully undermaintained (and the Acela Express therefore limited to running well below its rated speed most of the time). Our priorities in this country are pretty out of whack when it comes to transit, but that doesn't mean maglev is a good idea for us.
Points to HP for bucking the trend and using standards instead of the Microsoft assigned format.
Oh come on. As the parent (or grandfather) says, this is a war of two monopolies. Neither one is using standards. I can't play iTunes files on my computer even though I have half a dozen players that will play, rip, and burn AAC files, because of Apple's DRM. I can't play them on my portable player either. DRM may be considered a necessary evil for these companies but it also means that all of these formats are proprietary. Stick DRM on a Vorbis or MP3 file and that renders it proprietary as well.
HP said they "chose the most popular format", not that they "chose a standard", because they didn't choose a standard. They just chose one proprietary format over another. (Of course, the iPod also plays MP3's - but this is technically a proprietary format as well, albeit a pretty universal one. The point, though, is that you can't buy songs off Wal-Mart or Napster or whatever and play them on the HP iPod, just like Napster player owners can't buy songs off iTunes and play them.)
I think it's important to point out in discussions like this, because they still get turned into David (Apple) vs. Goliath (MS) arguments more often than not. The fact is in terms of music it's at best two Goliaths. Neither of these companies believes in standards, except the ones they set themselves and then expect the rest of the world to follow whether the world likes it or not.
Me, I'm sticking with buying and ripping my own CD's until someone gives me a real standard format for download. Which will never happen, because the music industry won't allow it. I guess I'm stuck with my own private digital revolution.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/images.html
Looking at the raw images, it almost appears that they take three separate monocrhome images when they want a color photo - one for each channel. This would make perfect sense, and would probably be easy enough to verify (just download and combine in Photoshop; see what you get). This isn't "colorizing" if that's the case; this is the best way to get the most accurate color. There are a few reasons it's generally not done in commercially available digital cameras; for one, you'd need a perfectly stable tripod, and the time to take three pictures.
I am inclined not to believe that NASA doctored these color photos. If they did, I am inclined not to care. There's no scientific sleight of hand going on here, as these are publicity photos, and the raw photos are the ones that will be studied.
"But hey, I could be wrong, and we could all be getting $99 hPods next December. "
It seems obvious that part of the licensing deal would stipulate that HP cannot undercut Apple's pricing. I would be shocked to see any HP models with anything but the same capacities as Apple's at the same prices. And if anything, they'll be physically bigger, or won't look as nice. Apple's going to keep the high ground somehow.
"The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S."
Did she actually say that? Being highly skilled and not being willing to work for below minimum wage is a *problem*? I'm speechless. I don't know what to say. My mouth is currently agape.
This is certainly not a company I would want to work for at any price, if this is how they think of their employees. She probably thinks her employees owe *her* money for hiring them!
Time shifting is both obvious and trivial, and hence any patent issued is invalid.
It is neither obvious nor trivial. Tell me who did real-time time shifting of TV shows (including watching the beginning of a show while the end of that same show is still recording) prior to TiVo. You couldn't do that with a VCR, and nobody was using PC's to time-shift at that time (and if they were, they didn't patent that feature - TiVo did).
The fact that it seems obvious and trivial now is a testament to how DVR's have changed our lives. There was nothing obvious or trivial about what they did when they were first invented, and that's the whole point of patents. DVR's are a major advance, an incredible invention, and one of the things that makes them so unique is the very feature TiVo is trying to protect.
All TiVo is asking for is a proper licensing deal, which it seems they're due, and which many other companies have with them already. This is not an SCO-like case. TiVo is not trying to claim something like they invented the hard drive and any device that uses a hard drive violates their copyright. They're saying their business is largely based on a particular feature of a particular device that they did patent before anybody else, and they're just trying to protect that patent and get Echostar to sign a licensing agreement with them, which Echostar should have done in the first place if their legal dept. was paying attention (it's very easy to look up a patent ahead of time). They're not claiming a generic feature of PC's as their own, or of any particular OS, and they're not claiming a patent on something that existed before they did. And they've owned this patent for a long time.
This is the sort of thing patent law was designed for. If you don't like patents in general, then you can argue against it on that position, though TiVo would likely be out of business without it. You can't argue, as I see it, against this specific patent, though. It's a perfectly reasonable sounding patent. Of course, IANAL.
It is smaller and lighter. iPods are already small. Many consumers value smallness hugely. To a consumer who cares more about unit size, than hard disk size, the mini iPod is better and cheaper.
To an extent I agree with you, but we've reached the point of diminishing returns IMO. First, I think we can all acknowledge that there comes a point at which smaller is just smaller, not better (no jokes, please!). I mean at some point it actually becomes a detriment to usability - the buttons have to be too small, it's hard to keep track of in your pocket (or wherever you keep it), it's more prone to damage, not as comfortable to hold in the hand, or whatever. Where that point is I'm sure varies a bit from person to person, but it exists for everybody - for example, nobody would be able to use an iPod the size of a Tic Tac, and almost everybody who tried would probably lose it within a week of buying one.
The regular iPod is already small - probably as small as a lot of people would want something like this to be (certainly not everybody, but a lot of people - just to head off some of the "it's not small enough for me!" responses). The iPod fits in your pocket but you never can forget it's there. It's light but has a nice, quality heft. It looks nice. People can easily see that you're using one (honestly, I think this is important to a lot of iPod users). And it's approximately the same size as a lot of other electronic gadgets we're used to - PDA's, cell phones, etc.
Now, according to Jobs, Apple is targeting the iPod Mini at the "Flash player market". If this is true, it's not going to work. People buy flash-based players because they're cheap, not because they're small. I would guess the current market share of players $200 and up in this category is exceedingly tiny - frankly, if you have more than $200 to spend on an MP3 player, you're going to get an iPod anyway (or some equivalent). So, now people have the choice of two iPods at approximately that price, one of which has more than three times the storage space - at best you've just split the iPod market without adding any new customers. At worst you've got a money-losing new product that doesn't sell.
I have no doubt there will be a flurry of initial orders for this thing from the Apple faithful - there are a lot of wealthy gadget lovers out there who also happen to be Mac-heads, and they buy pretty much everything Apple releases. Beyond that, though, I'm not sure. I don't see how this product opens the iPod up to any new customers it didn't have before.
2GB for $100 would have really hit a sweet spot, though, and probably would have absolutely destroyed the flash player market in one fell swoop. It would have opened up the iPod line to a vast new customer base and no doubt would have made buckets of money for Apple in the long-term (maybe not the short term due to cost, but if Apple ends up basically monopolizing the entire mp3 market, that can only be good for the bottom line over time). I don't really see the reasoning for what we got instead.
It might be ok to once in a while show some video to somebody, but if the device has to be large, then nobody will want to carry it. This seems to be another case of gee-whiz over what people really want.
Sounds like somebody has never heard of pr0n! All your downloaded pr0n files "in hand" on one device!
It's interesting that the act doesn't allow you to send unsolicited ads from a computer to a fax machine, but doesn't go as far as prohibiting sending them from a computer to a computer (even if it was receiving faxes).
Yes it does. Read the law itself, part of which says:
"The term ``telephone facsimile machine'' means equipment which has the capacity (A) to transcribe text or images, or both, from paper into an electronic signal and to transmit that signal over a regular telephone line, or (B) to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper."
Case law has established that this includes PC's capable of receiving faxes, and as you can see, it works in both directions.
I'm sure it will all wind up being digital, but there will be those die-hard people that will never change. (Like Charlie Chaplan refused to use films with sound, and didn't think it was an appropriate art form.) However, the nature of a print totally changes. It's a big deal to have an original print of a photo, one that's done from the negative. How is this going to effect the monetary value of the photos? For the record, I didn't RTFA. It might be answered in the article. (At least I'm honest.)
I'll just say that a true professional uses whatever tools are most appropriate for the job. If it's digital, it's digital. If it's analog, it's analog. Different photographers (or professionals in any field, really) do get used to working a certain way, and learn various tricks and techniques that they fear won't transfer over to a new medium, but it just then becomes a case where the advantages need to outweigh the hardship involved in learning a new system.
I don't think any true pro like Ansel Adams would be blindly loyal to one camera format or another (and that's all digital is; just another format in the grand scheme of things). If he didn't want to change, it wouldn't be because he was some sort of "die-hard" that refused to embrace new technology. It would only be because he didn't believe the advantages in the new format (convenience, ease of use, lightness of the equipment - which can be a big deal to a pro photographer) yet outweighed the disadvantages (lower resolution, lower sensitivity, less accurate color reproduction) or the difficulty in learning how to do the things you know how to do in one format on another.
In other words, it would only be because he felt that digital had not yet reached the quality of film - which is still true. But as digital improves, it's catching up fairly rapidly, and eventually I think he would have made the switch as will most current pros. I would bet that most pro landscape photographers already carry around a little point and shoot digital camera when they are not on formal shoots - as small and light as digital cameras are these days, and as good as the quality's getting, there's really no reason for a true photographer to ever be without one anymore. You never know when a great shot is going to present itself, and you're not always going to have your large-format film camera with you to capture it.
(Of course, a point and shoot film camera is just as small and light, but I do think in that segment of the market digital really pretty much has gotten to the point where the convenience eclipses any lingering resolution or color accuracy issues, and I think a lot of photographers are starting to realize that. A 5 megapixel point and shoot is good enough for the purposes of capturing quick shots that you'd otherwise miss, and with no worrying about running out of film or whether you actually got the shot afterwards.)
Diebold's attitudes toward their voting machines make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines were demonstrated to be.
Now why would you worry about Diebold ATM's?