Those are all perefectly valid questions that aren't being asked by our government. We don't even have a national dialog yet.
Listen, I have no problem with the pragmaticism cutting both ways, but I would at least prefer an honest discussion, as opposed to faith-based suppositions.
The problem right now is the fundamental framing of the issue by our politicians and media.
What ever happened to pragmaticsm? Seriously?
Wouldn't you rather be wrong about the fact there is global warming than be wrong about there not being global warming?
That's what I don't understand. Look at it from a free-market perspective for christsakes. Markets are all about hedging bets and spotting potential trouble on the horizon and then taking steps to reduce the potential issues. It's called due diligence.
We live in a country that has the most incredible technology, ever. We act like we are an enlightened society. And yet we don't do anything except react. True moral leadership comes from seeing problems before they are problems and then fixing them. When a society fails, it comes from the inability to see where policies will lead. If you look at great empires that have crumbled, they fail from the inside out. Easter Island? It failed because no one was smart enough to say "Gee, maybe we should stop cutting trees."
Rome? "Gee, maybe we shouldn't over-extend ourselves." Followed by, "Nobody could have expected the Huns to invade."
And this keeps going on and on through history. Empires fail due to a confluence of events and policies. And we, as a country, as an idea, continually ignore any sort of cautionary tale.
I don't want to sound flip or ironic... I just want people to start realizing that the stuff that is happening right now matters. It matters who we put into office. It matters what kind of car we drive. It matters that we aren't asking the really tough questions. Because the ugly stuff, the talk of what is looming as a very real threat to our entire way of life, is absolutely important.
I posted this last week but it got lost in the modding shuffle. I'm really interested to see if anyone else agrees with this so I'm going to repost it here:
Apple is building a remote. It will really be a thin client/palm-style device. But it will be marketed as a remote for your entire life. Look, apple's already said that they view thier media in a modular way. That's because they are a weird amalgamation of a software and hardware. This model really affects thier design in a fundamental way. They view both as feeding the other. Unlike Microsoft. Or Sony. Both of those companies don't have the (ability) (balls) (forsight) to realize that you really do benefit from doing both. That's because the new tech market is turning towards usability as it's prime selling point. Witness the iPod. But you know this.
Now, think about the home media center. What is the primary user interface element? The remote. For all intents and purposes, the equipment has acheived a level of abstraction in our heads. What do the butttons on a TV do? Who cares? The remote can do it. My AV receiver doesn't even have all the bottons on the face. Only on the remote. And this abstraction yeilds some interesting results.
One, that you handle your remote more times in the average day than a book or your keyes. We don't even realize how much time we spend with these damn things. They are integral. And they almost uniformly suck. How many remotes do you use? How much fumbling? Your universal remote does most things. But what about when you need to schedule and rank your DVR? The remote falls apart. The fuction is mapped to some button that is not intuitive. It's a giant mess. Sort like the MP3 market ummm.... four years ago.
While the remote is bad at it's primary function, it falls apart completely when it comes to digital media. Enter microsoft with their assinine "Media Center PC" Why God, why? Why do you need a whole new computer in your living room? You already have a computer somewhere in your house. But Microsoft is a software company. They need to sell the software. They're trying to break out of this with the Xbox. And they will haves success. But it's a lackluster implimentation of the central problem: the remoteis the media center, see. How are people going to interact with the Xbox? With the controller and a TV monitor. This is crummy, in my mind, because if thier view of media is to add another box to the den that just happens to deal with my digital media as a second fuction, I call bullshit. Let each componant do what it is primarily good at. The Xbox controller , even if it includes that rollerball thing, still is a poor way to interact with media. It'll be good for gamers, sure. But that will color the rest of it functionality. It already has, really. See, there's no big, legible display to speak of on the damn thing. So you abstract the abstract. The Xbox took over your media and the controller takes over your Xbox, which makes you look at the tv screen as the navigation aid. I'm not sure if I can exactly explain why.... but this feels icky to me.
So, this is where Apple steps in. The Airport express is an important clue. The idea is make a centeral computer and stream over the air the media to a router near the media center. But make the router "magic" Using, I don't know, Rendevou...err... Bonjour. Which just got released for the PC, yes? Pieces are starting to fall into place. So, what's misssing is a remote that doesn't suck for your media that can interact wirelessly with your media. Something like a big lcd touchscreen. And only like an LCD screen. Nothing else. It's the display and the input. Simple. Elegant. Getting cheap. This is a thin client, really. But it won't be marketed as such. No, it'll be the iPod for the rest of your life. It'll be your remote. It'll be your newspaper. It'll be your media manipulator (edit movies, work on garage band tracks, retouch photos). It will be your morning newspaper. It will be the thing you pick up when you put your iPod down. Think about it. All the technology is there. But
I agree that LCD remotes suck right now. But look at Dashboard. Here's how I see it working: You're reading your morning paper on the iThing and want to change the chanel on the kitchen TV. Invoke an expose/dashboard-like function where your remotes swoop onto the screen. Change the channel. Swoop out. Expand the idea of widgets into remotes. HTML java, easy, right? So... imagine dashboard. I think that's a clue, too. That wouldn't suck so much, I think. Especially if they release a bone simple API for it. Electronics companies will jump all over this, because they know it will be huge. After all, it's just java and HTML. They'll run on anything fairly easily.
I've posted this a couple of times before, but it works here as well.
This is a remote. Or Apple's version of one. Look, apple's already said that they veiw thier media in a modular way. That's because they are a weird amalgamation of a software and hardware. This model really affects thier design in a fundamental way. They view both as feeding the other. Unlike Microsoft. Or Sony. Both of those companies don't have the (ability) (balls) (forsight) to realize that you really do benefit from doing both. That's because the new tech market is turning towards usability as it's prime selling point. Witness the iPod. But you know this.
Now, think about the home media center. What is the primary user interface element? The remote. For all intents and purposes, the equipment has acheived a level of abstraction in our heads. What do the butttons on a TV do? Who cares? The remote can do it. My AV receiver doesn't even have all the bottons on the face. Only on the remote. And this abstraction yeilds some interesting results.
One, that you handle your remote more times in the average day than a book or your keyes. We don't even realize how much time we spend with these damn things. They are integral. And they almost uniformly suck. How many remotes do you use? How much fumbling? Your universal remote does most things. But what about when you need to schedule and rank your DVR? The remote falls apart. The fuction is mapped to some button that is not intuitive. It's a giant mess. Sort like the MP3 market ummm.... four years ago.
While the remote is bad at it's primary function, it falls apart completely when it comes to digital media. Enter microsoft with their assinine "Media Center PC" Why God, why? Why do you need a whole new computer in your living room? You already have a computer somewhere in your house. But Microsoft is a software company. They need to sell the software. They're trying to break out of this with the Xbox. And they will haves success. But it's a lackluster implimentation of the central problem: the remoteis the media center, see. How are people going to interact with the Xbox? With the controller and a TV monitor. This is crummy, in my mind, because if thier view of media is to add another box to the den that just happens to deal with my digital media as a second fuction, I call bullshit. Let each componant do what it is primarily good at. The Xbox controller , even if it includes that rollerball thing, still is a poor way to interact with media. It'll be good for gamers, sure. But that will color the rest of it functionality. It already has, really. See, there's no big, legible display to speak of on the damn thing. So you abstract the abstract. The Xbox took over your media and the controller takes over your Xbox, which makes you look at the tv screen as the navigation aid. I'm not sure if I can exactly explain why.... but this feels icky to me.
So, this is where Apple steps in. The Airport express is an important clue. The idea is make a centeral computer and stream over the air the media to a router near the media center. But make the router "magic" Using, I don't know, Rendevou...err... Bonjour. Which just got released for the PC, yes? Pieces are starting to fall into place. So, what's misssing is a remote that doesn't suck for your media that can interact wirelessly with your media. Something like a big lcd touchscreen. And only like an LCD screen. Nothing else. It's the display and the input. Simple. Elegant. Getting cheap. This is a thin client, really. But it won't be marketed as such. No, it'll be the iPod for the rest of your life. It'll be your remote. It'll be your newspaper. It'll be your media manipulator (edit movies, work on garage band tracks, retouch photos). It will be your morning newspaper. It will be the thing you pick up when you put your iPod down. Think about it. All the technology is there. But it's maddening to use, especially for average consumers. They are maing a remote. They just have to be.
Forgive me for cutting and pasting an entry I made last year in the post announcing the Airport Express, but I think it's very pertinant to this discussion and still applies now:
eriously, Apple folds innovations on top of other innovations they make. This is the next ipod, people, they are already approaching the home stereo which is now integral to the home theater as well. 802.11g has more than enough bandwidth to stream movies, right? Now, Apple has completely outflanked MS's "media center" methodology by saying "why for the love of god to you need a completely separate computer to run your home entertainment system?" what is a receiver except for a specialized computer, a computer that can be linked with other computers through a router. My prediction: a wireless OLED remote with a bare-bones OS X-style interface controlling (wirelessly) all the media in computers around the house. All this for around 300 bucks. Apple won't produce a PDA because that has no defined role, it's too nebulous and from that comes confusion. BUT Apple has all the experience needed for a kick-ass remote that just HAPPENS to do email, surf the net, etc.Or, what if the ipod BECOMES the remote? Mark my words, this is coming within a year and it will be huge and considerably less-expensive than the microsoft solution. Plus, it will all integrate with the ipod, I'm betting. You know how OS X hooks up with bluetooth phones? Same idea. This is huge and it is huge because it will be cheap, seamless, and not smacking of convergence./cut and paste
This is it, people. This is the next piece of consumer electronics from Apple. As sure as I am sitting here. What is a remote except for a physical GUI? What does Apple do? Create flawless GUI's. For all intents and purposes, the remote has become the media center GUI. And, almost all remotes royally suck. You have two, one does somethings, the other does other things. You can use a universal remote until it comes to your cable box which has specific buttons that will be mapped in a universal remote to some weird button. This is complete bullshit. This is crying out for a fix. This is exactly the place MP3 players were at when Apple entered the market. Think about it.
Don't forget that AAC is VBR out of the box. I think there's most likely no clear-cut winner in the quality argument here... which is bad for microsoft because they really don't have much else to crow about.
And the thing about this is that it's just so classically Apple. They create new markets. Why the hell hasn't anyone else stumbled on the idea of combining media sharing and a wireless access point? That's so obvious. But Apple's the first, and can guarantee a measure of inter-operability that Microsoft just can't because they don't control the whole widget. BUT now Apple can even make inroads on PC's too, because they have vertical integration. So, hypothetically, Apple may be able to bring media center functionality to PC's as well, without making the consumer buy another Wintel computer for media.
This is the problem with Apple innovation, it seems so obvious and logical in retrospect that you tend to discount it because it is so elegant and obvious.
But it's also interesting to note that Apple continues to innovate in ways that Microsoft can't because they're tied to a software only model and let others make the hardware (except for the X-Box). And it's also interesting because Apple seems to approach everything from a "modular" angle, letting bits and pieces build on each other as technology matures as opposed to the MS way of saying "this is how we are going to innovate, so all you better start." In short, Apple cuts out the nebulous third "????" step, patiently waiting until all the technology is there, all their ducks in order and then they release it and it isn't some half-assed near solution but a complete paradigm.
Look at the PowerBook. They held off on G4's until they could do them right.
Seriously, Apple folds innovations on top of other innovations they make. This is the next ipod, people, they are already approaching the home stereo which is now integral to the home theater as well. 802.11g has more than enough bandwidth to stream movies, right? Now, Apple has completely outflanked MS's "media center" methodology by saying "why for the love of god to you need a completely separate computer to run your home entertainment system?" what is a receiver except for a specialized computer, a computer that can be linked with other computers through a router. My prediction: a wireless OLED remote with a bare-bones OS X-style interface controlling (wirelessly) all the media in computers around the house. All this for around 300 bucks. Apple won't produce a PDA because that has no defined role, it's too nebulous and from that comes confusion. BUT Apple has all the experience needed for a kick-ass remote that just HAPPENS to do email, surf the net, etc.Or, what if the ipod BECOMES the remote?
Mark my words, this is coming within a year and it will be huge and considerably less-expensive than the microsoft solution.
Plus, it will all integrate with the ipod, I'm betting. You know how OS X hooks up with bluetooth phones? Same idea. This is huge and it is huge because it will be cheap, seamless, and not smacking of convergence.
I've been waiting for an emulator like this for a while and while I may be waxing rhapsodic, this could be the butterfly-flapping-it's-wings event that brings open source, Apple, and Microsoft together in a way that none of the three entities can control.
This kind of software could be the death of Microsoft, Linux or Apple. The question is, which one? On the one hand, this could become the killer app open source has been going for. I mean, one of the main things both helping and hindering Apple is it's initial cost for both hardware and software. If open-source can do an end-run around the Apple tax, then what? Apple certainly seems to then become a hardware company whose hardware isn't necessary. And make no mistake, this will be able to happen sooner rather than later. Longhorn's still two years away, chips are going to get faster, and PearPC and it's ilk will get optimized.
Imagine a point in the future when you'd be able to get a torrent of OS X 10.x and dual boot into it or Windows on an x-86. What once would have cost at least 900 bucks then becomes absolutely free. Don't forget, his Jobsness trusts us little people so we don't really have to register the program to use it, unlike MS.
One of the frequent open source complaints is it's lack of user-friendliness. Imagine packaging OS X through opensource: "This superior operating system brought to you by your helpful friends at free-as-in-beer Open Source. We bring the bourgeoisie-juju-magic of Apple to the masses." But, if this takes off, what would prevent everyone from switching over to OS X entirely, itself just a fork of Unix? Sure, ther'd be the slashdoters fighting the good fight but most would see OS X as the best possible combination of open source and proprietary. Especially once it came to x-86. I'd be willing to bet that OS X would replace the majority of Linux users desktops (not servers, probably), especially if it wasn't on Apple's terms. It would be a dead end for Linux, a dead end still full of many uses but kept out of the zeitgiest of "personal desktop/laptop computers".
Now, I wonder if Apple has planned for this. They'd be stupid not to, and I think Jobs and company are way too smart to bury their head in the sand. If there's one lesson to learn about technology in the past ten years it is that it can and will always be reversed engineered.
Here's what I see happening. PearPC gets better, OS X-on-x86 starts to get word of mouth. Jobs says, "Hey, you can use this hacked up hardware emulation for free that will be slow and buggy or pay us $129 for a native PC version. Of course, to get all the new ultra-l33t goodies we include, you really need to think about investing in our approved hardware with our superior technology for your next computer."
Apple could survive on that, I think. Because Apple has realized that even commodity goods can have brand-name recognition. Krispy-Kreme, Maytag ect., people who want the best buy these things and happily pay out the money. What if the same software package could be used for both Mac and PC? Just distribute as encrypted binaries and compile when installing.
If Apple can find a way to completely co-opt the bargain basement computers by providing a native operating system (letting those companies keep their razor-thin profit margins to themselves) while also providing a "complete and better solution" for a considerably larger and more profitable chunk of change then Apple could become both a hardware and software company and still be profitable at both. A sort of amalgam between Windows and Dell. Am I crazy? Probably. But something like this is bound to happen sooner or later. I just wonder how MS is going to handle it. They'd certainly not die, at least not for a good long while, but I think they'd no longer have dictatorial power over the industry.
Points two and three are no longer necessarily true. The analogue phone network is the single most complex network on the face of the earth. The Internet is evolving and will most likely overtake the POTS but today the intricacy of the phone network is boggling. Think about it: You can pick up a phone anywhere in the world and call anyone else anywhere and have a near real time conversation. And this was achieved over half a century ago! The problem today is that the older people who originally designed and implemented these systems are now almost all retired and left in its place are those people who are now more technicians than designers and don't understand the intricacies of the network. And the network is overloaded now, in a way that can cause failures due to very tiny and subtle problems. As more and more of these old guards are forced into retirement--the ones that understood both the scale and the complexity and had been a part of the jury-rigging of the structure as it began to balloon-- I think we're going to see a huge drop in the dependancy of the phone service, both through reliability and quality of service in the near future. With our current rate of growth I see it happening within the decade. And this is when digital/internet phone will just be becoming viable. I think the phone companies have a lot to worry about right now.
Slashdot Mirror
But what if I am not wrong? Then we could save billions of dollars and save millions of lives.
Those are all perefectly valid questions that aren't being asked by our government. We don't even have a national dialog yet.
Listen, I have no problem with the pragmaticism cutting both ways, but I would at least prefer an honest discussion, as opposed to faith-based suppositions.
The problem right now is the fundamental framing of the issue by our politicians and media.
What ever happened to pragmaticsm? Seriously? Wouldn't you rather be wrong about the fact there is global warming than be wrong about there not being global warming? That's what I don't understand. Look at it from a free-market perspective for christsakes. Markets are all about hedging bets and spotting potential trouble on the horizon and then taking steps to reduce the potential issues. It's called due diligence. We live in a country that has the most incredible technology, ever. We act like we are an enlightened society. And yet we don't do anything except react. True moral leadership comes from seeing problems before they are problems and then fixing them. When a society fails, it comes from the inability to see where policies will lead. If you look at great empires that have crumbled, they fail from the inside out. Easter Island? It failed because no one was smart enough to say "Gee, maybe we should stop cutting trees." Rome? "Gee, maybe we shouldn't over-extend ourselves." Followed by, "Nobody could have expected the Huns to invade." And this keeps going on and on through history. Empires fail due to a confluence of events and policies. And we, as a country, as an idea, continually ignore any sort of cautionary tale. I don't want to sound flip or ironic... I just want people to start realizing that the stuff that is happening right now matters. It matters who we put into office. It matters what kind of car we drive. It matters that we aren't asking the really tough questions. Because the ugly stuff, the talk of what is looming as a very real threat to our entire way of life, is absolutely important.
Just found this: http://www.hypnoticnet.com/apple_airtunes_remoteco ntrol.html
I posted this last week but it got lost in the modding shuffle. I'm really interested to see if anyone else agrees with this so I'm going to repost it here:
Apple is building a remote. It will really be a thin client/palm-style device. But it will be marketed as a remote for your entire life. Look, apple's already said that they view thier media in a modular way. That's because they are a weird amalgamation of a software and hardware. This model really affects thier design in a fundamental way. They view both as feeding the other. Unlike Microsoft. Or Sony. Both of those companies don't have the (ability) (balls) (forsight) to realize that you really do benefit from doing both. That's because the new tech market is turning towards usability as it's prime selling point. Witness the iPod. But you know this.
Now, think about the home media center. What is the primary user interface element? The remote. For all intents and purposes, the equipment has acheived a level of abstraction in our heads. What do the butttons on a TV do? Who cares? The remote can do it. My AV receiver doesn't even have all the bottons on the face. Only on the remote. And this abstraction yeilds some interesting results. One, that you handle your remote more times in the average day than a book or your keyes. We don't even realize how much time we spend with these damn things. They are integral. And they almost uniformly suck. How many remotes do you use? How much fumbling? Your universal remote does most things. But what about when you need to schedule and rank your DVR? The remote falls apart. The fuction is mapped to some button that is not intuitive. It's a giant mess. Sort like the MP3 market ummm.... four years ago.
While the remote is bad at it's primary function, it falls apart completely when it comes to digital media. Enter microsoft with their assinine "Media Center PC" Why God, why? Why do you need a whole new computer in your living room? You already have a computer somewhere in your house. But Microsoft is a software company. They need to sell the software. They're trying to break out of this with the Xbox. And they will haves success. But it's a lackluster implimentation of the central problem: the remoteis the media center, see. How are people going to interact with the Xbox? With the controller and a TV monitor. This is crummy, in my mind, because if thier view of media is to add another box to the den that just happens to deal with my digital media as a second fuction, I call bullshit. Let each componant do what it is primarily good at. The Xbox controller , even if it includes that rollerball thing, still is a poor way to interact with media. It'll be good for gamers, sure. But that will color the rest of it functionality. It already has, really. See, there's no big, legible display to speak of on the damn thing. So you abstract the abstract. The Xbox took over your media and the controller takes over your Xbox, which makes you look at the tv screen as the navigation aid. I'm not sure if I can exactly explain why.... but this feels icky to me. So, this is where Apple steps in. The Airport express is an important clue. The idea is make a centeral computer and stream over the air the media to a router near the media center. But make the router "magic" Using, I don't know, Rendevou...err... Bonjour. Which just got released for the PC, yes? Pieces are starting to fall into place. So, what's misssing is a remote that doesn't suck for your media that can interact wirelessly with your media. Something like a big lcd touchscreen. And only like an LCD screen. Nothing else. It's the display and the input. Simple. Elegant. Getting cheap. This is a thin client, really. But it won't be marketed as such. No, it'll be the iPod for the rest of your life. It'll be your remote. It'll be your newspaper. It'll be your media manipulator (edit movies, work on garage band tracks, retouch photos). It will be your morning newspaper. It will be the thing you pick up when you put your iPod down. Think about it. All the technology is there. But
I agree that LCD remotes suck right now. But look at Dashboard. Here's how I see it working: You're reading your morning paper on the iThing and want to change the chanel on the kitchen TV. Invoke an expose/dashboard-like function where your remotes swoop onto the screen. Change the channel. Swoop out. Expand the idea of widgets into remotes. HTML java, easy, right? So... imagine dashboard. I think that's a clue, too. That wouldn't suck so much, I think. Especially if they release a bone simple API for it. Electronics companies will jump all over this, because they know it will be huge. After all, it's just java and HTML. They'll run on anything fairly easily.
I've posted this a couple of times before, but it works here as well.
This is a remote. Or Apple's version of one. Look, apple's already said that they veiw thier media in a modular way. That's because they are a weird amalgamation of a software and hardware. This model really affects thier design in a fundamental way. They view both as feeding the other. Unlike Microsoft. Or Sony. Both of those companies don't have the (ability) (balls) (forsight) to realize that you really do benefit from doing both. That's because the new tech market is turning towards usability as it's prime selling point. Witness the iPod. But you know this.
Now, think about the home media center. What is the primary user interface element? The remote. For all intents and purposes, the equipment has acheived a level of abstraction in our heads. What do the butttons on a TV do? Who cares? The remote can do it. My AV receiver doesn't even have all the bottons on the face. Only on the remote. And this abstraction yeilds some interesting results.
One, that you handle your remote more times in the average day than a book or your keyes. We don't even realize how much time we spend with these damn things. They are integral. And they almost uniformly suck. How many remotes do you use? How much fumbling? Your universal remote does most things. But what about when you need to schedule and rank your DVR? The remote falls apart. The fuction is mapped to some button that is not intuitive. It's a giant mess. Sort like the MP3 market ummm.... four years ago.
While the remote is bad at it's primary function, it falls apart completely when it comes to digital media. Enter microsoft with their assinine "Media Center PC" Why God, why? Why do you need a whole new computer in your living room? You already have a computer somewhere in your house. But Microsoft is a software company. They need to sell the software. They're trying to break out of this with the Xbox. And they will haves success. But it's a lackluster implimentation of the central problem: the remoteis the media center, see. How are people going to interact with the Xbox? With the controller and a TV monitor. This is crummy, in my mind, because if thier view of media is to add another box to the den that just happens to deal with my digital media as a second fuction, I call bullshit. Let each componant do what it is primarily good at. The Xbox controller , even if it includes that rollerball thing, still is a poor way to interact with media. It'll be good for gamers, sure. But that will color the rest of it functionality. It already has, really. See, there's no big, legible display to speak of on the damn thing. So you abstract the abstract. The Xbox took over your media and the controller takes over your Xbox, which makes you look at the tv screen as the navigation aid. I'm not sure if I can exactly explain why.... but this feels icky to me.
So, this is where Apple steps in. The Airport express is an important clue. The idea is make a centeral computer and stream over the air the media to a router near the media center. But make the router "magic" Using, I don't know, Rendevou...err... Bonjour. Which just got released for the PC, yes? Pieces are starting to fall into place. So, what's misssing is a remote that doesn't suck for your media that can interact wirelessly with your media. Something like a big lcd touchscreen. And only like an LCD screen. Nothing else. It's the display and the input. Simple. Elegant. Getting cheap. This is a thin client, really. But it won't be marketed as such. No, it'll be the iPod for the rest of your life. It'll be your remote. It'll be your newspaper. It'll be your media manipulator (edit movies, work on garage band tracks, retouch photos). It will be your morning newspaper. It will be the thing you pick up when you put your iPod down. Think about it. All the technology is there. But it's maddening to use, especially for average consumers. They are maing a remote. They just have to be.
Forgive me for cutting and pasting an entry I made last year in the post announcing the Airport Express, but I think it's very pertinant to this discussion and still applies now: eriously, Apple folds innovations on top of other innovations they make. This is the next ipod, people, they are already approaching the home stereo which is now integral to the home theater as well. 802.11g has more than enough bandwidth to stream movies, right? Now, Apple has completely outflanked MS's "media center" methodology by saying "why for the love of god to you need a completely separate computer to run your home entertainment system?" what is a receiver except for a specialized computer, a computer that can be linked with other computers through a router. My prediction: a wireless OLED remote with a bare-bones OS X-style interface controlling (wirelessly) all the media in computers around the house. All this for around 300 bucks. Apple won't produce a PDA because that has no defined role, it's too nebulous and from that comes confusion. BUT Apple has all the experience needed for a kick-ass remote that just HAPPENS to do email, surf the net, etc.Or, what if the ipod BECOMES the remote? Mark my words, this is coming within a year and it will be huge and considerably less-expensive than the microsoft solution. Plus, it will all integrate with the ipod, I'm betting. You know how OS X hooks up with bluetooth phones? Same idea. This is huge and it is huge because it will be cheap, seamless, and not smacking of convergence. /cut and paste
This is it, people. This is the next piece of consumer electronics from Apple. As sure as I am sitting here. What is a remote except for a physical GUI? What does Apple do? Create flawless GUI's. For all intents and purposes, the remote has become the media center GUI. And, almost all remotes royally suck. You have two, one does somethings, the other does other things. You can use a universal remote until it comes to your cable box which has specific buttons that will be mapped in a universal remote to some weird button. This is complete bullshit. This is crying out for a fix. This is exactly the place MP3 players were at when Apple entered the market. Think about it.
You must have faith if you post a geocities adress to slashdot.
Wow.... just...wow.
Don't forget that AAC is VBR out of the box. I think there's most likely no clear-cut winner in the quality argument here... which is bad for microsoft because they really don't have much else to crow about.
err.... does 125 million sales count?
But surely this disproves the notion that Opteron "wins by a longshot".
Why do you need to have wires? Why couldn't you just plug in a sort of airport extreme card for your TV?
And the thing about this is that it's just so classically Apple. They create new markets. Why the hell hasn't anyone else stumbled on the idea of combining media sharing and a wireless access point? That's so obvious. But Apple's the first, and can guarantee a measure of inter-operability that Microsoft just can't because they don't control the whole widget. BUT now Apple can even make inroads on PC's too, because they have vertical integration. So, hypothetically, Apple may be able to bring media center functionality to PC's as well, without making the consumer buy another Wintel computer for media.
This is the problem with Apple innovation, it seems so obvious and logical in retrospect that you tend to discount it because it is so elegant and obvious.
But it's also interesting to note that Apple continues to innovate in ways that Microsoft can't because they're tied to a software only model and let others make the hardware (except for the X-Box). And it's also interesting because Apple seems to approach everything from a "modular" angle, letting bits and pieces build on each other as technology matures as opposed to the MS way of saying "this is how we are going to innovate, so all you better start." In short, Apple cuts out the nebulous third "????" step, patiently waiting until all the technology is there, all their ducks in order and then they release it and it isn't some half-assed near solution but a complete paradigm.
Look at the PowerBook. They held off on G4's until they could do them right.
Seriously, Apple folds innovations on top of other innovations they make. This is the next ipod, people, they are already approaching the home stereo which is now integral to the home theater as well. 802.11g has more than enough bandwidth to stream movies, right? Now, Apple has completely outflanked MS's "media center" methodology by saying "why for the love of god to you need a completely separate computer to run your home entertainment system?" what is a receiver except for a specialized computer, a computer that can be linked with other computers through a router. My prediction: a wireless OLED remote with a bare-bones OS X-style interface controlling (wirelessly) all the media in computers around the house. All this for around 300 bucks. Apple won't produce a PDA because that has no defined role, it's too nebulous and from that comes confusion. BUT Apple has all the experience needed for a kick-ass remote that just HAPPENS to do email, surf the net, etc.Or, what if the ipod BECOMES the remote? Mark my words, this is coming within a year and it will be huge and considerably less-expensive than the microsoft solution. Plus, it will all integrate with the ipod, I'm betting. You know how OS X hooks up with bluetooth phones? Same idea. This is huge and it is huge because it will be cheap, seamless, and not smacking of convergence.
I've been waiting for an emulator like this for a while and while I may be waxing rhapsodic, this could be the butterfly-flapping-it's-wings event that brings open source, Apple, and Microsoft together in a way that none of the three entities can control. This kind of software could be the death of Microsoft, Linux or Apple. The question is, which one? On the one hand, this could become the killer app open source has been going for. I mean, one of the main things both helping and hindering Apple is it's initial cost for both hardware and software. If open-source can do an end-run around the Apple tax, then what? Apple certainly seems to then become a hardware company whose hardware isn't necessary. And make no mistake, this will be able to happen sooner rather than later. Longhorn's still two years away, chips are going to get faster, and PearPC and it's ilk will get optimized. Imagine a point in the future when you'd be able to get a torrent of OS X 10.x and dual boot into it or Windows on an x-86. What once would have cost at least 900 bucks then becomes absolutely free. Don't forget, his Jobsness trusts us little people so we don't really have to register the program to use it, unlike MS. One of the frequent open source complaints is it's lack of user-friendliness. Imagine packaging OS X through opensource: "This superior operating system brought to you by your helpful friends at free-as-in-beer Open Source. We bring the bourgeoisie-juju-magic of Apple to the masses." But, if this takes off, what would prevent everyone from switching over to OS X entirely, itself just a fork of Unix? Sure, ther'd be the slashdoters fighting the good fight but most would see OS X as the best possible combination of open source and proprietary. Especially once it came to x-86. I'd be willing to bet that OS X would replace the majority of Linux users desktops (not servers, probably), especially if it wasn't on Apple's terms. It would be a dead end for Linux, a dead end still full of many uses but kept out of the zeitgiest of "personal desktop/laptop computers". Now, I wonder if Apple has planned for this. They'd be stupid not to, and I think Jobs and company are way too smart to bury their head in the sand. If there's one lesson to learn about technology in the past ten years it is that it can and will always be reversed engineered. Here's what I see happening. PearPC gets better, OS X-on-x86 starts to get word of mouth. Jobs says, "Hey, you can use this hacked up hardware emulation for free that will be slow and buggy or pay us $129 for a native PC version. Of course, to get all the new ultra-l33t goodies we include, you really need to think about investing in our approved hardware with our superior technology for your next computer." Apple could survive on that, I think. Because Apple has realized that even commodity goods can have brand-name recognition. Krispy-Kreme, Maytag ect., people who want the best buy these things and happily pay out the money. What if the same software package could be used for both Mac and PC? Just distribute as encrypted binaries and compile when installing. If Apple can find a way to completely co-opt the bargain basement computers by providing a native operating system (letting those companies keep their razor-thin profit margins to themselves) while also providing a "complete and better solution" for a considerably larger and more profitable chunk of change then Apple could become both a hardware and software company and still be profitable at both. A sort of amalgam between Windows and Dell. Am I crazy? Probably. But something like this is bound to happen sooner or later. I just wonder how MS is going to handle it. They'd certainly not die, at least not for a good long while, but I think they'd no longer have dictatorial power over the industry.
Mitch: And from now on, stop playing with yourself! Kent: It is God!
And then they'd pass after they see you can't use contractions.... of course Data couldn't either... but do THEY know that?
I think we should have a +1 Old Skool moderation for obscure pop-culture references.
Posting on Slashdot seems to be a good start.
Points two and three are no longer necessarily true. The analogue phone network is the single most complex network on the face of the earth. The Internet is evolving and will most likely overtake the POTS but today the intricacy of the phone network is boggling. Think about it: You can pick up a phone anywhere in the world and call anyone else anywhere and have a near real time conversation. And this was achieved over half a century ago! The problem today is that the older people who originally designed and implemented these systems are now almost all retired and left in its place are those people who are now more technicians than designers and don't understand the intricacies of the network. And the network is overloaded now, in a way that can cause failures due to very tiny and subtle problems. As more and more of these old guards are forced into retirement--the ones that understood both the scale and the complexity and had been a part of the jury-rigging of the structure as it began to balloon-- I think we're going to see a huge drop in the dependancy of the phone service, both through reliability and quality of service in the near future. With our current rate of growth I see it happening within the decade. And this is when digital/internet phone will just be becoming viable. I think the phone companies have a lot to worry about right now.
...singing "Silent Mice" to the tune of "Silent Night"? Cause I am.
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I'll hit preview this time instead of just blindly clicking. Sorry bout that.