Whether or not to play in Apple's iOS garden is a business decision companies like Amazon or B&N will have to make. There's no reason for them to offer iOS versions of the e-readers. Oh, except for the large customer base. If that customer base is big enough I'm sure Amazon and B&N and others will agree to Apple's rules. 70% revenue for a customer pool of millions of iPhone and iPad users is better than 100% revenue for zero of them.
Apple is offering others the ability to take advantage of their platform. How many Nook books can you buy from B&N on the Kindle, or Apple iBooks on the Nook? None. Apple is creating a place where Amazon and B&N will be able to compete with iBooks on price using the same e-reader. Neither Amazon nor B&N open their gardens to competitors.
Cops are using head-mounted cameras to record everyone and everything they come in contact with. They like this tool because they control the video. That's what it's really about, controlling information. But when ordinary people record street scenes, that's "bad".
Cops are out in public engaging in public-viewable activity, just like the rest of us. They should expect being recorded and do their job appropriately.
There is no way to know if the open wifi networks are open intentionally or not. Just ask Bruce Schneier. Saying they're "open to criminals" is biased, maybe "open to visitors" would be more appropriate. How come coffee shops and other businesses with open wifi aren't called out for letting criminals access the network?
That one day, little iPhones, and little Android phones, may one day access the same content.
That was, essentially, Steve Jobs argument in his letter slamming Flash. His view is that the Web should be based on standards.
The truth is Flash is not a standard, it's a convention. A huge amount of Web content may be in Flash, but it's a closed system. Only one company, Adobe, decides how it works. Ten years ago you could say the same thing about RealPlayer. Shouldn't the iPhone support Real video? What about ActiveX?
The iPhone platform is closed, sure. But it's not delivering content to others, it happens to include a way to access web content. If it does a poor job of that the market will reject it, but the only ones who seem up in arms are Flash developers who are mad about their favorite tools not working on some shiny, popular platform.
...where would the PC world be without interoperatability and standards?
Since USB-IF assigns unique vendor IDs to its members, Palm cloning Apple's vendor ID is in fact breaking the USB standard. Imagine if vendors didn't respect their uniquely assigned IDs with other hardware, such as ethernet. That would be a nightmare for driver writers.
I don't see how Palm forging a vendor ID in direct violation of the USB standard is a good thing for the industry. It renders that portion of the USB standard meaningless.
You've always been able to buy Mac OS X separately, usually for $129. So if you started with 10.0 and upgraded to each version to 10.6 you would have paid at most about $775 over seven OS versions (including Snow Leopard) and eight years.
Of course, that's not going to really count since Intel Macs weren't introduced until 2006 under 10.4 (Tiger). And all Mac purchases come with the latest OS, even if Apple has to slap an upgrade disc on the outside of the box (my Intel Mac mini came that way).
This reminds me of Bill McNeal on News Radio trying to be "cool" with his Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor promos:
"Gazizza, dilznoofuses, this is Bill McNeal saying, get with the crazappy taste of Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor! Rocket Fuel's got the upstate prison flavor that keeps you ugly all night long. So when you wanna get sick, remember: Nothing makes your feet stank like Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor. Damn, it's crazappy!"
Boxee consolidates the indefinite number of online content services into a single viewing experience. Kind of the best of all worlds, the content providers get to try and make their own walled gardens but the users get a simplified experience. So Hulu decides no, that's not good enough. We want to force everyone to buy our hardware too, so they can pay $$ for the hardware to watch our "free" service on their teevees.
Yeah, no.
Or maybe Hulu's goal is to keep people using a crappy web browser experience on their computer display while the 60" flat screen HDTV across the room sits dark.
The real issue is that all light bulbs really do need to have the rating of lumens. Wattage is power use, lumens is light output (obviously). Saying "40-watt equivalent" is empty marketing speak, no wonder they were disappointing. And then there's the whole light temperature issue, which is very difficult for a consumer to determine.
For my LED experience, I went with these LED bulbs for my chandelier (I was looking for a "25-watt equivalent") and have been very pleased. It may help that it's a cluster of bulbs in my fixture. Considering the lifespan of LED bulbs, I'm willing to pay a lot more per bulb providing the light output falls in the appropriate range.
I hope stations switch anyway. The February 17 deadline is three weeks away. Stations have already scheduled their work crews and support staff, have made plans for the hardware cutover, etc. Now they're expected to suddenly halt everything, add an additional four months of dual-service costs and redo all of their plans?
Seems to me this move does nothing to help people prepare for the switch, but will succeed in making the stations unprepared. So it'll be a bigger mess than sticking to the original date.
I've become very annoyed at my battery in my MacBook Pro, it's been a weak point in the case. I seem to always put the most pressure right where the battery is when moving my laptop. Sure, it could be moved, but does everyone grab the laptop the same way? Could it ever be moved to a good place?
I'm not sure how good the battery in the new 17" MBP is going to be, but I think it's the right idea. Most people replace their laptops every 2-3 years (especially in the high end world), and those who don't will surely have battery replacement options.
A more interesting issue is how do you "unfreeze" something with a built-in battery? I've had to remove my battery a few times to get the machine to cold start, not sure how Apple's worked around that with the sealed battery.
C. Crane's GEOBulb looks very promising in terms of the future of LEDs, but the price is quite painful. I'm personally using some 120-130 lumen candelabra LED bulbs, which delivers close to the light of a 25 watt incandescent.
The LED bulbs are now coming in different color temperatures, so things are progressing.
I've always felt Microsoft is likely doomed to follow Wang Labs decline from huge success to irrelevancy. The only real question is the timeline.
Wang, like Microsoft, dominated for a long time with proprietary OS and software, generating gobs of money and being a huge company. Then one day it seemed like the world just walked by them and they stopped selling new stuff and just sort of faded away.
Microsoft's decline will could be more complex, largely due to the Xbox and Windows Mobile markets with their own cycles, but Microsoft seems stuck in their tell-the-market-what-it-wants mindset instead of adapting to changes.
I recently moved into a rural area where I had no options for cable or DSL from my telco, ended up getting EVDO (mobile broadband) from Sprint. Not as fast as cable, but certainly fast enough to be usable. I got the service directly without tying it to a voice plan, so all I pay for is the EVDO service. I then got myself a Cradlepoint router that let me plug the EVDO modem right into it, becoming as easy to use as a cable modem.
Works really well, speeds similar to DSL. There is a 5GB "cap" but whenever I ask Sprint about it they don't give me the same answer—sometimes I'm told I'll be asked to pay more, other times they say it slides, and I've also been told they have higher-tiered plans but I can't get into one until I exceed the cap regularly. Not sure they know themselves what they're doing. But the service is excellent, and I haven't had any issues with my data usage.
The Kensington Runestone is an intriguing item in my neck of the woods. It's largely considered a hoax these days, but there will always be believers. It's pretty elaborate for a hoax if it is one, causing a century of controversy.
Yeah, that face sets off the creeps in me, it's clearly an uncanny mask over a human. The only "advancement" I see there is the natural movement, because it's a human moving.
Yes, there are technical reasons to shape traffic to optimize network flow. But the problem is that the large ISPs are using business, not technical, reasons to determine the network traffic policies. If companies like Comcast, Time Warner and Virgin Media could be trusted to base network design on technical issues, that'd be a nice utopia.
But we know these companies are instead targeting packets that they see as business competitors, so they are not making sound technical decisions. I say it's better to make it harder for a perfect network than to allow corporate interests to balkanize the internet for their greedy purposes.
Considering Sandra Day O'Connor's direct hand in subverting democracy, will there there be a bonus level for executing a bloodless coup by judicial fiat?
Aside from the risks to the Flickr photo community by introducing YouTube-style junk videos (and the people who are into that), it seems odd that a new video service would roll out with Flash as the only way to play. The iPhone and the growing number of competitors shows that mobile video is something that shouldn't be ignored by a service.
It really seems like Yahoo/Flickr is trying to get competitive with Google/YouTube, but YouTube has moved into the iPhone world while Flickr has introduced something that's comparable to YouTube from two years ago.
And has anyone else noticed the 90-second video length is ideal for advertising. I can't wait...
This is likely incorrect. Adobe is one of Apple's key development partners. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft get privileged developer information from Apple, always have. I'm sure Apple was alerting Adobe to the Carbon issue long before WWDC 2007.
Keep in mind Adobe's track record on software development for the Mac. They (along with Microsoft, shocking) were one of the last to deliver an Intel-native version of their premier software, over a year after Apple's switch to Intel. I don't think Adobe's that impressive of a development company, probably carrying around a lot of ugly legacy code that's mostly a cross-compile from Windows.
I use Eye TV to record over-the-air HD, and it's quite obvious to me the quality is much higher than Comcast's HD. That said, I can't get as may OTA HD channels as I can on Comcast. And the quality of, say, Sci Fi Channel HD shows beats the standard def Sci Fi Channel.
Still, it would be nice as a consumer to know what I'm really getting. Maybe Comcast (and anyone else) should be required to label their channels as "compressed HDTV".
I've had an iPod touch for about two weeks now, and the device is essentially designed to jump on open wifi networks. It acts as a nice little stumbler and makes it trivial to just try every open wifi network that shows up in the list. Once you successfully connect the iPod touch remembers that network and will automatically reconnects to the network if it can.
So yeah, make using open networks a crime and then let's see how well that works out with evolving technology.
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Whether or not to play in Apple's iOS garden is a business decision companies like Amazon or B&N will have to make. There's no reason for them to offer iOS versions of the e-readers. Oh, except for the large customer base. If that customer base is big enough I'm sure Amazon and B&N and others will agree to Apple's rules. 70% revenue for a customer pool of millions of iPhone and iPad users is better than 100% revenue for zero of them.
Apple is offering others the ability to take advantage of their platform. How many Nook books can you buy from B&N on the Kindle, or Apple iBooks on the Nook? None. Apple is creating a place where Amazon and B&N will be able to compete with iBooks on price using the same e-reader. Neither Amazon nor B&N open their gardens to competitors.
Cops are using head-mounted cameras to record everyone and everything they come in contact with. They like this tool because they control the video. That's what it's really about, controlling information. But when ordinary people record street scenes, that's "bad".
Cops are out in public engaging in public-viewable activity, just like the rest of us. They should expect being recorded and do their job appropriately.
Actually, it's a rebirth of the Newton eMate 300.
There is no way to know if the open wifi networks are open intentionally or not. Just ask Bruce Schneier. Saying they're "open to criminals" is biased, maybe "open to visitors" would be more appropriate. How come coffee shops and other businesses with open wifi aren't called out for letting criminals access the network?
That one day, little iPhones, and little Android phones, may one day access the same content.
That was, essentially, Steve Jobs argument in his letter slamming Flash. His view is that the Web should be based on standards.
The truth is Flash is not a standard, it's a convention. A huge amount of Web content may be in Flash, but it's a closed system. Only one company, Adobe, decides how it works. Ten years ago you could say the same thing about RealPlayer. Shouldn't the iPhone support Real video? What about ActiveX?
The iPhone platform is closed, sure. But it's not delivering content to others, it happens to include a way to access web content. If it does a poor job of that the market will reject it, but the only ones who seem up in arms are Flash developers who are mad about their favorite tools not working on some shiny, popular platform.
...where would the PC world be without interoperatability and standards?
Since USB-IF assigns unique vendor IDs to its members, Palm cloning Apple's vendor ID is in fact breaking the USB standard. Imagine if vendors didn't respect their uniquely assigned IDs with other hardware, such as ethernet. That would be a nightmare for driver writers.
I don't see how Palm forging a vendor ID in direct violation of the USB standard is a good thing for the industry. It renders that portion of the USB standard meaningless.
You've always been able to buy Mac OS X separately, usually for $129. So if you started with 10.0 and upgraded to each version to 10.6 you would have paid at most about $775 over seven OS versions (including Snow Leopard) and eight years.
Of course, that's not going to really count since Intel Macs weren't introduced until 2006 under 10.4 (Tiger). And all Mac purchases come with the latest OS, even if Apple has to slap an upgrade disc on the outside of the box (my Intel Mac mini came that way).
Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Not such a hot property these days. I wouldn't put any money into Murdoch's internet instincts.
This reminds me of Bill McNeal on News Radio trying to be "cool" with his Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor promos:
"Gazizza, dilznoofuses, this is Bill McNeal saying, get with the crazappy taste of Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor! Rocket Fuel's got the upstate prison flavor that keeps you ugly all night long. So when you wanna get sick, remember: Nothing makes your feet stank like Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor. Damn, it's crazappy!"
Boxee consolidates the indefinite number of online content services into a single viewing experience. Kind of the best of all worlds, the content providers get to try and make their own walled gardens but the users get a simplified experience. So Hulu decides no, that's not good enough. We want to force everyone to buy our hardware too, so they can pay $$ for the hardware to watch our "free" service on their teevees.
Yeah, no.
Or maybe Hulu's goal is to keep people using a crappy web browser experience on their computer display while the 60" flat screen HDTV across the room sits dark.
The real issue is that all light bulbs really do need to have the rating of lumens. Wattage is power use, lumens is light output (obviously). Saying "40-watt equivalent" is empty marketing speak, no wonder they were disappointing. And then there's the whole light temperature issue, which is very difficult for a consumer to determine.
For my LED experience, I went with these LED bulbs for my chandelier (I was looking for a "25-watt equivalent") and have been very pleased. It may help that it's a cluster of bulbs in my fixture. Considering the lifespan of LED bulbs, I'm willing to pay a lot more per bulb providing the light output falls in the appropriate range.
I hope stations switch anyway. The February 17 deadline is three weeks away. Stations have already scheduled their work crews and support staff, have made plans for the hardware cutover, etc. Now they're expected to suddenly halt everything, add an additional four months of dual-service costs and redo all of their plans?
Seems to me this move does nothing to help people prepare for the switch, but will succeed in making the stations unprepared. So it'll be a bigger mess than sticking to the original date.
I've become very annoyed at my battery in my MacBook Pro, it's been a weak point in the case. I seem to always put the most pressure right where the battery is when moving my laptop. Sure, it could be moved, but does everyone grab the laptop the same way? Could it ever be moved to a good place?
I'm not sure how good the battery in the new 17" MBP is going to be, but I think it's the right idea. Most people replace their laptops every 2-3 years (especially in the high end world), and those who don't will surely have battery replacement options.
A more interesting issue is how do you "unfreeze" something with a built-in battery? I've had to remove my battery a few times to get the machine to cold start, not sure how Apple's worked around that with the sealed battery.
C. Crane's GEOBulb looks very promising in terms of the future of LEDs, but the price is quite painful. I'm personally using some 120-130 lumen candelabra LED bulbs, which delivers close to the light of a 25 watt incandescent.
The LED bulbs are now coming in different color temperatures, so things are progressing.
I've always felt Microsoft is likely doomed to follow Wang Labs decline from huge success to irrelevancy. The only real question is the timeline.
Wang, like Microsoft, dominated for a long time with proprietary OS and software, generating gobs of money and being a huge company. Then one day it seemed like the world just walked by them and they stopped selling new stuff and just sort of faded away.
Microsoft's decline will could be more complex, largely due to the Xbox and Windows Mobile markets with their own cycles, but Microsoft seems stuck in their tell-the-market-what-it-wants mindset instead of adapting to changes.
I recently moved into a rural area where I had no options for cable or DSL from my telco, ended up getting EVDO (mobile broadband) from Sprint. Not as fast as cable, but certainly fast enough to be usable. I got the service directly without tying it to a voice plan, so all I pay for is the EVDO service. I then got myself a Cradlepoint router that let me plug the EVDO modem right into it, becoming as easy to use as a cable modem.
Works really well, speeds similar to DSL. There is a 5GB "cap" but whenever I ask Sprint about it they don't give me the same answer—sometimes I'm told I'll be asked to pay more, other times they say it slides, and I've also been told they have higher-tiered plans but I can't get into one until I exceed the cap regularly. Not sure they know themselves what they're doing. But the service is excellent, and I haven't had any issues with my data usage.
One last time, because it's got a good techno beat. DJ Ted Stevens, "A Series of Tubes"
The Kensington Runestone is an intriguing item in my neck of the woods. It's largely considered a hoax these days, but there will always be believers. It's pretty elaborate for a hoax if it is one, causing a century of controversy.
Yeah, that face sets off the creeps in me, it's clearly an uncanny mask over a human. The only "advancement" I see there is the natural movement, because it's a human moving.
Yes, there are technical reasons to shape traffic to optimize network flow. But the problem is that the large ISPs are using business, not technical, reasons to determine the network traffic policies. If companies like Comcast, Time Warner and Virgin Media could be trusted to base network design on technical issues, that'd be a nice utopia.
But we know these companies are instead targeting packets that they see as business competitors, so they are not making sound technical decisions. I say it's better to make it harder for a perfect network than to allow corporate interests to balkanize the internet for their greedy purposes.
Considering Sandra Day O'Connor's direct hand in subverting democracy, will there there be a bonus level for executing a bloodless coup by judicial fiat?
Aside from the risks to the Flickr photo community by introducing YouTube-style junk videos (and the people who are into that), it seems odd that a new video service would roll out with Flash as the only way to play. The iPhone and the growing number of competitors shows that mobile video is something that shouldn't be ignored by a service.
It really seems like Yahoo/Flickr is trying to get competitive with Google/YouTube, but YouTube has moved into the iPhone world while Flickr has introduced something that's comparable to YouTube from two years ago.
And has anyone else noticed the 90-second video length is ideal for advertising. I can't wait...
This is likely incorrect. Adobe is one of Apple's key development partners. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft get privileged developer information from Apple, always have. I'm sure Apple was alerting Adobe to the Carbon issue long before WWDC 2007.
Keep in mind Adobe's track record on software development for the Mac. They (along with Microsoft, shocking) were one of the last to deliver an Intel-native version of their premier software, over a year after Apple's switch to Intel. I don't think Adobe's that impressive of a development company, probably carrying around a lot of ugly legacy code that's mostly a cross-compile from Windows.
I use Eye TV to record over-the-air HD, and it's quite obvious to me the quality is much higher than Comcast's HD. That said, I can't get as may OTA HD channels as I can on Comcast. And the quality of, say, Sci Fi Channel HD shows beats the standard def Sci Fi Channel.
Still, it would be nice as a consumer to know what I'm really getting. Maybe Comcast (and anyone else) should be required to label their channels as "compressed HDTV".
I've had an iPod touch for about two weeks now, and the device is essentially designed to jump on open wifi networks. It acts as a nice little stumbler and makes it trivial to just try every open wifi network that shows up in the list. Once you successfully connect the iPod touch remembers that network and will automatically reconnects to the network if it can.
So yeah, make using open networks a crime and then let's see how well that works out with evolving technology.