If they only put the HD movies on at a milder compression then there would probably only be room for one movie.
But hollywood has their own idea of what "good enough" means when it comes to MPEG compression. That's why satellite TV looks like crap.
DVDs are roughly 5:1 compression with a 90m single layer DVD. Not that great.
At least with an ultra-high capacity disk it's technically possible to put an HD movie on it with mild enough compression that even a videophile might not see the blockiness.
I just have my doubts that the movies that come out will be offered in that quality.
Oh come on. Don't you know that the terrorists have TRIED to hit us again? No, they just wanted to do one attack and end it at that. Yeah, sure. The only reason we haven't had another major tragedy like that has been because of our vigilance.
That's exactly why they started going after 'soft targets' in other countries like Bali and now Iraq, or hitting our allies instead of us directly.
I find it amusing that at the same time everyone is hand-wringing over the safety factors of the pending shuttle launch, Soyuz is flying to ISS again without fanfare.
I think that says everything there is to say about the US space program.
We're putting a lot of effort to put a lame duck platform back in orbit that is going to be decommissioned in 5 years or so anyway with no clear successor and we just kind of ignore the fact that Russia has a time-tested (but not glamorous) platform with a far better safety record.
Well, if they bring any new cast on from the Canadian population, they are likely to get some of that Canadian accent. I think Mutant-X has some of them. They say out kinda inbetween "oot" and "oat" and it is freaking annoying.
>> Look, everyone *knew* that most of the plotlines in TOS were weak at best - but we didn't care because Spock and his internal struggle intrigued us and we liked the growing friendship between Kirk and Spock. And the love/hate relationship between McCoy and Spock.
Come on. Only some of the stories were bad. Most Trek episodes were very well written. It's true that even on the bad episodes, the likeable characters transcend the bad writing. But the post TOS shows had a far worse record in the plot dept. than TOS.
I don't think I'd want a 4GHZ CPU because the fans required to keep it cool would sound like a jet engine.
Mainstream desktop CPUs are not really getting that much faster lately because of these heat issues. That's the whole rationale for dual-core. To go parallel instead of just clocking faster.
Re:An argument against an Apple subnotebook
on
New Mac System Specs
·
· Score: 1
Well gee, the worst thing in the world for Apple would be to try to expand their market instead of having such a defeatist attitude and selling to their existing market.
With that kind of attitude they never would have made the iPod in the first place, let alone the Mac Mini.
I believe Voyager requires periodic upload communications to tell it what to do or to help it better manage its dwindling resources and maintain its ability to accurately point back to earth.
I don't think Voyager would remain in contact with earth for that long unless that upload path were maintained.
You just can't get by through simply listening for Voyager.
Mecha started with "Giant Robots" which were really Japan's way of doing Sci-fi while tying back to its Samurai roots.
When you actually look objectively at what a "Mech" would require, engineeringwise, and how it would pose risks to the human pilot, you realize how it will never become a reality, no matter how much R&D is spent.
When you watch an anime battle with Mecha you see a lot of instances of these things doing hairpin turns and falling to the ground and bouncing around in a jarring fashion. Even today jet pilots can not pull certain maneuvers without blacking out from the G-forces. The kinds of things you see in anime would kill a human pilot instantly without some kind of magical inertial dampener technology. You'd be lucky if you walked away with just a case of whiplash.
Secondly, we just don't have materials strong enough to build one of these. The joints especially are problematic. There is a real limit to how big these can be without being ultra fragile. If one of these were to fall over, not only would you need help to pick it up, but you'd probably also have to repair it.
Third, power supply. All those motors need energy. How long do you think it will run off an internal battery or some noisy gas engine?
I think it's great to try, but just because it LOOKS like something out of anime doesn't mean it's going to be anything close to as functional, and like I said, even if you could magically produce something that could perform like anime, without those intertial dampenders you REALLY wouldn't want to play around with it.
I've been using a marble mouse (really a misnomer, since it's a trackball) for over five years. I can see the advantage of splitting off the axes into two different zones so you don't have to focus so much on moving scrollbars, but for general purpose pointer control, the marble mouse is good enough for me. I can alternate which fingers hit the buttons so I don't get too sore, at least I haven't gotten carpal tunnel, and based on the number of hours I use computers, I should have by now.
iTunes was fast out of the starting gate with its service. There were only a couple failed experiments before.
If Apple waits for others to show them video works, they will be too late to the party. This is especially true if the competition uses their own DRM scheme which locks out Apple (just as Apple has done with its AAC files).
They have to decide whether they want to be a leader, a follower, or not bother at all. I think they are going to not bother at all, because Apple is a small company and they have to really pick their battles to avoid risk.
Ironically, game console manufacturers understand that software makes more money than hardware.
As Apple gets more and more into closed consumer devices like the iPod, they are going to have to realize that there is a saturation point and that you can not sell the same hardware to the same person again and again and again.
What you can do, however, is sell more software for that hardware, or updated software.
Look at how many revisions of the IPOD there have been. 4 generations of classic ipod plus the ipod color, the mini, and the shuffle. The market is going to saturate and what will Apple be able to sell to these people? They already claim not to make much money on iTunes downloads.
I'm sure they make a good chunk of change selling OSX updates. If they had a larger installed base, that OS update money would multiply bigtime. This is the cash crop for Microsoft and it could be for Apple also.
I do think that Apple is living on borrowed time with its overpriced hardware. They suffer when their PPC chips fall behind the curve compared to x86 as they ALWAYS do. Not being able to put a G5 in the notebooks is really putting the squeeze to them. Right now they are charging two or three times as much as the Mac Mini for what is basically a Mac Mini with a screen in the iBook and PowerBook line. I don't think Apple can continually charge a premium for their hardware unless their CPUs are as fast as the current state of the art since Apple's core market is digital content creators who need that throughput.
They thought they'd get themselves out of trouble by moving from Motorola to IBM but IBM still doesn't have the chip R&D resources of an Intel or even an AMD, apparently.
I just don't think the PC world is as chaotic as it was in the mid to late 90s if you decide to support modern hardware only.
A lot of the legacy in the PC world is gone. ISA is long gone. Most PCI cards sold have pretty mature plug-n-play features, something that never really happened properly with ISA. There are only 2 graphics card designers left. It was a free-for-all in the mid 90s in comparison.
Since the internet is able to keep up with all the pirate movie downloading I don't see how bandwidth is a problem.
Comcast cable modems get 3 megabits down. At that speed you can watch a high quality DIVX in realtime as it streams. I would assume most people who buy stuff on iTunes use DSL or greater even though technically you could get away with dialup.
Video is just a matter of time. Hard drive capacity is there, even low-end computers from a few years ago can play back DIVX with ease, and broadband acceptance is almost there.
It might not be there for portables, but it certainly is at the very least on the cusp for desktops.
Linux is a popular OS in the server and increasingly the embedded devices market, but I don't see it taking over the desktop.
The problem is that Linux development is spearheaded by coders writing for other coders.
It takes more than a programmer's mind to make a truly polished end-user app. It's fine for things like Apache or db servers where the user is also a techie, but not for the average joe.
You need UI experts and designers to finish things off, and these types of people just don't give away their services to the open-source movement for free.
Linux developers will never spend the kind of time that Apple does to make things cohesive and easy to use and maintenance free. I agree that Lindows is trying to follow the Apple model and I wish them well, but when I tried it about six months ago I found the desktop to be sluggish and there were annoyances to be had here and there, like the embedded HTML browser in the file explorer not being the same as the regular web browser, hence pages rendering differently. Lots of weird font issues.
I was hoping to use it on a salvaged PIII600 I gave my dad but I wound up putting Windows 2000 on it instead because Win2K ran faster/better.
1) I want isolated songs that I like enough that I don't want to risk getting a crappy copy off of Kazaa, or I care enough about the band that made the song that I want to make sure the money filters through to them (however little).
2) I get an album if I'm:
-Too impatient to look for it in the store or order it online, or the item is hard enough to find that I'd have to order it online and wait for it to ship.
-The iTunes price is significantly cheaper than a new CD (usually for new releases where you can't find used CDs off of Amazon).
-I'm not too concerned about archival quality.
So there are a enough trigger situations that I usually buy about $10 worth of music a month through iTunes. I doubt many people are using iTunes as their only source of music. But they aren't ignoring it either.
It took me a while to gather the initiative to buy my first iTunes song but it worked smoothly enough that it is tempting to buy stuff you can trust vs. search for stuff on Kazaa and download it and get pissed off because the song cuts out at the end or there is a glitch somewhere.
The worst part about iTunes is the AAC files can only be burned to audio CDs rather than MP3 CDs (which would require a transcode) so if you wanted to play stuff in your car stereo with an MP3-capable CD changer you can't put many songs on each CD. But that's why people are looking to hook up their iPods to their cars.
This would make sense when you consider the amount of work that has gone into GarageBand.
However, there is a MacJams site that already streams music for free ala the old MP3.COM. I'm not sure how much people want to pay for "amateur" musicians, no matter how good the music sounds. There is a perceived value in store-bought CDs that just doesn't trickle down into the indie market.
The original Galactica had continuity too. Remember that Baltar wound up getting captured and then some episodes featured him in prison, then escaping, etc...
There were occasional references to events earlier in the series.
There was a narrative flow to the series as it went on. It wasn't just reset button every week.
Slashdot Mirror
If they only put the HD movies on at a milder compression then there would probably only be room for one movie.
But hollywood has their own idea of what "good enough" means when it comes to MPEG compression. That's why satellite TV looks like crap.
DVDs are roughly 5:1 compression with a 90m single layer DVD. Not that great.
At least with an ultra-high capacity disk it's technically possible to put an HD movie on it with mild enough compression that even a videophile might not see the blockiness.
I just have my doubts that the movies that come out will be offered in that quality.
You can't have a Star Wars thread without someone spelling prequel "prequal".
Oh come on. Don't you know that the terrorists have TRIED to hit us again? No, they just wanted to do one attack and end it at that. Yeah, sure. The only reason we haven't had another major tragedy like that has been because of our vigilance.
That's exactly why they started going after 'soft targets' in other countries like Bali and now Iraq, or hitting our allies instead of us directly.
But what producers of "kids" programs don't realize is that the most successful "kids" SF tend to be "adult" SF.
For instance, Trek reruns in the 70s.
The second you talk down to kids, you alienate them (think Jar Jar). They don't like it, especially geeky kids who are looking for SF.
I find it amusing that at the same time everyone is hand-wringing over the safety factors of the pending shuttle launch, Soyuz is flying to ISS again without fanfare.
I think that says everything there is to say about the US space program.
We're putting a lot of effort to put a lame duck platform back in orbit that is going to be decommissioned in 5 years or so anyway with no clear successor and we just kind of ignore the fact that Russia has a time-tested (but not glamorous) platform with a far better safety record.
What about oil use in the production of fertilizer?
What about the need for transporting that food around the globe to areas that can't grow their own food locally?
Essentially humanity is feeding off of oil because of this. How do you reduce demand without reducing the population?
Well, if they bring any new cast on from the Canadian population, they are likely to get some of that Canadian accent. I think Mutant-X has some of them. They say out kinda inbetween "oot" and "oat" and it is freaking annoying.
>>
Look, everyone *knew* that most of the plotlines in TOS were weak at best - but we didn't care because Spock and his internal struggle intrigued us and we liked the growing friendship between Kirk and Spock. And the love/hate relationship between McCoy and Spock.
Come on. Only some of the stories were bad. Most Trek episodes were very well written. It's true that even on the bad episodes, the likeable characters transcend the bad writing. But the post TOS shows had a far worse record in the plot dept. than TOS.
I don't think I'd want a 4GHZ CPU because the fans required to keep it cool would sound like a jet engine.
Mainstream desktop CPUs are not really getting that much faster lately because of these heat issues. That's the whole rationale for dual-core. To go parallel instead of just clocking faster.
Well gee, the worst thing in the world for Apple would be to try to expand their market instead of having such a defeatist attitude and selling to their existing market.
With that kind of attitude they never would have made the iPod in the first place, let alone the Mac Mini.
No, not all stupid, just the red states.
That would be great, if there were any alternatives to Citibank that didn't outsource. But I don't think there are any.
I believe Voyager requires periodic upload communications to tell it what to do or to help it better manage its dwindling resources and maintain its ability to accurately point back to earth.
I don't think Voyager would remain in contact with earth for that long unless that upload path were maintained.
You just can't get by through simply listening for Voyager.
Mecha started with "Giant Robots" which were really Japan's way of doing Sci-fi while tying back to its Samurai roots.
When you actually look objectively at what a "Mech" would require, engineeringwise, and how it would pose risks to the human pilot, you realize how it will never become a reality, no matter how much R&D is spent.
When you watch an anime battle with Mecha you see a lot of instances of these things doing hairpin turns and falling to the ground and bouncing around in a jarring fashion. Even today jet pilots can not pull certain maneuvers without blacking out from the G-forces. The kinds of things you see in anime would kill a human pilot instantly without some kind of magical inertial dampener technology. You'd be lucky if you walked away with just a case of whiplash.
Secondly, we just don't have materials strong enough to build one of these. The joints especially are problematic. There is a real limit to how big these can be without being ultra fragile. If one of these were to fall over, not only would you need help to pick it up, but you'd probably also have to repair it.
Third, power supply. All those motors need energy. How long do you think it will run off an internal battery or some noisy gas engine?
I think it's great to try, but just because it LOOKS like something out of anime doesn't mean it's going to be anything close to as functional, and like I said, even if you could magically produce something that could perform like anime, without those intertial dampenders you REALLY wouldn't want to play around with it.
I've been using a marble mouse (really a misnomer, since it's a trackball) for over five years. I can see the advantage of splitting off the axes into two different zones so you don't have to focus so much on moving scrollbars, but for general purpose pointer control, the marble mouse is good enough for me. I can alternate which fingers hit the buttons so I don't get too sore, at least I haven't gotten carpal tunnel, and based on the number of hours I use computers, I should have by now.
iTunes was fast out of the starting gate with its service. There were only a couple failed experiments before.
If Apple waits for others to show them video works, they will be too late to the party. This is especially true if the competition uses their own DRM scheme which locks out Apple (just as Apple has done with its AAC files).
They have to decide whether they want to be a leader, a follower, or not bother at all. I think they are going to not bother at all, because Apple is a small company and they have to really pick their battles to avoid risk.
Ironically, game console manufacturers understand that software makes more money than hardware.
As Apple gets more and more into closed consumer devices like the iPod, they are going to have to realize that there is a saturation point and that you can not sell the same hardware to the same person again and again and again.
What you can do, however, is sell more software for that hardware, or updated software.
Look at how many revisions of the IPOD there have been. 4 generations of classic ipod plus the ipod color, the mini, and the shuffle. The market is going to saturate and what will Apple be able to sell to these people? They already claim not to make much money on iTunes downloads.
I'm sure they make a good chunk of change selling OSX updates. If they had a larger installed base, that OS update money would multiply bigtime. This is the cash crop for Microsoft and it could be for Apple also.
I do think that Apple is living on borrowed time with its overpriced hardware. They suffer when their PPC chips fall behind the curve compared to x86 as they ALWAYS do. Not being able to put a G5 in the notebooks is really putting the squeeze to them. Right now they are charging two or three times as much as the Mac Mini for what is basically a Mac Mini with a screen in the iBook and PowerBook line. I don't think Apple can continually charge a premium for their hardware unless their CPUs are as fast as the current state of the art since Apple's core market is digital content creators who need that throughput.
They thought they'd get themselves out of trouble by moving from Motorola to IBM but IBM still doesn't have the chip R&D resources of an Intel or even an AMD, apparently.
I just don't think the PC world is as chaotic as it was in the mid to late 90s if you decide to support modern hardware only.
A lot of the legacy in the PC world is gone. ISA is long gone. Most PCI cards sold have pretty mature plug-n-play features, something that never really happened properly with ISA. There are only 2 graphics card designers left. It was a free-for-all in the mid 90s in comparison.
Since the internet is able to keep up with all the pirate movie downloading I don't see how bandwidth is a problem.
Comcast cable modems get 3 megabits down. At that speed you can watch a high quality DIVX in realtime as it streams. I would assume most people who buy stuff on iTunes use DSL or greater even though technically you could get away with dialup.
Video is just a matter of time. Hard drive capacity is there, even low-end computers from a few years ago can play back DIVX with ease, and broadband acceptance is almost there.
It might not be there for portables, but it certainly is at the very least on the cusp for desktops.
Linux is a popular OS in the server and increasingly the embedded devices market, but I don't see it taking over the desktop.
The problem is that Linux development is spearheaded by coders writing for other coders.
It takes more than a programmer's mind to make a truly polished end-user app. It's fine for things like Apache or db servers where the user is also a techie, but not for the average joe.
You need UI experts and designers to finish things off, and these types of people just don't give away their services to the open-source movement for free.
Linux developers will never spend the kind of time that Apple does to make things cohesive and easy to use and maintenance free. I agree that Lindows is trying to follow the Apple model and I wish them well, but when I tried it about six months ago I found the desktop to be sluggish and there were annoyances to be had here and there, like the embedded HTML browser in the file explorer not being the same as the regular web browser, hence pages rendering differently. Lots of weird font issues.
I was hoping to use it on a salvaged PIII600 I gave my dad but I wound up putting Windows 2000 on it instead because Win2K ran faster/better.
Too little too late.
I use the Itunes service when:
1) I want isolated songs that I like enough that I don't want to risk getting a crappy copy off of Kazaa, or I care enough about the band that made the song that I want to make sure the money filters through to them (however little).
2) I get an album if I'm:
-Too impatient to look for it in the store or order it online, or the item is hard enough to find that I'd have to order it online and wait for it to ship.
-The iTunes price is significantly cheaper than a new CD (usually for new releases where you can't find used CDs off of Amazon).
-I'm not too concerned about archival quality.
So there are a enough trigger situations that I usually buy about $10 worth of music a month through iTunes. I doubt many people are using iTunes as their only source of music. But they aren't ignoring it either.
It took me a while to gather the initiative to buy my first iTunes song but it worked smoothly enough that it is tempting to buy stuff you can trust vs. search for stuff on Kazaa and download it and get pissed off because the song cuts out at the end or there is a glitch somewhere.
The worst part about iTunes is the AAC files can only be burned to audio CDs rather than MP3 CDs (which would require a transcode) so if you wanted to play stuff in your car stereo with an MP3-capable CD changer you can't put many songs on each CD. But that's why people are looking to hook up their iPods to their cars.
This would make sense when you consider the amount of work that has gone into GarageBand.
However, there is a MacJams site that already streams music for free ala the old MP3.COM. I'm not sure how much people want to pay for "amateur" musicians, no matter how good the music sounds. There is a perceived value in store-bought CDs that just doesn't trickle down into the indie market.
The original Galactica had continuity too. Remember that Baltar wound up getting captured and then some episodes featured him in prison, then escaping, etc...
There were occasional references to events earlier in the series.
There was a narrative flow to the series as it went on. It wasn't just reset button every week.
Cable is really taking off vs. DSL and it's faster than DSL (my Comcast account is 3mb down).
At that speed, it should be able to watch a high quality video stream in realtime as it's downloading.