Come on... physical education and some amount of team sports activity are a pretty important part of education. Not only that, but giving those kids that aren't academically or creatively inclined an area to excel in (besides the military) is vital for society.
Now, I'll acknowledge that -far- too much emphasis is currently placed on competitive sports, compared to (for example) the pursuit of intellectual or artistic excellence, but doing away with it entirely is equally bad.
There have been experiments where they've connected electrodes to the brains of rats - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/05 01_020501_roborats.html - and gotten them to turn left and right on command.
I'm thinking the same principle could be scaled down small enough and light enough to produce a radio control apparatus for a living insect.
The reason the iPod is good compared to the other players is that engineering a small, light, hard drive based player, with good battery life and reasonable survivability, is hard. Most of those companies just don't seem to have the design and engineering skills that Apple is rightly famous for.
Take the hard drive out of the equation, though, and it's a total piece of cake. All of a sudden, the battery can be smaller, the electronics simpler, you don't need any of the impact protection... building a decent Flash player in an iPod-mini form factor is trivial. The only limiting factor, right now, is that cheap and readily available Flash chips are not quite big enough yet - Joe Average probably needs 2GB to hold all the music they want to listen to with any kind of regularity.
As to the software side... it would not surprise me to see the more advanced P2P players (Shareaza, eMule and the like) come up with an open API for portable player vendors (if such a thing doesn't exist already) - when that happens, iTunes might as well never have existed.
Yeah, like those Sinclair portable TVs did in the 80s? Or even those little portable DVD players that look like miniature laptops without the keys? Video and audio are fundamentally not the same thing (you really can't watch video whilst doing something else at the same time, which is the reason you need the tiny form factor in the first place; and those postage stamp screens are just too damn small for most people to enjoy video on anyways). The only time most people want such a thing is for live streaming video - news, sporting events, talking to a loved one or important business contact - and for that, a 3G phone is the right device.
Now, personally, I think it's a great shame that the phone, and not the handheld general purpose computer, is the device that everything seems to be converging around - the phone companies have the worst proprietary-software, secrecy, lock-it-all-down philosophy of any hi-tech industry besides the military. But it seems, unsurprisingly, that the phone is the device that the great unwashed find to be the best starting point - communication is what people want to do more than anything else, so they're prepared to work harder to overcome their natural technophobia when that's the goal.
Apple manages to have good margins because it's premium, niche gear - they're the equivalent of yuppie-grade audiophile hi-fi gear. Nice design and above-average engineering sold at a large premium.
I have no doubt that Apple can continue to make some of the best players on the market, and even sell them at a profit - the question is, is it a market that's worth being in for them if they only have 2-3% of it, as they do with computers? When Sony have a $99 2GB player, no-name Chinese-made players are $50, and the Samsung phone you get free with your contract has a multi-GB memory, where's the market for a $399 hard-disk player? Yes, some people can and will buy them for the flash factor, but most of the market is Honda and Dell, not BMW and Macintosh.
Players will be a profitless commodity within two years (as soon as 2GB flash chips are cheap and readily available, you can forget about the engineering challenges that shoehorning an HD in to a small, elegant box brings). Whether or not there is any money to be made from the other two depends on whether or not the DRM model wins out against both genuinely-free and illegaly-copied music.
In theory this allows all Windows VSTs to work. In practice compatibility is somewhat less than 100% due to bugs in the VSTis themselves, or lack of support for nasty things like PACE copyprotection drivers which quite a few VSTs (including, I think, TC) use.
Not to mention, I have a feeling these guys -> www.museresearch.com - (who, by the way, are doing some great work in getting VSTs to run on a custom Linux-based PC) might feel that this infringes on their trademark just a little.
It's not a big problem. WINE is slower than Windows API calls, yes, but VSTs shouldn't be making Windows API calls from the low-latency parts of the code anyway (and indeed, the vast majority do not).
Nice advert:p - sure, Band In A Box isn't bad at all, and is the ideal app for a great many people - BUT, there are plenty of things a musician could legitimately want that it doesn't do.
Most of that $50K is hardware - DSP accelerators, fast external drives, high quality AD/DA convertors. Yes, you can get equivalent performance with cheaper hardware, but we are still talking about rather more than a $500 secondhand PC.
Probably not many. The current generation of planet detection techniques are only sensitive enough to pick up Jupiter-scale planets (although, presumably, systems that have Jupiter-like planets are also likely to have smaller, rocky, Earth/Mars/Venus sized worlds as well).
Better than the 300, maybe, but still far from perfect. In my experience, the Treo 600 is roughly at the Windows 95A stage in evolution... I have bright hopes for the future of the Treo, but the 600 leaves a lot to be desired.
PalmOS = having to pay $25 a time for things which very often should be either free, or included by default (call timer and GPRS/GSM data meter, anyone)?
The Treo 600 is nearly there. Now if they could just...... fit a hard drive and some non-volatile memory... make the camera not suck... and solve the general reliability problems
it really would be the ultimate pocket phone/player/pda.
Won't work. SpaceShipOne is able to be small enough to be carried by an airliner because it doesn't go all that high - so it needs little fuel, and almost no reentry shielding. Manned truly orbital vehicles need to be much more heavily constructed - the 35,000ft in altitude and 600mph in velocity you gain by piggy-backing your orbital vehicle on a 747 is not a very significant percentage of the journey in to orbit, and whilst a 747 can indeed carry a shuttle, it would not be able to carry the drop tank & boosters as well.
That said, for very small (a few kilos) unmanned satellites, the US military has used this approach courtesy of the B-52 and the Pegasus rocket.
False. Medical needs are related to the health of the people, not their age. Most attempts to extend life are about trying to extend the 50-or-so healthy years of adulthood, not the 10 or 20 sickly ones at the end.
Of course, if we have a large population of fit, healthy 75 year olds, we should certainly be expecting them to earn their keep... as life expectancy increases, so must the retirement age.
The problem is not so much one of monitoring by governments and ISPs. Western governments by and large really do not care that much, and, in any case strong crypto and spoofing of all varieties is readily enough available that those who want privacy for high-value matters relating to, say, business, or national security, that it's not such a worry in those spheres.
For me it's more a case of - these days, once the Govt., or the intelligence and security services, have this monitoring infrastructure, it goes something like this:-
Year 1: The tax and benefits departments in the Govt will ask the spooks to start sharing. The police will ask for access also.
Year 2: The entire Government - health, pensions, local govt. etc., education - will all want it. Schools will use it to vet new employees.
Year 3: Security-conscious corporations like banks and airlines will demand access.
Year 4: The whole damn lot will be available on a couple of DVDs at your friendly local market... at least if you live in Moscow or Jakarta.
Year 5: "Check Other Peoples' Email" toolbar appears on Google. The dying embers of the snailmail service are suddenly brought back to life by the return to fashion of the traditional love letter.
Wind and solar, certainly not... extracting any kind of energy literally out of thin air is not going to provide any kind of long term solution, as the energy densities involved are rather low.
Now, tidal, wave, hydroelectric and hydrothermal power stations are a completely different matter. Yes, they are not without environmental consequences of their own, but the amount of power they can generate is much more substantial.
The Treo600 with appropriate memory card is pretty darn close to this, and the battery life is good. It includes phone, camera, the regular PDA features, and with additional software can serve as an mp3 player, Gameboy and SNES emulators, wireless SSH/telnet client, etc.. I own one and am reasonably happy with it.
BUT:-
- the phone is "only" 2.5G, not 3G (not that this makes much difference in most countries, mind you)
- there's no Bluetooth. PC connection is via USB only.
- a lot of seemingly key software (GPRS modem for PC? GPRS data meter?) is missing entirely, and much of the rest is somewhat lacking (the email client sucks).
- The camera is pretty hopeless - VGA resolution, with no flash (not even LED), and poor CCD sensitivity in medium..low light leading to blurry pictures.
- The screen is of the low-res variety.
- Storage is SD-Card only, making it expensive as a music player. Apple have shown that it's possible to fit a hard drive in to this sort of form factor, shame Handspring couldn't do the same.
Nonetheless, it's close -enough- that I'm confident they are headed in the right direction; the overall build quality, software quality and ergonomics run rings around anything from Archos.
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GarageBand is not really a midi sequencer. More of an audio arranger, looper and basic multitracker.
RPM are per minute, not per second... 60-80rpm is one rev per second, or 30 fields/rev - perfectly visible.
Come on... physical education and some amount of team sports activity are a pretty important part of education. Not only that, but giving those kids that aren't academically or creatively inclined an area to excel in (besides the military) is vital for society.
Now, I'll acknowledge that -far- too much emphasis is currently placed on competitive sports, compared to (for example) the pursuit of intellectual or artistic excellence, but doing away with it entirely is equally bad.
My ultimate wish list:-
- Treo600 form factor
- 2GB+ storage, either hard drive or solid state
- 2mpix camera with flash and lens-protector (and crude manual zoom or digital zoom?)
- USB2, able to act as either host or slave
- Slimmed down version of any desktop OS: Linux, WinXP or OS X (trimmed to fit in 128 or 256M ram, and operate on ~300MHz processor)
- Phone functionality
- 802.11a/b inc hosting, GSM-GPRS and 3G. Not so much need for Bluetooth, but would be nice.
- Stereo analog/digi combo headphone and microphone jacks
- High density screen
No real need for a memory card slot, as it could use USB thumbdrives for removable storage.
There have been experiments where they've connected electrodes to the brains of rats - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/05 01_020501_roborats.html - and gotten them to turn left and right on command.
I'm thinking the same principle could be scaled down small enough and light enough to produce a radio control apparatus for a living insect.
The reason the iPod is good compared to the other players is that engineering a small, light, hard drive based player, with good battery life and reasonable survivability, is hard. Most of those companies just don't seem to have the design and engineering skills that Apple is rightly famous for.
Take the hard drive out of the equation, though, and it's a total piece of cake. All of a sudden, the battery can be smaller, the electronics simpler, you don't need any of the impact protection... building a decent Flash player in an iPod-mini form factor is trivial. The only limiting factor, right now, is that cheap and readily available Flash chips are not quite big enough yet - Joe Average probably needs 2GB to hold all the music they want to listen to with any kind of regularity.
As to the software side... it would not surprise me to see the more advanced P2P players (Shareaza, eMule and the like) come up with an open API for portable player vendors (if such a thing doesn't exist already) - when that happens, iTunes might as well never have existed.
Yeah, like those Sinclair portable TVs did in the 80s? Or even those little portable DVD players that look like miniature laptops without the keys? Video and audio are fundamentally not the same thing (you really can't watch video whilst doing something else at the same time, which is the reason you need the tiny form factor in the first place; and those postage stamp screens are just too damn small for most people to enjoy video on anyways). The only time most people want such a thing is for live streaming video - news, sporting events, talking to a loved one or important business contact - and for that, a 3G phone is the right device.
Now, personally, I think it's a great shame that the phone, and not the handheld general purpose computer, is the device that everything seems to be converging around - the phone companies have the worst proprietary-software, secrecy, lock-it-all-down philosophy of any hi-tech industry besides the military. But it seems, unsurprisingly, that the phone is the device that the great unwashed find to be the best starting point - communication is what people want to do more than anything else, so they're prepared to work harder to overcome their natural technophobia when that's the goal.
Apple manages to have good margins because it's premium, niche gear - they're the equivalent of yuppie-grade audiophile hi-fi gear. Nice design and above-average engineering sold at a large premium.
I have no doubt that Apple can continue to make some of the best players on the market, and even sell them at a profit - the question is, is it a market that's worth being in for them if they only have 2-3% of it, as they do with computers? When Sony have a $99 2GB player, no-name Chinese-made players are $50, and the Samsung phone you get free with your contract has a multi-GB memory, where's the market for a $399 hard-disk player? Yes, some people can and will buy them for the flash factor, but most of the market is Honda and Dell, not BMW and Macintosh.
Players will be a profitless commodity within two years (as soon as 2GB flash chips are cheap and readily available, you can forget about the engineering challenges that shoehorning an HD in to a small, elegant box brings). Whether or not there is any money to be made from the other two depends on whether or not the DRM model wins out against both genuinely-free and illegaly-copied music.
In theory this allows all Windows VSTs to work. In practice compatibility is somewhat less than 100% due to bugs in the VSTis themselves, or lack of support for nasty things like PACE copyprotection drivers which quite a few VSTs (including, I think, TC) use.
Not to mention, I have a feeling these guys -> www.museresearch.com - (who, by the way, are doing some great work in getting VSTs to run on a custom Linux-based PC) might feel that this infringes on their trademark just a little.
It's not a big problem. WINE is slower than Windows API calls, yes, but VSTs shouldn't be making Windows API calls from the low-latency parts of the code anyway (and indeed, the vast majority do not).
Nice advert :p - sure, Band In A Box isn't bad at all, and is the ideal app for a great many people - BUT, there are plenty of things a musician could legitimately want that it doesn't do.
Most of that $50K is hardware - DSP accelerators, fast external drives, high quality AD/DA convertors. Yes, you can get equivalent performance with cheaper hardware, but we are still talking about rather more than a $500 secondhand PC.
Probably not many. The current generation of planet detection techniques are only sensitive enough to pick up Jupiter-scale planets (although, presumably, systems that have Jupiter-like planets are also likely to have smaller, rocky, Earth/Mars/Venus sized worlds as well).
... besides the K6-2, the Alpha, and all manner of vector processing chips.
Make that the 40s and 50s...
Better than the 300, maybe, but still far from perfect. In my experience, the Treo 600 is roughly at the Windows 95A stage in evolution... I have bright hopes for the future of the Treo, but the 600 leaves a lot to be desired.
Linux = access to free software.
PalmOS = having to pay $25 a time for things which very often should be either free, or included by default (call timer and GPRS/GSM data meter, anyone)?
The Treo 600 is nearly there. Now if they could just... ... fit a hard drive and some non-volatile memory ... make the camera not suck ... and solve the general reliability problems
it really would be the ultimate pocket phone/player/pda.
Won't work. SpaceShipOne is able to be small enough to be carried by an airliner because it doesn't go all that high - so it needs little fuel, and almost no reentry shielding. Manned truly orbital vehicles need to be much more heavily constructed - the 35,000ft in altitude and 600mph in velocity you gain by piggy-backing your orbital vehicle on a 747 is not a very significant percentage of the journey in to orbit, and whilst a 747 can indeed carry a shuttle, it would not be able to carry the drop tank & boosters as well.
That said, for very small (a few kilos) unmanned satellites, the US military has used this approach courtesy of the B-52 and the Pegasus rocket.
False. Medical needs are related to the health of the people, not their age. Most attempts to extend life are about trying to extend the 50-or-so healthy years of adulthood, not the 10 or 20 sickly ones at the end.
Of course, if we have a large population of fit, healthy 75 year olds, we should certainly be expecting them to earn their keep... as life expectancy increases, so must the retirement age.
The problem is not so much one of monitoring by governments and ISPs. Western governments by and large really do not care that much, and, in any case strong crypto and spoofing of all varieties is readily enough available that those who want privacy for high-value matters relating to, say, business, or national security, that it's not such a worry in those spheres.
For me it's more a case of - these days, once the Govt., or the intelligence and security services, have this monitoring infrastructure, it goes something like this:-
Year 1: The tax and benefits departments in the Govt will ask the spooks to start sharing. The police will ask for access also.
Year 2: The entire Government - health, pensions, local govt. etc., education - will all want it. Schools will use it to vet new employees.
Year 3: Security-conscious corporations like banks and airlines will demand access.
Year 4: The whole damn lot will be available on a couple of DVDs at your friendly local market... at least if you live in Moscow or Jakarta.
Year 5: "Check Other Peoples' Email" toolbar appears on Google. The dying embers of the snailmail service are suddenly brought back to life by the return to fashion of the traditional love letter.
Wind and solar, certainly not... extracting any kind of energy literally out of thin air is not going to provide any kind of long term solution, as the energy densities involved are rather low.
Now, tidal, wave, hydroelectric and hydrothermal power stations are a completely different matter. Yes, they are not without environmental consequences of their own, but the amount of power they can generate is much more substantial.
The Treo600 with appropriate memory card is pretty darn close to this, and the battery life is good. It includes phone, camera, the regular PDA features, and with additional software can serve as an mp3 player, Gameboy and SNES emulators, wireless SSH/telnet client, etc.. I own one and am reasonably happy with it.
BUT:-
- the phone is "only" 2.5G, not 3G (not that this makes much difference in most countries, mind you)
- there's no Bluetooth. PC connection is via USB only.
- a lot of seemingly key software (GPRS modem for PC? GPRS data meter?) is missing entirely, and much of the rest is somewhat lacking (the email client sucks).
- The camera is pretty hopeless - VGA resolution, with no flash (not even LED), and poor CCD sensitivity in medium..low light leading to blurry pictures.
- The screen is of the low-res variety.
- Storage is SD-Card only, making it expensive as a music player. Apple have shown that it's possible to fit a hard drive in to this sort of form factor, shame Handspring couldn't do the same.
Nonetheless, it's close -enough- that I'm confident they are headed in the right direction; the overall build quality, software quality and ergonomics run rings around anything from Archos.