You've missed the point here, somewhat. Bluetooth isn't used for high-bandwidth purposes, as that's not what it's designed for. It's designed to be tiny, cheap and low-power. You can include it in a device for a buck or two, which is a lot cheaper than any other wireless I can think of (except IrDA, of course;)).
It's used to sync small amounts of data, send short messages, sporadic control IO (keyboards/etc), voice streams, etc. It's used to link PDAs/PCs/notebooks to cellphones for GPRS/G3 internet access, and (as you said) headsets (which is missing the bigger picture - we're talking about any audio in/out device, computer speakers/mics included), not forgetting fax/printing services.
It's most definitely not going anywhere, and its adoption will increase rapidly, especially when Windows gets its act together and has a decent BT stack. WIDCOMM is cool, but it looks like crap and doesn't work with everything. The macs have BT down.
Just because you can't see a use for it, doesn't mean it's useless and should go away. I can't think of a good reason to own a mass spectrometer or a soldering iron, but that doesn't mean they're useless and should be disposed of immediately.
That's pretty funny. Do you actually know about bluetooth? It's a very small, very cheap, very low-power radio technology for low-bandwidth data. It's not meant to be a 100ft-range-gigabit-ethernet-multimedia-streaming technology, but a useful replacement for low-bandwidth cabling. Headsets, keyboards, mice, microphones, etc. It does something other wireless chipsets don't, and nothing out there at the moment (or the forseeable future) can replace it.
Here's a nice scene: You're on your PDA, and not in a wireless hotspot. You want to check your mails, so you connect to your ISP using your phone which is in your pocket. You don't have to reach for anything - the two communicate, and you instantly have GPRS to your PDA. Or, another cool scene: At work, listening to music, and you want to check your voicemails quickly. Dial the answerphone on your phone (or from your computer), and listen to the messages over your headphones, nicely mixed with some quiet music from itunes or whatever, via bluetooth. Even better: send and receive text messages from your desktop/pda/notebook using a real keyboard. The list goes on.
People always pipe up and say something like "waah waah bluetooth waah crap waah WUSB is miles better waah waah", when they've blatantly misunderstood the purpose of the technology, and haven't realised just how useful it is.
I totally agree with you. I went to college in the UK (Bristol UWE), and I lived off-campus in a house with 6 other people. Really good stuff - people over all the time, lots of booze/pot/ladies etc. great times. Anyway, I learned more outside of the classroom than inside. True, I picked up some perl, java, c, etc. and that helped, but I stopped going to every class after about 3 months, and my attendance gradually tapered off until my placement year (3rd year of the course - you work in your preferred sector, in my case the internet). I ended up with a sweeeeet job in London. They flew me out to LA on my second day (with some of the CEO's cash in my pocket), and I stayed out there for 6 weeks (even met my wife-to-be at the LA offices, married 2 years). I didn't return to college, as I was on a full salary straight away (and they kept flying me to LA to hang out with my mates). Anyway, the moral of the story is - degrees don't mean success. College isn't all about classes and stuff, but learning about you, people, ladies, drugs, more ladies, and more drugs. If you concentrate on work so hard, you'll miss all the cool stuff.:)
That's just a great idea. You can't keep a PC under control, but somehow having a firearm is going to make everything better. What a mentality. No offense;)
It became popular because it did something nothing else did. It allowed us to compress audio on our PCs/macs/whatever relatively fast, and let us play it back, also relatively fast, and leaving us with a small-ish file. There wasn't anything else out there that could do it. Now, you get lots of products that do exactly what another product does, but slightly similar, and everyone bitches when it isn't supported, or conversely everyone bitches when it makes an appearance on the scene. It seems, on a technical level only, that something has to do something tangibly different before it becomes a runaway success. I think the iPod was helped a lot because of its design. True, it's a first-class mp3 player, but its design is what made it really appealing. Initially, it was its size (the nearest HDD player was MASSIVE compared). I guess the publicity it got from that elevated its appeal to the mass market, and it went off from there..ogg audio, on the other hand, does exactly what MP3 does, the only difference being the ideology behind its creation (the licenses don't affect end users, even if mp3 is a licensed technology - no-one notices), which simply isn't enough to make people jump ship. That's why.ogg support on MP3 devices isn't as great as ogg users would want, yet is something unnoticed by those who don't own any.ogg files.
Even candy bars... start eating, and they taste great! Keep eating, and you get sick. Then, the attraction decreases rapidly, until you've not eaten them so much that they start to be tasty again, but you don't eat so many so you don't get ill.
It's even broken in IE6 (spits up JS error). I mean, if they can't even get it to work on the most popular browser out there, how can they make a secure voting system? It makes the mind boggle.
And you can use that for transferring gigs of data from work to home how, exactly?;) that's my point.
The iPod merges in a large storage device with a very functional MP3 player. No media to swap out, no "Oh shit I gotta change the tunes on my mp3 player before I go out", no "damn I wish I could fit this image on one CD to take it home", etc. It's the perfect combination of large capacity storage, MP3-playing goodness and user friendliness.
You forgot the speed of creating a new CD for your player, which is considerably slower than copying the same tracks across firewire, or even USB2...
Decreasing the amount of crime where the perpetrator kills, or is more likely to kill, a victim is the major concern, not reducing crime in general (be it violent or not).
You can mug someone with a knife, true, but it's very hard to kill a group of people with one from a few feet away. There are no reasons to have guns at all. I've not heard a single logical argument as to why guns should be legal. Not a single one.
Bits, but then you can get 800mb/s firewire too, which is incredibly fast. Not that 400mb/s isn't fast either - much faster than USB2 in the same situation (and a LOT more common than 1gb/s LAN;))
That hard drive is just that - a hard drive. It isn't firewire (as you said), and it can't play music. If I wanted one of those, I'd have to have TWO devices in my pockets to do what I currently do with ONE.
I can listen to my iPod for about 6 hours before the battery dies. As I said, the number isn't about listening to them all at once, but to give me a choice. I can choose between any one of those songs on the road - you can only choose between 60. There's no contest.
I never take my charger out with me, unless I'm going to a party or on holiday, when I want either a sure-fire, non-portable music source, or if I'm away from a mains plug for a few days.
The iPod hard disk is only used when it's loading songs into RAM. All the other times it's parked, safely.
White box? Right. Great one. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is some paint on some cloth. Sheesh.
People not having guns decreases gun crime more than lowering poverty, that's for sure. Just think about it for two seconds. You can't shoot someone if you don't have a gun. You can only run up to them and make "bang! bang!" noises while pointing at them... not as dangerous. We don't need guns any more. They aren't useful in case the government go crazy - the government has bigger guns than people are allowed. It just doesn't make sense.
People owning guns in the US has flooded the populace with firearms. Someone taking a stand against those with guns will most likely need protection from them, and that needs guns. As soon as guns are criminalised, the need will die down. That's just logic, not a hole in the anti-gun argument. The fact that people have guns means other people need guns to be protected, which gives weight to the anti-gun argument, and not the pro-gun.
She doesn't own a handgun and go shooting tin cans every afternoon - her bodyguards have them because they need them, for legitimate purposes. If you can't see the difference, then, well, your tough luck.
That's probably because gun-nuts keep trying to kill her... She doesn't advocate personal firearms, yet has to use them because the people who do are creating a dangerous environment where that's necessary. Your point was one of the worst I've ever come across in the pro-gun world. I mean, really bad.
But it's just your MP3 player, which also happens to be a great external hard disk. You're telling me you've never wanted to carry a large file home with you, without using a notebook? Having the disk in a notebook makes it less useful. I can't carry a notebook everywhere I'm going, all day. Ethernet? I'd rather have 400mb firewire, thanks. If you got an external hard disk for 1/3 of the price, it would be 3 times as large, require a seperate power supply, won't be as hard-wearing, and won't play MP3s for you. Your choice.
I'm not intending to listen to all 6,000 at once, but I like to have the choice of which of the 6,000 tracks make up my days listening as I'm going about my daily business, not when I wake up before I leave for the office. It's about choice. As for charging, most people I know have firewire computers, so that's not an issue. The charger is tiny, anyway, and does fit very easily in a pocket.
The iPod will be as usable in 5 years as your Nomad. Hard disks can last over 5 years, you know.
You obviously have a chip on your shoulder about all of this. It's a design icon. Calling it a box shows your true feelings on the matter.
But, apple could not bother with any of that, and wouldn't notice the difference. That's what I'm talking about. If they did have Ogg support, they'd have absolutely minimal return on it. What's the point?
Yes, but think of how much it costs Apple to devote their developers' time to adding support for OGG files. Sure, it's technically easy (as the right hardware is there), but it still costs time and money physically writing the code to make it all happen. If Apple aren't going to get enough sales out of that one piece of functionality to cover the costs, they won't do it. That's why niche markets (like Ogg) are marginalised, and only called on when the service/commodity provider really needs it. Apple don't need it, so don't support it. Even if xiph offered help, it wouldn't matter. Apple would have to develop it itself otherwise face a licensing nightmare - both costing Apple more time and more money.
Sure, it's a box. It's also a 40-gig firewire hard disk, loaded up with all sorts of ISOs and AVIs and such, as well as music. I can fill it up and empty it without having to wait for the USB to chug along. (I took every simpsons episode ever to work the other day, all on my iPod - I'd hate to do that using CDRs, DVDRs, or 128mb flash players)
I don't have to think which tracks I want to listen to during the entire day before I leave the house - I have the choice to make up my mind when I want to listen to the tunes. I don't have to guess my mood throughout the day, and express it in 60 pre-chosen tracks. I have over 6,000 tracks on my iPod, so I can find something to suit my mood every single time. I take it to parties to help out with the music should it be needed. I don't have to guess the ebb and flow of the party in the evening before I leave the house in the morning - I have everything I need right with me.
No moving parts is cool, I guess, but then the iPod copies music from its hard disk to memory before it starts playing, then parks the heads on the disk.
Saying it's just "a box" is pretty silly, especially seeing as it's won all sorts of awards and has become one of the most easily recognisable designs of IT to date. Also, calling it "hefty" is pretty silly, as it fits in my jacket pocket without me even noticing. Hefty implies "considerable" size, which it clearly isn't. CD walkmans, house bricks and SUVs are hefty, iPods are not.
It sucks for the handful of people who use a niche format for their audio. I mean, if I converted all my movies to.TIFFs with a.WAV soundtrack, I wouldn't moan that the latest DVD players don't play them - that's what you get for adopting an uncommon format. Economics dictate you're not going to get a look in.
Maybe that's another feature of the iPod - better construction. I'm not trolling, but I've only had very minor problems with my iPods. I got a first-gen back in 2001 (5gig), which has been all round europe and over to the states and back a few times. The hard disk still works fine (but the FW connector is a bit flakey). My 2nd iPod, a 3rd-gen 40giger is working fine (coming up to a year old). My friends who also have iPods (4) havent had any problems with theirs, either.
Of course, I use a widely-accepted music format, so I'm not locked in to manufacturers looking for a niche market;)
The fact is, Google have specifically asked users to not use these 3rd-party tools. Regardless of their reasoning behind it, if someone wants to use their system, they have to play by the rules.
It's nothing to do with paying for a service or whatever. It wouldn't make a jot of difference if you paid $10,000 a month for it.
(and saying windows is much more limited with regards to new software and extensions is pretty funny:))
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It's used to sync small amounts of data, send short messages, sporadic control IO (keyboards/etc), voice streams, etc. It's used to link PDAs/PCs/notebooks to cellphones for GPRS/G3 internet access, and (as you said) headsets (which is missing the bigger picture - we're talking about any audio in/out device, computer speakers/mics included), not forgetting fax/printing services.
It's most definitely not going anywhere, and its adoption will increase rapidly, especially when Windows gets its act together and has a decent BT stack. WIDCOMM is cool, but it looks like crap and doesn't work with everything. The macs have BT down.
Just because you can't see a use for it, doesn't mean it's useless and should go away. I can't think of a good reason to own a mass spectrometer or a soldering iron, but that doesn't mean they're useless and should be disposed of immediately.
Here's a nice scene: You're on your PDA, and not in a wireless hotspot. You want to check your mails, so you connect to your ISP using your phone which is in your pocket. You don't have to reach for anything - the two communicate, and you instantly have GPRS to your PDA. Or, another cool scene: At work, listening to music, and you want to check your voicemails quickly. Dial the answerphone on your phone (or from your computer), and listen to the messages over your headphones, nicely mixed with some quiet music from itunes or whatever, via bluetooth. Even better: send and receive text messages from your desktop/pda/notebook using a real keyboard. The list goes on.
People always pipe up and say something like "waah waah bluetooth waah crap waah WUSB is miles better waah waah", when they've blatantly misunderstood the purpose of the technology, and haven't realised just how useful it is.
Are you American? :)
I totally agree with you. I went to college in the UK (Bristol UWE), and I lived off-campus in a house with 6 other people. Really good stuff - people over all the time, lots of booze/pot/ladies etc. great times. Anyway, I learned more outside of the classroom than inside. True, I picked up some perl, java, c, etc. and that helped, but I stopped going to every class after about 3 months, and my attendance gradually tapered off until my placement year (3rd year of the course - you work in your preferred sector, in my case the internet). I ended up with a sweeeeet job in London. They flew me out to LA on my second day (with some of the CEO's cash in my pocket), and I stayed out there for 6 weeks (even met my wife-to-be at the LA offices, married 2 years). I didn't return to college, as I was on a full salary straight away (and they kept flying me to LA to hang out with my mates). Anyway, the moral of the story is - degrees don't mean success. College isn't all about classes and stuff, but learning about you, people, ladies, drugs, more ladies, and more drugs. If you concentrate on work so hard, you'll miss all the cool stuff. :)
That's just a great idea. You can't keep a PC under control, but somehow having a firearm is going to make everything better. What a mentality. No offense ;)
damn I ramble on a lot.
ok, maybe I think about candy too much.
It's even broken in IE6 (spits up JS error). I mean, if they can't even get it to work on the most popular browser out there, how can they make a secure voting system? It makes the mind boggle.
Touché :)
The iPod merges in a large storage device with a very functional MP3 player. No media to swap out, no "Oh shit I gotta change the tunes on my mp3 player before I go out", no "damn I wish I could fit this image on one CD to take it home", etc. It's the perfect combination of large capacity storage, MP3-playing goodness and user friendliness.
You forgot the speed of creating a new CD for your player, which is considerably slower than copying the same tracks across firewire, or even USB2...
You can mug someone with a knife, true, but it's very hard to kill a group of people with one from a few feet away. There are no reasons to have guns at all. I've not heard a single logical argument as to why guns should be legal. Not a single one.
That hard drive is just that - a hard drive. It isn't firewire (as you said), and it can't play music. If I wanted one of those, I'd have to have TWO devices in my pockets to do what I currently do with ONE.
I can listen to my iPod for about 6 hours before the battery dies. As I said, the number isn't about listening to them all at once, but to give me a choice. I can choose between any one of those songs on the road - you can only choose between 60. There's no contest.
I never take my charger out with me, unless I'm going to a party or on holiday, when I want either a sure-fire, non-portable music source, or if I'm away from a mains plug for a few days.
The iPod hard disk is only used when it's loading songs into RAM. All the other times it's parked, safely.
White box? Right. Great one. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is some paint on some cloth. Sheesh.
People not having guns decreases gun crime more than lowering poverty, that's for sure. Just think about it for two seconds. You can't shoot someone if you don't have a gun. You can only run up to them and make "bang! bang!" noises while pointing at them... not as dangerous. We don't need guns any more. They aren't useful in case the government go crazy - the government has bigger guns than people are allowed. It just doesn't make sense.
She doesn't own a handgun and go shooting tin cans every afternoon - her bodyguards have them because they need them, for legitimate purposes. If you can't see the difference, then, well, your tough luck.
It's the Ultra model, so it has v. fast RAM. Also, I can play Doom III on my geforce 2 with 64mb. Sure, it's not blisteringly fast, but it works.
That's probably because gun-nuts keep trying to kill her... She doesn't advocate personal firearms, yet has to use them because the people who do are creating a dangerous environment where that's necessary. Your point was one of the worst I've ever come across in the pro-gun world. I mean, really bad.
I'm not intending to listen to all 6,000 at once, but I like to have the choice of which of the 6,000 tracks make up my days listening as I'm going about my daily business, not when I wake up before I leave for the office. It's about choice. As for charging, most people I know have firewire computers, so that's not an issue. The charger is tiny, anyway, and does fit very easily in a pocket.
The iPod will be as usable in 5 years as your Nomad. Hard disks can last over 5 years, you know.
You obviously have a chip on your shoulder about all of this. It's a design icon. Calling it a box shows your true feelings on the matter.
But, apple could not bother with any of that, and wouldn't notice the difference. That's what I'm talking about. If they did have Ogg support, they'd have absolutely minimal return on it. What's the point?
No, we already have the chicken and the egg - Ogg is egg v2, which no-one needs.
Yes, but think of how much it costs Apple to devote their developers' time to adding support for OGG files. Sure, it's technically easy (as the right hardware is there), but it still costs time and money physically writing the code to make it all happen. If Apple aren't going to get enough sales out of that one piece of functionality to cover the costs, they won't do it. That's why niche markets (like Ogg) are marginalised, and only called on when the service/commodity provider really needs it. Apple don't need it, so don't support it. Even if xiph offered help, it wouldn't matter. Apple would have to develop it itself otherwise face a licensing nightmare - both costing Apple more time and more money.
Got any proof of your anti-gun "pundit" allegation? Just curious... :)
I don't have to think which tracks I want to listen to during the entire day before I leave the house - I have the choice to make up my mind when I want to listen to the tunes. I don't have to guess my mood throughout the day, and express it in 60 pre-chosen tracks. I have over 6,000 tracks on my iPod, so I can find something to suit my mood every single time. I take it to parties to help out with the music should it be needed. I don't have to guess the ebb and flow of the party in the evening before I leave the house in the morning - I have everything I need right with me.
No moving parts is cool, I guess, but then the iPod copies music from its hard disk to memory before it starts playing, then parks the heads on the disk.
Saying it's just "a box" is pretty silly, especially seeing as it's won all sorts of awards and has become one of the most easily recognisable designs of IT to date. Also, calling it "hefty" is pretty silly, as it fits in my jacket pocket without me even noticing. Hefty implies "considerable" size, which it clearly isn't. CD walkmans, house bricks and SUVs are hefty, iPods are not.
It sucks for the handful of people who use a niche format for their audio. I mean, if I converted all my movies to .TIFFs with a .WAV soundtrack, I wouldn't moan that the latest DVD players don't play them - that's what you get for adopting an uncommon format. Economics dictate you're not going to get a look in.
Of course, I use a widely-accepted music format, so I'm not locked in to manufacturers looking for a niche market ;)
But seeing as only about 20 people on the face of the earth use OGG, it's not that important :)
It's nothing to do with paying for a service or whatever. It wouldn't make a jot of difference if you paid $10,000 a month for it.
(and saying windows is much more limited with regards to new software and extensions is pretty funny :))