wtf are you talking about?
ipod video has been basically killed here due to the non-availability of video for download, presumably because apple couldn't get the rights. There has never been any such thing as an "ipod video." Apple never marketed any such product, so I think "killed" is a little presumptuous. In fact, "ipod video" is just blathering blogspeak. It started before video was available when people thought that the "ipod video" would be some kind of PSP sized crap box for dedicated video viewing. It was never meant to be that way.
It's marketed as a larger ipod, Yeah, see what they did is they added video playback to the (near) original form-factor iPod, which has always been the largest capacity unit in the family. They were already selling these "larger ipods," because THAT WAS THE ORIGINAL PRODUCT.
but of everyone I know that's got an ipod in the last few months they've gone for the cheaper version because video on its own is a bit pointless (not to mention video mobile phones are freely available and much cheaper). Even before video playback was a feature on the iPod, it was being outsold by another product called iPod Mini because (gasp!) the Mini was smaller and cheaper! Guess what? The iPod Nanos that your friends bought have always outsold the full-sized iPod, and it has nothing to do with people opting out on "ipod videos" because there aren't any videos. Apple has ALWAYS marketted them as the highest tier of a family of music players, with a bonus feature (video).
If iTV has to rely on internet downloads it simply won't have any use here unless apple can get the rights to sell full length episodes etc.. It's not worth paying for a device that can browse utube and that's it.. That is about as lame as arguing that the iPod relies on songs downloaded from ITMS. It does not. The "iTV" is intended to play ANY content on your computer--pictures, video, audio--on your home entertainment system. It bridges the gap. Any content sales will piggyback on this idea, just like ITMS piggybacks on iTunes capability to play ANY content that you give it (CDs, pirated MP3s, etc).
they'd sell about 3 of them. Yeah, just like they only sold 3 original iPods before ITMS was available. Have you forgotten that online sales came AFTER the iPod was already selling like hotcakes?
I somehow don't think it will be called iTV in the USA, because Jobs said that was just an internal project name and that it would be called something else at release.
I was going to make a joke about how the PS3 can barely be said to be "out" in North America, but then I was at Target yesterday and they had PS3s but no Wiis... so I guess the joke is "And the Wii isn't even out yet..."
You should read slashdot more than once a year; I think this has been said umpteen times in every single "next-generation" console thread since the 360 came out:P
Well, there's also the matter of latitude to remember here, when comparing Europe and the USA. I live in Phoenix, which is at approximately the same latitude as Baghdad. Most of the USA lines up with the Mediterranean, not with Scandinavia.
At high altitudes in AZ, you can get away with passive cooling if you have excellent insulation. You can open the doors and windows at night, and close them during the day, and keep your house livable. At low altitudes like Phoenix, however (~1500'), that's a fool's errand. Summer nights may not dip below 90 F for weeks, and can sometimes be 100 F. You would have to live in an underground bunker to get any kind of passive cooling. The only solution to "being too hot" is AC.
Of course, it's nice during the winter, because we can do passive heating;) Can you guys do that? Stop wasting energy on heat, ya savages!
Straw bale isn't any more traditional than a geodesic dome. It's a nifty idea that has been touted by the nifty idea crowd for a while now. "Traditional" Arizona houses were brick, wood framed, or adobe. Baled straw didn't even exist until the 20th century.
If you use straw bale exclusively (as the only support for your roof), then yeah, you're limited in height. Most (modern, anyway) straw bale houses are still framed, because the frame also helps keep you from having problems as the bales settle. This also eliminates the height limit./Arizonan from the old school//Helped build a strawbale house
I liked my free account on WoW. I already had a copy installed on my laptop, so I opened my own trial account to play around. It would be a paid account now, except that I don't want to shell out $60 for another boxed copy.
Blizzard: Sell accounts online. Instead of making me go to the store and buy a box, just sell me the damned account number online and call it a "setup fee." Everybody knows that the "free downloadable client" is exactly the same as the boxed client. You are retarded for making me drive to the store. For that reason, I'm just going to continue mooching off my brother's account while he's not playing.
Apple also bends over bass-ackwards for Blizzard too, at least as far as they do for anybody else. There have been a grip of driver updates for OS X to tweak WoW performance.
Don't get too snide; coastal tax dollars pay you to grow the corn and make the ethanol and southerners grow the cotton. We've paid for that corn several times over before we get to the pump. The irony of "red states" in the midwest is that they're the beneficiaries of what amounts to socialist farm policies.
And yes, I'm from a small town that grows obscene amounts of corn on the taxpayers' dime. We only burn ethanol in our cars because we've got to do SOMETHING with all the surplus corn that is produced. If there were no tax subsidy, there would be no ethanol.
Small town America is great, but don't confuse reality with fairy tales. Reality is a bitch.
Re:iTunes Music Store only looks like a lock in.
on
Opening Zune Sales Flaccid
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you represented any significant percentage of the market, Apple might care about you. Of course they don't!
Joe Six-Pack doesn't see iTunes' DRM getting in his way. In fact, the only time he notices it is when he types in his password (once in a blue moon), to get another computer authorized on his iTunes account. He doesn't notice the compression artifacts; he doesn't even know what "lossy" means.
Right on. Just for comparison, I can squeeze around 5 hours of use out of my 12" G4/800 iBook when I put the screen brightness on lowest level, mute the sound, and use the "best battery life" setting. Screen up, sound on, I get about 3.5 hours. It's a huge difference.
I learned that sound trick from a slashdot post one time. I was skeptical, but it actually works--you can see the battery life climb after muting.
Wikipedia's internal search blows. When I'm curious about something, I type "wikipedia topic" into google, where topic can be pretty much anything. Then, even if "topic" isn't exactly what the title of the article is, I'll get some hits to start with. I almost never use Wikipedia's own search function. Google FTW.
* Nice eye candy, some people like the way windows do that slurpy thing when you minimize them, etc. Personally I don't like the dock, find it a bit big, clunky, and lacking real information about what programs I have open.
So:
- Turn off the slurpy thing. I don't like it either, and I don't have it on. System Preferences > Dock > Minimize Using Scale Effect
- Make the dock smaller, make it disappear when unused, etc. from the same menu. And what information, exactly, do the taskbars in windows or Gnome tell you about running programs, other than that they are running?
* Most everything 'just works' the way it's supposed to. If you can get into the "Mac way" of doing things, eg, iphoto, itunes, etc. then you'll be right at home.
You can also purchase or DL your own favorite programs and work outside of the apple ecosystem, in which case your computer will do everything the way that your other OS's do 'em.
The drawbacks are that OSX is not very customizable the way Gnome (the default Ubuntu desktop environment) is.
Examples?
Terminal application is somewhat lacking. It has basic features but cannot be customized very much. If you do a lot of work on the command line you'll probably want a third-party terminal application to get your real work done.
Examples? I can only think of one; I can't figure out how to dump screen output into a file.
The wireless setup is not straightforward, and if you're not used to it can be a bit confusing.
Retarded. Click on the wireless icon, pick the network, type in your password. Knowing what kind of password/key/whatever you need is a function of the complexity of your router, not your Mac.
If you want an office suite, you have to pay quite a bit extra to get it. MS Office for Mac is something like $379 or so. If you're a student you might get it for less.
Also retarded. How much do you pay for Office on Ubuntu? Oh wait, it's not available? Your'e usuing a free open source office suite? Yeah, those are available for the Mac, too, and Mail.app is included free. You are awarded no points.
There are plenty of valid criticisms for the Mac and plenty of valid cheering points for Ubuntu. Come back when you find them.
Good point re: the VM. How much virtualization is too much virtualization? Would Parallels for the Intel Macs cross the line? What does this do to the future of a total virtualization solution (a la Windows-in-a-window on the Macintosh)?
What about Vista Home in Virtual PC? Disallowed? Why?
If your kid throws rocks and breaks windows, you (parent) pay for it. It doesn't matter if they threw rocks at home, church, or the neighbor's house.
Just because you're not around you don't get off the hook.
If your kid screws up, you are liable. Period. Teach your children well, and be ready for appropriate discipline when that fails. This is the way the world has worked since time immortal, and there's no sense in making up new special cases just for the "intarnet age."
My brother and I (and like 70 million other people) played ours until they practically died from materials fatigue. Actually, I think that mine still works, even after riding around in the pockets of preteens (good thing pockets started getting bigger in the mid '90s), being through airports, roadtrips, dropkicked, sat on, and having batteries explode in it. And on top of that, you could squeeze an outrageous amount of time out of the batteries... they'd go for days! The one time I played a GameGear you practically had to change the batteries just to get through a four hour flight.
No backlight was no problem. The screen has enough contrast that it is readable (for young eyes) as long as there's any kind of ambient light. Graphing calculators don't have any backlights either, and none of my students complain that they are unplayable:)
Slashdot Mirror
I somehow don't think it will be called iTV in the USA, because Jobs said that was just an internal project name and that it would be called something else at release.
Rebuilding the entire startup procedure for an OS (launchd) doesn't count as a bugfix to me.
Bottoms up on being an idiot.
I was going to make a joke about how the PS3 can barely be said to be "out" in North America, but then I was at Target yesterday and they had PS3s but no Wiis... so I guess the joke is "And the Wii isn't even out yet..."
You should read slashdot more than once a year; I think this has been said umpteen times in every single "next-generation" console thread since the 360 came out :P
Well, there's also the matter of latitude to remember here, when comparing Europe and the USA. I live in Phoenix, which is at approximately the same latitude as Baghdad. Most of the USA lines up with the Mediterranean, not with Scandinavia.
;) Can you guys do that? Stop wasting energy on heat, ya savages!
At high altitudes in AZ, you can get away with passive cooling if you have excellent insulation. You can open the doors and windows at night, and close them during the day, and keep your house livable. At low altitudes like Phoenix, however (~1500'), that's a fool's errand. Summer nights may not dip below 90 F for weeks, and can sometimes be 100 F. You would have to live in an underground bunker to get any kind of passive cooling. The only solution to "being too hot" is AC.
Of course, it's nice during the winter, because we can do passive heating
Straw bale isn't any more traditional than a geodesic dome. It's a nifty idea that has been touted by the nifty idea crowd for a while now. "Traditional" Arizona houses were brick, wood framed, or adobe. Baled straw didn't even exist until the 20th century.
/Arizonan from the old school //Helped build a strawbale house
If you use straw bale exclusively (as the only support for your roof), then yeah, you're limited in height. Most (modern, anyway) straw bale houses are still framed, because the frame also helps keep you from having problems as the bales settle. This also eliminates the height limit.
If I had points, I'd mod you down for the snide comment at the end. You turned an otherwise excellent post into a whine.
Well-thought criticism is frequently modded up, regardless of how cliched the "apple fanbois" are supposed to be here.
I liked my free account on WoW. I already had a copy installed on my laptop, so I opened my own trial account to play around. It would be a paid account now, except that I don't want to shell out $60 for another boxed copy.
Blizzard: Sell accounts online. Instead of making me go to the store and buy a box, just sell me the damned account number online and call it a "setup fee." Everybody knows that the "free downloadable client" is exactly the same as the boxed client. You are retarded for making me drive to the store. For that reason, I'm just going to continue mooching off my brother's account while he's not playing.
Apple also bends over bass-ackwards for Blizzard too, at least as far as they do for anybody else. There have been a grip of driver updates for OS X to tweak WoW performance.
Amen!
Don't get too snide; coastal tax dollars pay you to grow the corn and make the ethanol and southerners grow the cotton. We've paid for that corn several times over before we get to the pump. The irony of "red states" in the midwest is that they're the beneficiaries of what amounts to socialist farm policies.
And yes, I'm from a small town that grows obscene amounts of corn on the taxpayers' dime. We only burn ethanol in our cars because we've got to do SOMETHING with all the surplus corn that is produced. If there were no tax subsidy, there would be no ethanol.
Small town America is great, but don't confuse reality with fairy tales. Reality is a bitch.
If you represented any significant percentage of the market, Apple might care about you. Of course they don't!
Joe Six-Pack doesn't see iTunes' DRM getting in his way. In fact, the only time he notices it is when he types in his password (once in a blue moon), to get another computer authorized on his iTunes account. He doesn't notice the compression artifacts; he doesn't even know what "lossy" means.
You win, sir!
Yeah, pathetic that they do investigative reporting. Who listens to NPR for that? I want my "Delicious Dish."
Something tells me you didn't feel bad to begin with. So why are you listening to NPR, if they offend you so much?
Nothing like a cup o' joe and some /. trolling to get the day started.
How can we kill that which... has no life?
Right on. Just for comparison, I can squeeze around 5 hours of use out of my 12" G4/800 iBook when I put the screen brightness on lowest level, mute the sound, and use the "best battery life" setting. Screen up, sound on, I get about 3.5 hours. It's a huge difference.
I learned that sound trick from a slashdot post one time. I was skeptical, but it actually works--you can see the battery life climb after muting.
Wikipedia's internal search blows. When I'm curious about something, I type "wikipedia topic" into google, where topic can be pretty much anything. Then, even if "topic" isn't exactly what the title of the article is, I'll get some hits to start with. I almost never use Wikipedia's own search function. Google FTW.
And I bet GP would beg to point out to you that they're not talking about NOW, they're talking about 10 years ago. The price of RAM now is irrelevant.
So:
- Turn off the slurpy thing. I don't like it either, and I don't have it on. System Preferences > Dock > Minimize Using Scale Effect
- Make the dock smaller, make it disappear when unused, etc. from the same menu.
And what information, exactly, do the taskbars in windows or Gnome tell you about running programs, other than that they are running?
You can also purchase or DL your own favorite programs and work outside of the apple ecosystem, in which case your computer will do everything the way that your other OS's do 'em.
Examples?
Examples? I can only think of one; I can't figure out how to dump screen output into a file.
Retarded. Click on the wireless icon, pick the network, type in your password. Knowing what kind of password/key/whatever you need is a function of the complexity of your router, not your Mac.
Also retarded. How much do you pay for Office on Ubuntu? Oh wait, it's not available? Your'e usuing a free open source office suite? Yeah, those are available for the Mac, too, and Mail.app is included free. You are awarded no points.
There are plenty of valid criticisms for the Mac and plenty of valid cheering points for Ubuntu. Come back when you find them.
Good point re: the VM. How much virtualization is too much virtualization? Would Parallels for the Intel Macs cross the line? What does this do to the future of a total virtualization solution (a la Windows-in-a-window on the Macintosh)?
What about Vista Home in Virtual PC? Disallowed? Why?
No, that would be no defense.
If your kid throws rocks and breaks windows, you (parent) pay for it. It doesn't matter if they threw rocks at home, church, or the neighbor's house.
Just because you're not around you don't get off the hook.
If your kid screws up, you are liable. Period. Teach your children well, and be ready for appropriate discipline when that fails. This is the way the world has worked since time immortal, and there's no sense in making up new special cases just for the "intarnet age."
w00t! PWN3D!!!!1
My brother and I (and like 70 million other people) played ours until they practically died from materials fatigue. Actually, I think that mine still works, even after riding around in the pockets of preteens (good thing pockets started getting bigger in the mid '90s), being through airports, roadtrips, dropkicked, sat on, and having batteries explode in it. And on top of that, you could squeeze an outrageous amount of time out of the batteries... they'd go for days! The one time I played a GameGear you practically had to change the batteries just to get through a four hour flight.
:)
No backlight was no problem. The screen has enough contrast that it is readable (for young eyes) as long as there's any kind of ambient light. Graphing calculators don't have any backlights either, and none of my students complain that they are unplayable