Can you imagine if HMV, Virgin or suddenly switched to only selling a proprietary compact disc format which only played on their player and had built-in restrictions?
Sounds a bit like the failed DiVX DVD wannabe we all hated doesn't it?
Oh, except the player was really good though, so everybody wanted one.
Well maybe we should look past the white plastic and aluminium exterior, because that's where Apple are now. It may be an end-to-end solution and it may work well, and we may all love them because they're not Microsoft, but they're a business, and they're in danger of becoming the M$ of digital music players. And seeing as how chummy they've got with the music companies (not the artists the companies) and the stunts they've pulled with sharing playlists etc, I'm not sure I like the idea of a Apple (read: recording company) dominated digital music scene.
I had a quick poke around their support site and found this, along with some instructions on using it with the LinuxTV.org drivers here.
Hopefully the quality of the card itself will mean more people developing for it over time. It's also nice to see the manufacturers promoting development for this card too.
While I must admit that I'm new to the whole built-it-yourself PVR box scene, I started off by buying myself a stand alone TV card, just to see what kind of quality I'd get, and also because I couldn't find a standalone box that was open enough.
I chose the Nebula DigiTV card, and I have to say, I cannot recommend it enough. 110UKP gets you a PCI card, remote and a bundle of good software that covers pretty much everything - including letting your PC become a TV server on a network. The best bit about the card though... It's got a built in Freeview decoder.
Yup, the quality of the recordings is absolutely amazing - read cable quality - and the PVR software easy to use and if you don't have any special requirements it could be the only software you need.
All in all, incredibly chuffed - especially after some lacklustre forays into more mainstream TV cards a few years ago. Now all I have to do is build another PC to put it all in.
"users can still click on the "Windows Update" shortcut on the start menu and update from Microsoft themselves.
"
You can disable this is group policy on Windows XP machines - it's in the 'User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update' folder. On attempting to visit Windows Update via URL or OS, a message appears informing them that the computer administrator has disabled this option.
Anyway yes, I'm also looking forward to WSUS - it'll be nice to have a centralised management console for MS updates at last (downloading RC1 right now actually).
We use SUS to manage around 200-300 Windows 2K and XP machines across four sites and haven't had any major issues with pushing updates out. Ditto with SP2 - while we do use a few custom-built applications internally, most of them are web applications. Some careful planning and firewall configurations meant that come deployment, we had pretty much zero issues.
I have to say that SUS is great, although we do have some internal rules we adhere to. Firstly the IT department gets the patches a week before anyone else - just in case any issues arise. Secondly, we never run our servers under SUS. They have allocated downtime windows for patching and testing.
SUS is about to change into Windows Software Update Services (WSUS, not WUS as incorrectly mentioned somewhere here) which rolls Office, Windows and Server software updates into one management console. Hopefully that'll keep patching more centralised and easier to deploy in the long run.
At least if a server fails it's one unit that'll either get hot or shutdown which means a high degree of business continuity.
When your aircon goes down you're in a whole world or hurt. Ours went in a powercut, yet the servers stayed on because of the UPSes - hence the room temperature rose and the alarms went off. Nothing damaged, but it made us realise that it's important to have both, otherwise your redundancy and failover plans expand into the world of facilities and operations, rather than staying within the IT realm.
These are more issues with the user themselves than computers. Computers are inherently complex and people buying them need to understand that. Like law, medicine, aviation and space travel, it has its own terminology which has arisen over time through trial and error and through good reason. It also makes sense if you understand other areas of life (Virus and Trojan for Pete's sake - come on people!) and will stand you in good stead as time goes on. At least it's not like legal Latinese. If it's too taxing, get training - just like driving a car really.
There's a lot more that the end user could do to make things easier for themselves before harping on about it being too difficult - it's like those folk who move to the country then complain about the sounds and smells of animals...
The Microsoft Smart Display (SD) technology that appeared a couple of years ago.
When I first heard about it, the idea of what was essentially a touchscreen terminal attached wirelessly to your desktop seemed to open a huge number of possibilities, VoIP telephony being one of them. Ultimately, Smart Displays failed - one of the main reasons being the price and the simultaneous release of the Tablet PC which was similar, yet gave much more VFM. The SD tended to be based around CE.NET running on an ARM chip with around 32MB of RAM if I remember correctly.
So, although these 70-odd phones at the Cambridge labs are unique (you can't buy them commercially), there exists out there a large number of devices with ARM chips, touchscreens and WiFi that are capable of doing this kind of thing. You can probably pick them up cheap now so modifying a secondhand SD device may be a neat way to get started...
Think about the Soyuz... the AK47...
on
Hondas in Space
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's not so much the cost part as the simplicity part or finding the right way to do something. He mentions this in the linked article but it seems to be missing from the story above.
An AK47 assault rifle is more reliable than an M16 because it was designed to be simple and mass-produced, not designed to be cheap. A Honda Civic is more reliable than a Ferrari because it has less moving parts and is mass produced, ditto the Soyuz space capsule that the Russians use - on a per mission basis, it's had less failures than the shuttle.
It doesn't mean the rocket is being made with bits from scrapyards and eBay, just that the ideas are being lifted from non-rocket science thinking, and some of the tools are secondhand. Either way, getting someone into space on top of a controlled explosion is not cheap however you look at it, and if they can cut down on the peripheral costs, then good luck to them.
If I turned up at a recording studio, a physics lab, movie preview, college lecture or a party with a laptop, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be laughed out of the shop.
In each one of those situations, your dedicated device beats by laptop. Taken as a whole though, my 'universal machine' beats any dedicated device hands down.
"Then why do people keep using TVs, DVD players, stereos, watches, telephones,...?"
Because convergence is happening now - it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Along the way, some companies will get it right (cameras in phones, although I have yet to find a use), and some will get it wrong (Bluetooth in DV cameras - what was that about?).
Granted, single devices are much easier to use, but they are bitches to get to interact with each other if you need/want them to. Here in the UK we don't get TiVo, so I bought a Freeview box with a HDD recorder in it. But can I get that video off it? Hell no. So I've just invested in a Nebula DigiTV card for my PC; Freeview, PVR, Teletext, recording in MPEG format and a remote for £120. The key here is that these are the right kind of converged functions I'd like to see. The downside - as you rightly say - is that I have a damn PC attached to the back-end that makes the process way too complex... stick all this is a cheaper consumer box and I'd snap it up.
I hate to say it, but much as Bill Gates wants to solve the problem of the 'digital home', he's also perpetuating it. The best way to take Media Center PC's would be to stick Windows CE in them and make them consumer boxes without the Windows OS proper in them, but as this is their flagship product, convergence for the masses looks like it's going to be overcomplicated - and crippled by proprietary standards - for so time to come.
Prices don't come down in areas where Microsoft is traditionally strong, specifically Office and OS areas. If that were the case, then Office and Windows would be two of their cheaper products, not so. The cash bought in by these products allows them the leverage to enter new markets without much risk and some cushioning against failure (the fabled 'right by version 3.0' theory).
Now the yes answer. Where they do bring prices down is in areas that they don't lead in; finance, server-side software, CRM, etc. This has two effects; firstly they can compare on price against non-comparable products (let's say Oracle and SQL Server) and corporations start to use those kind of figures as bargaining chips to lower vendor pricing and get a better deal. Secondly, if you are a niche software manufacturer, you can't afford to have MS hoover up your market share, so the price gets lowered and eventually you get priced out of the market, or bought by them. And funnily enough, MS usually buys a company if it wants to enter a market - and usually a cheaper one (Great Plains anyone?). Suddenly the MS branding machine can make a low-end product look much more attractive.
However the argument should be looking at more than the price of the software, it should be looking at the quality of it too. What use is cheaper software if it doesn't work as well as it should?
I've found that the PocketPC is generally better in this respect. Before I get modded as a troll like all the other pro-PocketPC comments, have a read.
"all files must be "owned" by an application"
For a device like a Palm, this makes perfect sense. A Palm is not a file transport device, it is a PDA/viewer. Not having to deal with filetypes per se means that it can do away with a huge chunk of complexity as you don't need the equivalent of Windows Explorer to manage the file structure. In any case, why would you want to look at files that aren't associated with an application, moreso, how would you look at them?
This is where the Palm is a damn good PDA, whereas the PocketPC takes the PC metaphor and shrinks it down to - literally - a pocket PC. While there are a lot of people posting saying the PocketPC is better, it is also more complex, which is not desirable if you want a PDA. It also suffers from exactly the same problem as the PocketPC - or any desktop PC for that matter - in that if you don't have a required app installed, you can't view certain files.
From personal use of both devices in the past (Pilot Pro > Casio E115 > Tungsten T > Fujitsu LOOX 720) I've found that the Palm is a much better PDA, while the PocketPC is a much better pocket computer. In essence they've both defined their own niches in the market and if you find that one doesn't suit you, the other one will.
Yup, I should've been nicer and put in a caveat; people can be forgiven for not finding all this info because the MS site is so damned hard to find stuff on. Incidentally, if you go to Start > Run and enter cliconfg you get a nice little app that allows you to fully disable protocols that you don't use. Very handy.
On a side note, back in my Napstering days, the number of machines that ID'd themselves as TCP/IP SQL Servers sharing songs was astonishing, usually with user: sa and pwd: <blank>... scary stuff!
For others - and the story poster - there's some very useful information about how XP SP2 affects SQL Server here.
To write something as stupid as "I know I still have not installed SP2 because of the problems it causes with SQL Server, I can't wait to see what kind of havoc it causes on the servers..." is just down to ignorance, incompetence and probably a lack of understanding about both products. Yes it might sound harsh, but to write something as daft as that in a story for nothing more than an anti-MS dig deserves a slap.
Gus Van Sant's Elephant hand a great deal of first person perspectives in it, including a lot of long tracks down corridors (check out the trailer on the site). Essentially a Columbine-esque story, one of the key reasons for doing this was to link the viewer's point of view with that of a Doom-like computer game reputed to have influenced the Columbine killings. It's quite chilling when you watch it.
Before that, Kubrick's The Shining was a pioneering film in using the newly invented steadicam to do some neat tracking shots - albeit at a lower angle than FPS - of Danny while he's riding his trike around the hotel.
...like the SidStation based on the legendary MOS 6581 (aka. SID) chip from the Commodore 64.
The SidStation is essentially a MIDI synth expander that uses the SID chip as it's main sound source. It'd be interesting to do the same kind of thing with a SNES sound source, although from memory, it wasn't a sound chip worthy of any merit.
Pong had scroll wheels of a sort for cursor movement too - translating rotational into linear motion. I think that was around 30-odd years ago. Since then we've had the early 80s consoles and jog dials.
However, I find it quite interesting how old ideas are reborn - if someone said 10 years ago that there'd be a big rotational dial on the front of the biggest selling music player in 2004, I wouldn't have believed them... same with analogue controls on synthesizers which have recently made a comeback.
Actually, you raise an interesting point which has got me a little baffled; why is there no TV tuner in the iMac?
The Dell comes with a LCD TV monitor, yet the iMac doesn't. Given the price of standalone LCD TVs here in the UK (400/500 UKP - i.e. over-inflated) it would make sense for Apple to have added in a TV tuner, added some nice PVR software to their iLife suite and cleaned up on the home entertainment front.
While I'm a Dell owner, I know I'd rather have an iMac sat in my front-room than a Dell box. At the moment, the nearest thing out there that I'd consider is the Sony Vaio V1.
I think this is more of an anglicised expression than a legal dig at competitors, although I agree with your comments and wouldn't be surprised if it was selected for the subtext that it conjours up. The quote came from David Mentley - an analyst at Stanford Resources, not the reporter - so I'd expect him to be the kind of guy that chooses his words for effect.
Then again, I personally don't agree with Mr Mentley's opinions. If you asked me 5 years ago whether Intel or TI would succeed in the LCOS/DLP or large size TV arena, I would've said TI. The lead wasn't stolen - not even in the metaphorical, it's just that Intel were always second and still haven't got their act together. Citing 'clear product differentiation' as a reason for pulling a product usually translates to 'we spent so much time on it, it's not any better than what's out there now...'
I'd agree with you - to the extent that so much focus is put on race/sex/ability/etc. here in the UK that I think the biggest hinderance to getting a job is being a middle-aged white male.
It's got so far that people are saying x% of lawyers need to be black, or y% of IT professionals need to be female, or z% of your workforce need to be under 5'3". I'm seriously waiting to see some figures saying that companies must employ a certainly percentage of people who are incompetent.
At the start of the article, a woman says that she couldn't imagine being employed in the profession. Maybe it was the wrong profession for her? I've found that in IT, it comes down to a lot more than studying. MOst - if not all - IT pros I know are naturals. If you want to get into IT and you are not a natural, you are going to have an uphill battle on your hands, especially as employers have a duty to themselves to hire the best employees for the job, not someone based on sex, height, ro any other skill not related to the job in hand.
Dead right, but I didn't mention reliability, just performance and cost of replacement. Specifically performance is what is necessary for the guys who use the system. As it's functioning as a scratch disk, nobody particularly cares about reliability, it just means that you can be accessing video data at the same time as spooling over stuff onto the drive from a DV camera which saves a lot of time. If a drive does go down, a new one gets slotted in, striped and the source video in use gets copied back off tape.
Yes, I know it sounds nuts, but from a digital video post-production viewpoint it makes sense. And before you ask, the output goes to a RAID 5 box - that stuff is important!:o)
They're used quite frequently in video editing - specifically as scratch disks. Great performance, and no immediate need to back up either frequently or extensively. This is a great use for RAID 0. In this case, the OS isn't on the RAID 0 partition, so a drive failure isn't too much of a headache to solve.
A lot of people seem to be hung up on the 'if one drive fails, you lose everything' problem. Well, take 2 scenarios; 2x80GB drives and 1x160GB drive. Regardless of choice, a single drive failure will mean I lose everything, but one will give better performance, and be cheaper to replace. Which would you choose?
"It seems to me that a tablet PC is really aimed at a market that is small-to-non-existant."
I suppose that depends on how you perceive computing to be in the future.
Right now, we have servers, desktops, laptops, tablets and pdas/phones as form factors for computing powerthat we use. Do you really see that being the case 20, 50 years from now? I want voice activation, handwriting recognition, tactile feedback, touchscreens, I don't want to have to flip open my 19" Sony Vaio and use a touchpad and keyboard... compared to an intuitive screen and pen combo, touchpads are incredibly clunky.
The concept behind the tablet form factor goes way beyond just lopping off the keyboard, it goes all all the way down to the basics of making the screen the central part of the machine. You can interact (I hate that word) with data much more naturally that with a laptop. You can have other people interact with your tablet - maybe draw on a diagram, maybe you might pass it around - and you can do this in a corridor, elevator, bus, standing up, sat on the couch, wherever you like.
It's the most versatile form factor I've ever used - light, thin, good battery life and a full spec'd Centrino box. It's certainly not a toy, and definitely not a PDA.
So in any case, if you really want a future where we're stuck with clamshell devices that seem to be getting bigger and less portable, and are content with always looking for a table when you want to do some work then great, go for a laptop, but the tablet will hopefully encourage people to be a bit more experimental with form-factors and computing as a whole.
I've seen quite a lot of adversity directed at Tablet PCs which I really don't understand.
I've been using a TC1000 since November 2002 and it's an absolutely fabulous piece of hardware. It's the kind of stuff people on the cutting edge of technology should be embracing, and instead of asking what you'd want one for, finding out what you can use it for. Writing on the screen isn't as gimmicky as you'd think - taking notes, annotating diagrams, documents, roughing presentations is incredibly easy. The form factor means you can pull one out in a meeting without hiding behind a laptop screen, you can pass it around more easily to show people ideas and you can get information into it quicker.
To put it bluntly, since buying a new laptop - because I started to believe that it was a gimmicky toy - I am really missing the tablet functions and realise that I was wrong. Sure, my new laptop is faster, bigger, better, etc. etc. but the tablet functions just opened up a new way of using a PC that I really miss now. I can't comfortably lie in front of the TV and work, and note-taking isn't as easily transferred to emails, document etc. Before I could quite happily rough a document outline up in a meeting and have it mailed off by the end to all present. Can't do that with a laptop, or handwritten notes come to think of it.
So, they aren't just giant PDAs, they're a new platform that needs to be exploited by apps like OneNote. I certainly hope the form-factor succeeds and heaven help us if we're tied to desktops and laptops for the foreseeable future, because that would severely cripple the importance of the computer in it.
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Can you imagine if HMV, Virgin or suddenly switched to only selling a proprietary compact disc format which only played on their player and had built-in restrictions?
Sounds a bit like the failed DiVX DVD wannabe we all hated doesn't it?
Oh, except the player was really good though, so everybody wanted one.
Well maybe we should look past the white plastic and aluminium exterior, because that's where Apple are now. It may be an end-to-end solution and it may work well, and we may all love them because they're not Microsoft, but they're a business, and they're in danger of becoming the M$ of digital music players. And seeing as how chummy they've got with the music companies (not the artists the companies) and the stunts they've pulled with sharing playlists etc, I'm not sure I like the idea of a Apple (read: recording company) dominated digital music scene.
I had a quick poke around their support site and found this, along with some instructions on using it with the LinuxTV.org drivers here.
Hopefully the quality of the card itself will mean more people developing for it over time. It's also nice to see the manufacturers promoting development for this card too.
While I must admit that I'm new to the whole built-it-yourself PVR box scene, I started off by buying myself a stand alone TV card, just to see what kind of quality I'd get, and also because I couldn't find a standalone box that was open enough.
I chose the Nebula DigiTV card, and I have to say, I cannot recommend it enough. 110UKP gets you a PCI card, remote and a bundle of good software that covers pretty much everything - including letting your PC become a TV server on a network. The best bit about the card though... It's got a built in Freeview decoder.
Yup, the quality of the recordings is absolutely amazing - read cable quality - and the PVR software easy to use and if you don't have any special requirements it could be the only software you need.
All in all, incredibly chuffed - especially after some lacklustre forays into more mainstream TV cards a few years ago. Now all I have to do is build another PC to put it all in.
"users can still click on the "Windows Update" shortcut on the start menu and update from Microsoft themselves. "
You can disable this is group policy on Windows XP machines - it's in the 'User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update' folder. On attempting to visit Windows Update via URL or OS, a message appears informing them that the computer administrator has disabled this option.
Anyway yes, I'm also looking forward to WSUS - it'll be nice to have a centralised management console for MS updates at last (downloading RC1 right now actually).
Agreed.
We use SUS to manage around 200-300 Windows 2K and XP machines across four sites and haven't had any major issues with pushing updates out. Ditto with SP2 - while we do use a few custom-built applications internally, most of them are web applications. Some careful planning and firewall configurations meant that come deployment, we had pretty much zero issues.
I have to say that SUS is great, although we do have some internal rules we adhere to. Firstly the IT department gets the patches a week before anyone else - just in case any issues arise. Secondly, we never run our servers under SUS. They have allocated downtime windows for patching and testing.
SUS is about to change into Windows Software Update Services (WSUS, not WUS as incorrectly mentioned somewhere here) which rolls Office, Windows and Server software updates into one management console. Hopefully that'll keep patching more centralised and easier to deploy in the long run.
From experience of aircon failing/breaking.
At least if a server fails it's one unit that'll either get hot or shutdown which means a high degree of business continuity.
When your aircon goes down you're in a whole world or hurt. Ours went in a powercut, yet the servers stayed on because of the UPSes - hence the room temperature rose and the alarms went off. Nothing damaged, but it made us realise that it's important to have both, otherwise your redundancy and failover plans expand into the world of facilities and operations, rather than staying within the IT realm.
- An inability to do research?
- In inclination to not be bothered to do research?
- Lack of intelligence?
- Ignorance?
These are more issues with the user themselves than computers. Computers are inherently complex and people buying them need to understand that. Like law, medicine, aviation and space travel, it has its own terminology which has arisen over time through trial and error and through good reason. It also makes sense if you understand other areas of life (Virus and Trojan for Pete's sake - come on people!) and will stand you in good stead as time goes on. At least it's not like legal Latinese. If it's too taxing, get training - just like driving a car really.There's a lot more that the end user could do to make things easier for themselves before harping on about it being too difficult - it's like those folk who move to the country then complain about the sounds and smells of animals...
The Microsoft Smart Display (SD) technology that appeared a couple of years ago.
When I first heard about it, the idea of what was essentially a touchscreen terminal attached wirelessly to your desktop seemed to open a huge number of possibilities, VoIP telephony being one of them. Ultimately, Smart Displays failed - one of the main reasons being the price and the simultaneous release of the Tablet PC which was similar, yet gave much more VFM. The SD tended to be based around CE.NET running on an ARM chip with around 32MB of RAM if I remember correctly.
So, although these 70-odd phones at the Cambridge labs are unique (you can't buy them commercially), there exists out there a large number of devices with ARM chips, touchscreens and WiFi that are capable of doing this kind of thing. You can probably pick them up cheap now so modifying a secondhand SD device may be a neat way to get started...
It's not so much the cost part as the simplicity part or finding the right way to do something. He mentions this in the linked article but it seems to be missing from the story above.
An AK47 assault rifle is more reliable than an M16 because it was designed to be simple and mass-produced, not designed to be cheap. A Honda Civic is more reliable than a Ferrari because it has less moving parts and is mass produced, ditto the Soyuz space capsule that the Russians use - on a per mission basis, it's had less failures than the shuttle.
It doesn't mean the rocket is being made with bits from scrapyards and eBay, just that the ideas are being lifted from non-rocket science thinking, and some of the tools are secondhand. Either way, getting someone into space on top of a controlled explosion is not cheap however you look at it, and if they can cut down on the peripheral costs, then good luck to them.
If I turned up at a recording studio, a physics lab, movie preview, college lecture or a party with a laptop, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be laughed out of the shop.
In each one of those situations, your dedicated device beats by laptop. Taken as a whole though, my 'universal machine' beats any dedicated device hands down.
"Then why do people keep using TVs, DVD players, stereos, watches, telephones, ...?"
Because convergence is happening now - it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Along the way, some companies will get it right (cameras in phones, although I have yet to find a use), and some will get it wrong (Bluetooth in DV cameras - what was that about?).
Granted, single devices are much easier to use, but they are bitches to get to interact with each other if you need/want them to. Here in the UK we don't get TiVo, so I bought a Freeview box with a HDD recorder in it. But can I get that video off it? Hell no. So I've just invested in a Nebula DigiTV card for my PC; Freeview, PVR, Teletext, recording in MPEG format and a remote for £120. The key here is that these are the right kind of converged functions I'd like to see. The downside - as you rightly say - is that I have a damn PC attached to the back-end that makes the process way too complex... stick all this is a cheaper consumer box and I'd snap it up.
I hate to say it, but much as Bill Gates wants to solve the problem of the 'digital home', he's also perpetuating it. The best way to take Media Center PC's would be to stick Windows CE in them and make them consumer boxes without the Windows OS proper in them, but as this is their flagship product, convergence for the masses looks like it's going to be overcomplicated - and crippled by proprietary standards - for so time to come.
I'll start with the No first.
Prices don't come down in areas where Microsoft is traditionally strong, specifically Office and OS areas. If that were the case, then Office and Windows would be two of their cheaper products, not so. The cash bought in by these products allows them the leverage to enter new markets without much risk and some cushioning against failure (the fabled 'right by version 3.0' theory).
Now the yes answer. Where they do bring prices down is in areas that they don't lead in; finance, server-side software, CRM, etc. This has two effects; firstly they can compare on price against non-comparable products (let's say Oracle and SQL Server) and corporations start to use those kind of figures as bargaining chips to lower vendor pricing and get a better deal. Secondly, if you are a niche software manufacturer, you can't afford to have MS hoover up your market share, so the price gets lowered and eventually you get priced out of the market, or bought by them. And funnily enough, MS usually buys a company if it wants to enter a market - and usually a cheaper one (Great Plains anyone?). Suddenly the MS branding machine can make a low-end product look much more attractive.
However the argument should be looking at more than the price of the software, it should be looking at the quality of it too. What use is cheaper software if it doesn't work as well as it should?
I've found that the PocketPC is generally better in this respect. Before I get modded as a troll like all the other pro-PocketPC comments, have a read.
"all files must be "owned" by an application"
For a device like a Palm, this makes perfect sense. A Palm is not a file transport device, it is a PDA/viewer. Not having to deal with filetypes per se means that it can do away with a huge chunk of complexity as you don't need the equivalent of Windows Explorer to manage the file structure. In any case, why would you want to look at files that aren't associated with an application, moreso, how would you look at them?
This is where the Palm is a damn good PDA, whereas the PocketPC takes the PC metaphor and shrinks it down to - literally - a pocket PC. While there are a lot of people posting saying the PocketPC is better, it is also more complex, which is not desirable if you want a PDA. It also suffers from exactly the same problem as the PocketPC - or any desktop PC for that matter - in that if you don't have a required app installed, you can't view certain files.
From personal use of both devices in the past (Pilot Pro > Casio E115 > Tungsten T > Fujitsu LOOX 720) I've found that the Palm is a much better PDA, while the PocketPC is a much better pocket computer. In essence they've both defined their own niches in the market and if you find that one doesn't suit you, the other one will.
Yup, I should've been nicer and put in a caveat; people can be forgiven for not finding all this info because the MS site is so damned hard to find stuff on. Incidentally, if you go to Start > Run and enter cliconfg you get a nice little app that allows you to fully disable protocols that you don't use. Very handy.
On a side note, back in my Napstering days, the number of machines that ID'd themselves as TCP/IP SQL Servers sharing songs was astonishing, usually with user: sa and pwd: <blank>... scary stuff!
For others - and the story poster - there's some very useful information about how XP SP2 affects SQL Server here.
To write something as stupid as "I know I still have not installed SP2 because of the problems it causes with SQL Server, I can't wait to see what kind of havoc it causes on the servers..." is just down to ignorance, incompetence and probably a lack of understanding about both products. Yes it might sound harsh, but to write something as daft as that in a story for nothing more than an anti-MS dig deserves a slap.
Gus Van Sant's Elephant hand a great deal of first person perspectives in it, including a lot of long tracks down corridors (check out the trailer on the site). Essentially a Columbine-esque story, one of the key reasons for doing this was to link the viewer's point of view with that of a Doom-like computer game reputed to have influenced the Columbine killings. It's quite chilling when you watch it.
Before that, Kubrick's The Shining was a pioneering film in using the newly invented steadicam to do some neat tracking shots - albeit at a lower angle than FPS - of Danny while he's riding his trike around the hotel.
...like the SidStation based on the legendary MOS 6581 (aka. SID) chip from the Commodore 64.
The SidStation is essentially a MIDI synth expander that uses the SID chip as it's main sound source. It'd be interesting to do the same kind of thing with a SNES sound source, although from memory, it wasn't a sound chip worthy of any merit.
Pong had scroll wheels of a sort for cursor movement too - translating rotational into linear motion. I think that was around 30-odd years ago. Since then we've had the early 80s consoles and jog dials.
However, I find it quite interesting how old ideas are reborn - if someone said 10 years ago that there'd be a big rotational dial on the front of the biggest selling music player in 2004, I wouldn't have believed them... same with analogue controls on synthesizers which have recently made a comeback.
Actually, you raise an interesting point which has got me a little baffled; why is there no TV tuner in the iMac?
The Dell comes with a LCD TV monitor, yet the iMac doesn't. Given the price of standalone LCD TVs here in the UK (400/500 UKP - i.e. over-inflated) it would make sense for Apple to have added in a TV tuner, added some nice PVR software to their iLife suite and cleaned up on the home entertainment front.
While I'm a Dell owner, I know I'd rather have an iMac sat in my front-room than a Dell box. At the moment, the nearest thing out there that I'd consider is the Sony Vaio V1.
I think this is more of an anglicised expression than a legal dig at competitors, although I agree with your comments and wouldn't be surprised if it was selected for the subtext that it conjours up. The quote came from David Mentley - an analyst at Stanford Resources, not the reporter - so I'd expect him to be the kind of guy that chooses his words for effect.
Then again, I personally don't agree with Mr Mentley's opinions. If you asked me 5 years ago whether Intel or TI would succeed in the LCOS/DLP or large size TV arena, I would've said TI. The lead wasn't stolen - not even in the metaphorical, it's just that Intel were always second and still haven't got their act together. Citing 'clear product differentiation' as a reason for pulling a product usually translates to 'we spent so much time on it, it's not any better than what's out there now...'
I'd agree with you - to the extent that so much focus is put on race/sex/ability/etc. here in the UK that I think the biggest hinderance to getting a job is being a middle-aged white male.
It's got so far that people are saying x% of lawyers need to be black, or y% of IT professionals need to be female, or z% of your workforce need to be under 5'3". I'm seriously waiting to see some figures saying that companies must employ a certainly percentage of people who are incompetent.
At the start of the article, a woman says that she couldn't imagine being employed in the profession. Maybe it was the wrong profession for her? I've found that in IT, it comes down to a lot more than studying. MOst - if not all - IT pros I know are naturals. If you want to get into IT and you are not a natural, you are going to have an uphill battle on your hands, especially as employers have a duty to themselves to hire the best employees for the job, not someone based on sex, height, ro any other skill not related to the job in hand.
"Nope, reliability goes down."
:o)
Dead right, but I didn't mention reliability, just performance and cost of replacement. Specifically performance is what is necessary for the guys who use the system. As it's functioning as a scratch disk, nobody particularly cares about reliability, it just means that you can be accessing video data at the same time as spooling over stuff onto the drive from a DV camera which saves a lot of time. If a drive does go down, a new one gets slotted in, striped and the source video in use gets copied back off tape.
Yes, I know it sounds nuts, but from a digital video post-production viewpoint it makes sense. And before you ask, the output goes to a RAID 5 box - that stuff is important!
They're used quite frequently in video editing - specifically as scratch disks. Great performance, and no immediate need to back up either frequently or extensively. This is a great use for RAID 0. In this case, the OS isn't on the RAID 0 partition, so a drive failure isn't too much of a headache to solve.
A lot of people seem to be hung up on the 'if one drive fails, you lose everything' problem. Well, take 2 scenarios; 2x80GB drives and 1x160GB drive. Regardless of choice, a single drive failure will mean I lose everything, but one will give better performance, and be cheaper to replace. Which would you choose?
"It seems to me that a tablet PC is really aimed at a market that is small-to-non-existant."
I suppose that depends on how you perceive computing to be in the future.
Right now, we have servers, desktops, laptops, tablets and pdas/phones as form factors for computing powerthat we use. Do you really see that being the case 20, 50 years from now? I want voice activation, handwriting recognition, tactile feedback, touchscreens, I don't want to have to flip open my 19" Sony Vaio and use a touchpad and keyboard... compared to an intuitive screen and pen combo, touchpads are incredibly clunky.
The concept behind the tablet form factor goes way beyond just lopping off the keyboard, it goes all all the way down to the basics of making the screen the central part of the machine. You can interact (I hate that word) with data much more naturally that with a laptop. You can have other people interact with your tablet - maybe draw on a diagram, maybe you might pass it around - and you can do this in a corridor, elevator, bus, standing up, sat on the couch, wherever you like.
It's the most versatile form factor I've ever used - light, thin, good battery life and a full spec'd Centrino box. It's certainly not a toy, and definitely not a PDA.
So in any case, if you really want a future where we're stuck with clamshell devices that seem to be getting bigger and less portable, and are content with always looking for a table when you want to do some work then great, go for a laptop, but the tablet will hopefully encourage people to be a bit more experimental with form-factors and computing as a whole.
I've seen quite a lot of adversity directed at Tablet PCs which I really don't understand.
I've been using a TC1000 since November 2002 and it's an absolutely fabulous piece of hardware. It's the kind of stuff people on the cutting edge of technology should be embracing, and instead of asking what you'd want one for, finding out what you can use it for. Writing on the screen isn't as gimmicky as you'd think - taking notes, annotating diagrams, documents, roughing presentations is incredibly easy. The form factor means you can pull one out in a meeting without hiding behind a laptop screen, you can pass it around more easily to show people ideas and you can get information into it quicker.
To put it bluntly, since buying a new laptop - because I started to believe that it was a gimmicky toy - I am really missing the tablet functions and realise that I was wrong. Sure, my new laptop is faster, bigger, better, etc. etc. but the tablet functions just opened up a new way of using a PC that I really miss now. I can't comfortably lie in front of the TV and work, and note-taking isn't as easily transferred to emails, document etc. Before I could quite happily rough a document outline up in a meeting and have it mailed off by the end to all present. Can't do that with a laptop, or handwritten notes come to think of it. So, they aren't just giant PDAs, they're a new platform that needs to be exploited by apps like OneNote. I certainly hope the form-factor succeeds and heaven help us if we're tied to desktops and laptops for the foreseeable future, because that would severely cripple the importance of the computer in it.