Well, you could look at it that way as historically Windows Media Extender boxes - which is what the Xbox 360 essentially is - have been around since the first release of Windows Media Center and as far as I can remember, they've always been able to play videos from the host PC. In that respect, the AppleTV/Front Row combo is Apple's response to the Media Extender/MediaCenter kit from Microsoft, although they got there first with movie and TV downloads.
Needless to say, as MS have one of the best online systems in the shape of xBox Live, it makes sense for them to distribute buyable media content through it. Since the 360 was released, you've been able to get some trailers and stuff, but they haven't been consistent in coming or impressive in scope. I've always wondered why they didn't make anything more of this ability, but I guess one reason was the crippling 20GB optional drive.
With the imminent release of the Live service for Windows owners for gaming, I think that it has the potential to be Microsoft's answer to the iTunes Music Store and more. Once PCs get access to Live, you're looking at much increased storage on client machines and also teh ability to stream that to the 360 - a lá AppleTV. If - and I say if - they can pull off the integration of online gaming, chat, media downloads with their combined MediaCenter (I suppose Vista too), 360, Zune (bleh!) platform, then Apple are going to have some serious problems on their hands, especially from the console/games perspective.
With the release of the AppleTV, I guess we might see a cut down 360-type device that has the same kind of functions. Based on the current 360 price, I'd wager that it'd undercut the AppleTV by a considerable amount too.
Kinda cool really - technology in the front room has suddenly got a whole lot more interesting...
Ok, while strictly not a product in its own right, USB was one of the defining moments in the 90's for technology - even my digital radio has a USB port on it.
I suppose if you were to associate USB with any one machine, it'd be the iMac, which did a lot for propelling it forward by ditching the ADB ports and floppy, ushering in a new age for peripherals (which unfortunately came in crappy gel colours too)...
...both include the Mediacenter stuff that the MCE version of XP had.
I'm pretty sure HP will still be selling those, regardless of whether they'll look good under your TV. If anything, over the next few years, HP will be shifting more units of MCE-grade machines...
I have a Sony UX180 and I must say the thing is absolutely awesome - stupidly feature-packed for a tiny device.
However, it has a flaw that really irks me: it doesn't have a right shift key. This wouldn't be so much a problem on many devices, but for something so small that you're supposed to use with both hands, Shift + 2 for a '@' symbol when using just your thumbs is a total sod. I thought this might be a teething thing and be fixed in future versions, but it hasn't been.
Apart from that, they've done a good job - dedicated nipple and buttons for mouse movement, dedicated zoom buttons (the 1024x600 screen can be a little small at times, so this helps), and an included dock and dongle make for a really professional package.
For a 1.2GHz Core Solo, the thing isn't too slow either. I wish it had a gig of memory, but this has been corrected in the newer versions.
For mobile computing though, it's great - I just wish they'd fix that damn shift key problem.
...an operating system is an operating system, and will be used to bolster a company's profit margin, not reduce the cost to the consumer.
This is a problem I made comments on in the past: people just don't get how an operating system can be 'free', companies take advantage of this. Until the consumer wises up, Linux is just a neat way for PC manufacturers to make more cash on each box sold.
Apart from getting the two results that link back to this specific story, at the bottom, on big letters, you get Did you mean to search for: Lexus-Financial.com
This is just straight MS bashing for no reason - chances are that if you typo'd, you'd probably be looking for the suggested alternate. If you typed the same stuff into Google and spelt it correctly, chances are your first link would be a sponsored one at the top.
I mean, if a search engine helps you fidn what your looking for, it's doing its job. if it makes money while it's doing it, so what?
True, but don't you think it'd be cool if it did index offline media? Imagine a quick "don't worry, you've got another copy of it on blah blah CD..." message popping up when you'd searched for a file name and it returned no results. So you plonk the correct media in and voila! You find your file.
That said, I'm thinking purely in filename terms here, if you stretched it to the kinds of data that say Google Desktop Search indexes, I'd imagine your repository of info would get large pretty fast if offline media were included.
...it'd be great if they also indexed your offline media too?
The number of times I have to swap out CDs trying to find an image file or an old piece of code - it drives me nuts! Now with DVD it gets worse, HD-DVD, Blu-ray - forget it, that's a needle in a haystack. How difficult could it be to have the drive index offline media too - a bit like some tape library software or the like? Maybe it could index when you burn? The last time I saw something like this was when I got a Zip drive back in 1997 and some nifty free software came with it. Now, it seems that you can only search your local drive - a bad idea when removable media is the norm.
So, at the risk of sounding like a total banana; why doesn't anyone do this, or am I missing some glaringly obvious checkbox somewhere in OS X/XP/Fedora/Vista?
If you're unaware, he wrote a memo in 1945 titled 'As we may think' which laid down a lot of seminal ideas about information, computing devices (the Memex) and the way in which we interact with it - specifically the concept of hypertext.
If you haven't already read his memo, give it a shot. Along with Alvin Toffler's book 'Future Shock', this changed the way I view technology for ever... oh, stick Alvin Toffler on the list too, Bill Gates for 'commoditising' the PC, Gordon Moore, pretty much anyone who ever worked at Xerox PARC and the guy who invented the MP3 codec. They're all important to why we're sat here today.
...by the Nintentdo Wii. Download the internet channel preview and voila! YouTube in your living room. And I assure you that worldwide, there'll probably be more Wii's sat by TVs than Apple iTV boxes.
If you like coffee-table electro then visit bleep.com. Non-DRM'd, MP3'd, cool music from Warp Records and associates. If you like the Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Plaid or that kind of stuff, then consider that link a Christmas present from the Gods!
Merry Christmas all!
DRM'd music? I'd rather feed their bones to pigs...
It's not security, it's not size.. it's the bleedin' fact that every sodding day some bellend asks me how they insert >picture/video/stupidlink< into their email. I'm fed up with it! I'd rather feed their bones to pigs!
Merry Christmas by the way.
Incidentally, if those bloody angle brackets are the wrong way round - blame the sodding HTML! Merry Christmas again... and yes, I've been out getting lathered, deal with it!:o)
Respect is earned, not given. As far as I'm concerned, AJAX has given JavaScript a new lease of life. Without it, there would be no Gmail, no Google Maps, or at least not in the way we've come to admire them. When you see the fantastic stuff Google (and Windows Live for that matter) produce, XMLHTTP was the catalyst that made that possible, but all the donkey work is done by JavaScript.
Thus I have a lot of respect for it as a client scripting language, in most cases it's the only way of getting something done in a browser.
Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS. If I dropped copy of Ubuntu on their lap at Christmas, they'd immediately be suspicious of it. On booting, they'd complain that it wasn't Windows and that'd be that.
Reminds me of giving out mince pies in front of church on Saturday - most people couldn't understand why we would possibly give away mince pies. It was just a nice idea for shoppers walking past. Same with OSes - people expect to be charged, if they're not, they instantly assume that it's of low quality and crap, or there's some kind of benefit in it for you. Linux has more chance of being taken up if it was a $500 OS. Then it'd be a status symbol and everyone under the Sun would want it, or aspire to own it.
Interesting. Well firstly I'd like to say that I don't consider myself a fanboy of any particular database/OS/web server/development product, I work to solve problems, not increase/decrease some software/hardware company's market share.
In most cases, SQL Server is right becasue a company has in-house SQL Server Admins and deploying another database platform is a waste on company resources. That would entail another complete platform and maintenance/admin skillset. In many cases companies don't want this, which makes perfect sense as there's no point having a disparate bunch of technologies that you need to manage. If I was ever deploying a.NET solution, SQL Server 2000/2005 is also what I'd recommend as it talks to.NET code much more effectively than MySQL or other alternatives. Performance of SQL Server against MySQL with.NET code is way better to the extent that I wouldn't recommend MySQL in that situation, regardless of deployment cost. As you work with various platforms, technologies and languages, you tend to fit the ones which fit together best - that's something that comes with experience. You also have to look at an outfit before you start on a new database project. If a company is using a lot of Windows boxes, has sysadmins who are Windows-based, then chances are that they'll be much more at home doing admin of a SQL Server on a Windows platform. In an ideal world, I'd all roll out what I personally love best. In a business world (the real world) I roll out what's best long term for the client, and that's looking at return on investments, total costs of ownership and what they already have in place. There's no point in rolling a shiny new Windows 2003 server into an Oracle datacenter and asking them to admin it. These are all factors that'll affect what I'm recommending/using/deploying.
Personally speaking, I've never had any issus with any SQL Server versions in either performance, scaling or security. A well installed, maintained and managed setup will work really well and be considerably cheaper than alternatives such as Oracle. While MySQL may be cheaper, it's not as fully featured as SQL Server. Off the top of my head, I reckon I've dealt with around 40 or 50 SQL Server setups since version 6.5 and I don't have a bad word to say about them - never had an intrusion, never had database corruption, havce ported databases between machines with no problems, run them on VMware etc. etc. It's certainly one of Microsoft's better technology platforms and though many people would like me to, I can't really fault it. Same goes for MySQL - I like it and I use it where necessary and relevant, i.e. conversely, I'd tend to roll out MySQL in a Linux-house if I were developing PHP on Apache for instance. As I said earlier, you find technologies fit together through experience.
Although as with anything out there, chances are someone's had some really bad experiences with it and couldn't recommend it though personal experiences, YMMV.
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.
'The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.'
Am I missing something here, I was unaware that there was a stigma attached to being a web programmer using Windows. Right tools for the job, whether it's Ruby on Rails or not I'm afraid. Last project was PHP on Apache and MySQL, current project is ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005. My next project will be PHP on Windows using MySQL and IIS. I do what's best for my clients, not what's flavour of the month.
Attaching a stigma to certain platforms or technologies for certain jobs is just stupid and childish. Are we going to start lambasting publishers that don't use Macs next, or Linux users that do accounting on their machines? Bizarre...
That the guy might've been addicted because he was chatting about sex, rather than because he was "on the internet"? I thought sex was supposed to be a far bigger compulsion towards addiction than using the internet
I find it all to worrying nowadays that people come up with stupid liberal, pseudo-sciences to determine that you're doing too much/too little of something. Bloody hell, so some peopel like spending time playing games and using the internet - so what! Computers can be used for many different things - like cars. You don't hear about people being addicted to cars or roads do you? And adrenaline - well you're average adrenaline junkie doesn't get as much stick as people who are "computer addicts".
It sucks that we now live in a society where having a hobby or interest is now considered a problem - maybe we should all be bored shitless and hanging around outside malls... or just sit around and come up with meaningless generalisations about who does and who doesn't match up to the modern social norm...
it's gone through more violent and extreme changes long before a single human emerged from the primordial sludge. And now we're to believe that somehow earth's perfect harmonial environemntal equilibirum, which never ever existed in the first place, is being upset by man?
Yup, we're Earth's cancer. We grow and grow and grow, and at some point in the future, we're going to kill our host being. As an organism with a lifespan of C.70 years, we lack the ability to understand our impact on the planet firsthand, so we'll ignore the initial symptoms, putting them down to other causes.
Then one day, we'll find there's no food, water, air, fuel, space. One day there will be too many of us, using a finite amount of resources. Self-destruction is our destiny - it's part of being human and it will happen. As you say - 6 billion years of extreme changes, but you can't deny that the Earth as a body in it's own right, is past its zenith. It's downhill from here and it would be better without us.
man's impact on the environment has been 'downgraded'. A UN report has found that our species has not had as large effect on climate change as was previously thought
Last time I checked, environment was very different from climate change.
Man has undeniably had a huge effect on the environment; making species extinct, over fishing/hunting other species to the point of extinction, using up the Earth's non-renewable fuel sources - wood, oil, coal, building over huge chunks of the planet, not to mention the various poisons, dioxins and various nuclear stuff we throw into the atmosphere, ground and oceans.
In this case the submitter has his facts wrong. The Telegraph article linked mentions only climate change, not man's impact on the environment as a whole. Sorry to nitpick, but I see those words being substituted for each other way too much now. You can argue all you like about climate change, but man's impact on the environment as a whole is proven.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you could look at it that way as historically Windows Media Extender boxes - which is what the Xbox 360 essentially is - have been around since the first release of Windows Media Center and as far as I can remember, they've always been able to play videos from the host PC. In that respect, the AppleTV/Front Row combo is Apple's response to the Media Extender/MediaCenter kit from Microsoft, although they got there first with movie and TV downloads.
Needless to say, as MS have one of the best online systems in the shape of xBox Live, it makes sense for them to distribute buyable media content through it. Since the 360 was released, you've been able to get some trailers and stuff, but they haven't been consistent in coming or impressive in scope. I've always wondered why they didn't make anything more of this ability, but I guess one reason was the crippling 20GB optional drive.
With the imminent release of the Live service for Windows owners for gaming, I think that it has the potential to be Microsoft's answer to the iTunes Music Store and more. Once PCs get access to Live, you're looking at much increased storage on client machines and also teh ability to stream that to the 360 - a lá AppleTV. If - and I say if - they can pull off the integration of online gaming, chat, media downloads with their combined MediaCenter (I suppose Vista too), 360, Zune (bleh!) platform, then Apple are going to have some serious problems on their hands, especially from the console/games perspective.
With the release of the AppleTV, I guess we might see a cut down 360-type device that has the same kind of functions. Based on the current 360 price, I'd wager that it'd undercut the AppleTV by a considerable amount too.
Kinda cool really - technology in the front room has suddenly got a whole lot more interesting...
Ok, while strictly not a product in its own right, USB was one of the defining moments in the 90's for technology - even my digital radio has a USB port on it.
I suppose if you were to associate USB with any one machine, it'd be the iMac, which did a lot for propelling it forward by ditching the ADB ports and floppy, ushering in a new age for peripherals (which unfortunately came in crappy gel colours too)...
...both include the Mediacenter stuff that the MCE version of XP had.
I'm pretty sure HP will still be selling those, regardless of whether they'll look good under your TV. If anything, over the next few years, HP will be shifting more units of MCE-grade machines...
I have a Sony UX180 and I must say the thing is absolutely awesome - stupidly feature-packed for a tiny device.
However, it has a flaw that really irks me: it doesn't have a right shift key. This wouldn't be so much a problem on many devices, but for something so small that you're supposed to use with both hands, Shift + 2 for a '@' symbol when using just your thumbs is a total sod. I thought this might be a teething thing and be fixed in future versions, but it hasn't been.
Apart from that, they've done a good job - dedicated nipple and buttons for mouse movement, dedicated zoom buttons (the 1024x600 screen can be a little small at times, so this helps), and an included dock and dongle make for a really professional package.
For a 1.2GHz Core Solo, the thing isn't too slow either. I wish it had a gig of memory, but this has been corrected in the newer versions.
For mobile computing though, it's great - I just wish they'd fix that damn shift key problem.
...an operating system is an operating system, and will be used to bolster a company's profit margin, not reduce the cost to the consumer.
This is a problem I made comments on in the past: people just don't get how an operating system can be 'free', companies take advantage of this. Until the consumer wises up, Linux is just a neat way for PC manufacturers to make more cash on each box sold.
Try typing Lexus-Financial.com into Google...
Apart from getting the two results that link back to this specific story, at the bottom, on big letters, you get Did you mean to search for: Lexus-Financial.com
This is just straight MS bashing for no reason - chances are that if you typo'd, you'd probably be looking for the suggested alternate. If you typed the same stuff into Google and spelt it correctly, chances are your first link would be a sponsored one at the top.
I mean, if a search engine helps you fidn what your looking for, it's doing its job. if it makes money while it's doing it, so what?
...but how much did performance increase by?
True, but don't you think it'd be cool if it did index offline media? Imagine a quick "don't worry, you've got another copy of it on blah blah CD..." message popping up when you'd searched for a file name and it returned no results. So you plonk the correct media in and voila! You find your file.
That said, I'm thinking purely in filename terms here, if you stretched it to the kinds of data that say Google Desktop Search indexes, I'd imagine your repository of info would get large pretty fast if offline media were included.
...it'd be great if they also indexed your offline media too?
The number of times I have to swap out CDs trying to find an image file or an old piece of code - it drives me nuts! Now with DVD it gets worse, HD-DVD, Blu-ray - forget it, that's a needle in a haystack. How difficult could it be to have the drive index offline media too - a bit like some tape library software or the like? Maybe it could index when you burn? The last time I saw something like this was when I got a Zip drive back in 1997 and some nifty free software came with it. Now, it seems that you can only search your local drive - a bad idea when removable media is the norm.
So, at the risk of sounding like a total banana; why doesn't anyone do this, or am I missing some glaringly obvious checkbox somewhere in OS X/XP/Fedora/Vista?
He's an absolutely huge omission from the list.
If you're unaware, he wrote a memo in 1945 titled 'As we may think' which laid down a lot of seminal ideas about information, computing devices (the Memex) and the way in which we interact with it - specifically the concept of hypertext.
If you haven't already read his memo, give it a shot. Along with Alvin Toffler's book 'Future Shock', this changed the way I view technology for ever... oh, stick Alvin Toffler on the list too, Bill Gates for 'commoditising' the PC, Gordon Moore, pretty much anyone who ever worked at Xerox PARC and the guy who invented the MP3 codec. They're all important to why we're sat here today.
...and also that 2 women are superior in the bedroom...
...by the Nintentdo Wii. Download the internet channel preview and voila! YouTube in your living room. And I assure you that worldwide, there'll probably be more Wii's sat by TVs than Apple iTV boxes.
I think the general rule back then was that you had one or the other...
No-DRM == winner!
DRM == looser!
If you like coffee-table electro then visit bleep.com. Non-DRM'd, MP3'd, cool music from Warp Records and associates. If you like the Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Plaid or that kind of stuff, then consider that link a Christmas present from the Gods!
Merry Christmas all!
DRM'd music? I'd rather feed their bones to pigs...
It's not security, it's not size.. it's the bleedin' fact that every sodding day some bellend asks me how they insert >picture/video/stupidlink< into their email. I'm fed up with it! I'd rather feed their bones to pigs!
:o)
Merry Christmas by the way.
Incidentally, if those bloody angle brackets are the wrong way round - blame the sodding HTML! Merry Christmas again... and yes, I've been out getting lathered, deal with it!
...can be found here.
I have to say, it looks awesome! Any idea when we can get our hands on it?
Respect is earned, not given. As far as I'm concerned, AJAX has given JavaScript a new lease of life. Without it, there would be no Gmail, no Google Maps, or at least not in the way we've come to admire them. When you see the fantastic stuff Google (and Windows Live for that matter) produce, XMLHTTP was the catalyst that made that possible, but all the donkey work is done by JavaScript.
Thus I have a lot of respect for it as a client scripting language, in most cases it's the only way of getting something done in a browser.
Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS. If I dropped copy of Ubuntu on their lap at Christmas, they'd immediately be suspicious of it. On booting, they'd complain that it wasn't Windows and that'd be that.
Reminds me of giving out mince pies in front of church on Saturday - most people couldn't understand why we would possibly give away mince pies. It was just a nice idea for shoppers walking past. Same with OSes - people expect to be charged, if they're not, they instantly assume that it's of low quality and crap, or there's some kind of benefit in it for you. Linux has more chance of being taken up if it was a $500 OS. Then it'd be a status symbol and everyone under the Sun would want it, or aspire to own it.
Interesting. Well firstly I'd like to say that I don't consider myself a fanboy of any particular database/OS/web server/development product, I work to solve problems, not increase/decrease some software/hardware company's market share.
.NET solution, SQL Server 2000/2005 is also what I'd recommend as it talks to .NET code much more effectively than MySQL or other alternatives. Performance of SQL Server against MySQL with .NET code is way better to the extent that I wouldn't recommend MySQL in that situation, regardless of deployment cost. As you work with various platforms, technologies and languages, you tend to fit the ones which fit together best - that's something that comes with experience. You also have to look at an outfit before you start on a new database project. If a company is using a lot of Windows boxes, has sysadmins who are Windows-based, then chances are that they'll be much more at home doing admin of a SQL Server on a Windows platform. In an ideal world, I'd all roll out what I personally love best. In a business world (the real world) I roll out what's best long term for the client, and that's looking at return on investments, total costs of ownership and what they already have in place. There's no point in rolling a shiny new Windows 2003 server into an Oracle datacenter and asking them to admin it. These are all factors that'll affect what I'm recommending/using/deploying.
In most cases, SQL Server is right becasue a company has in-house SQL Server Admins and deploying another database platform is a waste on company resources. That would entail another complete platform and maintenance/admin skillset. In many cases companies don't want this, which makes perfect sense as there's no point having a disparate bunch of technologies that you need to manage. If I was ever deploying a
Personally speaking, I've never had any issus with any SQL Server versions in either performance, scaling or security. A well installed, maintained and managed setup will work really well and be considerably cheaper than alternatives such as Oracle. While MySQL may be cheaper, it's not as fully featured as SQL Server. Off the top of my head, I reckon I've dealt with around 40 or 50 SQL Server setups since version 6.5 and I don't have a bad word to say about them - never had an intrusion, never had database corruption, havce ported databases between machines with no problems, run them on VMware etc. etc. It's certainly one of Microsoft's better technology platforms and though many people would like me to, I can't really fault it. Same goes for MySQL - I like it and I use it where necessary and relevant, i.e. conversely, I'd tend to roll out MySQL in a Linux-house if I were developing PHP on Apache for instance. As I said earlier, you find technologies fit together through experience.
Although as with anything out there, chances are someone's had some really bad experiences with it and couldn't recommend it though personal experiences, YMMV.
Hope that answers your question though.
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.
Attaching a stigma to certain platforms or technologies for certain jobs is just stupid and childish. Are we going to start lambasting publishers that don't use Macs next, or Linux users that do accounting on their machines? Bizarre...
That the guy might've been addicted because he was chatting about sex, rather than because he was "on the internet"? I thought sex was supposed to be a far bigger compulsion towards addiction than using the internet
I find it all to worrying nowadays that people come up with stupid liberal, pseudo-sciences to determine that you're doing too much/too little of something. Bloody hell, so some peopel like spending time playing games and using the internet - so what! Computers can be used for many different things - like cars. You don't hear about people being addicted to cars or roads do you? And adrenaline - well you're average adrenaline junkie doesn't get as much stick as people who are "computer addicts".
It sucks that we now live in a society where having a hobby or interest is now considered a problem - maybe we should all be bored shitless and hanging around outside malls... or just sit around and come up with meaningless generalisations about who does and who doesn't match up to the modern social norm...
Then one day, we'll find there's no food, water, air, fuel, space. One day there will be too many of us, using a finite amount of resources. Self-destruction is our destiny - it's part of being human and it will happen. As you say - 6 billion years of extreme changes, but you can't deny that the Earth as a body in it's own right, is past its zenith. It's downhill from here and it would be better without us.
Man has undeniably had a huge effect on the environment; making species extinct, over fishing/hunting other species to the point of extinction, using up the Earth's non-renewable fuel sources - wood, oil, coal, building over huge chunks of the planet, not to mention the various poisons, dioxins and various nuclear stuff we throw into the atmosphere, ground and oceans.
In this case the submitter has his facts wrong. The Telegraph article linked mentions only climate change, not man's impact on the environment as a whole. Sorry to nitpick, but I see those words being substituted for each other way too much now. You can argue all you like about climate change, but man's impact on the environment as a whole is proven.