Yeah... um.... you know that people keep coming up with standards, right? Like HDMI, for example. It didn't exist when TVs were invented, but many TVs have them now anyway.
Personally, I find it slightly confusing as to why we have soundcards convert to analog at all instead of having the analog conversion take place in the speakers (for consumer-grade speakers where you aren't going to have a separate amp anyway). I guess it's useful for headphones (and backwards compatibility), but it'd be better to put the headphone jack in the speakers anyway.
I'm not disagreeing or criticizing, just chiming in but-- who the hell is doing analog work in a PC anyway? You're right, the EM fields inside PCs are ridiculous-- to the point where some hardware will actually make mouse movements and big changes to your display audible in your speakers-- but the whole point of doing any audio/video on a PC is to make it digital!
So really it's a pretty simple principle: whatever you're doing, focus on making the analog->digital and digital->analog conversions as cleanly as possible, and make those conversions as rarely as possible. If you're going to go digital, go digital as early as possible so you aren't gathering analog noise as you go, keep it digital, and be aware of whatever conversions and processing you're doing to the digital signal. Then, output to analog as late as possible, again to avoid gathering noise, and use good analog equipment (amps and speakers and such).
I mean, WTF, I've only been peripherally involved with audio work, but that's just common sense. But sometimes, if you listen to audiophiles, you'll hear totally retarded things like how some brand of CD-Rs will provide clearer-sounding recordings.
Yeah, I'm no mathematician, but checksums simply weren't designed to uniquely identify files. It would be very unlikely that two arbitrary files would have the same checksum, and so it helps guard against file corruption and tampering. You can use a checksum to discover whether a file has been altered or updated, since it would be extremely difficult to alter a file without altering its checksum. However, you can not identify a file uniquely without having access to enough data to reconstruct the original file.
Or, at least, I don't see how it could be possible.
If Microsoft can't keep up with Mozilla, Opera, and Apple, then they'll just lose the "browser wars". It's not as though there aren't alternatives, so consumers will be fine.
I don't really get your complaint. I mean, I share your annoyance with uselessly flashy pages, and literally Flash-y pages, but what's wrong with refining standards? Many of the updates to HTML have made things cleaner, more precise, and more consistent. Some of the added features have allowed web developers to do more with less code (if you can call HTML "code"). Much of what's added in-- if you don't want to use it, don't use it. But if you have some reason to do something flashy on your site, it's probably better to have it be done in some standard way rather than though some hack or by adding Flash to your page.
If that's true, does that mean it's be possible to start with a checksum and filesize and, given enough computing power, retrieve the full file? If so, that's some impressive compression.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The business desktop version of Vista by default reboots without asking permission at 3am after receiving an update. After all, the computer can't be doing anything useful in the middle of the night, right?
You know what's worse? Windows Server 2003 will automatically reboot itself in the middle of the night after it's been updated. What kind of crazy shit is that?! If you tell your server to automatically download critical security fixes, it will reboot itself without warning?
I know, some know-it-all will tell me that Windows Server 2003 won't actually do that and that I'm just spreading FUD. And, you know, maybe all my servers just occasionally crash in the middle of the night, right after running updates, and they fail to report the unplanned reboot in the Event Log. If that's the case, it doesn't make me feel any better.
I'm not saying the distinction is reasonable, but it seems likely that the distinction would be made anyway. For as much carnage as you can create in San Andreas and Vice city, and as much non-airplane-related carnage as you can wreak in Liberty City, people will still be more sensitive to flying aircraft into tall buildings in a NYC-like city.
Some people will, believe it or not, actually find it shocking and saddening to see a video game that they believe intends to allow players to recreate what is, for those people, a very traumatic event in their own lives. Of course, these people will be in the minority of the "uproar". The majority of roaring (I believe) will come from people who just enjoy being outraged.
Either way, there will be an uproar about GTA4, I'm sure. People flipped out about GTA3, and this one will probably be just as bad but more realistic. My guess is that you'll hear people demanding that it's pulled from the shelves, but nothing will happen to stop sales. If you could fly a 747 into something that looked like the WTC, some horrible politician might actually try to do something about it.
I agree. One of the moments in GTA:SA that really got me going was this mission-- I think you were supposed to steal a helicopter-- where you had to get into a heavily-gaurded area. It didn't really give you instructions, as far as I can remember, about how you needed to accomplish this, but I just flew a plane over the area, jumped out, and sky-dove to my target, opening my parachute as late as possible to that I'd be a hard target to hit. The experience was impressive.
I suspect that the real reason might be that the setting, this time, it Liberty City. Being based loosely on NYC, there would probably be a big uproar if they let you fly planes into the skyscrapers.
The reason the Wii is in such demand is a series of well planned moves from Nintendo.
From what I've seen, a surprisingly large portion of the demand is coming from people who normally wouldn't buy a game system, or at least wouldn't put much time into trying to find one that's selling out so quickly. I've watched people who "hate video games" get hooked on Wii Sports because they're so easy to pick up and learn. I've taught people to play and they're surprised by the controls; they have a very hard time believing, for example, that the tennis game doesn't require that you press any buttons.
"So what button do I press to swing?"
"No buttons, just swing."
"Really? No! Oh, wait... really. I see. Cool."
Big smiles all around. It's almost fun just to watch other people get worked up. People try really hard to make good Miis, people jumping around to play tennis, etc. It's even fun for parties-- when's the last time you heard of a bunch of non-geeks getting together and throwing a party to play video games?
if you call the PS3 not fun, you're basically calling the PS2, the Xbox, and the Xbox 360 "not fun", because they have roughly the same sorts of games available.
I think that's the point: PS3s are prettier than the XBox or PS2, but they aren't any more fun. So far, it seems like they're offering the same sorts of games with better graphics. For a lot of people, the Wii is more fun than these other systems because of its novel control scheme. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit gimmicky, but it makes certain sorts of games easier and more fun. It makes people get up, move around, and make silly movements.
And so the question in some people's minds has been, "what's going to have a greater demand: pretty graphics or fun gameplay?" It's not that the Wii can't have pretty graphics or that the PS3 can't have fun gameplay, but which one sells more depends on which feature people are more interested in.
Yes, that's why I said "you could look at it as just encoding". The extreme case of my example, obviously, is the single bit. Therefore, the most likely candidate for copyright infringement would be the person providing the bittorrent tracker that told you which chunks to download and which order to put them in. However, it doesn't seem like the answer is so clear. If that were the case, then what about conventional bittorrent participants? Are they guilty of copyright infringement, or is it only the person offering the tracker?
Also, if you take the example in the other direction, what is someone offered two halves of a movie for download? Two complete halves. And then I told you, "Oh, well, put part one before part two, and you have the complete movie!" In that case, I wouldn't be guilty of copyright infringement, I don't think.
Personally, I think this is the inherent problem with copyright during the Internet Age. When you're talking about books or film, it's more clear what it means to "copy". However, digital media is constantly being cached and copies, pulled apart and strung back together. The result is a more abstract and ambiguous system.
Well, yes, I know that you can obviously do a checksum, but that won't tell you which parts of the file have changed. Unless, that is, you run checksums on the individual chunks. However, checksums do not uniquely identify a file. That is, it's been shown that you can manufacture a file to match a given checksum and yet have it be different from the file that the checksum was originally created from.
Part of the reason checksums work so well is that it's extremely unlikely that two given files will have the same checksums. So, for example, if a file is corrupted it's *extremely* unlikely to generate the same checksum as the original. However, if we all split all the files on our hard drives into little chunks and ran a checksum on them all, would I feel extremely confident that we could swap all the chunks with matching checksums without anything getting corrupted? I'm not sure. It would depend on how many different chunks of data you were comparing, but obviously, given enough files, you'd eventually hit two that matched.
I'll admit that I'm definitely not the most educated person in these matters, but I just don't quite "get it". If you are going to download only the differences between two files, doesn't that require that some computer has access to both files and can compare the differences? If one end or the other doesn't have both files, wouldn't you need to transfer the file first to make the comparison? (meaning you'd still need to download the whole thing?)
Anyway, I've thought about this before, even though I don't have the technical background to think about it properly-- what's the legal implication on copyrights in this instance? Let's imagine I have 50 public domain movies in MPEG format that I'm sharing through bittorrent, and that, miraculously, you could take different small chunks of data from these various movies, put those chunks into a different order, you could create a full copy of a copyrighted Hollywod movie released a few months ago. Now someone else introduces a bittorrent tracker that can pull those chunks from those 50 movies and put them into the correct order. In this unusual situation, is anyone violating the copyright of Hollywood movie?
It seems like a technicality, but it you'd have to figure that, for any size-limited chunk of data, there are a finite number of possibilities. Therefore, if you had a hard drive storing a different 4KB file representing every possible combination of data that could exist in 4KB, you would, in a sense, have every piece of information that it would be possible to create stored on that hard drive. Of course, in order to create a piece of information, you'd need additional information: which chunks need to be combines, in which order, and at what point to cut off the last 4KB chunk.
So it seems like a weird gray area to me. In one sense, you could consider this as a form of encoding. However, if several people and sharing several pieces of unrelated information which can be pieced together into a copyrighted work, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. On the server end, the copyrighted work simply doesn't exist. At no point is the copyrighted film actually being copied. But after a given series of data chunks are copied, they can be put into a series which results on the copyrighted work.
I know, I know, I probably sound very silly to those who know better.
"This issue is about the discipline of students, dealing with a prank in an appropriate manner, and ultimately finding the reason why some people find it funny to be disrespectful to someone (hopefully) dedicated to improving their future."
Are you kidding me?
People find it funny to be disrespectful to people in power. Why? Because frequently those people use that power badly. They earn that disrespect.
c.f. "President of the United States."
People *should* be disrespectful to the people in power. People in power need to regularly be taken down a notch. Taking them too seriously only gives them more power, and too much power breeds abuse.
Certainly, at least, it's better to be disrespectful of those with power than it is to be disrespectful of the powerless. If you do manage to go too far and actually cause some harm to those in power with your disrespect, at least they have the power to do something about it and defend themselves. The powerless don't even have that.
I'll never understand why we need [such-and-such] killers. An iPod killer? Why? Whether people like it or not, the iPod is a good product, so why does it need to be killed.
You're right, the more the merrier, so let's just leave the iPod in the game, but just hope that other people get in the game too. I'm hesitant to root for Microsoft after the abuse I've taken as one of their customers. I guess it's fine as long as they're sticking with MP3s or AACs, but in every instance where they're trying to force some form of WMA or WMV on the entire digital media market, I'm going to root against them.
What part of the hard drive requires ventilation? I mean, I know that hard drives need airflow for cooling, but is there really a part of hard drives that requires new air to be circulated to it? I though the actual hard drive was always sealed and air-tight anyway, and only the circuit board was exposed.
Isn't someone usually handling your mail anyhow? I mean, unless you're sending all your mail encrypted (in which case who cares is Google handles it?) or all of your mail is on your own server on your own network and it never leaves your own network, it seems to me you have to consider your e-mail to be "in the wild".
Really, even if you're keeping your e-mail on your personal server, if you're conversing with people who use Gmail, Google has that e-mail anyway.
You're saying that Apple needs to increase the capabilities of the device, which brings up an old issue with Apple that many people fail to recognize. For better or for worse, Apple doesn't cram all the functionality they can into products as soon as they can.
For some people, this is a negative: it means they don't get everything they want. For others, it's a positive trait: talk about Apple, and you'll hear their fans say phrases like "easy to use", "it just works", and "it's very simple".
Ultimately, though, it's a design and development philosophy that is vastly different from companies like Microsoft. When Microsoft comes out with their version 1 product, they throw in every feature and the kitchen sink, but only 1/3 of the features work properly, and the whole thing is pretty much unusable (XBox being the only exception i can think of). Over the years, they refine the everything. They change some features drastically for version 2, breaking some of the features that worked in version 1, and fixing some that didn't work. In version 3, they throw out a bunch of features that were never functional in the first place, and add a new feature here and there. By version 4, the product has actually become usable.
Apple (at least since Jobs returned) develops in roughly the opposite style. When they release version 1 of their products, they have about half or a third of the "features" of the Microsoft version 1 product, but 95% of those features work in sensible ways. The result is that you end up with a product that's actually pretty useful out of the gate, presuming you're satisfied with the somewhat limited feature-set. As the years go on, they slowly increase the feature-set here and there as they figure out how to work them in without breaking anything, and without violating a sensible design. Every new version is very functional, so long as you're satisfied with the feature set, and whatever worked in old version usually works in the new versions. The feature-set grows with each iteration, but they never really throw in the kitchen sink.
Each methodology has it's benefits and drawbacks, but personally, during the past few years, I've preferred the results of Apple's work.
HD content opens up a whole can of worms that Apple is probably hoping to avoid. First, regarding their relationship to the studios, many TV shows and Movie studios probably would want extra assurances and higher prices for real HD content. Also, Apple would incur a larger cost for offering HD videos since the bandwidth would be much greater. Prices would need to go up.
Also, I would guess there are technical problems, too. Download times would go up, and the probability of downloads failing would increase. Many customers who aren't as discriminating about video quality would complain. Moving these files to your iPod would require some extra transcoding, or else a lot more downscaling on the device, meaning a cut to battery life and fewer shows would fit on your iPod at once. People buying movies and shows would fill up their iPods and hard drives faster. The likelihood of glitches while streaming shows from your computer to your iTV would increase.
So it makes sense to me that Apple would want to continue to sell SDTV-quality shows for at least a few more years until internet connections can get faster and hard drives can get bigger. Even then, I would guess they might do something like offer a choice between SD and HD, much like the announced choice between 128kbps music and 256 kbps music.
This is correct. There are two real problems with quality for iTunes shows/movies on the iTV:
the video is highly compressed: Apple wanted to keep download times and server load reasonable, so they compressed the video a fair amount. They could increase the quality, but there's a decent chance they'd want to increase price a little to match the extra server load. Also, they might get more complaints about movies taking too long to download.
some video is badly compressed: Sometimes the small filesize isn't enough to justify the poor quality-- someone messed up. They encoded from the wrong source, they encoded with the wrong settings, or made some other mistake. Therefore the quality isn't as good as it should be for that filesize.
Now, it's debatable whether these problems are really Apple's fault. In the first instance, they're attempting to give consumers what they believe consumers want. They're guessing that consumers would rather have small file-sizes and quick downloads than perfect quality. Maybe they're wrong.
On the second issue, Apple often receives their media already encoded by the content owner. If you downloaded an episode of "Heroes" from iTunes, there's a good chance that the file was actually encoded by NBC (not Apple). If the quality is extra-bad, it's probably NBC's fault. Apple could probably try to do some more QA on these sorts of things, but to some extent there's some mastering/encoding that many people in these industries consider to have creative implications and therefore are the content owner's decision. For example, if you download an mp3 and it has some level of static on it, sometimes the static is actually part of the song.
In other words, Apple probably doesn't want to do too much QA as it puts responsibility on them for a certain level of creative control, too. Most likely, they generally just try to make sure they aren't selling corrupt files, and leave the optimization/encoding to the content owners.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... um.... you know that people keep coming up with standards, right? Like HDMI, for example. It didn't exist when TVs were invented, but many TVs have them now anyway.
Personally, I find it slightly confusing as to why we have soundcards convert to analog at all instead of having the analog conversion take place in the speakers (for consumer-grade speakers where you aren't going to have a separate amp anyway). I guess it's useful for headphones (and backwards compatibility), but it'd be better to put the headphone jack in the speakers anyway.
I'm not disagreeing or criticizing, just chiming in but-- who the hell is doing analog work in a PC anyway? You're right, the EM fields inside PCs are ridiculous-- to the point where some hardware will actually make mouse movements and big changes to your display audible in your speakers-- but the whole point of doing any audio/video on a PC is to make it digital!
So really it's a pretty simple principle: whatever you're doing, focus on making the analog->digital and digital->analog conversions as cleanly as possible, and make those conversions as rarely as possible. If you're going to go digital, go digital as early as possible so you aren't gathering analog noise as you go, keep it digital, and be aware of whatever conversions and processing you're doing to the digital signal. Then, output to analog as late as possible, again to avoid gathering noise, and use good analog equipment (amps and speakers and such).
I mean, WTF, I've only been peripherally involved with audio work, but that's just common sense. But sometimes, if you listen to audiophiles, you'll hear totally retarded things like how some brand of CD-Rs will provide clearer-sounding recordings.
Yeah, I'm no mathematician, but checksums simply weren't designed to uniquely identify files. It would be very unlikely that two arbitrary files would have the same checksum, and so it helps guard against file corruption and tampering. You can use a checksum to discover whether a file has been altered or updated, since it would be extremely difficult to alter a file without altering its checksum. However, you can not identify a file uniquely without having access to enough data to reconstruct the original file.
Or, at least, I don't see how it could be possible.
I assume the OP is having trouble imaging the Windows partition, not the OSX partition.
If Microsoft can't keep up with Mozilla, Opera, and Apple, then they'll just lose the "browser wars". It's not as though there aren't alternatives, so consumers will be fine.
I don't really get your complaint. I mean, I share your annoyance with uselessly flashy pages, and literally Flash-y pages, but what's wrong with refining standards? Many of the updates to HTML have made things cleaner, more precise, and more consistent. Some of the added features have allowed web developers to do more with less code (if you can call HTML "code"). Much of what's added in-- if you don't want to use it, don't use it. But if you have some reason to do something flashy on your site, it's probably better to have it be done in some standard way rather than though some hack or by adding Flash to your page.
If that's true, does that mean it's be possible to start with a checksum and filesize and, given enough computing power, retrieve the full file? If so, that's some impressive compression.
You know what's worse? Windows Server 2003 will automatically reboot itself in the middle of the night after it's been updated. What kind of crazy shit is that?! If you tell your server to automatically download critical security fixes, it will reboot itself without warning?
I know, some know-it-all will tell me that Windows Server 2003 won't actually do that and that I'm just spreading FUD. And, you know, maybe all my servers just occasionally crash in the middle of the night, right after running updates, and they fail to report the unplanned reboot in the Event Log. If that's the case, it doesn't make me feel any better.
I'm not saying the distinction is reasonable, but it seems likely that the distinction would be made anyway. For as much carnage as you can create in San Andreas and Vice city, and as much non-airplane-related carnage as you can wreak in Liberty City, people will still be more sensitive to flying aircraft into tall buildings in a NYC-like city.
Some people will, believe it or not, actually find it shocking and saddening to see a video game that they believe intends to allow players to recreate what is, for those people, a very traumatic event in their own lives. Of course, these people will be in the minority of the "uproar". The majority of roaring (I believe) will come from people who just enjoy being outraged.
Either way, there will be an uproar about GTA4, I'm sure. People flipped out about GTA3, and this one will probably be just as bad but more realistic. My guess is that you'll hear people demanding that it's pulled from the shelves, but nothing will happen to stop sales. If you could fly a 747 into something that looked like the WTC, some horrible politician might actually try to do something about it.
... you know, anything to distract the cattle.
I agree. One of the moments in GTA:SA that really got me going was this mission-- I think you were supposed to steal a helicopter-- where you had to get into a heavily-gaurded area. It didn't really give you instructions, as far as I can remember, about how you needed to accomplish this, but I just flew a plane over the area, jumped out, and sky-dove to my target, opening my parachute as late as possible to that I'd be a hard target to hit. The experience was impressive.
I suspect that the real reason might be that the setting, this time, it Liberty City. Being based loosely on NYC, there would probably be a big uproar if they let you fly planes into the skyscrapers.
From what I've seen, a surprisingly large portion of the demand is coming from people who normally wouldn't buy a game system, or at least wouldn't put much time into trying to find one that's selling out so quickly. I've watched people who "hate video games" get hooked on Wii Sports because they're so easy to pick up and learn. I've taught people to play and they're surprised by the controls; they have a very hard time believing, for example, that the tennis game doesn't require that you press any buttons.
"So what button do I press to swing?"
"No buttons, just swing."
"Really? No! Oh, wait... really. I see. Cool."
Big smiles all around. It's almost fun just to watch other people get worked up. People try really hard to make good Miis, people jumping around to play tennis, etc. It's even fun for parties-- when's the last time you heard of a bunch of non-geeks getting together and throwing a party to play video games?
I think that's the point: PS3s are prettier than the XBox or PS2, but they aren't any more fun. So far, it seems like they're offering the same sorts of games with better graphics. For a lot of people, the Wii is more fun than these other systems because of its novel control scheme. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit gimmicky, but it makes certain sorts of games easier and more fun. It makes people get up, move around, and make silly movements.
And so the question in some people's minds has been, "what's going to have a greater demand: pretty graphics or fun gameplay?" It's not that the Wii can't have pretty graphics or that the PS3 can't have fun gameplay, but which one sells more depends on which feature people are more interested in.
Yes, that's why I said "you could look at it as just encoding". The extreme case of my example, obviously, is the single bit. Therefore, the most likely candidate for copyright infringement would be the person providing the bittorrent tracker that told you which chunks to download and which order to put them in. However, it doesn't seem like the answer is so clear. If that were the case, then what about conventional bittorrent participants? Are they guilty of copyright infringement, or is it only the person offering the tracker?
Also, if you take the example in the other direction, what is someone offered two halves of a movie for download? Two complete halves. And then I told you, "Oh, well, put part one before part two, and you have the complete movie!" In that case, I wouldn't be guilty of copyright infringement, I don't think.
Personally, I think this is the inherent problem with copyright during the Internet Age. When you're talking about books or film, it's more clear what it means to "copy". However, digital media is constantly being cached and copies, pulled apart and strung back together. The result is a more abstract and ambiguous system.
Well, yes, I know that you can obviously do a checksum, but that won't tell you which parts of the file have changed. Unless, that is, you run checksums on the individual chunks. However, checksums do not uniquely identify a file. That is, it's been shown that you can manufacture a file to match a given checksum and yet have it be different from the file that the checksum was originally created from.
Part of the reason checksums work so well is that it's extremely unlikely that two given files will have the same checksums. So, for example, if a file is corrupted it's *extremely* unlikely to generate the same checksum as the original. However, if we all split all the files on our hard drives into little chunks and ran a checksum on them all, would I feel extremely confident that we could swap all the chunks with matching checksums without anything getting corrupted? I'm not sure. It would depend on how many different chunks of data you were comparing, but obviously, given enough files, you'd eventually hit two that matched.
I'll admit that I'm definitely not the most educated person in these matters, but I just don't quite "get it". If you are going to download only the differences between two files, doesn't that require that some computer has access to both files and can compare the differences? If one end or the other doesn't have both files, wouldn't you need to transfer the file first to make the comparison? (meaning you'd still need to download the whole thing?)
Anyway, I've thought about this before, even though I don't have the technical background to think about it properly-- what's the legal implication on copyrights in this instance? Let's imagine I have 50 public domain movies in MPEG format that I'm sharing through bittorrent, and that, miraculously, you could take different small chunks of data from these various movies, put those chunks into a different order, you could create a full copy of a copyrighted Hollywod movie released a few months ago. Now someone else introduces a bittorrent tracker that can pull those chunks from those 50 movies and put them into the correct order. In this unusual situation, is anyone violating the copyright of Hollywood movie?
It seems like a technicality, but it you'd have to figure that, for any size-limited chunk of data, there are a finite number of possibilities. Therefore, if you had a hard drive storing a different 4KB file representing every possible combination of data that could exist in 4KB, you would, in a sense, have every piece of information that it would be possible to create stored on that hard drive. Of course, in order to create a piece of information, you'd need additional information: which chunks need to be combines, in which order, and at what point to cut off the last 4KB chunk.
So it seems like a weird gray area to me. In one sense, you could consider this as a form of encoding. However, if several people and sharing several pieces of unrelated information which can be pieced together into a copyrighted work, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is necessarily guilty of copyright infringement. On the server end, the copyrighted work simply doesn't exist. At no point is the copyrighted film actually being copied. But after a given series of data chunks are copied, they can be put into a series which results on the copyrighted work.
I know, I know, I probably sound very silly to those who know better.
And they were going to move to a version of BeOS before that, but last I checked they were still using the years-old PalmOS v5. PalmOS is a POS.
People *should* be disrespectful to the people in power. People in power need to regularly be taken down a notch. Taking them too seriously only gives them more power, and too much power breeds abuse.
Certainly, at least, it's better to be disrespectful of those with power than it is to be disrespectful of the powerless. If you do manage to go too far and actually cause some harm to those in power with your disrespect, at least they have the power to do something about it and defend themselves. The powerless don't even have that.
I'll never understand why we need [such-and-such] killers. An iPod killer? Why? Whether people like it or not, the iPod is a good product, so why does it need to be killed.
You're right, the more the merrier, so let's just leave the iPod in the game, but just hope that other people get in the game too. I'm hesitant to root for Microsoft after the abuse I've taken as one of their customers. I guess it's fine as long as they're sticking with MP3s or AACs, but in every instance where they're trying to force some form of WMA or WMV on the entire digital media market, I'm going to root against them.
What part of the hard drive requires ventilation? I mean, I know that hard drives need airflow for cooling, but is there really a part of hard drives that requires new air to be circulated to it? I though the actual hard drive was always sealed and air-tight anyway, and only the circuit board was exposed.
Isn't someone usually handling your mail anyhow? I mean, unless you're sending all your mail encrypted (in which case who cares is Google handles it?) or all of your mail is on your own server on your own network and it never leaves your own network, it seems to me you have to consider your e-mail to be "in the wild".
Really, even if you're keeping your e-mail on your personal server, if you're conversing with people who use Gmail, Google has that e-mail anyway.
You're saying that Apple needs to increase the capabilities of the device, which brings up an old issue with Apple that many people fail to recognize. For better or for worse, Apple doesn't cram all the functionality they can into products as soon as they can.
For some people, this is a negative: it means they don't get everything they want. For others, it's a positive trait: talk about Apple, and you'll hear their fans say phrases like "easy to use", "it just works", and "it's very simple".
Ultimately, though, it's a design and development philosophy that is vastly different from companies like Microsoft. When Microsoft comes out with their version 1 product, they throw in every feature and the kitchen sink, but only 1/3 of the features work properly, and the whole thing is pretty much unusable (XBox being the only exception i can think of). Over the years, they refine the everything. They change some features drastically for version 2, breaking some of the features that worked in version 1, and fixing some that didn't work. In version 3, they throw out a bunch of features that were never functional in the first place, and add a new feature here and there. By version 4, the product has actually become usable.
Apple (at least since Jobs returned) develops in roughly the opposite style. When they release version 1 of their products, they have about half or a third of the "features" of the Microsoft version 1 product, but 95% of those features work in sensible ways. The result is that you end up with a product that's actually pretty useful out of the gate, presuming you're satisfied with the somewhat limited feature-set. As the years go on, they slowly increase the feature-set here and there as they figure out how to work them in without breaking anything, and without violating a sensible design. Every new version is very functional, so long as you're satisfied with the feature set, and whatever worked in old version usually works in the new versions. The feature-set grows with each iteration, but they never really throw in the kitchen sink.
Each methodology has it's benefits and drawbacks, but personally, during the past few years, I've preferred the results of Apple's work.
HD content opens up a whole can of worms that Apple is probably hoping to avoid. First, regarding their relationship to the studios, many TV shows and Movie studios probably would want extra assurances and higher prices for real HD content. Also, Apple would incur a larger cost for offering HD videos since the bandwidth would be much greater. Prices would need to go up.
Also, I would guess there are technical problems, too. Download times would go up, and the probability of downloads failing would increase. Many customers who aren't as discriminating about video quality would complain. Moving these files to your iPod would require some extra transcoding, or else a lot more downscaling on the device, meaning a cut to battery life and fewer shows would fit on your iPod at once. People buying movies and shows would fill up their iPods and hard drives faster. The likelihood of glitches while streaming shows from your computer to your iTV would increase.
So it makes sense to me that Apple would want to continue to sell SDTV-quality shows for at least a few more years until internet connections can get faster and hard drives can get bigger. Even then, I would guess they might do something like offer a choice between SD and HD, much like the announced choice between 128kbps music and 256 kbps music.
This is correct. There are two real problems with quality for iTunes shows/movies on the iTV:
Now, it's debatable whether these problems are really Apple's fault. In the first instance, they're attempting to give consumers what they believe consumers want. They're guessing that consumers would rather have small file-sizes and quick downloads than perfect quality. Maybe they're wrong.
On the second issue, Apple often receives their media already encoded by the content owner. If you downloaded an episode of "Heroes" from iTunes, there's a good chance that the file was actually encoded by NBC (not Apple). If the quality is extra-bad, it's probably NBC's fault. Apple could probably try to do some more QA on these sorts of things, but to some extent there's some mastering/encoding that many people in these industries consider to have creative implications and therefore are the content owner's decision. For example, if you download an mp3 and it has some level of static on it, sometimes the static is actually part of the song.
In other words, Apple probably doesn't want to do too much QA as it puts responsibility on them for a certain level of creative control, too. Most likely, they generally just try to make sure they aren't selling corrupt files, and leave the optimization/encoding to the content owners.
There's always Gentoo.