So you're saying, I should only be expecting Palm to make an address book, calendar, and a couple notes here and there, in a pocket-sized device? Well, welcome to 10 years ago, where I already had a Palm that could do that. What has Palm done lately?
As far as my experience goes, there's nothing innovative or elegant about Palm's approach. Neither are they pushing the limits of what a handheld device can do, nor are they scaling back their devices to be simple yet effective PDAs that are small, light, energy-efficient, and cheap. I would applaud either course. As it is, it seems more like they're steering a middle course, where they make their devices bigger, clunkier, more expensive power hogs in order to pack in some features that you claim nobody really uses.
That may be true, but it speaks worse of Palm, in my mind, that I would need to do a lot of research, finding extra software and buying extra hardware, coming up with obscure hacks, or whatever, in order to use their devices in "the best manner". They should figure out the best manner for using their devices, and provide what's necessary to use them that way out of the box.
As it is, I feel like the hardware may be fine, but their software is all long overdue for an update in order to make everything a lot easier to deal with. As a simple example, the last palm I owned had the ability to draw little sketches, and I don't remember if they could then be synced and viewed through their palm desktop software, but they offered no means to export those pictures into standard graphic formats. What sense does that make?
I think I even like the idea of a hotsync manager, but why no allow the palm device to be mounted as a disk, and then have highly configurable syncing software that would automatically keep whatever documents you wanted up-to-date on as many computers as you chose, but allow you to manually copy other things directly through the OS?
I've just run into too many issues where the Palm software forces you to do things one way, which has a bunch of drawbacks, and when I hacked another way around it, it had another set of drawbacks. In neither case did it really work well.
Yeah, umm... it was a joke. I was questioning whether it made sense to talk about "reviving" NeXT when it's not really dead, and, in fact, is enjoying quite a bit of success in its latest incarnation, although it's been rebranded and updated quite a lot.
Of course, OOo includes an "export to PDF" feature. So, even if you're on Windows and don't have Acrobat (or some other PDF generator), OpenOffice has you covered for read-only portable documents. Someone might argue that you should use OASIS because it's more open, but at least PDF is a lot more open than the Word format, and arguably more supported than Word even.
It doesn't support editing so well, so that's the real question. When you're sending a document, do you want the recipient to be able to edit the document easily? If the answer is yes, you probably don't want to use a PDF. If the answer is no, there isn't really a better format to use.
TV shows (like Lost) one day after they air, and you know damn well what's next... movies.
According to ThinkSecret (which tends to be pretty reliable):
The video playback capability, which sources say is in fact available in current models but is disabled, will be geared towards watching broadcast content, video podcasts, and other shorter videos, but Apple will not be offering movies to purchase at this time. Instead, the company is hoping to roll out a movie store later in 2006 when the "real" video iPod, which will sport a larger widescreen display wrapped in a new casing, will debut.
What was the "same point" you were making? I'm not sure I was making a point. Do you mean that you tried cracking the same joke, and people didn't get it?
What I believe is needed is a light-weight OO.org viewer that is quick to download and quick to open.
If all you need is for the client to view the document, send a PDF. That's what PDFs are for, and it also diminishes the reliance on Microsoft. Best of all, almost everyone already has a PDF viewer installed.
I think to the extent that what he is pointing out is true, IT managers should take note . Unfortunately most won't or don't.
I think a lot of IT managers already have taken note. Most people in IT understand that Microsoft doesn't play well with others, which leads to the idea that your best bet is either to use only Microsoft Office or not use Microsoft Office at all. However, there just aren't loads of options there. Microsoft Office is what most businesses use, so if you want to do business with them, you might want to stick with MS. Further, people are accustomed to Microsoft Office, so there's that issue.
Finally, and this is not unimportant, even though OOo might provide a viable alternative to most of MS Office, they don't offer an Outlook clone. Many businesses are flat-out addicted to Outlook for their scheduling. OOo might do well to integrate Evolution and help Novell port it to Windows/OSX.
Either way, I doubt that the real problem is that IT managers are oblivious to the vendor lock-in MS represents, but rather that the lock-in has already taken place, and now the question is, how do you get out? The answer may be to push MS to support OASIS.
Yeah, who on Earth would use NeXT? Even if they upgraded it, made it prettier, and wrote a whole bunch of software for it, I think I'd still stick with OSX.
I imagine I'm not the only one who finds Palms woefully inadequate? I've owned a couple Palms, and found them buggy and ever-crashing, filled with neat gimmicky software that's more or less unusable for real tasks. I guess the address book and calendar were fine, and maybe there were a couple games worth playing, but that seemed to be it for me. Music and photos were slow to transfer, and required using Palm's horrible hotsync utility, and even once they were on the device, the interface for viewing/listening was pretty frustrating.
Really, I've always thought palms were the epitome of the cool-but-useless-gadget phenomenon. I thought the Lifedrive, at least, was getting on to the right track. Bluetooth and Wifi, a 4GB drive, an actual file browser and the ability to transfer files like it was a normal external hard drive... I might, in theory, be able to use something like that. A couple revisions and a new (stable) operating system, and I might actually buy one. The current model however, when I tried one out, the included web browser kept crashing and the connection to an otherwise stable Wifi access point kept dropping.
At this rate, I think we'll see an iPod with an input device and wireless networking before Palm gets their act together and makes a device worth carrying around.
A 600M xvid file will give you a movie at DVD quality.
Apple seems pretty committed to h.264 right now, so I would expect they'd go with that instead of xvid. From what I understand (and from what I can tell from looking at it), the quality is better, too, but it requires more processing power to encode/decode.
Now, neither of these formats will really give you DVD quality at 600MB per movie, but I'd say somewhere between 600MB and 1GB, you'll hit that level of "good enough for most people". Remember, the iTunes Music Store isn't selling lossless music; they're only encoded at 128kb/s. Why would we expect Apple to sell lossless movies?
Re:It's "good better best" across the product line
on
New iPods on the Horizon
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This model is one of those Steve Jobs things. Most any other company would have kept the Mini in its lineup when the nano came out, but Jobs believes religiously in giving the consumer a pretty clear set of choices that way.
It certainly seems to be a "Jobs thing". From what I remember, you could just watch it happen when he returned to Apple. It's not just an issue of limiting options or anything, it's offering what is basically a standardized lineup with standard naming conventions, and then a little variation in configuration. It's the whole thing. It's called "marketing", and it's one of Jobs' big talents.
You get the iStuff, which is all white plastic consumer goods, and then the PowerStuff, which is all aluminum power-user/business goods. It gets to be pretty clear to the consumer what he's getting himself into. You know exactly which models are "better". They're mostly the same, except the more expensive one is faster, has a couple extra features, etc.
I'm still waiting for a "PowerPod".
And then Apple plays this whole "$50 more" game. More marketing. It's smart. People can say, "You can buy an iPod for only $99!" And that draws people in. They think, well, $100 isn't bad. But then, for $50 more, you can get twice as much memory. But for just $50 more than that, you can get a color screen AND twice as much memory. For just $50 more, you can get a whole lot more memory, 5 times as much. Next thing you know, you're thinking about spending $500 for something where you justified the purchase because it was cheap at $100.
And that's what the "$50 more" game is all about. Make your entry level product cheap enough that people feel like it's silly to think it's "too much money", and then add genuinely useful features at regular and small price increments. Consumers will naturally rise to the highest level of money they're willing to spend.
I don't rate the navigation system on the iPod. I have an iPod UI clone "pPod" (no longer legally obtainable) on my phone. It's nice and all, but it's a bit kludgy, especially if you have a large library.
I think if the US can support three cars per four people then saturation of the iPod market won't happen until we get 3 iPods per 4 people; with almost 300 million people, that means over 200 million iPods sold; since Apple is sold 6.5 million in the 4th quarter, and something like 6 million the quarter before, that means we have another 8 years at this rate, less if the sale rate increases.
Of course, within two years, 3 of those 6 million will be buying new iPods to replace the ones that are lost/broken, or just to get a smaller device, more HD space, or a higher-res screen. By the time those 8 years are up, 4th gen iPods will be collector's items.
I know, you weren't being serious when you were suggesting that the market would saturate in 8 years. I'm just pointing out the obvious: the market for techie toys and gadgets won't ever saturate as long as they can release new versions with better features and more convenient form-factors. Of course, Apple will have to stay ahead of the competition by always offering better features (including a better interface, which is an important feature) and such, but they've shown a certain knack for that.
Also Apple needs to release software that will transcode non-encrypted DVDs or VIDEO_TS forlders, and let "third parties" do the rest.
Apple has all the software it needs to rip DVDs and encode them in h.264 (good) in house already. All the pieces are already in the operating system (though some right now require a bit of freeware or an upgrade to quicktime pro). They'd just need to slap together an upgrade to iTunes, or else an iTunes-like application, that made it an easy process.
The real issue, though, is the encrypted DVDs. This is a good example of overzealous copyright protection (DMCA) stifling innovation and fair use. Apple can't build an iTunes-for-video application so that I can take my movies on-the-go because DVDs are encrypted. I have, in fact, ripped DVDs for the purpose of keeping them on my powerbook for travel, but IFAIK, I was committing crimes by doing so.
My post:I've known professors who should have their work overwritten by college freshmen.
Your post:How exactly have you "known" this? I'm sorry, but frankly, I've met one too many college kid who thinks they know far more than what they actually do.
Sure, I've known TONS of college kids who think they know more than they do. I've met an awful lot of people in any group who think they know more than they do.
What do you want me to say beyond that? Do you want me to issue my life's story, describe every interaction I've had with a professor or his work, and try to prove to you that not every professor knows what he's talking about? I'm not a college kid, if that's what you're wondering, but I went to college, and had enough good professors and bad professors to know the difference. I'm not currently in academia, but I know a bunch of professors and grad students.
Really, that's all you need, is to know these people. If you know enough, you get around to figuring out that they aren't god-like and omniscient. They might have more than their share of brilliance, but just like the rest of the population, the group of "college professors" has its share of morons and dumbasses, too.
ummmm, the Wikipedia authors and monitors. It's perfectly possible to verify people know what they're talking about some way or another....
It's not that easy to know who knows what they're talking about unless you know what they're talking about. In other words, if I don't know anything about quantum physics, how do I test you to find out if you know anything about quantum physics? You'd have to end up, probably, just allowing people who have degrees in these subjects and, like I said, I've known professors who don't really know their own subjects. They might know more than your average college freshmen, but many are heavily biased and even ignorant.
...and even if they don't and slip through the system, there will be other "certified" users who can overwrite/edit their mistakes just like 6 year olds can right now.
That's assuming you can attract enough qualified experts to each page, and verifying the expertise of lots of experts is going to be time consuming. Even so, let's imagine we've gotten tons of "experts" to look at a given page. What if the experts have their own disagreements (which experts do) and get into their own little Wiki-war? What if some ignorant expert keeps changing to page to something wrong?
You haven't really eliminated the problem, you've just tightened access in the hopes that a smaller group will be more cohesive. Even assuming you could get all those experts, I'm not sure it's worth de-democratising the wikipedia when you can't eliminate the problem.
The only thing is, who certifies? Who decides who's smart enough to be an authority, and who isn't? I've known professors who should have their work overwritten by college freshmen. Do we want those professors censoring smart people because they disagree?
I do rather like the idea of having some sort of editorial process to the wikipedia. Whenever this issue of "trustworthiness" has come up, I've always had the same hesitating suggestion: branch the wikipedia so that there's something like a "stable branch". Keep the wikipedia as it is, but it'd be nice if there were some kind of designated "editors" that could integrate the changes better, make sure the work is coherent, correct, etc. and put out the edited version as the "stable" version which would lag a bit behind from the "unstable".
Of course, such a thing would be a logistical nightmare, and it's damn near impossible. However, I think it would be appreciated by a lot of people if some editorial process could be worked in somehow.
So I guess I agree with the story submittor (askor?) that Wikipedia rocks, but that their model simply doesn't lend itself the the level of credibility needed for that sort of use.
When doing research for any purpose that matters, you should always be aware of your source. I don't care if it was written by the world's foremost expert on the topic, you should still be aware of the source being a fallible human being who may have his own slant/ideologies that he's catering to. We can all be wrong.
I'm not saying there's no point in listening to experts or that one source is as good as another, but always know what your source is. If possible, know your source's shortcomings and strengths. Factor all that in as best you can, and cite your sources. That's the best we can do.
So the question is, I suppose, where on the range of "trustworthiness" does the wikipedia stand, ranging between "the world's foremost expert who you're sure is being impartial" and "a retarded 2 month old monkey"? Personally, I rate it somewhere around "a friend you know, who tends to be pretty smart and on top of things," or "a stranger who seems to know what he's talking about". By that, I mean it's a good place to begin to learn about something, but just be aware that, before you run off to do something important with that information, you're just a bit better off than "source unknown".
More to the point, the US doesn't have any control over the Internet it could hand over to the UN even if it wanted to. The article talks about the DNS system - or so I presume anyway, since it mentions root servers; it doesn't actually state anything about DNS. The US currently hosts the root DNS servers. Those root servers are special only in that everyone keeps using them; they have any authority only because everyone agrees that they do.
You've just given me a great idea! What if we gave the UN our hardware from the root servers, and in their places, we set up new, identical servers with the same IP addresses and all?
"Hey, you have the root servers, so quit complaining!" My point is, if the authority is voluntary, based on something like 'reputation', what does it mean to "give it away"?
The UN does not even serve all countries, just its member nations. In this case, doesn't an organization like NATO have as much right to it as the UN?
This is an excellent point. The UN is not really "the world government" some make it out to be. It's mostly just a political organization, so why does it have a "right" to do anything, more than anyone else has a "right". Even if it was a real "government", since when do governments have rights? Governments have powers and responsibilities; people have rights.
I'm not arguing that people in other countries don't have the right to run their own networks, though. Fine. Run your own networks. I hope we can all agree on standards for interoperability.
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So you're saying, I should only be expecting Palm to make an address book, calendar, and a couple notes here and there, in a pocket-sized device? Well, welcome to 10 years ago, where I already had a Palm that could do that. What has Palm done lately?
As far as my experience goes, there's nothing innovative or elegant about Palm's approach. Neither are they pushing the limits of what a handheld device can do, nor are they scaling back their devices to be simple yet effective PDAs that are small, light, energy-efficient, and cheap. I would applaud either course. As it is, it seems more like they're steering a middle course, where they make their devices bigger, clunkier, more expensive power hogs in order to pack in some features that you claim nobody really uses.
Not only can I see why that was modded flamebait, but I don't think it's really accurate.
As it is, I feel like the hardware may be fine, but their software is all long overdue for an update in order to make everything a lot easier to deal with. As a simple example, the last palm I owned had the ability to draw little sketches, and I don't remember if they could then be synced and viewed through their palm desktop software, but they offered no means to export those pictures into standard graphic formats. What sense does that make?
I think I even like the idea of a hotsync manager, but why no allow the palm device to be mounted as a disk, and then have highly configurable syncing software that would automatically keep whatever documents you wanted up-to-date on as many computers as you chose, but allow you to manually copy other things directly through the OS?
I've just run into too many issues where the Palm software forces you to do things one way, which has a bunch of drawbacks, and when I hacked another way around it, it had another set of drawbacks. In neither case did it really work well.
Yeah, umm... it was a joke. I was questioning whether it made sense to talk about "reviving" NeXT when it's not really dead, and, in fact, is enjoying quite a bit of success in its latest incarnation, although it's been rebranded and updated quite a lot.
That's right. You show me some ET's, and I'll show you some Christians that want to baptize them.
It doesn't support editing so well, so that's the real question. When you're sending a document, do you want the recipient to be able to edit the document easily? If the answer is yes, you probably don't want to use a PDF. If the answer is no, there isn't really a better format to use.
According to ThinkSecret (which tends to be pretty reliable):
What was the "same point" you were making? I'm not sure I was making a point. Do you mean that you tried cracking the same joke, and people didn't get it?
If all you need is for the client to view the document, send a PDF. That's what PDFs are for, and it also diminishes the reliance on Microsoft. Best of all, almost everyone already has a PDF viewer installed.
Well, no point crying over spilt.... cow excretions.
I think a lot of IT managers already have taken note. Most people in IT understand that Microsoft doesn't play well with others, which leads to the idea that your best bet is either to use only Microsoft Office or not use Microsoft Office at all. However, there just aren't loads of options there. Microsoft Office is what most businesses use, so if you want to do business with them, you might want to stick with MS. Further, people are accustomed to Microsoft Office, so there's that issue.
Finally, and this is not unimportant, even though OOo might provide a viable alternative to most of MS Office, they don't offer an Outlook clone. Many businesses are flat-out addicted to Outlook for their scheduling. OOo might do well to integrate Evolution and help Novell port it to Windows/OSX.
Either way, I doubt that the real problem is that IT managers are oblivious to the vendor lock-in MS represents, but rather that the lock-in has already taken place, and now the question is, how do you get out? The answer may be to push MS to support OASIS.
Yeah, who on Earth would use NeXT? Even if they upgraded it, made it prettier, and wrote a whole bunch of software for it, I think I'd still stick with OSX.
Really, I've always thought palms were the epitome of the cool-but-useless-gadget phenomenon. I thought the Lifedrive, at least, was getting on to the right track. Bluetooth and Wifi, a 4GB drive, an actual file browser and the ability to transfer files like it was a normal external hard drive... I might, in theory, be able to use something like that. A couple revisions and a new (stable) operating system, and I might actually buy one. The current model however, when I tried one out, the included web browser kept crashing and the connection to an otherwise stable Wifi access point kept dropping.
At this rate, I think we'll see an iPod with an input device and wireless networking before Palm gets their act together and makes a device worth carrying around.
You got my two big concerns right there. I won't even consider an IM client unless it has those.
Apple seems pretty committed to h.264 right now, so I would expect they'd go with that instead of xvid. From what I understand (and from what I can tell from looking at it), the quality is better, too, but it requires more processing power to encode/decode.
Now, neither of these formats will really give you DVD quality at 600MB per movie, but I'd say somewhere between 600MB and 1GB, you'll hit that level of "good enough for most people". Remember, the iTunes Music Store isn't selling lossless music; they're only encoded at 128kb/s. Why would we expect Apple to sell lossless movies?
It certainly seems to be a "Jobs thing". From what I remember, you could just watch it happen when he returned to Apple. It's not just an issue of limiting options or anything, it's offering what is basically a standardized lineup with standard naming conventions, and then a little variation in configuration. It's the whole thing. It's called "marketing", and it's one of Jobs' big talents.
You get the iStuff, which is all white plastic consumer goods, and then the PowerStuff, which is all aluminum power-user/business goods. It gets to be pretty clear to the consumer what he's getting himself into. You know exactly which models are "better". They're mostly the same, except the more expensive one is faster, has a couple extra features, etc.
I'm still waiting for a "PowerPod".
And then Apple plays this whole "$50 more" game. More marketing. It's smart. People can say, "You can buy an iPod for only $99!" And that draws people in. They think, well, $100 isn't bad. But then, for $50 more, you can get twice as much memory. But for just $50 more than that, you can get a color screen AND twice as much memory. For just $50 more, you can get a whole lot more memory, 5 times as much. Next thing you know, you're thinking about spending $500 for something where you justified the purchase because it was cheap at $100.
And that's what the "$50 more" game is all about. Make your entry level product cheap enough that people feel like it's silly to think it's "too much money", and then add genuinely useful features at regular and small price increments. Consumers will naturally rise to the highest level of money they're willing to spend.
You're kidding, right?
Of course, within two years, 3 of those 6 million will be buying new iPods to replace the ones that are lost/broken, or just to get a smaller device, more HD space, or a higher-res screen. By the time those 8 years are up, 4th gen iPods will be collector's items.
I know, you weren't being serious when you were suggesting that the market would saturate in 8 years. I'm just pointing out the obvious: the market for techie toys and gadgets won't ever saturate as long as they can release new versions with better features and more convenient form-factors. Of course, Apple will have to stay ahead of the competition by always offering better features (including a better interface, which is an important feature) and such, but they've shown a certain knack for that.
Apple has all the software it needs to rip DVDs and encode them in h.264 (good) in house already. All the pieces are already in the operating system (though some right now require a bit of freeware or an upgrade to quicktime pro). They'd just need to slap together an upgrade to iTunes, or else an iTunes-like application, that made it an easy process.
The real issue, though, is the encrypted DVDs. This is a good example of overzealous copyright protection (DMCA) stifling innovation and fair use. Apple can't build an iTunes-for-video application so that I can take my movies on-the-go because DVDs are encrypted. I have, in fact, ripped DVDs for the purpose of keeping them on my powerbook for travel, but IFAIK, I was committing crimes by doing so.
Your post:How exactly have you "known" this? I'm sorry, but frankly, I've met one too many college kid who thinks they know far more than what they actually do.
Sure, I've known TONS of college kids who think they know more than they do. I've met an awful lot of people in any group who think they know more than they do.
What do you want me to say beyond that? Do you want me to issue my life's story, describe every interaction I've had with a professor or his work, and try to prove to you that not every professor knows what he's talking about? I'm not a college kid, if that's what you're wondering, but I went to college, and had enough good professors and bad professors to know the difference. I'm not currently in academia, but I know a bunch of professors and grad students.
Really, that's all you need, is to know these people. If you know enough, you get around to figuring out that they aren't god-like and omniscient. They might have more than their share of brilliance, but just like the rest of the population, the group of "college professors" has its share of morons and dumbasses, too.
It's not that easy to know who knows what they're talking about unless you know what they're talking about. In other words, if I don't know anything about quantum physics, how do I test you to find out if you know anything about quantum physics? You'd have to end up, probably, just allowing people who have degrees in these subjects and, like I said, I've known professors who don't really know their own subjects. They might know more than your average college freshmen, but many are heavily biased and even ignorant.
That's assuming you can attract enough qualified experts to each page, and verifying the expertise of lots of experts is going to be time consuming. Even so, let's imagine we've gotten tons of "experts" to look at a given page. What if the experts have their own disagreements (which experts do) and get into their own little Wiki-war? What if some ignorant expert keeps changing to page to something wrong?
You haven't really eliminated the problem, you've just tightened access in the hopes that a smaller group will be more cohesive. Even assuming you could get all those experts, I'm not sure it's worth de-democratising the wikipedia when you can't eliminate the problem.
I do rather like the idea of having some sort of editorial process to the wikipedia. Whenever this issue of "trustworthiness" has come up, I've always had the same hesitating suggestion: branch the wikipedia so that there's something like a "stable branch". Keep the wikipedia as it is, but it'd be nice if there were some kind of designated "editors" that could integrate the changes better, make sure the work is coherent, correct, etc. and put out the edited version as the "stable" version which would lag a bit behind from the "unstable".
Of course, such a thing would be a logistical nightmare, and it's damn near impossible. However, I think it would be appreciated by a lot of people if some editorial process could be worked in somehow.
When doing research for any purpose that matters, you should always be aware of your source. I don't care if it was written by the world's foremost expert on the topic, you should still be aware of the source being a fallible human being who may have his own slant/ideologies that he's catering to. We can all be wrong.
I'm not saying there's no point in listening to experts or that one source is as good as another, but always know what your source is. If possible, know your source's shortcomings and strengths. Factor all that in as best you can, and cite your sources. That's the best we can do.
So the question is, I suppose, where on the range of "trustworthiness" does the wikipedia stand, ranging between "the world's foremost expert who you're sure is being impartial" and "a retarded 2 month old monkey"? Personally, I rate it somewhere around "a friend you know, who tends to be pretty smart and on top of things," or "a stranger who seems to know what he's talking about". By that, I mean it's a good place to begin to learn about something, but just be aware that, before you run off to do something important with that information, you're just a bit better off than "source unknown".
You've just given me a great idea! What if we gave the UN our hardware from the root servers, and in their places, we set up new, identical servers with the same IP addresses and all?
"Hey, you have the root servers, so quit complaining!" My point is, if the authority is voluntary, based on something like 'reputation', what does it mean to "give it away"?
This is an excellent point. The UN is not really "the world government" some make it out to be. It's mostly just a political organization, so why does it have a "right" to do anything, more than anyone else has a "right". Even if it was a real "government", since when do governments have rights? Governments have powers and responsibilities; people have rights.
I'm not arguing that people in other countries don't have the right to run their own networks, though. Fine. Run your own networks. I hope we can all agree on standards for interoperability.