... now everytime INTeL announce something Mac Zealots get to say something less than interesting and completely speculative... so here goes:)
Clearly this is the precurser to Apple bringing out a set-top box to access their new iMovie Video store. The Apple Viiv, in combination with the iViiv will allow subscribers to download 'HD Quality' movies on both their TV and the on the move. Priced at just under the national debt of Cambodia, this product is expected to appeal to New Yorkers, who will where the white rimmed glasses (that act as the screen) with pride as they walk under trucks in and around Manhatten.
In other news, the FDA are concerned that obsessive watching of movies on the glasses may cause 'square eyes' a deadly virus originally thought to have been imported by Chinese immigrants. The MPAA have kindly asked them to keep their noses out, as they are "raking it in".
Jesus, I've just paid £0.91 for litre of fuel. Thats $1.64 for a litre, or $6.21 a gallon and its about the same all over Europe. I know you guys relate gas prices to freedom, but seriously, if going to ask for military help, maybe you could ask them to behead our government and get them to drop our fuel prices first;)
I don't really give a damn about ICC coming to Mac for exactly that reason. Your quite right, VS is a great IDE, and was one of the very few reasons I seriosuly concidered staying with the windows platform.
However, (puts Mac zealot hat on), Xcode isn't that far behind, and in a few areas its better. As an ex.Net developer I can say that for desktop apps Cocoa and the Core Frameworks are without equal on any platform(YMMV). I didn't think C# could be topped, I threw 10s of little apps together for friends and family, because it was almost as easy as drawing the interface on a piece of paper and throwing a little of code in the background. Cocoa takes away the even more of the code bit. Core data could change your life.
I would really like to see XCode ported to Windows, Linux and BSD. However, I think its unlikely to happen. But if there is one thing that Sun got right it is: "Its the applications, stupid".
Mac OS X isn't exactly starved of good apps. Its just that developers are still forced to make a choice of platforms when developing new software, and the sensible choice is still Windows. Until that choice is removed, the choice will always be Windows. It doesn't matter if OS X has all the bells and whistles, what matters is market share and performance (I added performance because of Java).
ICC won't make a jot of difference unless its included in XCode for Windows.
Only a fool believes in generalizations... but in an all male crowd they normally get a laugh. I have no idea why this got modded insightful. I was aiming for flaimbait! Short of doing a mother-in-law sketch I thought it was obvious that my tounge was firmly in my cheek. I offically appogise for any offense I may have caused.
PS Do you have any photos of you and your ex-date?:p
Feel free to blow me out of the water, especially as I'm too lazy to find the Sky press release I read a few months ago, but I'm almost certain they said they would be switching to H.264 (MPEG4) for Hi-Def. It makes sense. Better quality for the same bandwidth or less. Sky are pretty short of bandwidth, HD could kill them if they don't change compression technologies.
...so I guess I'll join in. This could be really cool. Skype and Google could be a marriage made in heaven. Skype is a good product, but to be great I think a few google phds could really iron out some of its potential flaws. Also, the google brand could make the product less scary to companies who see 'from the company that bought you kazaa' as a bad thing (quite rightly). It would also increase the number of people on the system. Even though its been out for months, I know very few people that use it.
The biggest problem I see with Skype at the moment is hardware. I set my girlfriend up with it and it caused no end of problems. Its one thing learning to use the interface (which is good) its another thing to learn about feedback, line in/out and buying a headphone set specifically for the purpose of VoIP (even if it is only $15). Still it was easier than trying to get AIM to work with iChat for a video chat.
Yes, but said PC wouldn't look pretty under the TV. Only since living with my significantly better half have I realised how important that feature is.
If I've learn't one thing over the last few years: wireless controllers were invented for men who live with women. Women hate wires. They see them as mess. Mess means grief. Its worth paying more for less grief - even if it means there is a little bit of lag, and extra batteries to buy.
Consoles tend to be quieter than PCs. Again this is important. If said better half is in the room whilst you're playing (a rarity) all they can hear is the fan, even if you've got the 5.1 turned up to 11.
Consoles have near instant on. This is important because a good women demands a lot of attention, and doesn't like to think that her precious 'you and me' time is shared between her and a 'stupid box in the corner'. You need to be able to grab every moment you can when and if you can, instant on is important for this.
Consoles can be bought as presents. If you live on a budget, and the better half wants to splash out on you don't ask her to buy you a new PC. She'll get it wrong. Ask her to buy you a XBox 360 and 9/10 she'll get it right and everyone is happy.
This whole double life business has interested me since the iNTEL announcement. At an application layer, you don't need to know or care whether your writing for x86, PPC or ARM, you write to the framework and APIs provided by the OS / runtime of your choice. If that OS/runtime works on other architectures you simply cross your fingers, say a little prayer and recompile.
My, admittedly limited, understand of OS writing is that the exact opposite is true. You are dealing with the processor directly and performance is crucial so ASM is used a fair bit. Now at a hardware level x86 and PPC are very different. They have different strengths and weaknesses which need to be addressed, and yet Apple said that with just a single, secret, dept. they managed to get their microkernal up and flying on two vastly different system architectures. (I think microkernal is probably the key word here)
My thought has always been, that if MACH is so well designed that it can be this easily ported to x86 and PPC simulateously, there is nothing stopping Apple from supporting Cell, ARM or SPARC within a few months of an announcement. Especially as they have no convinced a large portion of its loyal developers to switch to XCode.
One area I can see the Cell exCelling (sic) is set-top box TiVo and H.264. Its like it was purpose built for the job;) OK, it might not be the perfect general pupose CPU, but for the iLife suite and Quicktime the tech specs look like it could really make them fly.
I could see Apple shipping the boxtop mini, for 200 bucks that plugs straight into you Hi-Def TV and provides web access, PVR and H.264 movie downloading out of the box via a remote control and if you buy a Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for $50 extra you can do your homework from your armchair. OK so Mathematica will perform like a dog, and Pages won't be as snappy as it is on a $500 mini, but you knew that when you bought it.
I'm a big fan of dead trees. Huge. I've ranted about how great the interface is for years, but this is one instance where it kinda makes sense.
I would never buy an encylopedia now that I've got web access. I wouldn't buy a research paper either. The reason is that I only want to use a small fraction and I'll need it for 20 minutes whilst I extract the bit I need and plagerise it mercilessly:p. If I can just print that one bit out I'll be happy.
Its these circumstances when I want a tablet like device sitting next to my PC. Its dimesions should be somewhere between A5 and A4 notepad and weigh about the same (200g). The interface should be exactly the same as the iPod. A simple menu for selecting the book you want, and a scroll wheel for flicking through the pages. Left and right buttons to move back and forth through individual pages. There should be a stylus, so that you can highlight text. As you are never writing to the device, highlighting automatically places that text / picture into the clipboard of the host Mac/PC. Its must be wireless, preferably bluetooth, although the majority of its storage will come from a MMC card if you need to transfer alot of books. The screen should be relective, and black and white - no backlight nastiness. I don't need or want color or animation - yet.
"H.264 will be the winner in the end". That quote stuck my memory and this is why. We both know that your adoption of Blu-ray is lip service. We both know that you don't need an optical drive in your vision of the future. Hell, you probably haven't even got one in quadcore UberBook. The only reason you have signed up to this 'standard' is to keep Sony happy and because for all the speed that this industry moves, people are slow to adopt change, and a computer without an optical drive just isn't going to shift.
This bit of news has got to have made you smile. Two competing standards for a dead medium! Hah! All that's going to do is drive people towards your product: iMVS (iMovie Video Store). Now we both know that people are quite happy with renting movies. Hell, the only reason they buy them is because they're too lazy to get off their ass when they want to watch The Incredibles for the 100th time (good call with Pixar btw). The thing you don't understand is why the cable companies haven't done it first. I mean they've had the technology for years, but they've never done anything about it... or have they. They know a lot about broadcast, but they know jack shit about storage, and user interfaces.
Now as I see it, this store is going to be slightly different to iTMS. For a start your not going to sell movies, your going to rent them. Music is different. You buy a song, you want to know that you can listen to it constantly for the rest of your life if you want to. Movies are like books. You read a good book maybe twice in your life... except for one thing: your eyes don't get an upgrade every 12-24 months. I watched the Matrix on VHS, the big screen and DVD, if it comes out on 1024i I'll watch it on that too... once. A year later, when I've bough a wall filling 20Gpxl plasmatron drive (or whatever happens next) I'm going to want to watch The Matrix again to see what it looks like, but I'm going to want it at 20Gpxls. Now you can offer me that service for $20 a month, all-you-can-eat, movie rental service. Regular 'updates' to the client software will enable you to keep the studios much happier about this medium than any of the optical disk formats and H.264 will mean that you can interogate the client and only send me the data I need for that viewing.
Now I know what your thinking... where is the expensive hardware that I can use to pay for this service? Worry no more. Its not the iVid. Its the AirPort Express QT. Plug it into the wall behind your TV, plug that into RCA adapters at the back of your TV, and voila! Instant expensive hardware. I would happily hand over $150 dollars for this device. If it costs you $20 I'd be suprised. Even better. Sell a TiVo like box with an 80GB harddrive. Hell, buy TiVo! It lets you save 3 movies from the store, and record live TV! Thats gotta be $300 a unit right there.
Don't do it for me. Don't do it for the kids. Do it for the money. You'll make a killing, become the movie magnate you always dreamed of and if you do it like this the people will love you for over charging them! Remember, the reason that iTMS was successful was becuase you never expected to make any money from selling the music. You can do the same here. Honest, you can.
I couldn't understand why anyone would want a blu-ray either - until I got a 20" iMac G5. The fact is that a hi-def screen makes DVDs look like VHS. Its like the artifacts just come and bite you in the ass - and to be honest, once the price is reasonable (£100 for a firewire drive) I'll be in the queue ready to by my Blu-ray drive and a selection of my favourite films.
I think the success of Blu-ray is going to be directly linked to the success of hi-def TV. With Sky pushing hi-def in the UK in the next few months (probably in time for Christmas) I can see a lot of Brits trading annual gym membership for a brand spanking new hi-def LCD TV - especially once people see how much better football (soccer) looks in hi-def (MPEG2 just wasn't designed for sports). So I think blu-rays success in the living room will be driven by broadcast sport, followed by that itiching knowledge that the movie your watching could look better.
As for your prediction about storage. I'm not so sure. When I bought my first CD-ROM drive I had 120MB of harddisk space. Encarta, Monkey Island et al were all run from the ROM. I didn't buy a CD-ROM drive to steal music, I bought it because that was the only way of getting and running the software. I bought my first CD-WORM when my coursework began to be measured in MB not kB at Uni. It was the only way to get the files from home to campus. I bought my first DVD-RW when I got my first Mac 2 years a go, I've burnt a couple of home movies, and occasionally burnt some PVR stuff for friends and relatives. Its too small for backups, its too slow for transfering data. My love affair with spinning data disks is over.
CD Type media is terrible for data. A life span measured in years (fade in sunlight), makes it a poor solution for backing up. They are slow, resource hungry and have always been overly complicated to use (at least to write). I used it because it was the only solution. Now, I have an iPod with 40GB of storage that is faster, safer and more portable. If thats too bulky (?!?) I have a USB key for small files that can move 512MB of data. Both of these solutions are more robust and scaleable than plastic disks will ever be.
As for getting software, broadband is my delivery medium of choice. The only situation I can see my actually 'needing' blu-ray is for entertainment - be it Hi-Def home movies or buying the latest blockbuster and even then I've stopped buying DVDs in favour of renting them from Amazon. If iTunes offered this service with H.264 I wouldn't even need it for that. (I think Lord Jobs would agree with me that the renting model fits movies far better than it fits music)
If my next Mac didn't have optical drive I don't think I would be too gutted, in the same way I just don't miss floppy drives - I just don't use them any more.
This is very true. I think the reason Google are doing so well is that they think like Apple: User versus Task.
gMail is good because its simple and does exactly what you expect it to, and nothing more. As much as giving almost unlimited inbox spaces was a marketing gimick it also got over the biggest, unnecessary headache of free email - storage space.
google.com works because they relised that a search engine should be just that, a search engine not a portal.
maps.google.com works because they took out the biggest headache of free map software: waiting for yet another huge bitmap to be pulled from a database. And improved the interface by letting you do exactly what you always wanted to do - drag the map so that you can see everything you want to see, not what the server decided you wanted to see.
Google Talk will work if it does what users want it do. Provide cross platform chat, voice and video without them having to convince their friends / relatives / co-workers to switch with them. With the simple interface we've come to expect from google. I don't expect it to do this in beta, but I would expect the google client to provide all of those services out of the box in a homogenous environment, and just chat in a hetrogenous environment.
I work in a secure environment. But some peoples idea of secure is clearly different from others.
We're not allowed to connect to the internet unless we go through a Citrix session. We can't cut and paste between the Citrix session, but we are allowed to save to the host computer, then use SAMBA to connect to that host and grab the file.
We're not allowed to access the secure LAN from out workstations, but we are allowed to bring data sticks into the office, and use them to take data off the secure lan.
We can't bring cameras into the office, but the standard company phone comes with a camera built in.
We use Outlook 2k.
I could go on. It seems that although the company signs up to the concept of security, they don't actually like to implement it.
Wireless NES controllers, rumble protocol, 16 colours!!!! Heracy!
The whole point of the NES controller was that it was built to last. POed with a game, throw the controller out of a window. New games for the NES. WTF? Unless they actively pay me to take this console off their hands I see no reason why I should buy this instead of a current gen system, or an original 'cool' NES. And lets face it, modern emulators do a better job as they play current games as well.
If they're building this because they can... all power to them. If they're building this to market, I have two words: Market Research.
when I get sucked in by hype. When my Xbox popped-its-clogs on Christmas Eve last year (boy was I angry). I prommised myself that I was an adult now and that I didn't need a games console. So confident was I that I sold all my games and accessories.
I can actually feel my Maestro card burning in my pocket at the moment. I'm going to take a cold shower.
I'm not sure about the x copies bit. Let me rephrase that. Ideologically, I can see your point about the limited number of copies distributed, but I can't ever see it happening.
But I REALLY like your other idea. A funtion of copyright that means that any commercially released product is automatically public domain once a company removes it from the market. I think a year is probably more practical - but I guess any arbitralily short period of time would do.
In the case of software, it should be that the source code is released too, or there should be a mandate that states that a company that provides proprietary software, must provide support. If that support is removed or a court accepts a plea that the level of support is too low, then the source must be release into the public domain within x months of the support being removed under the GPL (I think BSD licencing would be too easy for others to profit from the code 'donation') on the request of a licence holding customer (I add this stipulation only as a prediction of the stupid limits that would be enforced).
I can see the big guns really kicking up a fuss about that as it would hinder their ability to force upgrades. But it would be a huge boon for consumers and competition in the market and has the ring of fair about it.
Play the ball or loose it.
You can leave the game, but you can't take the ball with you.
Break the ball, and suffer the consequences.
Which politians would we have to buy to make this happen?;)
Which I guess it just another way of saying, that in order for consumers to get vast internet pipes, telcos et al need to stop charging by data transfered, and start charging by pipe width.
I love XBMC, but I also love XBox Live. Now I have neither as my modchip blew and took out the usb-controller.
If Microsoft were serious about selling Xbox 2 they would use XBMC as the default dashboard. Hell, I was tempted to replace my Xbox purely for that reason and then buy games as a 'well it can do that too' sort of thing. Its a real shame that you have to depend on the work of grey hats to get real functionality out of machine you forked out $300 for and at the cost of using Xbox live.
The way I understood it was that x86 processors were faster because of the huge investments that had been made in them over the years creating the monolithic out-of-order, hyperthreaded processors. ie, put together some very, very, clever hacks, damn the bang-per-watt, and watch the performance sore. Why would you do this? Because Windows uses x86 and developers have a vested interest in keeping it alive, so they can continue to make money from "Upgrades".
We know x86 is an outdated instruction set. We also know that what they said in the article makes sense: don't process x86, convert x86 to something better (VLIW) and run it in order. But why bother with that stage if you have no legacy x86 code to support?
Why not just make the new chips with this new instruction set, and compile accordinly? Why not replace the x86 software decoder with a PPC software decoder?
I guess this boils down to getting market forces to work in your favour, and get the same discounted hardware Win32 has been getting... but it seems like such a nasty hack! I also expect there is a bit of politics going on, Intel are all about x86 and they're not about to change that for 3% of all processor sales.
When I bought my G5 I genuinely didn't know what I was going to do with 160GB of storage. Soon found out, PVR is a killer storage app. Once my storage is in the TB range my DVD collection is going on my PC and getting piped around the house like my music. Once my storage is in the PB range my then Bluray collection is going online as is my XBOX/Playstation etc collection as the emulators get good enough to be usable, so that I don't have to have the ugly boxes under my nice HiDef screen.
...isn't paper still better for comics? I pick up Dilbert in my mail box every morning, but thats because its a 3 pane comic that takes less than 20 secs to read. I couldn't imagine sitting down to read a graphic novel in front of my PC anymore than I could imagine sitting down in front of a PC to read a book. I know some die hards can do it, but I'm not one of them.
The paper interface rocks. Zero eye strain, intuitive, future proof, pretty cheap and very portable. Its rubbish at animation and sound, and the searching facility can only be described as rudimentry (even with a good index). Its also renewable and recyclable.
The only reason I can see artists moving from print to html to because of startup cost and creative control. All power to them - thats what the digital revolution is all about! But with that come piracy and constant struggle to figure out a way to make people pay for something which is percieved as free. I'd probably be more inclined to subscribe to a comic site than a news site, but I'm also more tollerant of advertising surrounding information as opposed art.
Can you imagine reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance only to be forced to click through an advert for OCC after every page?
Comics should be affordable to young, imaginative minds, and should be accessible as such. The web sucks for that as, however much you try, you can't just stick your pocket money in your PC and get a comic out. Even if we give children credit cards thats still a bad deal for artists, as cards are rubbish for micropayments. We shall see...
I'm not overly serious, but my sense of humour is dry, and when written down can, as it does in this instance, make it look like I'm trying to start a fire. I'm British, and sometimes I forget that Slashdot is American - Two nations seperated by a common language, its not that I'm trying to offend... honest.
However, whats wrong with copper? We're being butt fed asynchronous 6Mbps, when we could have fiber connections that make SATA look slow. I'm sure we could argue over whether we're ready for the technology on a national scale. Whether its cost effective etc. But in this context, when we're looking at trying to make POTS work over 20km, its time we really start to look at utiliziling fiber properly.
Your reply highlights one of the greatest weakness of fiber technology. Despite being cheeper to produce than copper, its still more expenisve to utilize. I guess thats got more to do with muxer / demuxers (mudems?) than anything else.
There I go again... butt fed just sounds funny to me.
Copper: great for POTS, crap for data, ubiquitous. So they invent DSL to compensate for copper's inadequacies.
Fiber: crap for POTS, great for data, ubiquitous right up until the end of the street. DSL doesn't work because its a copper technology, so these poor people who are feet away from all the broadband they could ever need can't access it because telcos only know how to do DSL.
I'm not oblivious to the fact that it costs more to split fiber (light doesn't split like electricty), but thats because we don't do it very often as the priority has always been POTS. How long will it be, now that data outweighs POTS, until we get fiber to the front door?
Slashdot Mirror
... now everytime INTeL announce something Mac Zealots get to say something less than interesting and completely speculative... so here goes :)
Clearly this is the precurser to Apple bringing out a set-top box to access their new iMovie Video store. The Apple Viiv, in combination with the iViiv will allow subscribers to download 'HD Quality' movies on both their TV and the on the move. Priced at just under the national debt of Cambodia, this product is expected to appeal to New Yorkers, who will where the white rimmed glasses (that act as the screen) with pride as they walk under trucks in and around Manhatten.
In other news, the FDA are concerned that obsessive watching of movies on the glasses may cause 'square eyes' a deadly virus originally thought to have been imported by Chinese immigrants. The MPAA have kindly asked them to keep their noses out, as they are "raking it in".
$3 a gallon!
;)
Jesus, I've just paid £0.91 for litre of fuel. Thats $1.64 for a litre, or $6.21 a gallon and its about the same all over Europe. I know you guys relate gas prices to freedom, but seriously, if going to ask for military help, maybe you could ask them to behead our government and get them to drop our fuel prices first
I don't really give a damn about ICC coming to Mac for exactly that reason. Your quite right, VS is a great IDE, and was one of the very few reasons I seriosuly concidered staying with the windows platform.
.Net developer I can say that for desktop apps Cocoa and the Core Frameworks are without equal on any platform(YMMV). I didn't think C# could be topped, I threw 10s of little apps together for friends and family, because it was almost as easy as drawing the interface on a piece of paper and throwing a little of code in the background. Cocoa takes away the even more of the code bit. Core data could change your life.
However, (puts Mac zealot hat on), Xcode isn't that far behind, and in a few areas its better. As an ex
I would really like to see XCode ported to Windows, Linux and BSD. However, I think its unlikely to happen. But if there is one thing that Sun got right it is: "Its the applications, stupid".
Mac OS X isn't exactly starved of good apps. Its just that developers are still forced to make a choice of platforms when developing new software, and the sensible choice is still Windows. Until that choice is removed, the choice will always be Windows. It doesn't matter if OS X has all the bells and whistles, what matters is market share and performance (I added performance because of Java).
ICC won't make a jot of difference unless its included in XCode for Windows.
Only a fool believes in generalizations... but in an all male crowd they normally get a laugh. I have no idea why this got modded insightful. I was aiming for flaimbait! Short of doing a mother-in-law sketch I thought it was obvious that my tounge was firmly in my cheek. I offically appogise for any offense I may have caused.
:p
PS
Do you have any photos of you and your ex-date?
Feel free to blow me out of the water, especially as I'm too lazy to find the Sky press release I read a few months ago, but I'm almost certain they said they would be switching to H.264 (MPEG4) for Hi-Def. It makes sense. Better quality for the same bandwidth or less. Sky are pretty short of bandwidth, HD could kill them if they don't change compression technologies.
...so I guess I'll join in. This could be really cool. Skype and Google could be a marriage made in heaven. Skype is a good product, but to be great I think a few google phds could really iron out some of its potential flaws. Also, the google brand could make the product less scary to companies who see 'from the company that bought you kazaa' as a bad thing (quite rightly). It would also increase the number of people on the system. Even though its been out for months, I know very few people that use it.
The biggest problem I see with Skype at the moment is hardware. I set my girlfriend up with it and it caused no end of problems. Its one thing learning to use the interface (which is good) its another thing to learn about feedback, line in/out and buying a headphone set specifically for the purpose of VoIP (even if it is only $15). Still it was easier than trying to get AIM to work with iChat for a video chat.
Yes, but said PC wouldn't look pretty under the TV. Only since living with my significantly better half have I realised how important that feature is.
If I've learn't one thing over the last few years: wireless controllers were invented for men who live with women. Women hate wires. They see them as mess. Mess means grief. Its worth paying more for less grief - even if it means there is a little bit of lag, and extra batteries to buy.
Consoles tend to be quieter than PCs. Again this is important. If said better half is in the room whilst you're playing (a rarity) all they can hear is the fan, even if you've got the 5.1 turned up to 11.
Consoles have near instant on. This is important because a good women demands a lot of attention, and doesn't like to think that her precious 'you and me' time is shared between her and a 'stupid box in the corner'. You need to be able to grab every moment you can when and if you can, instant on is important for this.
Consoles can be bought as presents. If you live on a budget, and the better half wants to splash out on you don't ask her to buy you a new PC. She'll get it wrong. Ask her to buy you a XBox 360 and 9/10 she'll get it right and everyone is happy.
This whole double life business has interested me since the iNTEL announcement. At an application layer, you don't need to know or care whether your writing for x86, PPC or ARM, you write to the framework and APIs provided by the OS / runtime of your choice. If that OS /runtime works on other architectures you simply cross your fingers, say a little prayer and recompile.
;) OK, it might not be the perfect general pupose CPU, but for the iLife suite and Quicktime the tech specs look like it could really make them fly.
My, admittedly limited, understand of OS writing is that the exact opposite is true. You are dealing with the processor directly and performance is crucial so ASM is used a fair bit. Now at a hardware level x86 and PPC are very different. They have different strengths and weaknesses which need to be addressed, and yet Apple said that with just a single, secret, dept. they managed to get their microkernal up and flying on two vastly different system architectures. (I think microkernal is probably the key word here)
My thought has always been, that if MACH is so well designed that it can be this easily ported to x86 and PPC simulateously, there is nothing stopping Apple from supporting Cell, ARM or SPARC within a few months of an announcement. Especially as they have no convinced a large portion of its loyal developers to switch to XCode.
One area I can see the Cell exCelling (sic) is set-top box TiVo and H.264. Its like it was purpose built for the job
I could see Apple shipping the boxtop mini, for 200 bucks that plugs straight into you Hi-Def TV and provides web access, PVR and H.264 movie downloading out of the box via a remote control and if you buy a Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for $50 extra you can do your homework from your armchair. OK so Mathematica will perform like a dog, and Pages won't be as snappy as it is on a $500 mini, but you knew that when you bought it.
LOL Its trolls like this that makes browsing at +2 Flamebait worth it.
I'm a big fan of dead trees. Huge. I've ranted about how great the interface is for years, but this is one instance where it kinda makes sense.
:p. If I can just print that one bit out I'll be happy.
I would never buy an encylopedia now that I've got web access. I wouldn't buy a research paper either. The reason is that I only want to use a small fraction and I'll need it for 20 minutes whilst I extract the bit I need and plagerise it mercilessly
Its these circumstances when I want a tablet like device sitting next to my PC. Its dimesions should be somewhere between A5 and A4 notepad and weigh about the same (200g). The interface should be exactly the same as the iPod. A simple menu for selecting the book you want, and a scroll wheel for flicking through the pages. Left and right buttons to move back and forth through individual pages. There should be a stylus, so that you can highlight text. As you are never writing to the device, highlighting automatically places that text / picture into the clipboard of the host Mac/PC. Its must be wireless, preferably bluetooth, although the majority of its storage will come from a MMC card if you need to transfer alot of books. The screen should be relective, and black and white - no backlight nastiness. I don't need or want color or animation - yet.
Oh... and I want a pony.
"H.264 will be the winner in the end". That quote stuck my memory and this is why. We both know that your adoption of Blu-ray is lip service. We both know that you don't need an optical drive in your vision of the future. Hell, you probably haven't even got one in quadcore UberBook. The only reason you have signed up to this 'standard' is to keep Sony happy and because for all the speed that this industry moves, people are slow to adopt change, and a computer without an optical drive just isn't going to shift.
This bit of news has got to have made you smile. Two competing standards for a dead medium! Hah! All that's going to do is drive people towards your product: iMVS (iMovie Video Store). Now we both know that people are quite happy with renting movies. Hell, the only reason they buy them is because they're too lazy to get off their ass when they want to watch The Incredibles for the 100th time (good call with Pixar btw). The thing you don't understand is why the cable companies haven't done it first. I mean they've had the technology for years, but they've never done anything about it... or have they. They know a lot about broadcast, but they know jack shit about storage, and user interfaces.
Now as I see it, this store is going to be slightly different to iTMS. For a start your not going to sell movies, your going to rent them. Music is different. You buy a song, you want to know that you can listen to it constantly for the rest of your life if you want to. Movies are like books. You read a good book maybe twice in your life... except for one thing: your eyes don't get an upgrade every 12-24 months. I watched the Matrix on VHS, the big screen and DVD, if it comes out on 1024i I'll watch it on that too... once. A year later, when I've bough a wall filling 20Gpxl plasmatron drive (or whatever happens next) I'm going to want to watch The Matrix again to see what it looks like, but I'm going to want it at 20Gpxls. Now you can offer me that service for $20 a month, all-you-can-eat, movie rental service. Regular 'updates' to the client software will enable you to keep the studios much happier about this medium than any of the optical disk formats and H.264 will mean that you can interogate the client and only send me the data I need for that viewing.
Now I know what your thinking... where is the expensive hardware that I can use to pay for this service? Worry no more. Its not the iVid. Its the AirPort Express QT. Plug it into the wall behind your TV, plug that into RCA adapters at the back of your TV, and voila! Instant expensive hardware. I would happily hand over $150 dollars for this device. If it costs you $20 I'd be suprised. Even better. Sell a TiVo like box with an 80GB harddrive. Hell, buy TiVo! It lets you save 3 movies from the store, and record live TV! Thats gotta be $300 a unit right there.
Don't do it for me. Don't do it for the kids. Do it for the money. You'll make a killing, become the movie magnate you always dreamed of and if you do it like this the people will love you for over charging them! Remember, the reason that iTMS was successful was becuase you never expected to make any money from selling the music. You can do the same here. Honest, you can.
Thank you Mr. Jobs for your time.
Yours sincerly
El Womble
PS - Can I get a pony too?
I couldn't understand why anyone would want a blu-ray either - until I got a 20" iMac G5. The fact is that a hi-def screen makes DVDs look like VHS. Its like the artifacts just come and bite you in the ass - and to be honest, once the price is reasonable (£100 for a firewire drive) I'll be in the queue ready to by my Blu-ray drive and a selection of my favourite films.
I think the success of Blu-ray is going to be directly linked to the success of hi-def TV. With Sky pushing hi-def in the UK in the next few months (probably in time for Christmas) I can see a lot of Brits trading annual gym membership for a brand spanking new hi-def LCD TV - especially once people see how much better football (soccer) looks in hi-def (MPEG2 just wasn't designed for sports). So I think blu-rays success in the living room will be driven by broadcast sport, followed by that itiching knowledge that the movie your watching could look better.
As for your prediction about storage. I'm not so sure. When I bought my first CD-ROM drive I had 120MB of harddisk space. Encarta, Monkey Island et al were all run from the ROM. I didn't buy a CD-ROM drive to steal music, I bought it because that was the only way of getting and running the software. I bought my first CD-WORM when my coursework began to be measured in MB not kB at Uni. It was the only way to get the files from home to campus. I bought my first DVD-RW when I got my first Mac 2 years a go, I've burnt a couple of home movies, and occasionally burnt some PVR stuff for friends and relatives. Its too small for backups, its too slow for transfering data. My love affair with spinning data disks is over.
CD Type media is terrible for data. A life span measured in years (fade in sunlight), makes it a poor solution for backing up. They are slow, resource hungry and have always been overly complicated to use (at least to write). I used it because it was the only solution. Now, I have an iPod with 40GB of storage that is faster, safer and more portable. If thats too bulky (?!?) I have a USB key for small files that can move 512MB of data. Both of these solutions are more robust and scaleable than plastic disks will ever be.
As for getting software, broadband is my delivery medium of choice. The only situation I can see my actually 'needing' blu-ray is for entertainment - be it Hi-Def home movies or buying the latest blockbuster and even then I've stopped buying DVDs in favour of renting them from Amazon. If iTunes offered this service with H.264 I wouldn't even need it for that. (I think Lord Jobs would agree with me that the renting model fits movies far better than it fits music)
If my next Mac didn't have optical drive I don't think I would be too gutted, in the same way I just don't miss floppy drives - I just don't use them any more.
This is very true. I think the reason Google are doing so well is that they think like Apple: User versus Task.
gMail is good because its simple and does exactly what you expect it to, and nothing more. As much as giving almost unlimited inbox spaces was a marketing gimick it also got over the biggest, unnecessary headache of free email - storage space.
google.com works because they relised that a search engine should be just that, a search engine not a portal.
maps.google.com works because they took out the biggest headache of free map software: waiting for yet another huge bitmap to be pulled from a database. And improved the interface by letting you do exactly what you always wanted to do - drag the map so that you can see everything you want to see, not what the server decided you wanted to see.
Google Talk will work if it does what users want it do. Provide cross platform chat, voice and video without them having to convince their friends / relatives / co-workers to switch with them. With the simple interface we've come to expect from google. I don't expect it to do this in beta, but I would expect the google client to provide all of those services out of the box in a homogenous environment, and just chat in a hetrogenous environment.
Can't wait to find out!
I work in a secure environment. But some peoples idea of secure is clearly different from others.
We're not allowed to connect to the internet unless we go through a Citrix session. We can't cut and paste between the Citrix session, but we are allowed to save to the host computer, then use SAMBA to connect to that host and grab the file.
We're not allowed to access the secure LAN from out workstations, but we are allowed to bring data sticks into the office, and use them to take data off the secure lan.
We can't bring cameras into the office, but the standard company phone comes with a camera built in.
We use Outlook 2k.
I could go on. It seems that although the company signs up to the concept of security, they don't actually like to implement it.
Wireless NES controllers, rumble protocol, 16 colours!!!! Heracy!
The whole point of the NES controller was that it was built to last. POed with a game, throw the controller out of a window. New games for the NES. WTF? Unless they actively pay me to take this console off their hands I see no reason why I should buy this instead of a current gen system, or an original 'cool' NES. And lets face it, modern emulators do a better job as they play current games as well.
If they're building this because they can... all power to them. If they're building this to market, I have two words: Market Research.
Has anyone else found that this breaks Mozzilla? and is that why its so quite round here at the moment?
when I get sucked in by hype. When my Xbox popped-its-clogs on Christmas Eve last year (boy was I angry). I prommised myself that I was an adult now and that I didn't need a games console. So confident was I that I sold all my games and accessories.
I can actually feel my Maestro card burning in my pocket at the moment. I'm going to take a cold shower.
I'm not sure about the x copies bit. Let me rephrase that. Ideologically, I can see your point about the limited number of copies distributed, but I can't ever see it happening.
But I REALLY like your other idea. A funtion of copyright that means that any commercially released product is automatically public domain once a company removes it from the market. I think a year is probably more practical - but I guess any arbitralily short period of time would do.
In the case of software, it should be that the source code is released too, or there should be a mandate that states that a company that provides proprietary software, must provide support. If that support is removed or a court accepts a plea that the level of support is too low, then the source must be release into the public domain within x months of the support being removed under the GPL (I think BSD licencing would be too easy for others to profit from the code 'donation') on the request of a licence holding customer (I add this stipulation only as a prediction of the stupid limits that would be enforced).
I can see the big guns really kicking up a fuss about that as it would hinder their ability to force upgrades. But it would be a huge boon for consumers and competition in the market and has the ring of fair about it.
Which politians would we have to buy to make this happen? ;)
Which I guess it just another way of saying, that in order for consumers to get vast internet pipes, telcos et al need to stop charging by data transfered, and start charging by pipe width.
I'm guessing thats going to take legislation.
I love XBMC, but I also love XBox Live. Now I have neither as my modchip blew and took out the usb-controller.
If Microsoft were serious about selling Xbox 2 they would use XBMC as the default dashboard. Hell, I was tempted to replace my Xbox purely for that reason and then buy games as a 'well it can do that too' sort of thing. Its a real shame that you have to depend on the work of grey hats to get real functionality out of machine you forked out $300 for and at the cost of using Xbox live.
The way I understood it was that x86 processors were faster because of the huge investments that had been made in them over the years creating the monolithic out-of-order, hyperthreaded processors. ie, put together some very, very, clever hacks, damn the bang-per-watt, and watch the performance sore. Why would you do this? Because Windows uses x86 and developers have a vested interest in keeping it alive, so they can continue to make money from "Upgrades".
We know x86 is an outdated instruction set. We also know that what they said in the article makes sense: don't process x86, convert x86 to something better (VLIW) and run it in order. But why bother with that stage if you have no legacy x86 code to support?
Why not just make the new chips with this new instruction set, and compile accordinly? Why not replace the x86 software decoder with a PPC software decoder?
I guess this boils down to getting market forces to work in your favour, and get the same discounted hardware Win32 has been getting... but it seems like such a nasty hack! I also expect there is a bit of politics going on, Intel are all about x86 and they're not about to change that for 3% of all processor sales.
When I bought my G5 I genuinely didn't know what I was going to do with 160GB of storage. Soon found out, PVR is a killer storage app. Once my storage is in the TB range my DVD collection is going on my PC and getting piped around the house like my music. Once my storage is in the PB range my then Bluray collection is going online as is my XBOX/Playstation etc collection as the emulators get good enough to be usable, so that I don't have to have the ugly boxes under my nice HiDef screen.
There is no such thing as enough storage.
...isn't paper still better for comics? I pick up Dilbert in my mail box every morning, but thats because its a 3 pane comic that takes less than 20 secs to read. I couldn't imagine sitting down to read a graphic novel in front of my PC anymore than I could imagine sitting down in front of a PC to read a book. I know some die hards can do it, but I'm not one of them.
The paper interface rocks. Zero eye strain, intuitive, future proof, pretty cheap and very portable. Its rubbish at animation and sound, and the searching facility can only be described as rudimentry (even with a good index). Its also renewable and recyclable.
The only reason I can see artists moving from print to html to because of startup cost and creative control. All power to them - thats what the digital revolution is all about! But with that come piracy and constant struggle to figure out a way to make people pay for something which is percieved as free. I'd probably be more inclined to subscribe to a comic site than a news site, but I'm also more tollerant of advertising surrounding information as opposed art.
Can you imagine reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance only to be forced to click through an advert for OCC after every page?
Comics should be affordable to young, imaginative minds, and should be accessible as such. The web sucks for that as, however much you try, you can't just stick your pocket money in your PC and get a comic out. Even if we give children credit cards thats still a bad deal for artists, as cards are rubbish for micropayments. We shall see...
I'm not overly serious, but my sense of humour is dry, and when written down can, as it does in this instance, make it look like I'm trying to start a fire. I'm British, and sometimes I forget that Slashdot is American - Two nations seperated by a common language, its not that I'm trying to offend... honest.
However, whats wrong with copper? We're being butt fed asynchronous 6Mbps, when we could have fiber connections that make SATA look slow. I'm sure we could argue over whether we're ready for the technology on a national scale. Whether its cost effective etc. But in this context, when we're looking at trying to make POTS work over 20km, its time we really start to look at utiliziling fiber properly.
Your reply highlights one of the greatest weakness of fiber technology. Despite being cheeper to produce than copper, its still more expenisve to utilize. I guess thats got more to do with muxer / demuxers (mudems?) than anything else.
There I go again... butt fed just sounds funny to me.
This has always struck me as stupid.
Copper: great for POTS, crap for data, ubiquitous. So they invent DSL to compensate for copper's inadequacies.
Fiber: crap for POTS, great for data, ubiquitous right up until the end of the street. DSL doesn't work because its a copper technology, so these poor people who are feet away from all the broadband they could ever need can't access it because telcos only know how to do DSL.
I'm not oblivious to the fact that it costs more to split fiber (light doesn't split like electricty), but thats because we don't do it very often as the priority has always been POTS. How long will it be, now that data outweighs POTS, until we get fiber to the front door?