Unless the manufacturers sign a deal which states otherwise, there will be dual format players with 18 months of Blu-rays debut. After that it simply won't matter what format your media comes on letting media houses pick the disc that suits their economics, with one exception, the PS3 which will still only play Blu-ray, which lets face it, is better than either the 360 or the Revolution.
Unlike Betamax verses VHS, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are essentially the same form factor and technology. The initial concerns about Blu-rays new process being expensive will be blown out of the water by PS3 media sales, increased capacity and no pesky legal copying, which will interest film houses, HD-DVD has friendlier copyright and already has fabs producing cheap media. We could see a genuine 50/50 split in the market, healthy competition and low prices for consumers!
Zero Configuration software that you have to install and configure... is not zero configuration.
Unless this ships with Vista (complete with zero conf viruses) this wonderful technology will fail to help the people that need it... noobs. For sys admins and geeks this technology is like code completion, a time saver not an enabler. I guess our one, last hope is that it will be sneaked in with iTunes for Windows (hell they seem to get away with it for Quicktime), but then there is probably something a little amoral about installing a technology that makes it easier for people to find your network resources on an operating system where most of its users don't understand what a firewall does.
I hate this doublethink. I both 100% agree with you and 100% hate the fact that your right.
Why do people associate the cost of the tool with the cost of the engineer? Surely a man who can create a masterpiece with a brush and an oil solute is worth more than some monkey with a digital camera and photoshop. I guess its just an easier metric for managers to deal with.
What annoys me the most is that this is why big companies, that make lousy solutions, are making a killing. The project I'm working on put out a tender for its platform technologies. Unsuprisingly, the technologies that won were BEA Weblogic (Container), Sun (Servers), Cisco (Networks) and Oracle (Database).
I know that the same product could be built using Tomcat (Container), Debian (Servers), OpenBSD (Networks) and PostgreSQL (Database) and work as well or better (the budget doesn't reflect the complexity in this case), and I know that they weren't even concidered because, as OSS solutions, they don't have a consultancy team running around making promises Dev can't keep. I used to believe that it was important that enterprise solutions came with enterprise support, however, I have yet to experience enterprise grade support from anyone, at least not in any form that was better than an OSS product.
But who am I trying to kid. If PHBs had a clue about technology they wouldn't be PHBs. The big corporations that can afford big iron software soultions exist because of pervasive ignorance and metric crunching abilities of middle management, and the zeal of their marketing dept, not becuase they know what their doing.
Email is great, but in only a couple of situations:
Sending information that you want the reciever to remember after the conversation
Requirements
Contracts
Information that doesn't require a conversation
A note
A news letter
An asynchroous, persistant conversation
Scientists exchanging theories
What annoys me is when people send out email when what they meant to do was put a file on a shared resource, or have a telephone conversation. Just because you've emailed it to somebody doesn't mean that they read it. If you need to ring somebody to confirm they recieved an email, chances are that you didn't need to send the mail - you could have just told them over the phone.
Other than that I like email. It has quirks: it's just plain text, so its difficult to track conversations; attachements were an after thought; security is something that happens to other technologies. But thats also its strength. It will probably out live me. So long as computers are still shipped with keyboards, email will continue to be a string technology.
The problem with democracy is that nobody seems to want it, and that when asked if they want it, 40% of voters stay at home, and the rest vote with whoever the media tells them too. People don't understand politics and values they understand the market. In that respect they want short term, more for less at the expense of the future, because the future is uncertain at best. So is it any wonder that left to its own devices the market forms monopolies (autocracies) and not co-operatives (democracies)? The best way to guarentee that you have the best deal, is if its the only deal in town.
I would like nothing more than hetrogenous IT landscape. I already use OS X on my laptop, Linux on my home server, Win2K on work dev box and Solaris on our dev servers. I code, predominantly in Java, but also do a bit of PHP, P/Jython and Cocoa, and I love the concepts of democracy and choice, but even in IT my views are not the norm. The developers I work with fear change. They actively avoid having to telnet into the Solaris boxes, they think I'm mad for owning a Mac, and they still think Linux is just for geeks (a category they sign up to only in job description). If thats the IT workforce, whats happening in the real world?
The noobs right to ask the question, why do we need more than one OS? The answer is, we don't. I'm not that suprised, that even within the OSS aware IT crowd that people are still asking that question, and will be asking it again when Hurd finally rears its horns. The reason we have OS X, Linux and BSD is not because we need them, but because we can, because it's there. That's the realm of mountain climbers, pioneers and artic explorers, not the 95% of people that are happy with Windows.
I started gaming with the Spectrum 48k. Apart from the 15 minute load times the thing that stuck out the most in my memory was the desire for the flash screen the apeared halfway through game load was the actual ingame graphics.
When I finally got my grubby little paws on a NES my wish was granted, and then I started to wish that the games I were playing were more 'realistic'. At the time I played beginner Games Worksop games like Hero Quest and Dungeon Bowl. What I wanted was a game were I could actually be in the 'dungeon' and walk around it like my characters in the game could. I upgraded my PC to a 486 SX20, installed Wolfenstein 3D and then I wanted it to have better graphics.
There were side wishes: I want to be able to shoot someone with a genuine fake gun: duck shoot. I want to be able play golf with a genuine fake club, I want to play racing games with a genuine fake steering wheel.
My current wishes include: play jedi knight with a real lightsaber (revoluntion?) and I want a truely immersive environment - just like the matrix. Do I expect the games to be any better? No not really.
Its not the games that are to blame for the increasingly bland gaming landscape its the market. We understand that emmersive 3D environments are expensive, so we're prepared to handover $60 per game, but we are also defensive about handing over that ammount of cash if we don't know we're going to like it.
Not all jobs can be offshored. I'm outsourced to the government, and, because of the data I work with, my job can never be offshored. I suspect, thats true of some banking information, and probably true of a few other paranoid businesses, but I have no proof to that effect. So paranoia and security can, and will continue to keep some enterprise grade software firmly onshore.
Small companies are becoming increasingly IT aware. We're seeing the first of the IT generation reaching management posts in Mom and Pops, and Citywides. It used to be that the price of the hardware was the problem, now its the cost of the developers. For small to medium sized business the cost of offshoring is too high... unless you broker.
There is also the question of trust. Small companies rely on trust over legislation and buying buying power. It's difficult to build trust with a 7 hour time difference and a telephone (although Match.com would probably disagree). The small companies I know would rather deal with other small companies where they might be able to get preferential buyer treatment and loyalty, than cheaper multinationals.
To me this stinks of profit. Doing lots of small jobs for small companies (customising OSS, a Ruby on Rails web shop) plus maintenance is the new electronic frontier.
Western technologists can compete. We have the home team advantage: meet and great is more important than ever. We are, hopefully, well educated and well informed, giving us the ability to adapt and create new technologies that make us more effective and cheaper. But, you have to be able to deliver.
Here is what I think my next MacBooks storage specs will look like:
4GB RAM (1GB RAM Disk for compiles and caching) 32GB SSD (OS / Apps / Work) 160GB External HDD (iPod for media and backup)
My current PowerBook only has 40GB of storage, that's already more than I need, as I have a 10GB Ubuntu partition and 7GB spare. I don't need more than 20GB of persistant storage because all I do on it is web/email/code/office. All my photos, music, movies etc. are stored on my iMac. If I'm at home I use AFP to connect to my media, if I'm on the move I use my iPod. The only thing that stops me from recommend this situation to everyone is the DRM in iTunes.
I can't be that unusual. I have an iMac at home, PowerBook everywhere and a Dell at work. The only thing that makes me even remotely 'on the edge' is the use of a laptop, the majority of computer users I know have a t least a desktop at home and at work. Why can't I register my iMac as a central repository and be able to elect 5 other computers as subrepositories (ie, I can freely move music from my G5 to the PowerBook or Dell using either the iPod or the magic of the intar-web, even if they are registered with iTMS to play the music?). By the same token, why can't I rip a CD on the PowerBook, and have it magically appear on my iMac when I resync the iPod?
I don't have an issue with MPCs not shipping with a TV tuner card. As I see it there are 4 competing standards:
Analog DVB-T DVB-C DVB-S
Of those, the only ones that would actually justify a £500 (I'm thinking signal quality and channel choice) box are DVB-C and DVB-S, but they rely on a CAM, which are almost impossible to source legally. The only feasable options are take the decompressed signal direct from the supplied decoder (limiting you to recording the channel your watching) or accept that Freeview is the only digital content you can actually PVR. This makes the BYO PVR a non starter.
Thats why I'm not suprised that Apple don't ship their minis with a tuner. The market is now so fragmented, that the only way they could provide a quality product is by buddying up with a supplier in each market. Expensive and anti-competitive: not good business.
I also think this makes comparing a Media Centre PC to a Mini fair game. So what if its got a built it tuner? It's not a feature so much as a bolt on. The only thing people can really do with this technology is watch downloaded content, DVDs and created content with a granny friendly interface, which is exactly what an XBox with modchip and XBMC can do for £100. OK, its not as quiet, or as small as the Mac, but its also £400 cheaper AND it plays XBox games!
This is why I'm so suprised that the 360 is so backwards when it comes to getting music from a Media Centre PC! If I could stream DivX/Xvid/H.264 from any network resource with little or no configuration or soldering I'd be very tempted by a 360. As it is, I see no reason to upgrade from my modded XBox (better graphics... meh).
I've 5000 songs on my iPod, split into 200 or so albums, and 300 artists. Click, or holding a button to navigate a list that long is unacceptable. Hell, I used to get bored scrolling though the menu on my old Nokia phone, a dial is the perfect interface.
I'm suprised Sony didn't include a jogwheel into their walkman. Seems like that would have made it more of a competitor (rather than the hideous phone like menu that they used).
OK, so Mac owners won't be able to buy Vista. Big Whoop. It's not like they don't have OS X, *BSD and handful of linux distros to choose from.
PC users won't be able to buy EFI based hardware... now thats the real tradgedy
My, limited, understanding is that it is because traditional x86 boxes use the old BIOS that you can't have instant sleep like Macs and you can't have firewire/usb target disk mode. These are small, but important improvements that significantly improve the end user experience.
MS should be supporting it out fo the box, not because Mac users might buy Vista, but because hardware vendors should be free to move towards EFI.
Cost of going to see a moview: £6.20 per person ($11) Cost of Popcorn / Drink: £5 per person ($8.70) Cost of parking (yes, they charge at my local cinema): £2.50 ($4.30) Cost of gas is $5.5 a gallon, so you may want to include that too.
Total cost of date: £24.90 ($43.25)
But thats cheap compared to eating out, I rarely see change from £40 ($70) and thats without buying a £6 dvd (which is approximately what a 2 year old film costs), oh and the service is crappy, for some reason people in briton would rather clean toilets than provide good customer service. The worst thing is, I don't even live in a city! I just live in a small town.
Last month my pay cheque was stopped 31% in mandatory, national income taxes (yes, national insurance is a tax) and virtually everything I buy has a 17.5% sales tax applied.
I'm not saying that the US Movie industry isn't greedy, I'm just saying that, they know, looking at the UK market that people can be squeezed for more. Expect it to get worse before it gets better.
The same reason I use gmail. I have three computers, and don't want three email addresses. For that reason its easier for me to sync if I have a central, 24/7 server I can get my mail from.
The same with a calender. I don't use.Macs calander web frontend, but I do sync with they're server so that no matter where I am I have the latest version, and, if I want to, it's trivial for me to share that information with others.
I do use my phone's calander, but more as a viewer than, data entry (if god had meant us to use a phone for data entry he would have given us 9 thumbs). If I do have to create an entry whilst I'm out, being able to use a web interface to polish it makes a lot of sense.
Because it works on the same technology as my girlfriend:
GF: "The bath is leaking!" Me: "Fix it then" GF : "The bath is leaking! That's your job!" Me: "Why? I know as much about plumbing as you do. Here, have a spanner." GF: "What's a spanner?" GF:... GF: "The bath is still leaking!"
Identifying and whinging about a problem is a completely seperate problem to identifying and actioning a fix.
PS. Spanner = Wrench PPS. This isn't a slight on girlfriends in general, I'm sure some girlfriends can plumb, I just don't have one of those models.
Nope. Its just the drivers.
Schools buy the cheapest, dirtiest hardware money can buy... and Macs. So driver support really is a massive issue.
They also buy the oddest hardware. All the schools I know have at least one piece of 'must support' hardware that only has drivers Windows, be it an Interactive Whiteboard, USB Microscope or a RS-232 turtle from the 1980s. Or there is a crappy piece of software that the head teacher is convinced is the greatest thing since sliced bread... and it's written in Visual Basic.
It takes a truely dedicated IT Leader within a school to make it happen. They have to truely hate the fact that a percentage of the LEAs budget is being given directly to Microsoft. Or that they are prescribed to teach MS Office as part of the national curriculum. They have to accept that they are going to get opposition at every stage, get blamed for every blip in the service, and won't see a single penny of the reduced TCO come there way.
Poor hardware support == higher TCO
Cost of mug to Starbucks: $0.50 Cost of coffee to Starbucks: $0.20 Price of coffee at Starbucks: $2.50 Cost of bad customer service: Priceless
Any coffee shop worth its salt should replace a broken cup of coffee... within reason. Of course they are under no obligation to, but it's got to be cheaper than investing in bomb shaped, ceramic nightmares from hell.
This is an intreresting academic exercise... right up there with "Who can design a vessel that can save an egg dropped from 200 feet?". That gem has kept school kids ammused for decades.
Dual proc machine, with vast amounts of storage and an innocent ubiquity is used as a corporate weapon. Next they'll be telling me that personal laptops can be used to sniff corporate networks, or that viruses can be transfered on floppy disk, and that restricted documents have been printed out, and 'sneaked' through the front door.
Any company with a decent security model will be able to recognise a user who's file browsing habits are irregular, and classified documents shouldn't be kept in a public repository on a LAN anyway.
It's the job of doctors to stop us from dying. Good Doctors, who are listened to by politians tell them that in order to prevent us from dying we should be told we should have our freedom to drink, smoke and eat whatever we liked reduced so that we all live forever. Its there job.
It's the job of the military to keep us safe from other countries. Good Generals therefore tell politians about the dangers of terrorism and spys and how we should kill everyone else just in case they are a threat to national security, and reduce the freedom of foreign nationals whilst they are in the country.. It's their job.
Its the job of the police to keep us safe from each other. Good Policeman, who are listened to by politians, say that the only way we can be kept safe from each other, is if our freeedoms are reduced and we are watched constantly. It's his job.
The real problem is the politions. Its their job to up hold our freedoms. If they listen to the experts, and let them 'do they're job', then they're not doing their job - and they're the ones who are in charge - this is a constitutional republic after all.
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. He's always going to say "Yes". (I'm too tired t spell check)
No Viruses No Noise No Hassle oh... and they're pretty.
They fit into the affordable luxary category, a lot like the iPod. If all you want is FIPS and MIPS, then you buy an AMD box, with water cooling and a heat sink as big as your car. Hell, why not go the whole hog and kit it out with LEDs to make it 'classy'.
Mac's are the Rolls Royce of computing, not the Ferrari. When it comes to the choice between comfort or performance, they choose comfort - but they still stick a big ol' engine in, because, let's face it, you paid for it. AMDs are the suped up Honda. Sure they get better 0-60, and are cheaper to 'upgrade', but you're still left driving a car that looks like a Honda.
If you're demanding performance specs, then either you are genuinly somebody who needs that performance (a dying breed) or your are a relic from the 1990's. Processor performance is no longer the most important factor in a desktop computer, we're still waiting for IO and memory to catch up.
This is a step in the right direction. Although using T9 to enter all the smilies is a real PITA. Waht we need is an application that can, in real time, convert my speech into binary, then transmit it to person I'm calling where it will, in real time be converted back into a sound, not entirely unlike my voice... oh.
If people are using your network to text and IM each other, in preference to talking YOU ARE CHARGING TOO MUCH!
I'm in the (un)fortunate position of seeing.Net and J2EE being used sideby side in the same application, and I don't get why people are using.Net in the enterprise. It can't be because CLR is faster than the JVM, it isn't. It may be fair to say that, for a bog standard application,.Net development is faster (Visual Studio is an excellent tool), but as soon as you start to push its framework (as all real applications do) the.Net teams fall behind the J2EE teams.
Java gives you choice. Choice of IDE, choice of framework, choice of application server and perhaps most importantly choice of platform. All that and it runs as fast as.Net and, if your on a budget, everything can be got for free. Need support? Buy WebLogic or JBoss support. Need training? Sun are more than happy to oblige. Need developers? You can't spit without hitting a J2EE developer. Need the source code? Sun will hand it over, for free, just don't expect any changes you made to be put back into the source tree, or them to give you any slack if you try and distribute at all - its not the freedom that OSS would like to give you, but its better than.Net.
So is it any wonder that there are less.Net developers. If I was starting out in software development again, I'd be still be looking to start in Java, and expect to move over to Ruby on Rails (or whatever is flavor of the month) in 5 to 10 years. Assuming people who make IT descisions get smarter, and OSS continues to get stronger, I can't see how any company selling enterprise grade software will be selling anything but the time and experiance of their staff sans the licencing fees of the tools and server software to their customers. How else will western developers compete with China and India?
So, selling upgrades as new products has finally been recognised by the general public, who are now tired of the EA tax every year?
Thats one option. The other is that they just slashed the price of most of their PS2 and XBox titles in an effort to maintain sales during the transition to XBox 360 and PS3.
The answer: stop working your staff into an early grave working on games that 10 years ago they wouldn't havae touched with a barge pole.
The implemented solution will be to release John Madden 2008 and FIFA 2008 in the summer of 2006 for the XBox Spinning Top and PS4 for $200 in an attempt to gazump its competitors. There will of course be collatoral damage, and a new record will be set with a EA developer dying from stress and fatigue before he's even been conceived.
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Unless the manufacturers sign a deal which states otherwise, there will be dual format players with 18 months of Blu-rays debut. After that it simply won't matter what format your media comes on letting media houses pick the disc that suits their economics, with one exception, the PS3 which will still only play Blu-ray, which lets face it, is better than either the 360 or the Revolution.
Unlike Betamax verses VHS, both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are essentially the same form factor and technology. The initial concerns about Blu-rays new process being expensive will be blown out of the water by PS3 media sales, increased capacity and no pesky legal copying, which will interest film houses, HD-DVD has friendlier copyright and already has fabs producing cheap media. We could see a genuine 50/50 split in the market, healthy competition and low prices for consumers!
Zero Configuration software that you have to install and configure... is not zero configuration.
Unless this ships with Vista (complete with zero conf viruses) this wonderful technology will fail to help the people that need it... noobs. For sys admins and geeks this technology is like code completion, a time saver not an enabler. I guess our one, last hope is that it will be sneaked in with iTunes for Windows (hell they seem to get away with it for Quicktime), but then there is probably something a little amoral about installing a technology that makes it easier for people to find your network resources on an operating system where most of its users don't understand what a firewall does.
I hate this doublethink. I both 100% agree with you and 100% hate the fact that your right.
Why do people associate the cost of the tool with the cost of the engineer? Surely a man who can create a masterpiece with a brush and an oil solute is worth more than some monkey with a digital camera and photoshop. I guess its just an easier metric for managers to deal with.
What annoys me the most is that this is why big companies, that make lousy solutions, are making a killing. The project I'm working on put out a tender for its platform technologies. Unsuprisingly, the technologies that won were BEA Weblogic (Container), Sun (Servers), Cisco (Networks) and Oracle (Database).
I know that the same product could be built using Tomcat (Container), Debian (Servers), OpenBSD (Networks) and PostgreSQL (Database) and work as well or better (the budget doesn't reflect the complexity in this case), and I know that they weren't even concidered because, as OSS solutions, they don't have a consultancy team running around making promises Dev can't keep. I used to believe that it was important that enterprise solutions came with enterprise support, however, I have yet to experience enterprise grade support from anyone, at least not in any form that was better than an OSS product.
But who am I trying to kid. If PHBs had a clue about technology they wouldn't be PHBs. The big corporations that can afford big iron software soultions exist because of pervasive ignorance and metric crunching abilities of middle management, and the zeal of their marketing dept, not becuase they know what their doing.
What annoys me is when people send out email when what they meant to do was put a file on a shared resource, or have a telephone conversation. Just because you've emailed it to somebody doesn't mean that they read it. If you need to ring somebody to confirm they recieved an email, chances are that you didn't need to send the mail - you could have just told them over the phone.
Other than that I like email. It has quirks: it's just plain text, so its difficult to track conversations; attachements were an after thought; security is something that happens to other technologies. But thats also its strength. It will probably out live me. So long as computers are still shipped with keyboards, email will continue to be a string technology.
You're not new here, but here we go...
I want a 16 core, PowerPC PowerBook, with 1 TB RAM, the ability to see in to the future... oh and I want a pony.
OMG! Ponies!... We're finally getting what we asked for... although I don't remember asking for slashdot in pink.
The problem with democracy is that nobody seems to want it, and that when asked if they want it, 40% of voters stay at home, and the rest vote with whoever the media tells them too. People don't understand politics and values they understand the market. In that respect they want short term, more for less at the expense of the future, because the future is uncertain at best. So is it any wonder that left to its own devices the market forms monopolies (autocracies) and not co-operatives (democracies)? The best way to guarentee that you have the best deal, is if its the only deal in town.
I would like nothing more than hetrogenous IT landscape. I already use OS X on my laptop, Linux on my home server, Win2K on work dev box and Solaris on our dev servers. I code, predominantly in Java, but also do a bit of PHP, P/Jython and Cocoa, and I love the concepts of democracy and choice, but even in IT my views are not the norm. The developers I work with fear change. They actively avoid having to telnet into the Solaris boxes, they think I'm mad for owning a Mac, and they still think Linux is just for geeks (a category they sign up to only in job description). If thats the IT workforce, whats happening in the real world?
The noobs right to ask the question, why do we need more than one OS? The answer is, we don't. I'm not that suprised, that even within the OSS aware IT crowd that people are still asking that question, and will be asking it again when Hurd finally rears its horns. The reason we have OS X, Linux and BSD is not because we need them, but because we can, because it's there. That's the realm of mountain climbers, pioneers and artic explorers, not the 95% of people that are happy with Windows.
I started gaming with the Spectrum 48k. Apart from the 15 minute load times the thing that stuck out the most in my memory was the desire for the flash screen the apeared halfway through game load was the actual ingame graphics.
When I finally got my grubby little paws on a NES my wish was granted, and then I started to wish that the games I were playing were more 'realistic'. At the time I played beginner Games Worksop games like Hero Quest and Dungeon Bowl. What I wanted was a game were I could actually be in the 'dungeon' and walk around it like my characters in the game could. I upgraded my PC to a 486 SX20, installed Wolfenstein 3D and then I wanted it to have better graphics.
There were side wishes: I want to be able to shoot someone with a genuine fake gun: duck shoot. I want to be able play golf with a genuine fake club, I want to play racing games with a genuine fake steering wheel.
My current wishes include: play jedi knight with a real lightsaber (revoluntion?) and I want a truely immersive environment - just like the matrix. Do I expect the games to be any better? No not really.
Its not the games that are to blame for the increasingly bland gaming landscape its the market. We understand that emmersive 3D environments are expensive, so we're prepared to handover $60 per game, but we are also defensive about handing over that ammount of cash if we don't know we're going to like it.
Not all jobs can be offshored. I'm outsourced to the government, and, because of the data I work with, my job can never be offshored. I suspect, thats true of some banking information, and probably true of a few other paranoid businesses, but I have no proof to that effect. So paranoia and security can, and will continue to keep some enterprise grade software firmly onshore.
Small companies are becoming increasingly IT aware. We're seeing the first of the IT generation reaching management posts in Mom and Pops, and Citywides. It used to be that the price of the hardware was the problem, now its the cost of the developers. For small to medium sized business the cost of offshoring is too high... unless you broker.
There is also the question of trust. Small companies rely on trust over legislation and buying buying power. It's difficult to build trust with a 7 hour time difference and a telephone (although Match.com would probably disagree). The small companies I know would rather deal with other small companies where they might be able to get preferential buyer treatment and loyalty, than cheaper multinationals.
To me this stinks of profit. Doing lots of small jobs for small companies (customising OSS, a Ruby on Rails web shop) plus maintenance is the new electronic frontier.
Western technologists can compete. We have the home team advantage: meet and great is more important than ever. We are, hopefully, well educated and well informed, giving us the ability to adapt and create new technologies that make us more effective and cheaper. But, you have to be able to deliver.
Here is what I think my next MacBooks storage specs will look like:
4GB RAM (1GB RAM Disk for compiles and caching)
32GB SSD (OS / Apps / Work)
160GB External HDD (iPod for media and backup)
My current PowerBook only has 40GB of storage, that's already more than I need, as I have a 10GB Ubuntu partition and 7GB spare. I don't need more than 20GB of persistant storage because all I do on it is web/email/code/office. All my photos, music, movies etc. are stored on my iMac. If I'm at home I use AFP to connect to my media, if I'm on the move I use my iPod. The only thing that stops me from recommend this situation to everyone is the DRM in iTunes.
I can't be that unusual. I have an iMac at home, PowerBook everywhere and a Dell at work. The only thing that makes me even remotely 'on the edge' is the use of a laptop, the majority of computer users I know have a t least a desktop at home and at work. Why can't I register my iMac as a central repository and be able to elect 5 other computers as subrepositories (ie, I can freely move music from my G5 to the PowerBook or Dell using either the iPod or the magic of the intar-web, even if they are registered with iTMS to play the music?). By the same token, why can't I rip a CD on the PowerBook, and have it magically appear on my iMac when I resync the iPod?
I don't have an issue with MPCs not shipping with a TV tuner card. As I see it there are 4 competing standards:
Analog
DVB-T
DVB-C
DVB-S
Of those, the only ones that would actually justify a £500 (I'm thinking signal quality and channel choice) box are DVB-C and DVB-S, but they rely on a CAM, which are almost impossible to source legally. The only feasable options are take the decompressed signal direct from the supplied decoder (limiting you to recording the channel your watching) or accept that Freeview is the only digital content you can actually PVR. This makes the BYO PVR a non starter.
Thats why I'm not suprised that Apple don't ship their minis with a tuner. The market is now so fragmented, that the only way they could provide a quality product is by buddying up with a supplier in each market. Expensive and anti-competitive: not good business.
I also think this makes comparing a Media Centre PC to a Mini fair game. So what if its got a built it tuner? It's not a feature so much as a bolt on. The only thing people can really do with this technology is watch downloaded content, DVDs and created content with a granny friendly interface, which is exactly what an XBox with modchip and XBMC can do for £100. OK, its not as quiet, or as small as the Mac, but its also £400 cheaper AND it plays XBox games!
This is why I'm so suprised that the 360 is so backwards when it comes to getting music from a Media Centre PC! If I could stream DivX/Xvid/H.264 from any network resource with little or no configuration or soldering I'd be very tempted by a 360. As it is, I see no reason to upgrade from my modded XBox (better graphics... meh).
I've 5000 songs on my iPod, split into 200 or so albums, and 300 artists. Click, or holding a button to navigate a list that long is unacceptable. Hell, I used to get bored scrolling though the menu on my old Nokia phone, a dial is the perfect interface.
I'm suprised Sony didn't include a jogwheel into their walkman. Seems like that would have made it more of a competitor (rather than the hideous phone like menu that they used).
OK, so Mac owners won't be able to buy Vista. Big Whoop. It's not like they don't have OS X, *BSD and handful of linux distros to choose from.
PC users won't be able to buy EFI based hardware... now thats the real tradgedy
My, limited, understanding is that it is because traditional x86 boxes use the old BIOS that you can't have instant sleep like Macs and you can't have firewire/usb target disk mode. These are small, but important improvements that significantly improve the end user experience.
MS should be supporting it out fo the box, not because Mac users might buy Vista, but because hardware vendors should be free to move towards EFI.
Its times like this that I hate being british.
Cost of going to see a moview: £6.20 per person ($11)
Cost of Popcorn / Drink: £5 per person ($8.70)
Cost of parking (yes, they charge at my local cinema): £2.50 ($4.30)
Cost of gas is $5.5 a gallon, so you may want to include that too.
Total cost of date: £24.90 ($43.25)
But thats cheap compared to eating out, I rarely see change from £40 ($70) and thats without buying a £6 dvd (which is approximately what a 2 year old film costs), oh and the service is crappy, for some reason people in briton would rather clean toilets than provide good customer service. The worst thing is, I don't even live in a city! I just live in a small town.
Last month my pay cheque was stopped 31% in mandatory, national income taxes (yes, national insurance is a tax) and virtually everything I buy has a 17.5% sales tax applied.
I'm not saying that the US Movie industry isn't greedy, I'm just saying that, they know, looking at the UK market that people can be squeezed for more. Expect it to get worse before it gets better.
The same reason I use gmail. I have three computers, and don't want three email addresses. For that reason its easier for me to sync if I have a central, 24/7 server I can get my mail from.
.Macs calander web frontend, but I do sync with they're server so that no matter where I am I have the latest version, and, if I want to, it's trivial for me to share that information with others.
The same with a calender. I don't use
I do use my phone's calander, but more as a viewer than, data entry (if god had meant us to use a phone for data entry he would have given us 9 thumbs). If I do have to create an entry whilst I'm out, being able to use a web interface to polish it makes a lot of sense.
Because it works on the same technology as my girlfriend:
...
GF: "The bath is leaking!"
Me: "Fix it then"
GF : "The bath is leaking! That's your job!"
Me: "Why? I know as much about plumbing as you do. Here, have a spanner."
GF: "What's a spanner?"
GF:
GF: "The bath is still leaking!"
Identifying and whinging about a problem is a completely seperate problem to identifying and actioning a fix.
PS. Spanner = Wrench
PPS. This isn't a slight on girlfriends in general, I'm sure some girlfriends can plumb, I just don't have one of those models.
I hope they've told this guy about this new article.
Nope. Its just the drivers. Schools buy the cheapest, dirtiest hardware money can buy... and Macs. So driver support really is a massive issue. They also buy the oddest hardware. All the schools I know have at least one piece of 'must support' hardware that only has drivers Windows, be it an Interactive Whiteboard, USB Microscope or a RS-232 turtle from the 1980s. Or there is a crappy piece of software that the head teacher is convinced is the greatest thing since sliced bread... and it's written in Visual Basic. It takes a truely dedicated IT Leader within a school to make it happen. They have to truely hate the fact that a percentage of the LEAs budget is being given directly to Microsoft. Or that they are prescribed to teach MS Office as part of the national curriculum. They have to accept that they are going to get opposition at every stage, get blamed for every blip in the service, and won't see a single penny of the reduced TCO come there way. Poor hardware support == higher TCO
Cost of mug to Starbucks: $0.50
Cost of coffee to Starbucks: $0.20
Price of coffee at Starbucks: $2.50
Cost of bad customer service: Priceless
Any coffee shop worth its salt should replace a broken cup of coffee... within reason. Of course they are under no obligation to, but it's got to be cheaper than investing in bomb shaped, ceramic nightmares from hell.
This is an intreresting academic exercise... right up there with "Who can design a vessel that can save an egg dropped from 200 feet?". That gem has kept school kids ammused for decades.
Dual proc machine, with vast amounts of storage and an innocent ubiquity is used as a corporate weapon. Next they'll be telling me that personal laptops can be used to sniff corporate networks, or that viruses can be transfered on floppy disk, and that restricted documents have been printed out, and 'sneaked' through the front door.
Any company with a decent security model will be able to recognise a user who's file browsing habits are irregular, and classified documents shouldn't be kept in a public repository on a LAN anyway.
XML Parsing?
Bulky strings in, nice, lean SAX events out.
It's the job of doctors to stop us from dying. Good Doctors, who are listened to by politians tell them that in order to prevent us from dying we should be told we should have our freedom to drink, smoke and eat whatever we liked reduced so that we all live forever. Its there job.
It's the job of the military to keep us safe from other countries. Good Generals therefore tell politians about the dangers of terrorism and spys and how we should kill everyone else just in case they are a threat to national security, and reduce the freedom of foreign nationals whilst they are in the country.. It's their job.
Its the job of the police to keep us safe from each other. Good Policeman, who are listened to by politians, say that the only way we can be kept safe from each other, is if our freeedoms are reduced and we are watched constantly. It's his job.
The real problem is the politions. Its their job to up hold our freedoms. If they listen to the experts, and let them 'do they're job', then they're not doing their job - and they're the ones who are in charge - this is a constitutional republic after all.
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. He's always going to say "Yes". (I'm too tired t spell check)
For mac users the key buying points are:
No Viruses
No Noise
No Hassle
oh... and they're pretty.
They fit into the affordable luxary category, a lot like the iPod. If all you want is FIPS and MIPS, then you buy an AMD box, with water cooling and a heat sink as big as your car. Hell, why not go the whole hog and kit it out with LEDs to make it 'classy'.
Mac's are the Rolls Royce of computing, not the Ferrari. When it comes to the choice between comfort or performance, they choose comfort - but they still stick a big ol' engine in, because, let's face it, you paid for it. AMDs are the suped up Honda. Sure they get better 0-60, and are cheaper to 'upgrade', but you're still left driving a car that looks like a Honda.
If you're demanding performance specs, then either you are genuinly somebody who needs that performance (a dying breed) or your are a relic from the 1990's. Processor performance is no longer the most important factor in a desktop computer, we're still waiting for IO and memory to catch up.
This is a step in the right direction. Although using T9 to enter all the smilies is a real PITA. Waht we need is an application that can, in real time, convert my speech into binary, then transmit it to person I'm calling where it will, in real time be converted back into a sound, not entirely unlike my voice... oh.
If people are using your network to text and IM each other, in preference to talking YOU ARE CHARGING TOO MUCH!
I'm in the (un)fortunate position of seeing .Net and J2EE being used sideby side in the same application, and I don't get why people are using .Net in the enterprise. It can't be because CLR is faster than the JVM, it isn't. It may be fair to say that, for a bog standard application, .Net development is faster (Visual Studio is an excellent tool), but as soon as you start to push its framework (as all real applications do) the .Net teams fall behind the J2EE teams.
.Net and, if your on a budget, everything can be got for free. Need support? Buy WebLogic or JBoss support. Need training? Sun are more than happy to oblige. Need developers? You can't spit without hitting a J2EE developer. Need the source code? Sun will hand it over, for free, just don't expect any changes you made to be put back into the source tree, or them to give you any slack if you try and distribute at all - its not the freedom that OSS would like to give you, but its better than .Net.
.Net developers. If I was starting out in software development again, I'd be still be looking to start in Java, and expect to move over to Ruby on Rails (or whatever is flavor of the month) in 5 to 10 years. Assuming people who make IT descisions get smarter, and OSS continues to get stronger, I can't see how any company selling enterprise grade software will be selling anything but the time and experiance of their staff sans the licencing fees of the tools and server software to their customers. How else will western developers compete with China and India?
Java gives you choice. Choice of IDE, choice of framework, choice of application server and perhaps most importantly choice of platform. All that and it runs as fast as
So is it any wonder that there are less
So, selling upgrades as new products has finally been recognised by the general public, who are now tired of the EA tax every year?
Thats one option. The other is that they just slashed the price of most of their PS2 and XBox titles in an effort to maintain sales during the transition to XBox 360 and PS3.
The answer: stop working your staff into an early grave working on games that 10 years ago they wouldn't havae touched with a barge pole.
The implemented solution will be to release John Madden 2008 and FIFA 2008 in the summer of 2006 for the XBox Spinning Top and PS4 for $200 in an attempt to gazump its competitors. There will of course be collatoral damage, and a new record will be set with a EA developer dying from stress and fatigue before he's even been conceived.