In the past, I always knew Apple had come out with a great device when people tried to disparage it using checklists of features that it didn't have. The fact that the roles are now reversed and people are doing it regarding a potentially competing device is a sign that Amazon has a serious challenger to the Apple iPad on its hands.
I wouldn't consider most of the things you listed dealbreakers except than perhaps AirPlay, which Amazon could always add later via a software update. The storage capacity and battery life are a bit lame, but livable. Amazon can always bump those up later.
It's protectionism. Lawyers control the law, and thus are quite capable and willing to ensure the law is written to stop anything from encroaching on their revenue stream. It's too bad really, because the law is very much like a programming language, and writing software to process it is quite feasible.
The old "classic" Mac OS used Pascal as a first-class development language for almost its entire existence. Eventually C gained more traction, but even so Apple published "universal headers" which included interfaces for every API in C, Pascal, and asm right up until the OS X conversion.
As a side note, the VHS and Internet were "legitimized" by unsavory elements of society.
Ah, the old "VHS beat Betamax because it had porn" canard! Haven't heard that one in a while. Google a bit and you'll find quite a bit of discussion on Snopes, The Straight Dope, and elsewhere about it. Bottom line is that there is no real evidence to support that notion, while there are plenty of other (well-documented) reasons why VHS won the war.
I did a simpler but similar analysis when the iPod first came out. I considered these three factors:
Size / weight
Price
Storage capacity
At the time of the original iPod, you could get devices that beat it on one or even two of those points, but you could not get one that beat it on all three. The iPod was (I believe) the first device to make use of 1.5" hard drives. Until then your only choices were flash storage, which was small but at the time had very little capacity, or 2.5" hard drives such as the Archos players used, which had lots of storage but were big, heavy, and ate battery. The 1.5" drive from Toshiba was a way to hit a size / weight / storage capacity niche that had never been achieved before.
And that's not even taking into account the factors mentioned such as the fast data transfers via Firewire or the click-wheel UI (which was a breakthrough in usability at the time even though the original iPod was mechanical unlike the later touch-sensitive models).
No one dare suggest Microsoft is losing the smartphone/tablet/desktop wars to Apple and Linux because they were busy slaughtering Nintendo and Sony.
A company with the resources of Microsoft should be able to do both.
Not to mention that, of the two, the mobile market is a vastly better prize. The set-top box and TV game console markets are tiny compared to the market for desktops and laptops, which is again dwarfed by the mobile device market. If MS really did choose to win the game market at the expense of the others, it was a monumentally stupid decision, not that I believe for a second that that was actually their plan.
Considering Apple initially licensed CoverFlow from a "small guy" (and presumably paid them well for it), you could spin this as good news for the small guy. Just sayin'
Oh and I have to mention that HP's decision wasn't necessarily a bad one given the trends that were happening in the mid-to-late 1990s. The big story in everyone's minds was that expensive UNIX workstations were on the way out, to be replaced almost overnight by cheap commodity PCs running WindowsNT (don't laugh, it was the first "Windows" to be taken seriously). SGI pretty much lost their entire hardware business that way. HP was just trying to save themselves from that fate by hitching their future to what looked to be the industry's dominant player.
Not that I'm a big fan of Carly, but you can't necessarily blame her for that. The decision for HP to go with Intel's fancy new solution was made in era of Lew Platt being CEO, well before Fiorina took over. I was at HP in the mid-90s and recall seeing roadmaps that showed HP's UNIX solutions all being based on the super-amazing upcoming new Intel architecture well before the end of the decade. PA-RISC was old and busted, and Intel had the new hotness just around the corner. The suits just couldn't say enough about what an unstoppable juggernaut Intel's new baby was going to be. According to them, it was going to solve everything, do everything, and pretty much take over the world.
I left in 97, but I am sure those roadmaps had to be quietly adjusted each time Intel's new chip was delayed (over and over). It was well past 2000 when the thing finally came out, and in the end, it was a huge disappointment (dare I say disaster) after PA-RISC had been sailing along smoothly for so long. The perf was terrible, the instruction set was a mess, and pretty much the entire industry did their best to avoid it. I'm surprised it took this long for Intel to throw in the towel on it.
PA-RISC really was a great series of CPUs. It's a shame it had to die. At one point I believe it actually surpassed the (at the time) much-vaunted DEC Alpha as the fastest thing on the market, if only for a little while. Itanium seemed designed solely to kill off the x86 CPU clone market. Intel came up with a completely new instruction set, and patented it so there would be no clones. Actually making a good chip did not seem to be a consideration.
Good riddance to Itanium, and a bittersweet farewell and R.I.P. to PA-RISC.
No shit, that's pretty low. If people are suggesting that we should stick with SD because of that 18% who can't tell, then the next step is to go back to black-and-white photographs since a little over 1% of the population has some form of colorblindness.
Oh and about the sonar: If you bounce a laser of a window any singal you put on the beam will be dopper modulated by the vibrations on the glass. You can listen to sounds inside from miles away. This would actually work better in space then in air and it's not "science fiction" Microwaves work too. there have been cases where this was done 20+ years ago.
I was about to post that. But then I thought "aw, let's not ruin the armchair skeptic's fun".:-)
99% of the time when people try to pick apart the physics of a movie they just end up making themselves look dumb.
No, but you miss understood my original post. Thus I am clarifying that for you.
No, you're backpedalling now. You claimed it didn't handle unix tasks "properly", yet it's been proven and documented that OS X is compliant. Arguing about the name is just misdirection.
I honestly don't care what that engineer did, the issues I posted are real problems that exist on OS X.
You don't care what changes have been made to make it UNIX, the very thing you are complaining about? Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, what "problems" specifically do you know of in the current version? Let's see one. Show me a genuine case where it doesn't pass compliance.
If such a patch is possible but results in termination of service the system is technically Opne Source but useless as such.
No, no, no! That can't be! If the words "open" and "google" simply appear enough times in enough news articles, that means the device will shit rainbows and cure cancer! It's true because I read it right here on Slashdot!
LOL, is that all you've got in response to the detailed post by an engineer who actually worked on the changes to make it real UNIX?
The recursive acronym is well known, but did you know that there was a bug filed during the certification effort to change the name to xiu, as it's now out of date? They didn't fix it because they figured it wouldn't be worth the trouble, and anyone who cared would be smart enough to know better. Guess they were wrong about that last part!
The parent post is just saying what everyone secretly knows is true.
People are making massive amounts of money from the iPhone App Store. There is nothing else out there like it. Google doesn't even have their store up yet, and after their last attempt at something like that, it is not at all certain that they can actually make it work.
Not to mention the fact that Android hasn't so far turned out to be the open-source panacea that everyone thought it would be. You have to program in Java and don't have access to low-level hardware like bluetooth any more so than on the iPhone.
The cellphone industry isn't "rapidly" doing anything other than playing catch-up to Apple. So far they still have a long way to go.
This was in San Francisco at the Castro theater. They do a great job. Which coast are you on? There's always the Cinerama in Seattle.
The problem with the screening was, oddly enough, with the sound and not the picture. They had the anamorphic 70mm worked out and everything, and then the DTS unit failed (this was a new print with a DTS timecode added). They were unable to resolve the problem and ended up canceling the screening. I was pretty bummed, but maybe next time.
It was going to make a bundle no matter what. People love this movie. And it looks fantastic in IMAX, something you can't experience at home.
This is someone in the anti-piracy department at Warner trying to take credit for something they didn't do. I'm sure Christopher Nolan is really happy to hear these lackeys try to ride his coattails.
Episode II looked like garbage on film because it got such a poor transfer. Not sure what they did wrong, but it really sucked. Movies since then that have had digital intermediates or transfers from digital video source haven't looked nearly as bad. Guess it's just hard to go from digital to film and get it right. Even Pixar seems to do a poor job of it -- their movies look far softer on film than they should. The only lab I've seen get consistently good results is EFilm. Most places that insist on rolling their own solution would probably do better to just let EFilm handle it.
Also, the resolution of the digital video cameras used for that Ep.II was far below 2K due to subsampling, so you were seeing nearly all the pixels even at 1280, so your observation isn't that surprising.
On the other hand, I've seen obvious jagged edges in 2K material transferred to film so many times I've lost count. And this is in regular theaters, not screening rooms. That alone a pretty good indication that 35mm can reproduce full 2K, even under "real world" conditions.
As for 4K, we've already got 4K from film, no need to wait for a digital camera. There have been movies shot on film that had 4K digital intermediates ever since Spider-Man 2. There are more and more each year. "Hancock" was the most recent big release, and it was shown in 4K on some electronic projectors. The 35mm prints looked pretty good too, obviously having come from a 4K laser-out.
James Cameron agrees with you about 48fps (near the bottom of the article).
Slashdot Mirror
In the past, I always knew Apple had come out with a great device when people tried to disparage it using checklists of features that it didn't have. The fact that the roles are now reversed and people are doing it regarding a potentially competing device is a sign that Amazon has a serious challenger to the Apple iPad on its hands.
I wouldn't consider most of the things you listed dealbreakers except than perhaps AirPlay, which Amazon could always add later via a software update. The storage capacity and battery life are a bit lame, but livable. Amazon can always bump those up later.
It's protectionism. Lawyers control the law, and thus are quite capable and willing to ensure the law is written to stop anything from encroaching on their revenue stream. It's too bad really, because the law is very much like a programming language, and writing software to process it is quite feasible.
Thank you, that is indeed an excellent article. I do hope against hope that a proper restoration of the original will some day take place.
The old "classic" Mac OS used Pascal as a first-class development language for almost its entire existence. Eventually C gained more traction, but even so Apple published "universal headers" which included interfaces for every API in C, Pascal, and asm right up until the OS X conversion.
Ah, the old "VHS beat Betamax because it had porn" canard! Haven't heard that one in a while. Google a bit and you'll find quite a bit of discussion on Snopes, The Straight Dope, and elsewhere about it. Bottom line is that there is no real evidence to support that notion, while there are plenty of other (well-documented) reasons why VHS won the war.
Instead of the usual way which is like this:
At the time of the original iPod, you could get devices that beat it on one or even two of those points, but you could not get one that beat it on all three. The iPod was (I believe) the first device to make use of 1.5" hard drives. Until then your only choices were flash storage, which was small but at the time had very little capacity, or 2.5" hard drives such as the Archos players used, which had lots of storage but were big, heavy, and ate battery. The 1.5" drive from Toshiba was a way to hit a size / weight / storage capacity niche that had never been achieved before.
And that's not even taking into account the factors mentioned such as the fast data transfers via Firewire or the click-wheel UI (which was a breakthrough in usability at the time even though the original iPod was mechanical unlike the later touch-sensitive models).
A company with the resources of Microsoft should be able to do both.
Not to mention that, of the two, the mobile market is a vastly better prize. The set-top box and TV game console markets are tiny compared to the market for desktops and laptops, which is again dwarfed by the mobile device market. If MS really did choose to win the game market at the expense of the others, it was a monumentally stupid decision, not that I believe for a second that that was actually their plan.
Considering Apple initially licensed CoverFlow from a "small guy" (and presumably paid them well for it), you could spin this as good news for the small guy. Just sayin'
So Larry Ellison is finally right about NetPCs?
Oh and I have to mention that HP's decision wasn't necessarily a bad one given the trends that were happening in the mid-to-late 1990s. The big story in everyone's minds was that expensive UNIX workstations were on the way out, to be replaced almost overnight by cheap commodity PCs running WindowsNT (don't laugh, it was the first "Windows" to be taken seriously). SGI pretty much lost their entire hardware business that way. HP was just trying to save themselves from that fate by hitching their future to what looked to be the industry's dominant player.
Not that I'm a big fan of Carly, but you can't necessarily blame her for that. The decision for HP to go with Intel's fancy new solution was made in era of Lew Platt being CEO, well before Fiorina took over. I was at HP in the mid-90s and recall seeing roadmaps that showed HP's UNIX solutions all being based on the super-amazing upcoming new Intel architecture well before the end of the decade. PA-RISC was old and busted, and Intel had the new hotness just around the corner. The suits just couldn't say enough about what an unstoppable juggernaut Intel's new baby was going to be. According to them, it was going to solve everything, do everything, and pretty much take over the world.
I left in 97, but I am sure those roadmaps had to be quietly adjusted each time Intel's new chip was delayed (over and over). It was well past 2000 when the thing finally came out, and in the end, it was a huge disappointment (dare I say disaster) after PA-RISC had been sailing along smoothly for so long. The perf was terrible, the instruction set was a mess, and pretty much the entire industry did their best to avoid it. I'm surprised it took this long for Intel to throw in the towel on it.
PA-RISC really was a great series of CPUs. It's a shame it had to die. At one point I believe it actually surpassed the (at the time) much-vaunted DEC Alpha as the fastest thing on the market, if only for a little while. Itanium seemed designed solely to kill off the x86 CPU clone market. Intel came up with a completely new instruction set, and patented it so there would be no clones. Actually making a good chip did not seem to be a consideration.
Good riddance to Itanium, and a bittersweet farewell and R.I.P. to PA-RISC.
No shit, that's pretty low. If people are suggesting that we should stick with SD because of that 18% who can't tell, then the next step is to go back to black-and-white photographs since a little over 1% of the population has some form of colorblindness.
"There are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" --Mark Twain
Obviously this quote means that the science of statistics is invalid and that nothing can ever be measured!
Oh and about the sonar: If you bounce a laser of a window any singal you put on the beam will be dopper modulated by the vibrations on the glass. You can listen to sounds inside from miles away. This would actually work better in space then in air and it's not "science fiction" Microwaves work too. there have been cases where this was done 20+ years ago.
I was about to post that. But then I thought "aw, let's not ruin the armchair skeptic's fun". :-)
99% of the time when people try to pick apart the physics of a movie they just end up making themselves look dumb.
Beagle ain't exactly the same thing.
No, but you miss understood my original post. Thus I am clarifying that for you.
No, you're backpedalling now. You claimed it didn't handle unix tasks "properly", yet it's been proven and documented that OS X is compliant. Arguing about the name is just misdirection.
I honestly don't care what that engineer did, the issues I posted are real problems that exist on OS X.
You don't care what changes have been made to make it UNIX, the very thing you are complaining about? Yeah, that makes sense. Anyway, what "problems" specifically do you know of in the current version? Let's see one. Show me a genuine case where it doesn't pass compliance.
It's UNIX. Get over it.
If such a patch is possible but results in termination of service the system is technically Opne Source but useless as such.
No, no, no! That can't be! If the words "open" and "google" simply appear enough times in enough news articles, that means the device will shit rainbows and cure cancer! It's true because I read it right here on Slashdot!
LOL, is that all you've got in response to the detailed post by an engineer who actually worked on the changes to make it real UNIX?
The recursive acronym is well known, but did you know that there was a bug filed during the certification effort to change the name to xiu, as it's now out of date? They didn't fix it because they figured it wouldn't be worth the trouble, and anyone who cared would be smart enough to know better. Guess they were wrong about that last part!
XNU (OS X's kernel) is not Unix
According to this, it is.
The parent post is just saying what everyone secretly knows is true.
People are making massive amounts of money from the iPhone App Store. There is nothing else out there like it. Google doesn't even have their store up yet, and after their last attempt at something like that, it is not at all certain that they can actually make it work.
Not to mention the fact that Android hasn't so far turned out to be the open-source panacea that everyone thought it would be. You have to program in Java and don't have access to low-level hardware like bluetooth any more so than on the iPhone.
The cellphone industry isn't "rapidly" doing anything other than playing catch-up to Apple. So far they still have a long way to go.
Granted the presentation of this post is a bit trollish
A "bit"? It's an outright lie.
he's nonetheless right
No he isn't. The summary says Lotus can be "installed" on an iPhone. It's a web app. Nothing is installed. He's wrong.
This was in San Francisco at the Castro theater. They do a great job. Which coast are you on? There's always the Cinerama in Seattle.
The problem with the screening was, oddly enough, with the sound and not the picture. They had the anamorphic 70mm worked out and everything, and then the DTS unit failed (this was a new print with a DTS timecode added). They were unable to resolve the problem and ended up canceling the screening. I was pretty bummed, but maybe next time.
It was going to make a bundle no matter what. People love this movie. And it looks fantastic in IMAX, something you can't experience at home.
This is someone in the anti-piracy department at Warner trying to take credit for something they didn't do. I'm sure Christopher Nolan is really happy to hear these lackeys try to ride his coattails.
Episode II looked like garbage on film because it got such a poor transfer. Not sure what they did wrong, but it really sucked. Movies since then that have had digital intermediates or transfers from digital video source haven't looked nearly as bad. Guess it's just hard to go from digital to film and get it right. Even Pixar seems to do a poor job of it -- their movies look far softer on film than they should. The only lab I've seen get consistently good results is EFilm. Most places that insist on rolling their own solution would probably do better to just let EFilm handle it.
Also, the resolution of the digital video cameras used for that Ep.II was far below 2K due to subsampling, so you were seeing nearly all the pixels even at 1280, so your observation isn't that surprising.
On the other hand, I've seen obvious jagged edges in 2K material transferred to film so many times I've lost count. And this is in regular theaters, not screening rooms. That alone a pretty good indication that 35mm can reproduce full 2K, even under "real world" conditions.
As for 4K, we've already got 4K from film, no need to wait for a digital camera. There have been movies shot on film that had 4K digital intermediates ever since Spider-Man 2. There are more and more each year. "Hancock" was the most recent big release, and it was shown in 4K on some electronic projectors. The 35mm prints looked pretty good too, obviously having come from a 4K laser-out.
James Cameron agrees with you about 48fps (near the bottom of the article).