We'll see. So far, this is Google's standard operating procedure for any major release, and even some minor ones.
In the past, as now, they partnered with exactly one OEM, on one hardware platform, for the new release. For Honeycomb, this was Motorola and the Xoom tablet, and sure, Motorola most likely paid for the special treatment. But this is smart on Google's part -- they have exactly one platform to worry about, and they have direct involvement from that hardware's developer.
On the day the Xoom shipped, the other major OEMs got access to the Honeycomb source code. This is the same thing Google did before... OEMs had the source weeks or even months before it went hot on source.android.com.
Presumably, after some time between Google and the OEMs, they'll put the Honeycomb source out for everyone else. This is the same progression that happened in the past, though definitely looks like it's going to take longer. Could be that they're waiting for more tablet ports to be done (with bug feedback), could be they're foot-dragging until "Ice-Cream" is completed, which is widely rumored to be the unified phone/tablet version of Honeycomb.
Of course, if Google drags this out, it's going to look back for their open source commitment. Thing is, they really don't have a choice, and there's no real indication they have any problem continuing with that. I think they're looking to use the Google + OEM development process for early development, rather than deal with outside input, at least unit they have 3.0.0 out on multiple devices.
Google's main revenue stream is advertising. Their main focus are web-based software technology products, particularly search. Much the same way that ABC or CBS also have a main revenue stream from advertising, but their main focus are entertainment video products.
Yup. And above 60GHz or so, air becomes opaque to RF. If Spectrum were really infinite, there wouldn't be billions spent on buying newly available frequencies... it would be far cheaper to develop higher frequency hardware. But physics is one of those uncorrectable things.. more money doesn't get you a break in the law.
It's not just spectrum that's the issue, but usable spectrum. The first big issue is free space path loss. For example, let's consider Verizon LTE at 700MHz versus Sprint WiMax at 2500MHz, just to keep with the theme of the topic. Based on the Friis equations, all things being otherwise equal, the Sprint link loses 100dB at 1km distance, while the Verison link loses 89dB... that's an 11dB advantage. That guy who won the 60GHz auction is at 128dB loss at the same distance... Verizon may not have the bandwidth one might be able to buy at 60Ghz, but they'll have a 39dB advantage in the field.
And it's worse than that, in practice. Most of these lower frequencies, lower UHF band stuff like Verizon and AT&T's LTE at 700MHz, do just dandy passing though foliage and buildings. Higher frequencies.. not so much. I work in digital radio design. My first generation RF technology was based on a semi-proprietary narrowband link for R/C and robot control (Nomadio Sensor and React on the commerical market, a thing called the "Bombot" which, along with a few other contracts, had our radios controlling more than half the robots in the early days of the Iraq war).
I have a 26 acre tree farm surrounding my house, so I did plenty of early testing there. The 2400MHz narrowband stuff we did could go 1500ft, but very line of sight. In testing from my back yard, I got great links up until the forest... maybe 100ft away. On another project, we were developing a customized 802.11 mesh network at 430MHz. So yeah, a bit more output power there, but the big win was that, from that same backyard deck, it didn't simply stop at the tree line, the very early prototypes did the half-mile to the country road behind my house. Through all that foliage.
So that's the deal here... most of the old UHF-TV band is prime, sweet, goes-through-trees spectrum. That's why those who don't have it will (the original 800Mhz AMPS bands took off the UHF channels up to 83 or so, the 700MHz band took those in the upper 60s... which was a good thing, given the lack of full use of the TV band anyway) want it.
For any of these auctions, there are rules that say the buyer must develop the spectrum within a certain time, or they get a shortened ownership, and, eventually, risk losing it entirely. The FCC isn't quite as stupid about this stuff as many (myself included) would have expected.
As in all things iTunes, Apple is always perfectly correct on every acceptance and rejection of software made available through the iTunes store. When you think there's a problem here, its you who are misinformed. An Apple Store Genius will be happy to assist you. Here, try these rose-tinted glasses, they will calm your raging mind. And have a tall, cool glass of Kool-Aid... you will soon be one with Lanrdu, er, Apple.
The original idea of copyright is a good one: time limited control of my creative works. This allows me to make a living on creative works. As bad as the music business is today, imagine no copyrights. I write a great new song, perform it a few times while I'm working out the kinks, saving up for studio time, etc. Before I know it, a large media conglomerate has used their performance scouts, on-staff musicians, and fully tricked out in-house studios to steal my song and release it nationally... before mine is even done. I have no legal recourse and, even if I do ultimately release my version, it's forever seen as the cover version.. and that big conglomerate makes a huge pile of money on my work, without me getting a dime.
Same thing with any application... I release a great new program that I'd hope will help keep me in the independent software business. It's very well regarded, I get good reviews on the pre-release, I have people lining up to buy it. And then, a week before release, I find that someone's hacked my server, and two days laters, Microsoft release the product under their name. And there's nothing I can do.. my version can still sell... no copyrights means no copyrights, but Microsoft will make millions, I'm lucky if my family members buy my version rather than Microsoft's.
No, the real problem with copyright is the perversion of it. And that's big business buying Congress, nothing less. Disney's one of the worst. A reasonable copyright on a song or software program is maybe in the 10-25 year range.. you can haggle about the specifics, but there's a normal life to any creative product, after which the value to me as the creator is probably small. It's still hard to argue the value to society is greater at any point, simply because society doesn't NEED my work at all. I may, just to put food on the table. But there's definitely a reasonable period of time here. Disney's crazy wealthy, and worried about "Steamboat Willy" being used in porn or something... so every time their copyrights come close to expiration, they send a semi-or-two of cash to Congress, and the copyright laws get amended. That's the real problem.
The other real problem is that there's no good means to log copyright abandonment. If a creative work is no longer valued by the original copyright holder, a good holder will put it in the public domain, re-release under GPL (more on this later), etc. But a bad, disinterested, or dissolved copyright holder won't do this. I had a question put to me last week... a guy has nearly every program for the Amiga computer system on a set of DVDs. What does he do? Well, that's all still under copyright, and other than a few programs released to some kind of FOSS, he can't do anything with that, despite that few if any of the copyright holders are liikely to care. And, thanks to Disney, we don't even know if his grandchildren can release those DVDs. So another big flaw in copyright is the lack of automatic loss. After 10 years or so, a copyright holder should have to re-assert their rights, or have the work put into the public domain. Particularly in the internet age, this puts no significant new burden on the copyright holder. Managing this wouldn't be expensive, and it would lead to a central repository of all copyright data... you could easily check to see if an older work was still under copyright, because those under copyright are listed in the renewal database.
And don't forget, GPL's "copyleft" is actually just another copyright. If there's no copyright law, there's no GPL... it's public domain, like BSD, all the way. I could take any GPLed work, mod it to my heart's content, and not release the source code changes. It's only the power of the copyright laws that enforce that. Many GPL users embrace the GNU philosophy and would release their code anyway, but there are plenty of big companies, building on GPL and FOSS, who do only because they must. And even without copyright, there's no mechanism at all that gets source code out in the world... code developers would simply be much more careful with their code propagation, knowing that any code that got out would be out for good. '
No.. most of that brand of conservative don't actually believe in trickle-down economics. And those that did, well, the Reagan and Bush experiments pretty much put to rest any lingering questions one might have had on that topic.
The Republican core goals have been the same pretty much since the 1960s -- eliminate the New Deal, "Starve the Beast" if you must (which Bush pretty much has, and Obama hasn't done anything serious to reverse), but kill it. Next, establish a permanent wealthy class, limit upward mobility by transferring more of the tax burden to the middle class.. or at least those in middle class you can't entirely eliminate.
Things like trickle-down economics are simply how you help sell this agenda to the masses. These things can only work if there's a way to get the average voter to vote against their economic self-interest. The core Republicans, the guys we think of as the old-school, pre-social-conservatism, Republicans.. they started the think tanks back in the late 1960s to work on this problem. They've been extremely good at it -- as much as the Democrats have helped them out. The Republicans frame the message, the Dems don't counterattack, they respond within the confines of the Republican message. As much as I'm against the Republican politics and social order itself, they more often than not do such a better job, selling the unsellable better than the Democrats sell what's ultimately good for 90%+ of the US.
The problem with a consumer-oriented (iPad/Xoom-like) Windows tablet is that, even if it's built without all those bugs, it still will inherently represent the lowest performance class of any Windows device. And even at that, the power consumption is going to be a problem (the tablet needs all-day battery life), apps are going to be a problem (most any existing Windows app will need a stylus or mouse), app size is a problem (I have one application on Windows that takes 20GB of HDD space... fairly daunting for a 32GB-64GB max tablet).
Of course the iPad was immediately useable.. it was a fastest-in-class iPod Touch, not a super scaled down desktop PC. You aren't going to do the same things with the same programs on the tablet as you do on the desktop, but what runs on any of these tablets will be device-appropriate.
Thing is, many if not most Android apps already work on higher resolution devices, even if they're not fully Honeycomb integrated. So while there are only a few Honeycomb-specific apps out yet, there are 100,000+ that work just dandy. This is not the situation you had last year, when the iPad debuted to a world of iOS apps that were all hard-wired for 480x320.
Actually, the Xoom may well have better hardware specs. Apple has mentioned they're dual core at 1GHz, but have not said if the iPad 2 is based on the Cortex A8 "Hummingbird" they got from Samsung, or whether it's using the newer and slightly faster A9. Apple's mum.
They have not spoke of memory... the Xoom has 1GB RAM, the iPad 2 by most estimations has 512MB. How about the relative performance of the graphics.. nVidia's is decent, but Apple may be using some standard core (PowerVR?) we haven't seen before... that's a good match up there, and one deftly avoided by this content-free "death match". The Xoom has a higher resolution screen... does Apple's use of IPS offset that advantage?
In short, there's plenty of stuff to compare.. things that can actually be measured. Why anyone thinks a 100% subjective review, particularly one with the gloves fully intact, is worth anyone's while, is beyond me.
But of course, you must know the latest "dustbuster" hard drives entirely eliminate the "digital dust" problem. The disc's rotational speed is modulated to hit the resonant frequency of digital dust (similar techniques are used to keep DSLR imagers clean), preventing any dust accumulation.
For archival, they also have electrostatic vaults now, which keep your hard drives safe in a temperature controlled environment, in a strong electrostatic field, that completely prevents the accumulation of digital dust. That dust, in fact, is harvested, and sold to companies like Apple and Microsoft. When incorporated into operating systems, this digital dust ensures that, over time, you start to hate that shiny new OS, and will convince yourself that you need the new version, despite there being any good reason for this upgrade.
Linux, curiously, contains no digital dust. There are occasional small self-generated bits of it, as with any large software project, but they tend to be quickly removed by the community. It's possible those are also sold off to Microsoft or Apple, but I have no specific knowledge on that.
Dude.. it's just audio. My entire MP3 directory, about 16,000 songs, tops out at around 60GB. That's like one hour of 1080/60p video in Cineform format (a popular editing format, for those not familiar). This isn't even a burden for my PS3 (there's a copy of all my MP3 stuff on my PS3), much less a decent PC. With 2TB drives at under $100 these days, most anyone's uncompressed + compressed audio needs will easily be met for not much cash.
You don't have infinite resolution in any analog medium... it's just a different limit. In digital, you think of resolution in terms of bitrate, sampling rate and resolution, etc. In analog, the limits are bandwidth and noise floor.
So, for example, RIAA compression. This boosts the high frequencies, because LPs are very lossy at high frequencies, and it cuts the lows, because LPs made with full amplitude low frequencies would run 10 minutes per side or less, and you'd have the tone arm skating across the disc every time a canon fired or a bass drum hit. That 20dB cut ensures that 20dB of low frequency audio is pushed down into the already high (as you mention) noise floor on the LP, never ever to be returned. It is gone for good, as is any other signal that's pushed into the local noise floor.
Some early CDs sounded like crap because they were mastered poorly. And there was such a rush to release, it was often worse than that. There were even a few cases of LP masters, RIAA compression and all, going directly onto CDs in the early days.
They've pretty much fixed that, these days. But there are still problems. For one, most popular music had heinous audio compression applied. No special reason, other than it makes it sound loud on radio and on your MP3 player, both situations where your room noise levels probably make compression not such a bad thing. But it shouldn't be in the original format you buy.
That's one practical advantage of LP these days -- when an LP is actually made today, the manufacturer knows the target is this weird class of audiophile who still worships at the LP alter. Or a DJ who hasn't discovered Serato discs yet. So they actually think before they master, they may not apply the nutty consumer compression, etc. Thus, LPs actually do sometimes sound better, on a very good system, than CDs, but for entirely the wrong reasons.
And you can also get that kind of attention on SACD, DVD-Audio, or Blu-ray... anything made for the audiophile/audiophoole market. And that's not a suggestion to buy $5,000 speaker cables or $25,000 turntables or other nut bag stuff.
And specking of that, don't forget SHM-CD. This is a bog standard CD using a new polycarbonate formulation or some such... or maybe they mix in the ghosts of dead musicians, not sure. Anyway, despite the obvious "bits are just bits" factor of any digital medium, this is (or at least was) all the rage in the Japanese audiophile community awhile back, and you can still find many SHM-CDs on Amazon and other music outlets... usually in the $30+ range. Audiophoole publications have claimed these sound as good as SACD on regular CD players (and given that they generally cost more than SACD or DVD-Audio, you'd kind of hope for that... but unless you believe in magic, don't).
The weird thing is... they often actually do sound better than regular CDs. For the same stupid reasons: these are in some cases being made with far better mixes... audio mixed for people who are going to listen on a high quality home stereo, not an iPod.
And that's the bottom line.. the mix is usually the limiting factor, not the medium.
CD audio is not as good as the best possible DVD audio (24-bit 182 kHz)
DVD Audio and Blu-ray audio can each support 24-bit and 192kHz sampling. Neither of which is "the best possible audio", but simply, the best commercially available audio. But there's certainly a point of diminishing returns... even 24-bit/48kHz is an improvement over 16-bit/44.1kHz... as you improve, the incrementals buy you less and less.
It's different when you record. I do all my recording in 24-bit/96kHz (my 88.2kHz if it's targeting CD only). Not because I need 10 or 15 tracks at 24-bit/96kHz to make a DVD or CD sound good, but so there's plenty of extra resolution for tweaking final levels to the CD. So while it's true that a professional studio might well be doing everything at 24-bit/176.4kHz or 24-bit/192kHz, it's not that useful in the final product -- the point is to keep everything at the highest possible quality throughout the mix.
CD audio is also not as good as LP audio; where the LP playback is done with a high quality pickup cartridge, and the playback is pristine (no record scratches, dust, vibration, hum, incorrect turntable setup, etc).
You mean that LP format that requires all sorts of heinous audio compression before being written to disc (eg, a 20dB cut in low frequencies -- which pushes audible sound down into the noise floor, never to return)... and all done, at least historically, via random analog filters. Even once they standardized on where to cut and boost the audio for mastering (the RIAA compression standard), there are variations from disc to disc and player to player.
Not to mention tracking errors on playback, unless you're paying serious green for a linear tracking turntable with ultra low mass cartridge. And a super low capacitance cartridge and wiring, so you don't eat up the high frequencies on the way to the preamp. And of course, you need that 10kg turntable, to avoid mechanical rumble and fluctuations. Some audiophiles spend more on their turntables than I did on my whole multitrack recording rig, including a over a dozen professional microphones. Or my car. I get better sound.
The big issue with FLAC isn't just player compatibility, but storage. I have a few 24-bit/96kHz FLAC-encoded albums, averaging over a gigabyte each in size. Unless you're using one of the hard-drive equipped Archos devices or something similar (if anyone else uses HDD anymore), you're not going to keep many albums on your player this way.
You're also probably listening via earbuds, maybe some better cans if you really care, but still... there's not that much need for the higher quality on a portable device. Unless you're using a Cowon device, you may not have the audio chops in the device hardware needed to get much better sound out of these files, either. But it's nice to know you can play that latest HDtracks download without the need to transcode.
And for those living in the 21rst century (dedicated audio players being so 1990s), FLAC is also supported in many Android media players.
You can lose considerable quality transcoding between different psychoacoustic compression models. In fact, it's usually much worse than generational compression using the same model, simply because you get weird random interactions between the models. Not everyone's going to hear this, but of course, some people were perfectly happy listening to 64kb/s WMA files, pre-echos and all.
But the models do improve, absolutely. The ability to re-compress stuff you ripped 15 years ago in the latest LAME encoder, for the player you're using now, is a great thing. That's a 10 minute setup and some off-line crunching if you have FLAC rips of your music; it's potentially months of random CD ripping if you don't.
And don't underestimate that last part, either. I actually DID re-rip my entire collection, many years ago. Not because of a format improvement (though I did re-rip at higher quality, still not FLAC back in those days, but back then, I didn't have an 8TB RAID either), but because my original music disc crashed, and I hadn't made backups. All my music in those days was CD rips, but I still had to start over... that's a huge investment in time. Don't forget about the backups, either... I currently have everything on Blu-ray backups, as well as MP3 versions of all music on my PS3's HDD (would be nice to automate that part).
Indeed... music pricing ought to be based on quality and transportability, nothing more. CD is the base-level standard if you actually care about quality; the market has generally demonstrated that most people do not.
Amazon's sales model is a decent one: downloads in 256kb/s MP3 are generally a couple bucks cheaper than the CD, if you buy by the album. Neither format is device-specific. And yeah, they could add FLAC and offer the CD quality without the disc media, but at the same price, I still like the CD -- free backup media with a nice label.
The big promise of FLAC is finally getting past the CD in terms of quality. They've tried... but the format wars doomed both DVD-Audio and SACD to the fringe. And while most of the high-end audio stuff going forward may be on Blu-ray, there's no guarantee that Blu-ray audio will catch on any better. But companies like HDtracks are already offering selected music in 24-bit and high-sampling (88.2kHz up to 192kHz) via FLAC downloads. And just as important for popular music, this is often sold without the overcompression (audio compression, not format compression) that's typically and increasingly applied to popular music. It's mostly classical and very classic rock albums at this point, but it's a start.
Unfortunately, the set of people who care about such higher quality audio is small enough that you're not going to be buying all your music this way, unless you live in a very weird space, musically.
Ok.. I probably deserve this for watching "Date Night"... horrible film. Why does Tina Fey act in any film she didn't write?
But anyway... not terribly unique "regular people drawn into a caper" comedy. There's a fundamental plot point that requires a USB stick being plugged into a Kindle (a little too obvious on the product placement). That can't happen.. no USB host port on a Kindle. Sorry, I'm a hardware guy, that was the final straw that made me hate the film (it had progress toward that hate by then already, even though I usually like just about anything with Fey or Steve Carell).
The iPod Touch isn't an MP3 player, or PMP. It's a PDA, which of course includes music and video apps. Only two of the devices you called out are PMPs, none of them are PDAs, and the iPod Touch certainly has a much better screen.
"Best" is never a complete formula for market success, much less dominance. Apple does ok in the war of technology. They have recently proven succesful at re-inventing (and thus re-invigorating) multiple product categories: MP3 player, smart phone, PDA, tablet computer. This is always coupled with the support system of the various Apple stores. That was the key factor that not only pushed the expensive iPod above other MP3 players, but also locked them in. They gave up on music lock-in, but kept it with video, applications, and now ebooks.
But just ok. Once the rest of these markets move forward, Apple has trouble keeping their technology current. Or they just don't care all that much. Most of the iPhone models were nothing that cutting edge. The iPad 2 is outperformed by a large segment of the existing or soon-out (shown at CES) tablets of 2010 and 2011.
But they've been spectacular at winning two other parts of the battle: the war for minds and the war for money. Apple has more die-hard crazy nut "faithful" fans than most other platforms. Combined. Many are in the press... there are countless articles about how other companies can't possible compete with the iPad, how no one else is producing tablets with WiFi only, etc.... and they support this by only discussing tablet companies (Samsung, Motorola) who are not competing on price, while ignoring others (Archos, Viewsonic, etc... ok, no need to mention the 37 Chinese companies making cheap but virtually useless hardware) who don't fit their thesis (Archos, for example, sells a 10" Android tablet, Wifi only, with specs similar to the iPad, starting at under $200... Android 2.2 isn't ideal for a tablet, but 3.0 or Maemo, and you have a pretty nice solution).
Android is currently demonstrating to consumers the same thing MS-DOS and Windows did back in the day.... ubiquity matters. If the average person walks into the store and sees one system on a dozen devices of all different flavors, with a few others on only one or two devices, they need some special reason to go to the one that's not being used everywhere. And they never see the system, Maemo or MeeGo or whatever, that never even made it into the store. Apple's winning a large part of the war on consumer mindset helps get around that one-size-fits-all problem, at least for enough customers to keep them selling underfeatured hardware at inflated prices... maybe 20% of a market, but 50% of the profits. I think they're good with that. Apple's early entry also means that plenty of that customer's friends may have Apple devices. But in a short while, most of the people that consumer knows will have Android devices -- that's the way the market's been heading. HP and RIM, despite the two oldest remaining brand in the smartphone business, have an uphill climb now, particularly with consumers.
And none of that really touches up which systems are great and which are awful. And, as in the case of Apple and iOS, you and I rate such a system "awful" for reasons the general buying public don't fully understand, much less factor into their buying decisions. I was sold on Android before I saw it, simply based on "Google" + "Open Source". It's not perfect, but my original Droid is the best smartphone/PDA I've owned.
-- sometimes they introduce a product (like the iPhone 4) that's ahead
1000 cycles is pretty typical for full cycling of Li-ion polymer cells. And if you don't full cycle them, they're bound to last longer. Early Li-ion cells lost long-term capacity when stored at full charge and at room temperature, but that's not true of many modern cells.
There are actually much longer lasting cells available today, but not in the Li-poly technology that enables these really thin Apple devices. Some of those, like those with lithium iron phosphate cathodes, trade some energy density for a much longer life.
The life of NiMh and Li-ion/Li-ion-poly is determined by a number of things. In all cases, the batteries last longer if you short-cycle them... never run it all the way to "full", never run it all the way to empty (a Li-ion cell can't actually be emptied, anyway, without causing destruction). Some chemistries lose capacity when keep full for long periods of time, others don't. All have a rated cell life, which is based on full charge/discharge cycles: about 1000 cycles for a common NiMh cell, 400-6000 for Li-ion, depending on chemistry, and about 1,000 for the more recent Li-poly cells. There's been lots of work, recently, on different anode and cathode materials to extend battery life. For example, Toshiba's Super Charge Ion Battey, which uses some sort of nano-engineered Lithium-Titanate on the anode, instead of carbon (one of the sources of heating during charge/discharge). These are claimed at over 6,000 rapid charge/discharge cycles.
Cell balancing in multi-cell batteries (anything over 3.6V) is also a life-prolonging technique. This ensures that each cell gets fully charged without overcharging, on every recharge cycle.
The charge cycle is also important for maintaining life. NiMh are relatively easy to charge, but they'll die sooner if allowed to heat too much. Hybrid cars using NiMh typically have a means of cooling the cells, and will also cut off their use when the temperatures rise too much. Li-ion cells have a more complex charging cycle, where the charger needs to switch off between constant current and constant voltage charging... avoiding heat is also key.
Apple gets the same cells everyone else can use -- they're not a battery company. But they have spent more time than most manufacturers tweaking their power savings and charging cycle -- that's their only claim to "special sauce" in the battery department, other than moving to Li-ion polymer for all products, despite these being slightly more expensive than run-of-the-mill li-ion. Another reason they get good battery life: LED backlights on all devices, and larger cells than in many competitive devices. They also stick to low or medium performance graphics devices.. fastest available today is the AMD Radeon HD 6750M.
And the final reason: larger batteries. The MacBook Pro these days includes a 77.5Wh battery on the 15" model and 95Whr on the 17" model.Most 15" laptops include a 40-50Wh cell. iPads sport 25Whr cells.... the top tablets are so similar in hardware these days, don't expect anything with a lower battery capacity to rival the iPad. And it's likely HP, RIM, and Android still have some power savings software to tweak.
That was the real problem. Nearly all PCs shipping in the couple of years before the Bondi blue iMac had USB ports. They didn't need them, there were pretty much no peripherals, etc. The big reason was that Microsoft didn't bother to support USB in WIndows 95. Even Windows 98 support was kind of joke. You really had to wait for Windows 98SE before USB was well supported on the PC.
And yeah, as the only form of expansion, the iMac helped all those USB chip developers justify their expenses, given the 5+ year gap between hardware ubiquity and software support. Microsoft did the same thing with Firewire... twice. The story they told was that you would need Windows 98 to use Firewire. But it didn't work properly in 98 or 98SE... it wasn't until Windows 2000 that it was a functional interface for everyday camcorder capture, as a built-in. Sure, some companies with their own hardware and custom driver solutions were up and running before that.
Microsoft had a long standing habit of using new device drivers to force OS upgrades. None of these things should have been anything but an automatic, free update. Particularly given the very tiny number of users for these things, back in the day.
Apple's "innovation" did have a big positive effect on USB, though. It was looking as if USB 1.x would be the go-to standard for low-speed interfaces, while Firewire would be for high-speed things. Then Apple got greedy, and decided there should be a $1.00 per port royalty on Firewire. This got Intel to stop developing Firewire as a built-in, and instead lead the charge for USB 2.0 as a replacement. Which it wasn't -- entirely... you still couldn't use USB 2.0 for video capture. But that was solved by the camcorders themselves.... works fine when you change from a dumb tape drive to computer-style random file system storage.
While I generally agree... if you look at things just so, they actually are showing science fiction... just unorthodox types. For example, WWE is clearly fiction.. the "science" part.. well, most actual sports these days have a strong scientific element behind the scenes. Boxing is even known as "the sweet science".. the art/science of getting your opponent to tire himself out, without getting yourself clobbered in the process. And then there's this "Ghost Hunters"... a fictionalized account of a couple of guys employing [bad] scientific methods to find ghosts, presented in the "scripted reality" format.
Ok.... you're correct. This used to be a great channel, and it sucks more every year.
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We'll see. So far, this is Google's standard operating procedure for any major release, and even some minor ones.
In the past, as now, they partnered with exactly one OEM, on one hardware platform, for the new release. For Honeycomb, this was Motorola and the Xoom tablet, and sure, Motorola most likely paid for the special treatment. But this is smart on Google's part -- they have exactly one platform to worry about, and they have direct involvement from that hardware's developer.
On the day the Xoom shipped, the other major OEMs got access to the Honeycomb source code. This is the same thing Google did before... OEMs had the source weeks or even months before it went hot on source.android.com.
Presumably, after some time between Google and the OEMs, they'll put the Honeycomb source out for everyone else. This is the same progression that happened in the past, though definitely looks like it's going to take longer. Could be that they're waiting for more tablet ports to be done (with bug feedback), could be they're foot-dragging until "Ice-Cream" is completed, which is widely rumored to be the unified phone/tablet version of Honeycomb.
Of course, if Google drags this out, it's going to look back for their open source commitment. Thing is, they really don't have a choice, and there's no real indication they have any problem continuing with that. I think they're looking to use the Google + OEM development process for early development, rather than deal with outside input, at least unit they have 3.0.0 out on multiple devices.
Google's main revenue stream is advertising. Their main focus are web-based software technology products, particularly search. Much the same way that ABC or CBS also have a main revenue stream from advertising, but their main focus are entertainment video products.
Yup. And above 60GHz or so, air becomes opaque to RF. If Spectrum were really infinite, there wouldn't be billions spent on buying newly available frequencies... it would be far cheaper to develop higher frequency hardware. But physics is one of those uncorrectable things.. more money doesn't get you a break in the law.
It's not just spectrum that's the issue, but usable spectrum. The first big issue is free space path loss. For example, let's consider Verizon LTE at 700MHz versus Sprint WiMax at 2500MHz, just to keep with the theme of the topic. Based on the Friis equations, all things being otherwise equal, the Sprint link loses 100dB at 1km distance, while the Verison link loses 89dB... that's an 11dB advantage. That guy who won the 60GHz auction is at 128dB loss at the same distance... Verizon may not have the bandwidth one might be able to buy at 60Ghz, but they'll have a 39dB advantage in the field.
And it's worse than that, in practice. Most of these lower frequencies, lower UHF band stuff like Verizon and AT&T's LTE at 700MHz, do just dandy passing though foliage and buildings. Higher frequencies.. not so much. I work in digital radio design. My first generation RF technology was based on a semi-proprietary narrowband link for R/C and robot control (Nomadio Sensor and React on the commerical market, a thing called the "Bombot" which, along with a few other contracts, had our radios controlling more than half the robots in the early days of the Iraq war).
I have a 26 acre tree farm surrounding my house, so I did plenty of early testing there. The 2400MHz narrowband stuff we did could go 1500ft, but very line of sight. In testing from my back yard, I got great links up until the forest... maybe 100ft away. On another project, we were developing a customized 802.11 mesh network at 430MHz. So yeah, a bit more output power there, but the big win was that, from that same backyard deck, it didn't simply stop at the tree line, the very early prototypes did the half-mile to the country road behind my house. Through all that foliage.
So that's the deal here... most of the old UHF-TV band is prime, sweet, goes-through-trees spectrum. That's why those who don't have it will (the original 800Mhz AMPS bands took off the UHF channels up to 83 or so, the 700MHz band took those in the upper 60s... which was a good thing, given the lack of full use of the TV band anyway) want it.
For any of these auctions, there are rules that say the buyer must develop the spectrum within a certain time, or they get a shortened ownership, and, eventually, risk losing it entirely. The FCC isn't quite as stupid about this stuff as many (myself included) would have expected.
As in all things iTunes, Apple is always perfectly correct on every acceptance and rejection of software made available through the iTunes store. When you think there's a problem here, its you who are misinformed. An Apple Store Genius will be happy to assist you. Here, try these rose-tinted glasses, they will calm your raging mind. And have a tall, cool glass of Kool-Aid... you will soon be one with Lanrdu, er, Apple.
The original idea of copyright is a good one: time limited control of my creative works. This allows me to make a living on creative works. As bad as the music business is today, imagine no copyrights. I write a great new song, perform it a few times while I'm working out the kinks, saving up for studio time, etc. Before I know it, a large media conglomerate has used their performance scouts, on-staff musicians, and fully tricked out in-house studios to steal my song and release it nationally... before mine is even done. I have no legal recourse and, even if I do ultimately release my version, it's forever seen as the cover version.. and that big conglomerate makes a huge pile of money on my work, without me getting a dime.
Same thing with any application... I release a great new program that I'd hope will help keep me in the independent software business. It's very well regarded, I get good reviews on the pre-release, I have people lining up to buy it. And then, a week before release, I find that someone's hacked my server, and two days laters, Microsoft release the product under their name. And there's nothing I can do.. my version can still sell... no copyrights means no copyrights, but Microsoft will make millions, I'm lucky if my family members buy my version rather than Microsoft's.
No, the real problem with copyright is the perversion of it. And that's big business buying Congress, nothing less. Disney's one of the worst. A reasonable copyright on a song or software program is maybe in the 10-25 year range.. you can haggle about the specifics, but there's a normal life to any creative product, after which the value to me as the creator is probably small. It's still hard to argue the value to society is greater at any point, simply because society doesn't NEED my work at all. I may, just to put food on the table. But there's definitely a reasonable period of time here. Disney's crazy wealthy, and worried about "Steamboat Willy" being used in porn or something... so every time their copyrights come close to expiration, they send a semi-or-two of cash to Congress, and the copyright laws get amended. That's the real problem.
The other real problem is that there's no good means to log copyright abandonment. If a creative work is no longer valued by the original copyright holder, a good holder will put it in the public domain, re-release under GPL (more on this later), etc. But a bad, disinterested, or dissolved copyright holder won't do this. I had a question put to me last week... a guy has nearly every program for the Amiga computer system on a set of DVDs. What does he do? Well, that's all still under copyright, and other than a few programs released to some kind of FOSS, he can't do anything with that, despite that few if any of the copyright holders are liikely to care. And, thanks to Disney, we don't even know if his grandchildren can release those DVDs. So another big flaw in copyright is the lack of automatic loss. After 10 years or so, a copyright holder should have to re-assert their rights, or have the work put into the public domain. Particularly in the internet age, this puts no significant new burden on the copyright holder. Managing this wouldn't be expensive, and it would lead to a central repository of all copyright data... you could easily check to see if an older work was still under copyright, because those under copyright are listed in the renewal database.
And don't forget, GPL's "copyleft" is actually just another copyright. If there's no copyright law, there's no GPL... it's public domain, like BSD, all the way. I could take any GPLed work, mod it to my heart's content, and not release the source code changes. It's only the power of the copyright laws that enforce that. Many GPL users embrace the GNU philosophy and would release their code anyway, but there are plenty of big companies, building on GPL and FOSS, who do only because they must. And even without copyright, there's no mechanism at all that gets source code out in the world... code developers would simply be much more careful with their code propagation, knowing that any code that got out would be out for good.
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No.. most of that brand of conservative don't actually believe in trickle-down economics. And those that did, well, the Reagan and Bush experiments pretty much put to rest any lingering questions one might have had on that topic.
The Republican core goals have been the same pretty much since the 1960s -- eliminate the New Deal, "Starve the Beast" if you must (which Bush pretty much has, and Obama hasn't done anything serious to reverse), but kill it. Next, establish a permanent wealthy class, limit upward mobility by transferring more of the tax burden to the middle class.. or at least those in middle class you can't entirely eliminate.
Things like trickle-down economics are simply how you help sell this agenda to the masses. These things can only work if there's a way to get the average voter to vote against their economic self-interest. The core Republicans, the guys we think of as the old-school, pre-social-conservatism, Republicans.. they started the think tanks back in the late 1960s to work on this problem. They've been extremely good at it -- as much as the Democrats have helped them out. The Republicans frame the message, the Dems don't counterattack, they respond within the confines of the Republican message. As much as I'm against the Republican politics and social order itself, they more often than not do such a better job, selling the unsellable better than the Democrats sell what's ultimately good for 90%+ of the US.
The problem with a consumer-oriented (iPad/Xoom-like) Windows tablet is that, even if it's built without all those bugs, it still will inherently represent the lowest performance class of any Windows device. And even at that, the power consumption is going to be a problem (the tablet needs all-day battery life), apps are going to be a problem (most any existing Windows app will need a stylus or mouse), app size is a problem (I have one application on Windows that takes 20GB of HDD space... fairly daunting for a 32GB-64GB max tablet).
Of course the iPad was immediately useable.. it was a fastest-in-class iPod Touch, not a super scaled down desktop PC. You aren't going to do the same things with the same programs on the tablet as you do on the desktop, but what runs on any of these tablets will be device-appropriate.
Thing is, many if not most Android apps already work on higher resolution devices, even if they're not fully Honeycomb integrated. So while there are only a few Honeycomb-specific apps out yet, there are 100,000+ that work just dandy. This is not the situation you had last year, when the iPad debuted to a world of iOS apps that were all hard-wired for 480x320.
Actually, the Xoom may well have better hardware specs. Apple has mentioned they're dual core at 1GHz, but have not said if the iPad 2 is based on the Cortex A8 "Hummingbird" they got from Samsung, or whether it's using the newer and slightly faster A9. Apple's mum.
They have not spoke of memory... the Xoom has 1GB RAM, the iPad 2 by most estimations has 512MB. How about the relative performance of the graphics.. nVidia's is decent, but Apple may be using some standard core (PowerVR?) we haven't seen before... that's a good match up there, and one deftly avoided by this content-free "death match". The Xoom has a higher resolution screen... does Apple's use of IPS offset that advantage?
In short, there's plenty of stuff to compare.. things that can actually be measured. Why anyone thinks a 100% subjective review, particularly one with the gloves fully intact, is worth anyone's while, is beyond me.
But of course, you must know the latest "dustbuster" hard drives entirely eliminate the "digital dust" problem. The disc's rotational speed is modulated to hit the resonant frequency of digital dust (similar techniques are used to keep DSLR imagers clean), preventing any dust accumulation.
For archival, they also have electrostatic vaults now, which keep your hard drives safe in a temperature controlled environment, in a strong electrostatic field, that completely prevents the accumulation of digital dust. That dust, in fact, is harvested, and sold to companies like Apple and Microsoft. When incorporated into operating systems, this digital dust ensures that, over time, you start to hate that shiny new OS, and will convince yourself that you need the new version, despite there being any good reason for this upgrade.
Linux, curiously, contains no digital dust. There are occasional small self-generated bits of it, as with any large software project, but they tend to be quickly removed by the community. It's possible those are also sold off to Microsoft or Apple, but I have no specific knowledge on that.
Dude.. it's just audio. My entire MP3 directory, about 16,000 songs, tops out at around 60GB. That's like one hour of 1080/60p video in Cineform format (a popular editing format, for those not familiar). This isn't even a burden for my PS3 (there's a copy of all my MP3 stuff on my PS3), much less a decent PC. With 2TB drives at under $100 these days, most anyone's uncompressed + compressed audio needs will easily be met for not much cash.
You don't have infinite resolution in any analog medium... it's just a different limit. In digital, you think of resolution in terms of bitrate, sampling rate and resolution, etc. In analog, the limits are bandwidth and noise floor.
So, for example, RIAA compression. This boosts the high frequencies, because LPs are very lossy at high frequencies, and it cuts the lows, because LPs made with full amplitude low frequencies would run 10 minutes per side or less, and you'd have the tone arm skating across the disc every time a canon fired or a bass drum hit. That 20dB cut ensures that 20dB of low frequency audio is pushed down into the already high (as you mention) noise floor on the LP, never ever to be returned. It is gone for good, as is any other signal that's pushed into the local noise floor.
Some early CDs sounded like crap because they were mastered poorly. And there was such a rush to release, it was often worse than that. There were even a few cases of LP masters, RIAA compression and all, going directly onto CDs in the early days.
They've pretty much fixed that, these days. But there are still problems. For one, most popular music had heinous audio compression applied. No special reason, other than it makes it sound loud on radio and on your MP3 player, both situations where your room noise levels probably make compression not such a bad thing. But it shouldn't be in the original format you buy.
That's one practical advantage of LP these days -- when an LP is actually made today, the manufacturer knows the target is this weird class of audiophile who still worships at the LP alter. Or a DJ who hasn't discovered Serato discs yet. So they actually think before they master, they may not apply the nutty consumer compression, etc. Thus, LPs actually do sometimes sound better, on a very good system, than CDs, but for entirely the wrong reasons.
And you can also get that kind of attention on SACD, DVD-Audio, or Blu-ray... anything made for the audiophile/audiophoole market. And that's not a suggestion to buy $5,000 speaker cables or $25,000 turntables or other nut bag stuff.
And specking of that, don't forget SHM-CD. This is a bog standard CD using a new polycarbonate formulation or some such... or maybe they mix in the ghosts of dead musicians, not sure. Anyway, despite the obvious "bits are just bits" factor of any digital medium, this is (or at least was) all the rage in the Japanese audiophile community awhile back, and you can still find many SHM-CDs on Amazon and other music outlets... usually in the $30+ range. Audiophoole publications have claimed these sound as good as SACD on regular CD players (and given that they generally cost more than SACD or DVD-Audio, you'd kind of hope for that... but unless you believe in magic, don't).
The weird thing is... they often actually do sound better than regular CDs. For the same stupid reasons: these are in some cases being made with far better mixes... audio mixed for people who are going to listen on a high quality home stereo, not an iPod.
And that's the bottom line.. the mix is usually the limiting factor, not the medium.
CD audio is not as good as the best possible DVD audio (24-bit 182 kHz)
DVD Audio and Blu-ray audio can each support 24-bit and 192kHz sampling. Neither of which is "the best possible audio", but simply, the best commercially available audio. But there's certainly a point of diminishing returns... even 24-bit/48kHz is an improvement over 16-bit/44.1kHz... as you improve, the incrementals buy you less and less.
It's different when you record. I do all my recording in 24-bit/96kHz (my 88.2kHz if it's targeting CD only). Not because I need 10 or 15 tracks at 24-bit/96kHz to make a DVD or CD sound good, but so there's plenty of extra resolution for tweaking final levels to the CD. So while it's true that a professional studio might well be doing everything at 24-bit/176.4kHz or 24-bit/192kHz, it's not that useful in the final product -- the point is to keep everything at the highest possible quality throughout the mix.
CD audio is also not as good as LP audio; where the LP playback is done with a high quality pickup cartridge, and the playback is pristine (no record scratches, dust, vibration, hum, incorrect turntable setup, etc).
You mean that LP format that requires all sorts of heinous audio compression before being written to disc (eg, a 20dB cut in low frequencies -- which pushes audible sound down into the noise floor, never to return)... and all done, at least historically, via random analog filters. Even once they standardized on where to cut and boost the audio for mastering (the RIAA compression standard), there are variations from disc to disc and player to player.
Not to mention tracking errors on playback, unless you're paying serious green for a linear tracking turntable with ultra low mass cartridge. And a super low capacitance cartridge and wiring, so you don't eat up the high frequencies on the way to the preamp. And of course, you need that 10kg turntable, to avoid mechanical rumble and fluctuations. Some audiophiles spend more on their turntables than I did on my whole multitrack recording rig, including a over a dozen professional microphones. Or my car. I get better sound.
No thanks.
The big issue with FLAC isn't just player compatibility, but storage. I have a few 24-bit/96kHz FLAC-encoded albums, averaging over a gigabyte each in size. Unless you're using one of the hard-drive equipped Archos devices or something similar (if anyone else uses HDD anymore), you're not going to keep many albums on your player this way.
You're also probably listening via earbuds, maybe some better cans if you really care, but still... there's not that much need for the higher quality on a portable device. Unless you're using a Cowon device, you may not have the audio chops in the device hardware needed to get much better sound out of these files, either. But it's nice to know you can play that latest HDtracks download without the need to transcode.
And for those living in the 21rst century (dedicated audio players being so 1990s), FLAC is also supported in many Android media players.
You can lose considerable quality transcoding between different psychoacoustic compression models. In fact, it's usually much worse than generational compression using the same model, simply because you get weird random interactions between the models. Not everyone's going to hear this, but of course, some people were perfectly happy listening to 64kb/s WMA files, pre-echos and all.
But the models do improve, absolutely. The ability to re-compress stuff you ripped 15 years ago in the latest LAME encoder, for the player you're using now, is a great thing. That's a 10 minute setup and some off-line crunching if you have FLAC rips of your music; it's potentially months of random CD ripping if you don't.
And don't underestimate that last part, either. I actually DID re-rip my entire collection, many years ago. Not because of a format improvement (though I did re-rip at higher quality, still not FLAC back in those days, but back then, I didn't have an 8TB RAID either), but because my original music disc crashed, and I hadn't made backups. All my music in those days was CD rips, but I still had to start over... that's a huge investment in time. Don't forget about the backups, either... I currently have everything on Blu-ray backups, as well as MP3 versions of all music on my PS3's HDD (would be nice to automate that part).
Indeed... music pricing ought to be based on quality and transportability, nothing more. CD is the base-level standard if you actually care about quality; the market has generally demonstrated that most people do not.
Amazon's sales model is a decent one: downloads in 256kb/s MP3 are generally a couple bucks cheaper than the CD, if you buy by the album. Neither format is device-specific. And yeah, they could add FLAC and offer the CD quality without the disc media, but at the same price, I still like the CD -- free backup media with a nice label.
The big promise of FLAC is finally getting past the CD in terms of quality. They've tried... but the format wars doomed both DVD-Audio and SACD to the fringe. And while most of the high-end audio stuff going forward may be on Blu-ray, there's no guarantee that Blu-ray audio will catch on any better. But companies like HDtracks are already offering selected music in 24-bit and high-sampling (88.2kHz up to 192kHz) via FLAC downloads. And just as important for popular music, this is often sold without the overcompression (audio compression, not format compression) that's typically and increasingly applied to popular music. It's mostly classical and very classic rock albums at this point, but it's a start.
Unfortunately, the set of people who care about such higher quality audio is small enough that you're not going to be buying all your music this way, unless you live in a very weird space, musically.
Ok.. I probably deserve this for watching "Date Night" ... horrible film. Why does Tina Fey act in any film she didn't write?
But anyway... not terribly unique "regular people drawn into a caper" comedy. There's a fundamental plot point that requires a USB stick being plugged into a Kindle (a little too obvious on the product placement). That can't happen.. no USB host port on a Kindle. Sorry, I'm a hardware guy, that was the final straw that made me hate the film (it had progress toward that hate by then already, even though I usually like just about anything with Fey or Steve Carell).
Apple has long been evil. So the real question: Are they turning into an Empire? Market-share-wise, no. Cash-wise, maybe.
The iPod Touch isn't an MP3 player, or PMP. It's a PDA, which of course includes music and video apps. Only two of the devices you called out are PMPs, none of them are PDAs, and the iPod Touch certainly has a much better screen.
These are far more the same kind of thing (eg, PMP/PDA, with Wifi):
http://www.amazon.com/ARCHOS-32-3-2-Inch-Touchscreen-Android/dp/B003X26VNM/ref=sr_1_11?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1299526746&sr=1-11
http://www.amazon.com/Archos-43-Internet-Tablet-Black/dp/B0042RRTOC/ref=sr_1_22?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1299526746&sr=1-22
"Best" is never a complete formula for market success, much less dominance. Apple does ok in the war of technology. They have recently proven succesful at re-inventing (and thus re-invigorating) multiple product categories: MP3 player, smart phone, PDA, tablet computer. This is always coupled with the support system of the various Apple stores. That was the key factor that not only pushed the expensive iPod above other MP3 players, but also locked them in. They gave up on music lock-in, but kept it with video, applications, and now ebooks.
But just ok. Once the rest of these markets move forward, Apple has trouble keeping their technology current. Or they just don't care all that much. Most of the iPhone models were nothing that cutting edge. The iPad 2 is outperformed by a large segment of the existing or soon-out (shown at CES) tablets of 2010 and 2011.
But they've been spectacular at winning two other parts of the battle: the war for minds and the war for money. Apple has more die-hard crazy nut "faithful" fans than most other platforms. Combined. Many are in the press... there are countless articles about how other companies can't possible compete with the iPad, how no one else is producing tablets with WiFi only, etc.... and they support this by only discussing tablet companies (Samsung, Motorola) who are not competing on price, while ignoring others (Archos, Viewsonic, etc... ok, no need to mention the 37 Chinese companies making cheap but virtually useless hardware) who don't fit their thesis (Archos, for example, sells a 10" Android tablet, Wifi only, with specs similar to the iPad, starting at under $200... Android 2.2 isn't ideal for a tablet, but 3.0 or Maemo, and you have a pretty nice solution).
Android is currently demonstrating to consumers the same thing MS-DOS and Windows did back in the day.... ubiquity matters. If the average person walks into the store and sees one system on a dozen devices of all different flavors, with a few others on only one or two devices, they need some special reason to go to the one that's not being used everywhere. And they never see the system, Maemo or MeeGo or whatever, that never even made it into the store. Apple's winning a large part of the war on consumer mindset helps get around that one-size-fits-all problem, at least for enough customers to keep them selling underfeatured hardware at inflated prices... maybe 20% of a market, but 50% of the profits. I think they're good with that. Apple's early entry also means that plenty of that customer's friends may have Apple devices. But in a short while, most of the people that consumer knows will have Android devices -- that's the way the market's been heading. HP and RIM, despite the two oldest remaining brand in the smartphone business, have an uphill climb now, particularly with consumers.
And none of that really touches up which systems are great and which are awful. And, as in the case of Apple and iOS, you and I rate such a system "awful" for reasons the general buying public don't fully understand, much less factor into their buying decisions. I was sold on Android before I saw it, simply based on "Google" + "Open Source". It's not perfect, but my original Droid is the best smartphone/PDA I've owned.
-- sometimes they introduce a product (like the iPhone 4) that's ahead
1000 cycles is pretty typical for full cycling of Li-ion polymer cells. And if you don't full cycle them, they're bound to last longer. Early Li-ion cells lost long-term capacity when stored at full charge and at room temperature, but that's not true of many modern cells.
There are actually much longer lasting cells available today, but not in the Li-poly technology that enables these really thin Apple devices. Some of those, like those with lithium iron phosphate cathodes, trade some energy density for a much longer life.
The life of NiMh and Li-ion/Li-ion-poly is determined by a number of things. In all cases, the batteries last longer if you short-cycle them... never run it all the way to "full", never run it all the way to empty (a Li-ion cell can't actually be emptied, anyway, without causing destruction). Some chemistries lose capacity when keep full for long periods of time, others don't. All have a rated cell life, which is based on full charge/discharge cycles: about 1000 cycles for a common NiMh cell, 400-6000 for Li-ion, depending on chemistry, and about 1,000 for the more recent Li-poly cells. There's been lots of work, recently, on different anode and cathode materials to extend battery life. For example, Toshiba's Super Charge Ion Battey, which uses some sort of nano-engineered Lithium-Titanate on the anode, instead of carbon (one of the sources of heating during charge/discharge). These are claimed at over 6,000 rapid charge/discharge cycles.
Cell balancing in multi-cell batteries (anything over 3.6V) is also a life-prolonging technique. This ensures that each cell gets fully charged without overcharging, on every recharge cycle.
The charge cycle is also important for maintaining life. NiMh are relatively easy to charge, but they'll die sooner if allowed to heat too much. Hybrid cars using NiMh typically have a means of cooling the cells, and will also cut off their use when the temperatures rise too much. Li-ion cells have a more complex charging cycle, where the charger needs to switch off between constant current and constant voltage charging... avoiding heat is also key.
Apple gets the same cells everyone else can use -- they're not a battery company. But they have spent more time than most manufacturers tweaking their power savings and charging cycle -- that's their only claim to "special sauce" in the battery department, other than moving to Li-ion polymer for all products, despite these being slightly more expensive than run-of-the-mill li-ion. Another reason they get good battery life: LED backlights on all devices, and larger cells than in many competitive devices. They also stick to low or medium performance graphics devices.. fastest available today is the AMD Radeon HD 6750M.
And the final reason: larger batteries. The MacBook Pro these days includes a 77.5Wh battery on the 15" model and 95Whr on the 17" model.Most 15" laptops include a 40-50Wh cell. iPads sport 25Whr cells.... the top tablets are so similar in hardware these days, don't expect anything with a lower battery capacity to rival the iPad. And it's likely HP, RIM, and Android still have some power savings software to tweak.
That was the real problem. Nearly all PCs shipping in the couple of years before the Bondi blue iMac had USB ports. They didn't need them, there were pretty much no peripherals, etc. The big reason was that Microsoft didn't bother to support USB in WIndows 95. Even Windows 98 support was kind of joke. You really had to wait for Windows 98SE before USB was well supported on the PC.
And yeah, as the only form of expansion, the iMac helped all those USB chip developers justify their expenses, given the 5+ year gap between hardware ubiquity and software support. Microsoft did the same thing with Firewire... twice. The story they told was that you would need Windows 98 to use Firewire. But it didn't work properly in 98 or 98SE... it wasn't until Windows 2000 that it was a functional interface for everyday camcorder capture, as a built-in. Sure, some companies with their own hardware and custom driver solutions were up and running before that.
Microsoft had a long standing habit of using new device drivers to force OS upgrades. None of these things should have been anything but an automatic, free update. Particularly given the very tiny number of users for these things, back in the day.
Apple's "innovation" did have a big positive effect on USB, though. It was looking as if USB 1.x would be the go-to standard for low-speed interfaces, while Firewire would be for high-speed things. Then Apple got greedy, and decided there should be a $1.00 per port royalty on Firewire. This got Intel to stop developing Firewire as a built-in, and instead lead the charge for USB 2.0 as a replacement. Which it wasn't -- entirely... you still couldn't use USB 2.0 for video capture. But that was solved by the camcorders themselves.... works fine when you change from a dumb tape drive to computer-style random file system storage.
No even the actual CPU's name... an Apple marketing term for a series of Motorola/IBM CPUs.
Or maybe "Games, Geeks, Gadgets, and Gear" or something of that ilk.
While I generally agree... if you look at things just so, they actually are showing science fiction... just unorthodox types. For example, WWE is clearly fiction.. the "science" part.. well, most actual sports these days have a strong scientific element behind the scenes. Boxing is even known as "the sweet science".. the art/science of getting your opponent to tire himself out, without getting yourself clobbered in the process. And then there's this "Ghost Hunters"... a fictionalized account of a couple of guys employing [bad] scientific methods to find ghosts, presented in the "scripted reality" format.
Ok.... you're correct. This used to be a great channel, and it sucks more every year.