Yeah, you have it entirely right in the first sentence... "to big to fail" doesn't exist. So big that someone (probably a country) doesn't allow it to fail has been clearly demonstrated in the last two years. Some people are still coming to grips with the fact that money is effectively created by banks, and too many bank failures kills most modern economies. It's interesting that, despite this realization, no one seems to have done anything about this weakness in the system.
But yeah, if Google vanished tomorrow, many people would be put out.. your email history, maybe your navigation, etc. But that's a big different than "total economic collapse". But it's maybe less than might be imagined.
Take Android... that's developed by Google now. The loss of Google would be a huge speedbump for the cellular industry, most of whom are developing Android, some of whom (Motorola, HTC) are increasingly married to it. But Android would survive. If Apple disappeared tomorrow, so would virtually everything one can do with the iPhone. This is the reason Android needs to get larger than Apple/iPhone, RIM, Palm, Microsoft/WinMo, etc.
But the reality is, this like the "Life After People" TV show... the premise is, people instantly vanish, and hey, it's cool to see what happens next. In reality, outside of a Steven King novel, it's highly unlikely that humans vanish overnight. Google is too huge to vanish overnight. If there was some fundamental flaw in their business model that suddenly kicked in, they still have billions in cash. If they could not correct that, they'd be selling off valuable assets. People would see the problems with Google, and at least shore things up... back up that Gmail account, etc.
But Kurosawa himself admittedly ripped off John Ford. Nothing's really made in a vacuum. Ok, apparently, Star Wars: Episode 1 was... so I'll restate: nothing good is made in a vacuum.
And since I didn't see it here, if you didn't like "Phantom Menace", you need to see this truly epic review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&feature=player_embedded. If you did like it, you still need to watch, do that you can fully realize, to quote the review, "what an idiot you are".
Well... yeah, it could. The best possible case is that George Lucas takes on the role of "executive producer" or some such. Maybe even suggests some story ideas, or Star Wars Universe ground rules. But really, he needs to do this from a galaxy far, far away from any actual work on any actual scripts.
The first rumors of a Star Wars TV show had Kevin Smith leading the project. This would be great.. particularly because "Star Wars" would now be set in New Jersey, rather than that afore-allusioned-to galaxy. Or maybe they'll save that for "Star Wars: 2014"... which will feature Boba Fett and Master Yoda, riding around the Garden State on golden motorcycles, solving individual problems, while the rest of the rebel fleet hides somewhere, for no particular reason other than to save money on FX shots.
But, particularly if they do it as a Star-Trek style episodic rather than a Babylon 5-style serial, they should make like the old Twilight Zone and Star Trek:TOS folks and solicit stories from actual writers. Otherwise, they had better find some spectacular staff writers, or they'll wind up as boring as most of the post-TOS Star Treks were. Sure, they had a few good stories in there, but way too many "holodeck malfunction" tales, and way, way, way, way too many deus ex machina endings.
Everyone's doing LCD shutter glasses right now, simply because the TV doesn't really need to know anything about 3D.. it's a private agreement between your media player and your eyes, just as 16:9 vs. 4:3 was with DVD (eg, the analog TV doesn't have a clue about the format... well, maybe some PAL TVs get the 16:9/4:3 flag sent via SCART, but usually, the TV didn't know).
Polarization is one great way to get away from active glasses. This is a piece of cake to do very nicely with a DLP projection TV, exactly as it's done in the theaters (since they're mostly using DLP projectors for 3D films). Linear polarization is a fail in the theater and a big fail at home... people sometimes watch TV lying down. But circular polarization, such as used in the RealD system you find in theaters, is easy to build into a DLP TV. At which point, your 3D glasses are basically just sunglasses.... pretty established cheap tech, available as prescription or clip-ons for the nearsighted in the crowd.
But sadly, this is probably not going to happen. Only Mitsubishi is still making DLPs or any other microdisplay-driven TV... Sony, Samsung, JVC, and maybe others have gone for the flat panel craze. And given the various issues with plasma (grey-blacks, relatively heinous power consumption, burn-in and all the other phosphor-based issues we know and love from the CRT days), this leaves LCD. Which is already using polarization (watch any LCD screen with a pair of polarized shades on.. very amusing for a few minutes). So this easy 3D add-on to already pretty low cost, high quality display technology is not likely to happen, simply because enough people get all gooey over a TV that can hang on the wall. Yeesh!
Which is of course one reason the PS3 update is expected this summer, rather than now, even if they do have the 3D Blu-Ray stuff working there already. 3D gaming makes perfect sense, anyway... video games are already largely 3D internal, just projected as 2D when rendered. So why not do a stereoscopic projection?
Of course, Sony will also want to have their 3D shutter glasses for the PS3 available at the same time the software's out. I hate to admit it, but I'll probably be in line for them the day they're out.
Rather, this is the typical theater vs. home wars, bumping up to the next level. It's clear that Hollywood, Inc. has discovered that "3D" in films, when used to actually enhance the film (rather as the gimmick it's been in the past) is fairly compelling. More people saw "Avatar" in 3D than normal, and this film is now the highest grossing in history, and the first to pass the $2 billion mark. And that's just box office.
The 3D thing is really overblown, anyway. It's largely a change in software on the Blu-Ray player, as the upgrades from Sony illustrate. It will work with some of today's TVs as-is, but a 3D aware television may offer better results, as would higher speed interfaces.
Most people are completely happy with Blu-Ray, and really do appreciate the difference between HD and SD (the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD is greater than the difference between DVD and VHS... and Blu-Ray is growing faster than DVD did at the same point in its evolution). What they're not ready for yet is $250+ for a player. So player sales only grew 67% in 2009 over 2008. Most industry watchers predict the crossover in media sales in 2012 or 2013. Today, Blu-Ray accounts for 10%-30% of media sales, depending on the release. In the last quarter of 2009, Blu-Ray media sales grew by 35% in the USA. DVD sales in the same quarter fell by 17%.
This is hardly an usual thing, but in fact, exactly what you sign up for when you make things based around computers. It was difficult to grow media formats in a compatible way back in the analog days, but for this, the 3D is just an optional add-on. Older players will just play the 2D version, and 3D-aware players will offer you a choice, or perhaps even only offer that choice in the presence of proper 3D viewing gear.
Hollywood, Inc. is already moving on. Most of the digital projectors in theaters these days have been 2K format projectors (nominally 2000x1000 pixels), which is essentially just the same as HDTV. They're moving rapidly to shooting in 4K (nominally 4000x2000), and beyond. Some folks in Japan have already shown off a prototype 8K television (nominally 8000x4000... http://www.nhk.or.jp/digital/en/super_hi/index.html). It just never ends.
Of course, it really does end. You can see 1080p just dandy on a computer monitor... I'm about 2ft away from my dual 1200p monitors here, and I see it fine. But at a normal television viewing distance, you can't tell the difference between 1200p/1080p and 720p. Unless you're Superman, or at least Harvey Birdman. I have a 71" 1080p television in my media room. Most people will see an advantage to 1080p at 10-12 feet from the screen, which is an absolutely reasonable viewing distance, within the THX optimal viewing range, and just a bit short of the SMPTE optimal viewing range (both THX and SMPTE are based on your angle of view).
To get much out of a 4K screen, I'm going to have to sit closer than ft, or get a very gigantic screen. Of course, when I grew up, my parent's "big screen" TV was a 25" Sears console... that was the largest they ever owned, at least while I was at home. Could be some go larger in the future. But how many people really have room for 100" + screens. Ok, if you're offering, sure, I'll make it fit...
That's incorrect. The original XBox 360 lacked a digital video output, and would only produce a 1080/60i output over analog, since virtually no analog HDTVs supported 1080/60p on YCrCb inputs. But the new ones support HDMI, like the PS3, and do 1080/60p just dandy.
Actually, support for 1080/60p input is more common in TVs than support for 1080/24p input, believe it or not. There's not much advantage to accepting 1080/24p if your screen refresh is fixed, or variable up to only 60p... the TV or the video source can do the higher speed pulldown from 24p, but it still has to be done.
Once you have variable refresh to 120Hz, as many of the 2009-vintage HDTVs do, then you can get a better display accepting 24p and pulling it to 72p output. So it's much more common to find 1080/24p support in more recent, higher refresh TVs.
My 71" Samsung DLP from 2006, for example, supports 1080/60p input just dandy, but not 1080/24p.
And of course, 720/60p is a standard HDTV format.. pretty much every HDTV supports it.
I think the original point is, for stereoscopic TV using existing hardware, if you have a 1080/60p or 720/60p input, you can have 30p per eye. It'll look ok, though of course, 60p per eye would be better yet, but the interfaces don't support that, anyway. The HDMI 1.4 specs support a number of more sophisticated stereoscopic video options, but they require active participation by the TV. Frame-multiplexing is easily done without the TV's knowledge, as long as the display is fast enough (and obviously, the player can do the switching).
Fanboys aren't the real issue here... Opera's being pretty clever here. They're announcing this, knowing full well that "Apple rejects App" will garner far more publicity than "Opera releases browser". There is a large segment of the electronic computer press, and perhaps even some print media still, that's just crazy obsessed with every little move Apple makes. Google too, for sure, and maybe all this only because Microsoft has been relatively boring lately.. they haven't eaten a baby or kicked a puppy in months.
It works for them either way, because they're making this all about Apple. If Apple rejects it, there will be press about it, just like Apple rejecting Google Voice... Opera's high profile enough, and as I pointed out, the computer industry press is just crazy hungry for Apple stories. If they accept it, then it's also big news, because it'll be the first major browser (Opera isn't big on the desktop, but Opera Mini is major in the cellphone world) accepted to the iTunes store. And presumably, the first that's not based on all the same components as Safari.
Actually, Apple got into the Safari business when they realized they needed control of a web browser for their platform, and where it was going (eg, iPhones and iPods Touch). They were beta testing Safari in 2003, and made it the default brower in MacOS X as of October 2003... incidently, just as their five-year agreement with Microsoft over IE ran out. Microsoft officially dropped support for IE on the Mac in June of 2003, six months after Safari was out.
It's not impossible for Apple to accept Opera Mini. I was a bit confused on this myself... they do actually allow alternate browsers on the iPhone, though in a limited way... kind of like the various browers that showed up on Windows some years back, all using the IE engine. To date, they only have allowed alternate browsers based on Webkit and using the iPhone's built-in Javascript engine. They won't allow Java, or a competing Javascript engine, or in fact, any kind of interpreter they don't control. Same reason I had to get a DROID to run the Commodore 64 emulator.. apparently, that's too dangerous to be allowed on an iPhone.
I'm certain the Opera people understand all these things. The real question is whether they've tried to stick within these existing and proven constrains, or whether they're pushing the limits. Normal everyday Opera Mini runs in Java, so that alone would prevent it from being permitted on the iPhone. But a native version could be another thing.
I would think AT&T would actually applaud widespread adoption of Opera Mini on the iPhone. Unlike normal smartphone browsers, Opera Mini processes all web pages through a proxy, re-rendering all pages for supposedly better viewing on small devices (they maintain a farm of about 100 proxy servers to manage this). This is the big reason they're on so many devices... they can support phones this way that aren't really web-capable, due to CPU or memory constraints.
I used this a bit on my old Palm Treo, but at that point, the new version was too buggy and the old version too limited for my tastes. I haven't tried the latest, but it's available in the Android Marketplace.
I have a monopoly over my own computer desktop... only stuff I put there goes there. You can't put your application there. That doesn't make ME a monopolist.
Apple's control of their own platform is not enough to make them a monopoly, on its own. If they had significant control of a real market (not just a segment of a larger one they've carved out for themselves), they might. But they don't. There are many other smartphone platforms, some still very much outselling Apple (Nokia, RIM). And in fact, while iPhone sales are still growing, their overall percentage of the smartphone market is starting to shrink. They fell several percentage points between 3Q09 and 4Q09, even though 4Q09 was Apple's best quarter ever. The simple fact is, the smart phone market is growing faster than the iPhone market.
That's another obvious indicator they do not have monopoly powers.
But consider what they had to do to keep the Mac platform viable. Microsoft's dominance was so powerful that no other PC or CPU architecture could remain competitive, so Apple had to change form the custom Mac architecture to making otherwise bog standard PCs in fancy cases. They had become a media software powerhouse, to prevent critical software from leaving the platform... even given their #2 position in the personal computer desktop world. And to generate enough revenue per Mac to keep that a worthwhile business (eg, if I can sell many customers a half-dozen high prices software apps to go with their OS and hardware, I don't need as many customers). And they entered different markets (MP3/PMP, Smartphone/PDA), also needed to remain viable.
Sure, they pulled it off... Apple's very healthy today. But they were nearly put out of business by the Microsoft juggernaut. And today, they're still just a niche, even if they've found a happy one.
Here's a good test of why Microsoft is a monopoly. Go to your local "Best Buy" and look at all the operating systems for sale on the shelves there. You'll probably find several versions of Windows, maybe a copy of Apple's OS-X... Apple still gets to sell desktop OSs because of their hardware lock-in.
But the price of a desktop OS has been reduced to essentially nothing, unless it's a Microsoft OS. There are virtually no companies even trying to sell a desktop OS anymore, other than Microsoft and Apple. In the Enterprise, it may seem that way, though what you generally find is that the companies doing business there are selling services, and maybe an OS along with that, free or paid.
There's nothing in the world preventing other companies from making operating systems as a rival to Microsoft. But selling them.. that's a very different thing. Even Apple has to go to fairly extraordinary lengths to keep their OS viable in their existing markets (largely, media content creation). They had to essentially trade the PC model for the Workstation model, vertically integrating in hardware, OS, and applications (Final Cut, Aperture, Shake, Color, Motion, DVD Studio, Logic, etc) to remain viable. Mac sales were down as low as 1% of the personal computer market at one point... Apple had to abandon proprietary hardware (today a Mac is really just another flavor of PC) and shore up against critical applications leaving the platform (as Adobe was starting to do, before the switch to x86).
This was all a reaction to Microsoft's dominance of the PC industry. No hardware platform or CPU architecture could survive on the desktop without Microsoft's commitment to support (which they never really gave to anything other than the x86... and, sure, AMD's 64-bit extended version).
Apple didn't start their own carrier. Neither did Google, Dell, Acer, Panasonic, Sony, or any of the other companies that more recently got into the smartphone market.
Yes, there are barriers to entry, but they are not prohibitive to all companies. And they have absolutely nothing to do with Apple, other than the fact that one can point to Apple as an example of why the smart phone market is open... four years ago, they were in the market. In this last year, Dell and Acer entered the smartphone market. So did Google, after a fashion (eg, they got an OEM to make the hardware for them).
Nokia is still the world leader in smartphones, but no, they were not successful in the USA. It's not the dealing with the US carriers that was the problem... every US carrier sells Nokia phones. But rather, creating demand for their smartphone platform. They did worse here than Microsoft.
Part of the problem was that, before the iPhone did so well, most smartphone vendors assumed that smartphones were only for business.. consumers would not buy them. RIM did really well here by building a system that let your evil corporate overloads set policies for you phone use, and the main point of the phone was corporate email anyway, not so much the apps thing. Microsoft sold theirs, as well, as being great at that corporate thing. I'm not sure Palm ever had a huge strategy, other than "Palm Pilot with a cellular modem", but they kind of stopped really playing for a few years, and yet, their gear still sold ok.
Anyway, Apple demonstrated the consumer demand for smartphones. This was also the focus for Android, and it's a big reason CE companies like Sony, Samsung, LG, and Panasonic are involved in the smartphone thing.
Different freedoms. Like "free as in speech" vs. "free as in beer".
If a government puts in place laws to retain market competition, they limit the freedom of a company to conquer whole markets. If they don't, then the rise of monopolies will limit the freedom of others to compete. There is no such thing as a perfectly free market, whether you regulate it or not.
That's 25% of the US sales in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 24% in the previous quarter. But they actually dropped in the global market. Apple had 18.1% of all the world's smart phone sales in 3Q09, but only 16.6% in 4Q09, despite that being Apple's best quarter in the history of the iPhone. The market is growing faster than the iPhone.. smartphone sales grew by 26% globally in 4Q09.
And even with all those iPhones, Apple is still lost in the noise when it comes to overall cellphone sales. Top five are Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson, together making up 76.4% of the global cellphone market. What should worry Apple more, however, is that Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson are making Android phones. Nokia, not yet, but they have shown off a tablet computer run by Android.
"The rest of us"... well, aren't WE the monopoly today.
You're incorrect, and also, incorrect about "a crime is a crime". Anyone can be anti-competitive. It's only illegal for a monopoly to do so. Period. The monopoly itself is not illegal, only certain behaviors, and only once you've been recognized as a monopoly.
Sure, you may be a market leader at 17% of a market, but you don't have any special ability to influence that market, limit others' competing within that market, or to use your powers in that market to help conquer another... you have plenty of competition.
So let's look at Apple... are there competitors? A-plenty.. they have a healthy but limited portion of the US smart phone market (about 25%).. they're not even dominant here, RIM is at 42%, as of December 2009. Globally, they only have about a 12% share. So there is plenty of competition. Dozens of companies make cellphones and smart phones. Thus, there is no monopoly of any kind in this market. So anyone in it can be as anti-competitive as they like, it might affect their sales, but it doesn't substantially affect the market as a whole.
Other signs of monopoly powers... Apple using their pricing to drive competition out of business? Nope... in fact, they keep their prices relatively high. Are they preventing other companies from entering the smartphone market? Nope... several companies entered the smartphone market in the last year, including Dell and Acer.
Is Apple seeing price pressure from other companies? This is impossible if they're any sort of monopoly... a very good example is Microsoft. Microsoft still gets $100-$500 or more for an operating system, despite the fact that in much of the rest of the OS market, the price of an OS has been reduced to zero. Many competitors were either driven out of the OS market (Be, Inc. for example) or forced to offer their OS free (Sun), at least on the PC desktop level. But Apple is in fact starting to see very real price pressure. This caused them to introduce a $100 (with subsidy) iPhone model in the past year.
If you're not a monopoly, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to participate in a free market to the best of your ability. The reason monopolies are illegal in most countries is simple: those societies value free markets, and create laws to help ensure markets stay free. There's no such thing as a perfectly free market, of course.. there's always some barrier to entry, always some product differentiation, which is fine. When a company gets powerful enough to change a formerly free market into one they substantially control, they get reigned in on those controls. Or they get broken up. Laws are intended to be expressions of the values of the greater society.
You should learn more about this stuff before going off about "all of us here" believing as you do. Some of us are actually educated on these points, and understand why Apple is obviously not a monopoly. And in fact, their behavior in the iTunes store, anti-competitive as it is relative their little fiefdom on the iPhone, is actually proving very good for their competition. Android, for example, is the fastest growing smartphone platform right now, and at least some of that's in response to Apple's behaviors. If they had a true monopoly, such behavior would not help their competition or hurt their sales. But it does.
You've been drinkin' the Apple kool-aid. They don't give a flyin' frack about "security problems" or slowdowns due to Java on the iPhone. Which, in fact, don't exist -- every other major smart phone supports Java, some (including Blackberry and Android) are based on Java, and suffer no performance problems.
Any time Apple is called to task on any mis-feature of the iPhone, they cry "stability", "security", and "performance". But the reality is, they want to control competition. They want all competition routed through their control, so they can bless or curse any iPhone application, and ensure they make money on any for-profit app. If they allow Java to run, it will offer an alternate means of running apps, one not controlled by Apple. So they don't allow it. Or Flash, for the very same reasons. Or multitasking, which would then allow any old company to do the things only Apple can do today... for example, build a music player than runs while you're browsing the web or playing a game. Today, only Apple can do that.
All of these things work just dandy on Apple's competition, proving beyond question that Apple's just making this stuff up, so average Joe's don't discover their real motivation.
Apps don't run on Apple's hard-drive based MP3/PMP devices (now called iPod Classic), nor the smaller Flash-based models (iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle).
The iPod Touch is essentially a PDA that Apple evolved out of an MP3 player, but it's not really just an MP3 player... any PDA can do the same MP3/PMP functions. So you really can't count iPod Touch or iPhone sales in the MP3 category, they're really PDA and Smartphone... where Apple is not dominant. Well, dominant enough to be considered to wield monopoly powers.
So far, the TV manufacturers are standing behind HDMI... DisplayPort is being pushed as the official computer industry replacement for DVI. There's a virtual certainty that some TVs will eventually grow DisplayPorts, but hey, most modern TVs have VGA connectors too. It's not as if anyone making a television is all THAT worried about cutting down on the ports count.
I'm pretty sure they're prototyping these Blu-Ray upgrades on the PS3.
But Sony's not just going to upgrade your PS3 for 3D Blu-Ray. They need to have support for 3D games, and of course, Sony's version of 3D shutter glasses so you can actually make use of the thing. My guess is they use Bluetooth for the sync... no need to add-on any hardware to the PS3, and receiving what's essentially 60 "flip a bit" signals per second can't be all that draining on the battery. It's a good move... I don't know if I'd worry too much about 3D if it meant a new TV and Blu-Ray player and all, but if it's $100 for a pair of glasses or two from Sony, I'm in.
Sony is almost certainly doing Blu-Ray over HDMI-1.3. The PS3 can only deliver a 60p video, so they're going to do field-multiplexed 30p stereoscopic, which should be good enough, as well as working on existing gear. HDMI 1.4 will support a bunch of more sophisticated 3D modes... presumably, there's some formula for handshaking the specific version between player and TV. This also makes the TV 3D aware, which it will not be over HDMI 1.3. But hey, you can do 3D today on plain old everyday computer monitors as long as the PC is driving the shutter sync, so this ought to work fine now.
Downshift? Not a Prius... there's no shifting, ever. Single speed gear box, no transmission. The effective gear ratio is set by the behavior of the small electric motor/generator, MG1. Check out this site, which includes a simple model of the system: http://eahart.com/prius/psd
They are completely correct about the behavior of the Prius cruise control, at least on my "Gen 1" model from 2003. You bump the lever up, you get 1mph faster, bump it down, you get 1mph slower. I like it -- it's the correct way to implement this. I have not messed with holding down long... guess I'll have to try that. But that should be unusual, anyway. The cruise control isn't a replacement for the accelerator pedal. If I'm using it, I go about as fast as I'm targeting, and then trim using the lever if a precise speed is needed (usually, it's just for long trips and known speed-trap areas).
I've been driving a Prius since 2003, and never found the problem. I did very quickly come to understand that one click up/down of the accelerate/decelerate level knocks you up/down 1 MPH (never tried it with the display in KM/hr... I wonder...). It's anything but a bad design... I think it's simply a case of "RTFM, Woz". Not that I did... the behavior was very obvious. Maybe you need to be retrained from analog to digital cruise control... never had much use for it anyway, personally.
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Yeah, you have it entirely right in the first sentence... "to big to fail" doesn't exist. So big that someone (probably a country) doesn't allow it to fail has been clearly demonstrated in the last two years. Some people are still coming to grips with the fact that money is effectively created by banks, and too many bank failures kills most modern economies. It's interesting that, despite this realization, no one seems to have done anything about this weakness in the system.
But yeah, if Google vanished tomorrow, many people would be put out .. your email history, maybe your navigation, etc. But that's a big different than "total economic collapse". But it's maybe less than might be imagined.
Take Android... that's developed by Google now. The loss of Google would be a huge speedbump for the cellular industry, most of whom are developing Android, some of whom (Motorola, HTC) are increasingly married to it. But Android would survive. If Apple disappeared tomorrow, so would virtually everything one can do with the iPhone. This is the reason Android needs to get larger than Apple/iPhone, RIM, Palm, Microsoft/WinMo, etc.
But the reality is, this like the "Life After People" TV show... the premise is, people instantly vanish, and hey, it's cool to see what happens next. In reality, outside of a Steven King novel, it's highly unlikely that humans vanish overnight. Google is too huge to vanish overnight. If there was some fundamental flaw in their business model that suddenly kicked in, they still have billions in cash. If they could not correct that, they'd be selling off valuable assets. People would see the problems with Google, and at least shore things up... back up that Gmail account, etc.
But Kurosawa himself admittedly ripped off John Ford. Nothing's really made in a vacuum. Ok, apparently, Star Wars: Episode 1 was... so I'll restate: nothing good is made in a vacuum.
And since I didn't see it here, if you didn't like "Phantom Menace", you need to see this truly epic review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&feature=player_embedded.
If you did like it, you still need to watch, do that you can fully realize, to quote the review, "what an idiot you are".
Well... yeah, it could. The best possible case is that George Lucas takes on the role of "executive producer" or some such. Maybe even suggests some story ideas, or Star Wars Universe ground rules. But really, he needs to do this from a galaxy far, far away from any actual work on any actual scripts.
The first rumors of a Star Wars TV show had Kevin Smith leading the project. This would be great.. particularly because "Star Wars" would now be set in New Jersey, rather than that afore-allusioned-to galaxy. Or maybe they'll save that for "Star Wars: 2014"... which will feature Boba Fett and Master Yoda, riding around the Garden State on golden motorcycles, solving individual problems, while the rest of the rebel fleet hides somewhere, for no particular reason other than to save money on FX shots.
But, particularly if they do it as a Star-Trek style episodic rather than a Babylon 5-style serial, they should make like the old Twilight Zone and Star Trek:TOS folks and solicit stories from actual writers. Otherwise, they had better find some spectacular staff writers, or they'll wind up as boring as most of the post-TOS Star Treks were. Sure, they had a few good stories in there, but way too many "holodeck malfunction" tales, and way, way, way, way too many deus ex machina endings.
Everyone's doing LCD shutter glasses right now, simply because the TV doesn't really need to know anything about 3D.. it's a private agreement between your media player and your eyes, just as 16:9 vs. 4:3 was with DVD (eg, the analog TV doesn't have a clue about the format... well, maybe some PAL TVs get the 16:9/4:3 flag sent via SCART, but usually, the TV didn't know).
Polarization is one great way to get away from active glasses. This is a piece of cake to do very nicely with a DLP projection TV, exactly as it's done in the theaters (since they're mostly using DLP projectors for 3D films). Linear polarization is a fail in the theater and a big fail at home... people sometimes watch TV lying down. But circular polarization, such as used in the RealD system you find in theaters, is easy to build into a DLP TV. At which point, your 3D glasses are basically just sunglasses.... pretty established cheap tech, available as prescription or clip-ons for the nearsighted in the crowd.
But sadly, this is probably not going to happen. Only Mitsubishi is still making DLPs or any other microdisplay-driven TV... Sony, Samsung, JVC, and maybe others have gone for the flat panel craze. And given the various issues with plasma (grey-blacks, relatively heinous power consumption, burn-in and all the other phosphor-based issues we know and love from the CRT days), this leaves LCD. Which is already using polarization (watch any LCD screen with a pair of polarized shades on.. very amusing for a few minutes). So this easy 3D add-on to already pretty low cost, high quality display technology is not likely to happen, simply because enough people get all gooey over a TV that can hang on the wall. Yeesh!
Which is of course one reason the PS3 update is expected this summer, rather than now, even if they do have the 3D Blu-Ray stuff working there already. 3D gaming makes perfect sense, anyway... video games are already largely 3D internal, just projected as 2D when rendered. So why not do a stereoscopic projection?
Of course, Sony will also want to have their 3D shutter glasses for the PS3 available at the same time the software's out. I hate to admit it, but I'll probably be in line for them the day they're out.
I don't really see it that way.
Rather, this is the typical theater vs. home wars, bumping up to the next level. It's clear that Hollywood, Inc. has discovered that "3D" in films, when used to actually enhance the film (rather as the gimmick it's been in the past) is fairly compelling. More people saw "Avatar" in 3D than normal, and this film is now the highest grossing in history, and the first to pass the $2 billion mark. And that's just box office.
The 3D thing is really overblown, anyway. It's largely a change in software on the Blu-Ray player, as the upgrades from Sony illustrate. It will work with some of today's TVs as-is, but a 3D aware television may offer better results, as would higher speed interfaces.
Most people are completely happy with Blu-Ray, and really do appreciate the difference between HD and SD (the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD is greater than the difference between DVD and VHS... and Blu-Ray is growing faster than DVD did at the same point in its evolution). What they're not ready for yet is $250+ for a player. So player sales only grew 67% in 2009 over 2008. Most industry watchers predict the crossover in media sales in 2012 or 2013. Today, Blu-Ray accounts for 10%-30% of media sales, depending on the release. In the last quarter of 2009, Blu-Ray media sales grew by 35% in the USA. DVD sales in the same quarter fell by 17%.
This is hardly an usual thing, but in fact, exactly what you sign up for when you make things based around computers. It was difficult to grow media formats in a compatible way back in the analog days, but for this, the 3D is just an optional add-on. Older players will just play the 2D version, and 3D-aware players will offer you a choice, or perhaps even only offer that choice in the presence of proper 3D viewing gear.
Hollywood, Inc. is already moving on. Most of the digital projectors in theaters these days have been 2K format projectors (nominally 2000x1000 pixels), which is essentially just the same as HDTV. They're moving rapidly to shooting in 4K (nominally 4000x2000), and beyond. Some folks in Japan have already shown off a prototype 8K television (nominally 8000x4000... http://www.nhk.or.jp/digital/en/super_hi/index.html). It just never ends.
Of course, it really does end. You can see 1080p just dandy on a computer monitor... I'm about 2ft away from my dual 1200p monitors here, and I see it fine. But at a normal television viewing distance, you can't tell the difference between 1200p/1080p and 720p. Unless you're Superman, or at least Harvey Birdman. I have a 71" 1080p television in my media room. Most people will see an advantage to 1080p at 10-12 feet from the screen, which is an absolutely reasonable viewing distance, within the THX optimal viewing range, and just a bit short of the SMPTE optimal viewing range (both THX and SMPTE are based on your angle of view).
To get much out of a 4K screen, I'm going to have to sit closer than ft, or get a very gigantic screen. Of course, when I grew up, my parent's "big screen" TV was a 25" Sears console... that was the largest they ever owned, at least while I was at home. Could be some go larger in the future. But how many people really have room for 100" + screens. Ok, if you're offering, sure, I'll make it fit...
That's incorrect. The original XBox 360 lacked a digital video output, and would only produce a 1080/60i output over analog, since virtually no analog HDTVs supported 1080/60p on YCrCb inputs. But the new ones support HDMI, like the PS3, and do 1080/60p just dandy.
Actually, support for 1080/60p input is more common in TVs than support for 1080/24p input, believe it or not. There's not much advantage to accepting 1080/24p if your screen refresh is fixed, or variable up to only 60p... the TV or the video source can do the higher speed pulldown from 24p, but it still has to be done.
Once you have variable refresh to 120Hz, as many of the 2009-vintage HDTVs do, then you can get a better display accepting 24p and pulling it to 72p output. So it's much more common to find 1080/24p support in more recent, higher refresh TVs.
My 71" Samsung DLP from 2006, for example, supports 1080/60p input just dandy, but not 1080/24p.
And of course, 720/60p is a standard HDTV format.. pretty much every HDTV supports it.
I think the original point is, for stereoscopic TV using existing hardware, if you have a 1080/60p or 720/60p input, you can have 30p per eye. It'll look ok, though of course, 60p per eye would be better yet, but the interfaces don't support that, anyway. The HDMI 1.4 specs support a number of more sophisticated stereoscopic video options, but they require active participation by the TV. Frame-multiplexing is easily done without the TV's knowledge, as long as the display is fast enough (and obviously, the player can do the switching).
Fanboys aren't the real issue here... Opera's being pretty clever here. They're announcing this, knowing full well that "Apple rejects App" will garner far more publicity than "Opera releases browser". There is a large segment of the electronic computer press, and perhaps even some print media still, that's just crazy obsessed with every little move Apple makes. Google too, for sure, and maybe all this only because Microsoft has been relatively boring lately.. they haven't eaten a baby or kicked a puppy in months.
It works for them either way, because they're making this all about Apple. If Apple rejects it, there will be press about it, just like Apple rejecting Google Voice... Opera's high profile enough, and as I pointed out, the computer industry press is just crazy hungry for Apple stories. If they accept it, then it's also big news, because it'll be the first major browser (Opera isn't big on the desktop, but Opera Mini is major in the cellphone world) accepted to the iTunes store. And presumably, the first that's not based on all the same components as Safari.
Actually, Apple got into the Safari business when they realized they needed control of a web browser for their platform, and where it was going (eg, iPhones and iPods Touch). They were beta testing Safari in 2003, and made it the default brower in MacOS X as of October 2003... incidently, just as their five-year agreement with Microsoft over IE ran out. Microsoft officially dropped support for IE on the Mac in June of 2003, six months after Safari was out.
It's not impossible for Apple to accept Opera Mini. I was a bit confused on this myself... they do actually allow alternate browsers on the iPhone, though in a limited way... kind of like the various browers that showed up on Windows some years back, all using the IE engine. To date, they only have allowed alternate browsers based on Webkit and using the iPhone's built-in Javascript engine. They won't allow Java, or a competing Javascript engine, or in fact, any kind of interpreter they don't control. Same reason I had to get a DROID to run the Commodore 64 emulator.. apparently, that's too dangerous to be allowed on an iPhone.
I'm certain the Opera people understand all these things. The real question is whether they've tried to stick within these existing and proven constrains, or whether they're pushing the limits. Normal everyday Opera Mini runs in Java, so that alone would prevent it from being permitted on the iPhone. But a native version could be another thing.
I would think AT&T would actually applaud widespread adoption of Opera Mini on the iPhone. Unlike normal smartphone browsers, Opera Mini processes all web pages through a proxy, re-rendering all pages for supposedly better viewing on small devices (they maintain a farm of about 100 proxy servers to manage this). This is the big reason they're on so many devices... they can support phones this way that aren't really web-capable, due to CPU or memory constraints.
I used this a bit on my old Palm Treo, but at that point, the new version was too buggy and the old version too limited for my tastes. I haven't tried the latest, but it's available in the Android Marketplace.
I have a monopoly over my own computer desktop... only stuff I put there goes there. You can't put your application there. That doesn't make ME a monopolist.
Apple's control of their own platform is not enough to make them a monopoly, on its own. If they had significant control of a real market (not just a segment of a larger one they've carved out for themselves), they might. But they don't. There are many other smartphone platforms, some still very much outselling Apple (Nokia, RIM). And in fact, while iPhone sales are still growing, their overall percentage of the smartphone market is starting to shrink. They fell several percentage points between 3Q09 and 4Q09, even though 4Q09 was Apple's best quarter ever. The simple fact is, the smart phone market is growing faster than the iPhone market.
That's another obvious indicator they do not have monopoly powers.
Apple's managing at about 5% of global PC sales.
But consider what they had to do to keep the Mac platform viable. Microsoft's dominance was so powerful that no other PC or CPU architecture could remain competitive, so Apple had to change form the custom Mac architecture to making otherwise bog standard PCs in fancy cases. They had become a media software powerhouse, to prevent critical software from leaving the platform... even given their #2 position in the personal computer desktop world. And to generate enough revenue per Mac to keep that a worthwhile business (eg, if I can sell many customers a half-dozen high prices software apps to go with their OS and hardware, I don't need as many customers). And they entered different markets (MP3/PMP, Smartphone/PDA), also needed to remain viable.
Sure, they pulled it off... Apple's very healthy today. But they were nearly put out of business by the Microsoft juggernaut. And today, they're still just a niche, even if they've found a happy one.
Here's a good test of why Microsoft is a monopoly. Go to your local "Best Buy" and look at all the operating systems for sale on the shelves there. You'll probably find several versions of Windows, maybe a copy of Apple's OS-X... Apple still gets to sell desktop OSs because of their hardware lock-in.
But the price of a desktop OS has been reduced to essentially nothing, unless it's a Microsoft OS. There are virtually no companies even trying to sell a desktop OS anymore, other than Microsoft and Apple. In the Enterprise, it may seem that way, though what you generally find is that the companies doing business there are selling services, and maybe an OS along with that, free or paid.
There's nothing in the world preventing other companies from making operating systems as a rival to Microsoft. But selling them.. that's a very different thing. Even Apple has to go to fairly extraordinary lengths to keep their OS viable in their existing markets (largely, media content creation). They had to essentially trade the PC model for the Workstation model, vertically integrating in hardware, OS, and applications (Final Cut, Aperture, Shake, Color, Motion, DVD Studio, Logic, etc) to remain viable. Mac sales were down as low as 1% of the personal computer market at one point... Apple had to abandon proprietary hardware (today a Mac is really just another flavor of PC) and shore up against critical applications leaving the platform (as Adobe was starting to do, before the switch to x86).
This was all a reaction to Microsoft's dominance of the PC industry. No hardware platform or CPU architecture could survive on the desktop without Microsoft's commitment to support (which they never really gave to anything other than the x86... and, sure, AMD's 64-bit extended version).
Apple didn't start their own carrier. Neither did Google, Dell, Acer, Panasonic, Sony, or any of the other companies that more recently got into the smartphone market.
Yes, there are barriers to entry, but they are not prohibitive to all companies. And they have absolutely nothing to do with Apple, other than the fact that one can point to Apple as an example of why the smart phone market is open... four years ago, they were in the market. In this last year, Dell and Acer entered the smartphone market. So did Google, after a fashion (eg, they got an OEM to make the hardware for them).
Nokia is still the world leader in smartphones, but no, they were not successful in the USA. It's not the dealing with the US carriers that was the problem... every US carrier sells Nokia phones. But rather, creating demand for their smartphone platform. They did worse here than Microsoft.
Part of the problem was that, before the iPhone did so well, most smartphone vendors assumed that smartphones were only for business.. consumers would not buy them. RIM did really well here by building a system that let your evil corporate overloads set policies for you phone use, and the main point of the phone was corporate email anyway, not so much the apps thing. Microsoft sold theirs, as well, as being great at that corporate thing. I'm not sure Palm ever had a huge strategy, other than "Palm Pilot with a cellular modem", but they kind of stopped really playing for a few years, and yet, their gear still sold ok.
Anyway, Apple demonstrated the consumer demand for smartphones. This was also the focus for Android, and it's a big reason CE companies like Sony, Samsung, LG, and Panasonic are involved in the smartphone thing.
Different freedoms. Like "free as in speech" vs. "free as in beer".
If a government puts in place laws to retain market competition, they limit the freedom of a company to conquer whole markets. If they don't, then the rise of monopolies will limit the freedom of others to compete. There is no such thing as a perfectly free market, whether you regulate it or not.
That's 25% of the US sales in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 24% in the previous quarter. But they actually dropped in the global market. Apple had 18.1% of all the world's smart phone sales in 3Q09, but only 16.6% in 4Q09, despite that being Apple's best quarter in the history of the iPhone. The market is growing faster than the iPhone.. smartphone sales grew by 26% globally in 4Q09.
And even with all those iPhones, Apple is still lost in the noise when it comes to overall cellphone sales. Top five are Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson, together making up 76.4% of the global cellphone market. What should worry Apple more, however, is that Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony-Ericsson are making Android phones. Nokia, not yet, but they have shown off a tablet computer run by Android.
"The rest of us"... well, aren't WE the monopoly today.
You're incorrect, and also, incorrect about "a crime is a crime". Anyone can be anti-competitive. It's only illegal for a monopoly to do so. Period. The monopoly itself is not illegal, only certain behaviors, and only once you've been recognized as a monopoly.
Sure, you may be a market leader at 17% of a market, but you don't have any special ability to influence that market, limit others' competing within that market, or to use your powers in that market to help conquer another... you have plenty of competition.
So let's look at Apple... are there competitors? A-plenty.. they have a healthy but limited portion of the US smart phone market (about 25%).. they're not even dominant here, RIM is at 42%, as of December 2009. Globally, they only have about a 12% share. So there is plenty of competition. Dozens of companies make cellphones and smart phones. Thus, there is no monopoly of any kind in this market. So anyone in it can be as anti-competitive as they like, it might affect their sales, but it doesn't substantially affect the market as a whole.
Other signs of monopoly powers... Apple using their pricing to drive competition out of business? Nope... in fact, they keep their prices relatively high. Are they preventing other companies from entering the smartphone market? Nope... several companies entered the smartphone market in the last year, including Dell and Acer.
Is Apple seeing price pressure from other companies? This is impossible if they're any sort of monopoly... a very good example is Microsoft. Microsoft still gets $100-$500 or more for an operating system, despite the fact that in much of the rest of the OS market, the price of an OS has been reduced to zero. Many competitors were either driven out of the OS market (Be, Inc. for example) or forced to offer their OS free (Sun), at least on the PC desktop level. But Apple is in fact starting to see very real price pressure. This caused them to introduce a $100 (with subsidy) iPhone model in the past year.
If you're not a monopoly, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to participate in a free market to the best of your ability. The reason monopolies are illegal in most countries is simple: those societies value free markets, and create laws to help ensure markets stay free. There's no such thing as a perfectly free market, of course.. there's always some barrier to entry, always some product differentiation, which is fine. When a company gets powerful enough to change a formerly free market into one they substantially control, they get reigned in on those controls. Or they get broken up. Laws are intended to be expressions of the values of the greater society.
You should learn more about this stuff before going off about "all of us here" believing as you do. Some of us are actually educated on these points, and understand why Apple is obviously not a monopoly. And in fact, their behavior in the iTunes store, anti-competitive as it is relative their little fiefdom on the iPhone, is actually proving very good for their competition. Android, for example, is the fastest growing smartphone platform right now, and at least some of that's in response to Apple's behaviors. If they had a true monopoly, such behavior would not help their competition or hurt their sales. But it does.
The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
You've been drinkin' the Apple kool-aid. They don't give a flyin' frack about "security problems" or slowdowns due to Java on the iPhone. Which, in fact, don't exist -- every other major smart phone supports Java, some (including Blackberry and Android) are based on Java, and suffer no performance problems.
Any time Apple is called to task on any mis-feature of the iPhone, they cry "stability", "security", and "performance". But the reality is, they want to control competition. They want all competition routed through their control, so they can bless or curse any iPhone application, and ensure they make money on any for-profit app. If they allow Java to run, it will offer an alternate means of running apps, one not controlled by Apple. So they don't allow it. Or Flash, for the very same reasons. Or multitasking, which would then allow any old company to do the things only Apple can do today... for example, build a music player than runs while you're browsing the web or playing a game. Today, only Apple can do that.
All of these things work just dandy on Apple's competition, proving beyond question that Apple's just making this stuff up, so average Joe's don't discover their real motivation.
Apps don't run on Apple's hard-drive based MP3/PMP devices (now called iPod Classic), nor the smaller Flash-based models (iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle).
The iPod Touch is essentially a PDA that Apple evolved out of an MP3 player, but it's not really just an MP3 player... any PDA can do the same MP3/PMP functions. So you really can't count iPod Touch or iPhone sales in the MP3 category, they're really PDA and Smartphone... where Apple is not dominant. Well, dominant enough to be considered to wield monopoly powers.
So far, the TV manufacturers are standing behind HDMI... DisplayPort is being pushed as the official computer industry replacement for DVI. There's a virtual certainty that some TVs will eventually grow DisplayPorts, but hey, most modern TVs have VGA connectors too. It's not as if anyone making a television is all THAT worried about cutting down on the ports count.
I'm pretty sure they're prototyping these Blu-Ray upgrades on the PS3.
But Sony's not just going to upgrade your PS3 for 3D Blu-Ray. They need to have support for 3D games, and of course, Sony's version of 3D shutter glasses so you can actually make use of the thing. My guess is they use Bluetooth for the sync... no need to add-on any hardware to the PS3, and receiving what's essentially 60 "flip a bit" signals per second can't be all that draining on the battery. It's a good move... I don't know if I'd worry too much about 3D if it meant a new TV and Blu-Ray player and all, but if it's $100 for a pair of glasses or two from Sony, I'm in.
Sony is almost certainly doing Blu-Ray over HDMI-1.3. The PS3 can only deliver a 60p video, so they're going to do field-multiplexed 30p stereoscopic, which should be good enough, as well as working on existing gear. HDMI 1.4 will support a bunch of more sophisticated 3D modes... presumably, there's some formula for handshaking the specific version between player and TV. This also makes the TV 3D aware, which it will not be over HDMI 1.3. But hey, you can do 3D today on plain old everyday computer monitors as long as the PC is driving the shutter sync, so this ought to work fine now.
Downshift? Not a Prius... there's no shifting, ever. Single speed gear box, no transmission. The effective gear ratio is set by the behavior of the small electric motor/generator, MG1. Check out this site, which includes a simple model of the system: http://eahart.com/prius/psd
They are completely correct about the behavior of the Prius cruise control, at least on my "Gen 1" model from 2003. You bump the lever up, you get 1mph faster, bump it down, you get 1mph slower. I like it -- it's the correct way to implement this. I have not messed with holding down long... guess I'll have to try that. But that should be unusual, anyway. The cruise control isn't a replacement for the accelerator pedal. If I'm using it, I go about as fast as I'm targeting, and then trim using the lever if a precise speed is needed (usually, it's just for long trips and known speed-trap areas).
I've been driving a Prius since 2003, and never found the problem. I did very quickly come to understand that one click up/down of the accelerate/decelerate level knocks you up/down 1 MPH (never tried it with the display in KM/hr... I wonder...). It's anything but a bad design... I think it's simply a case of "RTFM, Woz". Not that I did... the behavior was very obvious. Maybe you need to be retrained from analog to digital cruise control... never had much use for it anyway, personally.