Posts by JEDIDIAH 2525 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009
RDP is not bad but it's still very limited in what it can do for you. While it can certainly handle light desktop tasks without the lag and stutter of something like VNC, There is a lot of stuff you simply can't do across RDP even if you wanted to.
There are simply limits to the whole Xserver/RDP approach.
Plus maintaining all of that big box Unix style setup seems like a bit of a chore really.
Apple should live up to the image it has built for itself and "do the right" thing by the Italians. Throwing them an extra "bone" in terms of charity would not hurt either.
This just makes them look like "just another crass corporation". Of course that's what they really are but they should not be running around making that more obvious to people that might not have figured that out yet.
...yes: in other words XBMC is not a PVR and is at best a limited stripped down client for some other PVR. This is an important difference for anyone that's actually used a PVR for any amount of time and has noticed the difference.
OTOH, most HTPC software (even MCE) readily allows for running external programs to avoid these kinds of issues.
You simply don't have to turn XBMC in to something it is not in order to get a "complete" experience.
> has a fantastic interface for live TV
Which kind of misses the point of a PVR.
> MythTV - my god, what a buggy piece of crap
It might "suck" but it does well at handling a media collection that will choke MCE.
I don't need to be stuck with an xbox as an extender. Very handy for that whole "codec" problem.
While XBMC is nice in this regard (media). It is not a PVR of any sort.
Who uses the UI on a TV?
The interface is the set top box like a Tivo or a cable tuner.
On the other hand, Apple's current stuff in terms of both remotes and onscreen menus are nothing to brag about. Both are "simplified" to the point of being crippled. Real remotes might be ugly because they actually allow you do something and expose features that Apple just tries to ignore.
Then there's a whole world of universal remote hurt that your post doesn't even address. That's a whole industry spanning mess that Apple has no ability to influence.
"Edge cases" are exactly what an OS is supposed to be able to deal with.
The user or an incompetent programmer can always do something stupid. When this happens, it should not bring the whole system down. It's no longer 1984.
The system is there to be a gatekeeper, to manage resources , and to sensibly deal with problems including inept and malicious users.
...and oddly enough I found neither word nor excel particularly impressive when compared to it's rivals. This persistent myth that the competitors were "just crap" is nonsense. It's something made up to cover the real reason for the success of Microsoft userland apps (which was mostly a strange pro-monpoly attitude prevalent in corprorate America at the time).
Word 2 better than any version of WP? That's just silly.
Also, stuff in Windows didn't run so much as it crawled as it really needed more memory than was common at the time. A suitable amount of RAM was quite expensive in those days. It's an easy detail to forget and an easy one to miss when you are playing around with emulation on a modern machine.
While I can certainly see how cost per print might be a consideration, I think it is a little short sighted. A photo printer should above all produce excellent results. Cost should be a secondary consideration. If you are concerned about per page costs, you can always have another printer for that.
Something to be more concerned about is perhaps how certain HP AIO devices don't allow for network printing in Windows. My HP inkjet is like that.
> I think if you're waiting for 'minutes' for a YouTube video to start, you must still be on dial-up
...or WIFI.
I tried to put one of my MythTV boxes on WIFI and had no end of troubles. Thought I would try to plug the AppleTV into the same TV and see if it did any better. It didn't. The knackered network clobbered it.
Your network (and the experience of any network attached device) is only going to be as strong as the weakest link in the entire network between your appliance and Apple Corp or Netflix Corp. If there is any crummy WIFI or 3G network link in the middle, you may just be out of luck.
People are still able to use their Wii or their Xbox for the same exact things as you would buy a separate Roku or AppleTV for. Plus you've got other devices like BD players were these features are bundled in.
So it's really hard to take anything like this terribly seriously.
It sounds like some fans trying to create something that isn't really there.
Cue the Disraeli quote...
The last smart TV I bought came at a price premium high enough to pay for an HTPC and it's features were inferior to an AppleTV or a Roku. You could have saved money and gotten a better result just by buying a normal TV and a decent appliance.
My current main TV has lasted through 2 generations AppleTV gear. Why be stuck in the past with an older "smart TV" that will likely get desupported to encourage you to buy a new TV?
Those that know, know better. Those that don't know, probably don't get the point at all.
I think the only people being victimized here are those trying to get something for nothing. It seems to highlight and entirely separate problem from the one being used for FUD purposes. Google needs to ensure that it's the owner selling the app. This seems to be more a case of piracy than of malware.
Freeloaders are certainly not unique to Android. Freeloading also describes most of the activity on either of Apple's app stores.
> No, the speed limits are their to indicate the maximum possible speed at which the road can be considered safe, given a perfect set of conditions.
No, not really.
The speed limit is not the engineering limit of the road by any stretch of the imagination. It's not even the engineering limit for the worst vehicle you can find.
Otherwise the pervasive speeding that goes on would cause an awful lot more accidents.
...also the chances are very good that a large proportion of those gun deaths occur in locations that have already tried to heavily restrict gun ownership or outright ban it. The local drug gang is not going to pay attention to anti-gun laws when it is flaunting anti-drug laws.
> Why is a simple, intuitive interface bad?
It isn't. Except that's not really what we're talking about here.
No. Instead we're talking about taking that "simple intuitive interface" and getting rid of it for something more limited and less useful.
Perhaps something that emulates the interface of record players should be next.
Now here we get into one of my personal favorites that did not make the list: the Thrive.
You don't need any extra dongles that you are likely to use, you can just plug straight into the device itself. It's large enough that it can easily accommodate a real USB port and an HDMI port.
Why buy an inferior product you know you will have to buy extras for?
Having actually "been there and done that", I will say that an Apple dongle is a relatively expensive proprietary part that's easily lost and less easily replaced.
You are far better of beefing up the storage in your cameras as they were likely built without the Apple groupthink mindset and can actually be expanded. Fortunately, not everyone thinks it's folly to be able to upgrade an appliance as storage technology improves.
It is good that Apple makes neither video nor still cameras.
> True, but there's a lot more to do with a tablet than watch video on it.
...yes and none of that really depends on the aspect ratio of the screen.
It's pretty simple: Doing video right doesn't impact general usability.
Real machines running real apps like web browsers do fine with the wide format and so do real books. About the only thing that's relevant for 4:3 is old TV shows and similarly ancient computer monitors.
it's simply not 1988 anymore.
We just realize that if you actually want to share something, then you can do so explicitly. You don't need some other corporation doing it for you. This isn't about being a dinosaur that doesn't want to share but understanding the low S/N ratio that will ensue. Facebook already suffers from this.
There is nothing new here, just MBAs that don't fully appreciate or understand the data processing aspects of this situation.
...but I mainly object to the absurd idea that anyone that's in business for themselves will turn down someone's money. It doesn't matter if they're just a small part of the market, you just don't turn them away. You may not go chasing them, but you're not going to chase them away either.
No. The logical thing for a "business" person to do is NOTHING.
NOTHING does not require investing any extra money.
No. They "business" person will like the status quo. They might consider hedging against future changes but they will not blow a lot of money to screw over ANY portion of their user base. All money is good money. Someone that's actually in business tends not to just flush it for no good reason.
Who really cares if people try to save the films they stream from Lovefilm. They're crap. If someone is willing to put up with that, they are not great customers. They are simply too cheap and nothing you do will change that.
This is the modern equivalent of kids duping tapes between two cheap tape decks while riding next to each other on bicycles.
These people were always lost to you.
It's a piece of crap, that's why. Not everyone wears the same brand of blinders as you. This "we invented everything" mentality doesn't help either.
"Real multimedia" was done on other platforms before Quicktime and on even more austere hardware.
For most of us, Quicktime is at best just Apple's brand of Flash.
Not everyone wears your brand of blinders. We don't buy into the whole "Apple invented everything" mentality and actually find it quite annoying.
"Real multimedia" was being done by competitors with lesser hardware before Quicktime.
Most people just view Quicktime as another more proprietary variation on Flash.
PVRs and streamers are different kinds of devices. Unless you're building your own box, they will have mutually exclusive features. Trying to lump them together is a bit foolish to begin with.
This is especially true since streamers have gotten so cheap. You can easily add one to whatever setup you have. The fact that you are escalating the number of devices you are dealing with is easily offset by how cheap and small they are.
Buy the PVR for it's recording features and ignore the rest. Get a cheap streamer to go with it. Don't worry about about a device that is a jack of all trades an master of none.
Nothing beats an HTPC in terms of features. This goes for both the PVR and streaming features.
The real revisionism is to factor Apple in the same market as IBM.
It was never really a business computer. IBM entering the market really sealed Apple's fate and there's no arguing around that. Macs were just another "home computer" like Commies.
Anyone trying to claim that any 8-bit Apple was more appropriate for "work" is just on crack.
> Personally I think iLife + itunes make the difference.
Just don't let your data take a trip across another brand of computer between being recorded and being used by iMovie.
Any cheap software at BestBuy or available free as shareware can do better than iLife.
iLife is a joke for people with no clue or taste.
> Nearly everyone I know who doesn't work in IT and gets a laptop from work runs windows. Their home machines or "personally bought" laptops are Macs.
You must have a lot of rich friends. This goes double if you are on the other side of the pond.
Even if I liked MacOS, I would not touch Apple products due to poor engineering and bad ergonomics. It's too bad you can't run it on better hardware.
Most people outside of IT don't have any appreciation for "the better things" and tend to just be intolerably cheap.
All this article shows is that the reality distortion field has been on for a very long time.
As others have said, it was a crowded market in 1984. The idea that Apple was pushing an overpriced variant of the Apple II at that point was just sad. You can excuse Atari and Commodore for it a bit since their machines were cheap and they had not yet come out with their 68K machines.
If IBM was "failing" at this point then it was because the clones were beginning their rise.
The Apple narcissists are once again fixating on the wrong details.
Any perceived triump attributed to Apple here is statistical noise in the big picture.
I don't think IBM ever has understood the "retail" market.
They never had to really.
Others were able to take up the slack for them.
That's the value of a platform not limited merely to a single vendor. You can have multiple companies each effectively addressing different parts of the market some of which may be mutually exclusive.
You don't have to be excluded because a computer costs you what a new pickup truck would.
Portable storage still isn't very cheap. Most mobile devices don't even have enough capacity to hold a decent sized MP3 collection. Never mind storing everything in pristine formats.
That's not even getting into the question of whether or not some random device supports the format you want to use.
There is really no reason for consumer grade drives to be this expensive. The elasticity of demand just isn't there. The fellow that mentioned "gas stations" hit the nail right on the head. This is a luxury device for digital pack rats. I suspect that the market will ultimately not bear these prices.
Unless you have a drive failing right now and don't have a spare, you can probably wait this out.
I suspect this is just a speculative bubble based on some panic buying and a lot of wishful thinking.
Time will tell...
> People behave consistently, so if you're a flusterer in this question, it's a good indication that you may not respond well to stressful circumstances at work.
If you have to deal with this kind of nonsense in the interview, chances are that you will have to deal with similar nonsense on the job. It's a sign of bad corporate culture and a company best avoided.
You've got to ask yourself if you are really that desperate.
> There's a REASON why Apple makes a ton of money people,
Yes, and it's marketing.
The proper "location irrelevant' source is not your phone. It's just something that looks really impressive to people that really don't have any clue what they are looking at and are in no position to judge it based on that understanding (that they don't have).
Anything that can be streamed by an iPhone probably has no business being viewed in the manner you described. It's a great parlour trick but it ultimately shows a lack of taste by Apple and it's target demographic.
Being able to move data around freely is a considerable advantage. Anyone that's ever knackered their copy of iTunes can relate.
> The Samsung F4 2TB drives i bought for ~£70 are now a hilarious £180!
> No-one in their right mind would pay that.
I paid $400 for my first 1G drive and my first 500G drive.
If there aren't any other options, you either pay the market price or do without. The dirt cheap drives were nice for awhile but that seems to going away for awhile.
A $400 2TB spinny disk still beats the SSD alternative if one exist.
> You're not going to bother with a high end sports car because your compact has a trunk thats nearly as big.
No. It's more like saying that I won't bother with the high end sports car because it offers minimal marginal performance at a dramatically reduced cost. I can already engage in felonious speeding with a reasonably priced performance sedan.
Simply don't need a car that costs more than the house.
The cheap performance sedan has a nice trunk too.
Hobby is just a codeword for failure.
It's what they tell people instead of fessing up and saying that they managed to stumble at something. They don't want to do anything to undermine the myth of Apple. Of course the faithful eat it right up.
If anyone has a handle on this "problem" it's probably Tivo. They just have the same problem with the entrenched network monopolies that everyone else has.
It's that whole "we have a right to exclude anyone" mentality...
It doesn't just hurt Google.
Can't say anything good or bad about the Revue really. I don't think a lot of people can because it missed a very key element. It wasn't priced right. They released a $300 device when everyone else was releasing sub-$100 devices and a real PC could be had for the same $300.
It might be "a shitty product" or it might not be. Because of the whole pricing problem, I can be fairly certain that you are speaking completely out your arse because you're too cheap to have any actual firsthand experience.
It's an entirely different beast in this regard than a Roku or AppleTV and it has nothing to do with how good the actual tech is.
Yeah, this is about how the title exploits the BD format. It's not about how good the content is.
Given how good the DVD9 transfer of Revenge of the Sith was, I am not surprised that Lucasfilm did well with the BluRay transfers. Still not buying them though. I want theatrical releases. That goes for all of the films in question. If you're not going to give us the original trilogy in it's pristine form, at least give us a pristine version of the special editions.
Those movies need version numbers before you can sort out anything.
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