Spoken like someone who missed a lot of what Palm brought to the table at the time, and whose first PDA was an iPhone...

1.) Taking time to input data has always been a part of a pocket reference. If you were carrying around a Day Timer, you were doing data entry by hand to create your schedule. If you were carrying around a pocket Rolodex, you were adding contact names and numbers with a pencil. Palm took about the same amount of time at worst.
2.) Palm facilitated data entry by syncing with Outlook (for those who had existing data) or Hotsync Manager (for those who didn't) and allowing all of that data to be stored and backed up.
3.) It did seemingly trivial things like "sort alphabetically" - it's maddening to open a pocket phone book and be out of room to add a new person where they belong. Similarly, A Palm that was kept for 3-5 years (back then, they were, in fact, kept that long) was pretty close in cost to replacing a DayMinder annually - those things are NOT cheap.
4.) Alarms when things were coming up. A pocket calendar didn't chirp an hour before an event.
5.) Multiple calendar views. Wanted to see your paper calendar at a weekly level? Hope you bought it that way!
6.) Trading contact information by holding down the 'contacts' button and lining up the IR sensors. To this day, I've only seen weak attempts to recreate this - Bump, QR Codes, costly NFC tiles...nothing beat the simplicity of line up. hold one button. done.

Trivial as these things are to us now, the days of doing these tasks on paper saw them as a much bigger leap, because they were problems that went from 'unsolved' to 'solved', rather than 'solved' to 'optimized'. Also, keep in mind that battery life was measured in "weeks".......

Two genuine questions here. First, if a disproportionate reason why a person has cable at all is for HBO, then $15/month is less than what they're paying for HBO + everything else, so it may well be worth it. How many users fit this particular category?

Second, how much of HBO's back catalog is included? The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Dead Like Me are all still highly regarded series that have a good amount of rewatch value. HBO has also produced a wide array of well produced documentaries. Yes, everyone says "zomg Game of Thrones and True Blood!!11" because they're trendy at the moment, but if HBO Go gives on-demand access to virtually every piece of HBO produced content, in 1080[i/p]...that may well be a worthwhile number.

Bonus round: Once all the major draws have been binge watched over the next year, the dropoff rate will likely be noticeable, for the very reason you specify.

And equally as newsworthy.

You missed the key word: RETAIL. Tesla isn't a retail store. Tesla is a vertical market - they sell their own product in their own stores, and their product is relatively unique that they have additional liberties as a result. JC Penney doesn't make their own clothes, they sell other people's clothes for more money than they spent on acquiring them, and those same clothes are also being sold by other retailers. It's a completely different ballgame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

J.C. Penney tried this. It's become a textbook case study in retail management as to how not to run a retail store. Unfortunately, the "feeling of getting a bargain" is a powerful psychological motivator to purchase; treating customers like rational people is not.

A satellite running Linux is contingent upon a spontaneous reboot to function again? Great, now we'll never hear from that satellite again.

Clearly, the plan should have been to run the device on Windows 98. That way, it would only be out of commission for 49.7 days.

The people who actually believe in the bearded man in that lives in the sky are indeed concerned about living conditions in the third world. That's why they're building wells, providing medical assistance, and working to end child sex trafficking. Admittedly, I don't have a faith based charity off the top of my head that deals with food specifically, though I'm sure that some exist. Point is, the Christians on the receiving end of your condescension certainly exist...but the Christians who are actually working to combat poverty and poor living conditions in the third world are too busy addressing those problems to try and market themselves at a volume that can be heard above the Westboro Baptists.

Two things here. First, your condescension is misplaced. I don't see how believing that life is valuable is somehow an undesirable trait. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's common for Christians to place more value on a fetus than a death row inmate, but the abstract concept of "life is sacred" does not seem like a terrible stance to have. That being said, let's roll with your idea for a minute, and have an annual "Russian Roulette Day", where everyone has a 1/6 chance of being shot, because resources. Is it not advantageous for society to keep alive a doctor who won the lottery and heals the poor for free? Is that person truly an equal loss to society than a convicted serial killer? Either we run the risk of losing 1/6 of our core human infrastructure, or we start issuing 'exemptions' for world leaders and decorated veterans...and everyone else with money and/or connections to get on that list. As an added bonus, we know that the drug lords and mobsters aren't going to show up for Roulette Day, so a decade of this plan, and chaos starts getting ever closer to actually happening.

Better yet, don't kill anyone, and incentivize population control. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.

While sure, many of the people who have absurdly large families are also devoutly religious, that doesn't necessarily make it a direct comparison. I'm fully aligned with the concept of removing all government-based fiscal incentives for having more than three children - got a fourth? Great. No tax deduction after the third, and you pay for schooling out of pocket. If you can pay for 'em, you can have 'em, but if someone is going to get offended by the requirement that the money come from somewhere, that's not something that religion alone is responsible for.

Personally, I'm with you on that. Plenty of people disagree with me, but I do believe that people should be able to make their own decision to pull their own plug if they want to - and can reasonably prove that they are competent enough to do so out of their own free will without coercion or duress, then go for it. Now, the problem of course would be truly proving it. If medical bills start piling up to the point where insurance is about to run out, and the person makes the choice to die for the purposes of not passing the cost on to their children...is that 'duress'? Those kinds of situations tend to get messy, but I'm speaking in the abstract here for a reason.

The App Permissions seem to be missing the crucial ability to deny internet access to an app. There are apps where network data connectivity is the problem. Similarly, I wonder if Google will have this permission setting capability on its internal applications. I know that I have a rather tightly worn tin foil hat when it comes to Google and the information they get, but the Xprivacy 'deny' list on my phone is a mile long, and that's with most of their apps frozen or forcibly pulled out, I find that Google's data access on the platform demands a tight leash, leading the 'privacy' and 'permissions' charge to ring of hypocrisy - "we'll make sure that only we have your location" doesn't mean much to me :/

No, with that mentality, we'd have things like

• Phones that aren't anorexic, instead being willing to be a bit thicker and sport two days' worth of battery life.
• Phones with physical keyboards. Nothing wrong with Swype or Swiftkey, but if there's a market for pseudo surround sound in a phone, you can't tell me that having a keyboard like the Blackberry Curve or HTC Rhodium doesn't have a maket.
• Phones with intentionally lower DPI, for people with less-than-perfect eyesight that still want to use their phone.
• Phones with a better ability to leverage integrated storage
• Phones with screens designed to be user-replaceable

And that's just off the top of my head of hardware-based changes that end users would be much more likely to want, and would not negatively impact battery life.

I comprehensively covered this earlier in the thread, but it's not just the drive - it's that video format support isn't exactly a guarantee, and that USB flash drives are signficantly more expensive than a single DVD (and most 32GB flash drives are, at best, at cost parity with a single Blu-Ray disc). Yes, external burners are basically the answer here, but the problem here is that the newer Mac Pro units seem to have quite the laundry list of requirements of external hardware as opposed to even the previous design.

In context, MB = MacBook? I'm not sure, but I'd argue this point regardless. I worked at Staples in 2002, and that is when printers tended to be hybrid, having both parallel and USB ports. So, let's assume that 2002 was the last year that retail printers used parallel ports, and 2003 was the year of USB exclusivity on the printer. Your 'decade after' mark means that Macbooks should have had parallel ports in 2012, but my research indicates that no Macbook (i.e Intel-based Mac) has ever had a parallel port; even my HP dv9000 series laptop from 2006 was all USB. As for dedicated duplicators, they're great, but they still need an initial burn somewhere. While I know that there are models out there will allow one or more drives to be used directly from the PC, many pros I know did the initial burn from the computer, and then a one-to-many duplication on a standalone unit. I'm not saying that that's the only way to do it, but I am saying that there's still a good reason to have just the bay available.

I was most certainly around during that time, and like I said - many people who bought the early iMacs were unhappy with that design decision. CD-RW drives were expensive around the very-first-gen models, but PCs started shipping with them as standard fare around that time, making the price of external drives go down pretty quickly. Blank CDs were $2-$4 each, but 4MB flash drives and CompactFlash cards were $40-$60 each; it was a long time before cost-per-megabyte of USB flash drives were favorable to optical media at the 650MB mark.

That problem isn't nearly as much of a consideration when a trio of 4TB hard disks can be used as a RAID5 internally. Yes, archiving will need to be done in some form on a somewhat regular basis, but not on a per-project schedule. You're right that it doesn't lend itself to collaboration well, but collaboration isn't always an endgame, either. Moreover, technologies that are involved in sharing files that quickly between multiple computers get extremely expensive, extremely quickly, and don't scale down well to single-computer situations - even a Synology box costs a few hundred dollars, and you'll need to use one of those Thunderbolt ports for an ethernet adapter to handle the iSCSI traffic. External hard drives are a bit better of a bargain in those cases, but I'll be honest that I have no idea as to how well Apple supports RAID5 on a set of USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt disks.

Earlier, you were suggesting exactly that. Moreover, code gets big, but video gets bigger, faster. I'm sure that many coding projects end up being tens of gigabytes' worth of code and assets, but most of the things I see on Github are not.

Pixar, and companies that have more than a handful of Macs and Mac users, will have some sort of EMC/3Par/NetApp/Equalogic system in place, simply because the number of jointly shared assets, and the space they require, will easily hit the internal disk ceiling you're talking about. I'm not talking about that kind of scenario, I'm talking about the kind of scenario where 8-12TB of available storage is a practical amount to have. Across Apple's product line, external drives seem to be becoming an ever more necessary add-on purchase, while the number of ports into which to plug them is dwindling.

The original statement made was: "the need to have personal drives only comes from a small percentage of pros". My rebuttal was that if higher amounts of storage weren't that big of a deal to the Apple market, then Apple wouldn't have several square feet of shelf space dedicated to external storage devices, and Promise and friends wouldn't be selling Thunderbolt RAID arrays for a thousand bucks a pop. 256GB of storage is plenty for the Apple users who spend most of their time on Facebook and iTunes and iPhoto, but those are not the users to whom the Mac Pro is marketed. Those for whom the Mac Pro is marketed, should not, in my opinion, be relegated to having to spend several hundred dollars on external storage solutions when PCs at 1/5th the price pack a terabyte as standard equipment with room to grow.

You're right, they do. And let's even assume that I found somewhere on the internet that had some sort of packaging that resembled a DVD case, enabling this particular flash drive to be artfully labeled as the wedding video. What format do you suggest I provide the video in? .mp4? It's a fairly common format, generally well supported, but am I certain that the drive itself will be able to handle the throughput of a high bitrate video? Will the TV (or device connected thereto)? Or will there just be a whole lot of stuttering throughout? If she plugs it into her computer, will that play it back? Windows 8 might support .mp4 natively, but Windows 7/Vista/XP do not. Should I include a VLC installer for her? I don't know what OSX supports out of the box, but I think Quicktime plays it? Should she update Quicktime? What if she wants to bring it to her parent's house to see it - are her parents likely to have a Smart TV, or some other device with a USB input that reads .mp4? .MP4 may be the closest thing for compatibility, but no menus and awkward chapter authoring become a problem. .MKV solves those problems, but now we're playing compatibility roulette all over again. With a 64GB flash drive, I certainly could provide multiple formats, one with menus, one high-bitrate .mp4, one for the iPod, a Quicktime version, and even an MPEG-1 to be absolutely certain it'll play on something. Well, now I've spent $20 on a single flash drive for this bride, and increased my render time by a factor of five.

Or, I can, y'know, give her a DVD. I've yet to know someone who doesn't have the means by which to play back a DVD. If I'm feeling adventurous, I can ask her if she has a Blu-Ray player, and give her one of those. Still cheaper, still simpler, and still more reliable than gambling on a particular video format.

And how is that a better workflow than having one's data locally available on an internal hard drive? It's sure as hell more expensive, and the copy in/copy out plan is what one would generally have to do in that case, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's easily a half-hour each way - a half hour spent working around a technological shortcoming that is only there for design reasons.

That's indeed a fair point. It's entirely possible to go down that road, but now we're talking a storage array that costs more than the Mac Pro itself. Even the Thunderbolt RAID bays I've seen have cost several hundred dollars, and that's without drives...but I will indeed concede that it's possible. That's a large part of my point though - the standard-tower-style Mac Pro, while not Johnny Ives' vision of beauty, was at least highly functional and expandable. Having a small internal RAID meant "spending ~$450 on three hard disks, connecting the SATA connectors, and spending 20 minutes in Disk Utility", not "spend $900 on a Fiber connector, and then another $7,000 on a PowerVault, to add a decent amount of storage to a $3,000 computer".

Well, if someone were to use a logic analyzer to determine which pins of a Thunderbolt cable were PCI Express, so that they can solder up an off-board, wall-powered GPU, that would only run at PCI x4 speeds (ironically, I'd argue that the thermal portion of the equation would be the easiest to solve)...well, someone smart enough to do that is smart enough to use Windows competently :-).

Powerpoint isn't bad, people just don't know how to use it. Let's go back to 2007, when one of the most well-known Powerpoint* presentations was given: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Take a look at Steve as he's presenting. He's glancing back at the screen, from time to time, usually after his slides have advanced. The changing of the slides doesn't affect the flow of what he's saying; it underscores it at just the right time. It's mostly pictures; there are fewer than ten words on the screen at any given point, and not a bullet point in sight. The graphics are large, clear, and immediately relevant. There's no crowding on the screen, the text has a high contrast with the background, and there's nothing to distract the viewer from the presenter. Steve practiced what he was going to say, how it was going to be paced, the sequence in which points were going to be given, and designed his slides accordingly.

This was an excellent presentation for a reason - it's abundantly clear that countless hours went into every second of its exposition. This was no night-before job, with copy/pastes from Wikipedia, and low-res pictures from Google Images, being given by a presenter who was on a red eye flight three hours before he gave it, who is giving the talk having only practiced the first half just once, without an audience, much less a critical one. No, Steve knew that he had a presentation to give, so he was preparing it for quite some time.

The fact of the matter is that Powerpoint* wasn't relevant in this speech - it was the fact that it was a highly polished presentation, from a talented orator and presenter, with lots of practice, and a set of slides that were clearly designed by someone with a graphic design background. Every once in a while, you'll come across someone who is giving a presentation with a similar focus on design and implementation, who has taken their task seriously and practiced accordingly. Most of the time, they get all the time, focus, and attention to detail as a final paper in Freshman Comp, due the day after Memorial Day and read aloud half hungover - because that's how much priority the presentation itself is given by the presenter.

*Yes, it was probably Keynote.

At this point, you can turn this story into a Mad Lib, and fill in the blanks with basically any set of nouns, and it'll mostly be true.

I'm not the author of the GP post, but I *do* use a workstation.

Yesterday actually, when I burnt a DVD for a friend. See kids, I know that 'streaming' is all the rage and that all the cool kids are doing it, but there's still no substitute for handing someone a physical product. Wedding and event videos fall squarely in this category. No bride will be okay with spending $1,500 for a Vimeo link. Moreover, if you're using a copyrighted song in the video, and you've got the proper licensing to do it, an upload to Youtube will still be flagged, and you'll spend plenty of time sorting that out and providing paperwork. Even if we put that aside, Youtube quality varies based on any number of things, but they *do* compress video in order to stream it. Their HD streaming looks pretty good now, but it's still got much heavier compression than a Blu-Ray disc. Just because we don't burn mix CDs anymore or use them for backup devices doesn't mean that the optical drive is dead. It's a niche, but it's not dead.

...and Apple was rather widely panned for doing so at the time. This was in large part due to the dearth of an alternative storage medium being included - you were either getting files around with a 56K modem, a USB ZIP drive, a USB Floppy drive, or VERY expensive 16MB flash drives that, in many cases, had slower write speeds than actual floppy disks. Floppies were passe, no doubt, but Apple should have been putting CD-RW drives in the iMac long before they actually did.

You also need storage space. HD video, art assets, high resolution multitrack audio projects, and CAD drawings aren't exactly compact forms of data, y'know.

That's a rather broad brush to paint with, especially since disk I/O over the LAN starts hitting a ceiling pretty quick. This would be easier to swallow if there were a PCI Express slot to add a 10GigE/Fiber/Infiniband card, but they did away with that, too.

That number is so small that there's an insignificant market for storage devices that can connect to them, right? And it makes more sense for Apple to make them an online-only product rather than waste shelf space on them in the store, right? This logic is better illustrated with your optical drive notions earlier - Apple actually doesn't sell them in the store (or, in some stores, only has one or two slimline ones on the shelf, frequently with a thin layer of dust).

Yes...Pros let everything live on iSCSI volumes or in Teh Cloud (tm) and never have a reason to store things locally. (/sarcasm)

This is a fair point. I wish they would have better eSATA support, but I will certainly concede that eSATA has never been their thing.

Quadro/Firepro cards aren't exactly miserly with their power usage, especially when tied with a high end Core i7. Now, what Apple did in the redesigned Mac Pro units was indeed to match the PSU with the guts that would be alright with that amount of power. Given that they're not terribly user serviceable or expandable, this was acceptable...but a lack of headroom (and explicitly removing the need for it) is solely a design feature, not a consumer-friendly one.

http://apcmag.com/pirated_wind...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
http://store.vmware.com/store/...

New laptop, an SSD, and VMWare Workstation, all for less than $1,000. The key here is TinyXP, the custom-built flavor of XP circulating the internet that uses 50MB of RAM after installation. Boot time for all of them would certainly be measurable if not staggered, but 16VMs on a laptop that's got 16GB of RAM, running stripped down XP installations that have one job...I think it's doable.

I still think the Layer 3 Switch option is a better one. Where that might be a bit more of a problem would be with regards to whether the update software is capable of handling the possibility of seeing more than one device available to update at the same time. Even though it's possible with networking tricks to get all the pumps addressable at the same time, there's no guarantee that the software is built for that use case. For that matter, it's entirely possible that the software will throw up if multiple instances are attempted to run concurrently. Thus, the 16-VM route may be necessary for that reason, regardless of whether or not a layer 3 switch could solve the networking problem.