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Comment Add optical thunderbolt (Score 1) 482

About time.

I want a magsafe universal power adapter that has an optical thunderbolt cable running down it. Dock? Who needs a dock? Attach mag adapter and your desktop power adapter then has the ports that you need in it. Can still be cheaper/smaller ones used for travel w/o the ports/thunderbolt.

And, I think overall, if companies didn't spend the money designing and stocking multiple power supplies they'd make more money than what they are doing now selling expensive power adapters. Users would also be happier, thus more likely to buy. Vendor might even get away with NOT including a power adapter in the box. Doubly so if it works on more than just laptops like the claim.

Overall better for the world as well waste less resources/store less junk because power supplies can outlive the gadget they are hooked to. Also, companies can be encouraged to make better more efficient power supplies. Right now you have to take what you get.

Apple at least keeps cables and power adapters around a long time, but it's even better if EVERYONE used the same cables/power supply.

Comment Re:Makes sense... (Score 1) 341

The real threat will be an increase in the amount of video streamed and watched over the internet, NOT an increase in the video size.

Twitter commentary and Facebook will not be a huge increase in network bandwidth. Small bits of text. It's NOTHING. Text entered by humans. You can be the fastest typist EVER and you won't even touch what an audio stream is. You might say that everyone wants to provide their own audio tracks -- but that'll still pale to the existing skype traffic, which we're handling right now.

Sound might get more resolution, but we're already at the point where sound is a tiny portion of a movie. And there' s a limit to what the human ear can hear, and we're pretty close to that already.

You are also ignoring any increase in compression. We're much better at compressing sound and video than we were 10 years ago, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that we'll get better still in the next 10 years. This will offset some of the increase in resolution.

Really, the only driver in traffic (looking at file sizes) is video.

The highest resolution movies considered right now are 4k (4096×3072) or about 6x what 1080p is. We can pretty much guarantee that with the adoption rates of tvs that it'll take at least a decade to get there. No one is even making screens at that resolution that cost less than $30k yet. 3D might change that, but at present, it seems 3D will fizzle out. And it's only (at worst) a 2x increase in the video size, but a 3D compression algorithm would likely change that to a small % over a 2d movie (the 3D frames are largely the same).

Google is able to deliver in small doses, the network they are talking about, it'll only get easier to implement in the years to come. That network would serve up a 4k movie in 1.5 minutes assuming 15 seconds for a 1080p movie (maybe they aren't using 1080p for the 15 second quote though).

In other words, you are harping on a 10x increase in traffic due to file sizes, in the face of a 100x increase in bandwidth (10Mb to 1Gb).

As I said, the real threat will be the increased # of hours of video that people watch over the internet. That can scale higher than 10x, as people shift from watching video through cable/broadcast to over the internet.

Comment Re:Meh. Missing features. (Score 1) 365

The information that the original poster was referring to is here: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/2 Even though the article is recent, the model that they tested in the Mid-2009 MB Air, not the current model. That means the controller chip is at least a 1.5 years old, and most likely is not one of the new super-modern SSD controllers. The bullet point is, "OS X needs TRIM", what you're really asking is "OS X shouldn't degrade performance of an SSD the more it's used". This apparently doesn't happen, though to be sure it'd need to be retested with a 3rd party SSD. But I certainly trust facts and figures rather than people making claims w/o anything other "well it needs TRIM". And OS X gives the users several options on where to store iTunes data, it's trivial to move that off to another partition. You can even move the entire user profile to another drive if you want to.

Comment Re:Apple is not like Best Buy (Score 1) 482

This is really the analogy that you're going with? I know that it's technically true: Apple does indeed transmit a new digital copy each time someone purchases an app. But it not really the essence of what Apple does.

A developer submits an app, and verifies that they have the right to do so. Apple then sells the app for them, and collects the money, takes their cut for running the store, and then sends the money along to the developer.

In this case, Apple is selling the bits it got "in good faith" on consignment.

It's no more possible for Apple to confirm that the copyright is correct on all these items, than it is for YouTube to police all it's videos. And, unlike YouTube, Apple has a contract with the developer, and knows exactly who should be held responsible.

Similarly, if Apple sold a song through iTMS, that a publisher gave to it, I don't see any reasonable method for Apple to know if the rights are correct on it.

BTW, this will be true for Any electronic download service (XBOX, PS3, Amazon for music/tv), etc.

And it's true for any store. Best Buy is ok to sell the same illegal bits because they are affixed to a physical media?

Comment Re:The choice is Apple's to make (Score 1) 731

I'm going to make the simple obvious point: Adobe doesn't make Flash for any mobile phone. Flash Lite is not the "full flash experience" that Adobe is talking about. Flash 10.1 for Android is not going to be out for a few months, and it's over a year late, despite full support of the OS vendor (google). Yes, once it's here, Apple still won't allow it. But, right now? Apple is not allowing something that Adobe doesn't make. Somehow this is Apple's fault. Adobe has a lousy track record on mobile devices. Demonstrate a working Mobile Flash. Once Adobe does that, THEN Adobe can start whining. It's this pre-mature whining that annoys me. I'll give them the right to start whining about the SDK change that nixed Flash CS5 generating iPhone apps. I understood what Job's said, but it's wrong, not relevant, and short sighted. And yes, it'd be much better to evaluate the tool first, instead of banning outright. If you're going to ban a tool for reasons like this, it might be nice to have some objective criteria: Tools that do not do X, Y, Z and apps they generate, are banned from the iPhone store. That means that Apple shipping OS 4, would update the list, and maybe Flash CS5 would be banned until it supported some new features, but it would still be allowed to create OS 3 version apps (though Apple would probably stop accepting OS 3 apps). Nitpick: Flash CS5 doesn't compile to Objective-C, it compiles to ARM code (just like the Obj-c compiler would.)

Comment Re:US Copyright Office search (Score 3, Interesting) 648

The copyright is for "10.5" not "10.5.0".

Psystar's claim is that they buy commercially available leopard disks and use them.

I've not bought a retail version of Leopard lately, but there is still a pretty good chance that it's 10.5.0. After all, it'll boot any machine that did not come with leopard (and hence, has it's own restore disks). Not sure why Apple would go through the effort to make a new version, the only pay off is to save bandwidth starved users from downloading a combo update.

Just because Apple shipped macs with 10.5.1 ... 10.5.6, doesn't mean you can buy the disks. The only way to get them is to buy a new mac.

Though, I guess you can claim that THOSE disks don't have a copyright, and thus you are copying them. Buy one new mac, get a leopard disk and use it.

But, since you get hit for "only costs", Apple can claim these non-retail disks cost more. And, in fact they do as they contain iLife and an emergency disk. As well as some effort to make them run on the new machine (which wouldn't run the current version of OS X when they were released).

And, that pre-supposes that Apple has to re-register point releases to get the full benefit of Copyright protection. If I fixed some errata in a published book, and did not re-file the copyright, is it still fully protected? And is this what 10.5.1 is?

How much change is needed before someone has to re-file?

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