I know NBC is being silly and has taken its toys away. But still:
And when is that 24-hours-after-broadcast delay going to be removed? What is the point of that, anyway?
Edit: Survivor is available after all. I’ll replace it with anything from the BBC. Dr Who? Top Gear?
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssConsumerGoodsAndRetailNews/idUSWEN388420080211 and http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSWNAS040320080211
I guess that’s it for HD-DVD. We just need them to stop selling the players.
I wish Netflix would increase their stock of Blu-ray discs though. Most of the ones in my queue are marked “Short”, “Long”, or “Very long” wait. The incredible picture quality is worth the wait however. It beats the pants off AppleTV.
A Playstation 3 makes a very good Blu-ray player. Why O why doesn’t it remember where you left off on a disc? If you turn off the PS3, or play a game then come back to a movie, it’s totally forgotten where you got to. You’d think with that hard drive there’d be a bit of space to store restart-at locations for more than a couple of discs. But no, it’s time to endure all the copyright messages again. Groan. Couldn’t they just show those warnings once, perhaps before the very first disc you play?
I’ve been watching a few TV shows bought from iTunes. In particular, some documentaries from the History Channel. They’re quite good… except they are clearly edited for broadcasting with commercial breaks. Every few minutes the picture goes to black, followed by a recap of what you just watched. It’s very annoying. Editing to cut the recaps would mean less bandwidth required, more episodes fitting on a DVD, and watching more of a pleasure.
Decided to go for the upgrade: buyer for the 8GB conveniently timed his offer, and I’ve felt the 8GB is just a little cramped. Too many partial albums on there, hard to fit the kids’ music on as well as my own, etc.
Synced up the old iPhone first. Then shut it down, swapped SIM cards, and plugged in the new one. Had to go through the AT&T registration replacing the old phone on my plan, which went smoothly enough. The initial sync meant all my phone settings were retained – the only thing I had to do was re-enter my Voicemail password. I had no idea what that was, so I had to reset it by calling 611.
I copied over a few music tracks I’d been missing, and now have 7GB free and am wondering what the heck to fill it with! Must have got used to 8GB in the last few months…
Is it just my imagination or is the speakerphone louder? (After a day of use: just my imagination.)
Fake Rob (“and you can quote me on that”) Enderle and Fake John Dvorak make special guest appearances on the Single Pixel blog today. Fake Rob has a revelation concerning the iPhone’s origins, and Fake John makes his big prediction for 2008. Over to you, Rob:
FRE: Thanks, Graham. I have some amazing news about how the iPhone came to be. After some serious thinking, I have discovered the group inside Apple in which the iPhone originated. Think about it – which existing Apple device most closely resembles the iPhone in both size and weight? That’s right, the Apple Mouse. It makes perfect sense – the one button and everything! Last year even Apple abandoned the single button mouse, and the mouse group, fearing for their very existence, produced the first prototype of what would become the iPhone. They squashed the mouse flat, added some clear plastic left over from an old iMac, turned the laser tracking device upside down and – copying Microsoft’s breakthrough Surface here – used the infra-red laser to track the user’s touch. The same crazy designer who insisted on one button mice is now in charge of iPhone hardware design!
FJD: That’s amazing, Rob. Apple’s making the same mistake again – the one button mouse was never a success and it won’t work for phones either! People often scoff at me for saying that people weren’t interested in mice. I was right – until they added a second button! That’s when the mouse took off – everyone wants a second button. Consumers know a monopoly when they see one, and having only one button is hugely off-putting to those who demand choice. Someone (I doubt it will be Apple) will make a 2-button phone and it will sell in droves. That’s my prediction for 2008 – a two-button phone eclipsing the iPhone, and spawning a new era in phone usability.
FRE: After figuring out how the iPhone hardware came to be, I next had to figure out the software. There used to be a video on YouTube showing the iPhone UI running on Windows Mobile. That video has been removed due to a copyright claim by Apple Inc. Why? Because, like nearly all mice, that’s the answer – the iPhone actually runs Windows Mobile!
FJD: Holy xxx!
FRE: Yes! Why else do you think there is no iPhone SDK? Because Apple is still rewriting the iPhone software to run on Mac OS X! And that’s why we don’t see key Mac software on the iPhone. It’s all Windows based – why else did Apple have to release iTunes for Windows?
FJD: That explains so much! Quicktime, Safari, and I bet all the iPhone components, they all run on Windows!
FRE: I’m starting to think that the whole NeXT purchase was just subterfuge, a ruse to distract us from what really happened. That Apple, in 1995, did actually license the NT code as rumored and THAT is what runs OS X after all. My prediction for 2008 is that Microsoft, badly burned by Vista, will approach Apple and attempt to license back Apple’s branch of the NT code – the very same code that runs Leopard. And you can quote me on that!
Apparently this affects QuickBooks 2006 and 2007 – I’m using the NUE which comes with MBPs and it too is affected.
QB tells you it has an update: running the update gives you an out-of-disk-space error. Following that you find that your Desktop folder has been replaced with an empty file called “Desktop”. Everything you had on your desktop is GONE.
OUCH!
http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/webx/forums/mac/1917
In my case, I can say thank goodness for Time Machine. A lot of users are rightfully mad. What a fiasco.
Intuit say the issue is now fixed and it’s safe to run QuickBooks again… do you trust them?
I upgraded my SVN server to Leopard. While I could ssh to the machine without error, trying SVN resulted in an odd error:
ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory
Online, I found several people with the same error but no solution. Mine’s working now. I had an old version of Subversion in /usr/local (Leopard ships with svn in /usr/bin) – I’d already removed svn* from /usr/local, but was getting the error. I continued to remove items from /usr/local – anything to do with apr-config, apu-config, and neon. No idea what they are; I suppose they got installed with svn 1.3. Now Leopard’s svn works.
Waffle, or Jesper as he prefers to be known, posted a reply about the iPhones-should-be-unlocked issue.(About the name-calling: sorry Jesper, I didn’t know your name when I made my first post. Your blog pages don’t give the name of who posts so… Waffle it had to be.)Even Daring Fireball, oops John Gruber, decided this conversation was link-worthy.Jesper says: “If you seriously think Apple couldn’t have sold the iPhone without locking it to a network, you’re looking at the market through the lens of status quo.“The status quo is today’s marketplace. While not always perfect, basically we all get cheaper phones in return for a raised monthly payment. Apple has to compete in this market and selling a $1000 phone (unlocked or not) is not competitive. If it were unlocked carriers wouldn’t give you a price break, so you’d have an expensive phone with the regular expensive plans. Can you say iPhone Cube?What Apple and AT&T could experiment with is expensive phones and cheap plans. They should be able to sell the phone for $800 and lop $20/month off the monthly bill. Not bad, you’d get a voice+data plan for the price of a voice plan. Hardly a “cheap” plan though. Not cheap enough to make people look twice. So, we get the $400 phone and $60 plan.> If the iPhone paves the road for better (or less crippled) phones, it’s because it’s a good phone.Agreed. There are two separate arguments here, and I think we agree on one of them.
Waffle blog said:> The first mistake Apple did with the iPhone was picking a network to work with. Apple needs to have no network’s permission to make a GSM phone.I understand that many people would like an unlocked iPhone, and clearly some still don’t understand why Apple chose to go with a network at all.There are a couple of reasons.Firstly, features. You wouldn’t get one of the iPhone’s most important features: Visual Voicemail. Until you’ve tried this, don’t knock it. This is what makes the iPhone such a good phone.Secondly, money. It’s estimated that Apple receives $18 a month per iPhone from AT&T. They wouldn’t get that from unlocked phones. They’d have to charge, let’s say that’s over a contract’s life of two years, $18 x 24 months = $432 extra for a phone. Or over a grand at launch, and still over $800 now. You think they’d be selling so many at those prices? No way. Much better to sell at $400 and pick up double that over two years.Quite amazingly, normally consumers get a cheap phone then pay the subsidy back monthly. With the iPhone we get an unsubsidized phone, still pay full contract rates (as though the phone were subsidized) and then AT&T pays that money to Apple. Apple sells us a full-price phone, and pockets the subsidy payback! AT&T is still happy because they are getting a ton of users to jump up to the full data plan, an extra $20/month many weren’t paying before.Finally, it’s not like an unlocked iPhone would make that much difference in the US. The only other network it would work on is T-mobile. I like T-mobile but they’re not a reason to double the iPhone price for everyone.Sorry Waffle, but you’re the “spectacularly wrong-headed” one here. If iPhone means other phone makers have more leverage against carriers, that is tremendous news for consumers. We all know about Verizon’s idiotic disabling of Bluetooth and MP3 ability. With the iPhone in town, stupid moves like this will be harder to justify.Congratulations, Apple, on your Time Magazine “Invention of the Year” award. Completely justified.
John Siracusa has produced another great review of OS X. He’s been doing that since “Developer Preview 2” back in 1999 – that is still an interesting article to peruse. The introduction of Aqua back in 2000 is although work a look.I loved his point, referring to Time Machine, that it’s harder not to backup now.
