gleek
Flak Jacket
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OfflineE chu ta!
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Wost Tech Products of 2007
« on: December 28, 2007, 10:02:50 AM » |
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Woman, open the door, don't let it sting. I wanna breathe that fire again.
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Aske
Lederhosen
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #1 on: December 28, 2007, 10:14:34 AM » |
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article fails for not mentioned bluray 1.0 hardware-- now obsolete.
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Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century. -- Chimpy McFlightsuit, CEO of Bu$hco Industries of 'Merka
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Uisce Beatha
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat From: In the Jar
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OfflineGet me the tank!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #2 on: December 28, 2007, 11:03:32 AM » |
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I know I have a big time Apple fanboy rep around here but let me be the first to agree with Apple TV's inclusion on that list. Wrong product at the wrong time with the wrong resolution and wrongly supported. People want shiny little discs for their movies and they're willing to wait for the re-run or the box set for their TV shows.
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"If you're darker than a caramel, Reverend Al speaks for you." - Aasif Mandvi "Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man: no time to talk." - stroh
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stroh
Sleeveless Hoodie From: Impact Crater Springs, CA
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OfflineWe're doomed!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #3 on: December 28, 2007, 04:14:24 PM » |
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I wanted to get an Apple TV when they had the 160 giggers for a buck 289. I figured it would be a great poor man's TiVo, that did other stuff. Bad idea?
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tdcoly
Tartan Jacket From: The home of misfits, renegades, blowhards, idiots and fools.
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #4 on: December 28, 2007, 05:55:33 PM » |
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I love my Mac, but my son bought the AppleTV box, and it's not that impressive.
He also installed Leopard on one of his laptops, and I'm sticking with Tiger.
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"I'm only speeding 'cause I really have to poop"-as seen on a bumper sticker
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stroh
Sleeveless Hoodie From: Impact Crater Springs, CA
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #5 on: December 29, 2007, 07:07:48 AM » |
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I love my Mac, but my son bought the AppleTV box, and it's not that impressive.
What didn't he like about it? (I don't own a Mac yet, so I'm not familiar with what I should expect from an Apple product)
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tdcoly
Tartan Jacket From: The home of misfits, renegades, blowhards, idiots and fools.
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #6 on: December 29, 2007, 08:22:23 AM » |
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I love my Mac, but my son bought the AppleTV box, and it's not that impressive.
What didn't he like about it? (I don't own a Mac yet, so I'm not familiar with what I should expect from an Apple product) Mac's are great. AppleTV is a device to stream video from the computer to a TV. Just didn't turn out to be as great as he expected. If you buy a new Mac, you'll get Leopard. I don't see a big enough difference from Tiger to bother with an upgrade.
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"I'm only speeding 'cause I really have to poop"-as seen on a bumper sticker
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Uisce Beatha
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat From: In the Jar
Karma: 116 Posts: 7357
OfflineGet me the tank!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #7 on: December 29, 2007, 09:58:27 AM » |
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I wanted to get an Apple TV when they had the 160 giggers for a buck 289. I figured it would be a great poor man's TiVo, that did other stuff. Bad idea?
Apple TV's not a TiVo replacement. It simply facilitates the streaming of your iTunes library to your TV. You can't capture a TV show, store it on your Mac or your Apple TV and watch it later at your leisure. You have to buy the show from ITMS. It's nice for a few things such piping your iTunes music to your audio system with a typically slick Apple UI but definitely not worth the $$ to me. Mac geeks might want to give this a look - http://www.elgato.com/elg...re/EyeTV/product2.en.html.
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"If you're darker than a caramel, Reverend Al speaks for you." - Aasif Mandvi "Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man: no time to talk." - stroh
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geo1
Golf Shirt
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #8 on: December 29, 2007, 10:42:38 AM » |
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I wanted to get an Apple TV when they had the 160 giggers for a buck 289. I figured it would be a great poor man's TiVo, that did other stuff. Bad idea?
Apple TV's not a TiVo replacement. It simply facilitates the streaming of your iTunes library to your TV. You can't capture a TV show, store it on your Mac or your Apple TV and watch it later at your leisure. You have to buy the show from ITMS. It's nice for a few things such piping your iTunes music to your audio system with a typically slick Apple UI but definitely not worth the $$ to me. Mac geeks might want to give this a look - http://www.elgato.com/elg...re/EyeTV/product2.en.html. This is what I use to pipe my music throughout my household ( http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/). Plug it into electrical outlet and then into receiver. The Apple TV WAS a great idea and then they quit on it. It will stream anything that you can place into ITUNES, IPHOTO, and IMOVIE. There are some items you can make into a quicktime movie, load into ITUNES and stream. But that is not guaranteed to work.
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Uisce Beatha
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat From: In the Jar
Karma: 116 Posts: 7357
OfflineGet me the tank!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #9 on: December 29, 2007, 10:52:47 AM » |
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There's also the Onkyo dock. Obviously only works if you have an Onkyo receiver. I imagine other vendors have stuff like that too. Early days on this yet (not music really but video for sure.) The digital living room isn't quite a reality. We discussed storage and backup in another thread. Until those two, highly related, needs have simple, workable, affordable solutions it will be a niche market. Apple is working away towards it with ITMS and movies. They signed a deal with Fox this week. Rumors about Microsoft taking over the HDM market through downloads persist. But at the end of the day, how do I own a video library containing 100s of movies in high-res formats without an enterprise storage solution? We're starting to see promise in products like Drobo wherein J6P *might* make a run at the technology - but not at that price point. Five years. Maybe three.
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"If you're darker than a caramel, Reverend Al speaks for you." - Aasif Mandvi "Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man: no time to talk." - stroh
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stroh
Sleeveless Hoodie From: Impact Crater Springs, CA
Karma: 155 Posts: 16135
OfflineWe're doomed!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #10 on: December 29, 2007, 10:55:03 AM » |
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Maybe I'm missing the picture here (Lindberg baby) but what's the large hard drive for?
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Uisce Beatha
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat From: In the Jar
Karma: 116 Posts: 7357
OfflineGet me the tank!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #11 on: December 29, 2007, 11:06:21 AM » |
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Maybe I'm missing the picture here (Lindberg baby) but what's the large hard drive for?
Are you asking about the Drobo link? Standard DVDs are something like 5Gb and HDM is 30-50Gb. Obviously there are extras, multiple soundtracks, etc. on those but let's say a SD movie is 4Gb and a HD movie is 20Gb. It's not going to take long to burn through a 400Gb drive especially if you're HD ready. On top of that you wouldn't want to leave your investment exposed so you're going to want to back it up. Double the requirement. For just 50 HDM titles we're going to need a couple of terabytes If I'm going to have to purchase hundreds/thousands of dollars of hardware to make downloaded movies work they'd better be priced at next to nothing (seriously, maybe even $2-3.) Given there are only about 100 HDM titles I'd even want to own if they were free, almost everything else I already have on DVD and maybe ten TV series ever are worth owning I just don't see how I break even. Plus I have to find room for all the hardware, power it, replace it as it ages or capacity is exceeded, so on. Right now, I wait for a BOGO or end-cap Target sale and store something the width of a pencil in a drawer or two. That's an order of magnitude better for me. YMMV.
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"If you're darker than a caramel, Reverend Al speaks for you." - Aasif Mandvi "Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man: no time to talk." - stroh
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Aske
Lederhosen
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #12 on: December 29, 2007, 11:20:50 AM » |
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There's also the Onkyo dock. Obviously only works if you have an Onkyo receiver. I imagine other vendors have stuff like that too. Early days on this yet (not music really but video for sure.) The digital living room isn't quite a reality. We discussed storage and backup in another thread. Until those two, highly related, needs have simple, workable, affordable solutions it will be a niche market. Apple is working away towards it with ITMS and movies. They signed a deal with Fox this week. Rumors about Microsoft taking over the HDM market through downloads persist. But at the end of the day, how do I own a video library containing 100s of movies in high-res formats without an enterprise storage solution? We're starting to see promise in products like Drobo wherein J6P *might* make a run at the technology - but not at that price point. Five years. Maybe three. secure storage/licensing issues aside , 5 years isn't close to reality for at least 50% of this country, probably 75-80%. excluding the elite of current FIOS users and those select few who have dedicate T x lines for running/doing businesses out of their homes, most people couldn't download a true quality HD movie 'on demand in a day!' to save their life, and the telcos etc will keep it that way until there's really $ to be made in doing so. even then, they'll probably downsample/downres the content to cut the bandwidth demands, and j6p will still eat it up
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Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century. -- Chimpy McFlightsuit, CEO of Bu$hco Industries of 'Merka
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Uisce Beatha
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat From: In the Jar
Karma: 116 Posts: 7357
OfflineGet me the tank!
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #13 on: December 29, 2007, 11:22:59 AM » |
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Now, if they'd let me download and burn... Good point aske. Bandwidth is another huge hurdle and they will try to beat it through compression/downres which won't appeal at all to the targeted early adopters.
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"If you're darker than a caramel, Reverend Al speaks for you." - Aasif Mandvi "Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man: no time to talk." - stroh
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Aske
Lederhosen
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Re: Wost Tech Products of 2007
« Reply #14 on: December 29, 2007, 11:29:58 AM » |
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Now, if they'd let me download and burn... Good point aske. Bandwidth is another huge hurdle and they will try to beat it through compression/downres which won't appeal at all to the targeted early adopters. IIRC (sorry, I'm a bit occupied mentally on real work to actually recrank it or let alone even think about it) but it would take about a sustained 3Mb/s (Mb, not MB) running 24hours to get about a 30GB file downloaded. to stream it in real time would take an initial burst of 20-30x that and a sustained pipe of about 10-15x that . imagine everyone and their neighbors DL'ing 2-3 movies a week to watch even.
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Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century. -- Chimpy McFlightsuit, CEO of Bu$hco Industries of 'Merka
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