Poor man's Quicktime....
January 9, 2001 9:29 AM   Subscribe

Poor man's Quicktime.... Apple Keynote, in a text format.
posted by Cavatica (23 comments total)
 
THIS is far better than the supposed streaming Quicktime. The QT is sputtering so much it's worthless to watch, let alone listen to.

If you keep hitting the reload button on the text version it updates. The person inputting Job's talk is obviously doing so live.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 10:28 AM on January 9, 2001


Huh, funky, refresh, new stuff. How do they do that? Just edit and save text files?
posted by tiaka at 10:44 AM on January 9, 2001


maybe they setup a voice-to-text gateway and are feeding the updates via cellphone?

(that titanium powerbook sounds sweet, and I'm not even an apple fan.)
posted by mathowie at 10:47 AM on January 9, 2001


Damn, I knew I should have held out and not bought my PB when I did. Now we just have to wait for the Apple site to add the new products.
posted by Cavatica at 10:52 AM on January 9, 2001


Well, the apple store has the new stuff listed, but as expected the site is currently taking quite a hit. I can't get past the first page.
posted by gluechunk at 11:35 AM on January 9, 2001


Ooohh .... that's a nice laptop... and A 733mhz G4.... NICE! Terribly expensive though. (sigh)
posted by tiaka at 11:47 AM on January 9, 2001


Did not receive any response from application. It is possible that the application does not exist, or that the requested url is incorrect.

Either that, or a 500 error. Heh.
posted by pnevares at 11:53 AM on January 9, 2001


Summary
• 733MHz PowerPC G4
• 1.5GB SDRAM - 3 DIMMs
• 3x72GB Ultra160 SCSI - Dual card
• Apple Cinema Display (22" flat panel)
• Zip 250 Drive
• DVD-R/CD-RW
• NVIDIA GeForce2 MX - 32MB SDRAM
• 3 RAGE 128 PCI cards - 16MB each
• Ultra SCSI PCI card & cable adapter
• 56K internal modem
• Apple Pro Speakers
• AirPort Card
• Apple Pro Keyboard
• Mac OS
• 3yr AppleCare Protection Plan-Power Mac+Display


Subtotal $15,404.00

Perfect G4 system.
posted by tiaka at 11:56 AM on January 9, 2001


If only SGI would come out with a laptop. This is one of the few things I'm not fond of when it comes to Apple. They never say anything about any impending changes to the product line until the day it finally happens. So, you're forced to either wait it out for the Next Best Thing or just pick up what's already there.


posted by Cavatica at 12:03 PM on January 9, 2001


. . . because announcing changes would decrease the value of their inventory by 25%. Hard to blame them for that. But all of this stuff (733Mhz chips, G4 laptops, NVIDIA cards, more slots) has been making the rounds of the rumor mills for a while. The only thing I hadn't heard about was the "SuperDisk" (hm, interesting name, surprised no one's thought of it before. :). Oh, and the DVD software and the totally underwhelming "iTunes."
posted by rodii at 1:08 PM on January 9, 2001


I'll believe it's a real DVD-R when and only when someone outside the RDF burns one and plays it.

As for "SuperDisk", I'm surprised you haven't heard it before... in the typical Apple style, it's a registered trademark of someone else for a different product.

[ <sigh> re-reads message; sees smiley. never mind. ]
posted by baylink at 1:28 PM on January 9, 2001


Not one to nitpick usually, but SuperDisk is indeed a trademark of imation. However, the Apple product is called the "SuperDrive".

Personally I think it's a great idea. And the Titanium Powerbooks are very sweet, though I'm not a big Macintosh OS fan, and LinuxPPC leaves much to be desires, I'd probably get an IBM Thinkpad T21 instead, even though it is only Titanium composite . . .
posted by christian at 1:49 PM on January 9, 2001


Hey, I like iTunes. It's a typical MP3 player except for the ability to burn to CD. What's not to like?

posted by jragon at 1:50 PM on January 9, 2001


Okay, I must make love to that Powerbook.

...

Oh, that was out loud, wasn't it?
posted by solistrato at 2:03 PM on January 9, 2001


Well, Steve *did* say that it had 'the sex'...
posted by darukaru at 2:38 PM on January 9, 2001


I've downloaded ITunes, and I rather like it. It does away with all those little programs I was using, and bundles everything together nicely. Hell, it's FREE!! What's not to like?

Of course, I guess all those little companies (Audion, Macast, and the like) are really pissed about this . . .

As for the titanium, I've already made plans to sell my kidneys so that I might have one of my own.


posted by aladfar at 3:25 PM on January 9, 2001


It's got those sexy, SCSI, connectors.
posted by dhartung at 8:18 PM on January 9, 2001


(In case it's forgotten, back in the 80s, Apple -- being the first to popularize the standard -- tried to popularize a pronunciation for SCSI: "sexy".)
posted by dhartung at 8:19 PM on January 9, 2001


iTunes is kinda cool, although it lacks some stuff that I'm used to in SoundJam. But the Search is sweet!
posted by gluechunk at 11:10 PM on January 9, 2001


Blank one-shot DVD media for the superdrive is $10 a pop from Apple. They think schools are going to use this a lot? When did our schools suddenly get so rich? (When did Apple fix its educational sales program?)
posted by Steven Den Beste at 11:27 PM on January 9, 2001


I think $10 a pop is a great deal, considering what DVD-Rs normally cost. You're always trying to put Apple down, but at least they're not $70 as someone once said :)

But I think $10 is a steal compared to any other price I've seen. Besides, people aren't going to buy them just to save any old crap on them like they do with zip disks, or even CDs... They'll most likely put footage of treasured moments with loved ones, baby's first step, and underground xxx videos.
posted by premiumpolar at 12:02 AM on January 10, 2001


Steven, I agree with you halfway about schools and the whole iDVD issue. I think the only schools that would make any use of the iDVD would be film schools or something like the School of Visual Arts, here in Manhattan. I really can't fathom young schoolkids using an application like this, especially if they can just burn a iMovie onto a CD as a Quicktime snippet.
posted by Cavatica at 7:09 AM on January 10, 2001


I spent all of yesterday seething over Jobs' latest attempt to "prove" that the Mac is the fastest computer, using a blatantly rigged benchmark against a computer whose configuration I cannot find anywhere but which was probably deliberately crippled so as to make the Mac win.

Nothing I've located says how that P4 was configured. How much RAM was in it? What speed was the RAM? What OS was it running? I've found no answer to those questions. But I do know it shouldn't have been a P4 because it's already well known that the P4 is badly hampered in running legacy x86 code. (Which is why the P4 is selling extremely badly.)

Why wasn't it a 1.2GHz Athlon instead? Or if we really wanted to be fair, then it should have been an "equal bucks" PC, which would have been dual 1GHz P3's with a gigabyte of RAM (which system is still less money than that 733PPC Mac). Of course, Steve didn't want a fair comparison. He wanted a comparison which looked impressive but which the Mac would win. I understand that, but I don't have to like it.

As a result, I'm now in a foul mood about everything Apple. I don't like being lied to.

When Microsoft did a benchmark to show that Win2K server was faster than Linux in certain important regards, the screaming began and the result was that the benchmark was repeated, in public, by an impartial testing lab, in front of well-educated witnesses from the Linux community. (And much to their chagrin, they found that MS had been right; they'd exposed a bug in the Linux kernel. It's fixed now.)

I want the same thing done here. I want Apple to loan one of those 733's to an impartial tester who will do an honest suite of benchmarks against two or three well-configured PCs and then publish the results.

But it's not going to happen, because then the Emperor's new clothes will be exposed for what they are: air. (Hot air.)

Right now the Mac faithful are basking in the glow of the reality distortion field. In about a week the glow will wear off and a bad hangover will set in. Then they'll discover, once they start looking at the details, that there's really less here than it seemed. Steve Jobs is not in the business of making fair comparisons; he's in the business of selling Macs. He's in the situation of having a bad hand to play, and he's trying to play it as well as he can. I at least respect him for that.

But I also expect him to show some integrity, and I'm getting fed up with rigged benchmarks and fallacious claims about speed based on exactly one particular program (and always the same program). I didn't expect him to publicly admit that the fastest new Mac is slower than the fastest PC (which is true), or that there's a whole new generation of PCs coming very soon which will be faster yet; what I would have expected is that he stop trying to do comparisons. If you have a weakness, it's better to ignore it than to lie about it.

There's a lot which is wrong with these new computers, and once you start looking at them closely you'll find that it's the same old story: they're overpriced and underpowered for what they deliver. (I could go into details but this is too long already.) Yet again, you'll pay a major surcharge just for the privilege of using a Mac. By the time that 733 is shipping in quantity, you'll be able to get a dual 1.5GHz Palomino with more RAM and more cache for less money. And I have no doubt whatever that Pioneer will soon sell that drive to PC users. Needless to say, Jobs didn't bother bringing up any of those minor details.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:03 AM on January 10, 2001


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