Growing up in a union family, I’ve always had sympathy for the working man (ok, I’m also a working man, but you get the point).
Admittedly, some unions are better than others and not knowing both sides of the case, I whole heartedly, with full disclosure, present this video I found today about the writer’s strike going on in Hollywood.
Godspeed, Writer’s Guild of America and good luck. I’d like to see the Daily Show again this year.
Just a few quick general impressions from the show today.
iPhone and AppleTV
First, iPhone and AppleTV are two huge new platforms for Apple to develop and deserved the spotlight today. That said, not really being able to touch or to truly get a “live” demo of the iPhone was a bit of a bummer. I guess this is why Apple usually doesn’t release products that aren’t done.
[Jan 10, 2007 – David Pogue gets a hands on with the iPhone – “Typing is difficult”
The AppleTV seems to be on the surface of things a great platform for Apple to develop. That said, I think they may need to do some convincing to those of use with HDTVs. While photos look great on this device, video was …lacking. Maybe it’s the fact that I was looking at a 42″ HD set from less than 3 feet away, but video looked kind of horrible. I’m not sure if it is the device or the video, but man, it didn’t look good.
Fanboy Whining
No Macworld would be complete without a little complaining. I know we’ll see it soon, but I really, really wanna see what Leopard looks like. I get that two big products were introduced today, but what’s shipping from today? Typically, we get a little software to play with before the hardware ships, so I’m bummed that we didn’t get iLife ‘07 today. I suspect that it is tied to the features in Leopard we haven’t seen yet.
Finally
From a visit to Macworld perspective, Macworld is pretty boring. Folks at home are getting as much of a hands on experience as we are at the show. However, the AppleTV and iPhone launch are the most significant new directions we have seen from Apple in years. Exciting times, indeed.
What is pretexting?I’ve only kinda sorta followed the whole HP fiasco, but here is Valleywag’s explanation of what the hell pretexting is.
New InfluencersDraft chapters of the new book Paul Gillin about blogging and the influence it has in the world. Paul wrote the book to “help marketers understand the changes that social media are [...]
Mergers, wikis and movies, oh my!
AMD buys ATIAre any TLA companies starting with “A” safe from this insanity?
SocialText goes open source and JotSpot goes 2.0Two wikis enter, one wiki leaves. Will the open source wonder take down its more usable, more expensive foe?
Amazon to offer movie downloadsJobs better get their service out [...]
I’ve been a mostly happy user of EyeTV for about a year now (I’ve got the EyeTV 500 for recording digital TV signals), but I’d always hoped that they would go the 10 foot interface route.
I use EyeTV in our kitchen and record programs mainly for my daughter and to stream signals to a network [...]
ReplayTV resurrected? looks like my old pal ReplayTV is back from the dead in the form of PC software. But for $100 and a $20 yearly guide fee, uh-uh. Replay, you were my first and my favorite, why did you have to piss off the TV industry so? See Dave Zatz [...]
Digg goes to 3.0Third time’s the charm. Digg has updated their UI and added other categories including Science, Business, Entertainment, and Gaming. What, no Home and Garden?
10 Reasons High Definition DVD Formats Have Already FailedAKA why consumers hate format wars.
Sofa Control and Remote BuddyTwo apps for the Apple remote control. [via Daring [...]
The Wall Street Journal released their report from the Walt Mossberg’s CEO love-in from a few weeks back.
(FYI – “The D” is a small conference for executives from large companies and essentially is a series of discussions and interviews conducted by the Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.)
Interviews include Bill Gates, “who showed off [...]
As promised a few weeks back, ABC launched their experimental streaming television shows today. Launch shows include Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias and Commander in Chief. All shows come with 4 30 second ads from a single sponsor (reload if you don’t want the first one they give you. I’ve seen Tylenol, [...]
Ten foot interfaces. Microsoft has one and recently, so does Apple. And now, Yahoo! bought their very own. Meedio, one of the many television front ends for Windows XP, was acquired today by Yahoo! Strangely, tho, it appears that only the company was purchased but not all of their products, [...]
So, I’ve been secretly lusting for the Xbox 360 for some time. I told myself and others that I wasn’t going to hang out at Best Buy or Costco like the other nerds, but all the while I’ve made side trips into these dens of electronic goodness for the past several months.
The persistence finally [...]
Movielink and CinemaNow announced today that they will have day and date releases with their DVD counterparts reports the Wall Street Journal this morning. Starting tomorrow with Brokeback Mountain, both companies will give users the ability to buy movies the same day they arrive on DVD.
Both seem to limit what people can do with [...]
No Series 3 Tivo yet, but Amazon has specs on a SD dual cable tuner (one analog, one digital). Sounds like they may have one input for an external tuner and one internal tuner. Probably not the most straightforward thing to hook up, but Tivo has been pretty remarkable in the past making [...]
Not satisfied with just running regular XP on an Intel Mac, the folks over at the OSX86Project have gotten Windows MCE up and running on an Intel iMac. They don’t have the IR port working yet, but I imagine that it will only be a matter of time.
Read
(Via Matt Goyer’s Media Center Blog.)
A number of stories this morning regarding the relaunch of Disney’s Moviebeam service in 29 markets this year. In a nutshell, Moviebeam is a hard drive based set top box that receives movies over unused television spectrum. The box ships with a 100 movies on the hard drive and about 10 movies are [...]
Sony, in a cost cutting effort, has cut the AIBO and Qualia lines from production, according to Akihabara News. I think quite a few geeks will be sad to see the AIBO line die, but few will lament the passing of Sony’s Qualia line.
Qualia, FYI, is Sony’s ultra high end line of consumer [...]