Skip to main content

MeToo Apple

So many people think that Apple is the "de facto innovator" in personal electronics. It pains me physically to hear people exclaim "oh what a wonderful idea" when they see some nifty little white gadget from Apple.

Today the news is a-buzz about the AppleTV. Why this thing is so wonderful, I will never understand. Apple is yet another Johnny Come-Later implementor of the media-fusion device. The first of its kind was the Tivo, which was just a computer that could decode MPEG and interface with a television set. Then came Microsoft MediaCenter. Typical of Microsoft, though, it was confusing and not marketed very well. The home user didn't understand how to use MediaCenter because it wasn't packaged. Then came all of the open-source knockoffs of the Tivo device. They're the lunatic fringe, so they don't really account for any market. Then came the XBox 360, which was Microsoft's way of packaging MediaCenter into a fun and useful console. Granted, using the 360's controller as your DVD remote is weird at first, but you get used to it.

Now we have AppleTV which is just a packaged version of Windows MediaCenter. You get a simplified iMac console with Apple's "Media Center" variant of MacOS installed on it. The rest is just plug and play, no different than using the XBox 360 or Microsoft MediaCenter or Tivo.

The great part of Tivo is that it has programming for it. AppleTV has iTunes and no way to get additional content to it outside of iTunes. Yeah, it can do the Tivo recording of your favorite programs, but so what. Any device in this space has to be able to do that. You can get it for free with open source.

Why is Apple "MeToo"? Well, first you had Lisa, which was the first to market a graphical UI for an OS. Apple bought Lisa and created the MacPlus. Then they rewrote their Mac OS to be unix based. Windows NT was already there two years before them. Then they marketed their iPod, which came after the Rio personal MP3 player hit the market. Then they switched to using Intel processors, which everyone else in the world has been using for decades. Today, they have a media fusion set-top box, just like everyone else. Apple's only true identity now is the apple logo and the color "white". They had to buy up the remaining rights to that apple logo, though, because someone else had it first.

Getting tired of me lamenting Apple's management? MeToo.

Popular posts from this blog

Clustered Foolishness

I had morning coffee with a well respected friend of mine recently. Aside from chatting about the usual wifery and family, we touched on the subject of clustered indices and SQL Server performance. A common misconception in the software industry is that a clustered index will make your database queries faster. In fact, most cases will demonstrate the polar opposite of this assumption. The reason for this misconception is a misunderstanding of how the clustered index works in any database server. A clustered index is a node clustering of records that share a common index value. When you decide on an index strategy for your data, you must consider the range of data to be indexed. Remember back to your data structures classes and what you were taught about hashtable optimizations. A hashtable, which is another way of saying a database index, is just a table of N values that organizes a set of M records in quickly accessible lists that are of order L, where L is significantly less than M. ...
Read more

Deadly Information

Remember back to 2006 when a young girl killed herself [1] , [4] after being tricked and harassed by a faux boy she found on the Web using MySpace. The trial against the faux boy, an adult woman (Lori Drew), did not result in prosecution for the death of Megan, much to the dismay of many.  Yet, today we read about another trial where someone is being accused of second degree murder because they may have mentioned something slanderous about another person who was later killed by a hit man [2] . In this case, though, the person on trial is a former FBI agent who was working deep cover to infiltrate organized crime. In both cases, someone released information to third parties that resulted in the death of another person.  Neither defendant in either of these cases actually committed the act of murder, though. In the case of the FBI agent, though, the murder charge is being taken seriously. Yet, in the MySpace slander case, the murder charge was not taken seriously. How are t...
Read more

Faster Climate Change

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1] Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now. Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either: (1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it. (2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people. (3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans. (4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives. Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's goin...
Read more