Archive for category Tech
iPhone4S tariff bizarre’ness from O2
Being an O2 iPhone customer I was eager to see what their tariff prices are for the new iPhone4GS
The first thing I noticed is that they are offiering a 12 Month contract – obviously ready for the upgrade debacle when the iPhone5 is launched.
Secondly they are listing the data as a bolt-on which include Tethering and Visual Voicemail – from £3/month for a measly 100MB through £6 to £10/month which includes 1GB of data allowance, Wifi and a paultry 50 MMS’s.
Reading between the lines it looks like you don’t get Visual VM unless you get a data bolt-on “All our data Bolt Ons include Visual Voicemail and Tethering for iPhone.”
It’s when you start to crunch the numbers it becomes interesting, which if I am reading it right has all the tariffs (except the unlimited) are more or less the same when you factor in the cost of the phone. In fact the 1200 minutes tariff is cheapest of them all!
Here’s a little chart that demonstrates what I found.
So if I stick with O2 (which is likely taking a cursory look at Vodafone’s tariffs for the device) I’ll be signing up to the 12month 1200 minutes tariff and saving myself some cash.
Spammed? – me too. Bas^%*ds.
Once again my personal domain has been used by spammers to send an untold number of emails to poor unsuspecting individuals around the globe and no doubt the same domain will be blocked by spam filters because of it.
I have just opened my mailbox to find 47 bounced messages with replys from all manner of languages.
Folks, if you have come here because of it, I feel your pain 47 fold I really do.
Nothing I can do will stop this however – my domain name is out there and if anyone chooses to stick a fake email address into their email client it will look like it’s from me.
Up your filtering, delete the mail, move on – that’s the best advice I can give.
Peace out.
Seeking alternatives – a growing trend among Final Cut users
The FCPX bitching is still going on and an interesting thing is happening, people are thinking about leaving their Macs behind.
A number of commentors from around the production sites are saying that the only reason they are using Macs is to get FCP. These are the type of people who use computers as a tool, the editors and producers of this world who have to have a computer because they don’t shoot on film any more and their Steenbeck machine is looking a little dusty nowadays. These folks don’t care about OS loyalties. It’s just there to do a function – edit.
Earlier, even I started reading-up on Avid and premier products (my knowledge is sorely lacking in both camps, being a Macolite), looking for alternatives to FCPX for that time when my management say – OK so what about this new FCPX thing and I’ll have to answer that it doesn’t do all the things we need it too. In actual fact, because it can’t even talk to our Final Cut Server DAM it’s a complete non starter.
It is of course not personal on Apple’s part, they are just talking to the larger audience - it is all about the numbers, it always is.
Apple can (in theory) afford to lose vertical market customers like us, we buy ones and twos at a time and there aren’t that many of us. Even bigger organisations don’t have huge numbers of installed seats – in the 10s or at most low 100s.
On a global scale, these customers although nice to have, make-up a very small percentage of overall revenue when iOS devices and stores rake in billions. This is true doubly so for products like Final Cut Server which although I am not party to the numbers, I would imagine has a very small potential marketplace. Where would any sensible company spend it’s development budget? Not on a new version of Final Cut Server.
It is all very understandable, however what agreeves the people caught up in these situations is the lack of communication on Apple’s behalf. At some point they knew that this was going to happen and they were going to have some customers who would be left behind (or more accurately up the creek) following a technological dead end like FCS. It would have been nice for them to be a little more up-front and honest about it really, nods and winks are all well and good but are no basis to justify the huge expense of changing something as fundamental as a DAM system.
On the grapevine, I hear that there’s an interesting new product coming from an alternative supplier around Xmas time.
For now. our systems are all still working, we have sufficient FCPS3 licenses and we still have support for the time being.
You never know in 6 months time Apple may have seen the light and fixed the omissions in FCPX and built a FCServer replacement into Lion server (or whatever).
Not sure if I’d be gullible enough to bet my job on it though. Not again.
Note: I think it is worth pointing out here that the views expressed on my blog are mine only and are in no way shared or endorsed by my employer.
CoreData at the heart of FCPX
From what I am reading an Apple Technology called CoreData is at the heart of the new Final Cut Pro X software.
CoreData is a bit like a monolithic database that stores all the metadata for all your FCPX projects, instead of the data being stored in a project file as Final Cut Pro did. I believe this is the same for the latest generation of iMovie too and is the basis of the ‘events’ based organisation in these packages.
This is why (currently) there’s no direct import of FinalCut Pro projects into FCPX and is also why it’s not possible to use Final Cut Server with the new software.
CoreData doesn’t seem to directly lend itself to network environments – looking at various articles it seems to be another one of those Apple Technologies where they have taken it just so far and not thought how it might be used in the wider environment.
Cue collective sigh and shake of bowed heads. I might even venture a facepalm at the same time.
All a matter of scale
I sent my buddy Ian (probably the only reader of this blog – Hi mate) an article from Daring Fireball:
Demoted
Monday, 6 June 2011
Today’s was a jam-packed keynote. Apple announced a lot of news; there is much to talk and think about. But the key line was when Steve Jobs, describing iCloud replacing iTunes as your digital hub, said, “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device.”
iCloud is the new iTunes. The tethered digital hub is dead; long live the wireless digital hub. Apple sees iCloud as shaping the next ten years the way the iTunes-on-your-Mac/PC digital hub shaped the last ten.
This is a fundamentally different vision for the coming decade than Google’s. In both cases, your data is in the cloud, and you can access it from anywhere with a network connection. But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps — on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been.
Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.
Ian’s response was basically that Google has the economy of scale that will mean they will eventually win out:
I think the Apple world will be more feature rich, but Google will appeal more to the masses, people who don’t want to buy Apple hardware, I think both ideas have a market
Unfortunately this story has been told many times before:
- Betamax v VHS
- Mac OS v Windows 3.x
- iCloud v Google
I’m not saying iCloud will go the way of Betamax, just that it is unlikely to triumph overall
Hmmm, well lets look at the numbers:
Apple announced at the keynote that there are now 200 million iOS devices out there.
Google don’t release numbers however according to Wikipedia: ”It is not known how many people use the Google Apps platform, although a Google blog post in March 2010 claimed that 25 million people had “switched to Google Apps.”
So, working on the basis that Google have managed to double their subscribers over the last year and there is a 50% uptake of Apple’s cloud service that’s still leaves Apple with double the number of subscribers of Google and the number of potential customers for iCloud are growing at about 500k/day.
Thought for the day – why did M$ buy Skype
That’s a lot of money to buy an Internet phone company isn’t it?
Well, yes really, until you think a little differently and know a bit about how Skype works.
Skype is actually a distributed computing platform, the data that makes up your telephone and video calls is not gateway through a massive datacenter somewhere (although they probably have one), no it is sent via other Skype users machines and Internet connections to it’s destination at the same time as yours is handling called for other people.
So why did Microsoft buy Skype? Because Skype is a botnet, one with hundreds of millions of machines which is now in the hands of Steve Ballmer
SpotifApple?
Here’s a prediction that probably will fall flat, but I have been looking at Spotify recently – good but could be so much better.
Apple need to buy Spotify and incorporate it into iTunes – 10 million tracks at random chosen by Apple Genius. What more could you want.
As I said, probably barking up the wrong tree but how fantastic would it be.
Facebook OpenComputes.cx
Just been reading about FaceBook’s new initiative to Open Source their datacentre designs – opencompute.org.
Interesting stuff, although I can’t actually see that much thats original -
- cut out the stuff on the mother boards you don’t need – it is a sort of cut down server element – like a blade but on chilli dogs and full fat coke.
- stick it in a simple metal chassis that has a bunch of fans like a sort of, err; blade (again)
- run the PSU on three phase power, like oh one of those E10000 machines we used to have from Sun that had removeable CPU trays like erm, blades
- stick a DC UPS in for every six bays of 48 machines
- oh and naturally ventilate and cool the air with water, like Google and reuse the heat for building warmth (something Cray was kinda doing in the 60s - OK they used freon and that turned out well for the environment, but you get the point).
I would have thought it would be more efficient to put a bigger three phase to 12v PSU integrated with the UPS and distribute the 12v on bus bars to the machines (like this Cray XMP) and lose inefficient power inverters personally, that’s just my opinion of course.
What I didn’t see any mention of, was their software – I guess somethings are too commercially sensitive to release. However just like the iPhone is just a phone without iOS, these are just servers without the distributed database software running the back-end of the FaceBook system.
None of this is a revelation really, what is new however is that they are talking about it and posting pictures, like this of one of their Xeon blade system (which I have to say looks just like the ones Google were using years ago, albeit minus the onboard battery):
FaceBook OpenCompute server blade (Technology Review.com)
Hey, hold on. Did he just do a….?
Well I say!
iPad and the BBC
In the morning we normally have the BBC news on while we are getting ready. At about 08:20 this morning they did a piece about the iPad, well I say ‘a piece’, it was a hatchet job.
Technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones, who looked quite flustered and confused for some reason, had a bunch of pad devices in his hands (obviously to show that the iPad wasn’t the only game in town) but only talked about the Apple device and the Kindle.
Firstly he angled the device so that the screen reflected the studio lights (and all the finger prints – it looked like he had been using after eating KFC) into the camera.
He then showed an iBook on the device but slagged it off for being £15 and it not being shareable (“you can’t loan it to your friends can you?”).
Then he tried to demo the new Times app (launched today – this should be good I thought) but after moaning that it cost a tenner a month, it crashed on launch and he ended up showing a kids book instead – oh how embarrassing, way to go guys, that was your 15 minutes and you failed. Cellan-Jones commented “well I’m sure it will get better” in reference to the Times app.
No mention of iWork, nothing on the thousands of other fantastic apps on the store.
He finally summed up by calling it an expensive useless toy trapped in Apple’s ecosystem.
Tosser.
****Update****
I was speaking to a chap in the studio earlier who is closely involved in the Times App project (he was demoing it on camera for the site) and he knew about the “crash” of the app. Apparently it didn’t crash at all. It has been rock solid for all the time he has been using it including early betas and watching him demo the thing today it certainly looked like the onscreen graphics that I saw on the spot this morning were actually it’s splash screen with the Times masthead and then the choose and edition page – there’s only one edition in the middle of the screen because the thing only launched today!
Thinking back to the BBC footage, there wasn’t an unexpected close which the iPhone/iPod Touch does to misbehaving applications, they cut away to a wide shot before the app had started and he angled the thing away from camera. There were no blue dialog message boxes popping up or any other indications that is had fallen over.
The plot thickens – was Cellan-Jones deliberately pouring scorn on the Times App at the same time as dissing the iPad to really show it in a bad light?
As I said – Tosser
Another one of those ‘wouldn’t it be great’ posts…
With the ready availability of relatively inexpensive cloud storage, isn’t it about time some one (COUGHapple) had a small server for the home (COUGHtimecapsule) that had some intelligence to store just enough of your files that were regularly used to make them quick to retrieve (lets call it a cache for want of a better term) but off loaded all your files to the ‘cloud’ (COUGHidisk) automatically so you could have ‘unlimited’ safe storage that was accessible anywhere?
You know the sort of thing, the device would manage what it had on it’s local storage. Of course the online storage would cost a little bit extra on the services you already rented (COUGHwwwmecom) but a small price to pay for ubiqutous access to a robust storage solution surely.
At the same time, why not make the other devices you own (COUGHiphonepadpod) also access the data, hey it’s your data, your playlists, your music, your pictures, why shouldn’t you have (almost) instant access to it right? Would be good, wouldn’t it?
Hey by the way did you see the pictures of that huge data centre that Apple were just building and recruiting for?
Amazing. I wonder what they are putting in there, I bet that’s something to do with mobile advertising or distributing films or something don’t you?
Now where did I put the cough medicine, I have a really nasty tickle.