Apple’s Showtime event just wrapped up, and the new products announced read like a Microsoft Windows Media feature list… circa 2004.

Let’s go down the list, shall we?

First up, iTunes 7:

Movies: Windows Media Player has been playing movies since version 7, and a several movie stores were added in version 9. WMPs movie stores have movies from several major studios, not just Disney-owned studios.
CoverFlow: This is perhaps the only truly new feature iTunes 7 has. But it is purely aesthetic.
Automatic Album Art: Windows Media Player has been doing this since version 8, five years ago.
New User Interface: All of a sudden, iTunes looks suspiciously like Windows Media Player, with songlists grouped and stacked by artist and album, with prominent cover art adorning each group. Just like Windows Media Player does it in version 11 beta.
iPod Games: Another new, yet largely useless feature. Who wants to re-buy games for their iPod when they already have them for their phone (or they have a PSP or DS which provides a much better game experience?)
iPod Summary: Well, it’s about time Apple used its iPod+iTunes “synergy” for something that doesn’t involve restricting consumer choice.
Download Manager: This is one feature I wish Windows media Player did have. Unfortunately, Microsoft leaves it to its PlaysForSure store partners to create their own addon Download Managers, and that is probably the only reason why PlaysForSure isn’t as seamless as iPod+iTunes. At least not yet.
Higher Video Resolution: It’s about time. ‘nuff…
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Remember when you first got broadband internet access at home? After years of poking along at 56k, suddenly you had a 1.5M or even a 3M connection. Remember how you went around the Net, searching for the biggest things you could download, just for the hell of it? That 100MB video? No problem. That 350MB demo? Done by the time you finish dinner.

Well, I just got Verizon FiOS installed, and it feels like that all over again, only this time I’m downloading 1GB game demos and 4GB DVD .iso files.

FiOS is the moniker given to Verizon’s new Fiber-to-the-Premises network. It is spending $20bn over ten years to replace its copper phone network with all-Fiber network, which it will use to deliver voice, video and high-speed data to its customers. Most high-speed networks use Fiber as the backbone, but the so-called “last mile” to the customer’s residence uses copper or coaxial. FiOS does away with all that, using an all-Fiber connection which terminates in a box on the customer’s outside wall.

The main draw of this is the promise of practically unlimited bandwidth, through which Verizon can deliver all sorts of bandwidth-intensive services; video on demand, IPTV, tele-conferencing and voice over IP, just to name a few.  But the biggest draw, of course, is internet access. Internet access which is a significant notch faster than current coaxial and copper-based internet access services.

And when I say “significantly faster,” I do mean just that. Here’s the result of a speed test…
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[Update]
Bidding is over, thank you.
[/Update]

Apparently it seems I’ve been sitting on something people actually want and I had no idea.
I hate promoting it here, especially since it’s already over the price I wanted for it. But I want to give more people the opportunity on bidding for it now that I know that it’s worth something to others.

It’s a Vectrex Game Console with 6 games (5 carts + 1 built-in) and 2 controllers . All overlays and manuals are included. I have some trouble getting carts to play past the game screen - which leads me to believe the cart port just needs a good cleaning or maybe some re-soldering inside. It’s from the 80’s so that can’t be too hard for the experienced do-it-yourself repairman. But the built-in game, Mine Sweep, plays just fine.

But be forewarned, as of this writing, it’s up at $74.75 with 16 hours and 30 minutes left or so.
There is no reserve.

Again, I’m not advertising this for my interest altho I’ll admit the money does help immensely since I haven’t been able to work much due to my surgery and recovery. I just had no idea that I was sitting on something that is worth something to others.

Good luck!

On my morning rounds of the blogs I frequent I came across a rather interesting read by a Mr Paul Thurrott: Mac Pro vs. Dell Precision: A price comparison. Now of course, Apple has been touting that the Mac Pro is far cheaper than a comparable Dell, but Mr Thurrott has managed to prove otherwise by getting a Dell to be $1279 cheaper than an equivalent Mac Pro. Unfortunately for Mr Thurrott he misses some important components.

Now I have already emailed him about the problems I’m going to point out to you now, but as I only receive replies to half the emails I send to him pointing out errors and hardly any of these result in changes (I’ve not seen any changes to the factual errors I pointed out to him in his Leopard preview article on winsupersite.com) I’ve decided to post this to show where he slips up. First off, let’s look at the prices he finds:

Systems
Dell Precision Workstation 490 (32-bit) = $3,670
Apple Mac Pro = $4949
Dell price advantage = $1279

That seems to destroy Apple’s entire “cheaper than Dell” theory, or does it. It is very apt that he calls his post “A Price Comparison” because that’s all it is. It isn’t correct and it isn’t a direct comparison. While he says he has matched the same ram, video card and hard drive he hasn’t matched the same processors, so let’s spec out the correct Precision to compare to the Mac Pro:

Which…
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After all this time, my heart still belongs to AMD and Linux.

Windows this, OS X that, Shareware this, Nag-Screen there, - I just started to get sick of it all, and got a bit “home sick” (Home = Linux).

I looked around and saw a decent Motherboard/CPU combo that turned out even sweeter - an AMD Sempron 2800+ CPU and a Gigabyte K8 Triton Motherboard along with 256 MBs of RAM for around $160. Not a blazing system but it gets me “home”! Plus I can upgrade the CPU to an AMD64 later,albeit not to dual-core.

I tore out the guts from my old PC and installed the new hardware - everything SEEMED to be fine, but I somehow expected to be able to use the SVideo output connected to my EyeTV as a monitor, but that didn’t work. I ended up strapping it in a box behind my scooter and taking it to the office to set it up there. It was then that it dawned on me that I didn’t have any current Linux installation CDs at the office (or any current OS for that matter), took forever to download an ISO of Ubuntu 6.06, found an old blank CD that ended up failing… ARGH! Fine! I installed 5.04 (leaving some empty space to install another OS later), upgraded to 5.10 then 6.06.

A few hours later, “Frankie” (Frankenstein - as in it has parts from various systems) was alive and running beautifully! Altho it’s still at the…
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