Posts by Russell Brown
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It's no surprise to see the Times buying into the Bush strategy in Iraq, which essentially boils down to arguing that you need to bet the company pension fund in order to win back the payroll. Clearly if you stop gambling now the company is in real trouble - but if you win big with the pension fund then everything will be alright.
Nancy Pelosi: 'But what if we loose the pension fund?'
The Times: 'Ha! What do girls know about corporate finance?'Dude! Metaphor of the year so far!
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Apple made USB popular?
Are you sure Russell?
Pretty sure. Although it was developed by Intel, USB wasn't widely adopted until 1998, the year the first iMac was launched (and the year USB 1.1 arrived).
People were startled at the time at how bare-assed Apple was going on it - there were no other serial or SCSI ports (and, of course, no floppy drive - your only option was to buy a USB floppy drive, which barely existed at the time).
There was a gap of several months between the announcement and shipping, of the iMac, during which Apple promised that third parties would be delivering more peripherals - which they did, usually in candy-coloured plastics.
There were some PC users mucking about with USB (which was a royal pain to get working in Win95), but it was Apple that forced the issue.
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I've had no problem getting VLC to play the FLV files - I just open them via VLC's Open File dialog. This is on a MacBook.
That's what it says on the VLC website too. I was a couple of point releases behind on VLC, but I updated to 0.8.6 and it works just fine now. The .mp4 file converter I mentioned is still quite handy though ...
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Apple's entire history consists of taking pre-existing technology, making it better (generally simpler) and then embuing it with the emotional appeal only advertising and packaging can supply.
To nuance the above point, since Steve came back they've also done very well at picking winners in emerging hardware technologies. USB was going nowhere in a beige-box PC market until Apple made it a key part of every iMac. Similarly, Apple claimed 802.11 early by dressing it up, calling it AirPort and making it sexy.
The other big difference with Apple is the industrial design. It actually had its own plastics synthesised for the original iMacs, and the engineering that made the current iMac enclosure possible is pretty impressive.
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Answering my own question, still no luck playing the FLV files natively, but this thing converts them quite well on the Mac:
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Of course, it would help if one of the main characters wasn't a drug rapist psychopath that flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, or that all the rest of the team are almost entirely incompetent, or even that this supposedly vast secret organisation, now over a centruy old, and the last line of defence against alien marauders, is a staff of 5 in a basement in Cardiff. Uh?
All true, of course. But I still like its all-over-the-damn-place messiness. Best not to get too hung up on whether any of it makes sense.
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It's less than a 'trick or two', I think. You can get a directory listing of all their TV shows by looking at the right directory. More details are available here. It's in FLV format, but the 300k files don't look too shabby on a CRT TV, from my experience.
Top score! But if you can get FLV files to play in VLC you're a clever man than me. Advice, anyone, on stand-alone FLV players?
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Edward - check out my post two up from yours. I think the media device you want already exists...
It exists in my house too, after a fashion, in the form of my iBook, which I use to wirelessly copy over video files from the Mac in the office, and play them on TV via an ugly little device I got at Dick Smith (about $130) that converts VGA to standard video (it even does s-Video). It actually works really well.
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Could we do "tauiwi" now?
I don't mind being called pakeha (although palagi sounds better to my ear) but I was once called "that tauiwi fella" on a marae, and not in a very nice way.
And I do sort of object to being defined as a foreigner, immigrant or stranger in a country where I was born and where I've had family for more than a century.
Thoughts?
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Does TV in January really have to be bilge?
I recall coming back from London one summer and just being dumbstruck by the utter, utter crapness of January TV. There was <i>a Canadian soap opera</i> on, FFS ...
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