Stilgherrian » mac mini http://stilgherrian.com All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris. Vive les poissons rouges sauvages! Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:45:25 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 en hourly 1 © stil@stilgherrian.com () stil@stilgherrian.com() 1440 Live Internet broadcasts from Stilgherrian. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris. stil@stilgherrian.com No no http://stilgherrian.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/sla_144w.jpg Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com 144 144 Quote of the Day, 18 June 2008 http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/qotd_20080618/ http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/qotd_20080618/#comments Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:17:29 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/?p=1671 Photograph of a feral goldfish

Such a fuss over new version of the Firefox web browser today and Apple opening a new shop in Sydney tomorrow! The feral goldfish are all a’flutter, feeling left out if they don’t have the latest news this very second. Thank the gods for Richard Chirgwin.

In a discussion about how digital rights management will affect sales of Vista, he writes:

The actual adoption of Windows-based broadcast TV recording among mainstream users is pitifully small. It’s easier in every way for Joe Sixpack to buy a black box hard disk recorder.

Hence, although in many ways I think Vista is a dead duck anyway, DNR flagging won’t change its future one way or the other…

I can’t get the excitement about media centres, myself. Quite simply, why would I rearrange the house or run cables just to hook the TV to the computer, when I can put the recorder where the TV is?

PC-based Media Centres, whether Apple or Microsoft or Linux, have a specific target market: people for whom getting this sort of crap to work creates a sense of achievement which serves as a surrogate for the ability to do things that are actually useful…

Hear hear!

In a follow-up, Avi Miller said:

I challenge you to find an HD-PVR with the same functionality, size and form of the Mac Mini.

“Challenge”, eh?

Yes, let’s issue “challenges” about arbitrary mixes of functionality in a particularly-shaped black (or, in this case, white) box. Lets “challenge” someone to find something that isn’t a Mac Mini that looks like (has the “form” of) a Mac Mini.

As first glance, this looks like precisely the kind of techno-macho-wank that Richard was talking about.

Running water and sewerage, people, then health care and education… and then perhaps we can worry about what shape the digital TV recorder is…

[Update 8.40am: Avi Miller writes: "Sorry, I seem to have misplaced the :) in the original email. My reply was intended to be the exact techno-macho-wank previously implied." Ah, irony! Such a tricky beast...]

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