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| QUOTE (Bark @ Jan 27 2010, 02:59 PM) |
| The iPad sounds like one of those items my old lady buys for herself because I would be ashamed to have it in my shopping cart. |
| QUOTE (Bark @ Jan 27 2010, 03:03 PM) |
| It looks like an iPhone for the farsighted. |
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| Get MLB.TV and watch live on new iPad Viewing games gets even better in 2010 with latest device By Mark Newman / MLB.com 01/27/10 2:14 PM EST MLB.com made its 2010 MLB.TV subscriptions available on Wednesday, featuring state-of-the-art delivery of live, out-of-market Major League Baseball games as part of an unprecedented full season of access to the product over a variety of devices. That includes customers enabled to buy through applications on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the brand-new iPad. Here is what you need to know about MLB.TV, which returns for its eighth season and continues to raise the bar for streaming live events and searchable video on demand. What are some of the best features of MLB.TV for 2010? Portability is front and center, as fans will enjoy convenient MLB.TV options optimized for numerous screens, from home and office computers to laptops and large monitors. Additional distribution to various Apple products, including the company's latest innovation, essentially means that MLB.TV has something for everybody, everywhere there's an Internet or mobile connection. The full schedule of 2,430 regular season games is included, and most of those are delivered in HD quality (where available). MLB.com's proprietary speed detection allows high-speed users to receive crisp, best-in-class streaming video on any size monitor. Fans also will get real-time highlights and stats; on-demand access to full-game archives so one can watch any pitch from the whole season; MLB.com Condensed Games featuring substantial key-result at-bats; access to MLB.com Gameday Audio and a new, full-screen presentation of the popular pitch-by-pitch app; Clickable Linescores that let you go straight to any half-inning of a game; and a Fantasy Player Tracker consisting of ballplayers customized by subscribers and integrated with league rosters. MLB.TV Premium subscribers get all that, and they also can enjoy the following features: Choice of home or away broadcast feeds, so favorite announcers are always a simple click away; DVR for pausing, rewinding and jumping back to live action; and a multi-game view (Quad Mode, Picture in Picture and Split Screen). Now that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has just introduced the iPad, how will it help baseball fans? Amid great fanfare, Jobs announced the "iPad" and unveiled a lightweight tablet that he said is "way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone." MLB.com was represented on stage at the event, demonstrating how baseball fans can watch live baseball with that device. Chad Evans, director of mobile product development for MLB Advanced Media, gave the demo for MLB.com before Jobs returned to the stage. "We were incredibly excited to build something for the iPad, and we realized we couldn't just take our existing iPhone app and make it bigger," Evans said. "We really needed to create a whole new experience to take advantage of the big, gorgeous interactive screen on the device." He went through several screen displays showing how the content will look, including users' ability to touch players for details, bells and whistles, and to access data pertinent to game situations. "With all this great screen space we can now let you watch video highlights while all this is going on so you can replay the game' best moments," Evans said. "The first thing you notice is baseball is amazing on this screen, and now we've enhanced it." When Jobs took the stage again following that demo, he told a worldwide crowd: "Isn't that awesome? These guys only had two weeks. So we've seen some really great apps." How much does an MLB.TV subscription cost? Yearly subscriptions are now available at $99.95 for MLB.TV and $119.95 for MLB.TV Premium. That will give you immediate access to relive every moment from every Major League game played in the 2009 season, including the Yankees' World Series clincher. Will this work for Spring Training? As part of the subscription, you will be able to watch or listen to more than 150 live games from Florida and Arizona as teams prepare for the 2010 regular season. The exhibition schedule starts with Braves at Mets on March 2 in Port St. Lucie, Fla. What can we expect from MLB.com At Bat in 2010? The MLB.com At Bat app was synched up with MLB.TV during the 2009 season so that fans could watch all live out-of-market games over their iPhone and iPod Touch devices. That changed everything. It was the overall No. 2-selling app in iTunes for 2009. Rave reviews included Best Multimedia App by Macworld and "2009 Most Valuable App" by Sports Illustrated, and CNET called it "another step in proving MLB.com's technical superiority." Your favorite app will be back and enhanced for its second full season, available soon in the iTunes stores for use on devices including the iPhone and iPod Touch. Subscribe to MLB.TV, order the MLB.com At Bat app once it becomes available, and once again you will be able to watch live out-of-market games. What will the media player itself look like? The 2010 MLB.TV media player will deliver a fleet of enhancements in a convenient, cutting-edge Adobe Flash format, offering an unparalleled live viewing experience for every out-of-market regular season game. |
| QUOTE (Skipjack @ Jan 27 2010, 05:26 PM) |
| Bark is a very bright guy with very good eye-sight who may just want to be the world's youngest curmudgeon or maybe he's an Amazon or Microsoft employee or has a significant holding in their stock. He usually doesn't deal in throw-away lines. |
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| Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 Newspad finally arrives, nine years late by Steven Sande (RSS feed) on Jan 28th 2010 at 4:00PM One of my all-time favorite movies is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. At several points during the film, we see ill-fated astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole using a flat, iPad-like device. In one of the posters for the movie, astronauts at a base on the Moon are seen using this device (see image at right). Those who read Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of the movie will remember that he described this device as the "Newspad," something that was used by people of the future (as envisioned in 1968) to watch TV and read newspapers. You can read the full description of the device after the break -- it's described as a newsreader, with two-digit codes for each article online, and a constant stream of information from the hourly updates on "electronic papers." Of course, we don't have two-digit references to articles; we simply need to tap on them to bring them up. We do need to know the "codes" for the world's major electronic papers; we refer to them as URLs or specific apps. But like many things Clarke foresaw in his lifetime of writing science fiction, the Newspad has finally become reality in the form of Apple's iPad. I think Arthur would be proud. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination. Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites. It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg. From 2001: A Space Odyssey , by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Del Rey in 1968 |
| QUOTE (Skipjack @ Jan 28 2010, 05:37 PM) |
| I had a Newton and patiently waited for everyone else to get into handwriting recognition. It was fun though seeing how the software would interpret the writing…many Zen-like thoughts and nascent haiku came from the attempts to write a shopping list. |
| QUOTE (Bark @ Jan 28 2010, 11:55 PM) | ||
I totally forgot about that one. :D Do you have the Apple TV? I only know one person that owns the thing. Many don't even know it exists. |
| QUOTE (Milto @ Jan 29 2010, 08:32 AM) |
| He is trying to tip over your cart Jack. |
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| The Apple iPad Is For Old People The guys at Ultimi Barbarorum came up with an idea—an idea we were tossing around after the event yesterday, and even talked about a little last night—and put it into words. The iPad is for old people. Those that are dubious of the iPad's impending success (and I suspect that you are one of them, Baruch) are of course in danger or repeating history (qv iPod, iPhone). I have no intention of replicating all the arguments pro- and con the iPad, so I will limit myself to just one wholly original observation as to why I think the doubters once again are not getting it: 1. The iPhone was a success from the start, but it really became a ubiquitous device when it proved competent at a whole range of tasks beyond Apple's original marketing copy. (It was just "a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device," remember?) Now games rule on the iPhone, and as many parents will attest, the iPhone's one true calling is as breakthrough child pacification device. A similar role awaits the iPad. No, not for children; rather, look to the burgeoning end of the demographic curve: baby boomers. I know many baby boomers who are intimidated by computers. Plenty are not, but a great many spend far too much time wrestling with viruses and drivers, wondering what a DLL is, and generally not knowing the difference between their RAM and a hard disk - all just so they can read emails and check their bank account online. Some boomers have sired offspring who gladly help them with remote tech support sessions, but many others have not, and suffer for it. The reason for all this misery is simple: Computers are still too complex for those not prepared to give them their undivided attention. That's even the case for Macs. Not so with the iPhone. I've seen that thing understood within minutes by 2 year-olds and 84 year-olds. It does one thing at a time. Your finger is the cursor. There is no need to tap things twice before stuff happens. You are allowed to turn it off with the power button. But the iPhone isn't perfect for baby boomers. The screen and text are too small for aging eyes, the keyboard too cramped for confident typing, making it unusable for even basic office productivity tasks. Enter the larger, faster iPad. It's a complex computer simplified, which makes it a perfect fit to those whose remaining life is too short to spend it defragging drives. Add the keyboard dock, and the iPad is versatile enough to be a baby boomer's only computer. The only thing it won't let them do is videoconference with their grandchildren - which is an omission I hope they fix in next year's version - but on the other hand, at $500 this much is forgiven. My prediction: Within 2 years you will be reading articles describing how it was obvious - with hindsight - that the iPad would be a hit with aging baby boomers. But who needs hindsight when you have Ultimi Barbarorum? Post syndicated with permission from Ultimi Barbarorum |
| QUOTE (Skipjack @ Jan 29 2010, 09:30 AM) | ||
This explains my fascination:
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| I'll probably buy the iMaxiPad…for months all of the Apple site pundits/seers/evangelists have said don't call it the iPad… |
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| Before he passed away, Herv’e Villechaise ( “Tatoo” from the old “Fantasy Island” TV series) set up a charity that provided hotel rooms for “little people” from coast to coast that were provided gratis to them when they traveled. They were known as…………wait for it…………………..stay free mini-pads. |
| QUOTE (Skipjack @ Jan 30 2010, 09:54 AM) | ||
I saw this among the readers' comments of today's Doonesbury strip:
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| QUOTE (szekely @ Jan 29 2010, 05:08 PM) |
| PS: Bark, I trust you knew I was just doing a silly riff and not throwing it down (feel me couz?) |