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FlyPod redux November 15, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple , add a comment

With today’s announcement by Apple that they are teaming up with six major airlines (via tuaw) to provide seamless in-flight iPod integration I feel justified in having made an earlier prediction of such a deal! Hey, I even got one of the airlines right; Emirates joins Air France, Continental, Delta, KLM and United. I am surprised that Virgin Atlantic didn’t get involved.

OSS P2V 4 free via G4U November 13, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, virtualization, windows , add a comment

That title is bit of a mouthful… let me explain myself.

One of the big ideas in the world of virtualization is P2V or Physical-to-Virtual. One of the barriers to taking advantage of virtualization technology in your data-centre is the time spent setting up your new virtual machines, running under VMware Server or Xen or what-have-you, to mimic the physical machines they are replacing on one bigger, beefier (and hopefully more energy efficient) server. P2V technology aims to make it easy to migrate a complete physical server, with the OS and applications intact, to a virtual machine. The major players in the virtualization and backup space all have P2V solutions generally priced for the enterprise end of town.

Since Apple’s move to Intel architecture we have seen a few virtualization solutions for Mac OS X pop up; first from Parallels and most recently from VMware. This has made it easier for people to switch from Windows to Mac OS X knowing that they have a way to keep working with applications that do not have an OS X equivalent. At the same time though, I expect that many may resist simply because of the time needed to switch all applications from a Windows laptop to an Apple MacBook. So I got to wondering, what if there was a cheap way to go P2V from a laptop running XP to a Parallels Desktop XP virtual machine? Read on to find out how.

Amazon Unbox is Windows and US-only… pah! September 9, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : web, apple, gadgets , 1 comment so far

I had been planning on using a cold and wet Saturday in Sydney to give Amazon’s new movie download service a go. However it appears that it is US only. I was all fired up to watch the Star Trek episode, ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’; I have never seen this episode but understood that the Tribbles were the inspiration for the Trumbles in the Commodore 64 version of Elite. I downloaded the Amazon Unbox player (in my Windows XP virtual machine running under Parallels) and was ready to hand over my $1.99USD when I was confronted with a checkout screen that wanted me to enter my U.S. state of residence. Dang!

Perhaps the international Amazon stores (Canada, Japan and various European countries) will get a locally-branded Unbox soon enough. This is unlikely to help us Down Under however. Apple and iTunes are no better; despite television content being available from the US iTunes store the only video content Aussies can purchase or download are video clips, Pixar shorts and movie previews.

Of course a key barrier preventing the sale of episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives or whatever is the exclusive agreement that the local broadcaster has (in Australia’s case, channel 7 for both shows) to show them first. BitTorrent is an effective way to route around any such agreement for those with the know-how and willingness to break copyright. At the same time though it appears that local broadcasters have been quite unwilling to open their own content up to streaming or download, with the exception of the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, our government-owned television and radio broadcaster) who have been increasingly dipping their toes into internet distribution. Thank goodness for The Chaser’s vodcast!

The key to opening the floodgates of movie and TV downloads might be solving the problem of how people actually watch it. Watching short clips or TV episodes on a laptop or video iPod is fine but does not cut it for feature-length films. The content has to get onto the CRT, LCD or plasma TV in the living room. Microsoft has an offering of sorts with Windows XP Media Center edition and the XBox 360 can act as a media extender (I don’t see any reference in the Amazon Unbox FAQ as to whether the high-resolution version of the downloaded videos can be watched on an XBox 360?). Intel keep threatening to actually come up with a coherent strategy surrounding Viiv that might result in some kind of set-top box. Ultimately Apple have the opportunity to really innovate in this space… will this coming Tuesday’s “It’s Showtime” Apple event reveal the announcement of a video-compatible Airport Express or a media-centre docking station for a Mac mini? If only iTunes movie downloads are unveiled without additional hardware a great number of people will be disappointed.

Maybe when it comes down to looking for true innovation in the distribution of video online, I will have to consider something more Democratic.