[mythtv-users] Interesting Reading: Windows Secrets reviews AppleTV and GoogleTV

[Jarod Wilson]

On Dec 10, 2010, at 4:11 PM, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
...
> > Having iTunes running doesn't seem overly burdensome to me, and if you
> > have both iTunes and the AppleTV set for Home Sharing, they find each
> > other automatically.
> >
> > Configuration issues (or lack thereof in my case) aside, I find the
> > box itself to be quite useful and fun to play with. I can stream audio
> > and video to it wirelessly from my laptop and my iDevices, as well as
> > control it using just an iDevice. I find the netflix ui on it a bit
> > more polished than that on either my ps3 or roku hd|xr box, and I
> > definitely love the minimal power and space footprints.
> 
> And Apple loves it when you decide you'd like to use some non-Apple and you find that it doesn't work with all their proprietary software/hardware.

The vast majority of their hardware isn't proprietary. And a lot of
the software that comprises Mac OS X is actually open-source...

> Personally I find Apple to be the anti-open source,

That's... misguided, imo. Apple actually contributes quite a bit to
open source software. They just happen to also do proprietary. They
certainly aren't open-source purists, so I guess that makes them
evil-ish if you're a purist. At least Microsoft has the decency to
be entirely closed (only, of course, they aren't either).

> always trying to lock you into their products.

Freedom vs. really tight integration that Just Works, and a myriad
of other tradeoffs. But they actually do embrace open standards, so
you're really *not* that locked into anything with their software,
other than iTunes if there's audio/video with drm in the mix. Well,
and/or an iPhone or iPod Touch, if you want to sync it with your
computer, but I'm fine with that. Especially after seeing way too
many misadventures with Android "syncing", backup/restore, etc...

I'm perhaps somewhat of an oddball. I work for Red Hat and hack on
the Linux kernel, yet I run primarily Mac OS X on my desktop, and
I just recently replaced my old iPhone with the latest one. Couldn't
be happier with it. But I actually know quite a few folks who do
similar... (I won't name names, just in case some of them would
rather it not be known). ;)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com