IMO the last half of the series was *much* better than the first half, and that's probably just better characterisation.
I agree that the show got better as it went along, but I also found that, after seeing the entire run of the series, early episodes like "The Train Job" became far more entertaining to me.
The fun of the series relies heavilly on character-driven humor, which always works better after you get to know the characters.
...he's probably an Apple guy, though perhaps not nearly as close to the development teams as he likes to imply. His answers to people's questions seem to be rather long on design opinion, and rather short on technical details... and more than a little snippy at times.
Oh... Wait... It's so obvious, I'm surprised I didn't spot it sooner.
You're not an astroturfer if you tell people you work for the company.
An "astroturfer" is an employee or executive who is paid by the company to pretend he's just an ordinary schmuck who just happens to be really, really impressed with the company or their products, creating the artificial impression of strong grassroots support, hence: astroturf (meaning, fake grass.)
The word was coined when Microsoft was caught doing exactly that on various newsgroups back in the 90s.
This guy is either an Apple employee who is being very straight up about who he works for and what his bias and perspective is, or else he's a loser troll who gets off on pretending he's an Apple employee so people will consider his opinion on Apple stories to carry more weight.
Based on the nature of the things he's commented on in the past, my suspicion is that he's probably an Apple guy, though perhaps not nearly as close to the development teams as he likes to imply. His answers to people's questions seem to be rather long on design opinion, and rather short on technical details... and more than a little snippy at times.
Those intro sequences were never supposed to be part of the show, and were tacked on at the last minute because FOX screwed up the order the shows were broadcast in.
That trailer makes the Star Wars III trailer look like a stupid cartoon.
I'm so jacked up to see this, I'll probably skip "Revenge of the Sith" entirely and see "Serenity" one extra time with the eight bucks I save!
Re:Very OT, since no one else has said it yet ..
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 1
How fast is your Mac?
It's the 1.42 GHz mini. 1 GB of memory. I play everything back at full-frame.
EyeTV's playback software handles high-def signals really well on it.
Playing back full-frame high-def on this machine with VLC doesn't work at all, though. I keep VLC around strictly for playing XVCD rips of Doctor Who and such.
I will celebrate by rounding up 50,000 actual foxes and setting them all on fire!
And to really turn it in to a spectacle, I will call PITA and give them advanced warning of the event, so they can round up whoever they can find to try to stop me... and then I'll do it an hour earlier than I said I would.
You know when they lost me? When it was revealed that Anikin Skywalker built C3PO.
I mean, come on! It's a story that spans multiple planets, and George Lucas has to make every damn thing in the story about his main dozen-or-so characters.
Having Luke and Leah being Darth's kids is one thing, but this was the point when I thew up my hands and said "enough."
Then, in "Attack of the Clones" they reveal that Boba Fett's father is the genetic source for all the stormtrooper clones. WTF?
In the third film watch for the following revelations:
1. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru bought their farm from Watto.
2. Obi-Wan built IG88 in order to track down Jango Fett's son.
3. Han Solo is actually Palpatine's lost son and heir, and Grand Moff Tarkin is his brother. Darth Maul was their mother.
4. Yoda and Obi-Wan survive the Clone Wars in Episode 3 because they are saved at the last moment by a child named Wedge Antilles.
5. Jar-Jar Binks establishes a hide-out on the forth moon of Yavin, thinking it might come in handy for some kind of rebel alliance someday.
"Outlaws" was the best single-player FPS game I ever played. Once I loaded the 3DFX patch, I felt just like I was in an old western for hours at a time. Great storytelling with well-integrated action.
Jedi Knight's solo levels were almost as good.
The KotOR series was licensed by LucasArts, but Lucas himself and the usual LucasArts suspects never touched either one of them. They deserve zero credit for what you liked about the first one, and zero blame for what you hated about the second.
... the third Matrix film, which was fucking DRAGONBALL Z with sunglasses)
Best "Matrix: Revolutions" review 3var!!!
Also, did you notice that the shot of Neo being carried off by the machines was a frame-for-frame rip-off of the Ohm hoisting up Nausicaa in Miyazaki's vastly superior work, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind"?
Not to mention the final Neo vs. Smith showdown mirroring another superior film: "Dark City"... only without making sense in the context of the story.
Comment on Lucas to avoid the "offtopic" mods:
The man is a genius when it comes to the industrial side of film-making, but any artistic sense he ever had has clearly atrophied. Every frame of "Attack of the Clones" is a pig's breakfast of poor composition and brain-dead cinematography.
So thanks, George, for you and your people coming up with idead like robotic-controlled cameras and radically new methods of creating sound effects, but it's time for you to fade out. Be a producer for the great young minds of film on the rise. (I would love to see what Darren Aronofsky could do if he had access to Lucas-type resources.)
That doesn't sound like the words of a man milking some cash-cow for all its worth.
Actually, that's exactly what it sounds like.
"Okay okay, so the last two movies were much weaker than the ones which came before, and my changes to the original films were probably ill-advised and added nothing to the story while replacing a historical archive of some of the most inventive special effects in film history with third-rate CGI. I get it...... but this NEXT movie... Woo boy, is it ever a hum-dinger! Lining up and paying ten bucks to see it on opening weekend would be a bargain at half the price! Honest! Would I ever lie to you?"
Re:Very OT, since no one else has said it yet ..
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How does the eyeTV 500 work with the Mini? I've heard the peanut gallery say the Mini doesn't have the horse power to do HD...
Far exceeds expectations.
On 1080i broadcasts, there is some (very rare) frame-dropping which can happen during very fast camera-pans, but otherwise it does rather well. Even when it does happen, it's subtle enough that most house-guests don't notice it unless I point it out to them.
720p broadcasts, such as "Tru Calling" on FOX, play smooth as silk, as long as I'm not running other stuff in the background or moving anything else on the firewire bus.
The reason for the forehead transformation on Buffy was to make vampires more rodent-like.
The main rival in season one was a elder vampire who had a face very much like a rat or a bat (since, as an older vampire, he more closely resembled the demons from which they spawned. The mythology of the Buffy series includes a Lovecraftian concept of demons pre-dating humans on Earth, and Vampires are a lesser half-breed form of those elder demons.) Other vampires on the show were younger and tended to look more human, as they are "less pure" than The Master was.
Funny that Buffy should come up. One of the Buffy/Angel writers (David Fury) was consulted by the BBC when they were trying to pin down the format of the new Doctor Who show.
It's somewhat of a surprise because Daleks are not the intelectual property of the BBC.
Every time they do a Dalek episode, they have to cut a check to the writer who came up with them.
Also, they are kind of lame as villians go. Kind of like Star Trek's "Borg"... if all the Borg were wheelchair-bound and instead of a collective mind they communicated mainly by shouting at each other.
What makes the Daleks popular is the general creepiness of them. They look a little like tanks and behave a little like zombies. A good director can easilly create a rather suspenseful episode of TV around zombie tanks.
Re:Mildly OT, since no one else has said it yet ..
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's just "ho hum, another external hard-drive that isn't worth it". A dollar per gig?! Even with a 10 dollars worth of USB/FW hubs? It's a fucking travesty.
Actually, as somebody who just bought a Firewire hub for his mini (The EyeTV 500 is a terrific gadget for turning the mini into an HDTV PVR, but it doesn't play nice on a Firewire daisy-chain at all!), I would have almost considered buying this thing a couple months ago. I currently have two external drives (a 250 and a 300), both in el-Cheapo Firewire+USB2 enclosures, and while I came in under $1 per Gig (counting the enclosures, but not counting the hub), the 400GB drives I was looking at did not.
So $400 for 400GB + a Firewire port replicator is a way I might have seriously considered at the time.
I'm kind of glad I didn't, though. If the time comes when I want to add another half-TB to my storage, I'll probably just RAID everything in a single box instead, and then I can sell off the old enclosures to friends of mine. That would be a tougher sell had I bought something this specialized.
Look at some of the Apps which Apple has recently been pushing out: A web browser which saves them from reliance on IE, and two of the three programs they need to allow Mac users to abandon MS-Office for good. (They still probably need a spreadsheet program, and rumor has it that one is in development.)
This all comes down to a phone call between Jobs and Gates back when Jobs took over Apple. We are not likely to see a transcript, but a lot of folk suspect the conversation went along these lines:
"Hey Bill. It's Steve. Look, we've still got a shitload of lawsuits pending against Microsoft for all the stuff you've been brazenly stealing while I was off making digital cartoons, and now you've got the DoJ breathing down your necks and calling you a monopoly. How would you like to make both problems go away at once?"
"I'd be an idiot to say no, and I may be evil, but I'm no idiot. What are you proposing?"
"It's simple. This company has been run into the ground by morons for the past 10 years, and we need your 800-pound gorilla to prop us up for a while. We are prepared to put all these lawsuits behind us for good if you do the following:
1. Buy a bunch of non-voting stock in Apple. Say about $150 Million?
2. Make a public announcement that you intend to support the Mac with Office and Internet Exporer products for at least the next 5 years.
3. Pay us a small settlement to make our lawyers happy. Nobody has to know how much money it is.
In exchange, Apple will:
1. Not go out of business, which would have made it completely obvious that you really are a monopoly.
2. Pimp your web browser on our desktop... not that you haven't already pretty much already squished the competition.
3. Allow you to legitimately buy any of Apple's OS design ideas and technologies which you want to roll into your own (crappy) operating systems.
4. Mostly sell expensive machines to yuppie assholes, thereby not stepping on your toes in the general consumer market."
"Let's do it Steve."
"Oh one more thing... How would you like to appear as a guest on the Jumbo-tron at the next Mac trade show when I announce our deal?"
"Sound great... but... er... you're not going to make me look like that big evil face from the 1984 ad, are you?"
"Aw, come on Bill. Would I do something like that to you!?" (evil grin...)
Anyway, that's about it. The 5-year deal is over. Microsoft no longer needs to pretend they give a crap about OS X users, Apple is shipping affordable computers and developing home-grown replacement for most of the MS stuff which they customers used to use, the government heat is off Microsoft (at least in the US) and Apple is well in the black with and once again slowly growing marketshare.
It was a win for both sides to make the deal, and it's a win for both sides not to extend it. Jobs and Gates are cheerfully going right back to hating each other.
Re:Mildly OT, since no one else has said it yet ..
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 5, Funny
User #38 and this is the first time you've noticed a blatant Slashvertizement?
Are you a new user who bought this account from somebody else, or have you simply not been paying any attention?
If you think this is the last time his personality will radically shift over a short duration before he's ready to go away to college, you are in for a real shock.
Stopping him from playing games will not prevent your boy from developing his personality in new and surprising (and occasionally disappointing) ways. If you think this is a challenge... just wait until he starts getting interested in girls.
IMHO, all you really ought to do is discipline him for slacking off, limit his couch-potato time (whether that means gaming or TV) and move on.
On the other hand, he's your kid; if you think banning the game entirely will help, then by all means do so, but don't try to trick him into thinking it's an accident because even 5-year olds see through that shit.
Haven't you heard the expression "build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path do your door?"
SoundJam was not a "me too" MP3 player. It was a better MP3 player than just about anything else that was floating around at the time. For a tiny shareware app, that's relatively impressive.
That was the most adroit comment of the entire thread.
Thank you, AC, for reminding me why I still read Slashdot with a zero threshold. (Although I suspect your comment will be up to "5: Insightful" by the time I'm done typing this reply.)
Microsoft does indeed have some very, very smart people working for them.
They tend to hire the very best and brightest, right out of the top IT programs in the country, and train them from the beginning of their careers into "the Microsoft Way."
I've seen some of the questions they ask new hires in the interview. They love to throw MENSA-type logic puzzles at candidates to really separate the wheat from the chaff and get top-notch problem solvers on board.
Apple, on the other hand, has a reputation for a long hippie-dippy history (at least during the times it has been under Jobs's watch) of recruiting programmers with education and experience background completely outside the computer sciences, especially people with artistic backgrounds.
I strongly suspect this is the key difference as to why Apple, with a much smaller staff and having much less money, keeps cranking out fantastic ideas (with a few duds in the mix), and spotting the truly great garage innovations worth buying (for example, the decision to hire the SoundJam programmer to build iTunes for them)... while Microsoft seems to be completely incabable of ever bringing anything new to the table, or even recognizing something as worth buying/stealing before it's already a success.
Slashdot Mirror
Funniest comment I've seen on Slashdot all month. Thanks. Oh, and you owe me a keyboard.
IMO the last half of the series was *much* better than the first half, and that's probably just better characterisation.
I agree that the show got better as it went along, but I also found that, after seeing the entire run of the series, early episodes like "The Train Job" became far more entertaining to me.
The fun of the series relies heavilly on character-driven humor, which always works better after you get to know the characters.
...he's probably an Apple guy, though perhaps not nearly as close to the development teams as he likes to imply. His answers to people's questions seem to be rather long on design opinion, and rather short on technical details... and more than a little snippy at times.
Oh... Wait... It's so obvious, I'm surprised I didn't spot it sooner.
Mister Jobs, is that you?
You're not an astroturfer if you tell people you work for the company.
An "astroturfer" is an employee or executive who is paid by the company to pretend he's just an ordinary schmuck who just happens to be really, really impressed with the company or their products, creating the artificial impression of strong grassroots support, hence: astroturf (meaning, fake grass.)
The word was coined when Microsoft was caught doing exactly that on various newsgroups back in the 90s.
This guy is either an Apple employee who is being very straight up about who he works for and what his bias and perspective is, or else he's a loser troll who gets off on pretending he's an Apple employee so people will consider his opinion on Apple stories to carry more weight.
Based on the nature of the things he's commented on in the past, my suspicion is that he's probably an Apple guy, though perhaps not nearly as close to the development teams as he likes to imply. His answers to people's questions seem to be rather long on design opinion, and rather short on technical details... and more than a little snippy at times.
Those intro sequences were never supposed to be part of the show, and were tacked on at the last minute because FOX screwed up the order the shows were broadcast in.
That trailer makes the Star Wars III trailer look like a stupid cartoon.
I'm so jacked up to see this, I'll probably skip "Revenge of the Sith" entirely and see "Serenity" one extra time with the eight bucks I save!
How fast is your Mac?
It's the 1.42 GHz mini. 1 GB of memory. I play everything back at full-frame.
EyeTV's playback software handles high-def signals really well on it.
Playing back full-frame high-def on this machine with VLC doesn't work at all, though. I keep VLC around strictly for playing XVCD rips of Doctor Who and such.
I was a factor of 10^3 short on the number of foxes, too... but when "Inspirado" strikes, you don't waste time sweating the details.
(Besides, are there even 50,000,000 foxes in the world? Not counting the cast of "Vegas"?)
I will celebrate by rounding up 50,000 actual foxes and setting them all on fire!
And to really turn it in to a spectacle, I will call PITA and give them advanced warning of the event, so they can round up whoever they can find to try to stop me... and then I'll do it an hour earlier than I said I would.
MWwaaah-hahahahaha!!!
You know when they lost me? When it was revealed that Anikin Skywalker built C3PO.
I mean, come on! It's a story that spans multiple planets, and George Lucas has to make every damn thing in the story about his main dozen-or-so characters.
Having Luke and Leah being Darth's kids is one thing, but this was the point when I thew up my hands and said "enough."
Then, in "Attack of the Clones" they reveal that Boba Fett's father is the genetic source for all the stormtrooper clones. WTF?
In the third film watch for the following revelations:
1. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru bought their farm from Watto.
2. Obi-Wan built IG88 in order to track down Jango Fett's son.
3. Han Solo is actually Palpatine's lost son and heir, and Grand Moff Tarkin is his brother. Darth Maul was their mother.
4. Yoda and Obi-Wan survive the Clone Wars in Episode 3 because they are saved at the last moment by a child named Wedge Antilles.
5. Jar-Jar Binks establishes a hide-out on the forth moon of Yavin, thinking it might come in handy for some kind of rebel alliance someday.
"Outlaws" was the best single-player FPS game I ever played. Once I loaded the 3DFX patch, I felt just like I was in an old western for hours at a time. Great storytelling with well-integrated action.
Jedi Knight's solo levels were almost as good.
The KotOR series was licensed by LucasArts, but Lucas himself and the usual LucasArts suspects never touched either one of them. They deserve zero credit for what you liked about the first one, and zero blame for what you hated about the second.
Best "Matrix: Revolutions" review 3var!!!
Also, did you notice that the shot of Neo being carried off by the machines was a frame-for-frame rip-off of the Ohm hoisting up Nausicaa in Miyazaki's vastly superior work, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind"?
Not to mention the final Neo vs. Smith showdown mirroring another superior film: "Dark City"... only without making sense in the context of the story.
Comment on Lucas to avoid the "offtopic" mods:
The man is a genius when it comes to the industrial side of film-making, but any artistic sense he ever had has clearly atrophied. Every frame of "Attack of the Clones" is a pig's breakfast of poor composition and brain-dead cinematography.
So thanks, George, for you and your people coming up with idead like robotic-controlled cameras and radically new methods of creating sound effects, but it's time for you to fade out. Be a producer for the great young minds of film on the rise. (I would love to see what Darren Aronofsky could do if he had access to Lucas-type resources.)
That doesn't sound like the words of a man milking some cash-cow for all its worth.
... but this NEXT movie... Woo boy, is it ever a hum-dinger! Lining up and paying ten bucks to see it on opening weekend would be a bargain at half the price! Honest! Would I ever lie to you?"
Actually, that's exactly what it sounds like.
"Okay okay, so the last two movies were much weaker than the ones which came before, and my changes to the original films were probably ill-advised and added nothing to the story while replacing a historical archive of some of the most inventive special effects in film history with third-rate CGI. I get it...
How does the eyeTV 500 work with the Mini? I've heard the peanut gallery say the Mini doesn't have the horse power to do HD...
Far exceeds expectations.
On 1080i broadcasts, there is some (very rare) frame-dropping which can happen during very fast camera-pans, but otherwise it does rather well. Even when it does happen, it's subtle enough that most house-guests don't notice it unless I point it out to them.
720p broadcasts, such as "Tru Calling" on FOX, play smooth as silk, as long as I'm not running other stuff in the background or moving anything else on the firewire bus.
The reason for the forehead transformation on Buffy was to make vampires more rodent-like.
The main rival in season one was a elder vampire who had a face very much like a rat or a bat (since, as an older vampire, he more closely resembled the demons from which they spawned. The mythology of the Buffy series includes a Lovecraftian concept of demons pre-dating humans on Earth, and Vampires are a lesser half-breed form of those elder demons.) Other vampires on the show were younger and tended to look more human, as they are "less pure" than The Master was.
Funny that Buffy should come up. One of the Buffy/Angel writers (David Fury) was consulted by the BBC when they were trying to pin down the format of the new Doctor Who show.
This thing looks like R2D2's gay cousin from the Big City.
No, that would be C3PO.
Shocked? That there's Daleks in Dr Who?
It's somewhat of a surprise because Daleks are not the intelectual property of the BBC.
Every time they do a Dalek episode, they have to cut a check to the writer who came up with them.
Also, they are kind of lame as villians go. Kind of like Star Trek's "Borg"... if all the Borg were wheelchair-bound and instead of a collective mind they communicated mainly by shouting at each other.
What makes the Daleks popular is the general creepiness of them. They look a little like tanks and behave a little like zombies. A good director can easilly create a rather suspenseful episode of TV around zombie tanks.
It's just "ho hum, another external hard-drive that isn't worth it". A dollar per gig?! Even with a 10 dollars worth of USB/FW hubs? It's a fucking travesty.
Actually, as somebody who just bought a Firewire hub for his mini (The EyeTV 500 is a terrific gadget for turning the mini into an HDTV PVR, but it doesn't play nice on a Firewire daisy-chain at all!), I would have almost considered buying this thing a couple months ago. I currently have two external drives (a 250 and a 300), both in el-Cheapo Firewire+USB2 enclosures, and while I came in under $1 per Gig (counting the enclosures, but not counting the hub), the 400GB drives I was looking at did not.
So $400 for 400GB + a Firewire port replicator is a way I might have seriously considered at the time.
I'm kind of glad I didn't, though. If the time comes when I want to add another half-TB to my storage, I'll probably just RAID everything in a single box instead, and then I can sell off the old enclosures to friends of mine. That would be a tougher sell had I bought something this specialized.
Not really a truce, so much as a "cease fire."
Look at some of the Apps which Apple has recently been pushing out: A web browser which saves them from reliance on IE, and two of the three programs they need to allow Mac users to abandon MS-Office for good. (They still probably need a spreadsheet program, and rumor has it that one is in development.)
This all comes down to a phone call between Jobs and Gates back when Jobs took over Apple. We are not likely to see a transcript, but a lot of folk suspect the conversation went along these lines:
"Hey Bill. It's Steve. Look, we've still got a shitload of lawsuits pending against Microsoft for all the stuff you've been brazenly stealing while I was off making digital cartoons, and now you've got the DoJ breathing down your necks and calling you a monopoly. How would you like to make both problems go away at once?"
"I'd be an idiot to say no, and I may be evil, but I'm no idiot. What are you proposing?"
"It's simple. This company has been run into the ground by morons for the past 10 years, and we need your 800-pound gorilla to prop us up for a while. We are prepared to put all these lawsuits behind us for good if you do the following:
1. Buy a bunch of non-voting stock in Apple. Say about $150 Million?
2. Make a public announcement that you intend to support the Mac with Office and Internet Exporer products for at least the next 5 years.
3. Pay us a small settlement to make our lawyers happy. Nobody has to know how much money it is.
In exchange, Apple will:
1. Not go out of business, which would have made it completely obvious that you really are a monopoly.
2. Pimp your web browser on our desktop... not that you haven't already pretty much already squished the competition.
3. Allow you to legitimately buy any of Apple's OS design ideas and technologies which you want to roll into your own (crappy) operating systems.
4. Mostly sell expensive machines to yuppie assholes, thereby not stepping on your toes in the general consumer market."
"Let's do it Steve."
"Oh one more thing... How would you like to appear as a guest on the Jumbo-tron at the next Mac trade show when I announce our deal?"
"Sound great... but... er... you're not going to make me look like that big evil face from the 1984 ad, are you?"
"Aw, come on Bill. Would I do something like that to you!?" (evil grin...)
Anyway, that's about it. The 5-year deal is over. Microsoft no longer needs to pretend they give a crap about OS X users, Apple is shipping affordable computers and developing home-grown replacement for most of the MS stuff which they customers used to use, the government heat is off Microsoft (at least in the US) and Apple is well in the black with and once again slowly growing marketshare.
It was a win for both sides to make the deal, and it's a win for both sides not to extend it. Jobs and Gates are cheerfully going right back to hating each other.
User #38 and this is the first time you've noticed a blatant Slashvertizement?
Are you a new user who bought this account from somebody else, or have you simply not been paying any attention?
Oh for fuck's sake.
He's five!
If you think this is the last time his personality will radically shift over a short duration before he's ready to go away to college, you are in for a real shock.
Stopping him from playing games will not prevent your boy from developing his personality in new and surprising (and occasionally disappointing) ways. If you think this is a challenge... just wait until he starts getting interested in girls.
IMHO, all you really ought to do is discipline him for slacking off, limit his couch-potato time (whether that means gaming or TV) and move on.
On the other hand, he's your kid; if you think banning the game entirely will help, then by all means do so, but don't try to trick him into thinking it's an accident because even 5-year olds see through that shit.
Haven't you heard the expression "build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path do your door?"
SoundJam was not a "me too" MP3 player. It was a better MP3 player than just about anything else that was floating around at the time. For a tiny shareware app, that's relatively impressive.
Zing!
That was the most adroit comment of the entire thread.
Thank you, AC, for reminding me why I still read Slashdot with a zero threshold. (Although I suspect your comment will be up to "5: Insightful" by the time I'm done typing this reply.)
Microsoft does indeed have some very, very smart people working for them.
They tend to hire the very best and brightest, right out of the top IT programs in the country, and train them from the beginning of their careers into "the Microsoft Way."
I've seen some of the questions they ask new hires in the interview. They love to throw MENSA-type logic puzzles at candidates to really separate the wheat from the chaff and get top-notch problem solvers on board.
Apple, on the other hand, has a reputation for a long hippie-dippy history (at least during the times it has been under Jobs's watch) of recruiting programmers with education and experience background completely outside the computer sciences, especially people with artistic backgrounds.
I strongly suspect this is the key difference as to why Apple, with a much smaller staff and having much less money, keeps cranking out fantastic ideas (with a few duds in the mix), and spotting the truly great garage innovations worth buying (for example, the decision to hire the SoundJam programmer to build iTunes for them)... while Microsoft seems to be completely incabable of ever bringing anything new to the table, or even recognizing something as worth buying/stealing before it's already a success.
Huh. Lots of battlenet "d00dz" crowding into a server called "Hellscream." What a shocker.
Log into a server with a name which doesn't sound cool to twelve-year olds, and you probably will have much better luck.
(Currently playing on Silverhand, not seeing much of that crap.)