To put it simply, I don't want to be able to tell any difference whatsoever between the downloaded tracks and the same off of a retail CD. Under any listening conditions.
Sounds like you're an audiophile, and therefore a great candidate for the more bitchin' standards the industry has been trying to get us to agree to. Also sounds like you wouldn't like any of the existing consumer-level standards in audio files. Probably Apple's Store is not for you. But:
I suppose ultimately I'll have to spend $0.99 and see for myself what happens.
You just spent a dollar in effort typing your post. Go ahead and find out for yourself. Knock yourself out.
You're a dialup user or you have a shitty broadband connection if you don't.
Cable modem, not sure what the average speed would be. It's not bad -- streaming video is only a problem for the servers on the other end.
Stupid example: I have 9-year-old twins who had to do a nature exhibit for a science fair. They chose to do this elaborate thing about muskrats -- actually showed a lot of initiative. Long story short, along the way they found out about the song "Muskrat Love" -- oh, man, my head hurts. So, they wanted "Muskrat Love" to burn to a CD and play in front of their exhibit as a little joke.
We go out in the P2P world, looking for "Muskrat Love." I looked for it several times over the few days before the science fair thing. Saw it among the search results a few times. Got a lot of busy signals, one extremely slow aborted download (despite a supposed T1 connection on their end), and disappointment. No novelty music for their exhibit, sorry.
Maybe that's a good thing -- maybe the world doesn't need more Captain and Tenille hits. But I'd have gladly paid the buck, and the song is available on Apple's store.
For some people it's worth a buck to get what they want in a fast and convenient way. For a lot of people, a service like this is worth it next to the hassles of P2P -- and maybe if you were to be a little curious about that, you could figure out why.
...Kazaa or Limewire or Gnutella or Morpheus... Why you would need a MAC to get music quickly over the net either means A) You are an idiot, B) You are an APPLE SHILL or C) You are likely both
Even aside from your odd sentence structure, the word "quickly" must mean something really different to you than it does to the rest of us. Maybe it means "slow and frustrating"?
You mention P2P stuff, but you don't seem to have looked for anything less common than Britney's latest hit... I had a little Limewire phase, but dang it if I have the time to hassle with that.
But I agree, the parent was a Pollyanna post. I also gotta notice that a lot of people bought music on this service fast. Maybe you should be wondering why instead of flaming away, you know? Hint: the answer is not "Those Mac people will believe anything 'cause they're zealots." Maybe it has something to do with Apple seriously thinking about how to hit the sweet spot so they could satisfy the customers and the labels. You think?
It's amazing how people don't understand the issue...
...Apple is coming close. It might even be close enough to be successful. Whether it's close enough to save and industry in collapse may be another question.
Seems like just about every product release, Apple fails to save the world. Criminy. You'd think they could get their act together by now. Lazy buggers.
They release a nice little browser, Safari, as a beta -- and half the/. posts are about how it doesn't really fundamentally change what browsers are all about, so why are the Appleheads excited? (Uh, 'cause it's a nice, very fast, handy little browser.)
They come up with a pay-per-song service at an okay rate, $1 a song, and they get the major record labels to agree to DRM restrictions that come as close to "fair use"-friendly as I can really imagine them accepting, and they make it easy as anything to operate and basically pain-free. It's what a ton of people have been griping for: per song, no subscriptions, DRM that isn't intrusive...
It does seem to suffer from the same problems other music libraries do: you need to back them up against crashes, if you switch to another system you have problems moving files around, partly because of the DRM the recording industry demanded.
But will it save the "industry in collapse"?? Probably not. Maybe we shouldn't be expecting free updates to software we got free with our computers to do so... You think?
The latest vertical-model miniDV camcorders (Sony's DCRPC ones for example) have what you're talking about: they probably don't give you the best image or (especially) sound next to horizontal models, but the design is amazingly compact and cool. (Even they suffer from the combo-device problem, though; camcorders right now might give you a little more than a 1 MP still, which is crap, but you still pay $150 for a memory card slot and a card to take still shots.)
But this? This is The Sharper Image, all the way. Let's see, do I want to buy a wire to hook my well-designed laptop to my elegant little camcorder, or do I want to always lug the mini-laptop around like an extra limb on the camcorder? This doesn't even pass the portability test, not next to the obvious alternatives. It's like a leatherman tool that tried to add too many pliers.
...this article is somehow trying to strike the "oh look, things that have common characteristics with humans (in that their cells divide, and some of them have sperm ) made it alive through... it's not such a big tragedy after all."
What?? At most this is a melancholy little note after the event -- is it possible one of the experiments my produce data after such a catastrophic event? "No humans survived but the worms did, so it's not as big a tragedy"? Where the heck did you see that? I don't read that angle in the article, not at all.
Anyways, boo on CNN, it both draws on sensationalism (exploiting a story because of it's tragic sense), and assumes readers are stupid...
Again, what?? This article did a pretty decent job of delivering the layperson's description of what the moss and worm experiments were about -- including the bits about the worms' makeup -- along with the stuff about how they survived the crash. "Stupid" wouldn't have included the details about the life cycle of the words and so on, would it? The quotes weren't blown out of proportion at all. Pretty balanced popular science article in my book -- about on the level of Discover magazine or something like that.
Only person I see trying to be sensationalist about this story is you, and you're cooking up your outrage from thin air. Big Fox News fan, I'm guessing...
Seems to me like the really serious obstacles to voting in the last 100 years have been intentional -- poll taxes, registration tests calculated to cull out the black vote in the south, and so on. Take a look at Florida in 2000 and you have the striking-people-from-the-lists "accident" and the butterfly ballots and so on. Many states still have "you can't register on voting day" policies.
Next to all that, the physical challenges involved in voting -- waiting in line, signing your name, making the ballot -- seem less important.
(And maybe I'm just a ridiculously patriotic fool, but talking to the old ladies at the polling place, standing in line, and marking a physical ballot are all part of the social compact of the thing for me. I love that stuff. Clicking through a series of security certificate reminders or whatever just wouldn't be the same.)
How did you ever become a zealot about such a bland subject?
You could actually have tried to convince us of something, but instead you're foaming about cable users being nothing but pron-viewing ingrates and so on... How did you expect to win someone over when you'd gone after them that way? (Leaving alone how stupid the charge is. DSL users don't view pron, of course. Not them. They're holy and pure technology Monks.)
You're putting the blinders on yourself along the way, too. I mean,
you can't leave your computer on when you're not in front of it.
Has anyone ever seen that in a real cable TOS agreement, or are you just making it up 'cause it sounds good? Why are you so worked up over this that you'd lie, or at least half lie, to yourself?? You work for Qwest or something?
Overmarketing is when you sell a sucky product by hyping it.
Yeah -- and, you know, that's what we're worried about exactly. Good point.
Matrix Reloaded is going to be a superb product.
Unlike every other comparable sequel in the last 10 years? "Product" is the right word to use.
Don't be so cynical. Pretend you're 11 and this is Empire Strikes Back.
Empire Strikes Back was a great movie. We knew that when we saw it -- not before we saw it, based on the trailer. Hollywood didn't have its overhyping legs quite under it yet, back then. (We hadn't gone to see Batman or Pearl Harbor yet... And every kids' show on TV wasn't hand-in-hand with a line of action figures before it even aired.)
Take a look at all the releases this summer, and tell me we haven't reached a new nadir in movies. Everything's a sequel. Everything.
I just don't understand the controversy behind whether Dvorak is better or not... if your fingers have to travel less, you'll be able to type faster and more comfortably.
Well, it isn't exactly controversial with me. Hey, I tried it, right? But the usual points would be:
practical research has shown quite little speed advantage if any (a 4% speed advantage is not bad, but it's not enormous);
alternating between hands (with a spaced out layout like QWERTY) could actually help speed; and
the little research there is that's solidly pro-Dvorak was done by advocates.
We have little data to prove the RSI claims either way. (Maybe holding your hands still for hours could actually be worse long-term, you know?)
Your measurements of the distances between keys might fit point #3, more or less. You basically described the reasons for the design, but that's not proof that it'll make people faster or reduce RSIs in real life, would be the argument.
As far as the car thing goes, 5 miles vs. 50 isn't quite fair, especially when the actual speed difference has been measured at around 4%. 5 vs. 5.25 miles, is that? (Might be more like a debate about what kind of road system to build? Highway with limited access at higher speed vs. dispersed road system to spread the traffic load?)
Personally I'll try another new system when I can teach the technology rather than the other way around. One more funky keyboard doesn't turn my crank that much, though they're cool to look at.
But who actually uses it? I've not met any fellow Dvorak enthousiasts
I tried Dvorak for a while. It was novel, and I go through phases with things like that. Didn't change my life or anything.
My work wouldn't pick up a for-real Dovrak keyboard for me, so I'd just switch the OS's keyboard layout on the fly -- it was an OS 8 Mac office -- and learned to use the new layout blind, on keys that showed the QWERTY letters. (Kind of a fun little security measure, too, when someone sitting down to your machine gets all the wrong letters...)
Despite the convincing-sounding rationale behind it, there's real debate over whether Dvorak's an improvement over QWERTY. It makes intuitive sense when you hear the arguments, but there's research -- like this article comparing speed on both versions either way.
Conscience: look for yourself
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Anyone who doesn't see a difference in "conscience" between George W. Bush and Eisenhower should watch the American Experience episode about Ike.
I really meant "in a way W. Bush wouldn't even recognize." W. seems to live in a world where struggling to figure out the right thing to do is a sign of ineffectual moral weakness. Apparently a confident leader already knows the right thing to do, so he doesn't stew over things... (His dad, in interviews, has said he's proud W. doesn't stay up late worrying.) Ike struggled with what he should do. He tried to represent something more than just the core constituency of his own party, too.
Contrast Ike before D Day with George W. leading by "instinct" and priding himself on not fretting too much. No question who I'd want leading me.
Nope, didn't read Frank Miller's version. At what point do we get bored with the superhero as vendetta killer theme? It ain't that amazing.
My DareDevil would predate Miller's. He had the grittiness, and the stories were on a much more human scale than the other comics, but the whole turgid sullenness thing wasn't hip yet.
(Hmm. Didn't we hear a rumor about a sequel with Elektra as our protagonist?)
Thought it was totally innovative, and a very cool way to classify documents, something like a crude version of the OS seen in Minority Report (why do all of the video clips in the future have to be all flickery and dark though?).
All technology in the future will be jittery and disorienting to the point of being useless. Gap commercials will overlap one another to the point at which they're all incomprehensible. Newspapers will change while you're reading them, making it pretty hard to read a whole story. Sensitive criminal investigations will occur so quickly on a dizzying, gesture-based UI that nobody can adequately document the process to protect against charges of abuse.
"Piles," meanwhile, seems more like a UI version of the piles of paper people have on their desks. Very old fashioned, and it makes perfect sense once you see a single demo page. You'd maybe use it as an adjunct to true directories -- leave a pile of downloaded nature photos on the desktop before you decide which ones to print for your kid's science report.
Sliding "drawer" folders struck me as a similar UI approach. Based on a physical analog, and popular with some -- but other people didn't use 'em a bit.
The whole Gollum thing is a good model that would address both sides of this: You take a live actor, Lou F. in his day, but you map his motions to the CGI creation. Or if you want, you can do it the Hobbit way and re-size the guy.
But what do we get? We get Jar Jar Binks as action hero. Watchable in a trailer, and that's about it for me.
We're long since past the "Wow isn't that cool what they can do?" phase. The "big wow" scenes are just as painful. By halfway through Phantom Menace we'd gotten the joke: watching a huge panorama of CGI "action" on screen, half the time you can't even find the characters to root for them. When it's in the service of okay writing, it has limited value -- first glance at Rivendell -- but even in LOTR: Fellowship, I rolled my eyes at the enormous statues. In the background they might have worked, but to focus attention on them only makes it more obvious that I feel no sense of awe at all over this stuff.
Daredevil was kind of a mess, but basically it was just a B movie. They released it when they did 'cause it wouldn't have competed against the summer crowd of cookie cutter action movies.
Personally I thought it was far too luridly violent. The paper-clips-in-the-throat thing, the knife that goes through and stretches the character's shirt behind her torso, the (meant to be funny) killing of the old lady on the plane -- those were gratuitous, to use the word right, and didn't fit with the comics I remembered. The character could have had his grit and toughness without that kind of stupid choice.
At least they tried some stuff with the extreme flashback for their narrative line and the "seeing sounds" effect. The result was pretty uneven, but those two elements were in keeping with the spirit of the comics, I thought.
It's a C- of a movie. (Not nearly as awful as dreck like "Pearl Harbor" on the Ben Affleck mediocrity spectrum.)
Ike -- Boring? You're kidding, right?
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The book sounds good, and might make a nice complement to "Blind Man's Bluff," the rambling pop title about the history of submarine espionage. The PBS "American Experience" about Eisenhower is excellent, too, and covers the whole U2 angle quite a bit. Very watchable.
Where we got the idea that Eisenhower presided over a sleepy, suburban dream of America, I really don't know. Maybe that's how the Republicans like(d) to dream about life before those nasty 60s radicals shook everything up?
Take a look at the foreign policy Ike ran, though -- trying desperately to negotiate with the USSR from a position of strength in the new nuclear age while also staving off the "military industrial complex" (a phrase he coined) -- and he comes out in retrospect as a man of purpose and great ability. The one U2 flight too far, and he felt he'd failed... But the guy had a conscience in a way W. Bush wouldn't even recognize, and he did his damnedest under trying circumstances. Hardly dull, anyway.
There are a fair number of posts here that say something like:
This will always be a problem because people are just stupid.
At this point don't you think the "You are an idiot, I'm going to educate you," "awareness raising" security efforts by IT (and HR) people have basically failed? An irritatingly intrusive security approach combined with condescension to the users -- that should work, right? So let's force them to change passwords every month, but then chide them about writing down their passwords anywhere. Good idea. Makes things less secure, but as long as they're more secure in theory...
(I have a big plastic "pill" on my cabinet here; on the side is printed "A security breach is a tough pill to swallow. Your password is yours alone." This came from a major corporate IT department. Did they think an expensive internal advertizing campaign was the way to prevent people writing down passwords on post-its? These same people were behind dot-com advertizing, probably. Pretty lame.)
What it needs is to make sounds like the tricorders on the original Star Trek, and then I'm in.
Seriously -- what all did the tricorder do, exactly? (I can easily imagine an episode where they use it as a geiger counter; did that ever happen?) Ours do the communicator's job along the way too. Not too bad.
If only our in-the-field medical instruments resembled spinning salt shakers more...
I'll second the parent's motion: PLEASE MAY THIS EXPRESSION NOT GAIN WIDER ACCEPTANCE. (Those of us who used to work in bookstores are dreading, dreading, the first "Management" section book with "Shock and Awe" in its subtitle.)
I bet that would stop anybody else from using it.
You probably bet wrong. Hey, Rummy went ahead with the expression even when the comparison to Sept 11 was freakishly obvious. Which event had more "shock and awe" to it -- 9/11, or a sustained cruise missile attack Donny R had been talking up for months beforehand?
Terrorism on the Bin Laden scale is ABOUT shock and awe. Apparently Rumsfeld's a little jealous of the effect...
CompUSA isn't a pleasure, but basically all the big box stores are about the same for customer service. Try calling Best Buy and getting an answer. They all use "loss leaders" with limited stock to get people in the door. You get better customer service from sites online, really.
Apple's had a relationship with CompUSA for years now where CompUSA keeps a conspicuous Mac section open, so this is the natural place for something like this to happen. There's nothing new about the connection.
(And judging by another post, this isn't Apple only, it's more of a third-party vendor that sold the approach to CompUSA for Mac and Windows titles.)
A few different times now, I've sent something to the BBC's Web editors -- a little comment, a suggestion, a minor complaint about phrasing. (Once they'd put up an article about the ten-year anniversary of Prozac, IIRC, and their article basically treated Prozac as if it was the only SSRI or antidepressant around. I pointed them to some stuff about health plans in the US that had Zoloft on the formulary but wouldn't add Prozac any more, and suggested a less adulatory tone.)
In all three cases, they've actually rewritten their stories to reflect my bitching, at least in some minor ways. Amazing, huh? They responded, and actually rewrote copy, within a few hours.
On the one hand, how responsive they really are -- very cool, better than traditional papers by far and faster than, oh, a certain source of News for Nerds I can think of... ever try to get a headline changed?
But was there adequate editorial oversight, if one reader is capable of influencing them this much? These weren't even rush stories; they were more like the sort of thing where the "reporting" was largely transcribing chunks of a press release. They're rushing the stories up, even at the BBC.
Apple shares fell more than eight per cent on Friday after investors learned of talks the company could be in to acquire Universal Music Group from Vivendi Universal. Apple's stock closed at $13.20, down $1.17, or 8.14 per cent.
Comparing the deal to the AOL Time Warner merger, investors are concerned that an Apple/Universal deal would deplete Apple's healthy cash reserve, estimated at over $4 billion.
To "get involved with" a record label doesn't necessarily entail taking on colossal debt to actually buy one.
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Sounds like you're an audiophile, and therefore a great candidate for the more bitchin' standards the industry has been trying to get us to agree to. Also sounds like you wouldn't like any of the existing consumer-level standards in audio files. Probably Apple's Store is not for you. But:
I suppose ultimately I'll have to spend $0.99 and see for myself what happens.
You just spent a dollar in effort typing your post. Go ahead and find out for yourself. Knock yourself out.
Cable modem, not sure what the average speed would be. It's not bad -- streaming video is only a problem for the servers on the other end.
Stupid example: I have 9-year-old twins who had to do a nature exhibit for a science fair. They chose to do this elaborate thing about muskrats -- actually showed a lot of initiative. Long story short, along the way they found out about the song "Muskrat Love" -- oh, man, my head hurts. So, they wanted "Muskrat Love" to burn to a CD and play in front of their exhibit as a little joke.
We go out in the P2P world, looking for "Muskrat Love." I looked for it several times over the few days before the science fair thing. Saw it among the search results a few times. Got a lot of busy signals, one extremely slow aborted download (despite a supposed T1 connection on their end), and disappointment. No novelty music for their exhibit, sorry.
Maybe that's a good thing -- maybe the world doesn't need more Captain and Tenille hits. But I'd have gladly paid the buck, and the song is available on Apple's store.
For some people it's worth a buck to get what they want in a fast and convenient way. For a lot of people, a service like this is worth it next to the hassles of P2P -- and maybe if you were to be a little curious about that, you could figure out why.
Even aside from your odd sentence structure, the word "quickly" must mean something really different to you than it does to the rest of us. Maybe it means "slow and frustrating"?
You mention P2P stuff, but you don't seem to have looked for anything less common than Britney's latest hit... I had a little Limewire phase, but dang it if I have the time to hassle with that.
But I agree, the parent was a Pollyanna post. I also gotta notice that a lot of people bought music on this service fast. Maybe you should be wondering why instead of flaming away, you know? Hint: the answer is not "Those Mac people will believe anything 'cause they're zealots." Maybe it has something to do with Apple seriously thinking about how to hit the sweet spot so they could satisfy the customers and the labels. You think?
It's amazing how people always complain.
Seems like just about every product release, Apple fails to save the world. Criminy. You'd think they could get their act together by now. Lazy buggers.
They release a nice little browser, Safari, as a beta -- and half the /. posts are about how it doesn't really fundamentally change what browsers are all about, so why are the Appleheads excited? (Uh, 'cause it's a nice, very fast, handy little browser.)
They come up with a pay-per-song service at an okay rate, $1 a song, and they get the major record labels to agree to DRM restrictions that come as close to "fair use"-friendly as I can really imagine them accepting, and they make it easy as anything to operate and basically pain-free. It's what a ton of people have been griping for: per song, no subscriptions, DRM that isn't intrusive...
It does seem to suffer from the same problems other music libraries do: you need to back them up against crashes, if you switch to another system you have problems moving files around, partly because of the DRM the recording industry demanded.
But will it save the "industry in collapse"?? Probably not. Maybe we shouldn't be expecting free updates to software we got free with our computers to do so... You think?
The latest vertical-model miniDV camcorders (Sony's DCRPC ones for example) have what you're talking about: they probably don't give you the best image or (especially) sound next to horizontal models, but the design is amazingly compact and cool. (Even they suffer from the combo-device problem, though; camcorders right now might give you a little more than a 1 MP still, which is crap, but you still pay $150 for a memory card slot and a card to take still shots.)
But this? This is The Sharper Image, all the way. Let's see, do I want to buy a wire to hook my well-designed laptop to my elegant little camcorder, or do I want to always lug the mini-laptop around like an extra limb on the camcorder? This doesn't even pass the portability test, not next to the obvious alternatives. It's like a leatherman tool that tried to add too many pliers.
What?? At most this is a melancholy little note after the event -- is it possible one of the experiments my produce data after such a catastrophic event? "No humans survived but the worms did, so it's not as big a tragedy"? Where the heck did you see that? I don't read that angle in the article, not at all.
Anyways, boo on CNN, it both draws on sensationalism (exploiting a story because of it's tragic sense), and assumes readers are stupid...
Again, what?? This article did a pretty decent job of delivering the layperson's description of what the moss and worm experiments were about -- including the bits about the worms' makeup -- along with the stuff about how they survived the crash. "Stupid" wouldn't have included the details about the life cycle of the words and so on, would it? The quotes weren't blown out of proportion at all. Pretty balanced popular science article in my book -- about on the level of Discover magazine or something like that.
Only person I see trying to be sensationalist about this story is you, and you're cooking up your outrage from thin air. Big Fox News fan, I'm guessing...
Next to all that, the physical challenges involved in voting -- waiting in line, signing your name, making the ballot -- seem less important.
(And maybe I'm just a ridiculously patriotic fool, but talking to the old ladies at the polling place, standing in line, and marking a physical ballot are all part of the social compact of the thing for me. I love that stuff. Clicking through a series of security certificate reminders or whatever just wouldn't be the same.)
You could actually have tried to convince us of something, but instead you're foaming about cable users being nothing but pron-viewing ingrates and so on... How did you expect to win someone over when you'd gone after them that way? (Leaving alone how stupid the charge is. DSL users don't view pron, of course. Not them. They're holy and pure technology Monks.)
You're putting the blinders on yourself along the way, too. I mean,
Has anyone ever seen that in a real cable TOS agreement, or are you just making it up 'cause it sounds good? Why are you so worked up over this that you'd lie, or at least half lie, to yourself?? You work for Qwest or something?
Yeah -- and, you know, that's what we're worried about exactly. Good point.
Matrix Reloaded is going to be a superb product.
Unlike every other comparable sequel in the last 10 years? "Product" is the right word to use.
Don't be so cynical. Pretend you're 11 and this is Empire Strikes Back.
Empire Strikes Back was a great movie. We knew that when we saw it -- not before we saw it, based on the trailer. Hollywood didn't have its overhyping legs quite under it yet, back then. (We hadn't gone to see Batman or Pearl Harbor yet... And every kids' show on TV wasn't hand-in-hand with a line of action figures before it even aired.)
Take a look at all the releases this summer, and tell me we haven't reached a new nadir in movies. Everything's a sequel. Everything.
Well, it isn't exactly controversial with me. Hey, I tried it, right? But the usual points would be:
Your measurements of the distances between keys might fit point #3, more or less. You basically described the reasons for the design, but that's not proof that it'll make people faster or reduce RSIs in real life, would be the argument.
As far as the car thing goes, 5 miles vs. 50 isn't quite fair, especially when the actual speed difference has been measured at around 4%. 5 vs. 5.25 miles, is that? (Might be more like a debate about what kind of road system to build? Highway with limited access at higher speed vs. dispersed road system to spread the traffic load?)
Personally I'll try another new system when I can teach the technology rather than the other way around. One more funky keyboard doesn't turn my crank that much, though they're cool to look at.
I tried Dvorak for a while. It was novel, and I go through phases with things like that. Didn't change my life or anything.
My work wouldn't pick up a for-real Dovrak keyboard for me, so I'd just switch the OS's keyboard layout on the fly -- it was an OS 8 Mac office -- and learned to use the new layout blind, on keys that showed the QWERTY letters. (Kind of a fun little security measure, too, when someone sitting down to your machine gets all the wrong letters...)
Despite the convincing-sounding rationale behind it, there's real debate over whether Dvorak's an improvement over QWERTY. It makes intuitive sense when you hear the arguments, but there's research -- like this article comparing speed on both versions either way.
I really meant "in a way W. Bush wouldn't even recognize." W. seems to live in a world where struggling to figure out the right thing to do is a sign of ineffectual moral weakness. Apparently a confident leader already knows the right thing to do, so he doesn't stew over things... (His dad, in interviews, has said he's proud W. doesn't stay up late worrying.) Ike struggled with what he should do. He tried to represent something more than just the core constituency of his own party, too.
Contrast Ike before D Day with George W. leading by "instinct" and priding himself on not fretting too much. No question who I'd want leading me.
My DareDevil would predate Miller's. He had the grittiness, and the stories were on a much more human scale than the other comics, but the whole turgid sullenness thing wasn't hip yet.
(Hmm. Didn't we hear a rumor about a sequel with Elektra as our protagonist?)
All technology in the future will be jittery and disorienting to the point of being useless. Gap commercials will overlap one another to the point at which they're all incomprehensible. Newspapers will change while you're reading them, making it pretty hard to read a whole story. Sensitive criminal investigations will occur so quickly on a dizzying, gesture-based UI that nobody can adequately document the process to protect against charges of abuse.
"Piles," meanwhile, seems more like a UI version of the piles of paper people have on their desks. Very old fashioned, and it makes perfect sense once you see a single demo page. You'd maybe use it as an adjunct to true directories -- leave a pile of downloaded nature photos on the desktop before you decide which ones to print for your kid's science report.
Sliding "drawer" folders struck me as a similar UI approach. Based on a physical analog, and popular with some -- but other people didn't use 'em a bit.
But what do we get? We get Jar Jar Binks as action hero. Watchable in a trailer, and that's about it for me.
We're long since past the "Wow isn't that cool what they can do?" phase. The "big wow" scenes are just as painful. By halfway through Phantom Menace we'd gotten the joke: watching a huge panorama of CGI "action" on screen, half the time you can't even find the characters to root for them. When it's in the service of okay writing, it has limited value -- first glance at Rivendell -- but even in LOTR: Fellowship, I rolled my eyes at the enormous statues. In the background they might have worked, but to focus attention on them only makes it more obvious that I feel no sense of awe at all over this stuff.
Personally I thought it was far too luridly violent. The paper-clips-in-the-throat thing, the knife that goes through and stretches the character's shirt behind her torso, the (meant to be funny) killing of the old lady on the plane -- those were gratuitous, to use the word right, and didn't fit with the comics I remembered. The character could have had his grit and toughness without that kind of stupid choice.
At least they tried some stuff with the extreme flashback for their narrative line and the "seeing sounds" effect. The result was pretty uneven, but those two elements were in keeping with the spirit of the comics, I thought.
It's a C- of a movie. (Not nearly as awful as dreck like "Pearl Harbor" on the Ben Affleck mediocrity spectrum.)
The book sounds good, and might make a nice complement to "Blind Man's Bluff," the rambling pop title about the history of submarine espionage. The PBS "American Experience" about Eisenhower is excellent, too, and covers the whole U2 angle quite a bit. Very watchable.
Where we got the idea that Eisenhower presided over a sleepy, suburban dream of America, I really don't know. Maybe that's how the Republicans like(d) to dream about life before those nasty 60s radicals shook everything up?
Take a look at the foreign policy Ike ran, though -- trying desperately to negotiate with the USSR from a position of strength in the new nuclear age while also staving off the "military industrial complex" (a phrase he coined) -- and he comes out in retrospect as a man of purpose and great ability. The one U2 flight too far, and he felt he'd failed... But the guy had a conscience in a way W. Bush wouldn't even recognize, and he did his damnedest under trying circumstances. Hardly dull, anyway.
At this point don't you think the "You are an idiot, I'm going to educate you," "awareness raising" security efforts by IT (and HR) people have basically failed? An irritatingly intrusive security approach combined with condescension to the users -- that should work, right? So let's force them to change passwords every month, but then chide them about writing down their passwords anywhere. Good idea. Makes things less secure, but as long as they're more secure in theory...
(I have a big plastic "pill" on my cabinet here; on the side is printed "A security breach is a tough pill to swallow. Your password is yours alone." This came from a major corporate IT department. Did they think an expensive internal advertizing campaign was the way to prevent people writing down passwords on post-its? These same people were behind dot-com advertizing, probably. Pretty lame.)
Seriously -- what all did the tricorder do, exactly? (I can easily imagine an episode where they use it as a geiger counter; did that ever happen?) Ours do the communicator's job along the way too. Not too bad.
If only our in-the-field medical instruments resembled spinning salt shakers more...
(At least it got modded "Funny.")
I bet that would stop anybody else from using it.
You probably bet wrong. Hey, Rummy went ahead with the expression even when the comparison to Sept 11 was freakishly obvious. Which event had more "shock and awe" to it -- 9/11, or a sustained cruise missile attack Donny R had been talking up for months beforehand?
Terrorism on the Bin Laden scale is ABOUT shock and awe. Apparently Rumsfeld's a little jealous of the effect...
Apple's had a relationship with CompUSA for years now where CompUSA keeps a conspicuous Mac section open, so this is the natural place for something like this to happen. There's nothing new about the connection.
(And judging by another post, this isn't Apple only, it's more of a third-party vendor that sold the approach to CompUSA for Mac and Windows titles.)
Hmm. Just about a wash between that and the real thing.
In all three cases, they've actually rewritten their stories to reflect my bitching, at least in some minor ways. Amazing, huh? They responded, and actually rewrote copy, within a few hours.
On the one hand, how responsive they really are -- very cool, better than traditional papers by far and faster than, oh, a certain source of News for Nerds I can think of... ever try to get a headline changed?
But was there adequate editorial oversight, if one reader is capable of influencing them this much? These weren't even rush stories; they were more like the sort of thing where the "reporting" was largely transcribing chunks of a press release. They're rushing the stories up, even at the BBC.
Apple stock drops on Universal music speculation.
To "get involved with" a record label doesn't necessarily entail taking on colossal debt to actually buy one.