If people prefer to believe narratives that posit poor, abused corporations as the victims of frivolous lawsuits by mean old ladies, then maybe it is because their spirits and dreams have been sufficiently crushed.
Even as recently as the late 20th century, Americans rooted for the little guy - because, well, they're all little guys themselves, after all. But the ethos today is closer to that of TV's Survivor: screw everybody else. Buy that empty promise of social Darwinism, and nobody will be there to keep you from being screwed when you order coffee; when you buy a video game; when you are saddled with venal and moronic leaders.
(3) the authority was joking, drunk, or in some other way not being serious
Proof:
Show that either (i) the person cited is not an authority in the field, or that (ii) there is general disagreement among the experts in the field on this point.
Citing mainstream (CNN) and technical (O'Reilly) sources is evidence, not a fallacious appeal to authority. Now, the poster *did* indulge in some stupid ad hominem...;-)
...is yoursmartroom.com, which markets the 21st century version of the Cold War bomb shelter.
"This versatile structure is designed to protect homeowners and their families from a broad range of security, bio-chemical, natural and industrial disasters," etc.
It's worth a peek. There's this guy sitting on the bed with his protective arms around his wife and kids as they watch a TV set that is, presumably, declaring the end of the world or another Janet Jackson tit outbreak. Nobody's spazzing. They're in their SmartRoom(tm), illin' on the floral print sofa, kind of daring evildoers to try and penetrate their secure, tastefully decorated sanctum.
Whether they've burned all their twenties in the microwave for extra-smart safety, it doesn't say.
I've got an sff x86 box in my closet screaming away like a Baptist forced to watch Janet sing to her bare tit right now. Ironically, I bought it for size and style, thinking that if I had to run Windoze then at least I'd have this smart looking little silver toaster thingee on my desk. Right. That was before I heard it. I'd beat the bastard with a baseball bat if it wasn't required for work.
With wireless keyboard and mouse, we're talking only 3 long cables (power, monitor, net) under the door and the damn thing is out of sight and mostly out of hearing range. While it might pain Mac owners known for their aesthetic sensibilities, consider the closet for your G5. You can, er, out it if and when quieter cooling is available.
I'm skeptical, too. I love Moore's shorter work but not the lengthy From Hell, a kitchen sink for everything that even remotely interested him about the Ripper data. He's a master in miniature; he can be a tyrant in maximalism.
It's always a favorite thing of anti-iPod folks to say that it's only a "personal radio", but you sound like my Dad bitching at me when I was 15 for liking that "new-fangled acid rock".
It's OK. Feel the pain of that trauma. This is Slashdot. You can cry here.
Oh, yeah?? Well, just wait until you have to replace the rotor on the spindle! Then we'll see who's Mr. Hotshot Fancy Pants!
"Apple's view is that its stuff doesn't break"
on
Mac v. Microsoft TCO
·
· Score: 1
Kay said: "Apple's view is that its stuff doesn't break and therefore costs less to keep it going. And it has some merit in that."
There is some merit in most arguments.
Would it be too inconvenient to point out that Apple has recently been forced to launch a reimbursement program for the thousands of iBook owners whose logic boards have failed?
Or that, quite recently, it chose to settle a lawsuit brought by G3 owners who had terrible performance under OS X?
Or that, in the last few months, it has rushed out a battery replacement policy for iPod owners suffering from Neistat's Syndrome?
Apple makes good machines. If TCO is measured in terms of headaches, Apple beats Windows hands down. "Doesn't break," however, is not a claim that anyone would take seriously.
...Indians will have us by the balls. If we don't reverse this trend, Americans well end up working for them in giant discount stores, fast food restaurants, temp agencies, and--
Actually, we have the antivirus companies mostly to blame for this one; they discovered it wasn't enough to sell people the software(and that coming up with new features to get upgrades was difficult), but they had to lock them into updates too; pure corporate greed.
Nice work if you can get it, eh? Well, it's damaging to society to reward the inefficiency and arrogance of the antivirus companies when the national interest is at stake.
What to do? Regulate. Regulate Microsoft, and regulate the AV companies. If Ballmer protests, throw him in Guantanamo Bay. (But if he agrees to place nice and do the monkey boy dance in a TV spot advocating the new regulation, let him out.)
As the fields of energy and accounting have amply demonstrated in recent years, you really don't want to leave anything that's critical to the national infrastructure up to the whims of bean counters. Their self-interest will always lead them to sacrifice the common good, and today the safe network is the very essence of the common good. People are imperfect, true; but our problems are exacerbated because the profit motive has been put ahead of common sense.
Unless you believe that progress will come to an end, you can rest assured that things will work out in the long term.
What is this "progress" of which you speak, my friend?
Outsourcing, for instance, is progress. Outsourcing represents progress for capital. Capital, having found a new lever to maximize returns, now sends American jobs to India. By any rational measure, that is progress -- for capitalists.
But social progress for Americans it definitely is not. What is in America's larger interest here? Greater wealth for its tiny number of investors? Or the expansion of its middle class even at the expense of greater wealth for a few?
On these critical questions, capital is answering with a resounding, Screw you all! I'm off to India! But no sane society can accept such a verdict from its elite.
The time is nigh for those of you who have cast your lot with right wing politicians and the debased libertarianism of Wired to rethink your mistakes. You had your fun in the 90s pretending the market would roar forever, and you swallowed load after load from the likes of Gilder and Friedman. Well, it didn't; it won't again like that in your lifetime; that dream is over. You've been had. Worse, now you are facing irrelevance. You are being replaced, and your erstwhile prophets are telling you it's inevitable.
So! It's time to wake up and ask: how can you afford your right wing lifestyle when you're flipping burgers? You are at a crossroads, and the ethos of unbridled greed has sold you out, so now what will you do? There is an election coming; think about it.
As Malcolm Gladwell reported in the New Yorker two weeks ago, SUVs hold the distinction of being the least safe vehicles on the road. If you doubt this -- and judging from sales figures, most Americans will -- then see his article for the latest figures ranking cars according to deaths per million drivers.
Could it be that Forbes finds it more profitable to knock older vehicles than the contemporary death traps that provide it with advertising revenue?
Sure, that's fair enough. As I was responding to your claim that "Sony's done it better," I didn't touch the question of innovation. I don't think the Xbox is innovative, either. It just hasn't been outdone by the older PS 2.:-)
Check out Crimson Skies -- snazzy retro aeroplane shooter that, coincidentally, nicely leverages the extra power of the console.
1) America loves conformity
2) "Fanatical loyalty" is an in-group thing
Let me explain.
That famous Ridley Scott ad for the "1984" debut of the Macintosh? Terrible ad. Oh, it's a marketing milestone, and aesthetically very clever. But even 20 years ago, the number of Americans who cared about or even recognized the symbolism of George Orwell's dystopian novel was small. The majority were out voting overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan -- the candidate of stasis, conformity, and militarism, who answered the longing for the era of Eisenhower and The Blob. And along came Apple saying, You don't want to be a part of the blob. Wrong. People loved the blob. They did and they do.
So Scott and Apple bucked the zeitgeist, and Apple solidified its position forever as the refusenik's machine. But America has long been the land of the mass mind, of mass taste and mass obedience, and after the little spurt of difference represented by the 60s and the sexual revolution, cultural time had resumed its usual course: flowing backwards. Ronald Reagan announced a world that would be dominated by Britney Spears and Dubya, a world that emphatically doesn't celebrate the sexy athletic female version of Winston Smith jiggling her way past the helmets and truncheons to smash Big Brother's video monitor. Hell, in 2004, we have another measure of how far we've traveled: soon enough we may see those video monitors sprouting up, courtesy of our very own Fatherland Security.
The cult that has formed around Apple celebrates much that isn't intrinsic to the machine: all the value-added love that comes from the community of arty geekdom gathered on message boards, in cafes, at Macworld, on Slashdot. It's a nice enough subculture, or so I've found as a new Mac owner these past 18 months.
But having seen and interacted with it now, I can well understand why 97% of Americans aren't clamoring to join it. Fanatical loyalty is something Americans are happily familiar with in other contexts, such as churchgoing and warmaking. They commoditize it all the time, too, whether in Beanie Babies or SUVs or blue jeans. But you will see in most instances that such fanaticism is an expression of conformity. The blue jeans ad that promises you'll be hot sh1t with the chicks isn't saying you'll stand out as much as you'll blend in acceptably. Those jeans will keep you from being a pariah; once in them, you'll do. This is the opposite of the individualist ethos that Appple pushes.
Quite apart from stellar technology, Apple is in the business of selling separatism. It targets the off-kilter and aloof and sensitive as well as the rarefied and fussy and elite. (It most directly romanticized them in its Think Different campaign, where every geekette was invited to see herself as Amelia Earhart and every geek as Einstein. My computer makes me a hero? Cool beans!) Despite our fond myths about the old west and individualism, there aren't many such people in our society; if there were, we wouldn't need to reassure ourselves with the myth. Most Americans revel in their essential sameness, which is why our cars all look the same and our radio stations all play the same songs and our newspapers all mouth the same pieties and and our politicians all say the same things and our movies are generally about blowing the hell out of people who aren't like us. For such a culture, the Mac is a bit of a...tough sell.;-)
XBox -- Everyone's got a PS2. Sorry. Putting a P3-700 in a box with a harddrive and a TV-out running a stripped down windows kernel and DirectX doesn't count as "innovation". That's called "building a computer that plugs into the TV". And Sony's done it better.
In an otherwise sound post, you're really reaching here. The PS 2's graphics and storage capability are measurably inferior to those of the Xbox. And while controller response is subjective, I find the Xbox controller feels better.
As for "everyone" owning one, well, pfft. That's like arguing that Windows is superior to OS X because "everyone" runs Windows. And just as you couldn't be compelling saying, "There are 50,000 more word processors for Windows," it's rather hard to claim that lots and lots of turd clones of the same games means the PS 2 has a better selection than the Xbox. Quite to the contrary: the lack of any significant quality control over PS 2 licensing results in acres of dreck.
I own both consoles, and rent games for both. But I play the last-gen PS 2 less and less these days. It's not a bad machine -- just not very competitive with the Xbox where it counts.
On a related note, as of this week the Blackcider.com web site has nearly 1,800 signatures (give or take some trolls).
It isn't hard to see that Apple's policy of denying widespread iBook failures is going to bring about blowback. Can it really be worth the bad publicity, loss of customer loyalty and damage to the iBook brand? Does modern corporate experience teach that acknowledging product flaws is always a last resort, is Apple management just in denial, or what?
Form over function is seductive. It was months before I realized that turning off magnification actually makes the dock usable. But magnification looks much cooler. Before turning the stupid thing off once and for all, you can be spellbound by what Tog calls its demoability -- useless eyecandy for impressing shoppers -- until, that is, you get sick and tired of magnified icons spilling into the current window.
By comparison, on my desktop box running Win XP, the taskbar is much more efficient. It does not become cluttered with additional icons representing open documents. It uses color effectively. And so on: basically, all the things that Tognazzini bemoans the OS X dock lacking, the Win XP taskbar has. Sure, it's visually plain. But, as some wise ugly dude once said, looks aren't everything.;-)
My name is Friday. My partner's name is Dee Emcee Aigh. We call him Fuggin' A for short. These streets are sour with the stench of copyright infringement, and we have a job to do.
7:43 am. Stakeout at corner of Vine and Pearl.
We surveilled the suspect from approximately 6:00 am until five minutes ago. To keep us entertained, I played properly-licensed music on the car CD player, with the retail receipt taped to the dashboard as an example to passersby. Had it been necessary to answer a subpeona, I could have also produced my Visa bill to show proof of purchase in a New York minute.
7:45 am. Peddle to the metal.
We flew from the car with our RIAA jackets flapping like superhero capes, as Fuggin' A bore down on the suspect screaming, "Gimme a reason, you infringing scum!" The suspect, a man in a strangely colored shirt who stood behind a small card table piled high with CDs and plush animal toys, pretended not to understand. He was, he said, just "minding" the table for someone else. "Then you won't mind if I confiscate this evidence," I said, shoveling the contraband into a Hefty bag. "We'll see if you also don't 'mind' fines of up to $20,000 per infringement for taking food out of the mouth of Britney Spears and P. Diddley!"
7:58 am. Donut break.
After the bust, we had to put the chill on some extra endorphins so we parked it at Crispy Creme. Forensic science is increasingly important to the battle to keep America's recording artists off of the unemployment line, and I personally submitted 12 glazed red jellies for internal analysis. Conclusion: inconclusive. Further study needed.
8:37. Dorm room infiltration.
Espionage is not only for defending the Homeland; it's also for defending the rightful profits of Homieland from hip-hop fans who like the pizzle shizzle but don't like to pay for it. With Fuggin' A and I dressed in Outkast t-shirts, we cleverly slipped onto campus posing as eager out-of-town P2P traders keen to shift some "gigabytes." We soon met a contact, a dyspeptic young caucasian male with dreadlocks, who assured us that it was "all good," and in no time took us to a dorm room where his confederates in infringement sat around their computer cackling like Al Qaeda operatives planning to destroy our way of life by blowing up the set of "American Idol." These evildoers made my skin crawl, but I concentrated on not blowing my cover.
"Ok, man," said our surly contact. "How much you want?"
Here my training kicked into gear. I'd rehearsed and rehearsed for this moment.
"Er, uh, want? Say, all we want is to upload and download! Music, uh, wants to be pay- and royalty-free! Yo!"
"Huh? Ain't you got the shit? Panamanian, right?"
"Who are these middle-aged assh0les," grumbled one of the crew.
"We're..."
Then Fuggin A' ripped off his disguise, revealing his fiercesome jacket.
"RIAA! RIAA! Down on the floor! Down on the floor!"
What happened next, you can never rehearse for...
1:45 pm. Emergency room, visitor's lobby.
They say that Fuggin' A will be all right, thank God, and that he will be able to make regular bowel movements in time. The jacket can't be reused, unfortunately; it will be cleaned and retired, and possibly go on tour in the nation's schools as an object lesson for our impressionable youth. But watch out, evildoers - we have more jackets where that one came from!
Far from diluting Apple's brand, this move protects it while managing to find a whole new udder on the cash cow.
Despite the real gains it has made in OS improvements, Apple's cachet remains largely in its sexy, elite image. The schizophrenia that's marked its retail relationship with Target and other vendors - iPods for sale one day, then not, then back on again - points to the problems of dealing with the unexpected success of having a mass consumer hit on its hands.
And when is it ever a problem to dominate a mass consumer market? Well, it's a problem when you need to protect the refined sensibilities of your loyal base when at the same time you want to get a little, uh, action with consumers on the other side of the tracks. Put another way: how do you retain the people who don't shrink in horror at declarations that your product is "lickable" while reaching out to guys who dwell at Wal-Mart? They're mutually exclusive markets. You can't exactly make the ickyPod, now, can you? (Or can you? Look at the colors on those miniPods, jeezus!)
So this is Apple's challenge, then: continue selling iPods as avatars of youthful upmarket hipness, while growing the business by shifting product to another market segment via a ho-hum go-between. Enter HP with plenty of succesful experience in being ho-hum...
As the iBook scandal -- and scandal it is -- unfolds, Reuters is merely the first mainstream news outlet to take note. Online news sites are already attuned. The Register, for instance, reported a few days ago that iBook owners are planning to stage a protest at MacWorld this week.
Apple's own boards are buzzing with hundreds of posts. But the real action is at Macintouch.com and MacFixit.com, where both owner experiences and technical analysis are being shared as people try to understand why this is happening and decide what to do. If you have a problem iBook, try there. If you are thinking of an iBook purchase, better look there, too.
Why all the commotion? Simple: lots of iBooks broke down, then they broke down again, and through it all Apple has kept mum. Now, it's one thing when software, like Windows, performs crappily; people will endure an awful lot of that. When their shiny months-old laptop is going back for the second, third, or fourth logic board replacement, however, they tend not to be so forgiving.
And that's not all. Because Apple wants as fast a turnaround as possible, they're sending refurb units out for battery repairs. Meaning for your $99, you're actually getting a newly certified unit.
And surrender my collection of 5,000 Bay City Rollers outtakes, demos, and rarities?
Slashdot Mirror
If people prefer to believe narratives that posit poor, abused corporations as the victims of frivolous lawsuits by mean old ladies, then maybe it is because their spirits and dreams have been sufficiently crushed.
Even as recently as the late 20th century, Americans rooted for the little guy - because, well, they're all little guys themselves, after all. But the ethos today is closer to that of TV's Survivor: screw everybody else. Buy that empty promise of social Darwinism, and nobody will be there to keep you from being screwed when you order coffee; when you buy a video game; when you are saddled with venal and moronic leaders.
"This versatile structure is designed to protect homeowners and their families from a broad range of security, bio-chemical, natural and industrial disasters," etc.
It's worth a peek. There's this guy sitting on the bed with his protective arms around his wife and kids as they watch a TV set that is, presumably, declaring the end of the world or another Janet Jackson tit outbreak. Nobody's spazzing. They're in their SmartRoom(tm), illin' on the floral print sofa, kind of daring evildoers to try and penetrate their secure, tastefully decorated sanctum.
Whether they've burned all their twenties in the microwave for extra-smart safety, it doesn't say.
With wireless keyboard and mouse, we're talking only 3 long cables (power, monitor, net) under the door and the damn thing is out of sight and mostly out of hearing range. While it might pain Mac owners known for their aesthetic sensibilities, consider the closet for your G5. You can, er, out it if and when quieter cooling is available.
I'm skeptical, too. I love Moore's shorter work but not the lengthy From Hell, a kitchen sink for everything that even remotely interested him about the Ripper data. He's a master in miniature; he can be a tyrant in maximalism.
It's OK. Feel the pain of that trauma. This is Slashdot. You can cry here.
Oh, yeah?? Well, just wait until you have to replace the rotor on the spindle! Then we'll see who's Mr. Hotshot Fancy Pants!
There is some merit in most arguments.
Would it be too inconvenient to point out that Apple has recently been forced to launch a reimbursement program for the thousands of iBook owners whose logic boards have failed?
Or that, quite recently, it chose to settle a lawsuit brought by G3 owners who had terrible performance under OS X?
Or that, in the last few months, it has rushed out a battery replacement policy for iPod owners suffering from Neistat's Syndrome?
Apple makes good machines. If TCO is measured in terms of headaches, Apple beats Windows hands down. "Doesn't break," however, is not a claim that anyone would take seriously.
Oops.
Nice work if you can get it, eh? Well, it's damaging to society to reward the inefficiency and arrogance of the antivirus companies when the national interest is at stake.
What to do? Regulate. Regulate Microsoft, and regulate the AV companies. If Ballmer protests, throw him in Guantanamo Bay. (But if he agrees to place nice and do the monkey boy dance in a TV spot advocating the new regulation, let him out.)
As the fields of energy and accounting have amply demonstrated in recent years, you really don't want to leave anything that's critical to the national infrastructure up to the whims of bean counters. Their self-interest will always lead them to sacrifice the common good, and today the safe network is the very essence of the common good. People are imperfect, true; but our problems are exacerbated because the profit motive has been put ahead of common sense.
What is this "progress" of which you speak, my friend?
Outsourcing, for instance, is progress. Outsourcing represents progress for capital. Capital, having found a new lever to maximize returns, now sends American jobs to India. By any rational measure, that is progress -- for capitalists.
But social progress for Americans it definitely is not. What is in America's larger interest here? Greater wealth for its tiny number of investors? Or the expansion of its middle class even at the expense of greater wealth for a few?
On these critical questions, capital is answering with a resounding, Screw you all! I'm off to India! But no sane society can accept such a verdict from its elite.
The time is nigh for those of you who have cast your lot with right wing politicians and the debased libertarianism of Wired to rethink your mistakes. You had your fun in the 90s pretending the market would roar forever, and you swallowed load after load from the likes of Gilder and Friedman. Well, it didn't; it won't again like that in your lifetime; that dream is over. You've been had. Worse, now you are facing irrelevance. You are being replaced, and your erstwhile prophets are telling you it's inevitable.
So! It's time to wake up and ask: how can you afford your right wing lifestyle when you're flipping burgers? You are at a crossroads, and the ethos of unbridled greed has sold you out, so now what will you do? There is an election coming; think about it.
Mod AC parent up.
Could it be that Forbes finds it more profitable to knock older vehicles than the contemporary death traps that provide it with advertising revenue?
You think that's exciting, wait until you see what's coming in 1.5.3!
Check out Crimson Skies -- snazzy retro aeroplane shooter that, coincidentally, nicely leverages the extra power of the console.
1) America loves conformity
2) "Fanatical loyalty" is an in-group thing
Let me explain.
That famous Ridley Scott ad for the "1984" debut of the Macintosh? Terrible ad. Oh, it's a marketing milestone, and aesthetically very clever. But even 20 years ago, the number of Americans who cared about or even recognized the symbolism of George Orwell's dystopian novel was small. The majority were out voting overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan -- the candidate of stasis, conformity, and militarism, who answered the longing for the era of Eisenhower and The Blob. And along came Apple saying, You don't want to be a part of the blob. Wrong. People loved the blob. They did and they do.
So Scott and Apple bucked the zeitgeist, and Apple solidified its position forever as the refusenik's machine. But America has long been the land of the mass mind, of mass taste and mass obedience, and after the little spurt of difference represented by the 60s and the sexual revolution, cultural time had resumed its usual course: flowing backwards. Ronald Reagan announced a world that would be dominated by Britney Spears and Dubya, a world that emphatically doesn't celebrate the sexy athletic female version of Winston Smith jiggling her way past the helmets and truncheons to smash Big Brother's video monitor. Hell, in 2004, we have another measure of how far we've traveled: soon enough we may see those video monitors sprouting up, courtesy of our very own Fatherland Security.
The cult that has formed around Apple celebrates much that isn't intrinsic to the machine: all the value-added love that comes from the community of arty geekdom gathered on message boards, in cafes, at Macworld, on Slashdot. It's a nice enough subculture, or so I've found as a new Mac owner these past 18 months.
But having seen and interacted with it now, I can well understand why 97% of Americans aren't clamoring to join it. Fanatical loyalty is something Americans are happily familiar with in other contexts, such as churchgoing and warmaking. They commoditize it all the time, too, whether in Beanie Babies or SUVs or blue jeans. But you will see in most instances that such fanaticism is an expression of conformity. The blue jeans ad that promises you'll be hot sh1t with the chicks isn't saying you'll stand out as much as you'll blend in acceptably. Those jeans will keep you from being a pariah; once in them, you'll do. This is the opposite of the individualist ethos that Appple pushes.
Quite apart from stellar technology, Apple is in the business of selling separatism. It targets the off-kilter and aloof and sensitive as well as the rarefied and fussy and elite. (It most directly romanticized them in its Think Different campaign, where every geekette was invited to see herself as Amelia Earhart and every geek as Einstein. My computer makes me a hero? Cool beans!) Despite our fond myths about the old west and individualism, there aren't many such people in our society; if there were, we wouldn't need to reassure ourselves with the myth. Most Americans revel in their essential sameness, which is why our cars all look the same and our radio stations all play the same songs and our newspapers all mouth the same pieties and and our politicians all say the same things and our movies are generally about blowing the hell out of people who aren't like us. For such a culture, the Mac is a bit of a...tough sell. ;-)
In an otherwise sound post, you're really reaching here. The PS 2's graphics and storage capability are measurably inferior to those of the Xbox. And while controller response is subjective, I find the Xbox controller feels better.
As for "everyone" owning one, well, pfft. That's like arguing that Windows is superior to OS X because "everyone" runs Windows. And just as you couldn't be compelling saying, "There are 50,000 more word processors for Windows," it's rather hard to claim that lots and lots of turd clones of the same games means the PS 2 has a better selection than the Xbox. Quite to the contrary: the lack of any significant quality control over PS 2 licensing results in acres of dreck.
I own both consoles, and rent games for both. But I play the last-gen PS 2 less and less these days. It's not a bad machine -- just not very competitive with the Xbox where it counts.
It isn't hard to see that Apple's policy of denying widespread iBook failures is going to bring about blowback. Can it really be worth the bad publicity, loss of customer loyalty and damage to the iBook brand? Does modern corporate experience teach that acknowledging product flaws is always a last resort, is Apple management just in denial, or what?
By comparison, on my desktop box running Win XP, the taskbar is much more efficient. It does not become cluttered with additional icons representing open documents. It uses color effectively. And so on: basically, all the things that Tognazzini bemoans the OS X dock lacking, the Win XP taskbar has. Sure, it's visually plain. But, as some wise ugly dude once said, looks aren't everything. ;-)
iBooks are indestructible. Some people are on their fifth logic board replacement already! ;-)
See: www.blackcider.com
7:43 am. Stakeout at corner of Vine and Pearl.
We surveilled the suspect from approximately 6:00 am until five minutes ago. To keep us entertained, I played properly-licensed music on the car CD player, with the retail receipt taped to the dashboard as an example to passersby. Had it been necessary to answer a subpeona, I could have also produced my Visa bill to show proof of purchase in a New York minute.
7:45 am. Peddle to the metal.
We flew from the car with our RIAA jackets flapping like superhero capes, as Fuggin' A bore down on the suspect screaming, "Gimme a reason, you infringing scum!" The suspect, a man in a strangely colored shirt who stood behind a small card table piled high with CDs and plush animal toys, pretended not to understand. He was, he said, just "minding" the table for someone else. "Then you won't mind if I confiscate this evidence," I said, shoveling the contraband into a Hefty bag. "We'll see if you also don't 'mind' fines of up to $20,000 per infringement for taking food out of the mouth of Britney Spears and P. Diddley!"
7:58 am. Donut break.
After the bust, we had to put the chill on some extra endorphins so we parked it at Crispy Creme. Forensic science is increasingly important to the battle to keep America's recording artists off of the unemployment line, and I personally submitted 12 glazed red jellies for internal analysis. Conclusion: inconclusive. Further study needed.
8:37. Dorm room infiltration.
Espionage is not only for defending the Homeland; it's also for defending the rightful profits of Homieland from hip-hop fans who like the pizzle shizzle but don't like to pay for it. With Fuggin' A and I dressed in Outkast t-shirts, we cleverly slipped onto campus posing as eager out-of-town P2P traders keen to shift some "gigabytes." We soon met a contact, a dyspeptic young caucasian male with dreadlocks, who assured us that it was "all good," and in no time took us to a dorm room where his confederates in infringement sat around their computer cackling like Al Qaeda operatives planning to destroy our way of life by blowing up the set of "American Idol." These evildoers made my skin crawl, but I concentrated on not blowing my cover.
"Ok, man," said our surly contact. "How much you want?"
Here my training kicked into gear. I'd rehearsed and rehearsed for this moment.
"Er, uh, want? Say, all we want is to upload and download! Music, uh, wants to be pay- and royalty-free! Yo!"
"Huh? Ain't you got the shit? Panamanian, right?"
"Who are these middle-aged assh0les," grumbled one of the crew.
"We're..."
Then Fuggin A' ripped off his disguise, revealing his fiercesome jacket.
"RIAA! RIAA! Down on the floor! Down on the floor!"
What happened next, you can never rehearse for...
1:45 pm. Emergency room, visitor's lobby.
They say that Fuggin' A will be all right, thank God, and that he will be able to make regular bowel movements in time. The jacket can't be reused, unfortunately; it will be cleaned and retired, and possibly go on tour in the nation's schools as an object lesson for our impressionable youth. But watch out, evildoers - we have more jackets where that one came from!
...they're all Democrats! ;-)
Despite the real gains it has made in OS improvements, Apple's cachet remains largely in its sexy, elite image. The schizophrenia that's marked its retail relationship with Target and other vendors - iPods for sale one day, then not, then back on again - points to the problems of dealing with the unexpected success of having a mass consumer hit on its hands.
And when is it ever a problem to dominate a mass consumer market? Well, it's a problem when you need to protect the refined sensibilities of your loyal base when at the same time you want to get a little, uh, action with consumers on the other side of the tracks. Put another way: how do you retain the people who don't shrink in horror at declarations that your product is "lickable" while reaching out to guys who dwell at Wal-Mart? They're mutually exclusive markets. You can't exactly make the ickyPod, now, can you? (Or can you? Look at the colors on those miniPods, jeezus!)
So this is Apple's challenge, then: continue selling iPods as avatars of youthful upmarket hipness, while growing the business by shifting product to another market segment via a ho-hum go-between. Enter HP with plenty of succesful experience in being ho-hum...
Apple's own boards are buzzing with hundreds of posts. But the real action is at Macintouch.com and MacFixit.com, where both owner experiences and technical analysis are being shared as people try to understand why this is happening and decide what to do. If you have a problem iBook, try there. If you are thinking of an iBook purchase, better look there, too.
Why all the commotion? Simple: lots of iBooks broke down, then they broke down again, and through it all Apple has kept mum. Now, it's one thing when software, like Windows, performs crappily; people will endure an awful lot of that. When their shiny months-old laptop is going back for the second, third, or fourth logic board replacement, however, they tend not to be so forgiving.
And surrender my collection of 5,000 Bay City Rollers outtakes, demos, and rarities?
I think not, sir. I think not.