The iPod is practically on the cusp (if not already) of being one of those universal words that is synonymous with "portable music player" - and, in this case, not even because of the same reasons as Kleenex and Xerox, but because nearly all - over 92% [com.com] - of all hard drive-based portable music players actually are iPods.
Not really. No one uses iPod as a generic name for mp3 players. You won't hear someone with a Zen mp3 player say, "I'm going iPodding." That would be like getting into one's Yugo and saying, "I'm going Porsching!"
Market share isn't synonymous with vernacular usage, something that has occurred in the cases of Kleenex and Xerox.
We can speculate on why that happened in their cases (Xerox first to market, etc.) but there isn't any evidence that Apple has done more than successfully establish its trademark in a market-leading position. It may well wish to claim more, but the courts should slap down its pretensions to owning the word "pod."
Bad movies?! My friend, what are you complaining about? Armed with the IMDb and a little thing called taste, I haven't seen a bad movie in ages.
In just the last few months, I've been dazzled by cool stuff by Michael Haneke (*the* coolest end-of-the-world movie ever made, "Hour of the Wolf," the creepy "Hidden," and the revoltingly subversive "Funny Games") and Takashi Miike (the icy "Black Society" trilogy), the awesome 1976 black comedy "Network," and a pair of superb recent documentaries, "New York Doll" (70s glam rock) and "Why We Fight" (Eisenhower's warning against the military industrial complex). I can't also forget "The Servant," a sinister 60s-era British flick (made by Joseph Losey, the immensely talented film industry outcast from Wisconsin) about a manservant slowly taking over his master's life which has the additional gift of having been adapted by our recent Nobel Laureate in literature, Harold Pinter. Oh, yeah, and two really different, fantastic dramas about the boxing life: "Fat City" (1972) and "The Set-Up" (1949). Hell, I'd watch more, but the week's only so long and I have to make room for possibly the best serial drama ever made, Deadwood--a masterpiece in our time!
See, it's too late in the day to complain about Hollywood. Disappointment and boredom will await you if you depend on the idiot factory. Happily, the rest of the planet hasn't lost its touch. The library of international film is so full of good and even astonishing work that you need a lifetime to watch it all.
Like any subject, you won't get very far without some guidance. The little paragraph in the On Demand section? That isn't going to cut it. Get hold of a good film companion like Halliwell's, and read some of the great movie critics like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael. Or if you want to start this instant, then peruse the reliable Roger Ebert's short odes to great films. Start at random, you can hardly go wrong with anything here:
For BusinessWeek, reassembling broken killers' minds is just another story to plug into its Technology section (indeed one so low in priority they've assigned it to an intern).
For those miserables whose humanity was stolen from them in this war, however, the aftermath of mass murder is somewhat less of an occasion for sanguine techno-speculation. And so is it for us: as these shattered men rotate back into civilian life, we will see familiar patterns of depression, joblessness, drug addiction, domestic violence. There will be individual and collective pain.
Beyond the immeasurable human cost, the economic hit to our society may total trillions according to estimates by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Food for thought before starting unnecessary wars.
That's a narrow geek observation. Most game buyers won't care who came first; they'll see the remote as nothing more than another peripheral which either comes with or can be bought for their system.
If anything, what could make the Nintendo a winner in the next-gen sweepstakes is cost. In the 2007 recession, not a lot of people will be buying $500 PS3s or even $300 Xbox 360s.
so the only way Microsoft can make a dent here is for them to do something extremely innovative.
You've never seen an American movie or driven an American car, have you?
If you had, you wouldn't have such a misplaced faith in innovation. Things Microsoft can do to disturb Apple's market position include non-innovative yet time-tested measures:
Beat Apple on price
Appeal to the lowest common denominator
Subvert the supply chain (through deals with the music mafia)
Integrate Zune software in Vista (heard of a little thing called IE?)
I'll never own a Zune. I don't shop at Wal-Mart, either, but you know what? I hear it's kind of popular.
Vista? iPod effect? Come on, that's too nerdy to matter. Slowing PC sales have to do with tightening purse strings.
Everybody knows the obvious reasons (e.g., gas prices, interest rates, outsourcing), but the lurking fat girl ready to jump out of the cake and start farting up a storm is home equity borrowing.
Under Bush, you borrowed against your fast-appreciating home as fast as you could. Then you went out and bought crap.
That money's spent (though usually still owed). Unhappily for those counting on the "home ATM" to work forever, there's a glut of homes and condos nobody wants and that owners can't sell. Speculation is rife, values have ballooned beyond the reach of most buyers and new building is continuing like a bad thyroid problem: this will lead to declining values. The WSJ observed a plateauing in new equity borrowing back in March; just wait. There's more signs of the hard landing ahead today at WSJ.com, where it's argued that "the current slowdown in homes sales is more profound that many had first thought," along with mounting fears of recession.
Under mountains of debt and delusion many Americans are going to learn to live within their means, which will be reduced by the reckless choices--financial and political--made in this decade. Obviously, that means fewer new Dells and Apples among other things. Anyone looking for good prices on systems might want to wait for the foreclosure sales in McMansion land--lightly used, you know, just a little porn and Rush Limbaugh.;-)
Agreed, and it's not only conservatives who trot out the flag burning crisis. It's also opportunists fishing for right wing votes: there's Hillary Clinton, for instance, bravely defending Old Glory from imminent destruction.
To bring this back OT, let's not forget it was President Clinton who signed CIPA into law imposing on libraries and schools the duty to block "obscene material," which for some years helped fuel widespread use of censorware. The idea of a free Net has much to fear from all American politicians, particularly in our pandering age.
Yeow, that looks painful. Guess Pod Boy there never read Earbudinthians 7:36.
And the Lord was wrothful at the stupidity of young middle class Americans with more gadgets than brains, and He said: Thou who useth iPod in lightning, let thy ass know it matters not the righteousness of the playlist. For yea all are smoted when conductive wire runneth into the ear.
Heh. Then again, George W. Bush is only 1/300,000,000 of the American population. But just look at the little pooper go.
If you're Apple, you don't care if two stray sheep wander off. High-profile defections suck, though. Doctorow's blog, BoingBoing.net, had 2.3 million unique visitors in June. That's not an insignificant number who will be reading his ongoing series about switching.
True and alas, that's not even the half of it. Holding public office in these United States is a function not of literacy, nor even of intelligence, but entirely of one's aroma to money. Are you in good odor where the big green is concerned? Can money breathe deeply around you without fear of taking offense? Or are you the stinky kind who sweats ideas, oozes principles--lousy with some verminous notion of the public trust?
From technology to the environment to social issues to war, Ted Stevens smells just as his masters wish: a perfumed bitch, reliably found on all fours, with enormous amounts of material up his tube.
I don't think John understands why Doom worked. Asked what he'd change about it, his reply is he'd hire better level designers (and even takes an unnecessary dig at Sandy Petersen). They didn't know any better back then, he says. Huh?! Do you hear anyone complaining about the original Doom?
In fact, fans are still recreating Doom levels for other games as homages, which isn't to say those levels were stunningly brilliant. No, they were all they had to be--because the gameplay was so great. And the great fun rubbed off on the levels.
By contrast, Daikatana's levels were built and rebuilt, polished and repolished. Fat lot of good it did. Design is law, of course, as the Ion Storm mantra went; but Daikatana is $0.99 in the bargain bin, too.
Romero's on better ground when knocking Doom 3 for being dark, repetitive and predictable. Although he doesn't realize it, this argument bears on his earlier misguided comment. D3 is a masterpiece of level design, or at least of a certain highly-detailed future-industrial style. And that's all anyone takes away from it: how it looked. Having stood in line to get a copy the day it came out, I'm still trying to forget how mind-numbingly poorly it played.
Bottom line: level design is vastly overrated. Sure, it can be an art form (see, for instance, old custom Quake levels built by geniuses such as Headshot or Mr. Fribbles). But most games look alike today; no matter how technically sound their appearance, few do more than go for realism or ape genre cliches. This even as hyper-realistic design means longer development times and higher costs. And nobody thinks games are more fun than their blockier predecessors--no, quite the opposite.
So where Romero talks about level design as a virtue and even dreams about going back in time to revisualize Doom, the truth is something different. Level design is becoming little more than a clonable commodity.
The solution is to outsource it. Set up companies that do nothing but build cities, dungeons, jungles, etc. to some standard, scriptable world-building spec. Devs can then buy chunks of these "places" and build their games in them--for much less than the cost of paying salaries for asset creation. This would liberate game companies to pour their energies into gameplay before it becomes a lost art.
While to the untrained eye this much-exaggerated swelling and overheating might seem problematic, Mac users are taking it all in stride. Across the MacOSXisphere, we're harnessing the power of OS X to leverage our expectations, cushion the shock, podcast prayers for Steve and see us through what's already come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. I know for a fact that somewhere, Mac evangelist Dave Schroeder is preparing a 5,000-word Slashdot post that will have us weeping with joy and mods handing out Insightful points faster than pimps working the art of the compliment at the bus station. Meanwhile, later today I'll be releasing iDontseeanybulgedoyouseeanybulge? v2.0, my new zen koan widget for Tiger, which depicts raindrops landing in a rippling pool as a mellow, golden Wine Country voice endlessly intones: "Swelling batteries only make me stronger." Share it with someone you love ($29.99).
Bottom line, you Windoze and *nix folks: don't think you can poke fun. We're strong, we're united, we love our meringue-tinged MacBooks and MacBulger Pros and we'll continue to love them even if they start to fill out in back like John Merrick, the Elephant Man. It could be worse; we could be stuck on Dell machines getting carpal tunnel from jamming our trackpad fingers on that impossible START button found in the left corner of XP--now, there's a basis for a recall if ever there was one. I weep for you poor, START-bound Windoze users. And Linux? Please, Spock. Understand: nobody licks a prompt. Nobody.
I live in a typical US monopoly market where the pigopolists have protected the cable provider from competition, ensuring the highest profits for its owners and the least choice for consumers.
Gifted with such an enviable position by lawmakers, our cable company likes to run self-congratulatory TV spots to help ensure that the proles understand the natural order of things. The one I like best is "Cable...an American success story!" which purports to tell the story of how the plucky little guys with vision, effort, etc., have seized the day. The montage depicts working class folk engaged in simple, joyful labor--noble to the last dude shimmying up the telephone pole at sunset.
Naturally, this ad is a tax deduction for the cable company owners, who get to a) screw us; b) lie about it; and c) avoid paying their share of taxes to boot.
O, great frea mahkit--like da Lawd, you move in mysterious ways!
Here are MacBook owners on the Apple boards discussing their frustration and attempts to, er, get the yellow out, which is a major crisis in aesthete land. Not only that, but it's bringing people out of the woodwork to describe other problems with their BananaBooks. It's all too much for Apple moderators, who've shut down both discussions:
Locked discussions get a terse, "Unless otherwise noted, your Submission should either be a technical support question or a technical support answer." Er...what part of it's turning #@$%^! yellow!!! don't you understand?
"Macs are 100% capable of running all the latest games, and doing it well."
Ah, but the problem is which Macs.
Apple's gaming market consists of its pro users and iMac owners--not exactly sizable enough to set game publishers' hearts on fire.
Meanwhile, the bulk of Apple's computer hardware sales are consumer-level machines. Nobody's going to play any new games well at all on a Macbook or Mini with anemic integrated video.
This leaves Apple in the same place it was prior to the Intel switch: without commodity hardware that can appeal to the gaming market. This could change, but it won't overnight.
It's frustrating as hell to me that game development companies are so shallow that literally all they care about is what will make them money.
Heh, me too, and I have lots of good gaming hardware here in addition to my Mac. And thanks to the corrosive shallowness of today's corporate gaming industry, there's scarcely a damn thing that holds my attention beyond the first hour. Games have become the new Hollywood--but that's a post for another day.;-)
Your grammar dig is such a red herring, Kurt. The writer is clearly capable of a high level of English and the quoted speech is a very simple declarative sentence. Word, Mr. Phonics: for most non-native speakers, subject-verb constructions using the present tense of "to be" don't need help from Henry Higgins.
Now, on to the main point: you'd be surprised what Apple employees will say.
As my iBook 700mhz was nearing the end of the warranty (reluctantly extended by Apple after a barrage of logic board complaints), I asked a Genius if mine was exhibiting the telltale signs of failure. Yes, he said. But when it would go could not be predicted. What was I to do, then, I said, if it failed a week, a month past warranty?
He looked around. And then proceeded, quietly, to tell me that he couldn't tell me this, but...
I should throw it down repeatedly on a bed, he said. Or squeeze it very, very hard in the area above the logic board. Thusly could I speed the flowering of what Apple's bad craftsmanship had already sowed.
No, no, I know, you've probably never encountered that. But it happened; and I rather appreciated his generous suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's also a commentary on how many people want to be Cocoa developers.
Not really. No one uses iPod as a generic name for mp3 players. You won't hear someone with a Zen mp3 player say, "I'm going iPodding." That would be like getting into one's Yugo and saying, "I'm going Porsching!"
Market share isn't synonymous with vernacular usage, something that has occurred in the cases of Kleenex and Xerox.
We can speculate on why that happened in their cases (Xerox first to market, etc.) but there isn't any evidence that Apple has done more than successfully establish its trademark in a market-leading position. It may well wish to claim more, but the courts should slap down its pretensions to owning the word "pod."
In just the last few months, I've been dazzled by cool stuff by Michael Haneke (*the* coolest end-of-the-world movie ever made, "Hour of the Wolf," the creepy "Hidden," and the revoltingly subversive "Funny Games") and Takashi Miike (the icy "Black Society" trilogy), the awesome 1976 black comedy "Network," and a pair of superb recent documentaries, "New York Doll" (70s glam rock) and "Why We Fight" (Eisenhower's warning against the military industrial complex). I can't also forget "The Servant," a sinister 60s-era British flick (made by Joseph Losey, the immensely talented film industry outcast from Wisconsin) about a manservant slowly taking over his master's life which has the additional gift of having been adapted by our recent Nobel Laureate in literature, Harold Pinter. Oh, yeah, and two really different, fantastic dramas about the boxing life: "Fat City" (1972) and "The Set-Up" (1949). Hell, I'd watch more, but the week's only so long and I have to make room for possibly the best serial drama ever made, Deadwood--a masterpiece in our time!
See, it's too late in the day to complain about Hollywood. Disappointment and boredom will await you if you depend on the idiot factory. Happily, the rest of the planet hasn't lost its touch. The library of international film is so full of good and even astonishing work that you need a lifetime to watch it all.
Like any subject, you won't get very far without some guidance. The little paragraph in the On Demand section? That isn't going to cut it. Get hold of a good film companion like Halliwell's, and read some of the great movie critics like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael. Or if you want to start this instant, then peruse the reliable Roger Ebert's short odes to great films. Start at random, you can hardly go wrong with anything here:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/secti on?category=REVIEWS08
For those miserables whose humanity was stolen from them in this war, however, the aftermath of mass murder is somewhat less of an occasion for sanguine techno-speculation. And so is it for us: as these shattered men rotate back into civilian life, we will see familiar patterns of depression, joblessness, drug addiction, domestic violence. There will be individual and collective pain.
Beyond the immeasurable human cost, the economic hit to our society may total trillions according to estimates by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Food for thought before starting unnecessary wars.
If anything, what could make the Nintendo a winner in the next-gen sweepstakes is cost. In the 2007 recession, not a lot of people will be buying $500 PS3s or even $300 Xbox 360s.
You've never seen an American movie or driven an American car, have you?
If you had, you wouldn't have such a misplaced faith in innovation. Things Microsoft can do to disturb Apple's market position include non-innovative yet time-tested measures:
Beat Apple on price
Appeal to the lowest common denominator
Subvert the supply chain (through deals with the music mafia)
Integrate Zune software in Vista (heard of a little thing called IE?)
I'll never own a Zune. I don't shop at Wal-Mart, either, but you know what? I hear it's kind of popular.
That bloody Pete Doherty! He and a barely-disguised Kate Moss willl roll you for drugs money just like that mate!
Everybody knows the obvious reasons (e.g., gas prices, interest rates, outsourcing), but the lurking fat girl ready to jump out of the cake and start farting up a storm is home equity borrowing.
Under Bush, you borrowed against your fast-appreciating home as fast as you could. Then you went out and bought crap.
That money's spent (though usually still owed). Unhappily for those counting on the "home ATM" to work forever, there's a glut of homes and condos nobody wants and that owners can't sell. Speculation is rife, values have ballooned beyond the reach of most buyers and new building is continuing like a bad thyroid problem: this will lead to declining values. The WSJ observed a plateauing in new equity borrowing back in March; just wait. There's more signs of the hard landing ahead today at WSJ.com, where it's argued that "the current slowdown in homes sales is more profound that many had first thought," along with mounting fears of recession.
Under mountains of debt and delusion many Americans are going to learn to live within their means, which will be reduced by the reckless choices--financial and political--made in this decade. Obviously, that means fewer new Dells and Apples among other things. Anyone looking for good prices on systems might want to wait for the foreclosure sales in McMansion land--lightly used, you know, just a little porn and Rush Limbaugh. ;-)
To bring this back OT, let's not forget it was President Clinton who signed CIPA into law imposing on libraries and schools the duty to block "obscene material," which for some years helped fuel widespread use of censorware. The idea of a free Net has much to fear from all American politicians, particularly in our pandering age.
And the Lord was wrothful at the stupidity of young middle class Americans with more gadgets than brains, and He said: Thou who useth iPod in lightning, let thy ass know it matters not the righteousness of the playlist. For yea all are smoted when conductive wire runneth into the ear.
While you're at it, run the numbers through an online credit card calculator.
Assuming the 22.49% APR and a 3-year payoff, the total interest on a financed $899 iMac is $338, or 37% above the store price.
Now your $899 iMac costs you $1,237.
Ain't credit grand?
Heh. Then again, George W. Bush is only 1/300,000,000 of the American population. But just look at the little pooper go.
If you're Apple, you don't care if two stray sheep wander off. High-profile defections suck, though. Doctorow's blog, BoingBoing.net, had 2.3 million unique visitors in June. That's not an insignificant number who will be reading his ongoing series about switching.
From technology to the environment to social issues to war, Ted Stevens smells just as his masters wish: a perfumed bitch, reliably found on all fours, with enormous amounts of material up his tube.
In fact, fans are still recreating Doom levels for other games as homages, which isn't to say those levels were stunningly brilliant. No, they were all they had to be--because the gameplay was so great. And the great fun rubbed off on the levels.
By contrast, Daikatana's levels were built and rebuilt, polished and repolished. Fat lot of good it did. Design is law, of course, as the Ion Storm mantra went; but Daikatana is $0.99 in the bargain bin, too.
Romero's on better ground when knocking Doom 3 for being dark, repetitive and predictable. Although he doesn't realize it, this argument bears on his earlier misguided comment. D3 is a masterpiece of level design, or at least of a certain highly-detailed future-industrial style. And that's all anyone takes away from it: how it looked. Having stood in line to get a copy the day it came out, I'm still trying to forget how mind-numbingly poorly it played.
Bottom line: level design is vastly overrated. Sure, it can be an art form (see, for instance, old custom Quake levels built by geniuses such as Headshot or Mr. Fribbles). But most games look alike today; no matter how technically sound their appearance, few do more than go for realism or ape genre cliches. This even as hyper-realistic design means longer development times and higher costs. And nobody thinks games are more fun than their blockier predecessors--no, quite the opposite.
So where Romero talks about level design as a virtue and even dreams about going back in time to revisualize Doom, the truth is something different. Level design is becoming little more than a clonable commodity.
The solution is to outsource it. Set up companies that do nothing but build cities, dungeons, jungles, etc. to some standard, scriptable world-building spec. Devs can then buy chunks of these "places" and build their games in them--for much less than the cost of paying salaries for asset creation. This would liberate game companies to pour their energies into gameplay before it becomes a lost art.
Bottom line, you Windoze and *nix folks: don't think you can poke fun. We're strong, we're united, we love our meringue-tinged MacBooks and MacBulger Pros and we'll continue to love them even if they start to fill out in back like John Merrick, the Elephant Man. It could be worse; we could be stuck on Dell machines getting carpal tunnel from jamming our trackpad fingers on that impossible START button found in the left corner of XP--now, there's a basis for a recall if ever there was one. I weep for you poor, START-bound Windoze users. And Linux? Please, Spock. Understand: nobody licks a prompt. Nobody.
http://cnet.com.au/laptops/laptops/0,39035649,4006 3900,00.htm
No report on whether the bulge makes things snappier. ;-)
You are welcome to come to our dojo and try through the Exalted Master of Shin-Fu base station. But beware, warrior.
I live in a typical US monopoly market where the pigopolists have protected the cable provider from competition, ensuring the highest profits for its owners and the least choice for consumers.
Gifted with such an enviable position by lawmakers, our cable company likes to run self-congratulatory TV spots to help ensure that the proles understand the natural order of things. The one I like best is "Cable...an American success story!" which purports to tell the story of how the plucky little guys with vision, effort, etc., have seized the day. The montage depicts working class folk engaged in simple, joyful labor--noble to the last dude shimmying up the telephone pole at sunset.
Naturally, this ad is a tax deduction for the cable company owners, who get to a) screw us; b) lie about it; and c) avoid paying their share of taxes to boot.
O, great frea mahkit--like da Lawd, you move in mysterious ways!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID =2516244 = 516645&tstart=0
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID
Locked discussions get a terse, "Unless otherwise noted, your Submission should either be a technical support question or a technical support answer." Er...what part of it's turning #@$%^! yellow!!! don't you understand?
What is 17 billion joules when mad earthlings have tried to Cyclops you?
Well said!
"Macs are 100% capable of running all the latest games, and doing it well."
Ah, but the problem is which Macs.
Apple's gaming market consists of its pro users and iMac owners--not exactly sizable enough to set game publishers' hearts on fire.
Meanwhile, the bulk of Apple's computer hardware sales are consumer-level machines. Nobody's going to play any new games well at all on a Macbook or Mini with anemic integrated video.
This leaves Apple in the same place it was prior to the Intel switch: without commodity hardware that can appeal to the gaming market. This could change, but it won't overnight.
It's frustrating as hell to me that game development companies are so shallow that literally all they care about is what will make them money.
Heh, me too, and I have lots of good gaming hardware here in addition to my Mac. And thanks to the corrosive shallowness of today's corporate gaming industry, there's scarcely a damn thing that holds my attention beyond the first hour. Games have become the new Hollywood--but that's a post for another day. ;-)
Now, on to the main point: you'd be surprised what Apple employees will say.
As my iBook 700mhz was nearing the end of the warranty (reluctantly extended by Apple after a barrage of logic board complaints), I asked a Genius if mine was exhibiting the telltale signs of failure. Yes, he said. But when it would go could not be predicted. What was I to do, then, I said, if it failed a week, a month past warranty?
He looked around. And then proceeded, quietly, to tell me that he couldn't tell me this, but...
I should throw it down repeatedly on a bed, he said. Or squeeze it very, very hard in the area above the logic board. Thusly could I speed the flowering of what Apple's bad craftsmanship had already sowed.
No, no, I know, you've probably never encountered that. But it happened; and I rather appreciated his generous suggestion.
He'll make you an OS you can't refuse. ;-)
Imagine what Americans could do if they understood how their masters screw them.