No, Disney has done NOTHING for any of the Pixar movies except distribute them.
In the book "Second Coming Of Steve Jobs", there's an extensive account of the development hell for "Toy Story" (the original one). According to this book, Jeffrey Katzenberg (then - Disney, now - Dreamworks) actually participated in the storyline development. Initially, the cowboy Woody was more arrogant and more selfish in his attitude. Katzenberg said that the audience will hate Woody and won't feel any empathy towards his adventures; Lasseter said he won't change a single line; Katzenberg pulled the plug. The development halted. Then Lasseter changed the storyline according to Katzenberg's suggestions - and the rest was history.
I think you're vastly overestimating how much the general public cares about this.
Not to mention the power of Disney's marketing machine. It's not easy to sell an animated movie. Brad Bird previous movie "Iron Giant" was a masterpiece but it failed at the box office, because Warner had no clue how to market it. For an animated feature to be succesful it requires to be in McDonald's kid's menu, to be in Hasbro's, Mattel and Lego offers, to be in cheap and stupid kid's magazines etc. Disney mastered this machine just like Microsoft mastered using Windows monopoly to promote their applications. If Pixar can survive competing with Disney, it's still an open question. So far, only Dreamworks had real success on this field, but they were co-founded by Jef Katzenberg - it was as if Steve Ballmer would quit Microsoft to compete with Gates. In 2006 it might turn out that "Ratatouille" (the much-rumored first non-Disney Pixar feature) will be a masterpiece but a commercial failure and Disney's "Toy Story 3" will be an utter crap, but box office #1.
May I humbly suggest connecting your iPod either directly to the car player (if it has mp3 support, it might have also line-in jack) or indirectly beaming music via devices such as Griffin iTrip and similar? That's what I do.
There was, of course, the commercial that introduced the Macintosh. It was broadcast exactly once, during the 1984 Super Bowl
Ummm, it's not exactly true. Super Bowl commercials are often broadcast the year before in obscure local stations to be eligible for the same year awards. The "1984" commercial was aired on 1 AM in Twin Falls, Idaho on December 15, 1983. Of course the question is - can you actually BROADcast anything in Idaho...
If you read a lot of Polish press - I do - you will often find this kind of reasoning, especially whenever Polish national soccer team coach explains his latest failure (and in Polish soccer, there's always a failure to explain). My favorite is "we actually won the first half, but...". There ARE some important issues with Linux in corporate environment - laptop support, printing and device managing among the most important ones. Don't comfort yourself with easy explanation that corporations reject Linux migration only because someone is "tech-knownothing". Maybe they know something - namely that the overall cost of the whole hit-and-miss game with installing Linux on laptops might cancel the benefits of such migration?
You are most certainly wrong. I'm not even sure if Palmer was the worst one. With all due (dis)respect to Mr Ashcroft, nothing even remotely like Palmer Raids happened during his tenure. Palmer was the key factor behind the 1917 and 1918 "Espionage Act" and "Sedition Act", comparing to which Patriot Act is a teddy bear. According to this law, an elected member of Congress was refused a seat because of his pacifist views - and sentenced to 20 years of prison just because he didn't believe that America should join the slaughter of World War I (more on Victor Berger you can find here. The Palmer Raids themselves rendered the question of American "constitutional rights" simply irrelevant - it appeared there were none of them. To quote Wikipedia:
Starting on November 7, 1919, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations without warrants, concentrating on foreigners. They arrested over 10,000 people (...) In January, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the anarcho-syndicalist union Industrial Workers of the World. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 Communists were rounded up in a single night. All foreign aliens caught were deported.
The public reaction to these raids was favorable, stirring up a storm of anti-communist sentiment. In a murder eerily similar to the lynching of Germans during World War I, a group of young men in Centralia, Washington hanged a radical from a railway bridge. The coroner's report stated that the communist "jumped off with a rope around his neck and then shot himself full of holes." For most of 1919, the public seemed to side with Palmer.
I don't want to defend Bush & Ashcroft, but it's simply naive to see them as "the worst that happened". No, it's not the worst in American history. When you look on the whole American history it turns out that only the post-WWII period really resembles contemporary understanding of constitutional democracy (and even then there were authoritarian hiccups of McCarthyism or Watergate).
While I enjoyed "The Incredibles" very much, I couldn't shake the impression that the movie storyline is just a bit too close to the storyline of the classic Alan Moore graphic novel. "Watchmen" also tell the story of superheroes whose activity was banned by law - thus ending the Golden Age - and they were given new identities by the government just like in the witness protection. Even the idea of portraying the Golden Age and the contemporary narrative in different graphic styles, reflecting differences in aestethics of contemporary graphic novel and 1930's comics is present here - in "Incredibles", we have contemporary CGI animations and hilarious spoofs of "retro" cartoons of the Golden Age.
I had the opportunity to ask Brad Bird directly about this similarity on "The Incredibles" junkt in Santa Monica. He said he has never read "Watchmen". I believe him, but... it's just too close.
Like many other things in life, if it's worth trying and even if it's not, we've tried it in California. We already have a city without borders, we call it Los Angeles.
Joking aside, even as an idea or culture, one could argue that Los Angeles is world wide.
You probably have no idea how much you're right on that one. If you live in a country as different from California as possible - Eastern Europe, for example - you are still somehow aware of various LA-specific cultural phenomena. For example, if you are a frustrated teenager with no clear weather forecast for the labor market, you express your frustration in terms of "South Central ghetto", even if you are actually white in a 100% white nation. It was perfectly parodied in the hilarious Ali G show. But it goes further, even if you are NOT a hip-hop music fan. Popular Dreamworks 3D cartoons like "Shark Tale" or even "Shrek 2", expect from the viewer to understand at least the basics of LA reality. Actually, many Hollywood filmmakers are just too lazy to ever move out of the city, so some popular LA (or rather "within 2 hours driving from Beverly Hills") vistas and locations are ubiquitous in Hollywood movies. Which, in turn, are ubiquitous in cinemas in such remote places as Kosice, Slovakia or Tigru Mures, Transilvania. Kids and teenagers learn how to live in a multi-racial sprawl-infested megalopolis even before they start to learn how to live in their own community. I find it scary, sometimes.
A practical solution would be, of course, something from the incredibly rich selection of free alternative calculators. However, the inner nerd in me jumped on the "completely useless" part of your post. First of all, Calculator.app accepts input from standard clipboard ("command-v" for paste), so you can use any hex->dec converter, even something from equally rich selection of Unix CLI tools. Calculator.app is also AppleScriptable, so you can write yourself a simple script (and if you need hex, oct and bin - or for that matter, even know what it means - you obviously can write a simple AppleScript) to automate the conversion. Since Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen NOT to include built-in conversion to AppleScript, you can use something from the not-that-rich-but-still-useful selection of hex/dec add-ons to AppleScript.
Having said all that, I agree with you that no hex input in Calculator.app is just plainly stupid, just had to let my inner nerd go, otherwise he would harrass me for ages whispering dirty things about Natalie Portman to my inner ear when I try to concentrate.
I'm going to get modded down to hell and back but I think Aspyr's ports (coincedentally) are less optimized than from different publishers.
I have the same feeling. The most annoying part is that they often don't behave Mac-like (for example, command-q often doesn't work as quick quit). How much I miss the good old days, when Mac ports of games like Doom had even Mac-like "file" menu, with command-s for save etc! Nowadays they just take console/Wintel game and port it "as is", without any Mac modifications.
Where's the surprise? Wolfenstein 3D was commercially ported for Mac. Doom I was commercially ported for Mac. Doom II was commercially ported for Mac. Quake was commercially ported for Mac. Quake II was commercially ported for Mac. Quake III was commercially ported for Mac. Return To Castle Wolfenstein was commercially ported for Mac. What's, exactly, so surprising in Doom III being commercially ported for Mac?
..can I play this with my PowerBook which has only one-button (touchpad)mouse?
As a hardcore powerbook/iBook gamer I can assure you that the main obstacle is the touchpad itself. Touchpad is fine for GUI, but its nearly useless in 3D gaming. For my gaming pleasures, I always carry a tiny USB mouse with my iBook.
Surely having eyes on the back of the head would be a great advantage in avoiding predators.
Ok, let's not go that far then. Why don't we have a wider field of vision? Some creatures like deers have almost 360 degree of vision.
The evolution proves that our brains (and by "our", I mean the entire biosphere, not just human beigns) possess limited capability of processing information in a given amount of time. In theory, you could assume that a creature with falcon eyes, dog nose and bat ears would be unbeatable, because it's supreme set of senses could detect ANYTHING in any condition. In reality this creature would probably get eaten alive quite early, while trying to analyze all the information coming from all senses ("wait? what was that sound? no, wait - what's this smell? no, wait - what's that object on six hour? no, wait - what's that sound again?", etc) The nature of our brain forces us to focus on the most useful piece of information. Since your main evolutionary asset is the ability to use tools - your eyes are designed in a way facilitating to focus on whatever you hold in your hands. Many animals can indeed see the full 360 degrees, but they can't focus on anything. If you think better ears and wider sighting angle would help you survive, just try to work on a computer when 5 persons talk to you, 3 other listen to (different) radio stations and you have other monitors within your sight, distracting you from what you are doing.
Damn, looks like I have just described my workplace. But that's why I use iPod when I really have to focus.
Can we do away with the "iPod Killer" thing, it's old. Nothing is going to "kill" the iPod, it has establised itself as the standard for better or worse. It's like the Walkman. In fact, the iPod is the Walkman killer.
With all due respect, sir, you seem to contradit yourself. If iPod cannot be killed because it's like Walkman - and iPod is also a Walkman killer... you can't kill iPod, because it is like something it has killed?
Personally I think iPod can be killed, precisely because it is like Walkman. But I don't think that Yet Another Digital Music Player will be the iPod killer - I rather think it will be something as different as iPod is different from Walkman. Something based on entirely different technology, allowing - say - on-the-go wireless immediate purchase from online shop with even bigger choice than iTMS.
PS. I'm a die-hard iPod fan, I bought three of them since the 1st gen; but I also owned several Walkmans...
1968 was an important year in world history, no doubt about it. In 1998, there was a wave of documentaries, books and essays about that year. The authors focused on yippies trashing democratic convention in Chicago, Warsaw Pact invading Czechoslovakia, student uprising in Paris, Mexico massacre, flower-power, maoism, Vietnam war, Beatles recording white album or Che Guevara in Bolivia.
Almost nobody noticed that 1968 was also the year when Noyce an Moore founded Intel, Douglas Engelbart demoed for the fist time GUI, mouse and word processing, UCLA and Stanford started to build their networking connection. Even today, scholars seem not to notice the relevance of these facts.
Re:Sub culture of the IPod?
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It doesn't get much more main stream as far as Apple products go.
I'm not that sure. First, it's easy to use (at least once the songs are loaded; I do this service for my relatives) and a non-techie person can use one right away. I bought one for my father and another one for my significant other. Second, if one could say that the clubbing scene is a sort of main stream for urban young people, then the iPod has already won the battle - at least in London. There are many interestung cultural phenomena related to iPod - such as the habit of offering someone opportunity to "jack-in" to your iPod to share musical tastes. Plus, partially thanks to clever product placement, partially just for virtue of the gagdet itself, it's actually ubiquitous in pop culture nowadays. It's the first product made by Apple - since the original Apple II computer - that managed to break out of the ghetto and get popular in the simplest meaning of the word.
Re:PC users should read this...
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The PC users that constantly come on here with dell quotes talking about how you can get a "Better" machine for cheaper should be forced to read this book. Maybe then they will understand that price is not the end all be all factor in why someone would want a Mac. I know that the culture is probably the number one reason I own a Mac. I pay the extra price because I am proud of this high quality product.
I am typing these very words on an iBook and actually price WAS an important factor when choosing a portable (somehow all x86 alternatives are either bigger and heavier or stripped down of some important functions like combo-drive... or pricey as hell). I am really happy with my machine but I don't think of it as of a "high quality product". It's just a notebook, dammit. Quoting the Russian astronaut from "Armageddon", "Russian computers, American computers, they are all made in Taiwan". The same relates to notebook computers - "Apple notebooks, Dell notebooks, they are all made by subcontractors in Taiwan". You don't get "higher quality product" when choosing Apple instead of Dell, they are both made by the same company (usually Quanta). My advice: be a member of Mac community. Be a member of Mac user group. Be a member of Mac developers society. But don't be a member of Mac culture, because it's nothing but marketing tool for a corporation like any other.
Nintendo just made themselves look like a bunch of litigous assholes. I am, however, curious as to why they'd do such a stupid thing.
Japan is actually a very conservative society when it comes to certain issues (hentai notwithstanding), and in Japan it's just not good for corporate image to be associated both with porn and with suicide. Especially when talking about corporation strongly dependent on the market of toys bought largely by parents for kids. They just want to remove these references before Sankei Sports tabloid runs a headline "Suicidal porn buffs enjoy Nintendo games".
I'm currently reading guide to dumbest events in television history by David Hofstede and there's an excellent chapter on how NBC tried to sue David Letterman after his "defection" to CBS claiming that there is intellectual property owned by NBC in Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks". After a lot of ridicule and mockery, even from their very own Jay Leno, NBC finally backed off. I wish Nintendo could be at least that smart...
I'm sure it depends on what you're doing. If you're watching a movie, sure, it'll probably be low, since they'll need to keep the drive spinning and spinning.
For games, though, if they only spin up the drive when they absolutely need it, they can probably eek the 6 hours out of it.
You probably has very little experience with gaming consoles. Usually they are shipped with very small non-upgradeable RAM. In case of PS2, it's mere 32 MB. Usually, there's no harddrive (and even if there is one, a console game cannot use it the way it does on a Mac or PC). So actually "drive spinning and spinning" is an accurate description of virtually any PS2 game. That's why the laser in your console wears out much faster than that in CD/DVD drive of your home computer.
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No, Disney has done NOTHING for any of the Pixar movies except distribute them.
In the book "Second Coming Of Steve Jobs", there's an extensive account of the development hell for "Toy Story" (the original one). According to this book, Jeffrey Katzenberg (then - Disney, now - Dreamworks) actually participated in the storyline development. Initially, the cowboy Woody was more arrogant and more selfish in his attitude. Katzenberg said that the audience will hate Woody and won't feel any empathy towards his adventures; Lasseter said he won't change a single line; Katzenberg pulled the plug. The development halted. Then Lasseter changed the storyline according to Katzenberg's suggestions - and the rest was history.
I think you're vastly overestimating how much the general public cares about this.
Not to mention the power of Disney's marketing machine. It's not easy to sell an animated movie. Brad Bird previous movie "Iron Giant" was a masterpiece but it failed at the box office, because Warner had no clue how to market it. For an animated feature to be succesful it requires to be in McDonald's kid's menu, to be in Hasbro's, Mattel and Lego offers, to be in cheap and stupid kid's magazines etc. Disney mastered this machine just like Microsoft mastered using Windows monopoly to promote their applications. If Pixar can survive competing with Disney, it's still an open question. So far, only Dreamworks had real success on this field, but they were co-founded by Jef Katzenberg - it was as if Steve Ballmer would quit Microsoft to compete with Gates. In 2006 it might turn out that "Ratatouille" (the much-rumored first non-Disney Pixar feature) will be a masterpiece but a commercial failure and Disney's "Toy Story 3" will be an utter crap, but box office #1.
... to get me to confess my password, all they have to do is get my wallet?
Enjoy before you upgrade to biometricks. Then all they have to do is to cut your finger or your eyeballs.
May I humbly suggest connecting your iPod either directly to the car player (if it has mp3 support, it might have also line-in jack) or indirectly beaming music via devices such as Griffin iTrip and similar? That's what I do.
There was, of course, the commercial that introduced the Macintosh. It was broadcast exactly once, during the 1984 Super Bowl
Ummm, it's not exactly true. Super Bowl commercials are often broadcast the year before in obscure local stations to be eligible for the same year awards. The "1984" commercial was aired on 1 AM in Twin Falls, Idaho on December 15, 1983. Of course the question is - can you actually BROADcast anything in Idaho...
If you read a lot of Polish press - I do - you will often find this kind of reasoning, especially whenever Polish national soccer team coach explains his latest failure (and in Polish soccer, there's always a failure to explain). My favorite is "we actually won the first half, but...". There ARE some important issues with Linux in corporate environment - laptop support, printing and device managing among the most important ones. Don't comfort yourself with easy explanation that corporations reject Linux migration only because someone is "tech-knownothing". Maybe they know something - namely that the overall cost of the whole hit-and-miss game with installing Linux on laptops might cancel the benefits of such migration?
You are most certainly wrong. I'm not even sure if Palmer was the worst one. With all due (dis)respect to Mr Ashcroft, nothing even remotely like Palmer Raids happened during his tenure. Palmer was the key factor behind the 1917 and 1918 "Espionage Act" and "Sedition Act", comparing to which Patriot Act is a teddy bear. According to this law, an elected member of Congress was refused a seat because of his pacifist views - and sentenced to 20 years of prison just because he didn't believe that America should join the slaughter of World War I (more on Victor Berger you can find here. The Palmer Raids themselves rendered the question of American "constitutional rights" simply irrelevant - it appeared there were none of them. To quote Wikipedia:
Starting on November 7, 1919, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations without warrants, concentrating on foreigners. They arrested over 10,000 people (...) In January, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the anarcho-syndicalist union Industrial Workers of the World. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 Communists were rounded up in a single night. All foreign aliens caught were deported.
The public reaction to these raids was favorable, stirring up a storm of anti-communist sentiment. In a murder eerily similar to the lynching of Germans during World War I, a group of young men in Centralia, Washington hanged a radical from a railway bridge. The coroner's report stated that the communist "jumped off with a rope around his neck and then shot himself full of holes." For most of 1919, the public seemed to side with Palmer.
I don't want to defend Bush & Ashcroft, but it's simply naive to see them as "the worst that happened". No, it's not the worst in American history. When you look on the whole American history it turns out that only the post-WWII period really resembles contemporary understanding of constitutional democracy (and even then there were authoritarian hiccups of McCarthyism or Watergate).
Or should it be co-operative since it's a mac thread
Twentieth century called, they want they trolls back.
I guess it'll take even longer here in germany. Well, it'll be coming soon to a torrent tracker near you :-)
:-).
Or a country near you. It open on Nov 19th in Poland - after a couple of vodkas, you will even begin to understand Polish dialogue
While I enjoyed "The Incredibles" very much, I couldn't shake the impression that the movie storyline is just a bit too close to the storyline of the classic Alan Moore graphic novel. "Watchmen" also tell the story of superheroes whose activity was banned by law - thus ending the Golden Age - and they were given new identities by the government just like in the witness protection. Even the idea of portraying the Golden Age and the contemporary narrative in different graphic styles, reflecting differences in aestethics of contemporary graphic novel and 1930's comics is present here - in "Incredibles", we have contemporary CGI animations and hilarious spoofs of "retro" cartoons of the Golden Age.
I had the opportunity to ask Brad Bird directly about this similarity on "The Incredibles" junkt in Santa Monica. He said he has never read "Watchmen". I believe him, but... it's just too close.
Like many other things in life, if it's worth trying and even if it's not, we've tried it in California. We already have a city without borders, we call it Los Angeles. Joking aside, even as an idea or culture, one could argue that Los Angeles is world wide.
You probably have no idea how much you're right on that one. If you live in a country as different from California as possible - Eastern Europe, for example - you are still somehow aware of various LA-specific cultural phenomena. For example, if you are a frustrated teenager with no clear weather forecast for the labor market, you express your frustration in terms of "South Central ghetto", even if you are actually white in a 100% white nation. It was perfectly parodied in the hilarious Ali G show. But it goes further, even if you are NOT a hip-hop music fan. Popular Dreamworks 3D cartoons like "Shark Tale" or even "Shrek 2", expect from the viewer to understand at least the basics of LA reality. Actually, many Hollywood filmmakers are just too lazy to ever move out of the city, so some popular LA (or rather "within 2 hours driving from Beverly Hills") vistas and locations are ubiquitous in Hollywood movies. Which, in turn, are ubiquitous in cinemas in such remote places as Kosice, Slovakia or Tigru Mures, Transilvania. Kids and teenagers learn how to live in a multi-racial sprawl-infested megalopolis even before they start to learn how to live in their own community. I find it scary, sometimes.
...completely useless...
A practical solution would be, of course, something from the incredibly rich selection of free alternative calculators. However, the inner nerd in me jumped on the "completely useless" part of your post. First of all, Calculator.app accepts input from standard clipboard ("command-v" for paste), so you can use any hex->dec converter, even something from equally rich selection of Unix CLI tools. Calculator.app is also AppleScriptable, so you can write yourself a simple script (and if you need hex, oct and bin - or for that matter, even know what it means - you obviously can write a simple AppleScript) to automate the conversion. Since Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen NOT to include built-in conversion to AppleScript, you can use something from the not-that-rich-but-still-useful selection of hex/dec add-ons to AppleScript.
Having said all that, I agree with you that no hex input in Calculator.app is just plainly stupid, just had to let my inner nerd go, otherwise he would harrass me for ages whispering dirty things about Natalie Portman to my inner ear when I try to concentrate.
BreakOut, Super BreakOut... (photoshop) ?
Currently XIII
I'm going to get modded down to hell and back but I think Aspyr's ports (coincedentally) are less optimized than from different publishers.
I have the same feeling. The most annoying part is that they often don't behave Mac-like (for example, command-q often doesn't work as quick quit). How much I miss the good old days, when Mac ports of games like Doom had even Mac-like "file" menu, with command-s for save etc! Nowadays they just take console/Wintel game and port it "as is", without any Mac modifications.
Doom 3...on a Mac?
Where's the surprise? Wolfenstein 3D was commercially ported for Mac. Doom I was commercially ported for Mac. Doom II was commercially ported for Mac. Quake was commercially ported for Mac. Quake II was commercially ported for Mac. Quake III was commercially ported for Mac. Return To Castle Wolfenstein was commercially ported for Mac. What's, exactly, so surprising in Doom III being commercially ported for Mac?
..can I play this with my PowerBook which has only one-button (touchpad)mouse?
As a hardcore powerbook/iBook gamer I can assure you that the main obstacle is the touchpad itself. Touchpad is fine for GUI, but its nearly useless in 3D gaming. For my gaming pleasures, I always carry a tiny USB mouse with my iBook.
Surely having eyes on the back of the head would be a great advantage in avoiding predators. Ok, let's not go that far then. Why don't we have a wider field of vision? Some creatures like deers have almost 360 degree of vision.
The evolution proves that our brains (and by "our", I mean the entire biosphere, not just human beigns) possess limited capability of processing information in a given amount of time. In theory, you could assume that a creature with falcon eyes, dog nose and bat ears would be unbeatable, because it's supreme set of senses could detect ANYTHING in any condition. In reality this creature would probably get eaten alive quite early, while trying to analyze all the information coming from all senses ("wait? what was that sound? no, wait - what's this smell? no, wait - what's that object on six hour? no, wait - what's that sound again?", etc) The nature of our brain forces us to focus on the most useful piece of information. Since your main evolutionary asset is the ability to use tools - your eyes are designed in a way facilitating to focus on whatever you hold in your hands. Many animals can indeed see the full 360 degrees, but they can't focus on anything. If you think better ears and wider sighting angle would help you survive, just try to work on a computer when 5 persons talk to you, 3 other listen to (different) radio stations and you have other monitors within your sight, distracting you from what you are doing.
Damn, looks like I have just described my workplace. But that's why I use iPod when I really have to focus.
Can we do away with the "iPod Killer" thing, it's old. Nothing is going to "kill" the iPod, it has establised itself as the standard for better or worse. It's like the Walkman. In fact, the iPod is the Walkman killer.
With all due respect, sir, you seem to contradit yourself. If iPod cannot be killed because it's like Walkman - and iPod is also a Walkman killer... you can't kill iPod, because it is like something it has killed?
Personally I think iPod can be killed, precisely because it is like Walkman. But I don't think that Yet Another Digital Music Player will be the iPod killer - I rather think it will be something as different as iPod is different from Walkman. Something based on entirely different technology, allowing - say - on-the-go wireless immediate purchase from online shop with even bigger choice than iTMS.
PS. I'm a die-hard iPod fan, I bought three of them since the 1st gen; but I also owned several Walkmans...
I guess Google must not know that Linux has now outpaced desktop installs vs Mac's..
Maybe they know it didn't?
1968 was an important year in world history, no doubt about it. In 1998, there was a wave of documentaries, books and essays about that year. The authors focused on yippies trashing democratic convention in Chicago, Warsaw Pact invading Czechoslovakia, student uprising in Paris, Mexico massacre, flower-power, maoism, Vietnam war, Beatles recording white album or Che Guevara in Bolivia.
Almost nobody noticed that 1968 was also the year when Noyce an Moore founded Intel, Douglas Engelbart demoed for the fist time GUI, mouse and word processing, UCLA and Stanford started to build their networking connection. Even today, scholars seem not to notice the relevance of these facts.
It doesn't get much more main stream as far as Apple products go.
I'm not that sure. First, it's easy to use (at least once the songs are loaded; I do this service for my relatives) and a non-techie person can use one right away. I bought one for my father and another one for my significant other. Second, if one could say that the clubbing scene is a sort of main stream for urban young people, then the iPod has already won the battle - at least in London. There are many interestung cultural phenomena related to iPod - such as the habit of offering someone opportunity to "jack-in" to your iPod to share musical tastes. Plus, partially thanks to clever product placement, partially just for virtue of the gagdet itself, it's actually ubiquitous in pop culture nowadays. It's the first product made by Apple - since the original Apple II computer - that managed to break out of the ghetto and get popular in the simplest meaning of the word.
The PC users that constantly come on here with dell quotes talking about how you can get a "Better" machine for cheaper should be forced to read this book. Maybe then they will understand that price is not the end all be all factor in why someone would want a Mac. I know that the culture is probably the number one reason I own a Mac. I pay the extra price because I am proud of this high quality product.
I am typing these very words on an iBook and actually price WAS an important factor when choosing a portable (somehow all x86 alternatives are either bigger and heavier or stripped down of some important functions like combo-drive... or pricey as hell). I am really happy with my machine but I don't think of it as of a "high quality product". It's just a notebook, dammit. Quoting the Russian astronaut from "Armageddon", "Russian computers, American computers, they are all made in Taiwan". The same relates to notebook computers - "Apple notebooks, Dell notebooks, they are all made by subcontractors in Taiwan". You don't get "higher quality product" when choosing Apple instead of Dell, they are both made by the same company (usually Quanta). My advice: be a member of Mac community. Be a member of Mac user group. Be a member of Mac developers society. But don't be a member of Mac culture, because it's nothing but marketing tool for a corporation like any other.
Nintendo just made themselves look like a bunch of litigous assholes. I am, however, curious as to why they'd do such a stupid thing.
Japan is actually a very conservative society when it comes to certain issues (hentai notwithstanding), and in Japan it's just not good for corporate image to be associated both with porn and with suicide. Especially when talking about corporation strongly dependent on the market of toys bought largely by parents for kids. They just want to remove these references before Sankei Sports tabloid runs a headline "Suicidal porn buffs enjoy Nintendo games".
I'm currently reading guide to dumbest events in television history by David Hofstede and there's an excellent chapter on how NBC tried to sue David Letterman after his "defection" to CBS claiming that there is intellectual property owned by NBC in Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks". After a lot of ridicule and mockery, even from their very own Jay Leno, NBC finally backed off. I wish Nintendo could be at least that smart...
I'm sure it depends on what you're doing. If you're watching a movie, sure, it'll probably be low, since they'll need to keep the drive spinning and spinning. For games, though, if they only spin up the drive when they absolutely need it, they can probably eek the 6 hours out of it.
You probably has very little experience with gaming consoles. Usually they are shipped with very small non-upgradeable RAM. In case of PS2, it's mere 32 MB. Usually, there's no harddrive (and even if there is one, a console game cannot use it the way it does on a Mac or PC). So actually "drive spinning and spinning" is an accurate description of virtually any PS2 game. That's why the laser in your console wears out much faster than that in CD/DVD drive of your home computer.