spike jonze is a god. i honestly can’t think of something he’s done that i haven’t grinned foolishly at. some of the best music videos ever made are under his belt. weezer’s ‘buddy holly’. bjork’s ‘its oh so quiet’. wax’s ‘california’(the guy on fire in slo mo). beastie boy’s frickin ‘sabotage’. fatboy slim’s ‘praise you’. he’s one of the producers of ‘jackass’. ‘being john malkovich’ was obviously brilliant. now we have this.
who knew, huh? badass Dune reference, as well, but that’s more to Fatboy Slim’s credit.
Make sure you have crappy Realplayer
Monthly Archives: March 2001
Gnu-impossible-a
”[The RIAA is] really looking to understand and monitor the Gnutella network so they don’t find themselves in the same position as [they did with] Napster,”
Riiiiiiight. THAT’s going to happen.
LATimes registration required.
Calling all hackers…
If any site deserves to be hacked, it’s this one. I don’t mean Wired, but the site referred to in the article, which I won’t even link to from here.. it’s an anti-abortion site listing names and faces of doctors on a ‘most-wanted’ list. Fuck them. Please.
Sick of all the BS
Sigh. Everywhere I go, there’s another person ragging on OS X… ‘Mickey Mouse interface’… ‘OSuX’.. etc. I’m sick of that bullshit. It’s easy to put X down just by looking at the package. Yeah. The fucking buttons are jellyish. The Dock moves up and down… OOOOoooOOOh.. Oh my Fucking god. It’s the end of the god-damn world. You know what? I like clicking on the jelly buttons. I enjoy using the Dock now. I even turned the magnification back on a little bit, because I like the feedback the system gives me. Don’t like the colored buttons? Use the graphite interface instead. That’s what you wanted isn’t it? Gray buttons like 9? You’ve got it.
Everyone’s all up-in-arms about ‘well the only good things about X are the things 9 had wrong with it.’ Yeah. As I recall, that’s the fucking point of releasing software upgrades. To fix what was wrong in the past. Stability was one of those issues 9 had. Unix and multi-threading fixes that. You want to know what another of 9′s problems was? It was fucking OLD. If Apple hadn’t included the Platinum interface with OS 8, you’d all be wailing for a new interface.
Use X for 5 days straight. Open up any apps you need in Classic (you might even be surprised at how few you might need, and at how fast they run) and use the damn thing for 5 days. If you feel you aren’t going to like it, hey, borrow your friend’s copy. Just use it for a second, before you start your bitching. The Finder is NICER than 9′s Finder (although still a little inexplicably slower), and the Dock actually helps me a little more than it did when I first started. I still click on the date/time in the right-hand corner sometimes, looking for the App-switcher, but X is new. It’s going to take some getting used to. So instead of bitching and moaning in comment-systems and threaded discussion groups, just fucking TRY IT. With an open mind. If you gave a flying fuck about the platform, you should, anyway. And X isn’t so far away from what you think the platform is about. You’ll see.
Someone check the temperature in hell
Holy fucking shit. I’ve just successfully installed MySQL onto MacOS X 10.0. Take cover… the world may end any second now.
No one likes them
I had the wierdest dream last night: I went to see Metallica at a mysterious unknown venue… Only everyone wasn’t there to see them, but to ridicule them about Napster with verbal assualts and huge hand-made signs. I don’t remember much about their performace, only they were timid, and only playing the acoustic songs they have (all I remember is the intro to ‘…And Justice For All’). They had a flute player (possibly to illustrate my view of them being pussies, I dunno), and the performance kept getting fumbled up. Funny. Feel free to interpret.
Congress Adds ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’ Amendment To Bankruptcy Bill
Breaking news from The Onion:
WASHINGTON, DC– Seeking to increase fiscal accountability among citizens who have no chance to survive make their time, the House of Representatives added an “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” amendment Monday to H.R. 333, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2001.
MP3-Proof CDs?
Pride’s CD will incorporate technology that, in theory, will stop listeners from ripping its tracks into MP3s. If it works — a hotly disputed question — copy protection will change the terms of the battle over online music.
Raise your hand if you think this will work and/or not be hackable. If you raised your hand, you’re a moron. Gimme a break. If they can hack TiVos and the encryption mechanism for DVDs, this little anti-MP3 mechanism will be no problem.
NYSee
I know I’ve mentioned here before how much I enjoy being in New York. I thought I’d mention my new idea: in 2 weeks, I’m going to try to Priceline one round-trip ticket from Denver to New York / LaGuardia 2 days before I want to go. I’m going to walk the streets of Manhattan alone (well, not alone, Jen said she’d meet me there), and revel in its urban spring beauty for a couple days. My question is: Has anyone gotten any really great deals on Priceline? Use the comment function to let me know if a $150 ticket bid is realistic for a 2-day advance ticket for a Friday-Sunday trip.
Don’t hold your breath
I moved a couple months ago, and had DSL at my prior residence through Earthlink. Naturally, when I moved, I was a little concerned that DSL would not be available in my new area. But I said to myself ‘It’s central Denver. The Qwest building with the blue logo you can see for 30 miles around is just down the street. You’re fine.’
And the Earthlink site thought so, too.
So weeks go by. A month. Two months. No response from Covad or Mindspring or Earthlink telling me when my service was going to be installed. So I called them up, and asked why no one had contacted me about my order. ‘Your order was cancelled, sir.’ Okay, why? ‘Because all of our circuits in your neighborhood have been used up.’ So what can I do? ‘ Try another ISP, or resubmit your DSL order in 90 days.’ So I thanked him (especially for the free Earthlink dialup service I’d been receiving, which he promptly ‘fixed’ for me), and said I’d try another service provider. I broke down and called Qwest up. They told me they could install it, they’re just not sure when. So I wait. Yesterday, I get a call from Qwest letting me know that my order has been put on hold, because ALL THE CIRCUITS in my neighborhood are being used. Mother fuckers. I hate this bullshit. So I’m stuck on dialup for who-knows-how-long, until basically, someone else cancels their service. But, as we all know, to get DSL you usually have to sign lengthy contracts. Fuck them. Does anyone know of any alternative broadband solutions that aren’t cable or DSL (AT&T doesn’t have cable modem service in my area, either)?
NetWeed
Okay. So you know how NetFlix.com will send DVDs to your door? Well, We-Deliver.tv is kinda like that. Only it’s not DVDs, and the merchandise is coming from The Netherlands. Check out how they get away with it:
Now once it’s in the U.S., a post office worker might get it in they head to inspect a package like this since it look a little odd. And they are allowed to make sure it ain’t a bomb or something that could hurt a postal worker. But they ain’t allowed to open it up because of a very specifically worded commenticius clause in the U.S. Postal Inspection Code that say all inspectors are “prohibited from the internal examination of any package containing the remains of a human whose life be deemed legally and prematurely ended from without the borders of the United States, its commonwealths, protectorates and air space thereof, blah, blah, blah…”
So they send you the ‘remains’ of a loved one, with the package brandishing the appropriate warnings and codes. Only, when you open up the box, you find that they made a mistake, and shipped you something else that’s legal in The Netherlands….
*Note: If you try this and get caught, Alternate.org is in no way, shape, or form responsible for your actions.
Something to Ponder
I know this is a bit late but something to ponder…
Why do people have the perspective of Cesar Chavez as being exploited in this ad and not the other figures Apple has used in this particular advertising campaign? (Many of those figures are deceased as well.)
hmm…
A little anxious?
A four track promo CD for Radiohead’s new Amnesiac album has appeared on Ebay. Starting bid? $175.00. Pretty cool collectors item, but I’m just not in that big a hurry. All of the songs are going to be available for about $14 in a few months anyways.
X response
This post is in response to a post on SVN regarding MacOS X:
Sick of the OS X hype…
Yes, I am inviting a flaming deluge of comments here, but at least hear me out before you start writing back in ALL CAPS.
There are two things about the swarm of commentary on OS X among the Mac faithful that have me scratching my head.
The first:
Mac OS X is the future!
It might be the future for MacOS users, but to the rest of the computing world it’s old news. Ah yes, an OS that doesn’t crash once a day — let us all exult at the revolution! An OS that has support for more than one processor — by Zeus, my world has changed. An OS based on the tried and true UNIX (which is itself 20 years old), if that’s not a revolution, I don’t know what is! Now that brings me to my second point of confusion. I’ve read some form of the following in many a message board:
Unix is inside Mac OS X. It’s here to stay. That is a GOOD thing.
Why? Since when did UNIX become the only possible option in OS foundations? Yes, it certainly is stable and well understood, but what’s with this blind devotion to this very old technology. I’m disappointed that in the seventeen years since the release of the first version of what is now the MacOS Apple hasn’t come up with something better, particalarly considering the fact that Apple controls the entire widget (software and hardware). Jobs says that he wants OS X to be the foundation for the MacOS for the next fifteen years. If that’s the case I’ll be very bummed out because that would mean that very little of substance will have changed in the world of computing.
Here’s my point (which I’ve been slow in getting to), the current computing paradigm sucks. OS UIs are lame and OS X doesn’t do much to change that (prettier control widgets don’t cut it in my book). If that’s the best that they could muster then why not just develop skins for Windows 2000 or Linux?
Millions and millions of people have changed their behaviour and learned to cope with stupidly designed interfaces that force us to jump through the same hoops again and again and again and again. That needs to change if the real potential of the human/computer interface is to be realized, yet all anyone seems to be paying attention to is re-skinning existing interfaces and increasing MHz.
Why am I criticizing Apple? It may be unfair since Microsoft certainly does not seem to be doing anything better with Windows XP, but what do you expect from MS? What we’ve all come to expect from Apple is real change and OS X has been billed as a “revolutionary” product. Instead what Apple has delivered is an incrementally evolutionary product that has arrived about seven years later than it should have. Hey, no doubt that it’ll eventually be a boon to Mac users who won’t have to force reboot their computers several times a week, but it does nothing to solve the fundamental problems with current operating systems and that’s sad.
Ahem. Can I point out one small flaw in just what just about everyone is saying? I know at least one of the Signals crew disagrees with this analogy, but here goes: EK, you said yourself that UNIX is 15 years old, and that X has been in development in one form or another for 10 years. To us (computer users), that seems like a long time. But in reality, I think that expecting to see or being disappointed by not seeing ‘the future’ of the computer UI just 15 short years after its inception is wildly ridiculous. Here’s the analogy: cars. The design of the car did not significantly change 15 years after it was first designed, and in fact still hasn’t fundamentally changed, almost 100 years after its birth. What has changed? Comfort, style, & performance. Now, OSX might not have improved in comfort much yet, but in style and performance, compard to OS9, it’s off the charts. When I use classic now, I feel like I might as well be using System 6 or something… All this talk of Apple dismissing usability for creativity is, I feel, in error. Aqua is just an evolution of platinum. Were you this pissed when 7.6 or 8 came out (I can’t remember which had it) with the Aaron extension (renamed to appearance/platinum) that added nice 1px shadows and depth to windows and widgets? I doubt it, but with Aqua, everyone is up in arms that Apple is ignoring their own ideas, when that really isn’t true. I think, at least.
And one more thing: the act of getting upset with a company for distributing hype along with a new product is retarded. Sure, X isn’t the future: not yet. Apple is a company that needs to sell products in order to survive. Marketing furtheres that goal. Honestly, at this point, a true major evolution in the way humans interact with computers would not sell well, or even be regarded as such.
Ten bucks says you still won’t use it
I know what you’re thinking: ‘Gee… not much going on here.. I’ll go over to a better weblog where there’s some action.”
Well, my friend, if you were to be thinking that, you’d be dead fucking wrong. Because lo and behold. there’s a new comment system installed that I built just for you. Each and every one of you. It’s Alternate.org-branded (no more BlogVoices logos and blackouts), it’s built with PHP, and we control the whole damn thing. Yipty-frickin-do. So PLEASE, for the love of god, USE IT. I busted my ass today to get that damn thing working so you’re going to comment, and you’re going to damn-well like it.