Amazon.com beat Apple to the punch Thursday with a new service that lets customers download movies to their computers and take them for on-the-go viewing on portable media players — but not on Apple iPods.
I belong to the church of Intel and thus find it extremely gratifying that the toy-boys, the Jobsians, will be missing this source of supply for their pod-tech. How small of me.
The fact that Apple has been in this market long enough to sell 30 million videos, I will conveniently ignore. The tight integration between platform and content product offerings I will conveniently ignore.
In fact, I am saddling up the old war horse, Rocinante. We’re off on the Cupertino Crusade, eager to get there in time to get my share of the loots before the Church of Jobs has been totally destroyed, the best women ravaged, all the iPods stripped from the altars and hauled off as spoils of war.
I have this vision of a consumer gladiatorial contest, where the teams assemble to salute their respective overlords, and then march to the center of the arena to begin the ritual hurling of insults. In real life, it never quite comes to bloodshed, which is all to the good because consumer believers are a precious resource. In my vision, however, they do get violent. It’s a sorry spectacle because for the most part they’re not in very good shape and their weapons are hastily modified geek toys. Still, they manage.
The violence spreads into the audience and eventually out from the arena. They’re at it in the streets. A rumor goes through the milling crowds, that one of the Athlon partisans has been cooked and eaten by the PowerPC irredentist crowd. Typical, everyone mutters. Suddenly, clouds loom overhead and a strange beam shoots up to project an image on the backdrop. It’s Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Carly Fiorina and a host of others locked in a grim and unhappy menage. Their bodies writhe in a sickening parody of pleasure. They’ve formed a pyramid and are clawing at each other to get the top. The consumer believers, sadly, imitate them.
What do you think, Frank? We’ll need funding to get this into a format suitable for Fox.
You should know that I’m sitting with a group of fifty or so movers and shakers and I’m wearing my fractal t-shirt. None of them know that THEY will soon be eaten. (I also found and purchased a small metal key fob ornament, a cast ornament of an octopus that looks remarkably like a pastafarian’s icon… bottom line, the entertainments can ooze out into real life but I’m protected because I understand the imminence of doom.)
“How small of me.”
:D
How small of me.
I’m typing this on a PowerBook (my second as it happens) which you might think puts me in the cult of the Jobsian worshippers. Certainly I get that when I’m out and about.
I’m not. I use a Mac because it’s the best tool for what I do. When something better comes along I’ll use that.
e’re off on the Cupertino Crusade, eager to get there in time to get my share of the loots before the Church of Jobs has been totally destroyed, the best women ravaged, all the iPods stripped from the altars and hauled off as spoils of war.
That’s funny.
…Brian, what did you think of my idea of carbon nanotube netting to hold hundreds of miles of white reflective styrofoam sea islands to combat global warming?
I must have missed that.
Can we turn them off if it turns out to be too much of a good thing? I keep thinking that we don’t know as much as we think we do (as a species) so if it turns out we’ve done the global equivlent of mashing the gas when we meant the brake it would be nice to undo it.
Beware of extreme Green groups protesting your use of CNT in the ocean. And styrofoam - chunks will break off and the seagulls will eat it and die. Or something like that.
But really, right now I’m thinking back to my childhood in Oklahoma. Because all the lakes are man-made resivoirs (flood control not power) the lake levels go up and down, and the docks cannot be fixed piling affiars but are wood or concrete floating on .. styrofoam.
Because my father sailed (still does) boats on those lakes a constant sound in the background of my childhood was the squeak-squeak of concrete and wood rubbing on stryofoam. That sound is in my head and I’m thinking how _loud_ hundreds of miles of styrofoam islands would be. SQUEAK SQUEAK. Wouldn’t want them as neighbors.
And too - when there was surplus styrofoam it wound up in our hands and we’d set sail on large chunks of the stuff, floating around on the lake.
You’d have a constant problem with local urchins appropriating bits of your island, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad ..
we’ll keep it in the nets and roll them up at night