Caffeine is a helluva drug.
Could anything capture the current zeitgeist better than a free mp3 album of Michael Jackson classics, screwed and chopped? Yeah, I don’t think so either.
[Screwed and chopped is the slowed-down, stuttery variant strain of Dirty South hip-hop that has been huge in places like Houston for years but which is just starting to get noticed in other places.]
So Mac OS X runs on x86 now, and did all along, apparently. I remember scoffing at the rumors, for years, right on up to last week.
Although Steve’s demo model was apparently a Pentium 4, I can only hope that the processor that winds up in the production model Apples of 2006 and beyond is something other than that. One of the reasons I always enjoyed being an Apple user, and later an Apple technician, was that “our” ads didn’t have the ugly purple animated logo and the Intel Chime. I have recently heard that Intel pays PC manufacturers to put that branding crap in their ads. I also don’t want to run anything called an “Itanium” unless it was designed by the Little Rascals [wait, that line sounds familiar], but I guess as long as it runs OS X, I’m there. I can only hope that this represents a case of the processor adapting to the architecture. One of the things I, and I would guess others like me, love most about troubleshooting Apple hardware is the layout and the uniformity of the parts. It’s not like the beige-case world where your motherboard could be an AT, ATX, Micro-ATX, etc. I would hope this will continue. Not that I don’t welcome new challenges, and possibly new customers, if having Intel on their side — I mean, intel inside — impresses people enough to switch.
This has certainly put a damper on my planned computer purchase this year. Initially I was thinking about getting a tower, perhaps a duallie G5, maybe — maybe — water cooled [though those plans were seeming unlikely with the impending arrival], but now it’s looking like a G5 iMac is on the menu — something to get me through the next three or four years or so. I think I’ve earned a 20-inch screen though.
Full page scans of an old book apparently written for carnival strongmen back in the days of one-and-two-digit ZIP codes.
The Parents’ Television Council is most well-known for their mostly humorous TV reviews — come on, Aubree Bowling, you knew Family Guy was sleazy and CSI was gory, so you watched them each at least a second time this season… because you like having what’s left of your tattered innocence further assaulted? — but also rate and review console games.
I think the video-game reviewers do a better job of selecting their review subjects — instead of choosing easy straw men to beat on and going ballistic over the latest Grand Theft Auto installment, they choose games that are more likely to appeal to kids and highlight the games with the least violence.
I never thought I’d be arguing that the PTC didn’t go far enough, but I think they underestimate the graphic detail in Burnout 3 [no direct link, but visit the link above and scroll down or find for Burnout]. They laugh it off as cartoonish, but I think the graphics are more realistic than they give it credit for. Although I can easily enjoy the Road Rage mode with its fetishistic slow-mo closeups on you and your competitors’ shattered glass and shredded metal, the Crash mode, where you drive vehicles into busy traffic consisting of mundane, average-looking passenger and freight vehicles, gives me the creeps.
Although cars [beside your own] rarely explode or show fatal damage to the passenger compartments, I still feel a twinge of guilt when I play it [though I do play it]. I remind myself that this is a lot like crashing my toy cars in the sandbox or on the couch in the family room when I was a kid. Another friend, however, tells me he imagines packed buses, full oil tankers, families in the minivans and the whole nine. I guess that’s how he rolls.
Will this stop me from picking out Burnout Legends for the PSP? Not likely. But I won’t share them with the kids immediately any more than I will get them started with GTA.
