From Boot Camp to the Hackintosh to its Intel Core, the Mac is becoming more of a PC, it’s the amusing flip side of the I’m a Mac and I’m a PC commercials, the differences are eroding and with that erosion comes a wave of new threats. While Ars Technica reports on the discovery of fossil code that suggests that Apple may have been flirting with the idea of making Leopard Windows App compatible, there’s another QuickTime exploit out aimed at seizing control of Macs. Isolation, being an island OS, kept the Mac safe from the stormy seas of viruses and hackers, but to mix metaphors, the drawbridge is down now and the Mac is increasingly just a fancier PC,

While the cyber lynching of Lori Drew continues and new laws are getting passed to combat cyberbullying, there’s a pretty simple reality behind the whole thing. If Lori Drew had been a man and created a fake Myspace account and flirted with Megan Meier, even if Megan had never killed herself, the odds are great that Lori Drew would have gone to jail or at least become a registered sex offender. Lori Drew has remained out of reach of the law only because of her gender which gives her the presumption of innocence regarding any sexual motives, but the reality is that child abuse and pedophilia is not really about sex, it’s about power and control. Lori Drew was certainly using power and control over a child with a sexual edge added to it by the flirting. Had Lori Drew been a man, any of those would have been enough to nail her. But abuse isn’t only sexual as the Megan Meier case reminds us,.

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Like the slow kid trying to finish the race, there seems to be a welter of stories touting the PS3 as ‘almost succeeding’ , ‘almost beating the Wii’ or ‘headed on an upward trend’ and such. Now finally there is actually a story on the PS3 beating the Wii in Japan. Of course it’s unclear how much significance it has. Japanese are mostly not Christian and have no Black Friday or holiday shopping season. Sony’s price drop would promote the PS3 but it’s not clear that this period is an intensive shopping season in Japan so there’s no reason why a PS3 could not beat the Wii during a fall off period when in any case anyone who really wanted a Wii already had one.

On the evil level, Eidos is right up there with EA which means that it’s no real stretch to imagine that the head of Gamespot’s review team, Jeff Gerstamnn was fired for denying Eidos the glowing review they thought they were getting in exchange for pumping in the ad dollars into Gamespot. Gamespot itself is pretty much the home of game journalism mediocrity and it’s no secret that the ad dollars of some of the big boys like EA and Eidos have been compromising game magazine and game website coverage of games for some time now. Consider how many magazines went on reporting the blatantly false Majestic hype because EA had them over a barrel. Websites need ads to survive and with the centralization of the game market around a handful of publishers, the publishers like Eidos get a lot more power over them. So if Gerstamnn was indeed fired over his Lynch and Kane review, it would be a new low for both Eidos and Gamespot, but not a real surprise,

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If there is one thing that the corporate world is really good at, it’s the paranoid imitation of any trend in the hopes of staying relevant. Thus Google is pioneering or perhaps stumbling into opening up cell phones and Verizon responds by opening up its network to CMDA devices. It’s an impressive performance made only more impressive by the mutual cluelessness on both sides.

Google leaves behind a list of failures from its attempts to stumble into areas it didn’t understand, from Google Video to Froogle to Google Checkout and now Google has responded to its failures by thinking bigger, rummaging through alternative energy and DNA research. Google is no great threat to the cell phone industry but the hype that surrounds it and the success of the iPhone has panicked Verizon enough to do the right thing.

Well the pain just keeps coming for Microsoft’s red headed stepchild OS Windows Vista as Devil Mountain Software ran benchmark tests discovering that the gap between an XP OS with the third Service Service pack installed and Vista with the first service pack in place.

Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.

In a word ouch. From the very beginning I was writing that a Windows Vista upgrade would be a mistake, but despite Windows’ reputation for being a resource hog, even I didn’t expect that Vista would actually be a step back. Yet all Vista really offers is a snazzier interface that I’m not a fan of and phony security features that mean nothing in the larger picture.

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And the apostrophe bug too while you’re at it. Look I’m a Firefox booster. I love Firefox. I’ve tried the other browsers, I dumped IE7 after 5 minutes, Safari I rarely use. I enjoy Firefox’s spell check features which prevent me from misspelling every other word in a sentence like the ignorant Neanderthal I am, the plug ins and Greasemonkey and all that. I love it. Now please fix the memory hole.

Yes I know people have told you about it before and I know these things are hard to track down. Meanwhile the apostrophe bug is still unfixed, despite all the remedies out there online, and way too often I find myself being unable to type ‘ without the Find button (the only truly annoying thing about Firefox) popping up, not to mention my cut and paste function not working anymore. And you still haven’t fixed that even though you claimed that there was a fix in Firefox 2.02.

Well now you are finally beta testing Firefox 3. It’s got some sort of wacky new bookmark / RSS reader features but what I really want to hear is that you fixed the memory leak. 2 minutes ago my system was crawling and this is a top of the line computer. When I checked memory, I found that my memory usage was over a gigabyte and almost all of it was going to Firefox. So fix it. Please. Pretty please. I don’t want to have to switch to Safari even though it renders pages about 0.05 seconds faster. So don’t make me.

Sincerely,

The Great Baron of Blutania

From Microsoft to Google, the word is far from certain on what happens when companies that primarily deal in software begin trying to invade the realm of hardware. Apple may have scored big with the iPod which has helped encourage other companies to pile in, but Apple was always more of a hardware company than a software company anyway, even if all that’s left of the hardware on the eMac is a pretty case and general components.

Microsoft’s XBox forays have been mixed with the XBox and XBox 360 scoring some hits but overall ranking poorly compared to the established gaming players like Sony and Nintendo. The Zune by contrast started out as an iPod killer and ended up as the punchline to a joke. The Gphone meanwhile is still more fantasy than reality and has null odds of actually living up to the hype or looking good compared to the flashy black iPhone.

And now comes Amazon with Kindle. From its awkward name to its awkward design, Amazon seems to be trying to do for eBooks what the iPod did for music and since Amazon can be considered a kind of iTunes, it seemed like a no brainer business model. And no brainer is the key word to remember here. For starters there really is no huge portable book reader market. It’s just one of those devices that makes much more sense to integrate into an existing player or portable computing device. Instead Amazon unveils Kindle which looks like an IBM calculator from the 60’s, costs 400 bucks and comes with a free cellular connection. It’s the sort of thing a lunatic would create and while Newsweek and Time can run all the flattering stories they want, Kindle is likely to go down as the next Newton.

Ed Burns, yes he still exists and makes movies and he’s under the impression that his failure as a filmmaker is somehow proof that the art house movie is dead. Why? Well because he’s Ed Burns and he’s never gotten it through his head that he made precisely one good movie, in an ethnic neighborhood sort of way, and that he followed it up by making movies that no one with working eyes and ears would want to endure.

“There’s got to be a better way to reach audiences who dig these movies,” filmmaker Edward Burns wondered aloud to me this morning over breakfast in Times Square. “We could barely get anybody into the theaters on my last two films,”

Well you could reach them by making movies they would want to see. Nah, that’s too much of a reach.

That won’t be a problem for his latest film, “Purple Violets,” starring Selma Blair, Patrick Wilson, and Debra Messing, alongside Burns himself. You won’t find it in any theaters. Instead the film debuted exclusively today on iTunes where you can download it for $14.99. It’s the first experiment of its kind with such a high profile project being released exclusively to the web giant.

I’m sorry, high profile project? A movie starring Selma Blair and Debra Messing and Ed Burns is a high profile project? To quote the Church Lady, Nuh uh. This is an art house direct to DVD project going Direct to iTunes now.

“This is the year that art house cinema died,” he says. Referring to the box office disappointments that have been “Rendition” and “Lions for Lambs,” Burns continued “If they’re not going to see Reese Witherspoon and Tom Cruise they’re not coming out to see me and Patrick Wilson. The audience isn’t there anymore.”

The audience never went anywhere, the audience just expects more from movies. Rendition and Lions for Lambs weren’t art house movies. They were shrill political diatribes whose greatest sin was not political but predictable. Why would anyone go to a movie to get lectured to, whether it’s Streep or Cruise doing the lecturing?

Burns says. “‘The Squid and the Whale’ made six million dollars in 2005. That movie would have made fifteen million in the mid 90s!” he exclaims.

Possibly. It still could have. Part of the issue is how a movie is released and marketed. Indies aren’t dead, but the market has had too much junk dumped on it and that includes Ed Burns’ 7 movies after The Brothers McMullen. The Squid and the Whale made a small splash. Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite and Brick made bigger splashes, to name a few recent hits.

It used to be that when you bought a computer game and it kept crashing, you took it back to the store for a refund. Or you just struggled on disregarding the crashes. One of my happier gaming memories involved playing Hero’s Quest, before the evil patent lawyers of Parker Brothers forced them to rename it (and got themselves a role in the QFG2 Manual), which crashed every time i tried to leave Spielburg through the main entrance. So I spent a few days trying to work around it and eventually managed to come and go by climbing over the wall in the alley. That’s not even counting the time I spent trying to get into that locked warehouse which has noises coming from inside, which you can’t get into.

Of course these days I would have just gotten myself a lawyer and sued Sierra the way Randy Nunez did when his copy of Halo 3 kept crashing. So anyone interested in a JoWood/Derek Smart class action lawsuit?

Randy Nunez of California launched the suit, which also names Halo 3 developer Bungie as a defendant, after purchasing the game in mid-October from a Gamestop location in San Diego. “Relying on defendants’ skill and judgment to furnish goods suitable” for playing on the Xbox 360 console, Nunez laid down his $59.99 plus tax and headed home with his purchase. When he attempted to play the game, however, “Mr. Nunez’s Halo 3 videogame repeatedly locked up, froze and/or crashed while being operated on Mr. Nunez’s Xbox 360 console.”

Now ever since video game retailers have stopped taking returns on non-working games and since the XBox 360 is buggier than a box of snails, the lawsuit isn’t unfair per se. It’s just surreal to think of a universe where you can actually sue companies for non-working games. It sounds almost …. fair.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time and you know the rest. Right now the RIAA is beginning to discover that the hard way. While the RIAA is still smirking over its victory thanks to a jury of local yokels who couldn’t tell an internet server from a fork in the road, more and more judges are questioning the RIAA’s claims.

The latest comes from Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy in good ole New York in the UMG vs Lindor case who has authorized discovery into the RIAA’s losses per song download. The RIAA of course had been making completely fictional claims about losses, in line with the usual practice at the BSA and the MPAA and has gotten used to judges swallowing their claims whole.

Of course the problem with machine gun lawsuits where you keep suing and suing, is that the opposition only has to get lucky once to begin creating a precedent for questioning your premises and that’s beginning to happen. After all from a basic standpoint of probability, you can only go before so many judges until you run into one who starts asking questions.

As of now No Country for Old Men has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 95 percent which is pretty impressive. I doubt any Coen Brothers movie since Fargo has managed that. And after a string of mediocre failures like the Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, all the Coen Bros fanboys, myself included, wanted them to hit it out of the ballpark with No Country for Old Men. The trailer sure made it look like they had. Watching No Country for Old Men makes it clear they haven’t. Some of the blame may lie on the original Cormac McCarthy novel, but No Country for Old Men isn’t a movie, it’s more like a lost episode of McGyver.

Subtract 75 percent of the Coen Brothers traditional sense of humor and 90 percent of their characterization and what’s left in No Country for Old Men is a brief chase with a whole string of violent killings along the way. There are movies that depend on an idiot plot, No Country for Old Men is an idiot plot since everyone involved behaves like an idiot. Llewelyn Moss played adequately by Josh Brolin wanders around a scene filled with bodies and then returns to it. He’s a decent enough survivor but not much else and if it wasn’t for the wry twist that Brolin gives some of his lines, he’d be a complete blank. Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell is somehow supposed to matter, he’s certainly given the final eulogy but nothing he does is of any use whatsoever and the dialogue and Jones’ performance suggest premature senility rather than world weariness.

And then there’s Anton Chigurh as played by Javier Bardem, described in the movie and by a lot of reviewers as the Ultimate Badass. No he’s really not. He’s more like a retarded cousin left over from the Adams Family or Raul Julia if he had gotten really chubby and short. He’s not a badass, he’s simply the focal point of an idiot plot in which he walks around half of Texas killing everyone in sight and no one stops him.

To understand just how idiotic the idiot plot in No Country for Old Men is, at one point Anton Chigurh has been hit with a shotgun blast. He stops outside a pharmacy, blows up a car and walks inside the pharmacy full of people and begins taking what he needs. Of course in anything resembling real life, not only do you get noticed when you do that, but the police come. Not in No Country for Old Men though, despite the fact that multiple witnesses have seen his face and he casually leaves his fingerprints everywhere, that he dressed in black in the middle of rural Texas, carries a gun with a massive silencer, has an unusual haircut and has killed about a dozen people… apparently there are no bulletins out for him or police looking for him. He walks into an office building, kills a man, sticks around for a bit and leaves. He does that time and time again.

It’s senseless of course and the highly praised ending of No Country for Old Men is twice as senseless. Reviews praise No Country for Old Men as bleak, but it’s too comic and absurd to be bleak. It’s simply pointless. It pits Josh Brolin’s relatively competent character against a ridiculous incompetent hit man whom the script endows with superpowers until he’s basically Michael Meyers or Freddy Kruger, able to appear anywhere at will, to plan everything out and to go from murder scene to murder scene, completely unnoticed. The idea that No Country for Old Men makes any kind of meaningful statement about violence is as much of a joke as the rivers of similar hype for A History of Violence, but where A History of Violence at least worked as a movie, No Country for Old Men does not.

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After Yahoo Mail’s increasingly disastrous attempts to reinvent itself as the high end flashy Web 2.0 interface that most users are avoiding like the plague in favor of the classic version, you would think that Google would take a lesson from that when it moved up to a Gmail upgrade. As it turned out though, Google unsurprisingly behaved in much the same arrogant way, switching users up forcibly to a significantly bug filled update. Gmail 2.0 was supposed to be better, faster and more stable — much the same adjectives that Yahoo used to describe its own Yahoo Mail. Instead Gmail 2.0 proved to be more likely to crash your browser than to improve your email browsing experience.

Of course Gmail didn’t try to foist a bulky and ugly interface onto users the way Yahoo Mail Beta did, but Gmail 2.0 instead was poorly tested with many browsers and presumed that most users would be using IE7 and Firefox 2.0, when in fact a large number of internet users are still on IE6 and Firefox 1.6. Of course Google is being its usual arrogant self about it.

“Most users should see a marked improvement in performance. We recommend using IE7 and Firefox 2 to take full advantage of Gmail’s speedier interface,” said spokesman Jason Freidenfelds via e-mail. Asked about the problems users are reporting, Freidenfelds didn’t address the complaints specifically but said that Google appreciates the feedback it’s getting. “The new code underlying Gmail should allow us to roll out performance improvements more frequently,” he said.

As usual the emphasis is on the capabilities this provides to Google, but the simple reality is that Gmail 2.0 is slower and more bug prone than ever. Google needs to fix that because in the end there are always better solutions.

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Count on Senator Joe Lieberman who dedicated his years in the Senate to fighting Mortal Kombat, Sam Brownback, a dyed in the well fundie and Hillary Clinton, the Antichristress herself, who never saw anything she didn’t enjoy censoring to begin pushing this now and thank the greedy bastids over at Rockstar Games for giving them an opening with Manhunt 2.

“Four lawmakers, including one presidential hopeful, want the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to review the rating system for video games since Manhunt 2 received an “M” for mature.

Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to the board this week, saying that Manhunt 2’s rating had “opened the door to widespread release of the game, which depicts acts of horrific violence.”

Unlike say the horrific acts of violence depicted in real life.

“While significant progress has been made, the FTC reports that 42% of unaccompanied children 13 to 16 years of age can still successfully purchase M-rated games meaning that the practical difference between an AO and M rating affects more than simply 17-year-olds,” the Senators said in the letter.

So? The Senators should be addressing retailers on that one. Go chase after GameStop. I doubt anyone who has ever been in a GameStop would complain in the least if everyone at the top of that company was sent one way to Gitmo. Blaming the developers and publishers for retailer malfeasance is hypocritical and just plain wrong.

On Nintendo’s Wii system, Manhunt 2 players can act out torture scenes and murders instead of pressing buttons or moving joysticks on traditional remote controls. “This led one clinical psychologist to state that the realistic motions used with the Wii mean that ‘you’re basically teaching a child the behavioral sequencing of killing,” the Senators pointed out.

One problem. Manhunt 2 isn’t on the Wii. This is why people hate politicians. They lie all the time and the more self-righteous they get, the more they lie.

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