Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > October > 18 > Entry
March of the tech wins
I’ve been a bit remiss on keeping my geek ramblings up to date. I blame a crush of work activity, an all-day barbecue and late-night cake baking, plus the fall TV season. It does shame me to admit as much. I’d much rather say that I was building a water-cooling solution on my PC so that I could overclock my processor far past the heating limits that humans dare, or that I was busy with “Quake IV” (I haven’t seen “Quake IV” — it might be made out of maple syrup, and I wouldn’t know it), but none of that would be true.
This blogging time-lag means I missed commenting on last week’s Apple announcement about its new video iPods. My brother and I, who both have the 4G iPods surgically attached to our hands most hours of the day, suddenly want the foul things removed. Who wants this thing that only plays music? With a monochrome screen? Are we not far descended from apes? (Or, er, an Intelligent Designer?) If you tempt us with on-the-go episodes of “Lost” will we not pine?
For users who’ve been downloading whole seasons of “The Simpsons” via BitTorrent, the iTunes video movement presents a bit of an ethical dilemma. Continue downloading stuff in legally questionable ways, or plunk down $2 per program? (At 22 episodes per season, that’ll cost you as much as the DVD set for most TV shows, without benefit of extras of a video format you can play on your big-screen TV with any degree of quality.)
Right now, the TV offerings on the iTunes store are slim (“That’s So Raven,” anyone?), but make no mistake. This announcement is huge and if other networks hop on board, it will change the TV industry as surely as Apple has transformed the landscape of music.
As most techheads have pointed out, there are a few other problems: apart from the tiny screen, there is the matter of converting videos to the iPod format, something a lot of casual users won’t have the patience to do. Battery life for playing videos is significantly shorter than for playing music (we’re talking 2-3 hours). And the iPod Video apparently ditches the FireWire connection, which I’m not alone in preferring to USB But that’s pretty nitpicky.
The other interesting tech news this week is the dust-up between the videogame comic strip Penny Arcade and one-man anti-videogame crusade Jack Thompson. What started as an exchange of e-mails and phone calls has exploded spectacularly into threats of lawsuits, a very funny strip (warning: profanity), $10,000 charitable donations, the distancing from Thompson of a major game violence opponent and a call for police to arrest the hooligans who would dare to donate in someone else’s name.
It was one thing when Thompson was crusading against specific games and instances of violence, but Thompson has shifted his rhetoric to belittle gamers in general, in so many words: “To be fair, though, you can’t expect a bunch of gamers to understand the satire if they think that Jonathon Swift, the author of ‘A Modest Proposal,’ is the name of a new Nike running shoe…”
Nice spelling on Jonathan Swift, Jack.
I’d say that the very public unraveling of Thompson and all the free press Penny Arcade is getting for this stance against him is… well, for us illiterate videogame-playing thugs, positively Swiftian.
Permalink | | Categories: Gadgets, Internet, TV, Videogames
