Archive for October, 2007
Apple’s new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been out for a few days now, and we at PTTBT have been testing it extensively on our Macs. And while the Mac Mini, the MacBook and the Mac Pro all perform perfectly under the new system, we have been having many serious problems using it with our Mac Nano tablet . If your primary work machine is the Nano, consider waiting until 10.5.1
After installation, the Nano’s screen real estate is mysteriously crippled, giving you only 480×320 on a display meant for 800×600. The reduced resolution leads to bunched-up menus, which are painful to pinpoint with the touchscreen. What’s worse is that the “pinch” interface for zooming pages in Safari and iPhoto still seems to be using the full surface of the device, despite the fact that it’s not showing any picture. It’s also a pain when composing email, and the viewing angle bug of the early Nano units means you can’t always read what you’re writing.
Leopard also seems to bog down the Nano’s processor when playing graphics-intensive video games, which was never a problem before the upgrade. In some cases, the games outright crashed and reported “Unsupported hardware” when we ran them. Calls to Apple tech support about the issue just lead to a bunch of confusion, as if the call centre employees hadn’t even heard of their own product. All in all, a very bad experience.
Again, all these issues may be corrected in the first upgrade to Leopard, expected sometime next week. If you’ve got a Mac Nano lying around, wait until we give you the all-clear. Apple should have put more effort into their QA on this one.
PTTBT would like to sincerely apologize to Apple legal for the above post. Apparently Damen did not understand what the “pre-release unit” NDA was about.
You may have heard about the new movie starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, called “The Golden Compass”. It’s based on the novel by British author Philip Pullman, about a little girl named Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) who is given a mystical golden compass, and is sent on a long and dangerous quest to icy lands of the north to try and kill God.
Yes, that’s right. While the trailers may try and give the impression this movie is about polar bears and flying ships and witches, the real focus is on killing God, and a few Catholic bishops. Hollywood’s deception is understandable: would you go to the theatre knowing you were going to get 30 minutes of amazing special effects and battle sequences, only to be faced with 98 more minutes of Lyra sitting in a room debating theology with Christopher Lee? This is a movie that tries to pander to the thinking elite at the expense of the general movie-going public, and suffers greatly for it.
Nicole Kidman’s Mrs Coulter is both the worst and best part of the film: her lines are bland, her delivery wooden, and her development as a character is (at best) confused. However, when she straps on her ruby-trimmed shoes and provides a lively song-and-dance routine in the midst of the deity-dashing, it evokes all that made “Moulin Rouge” passable.
Daniel Craig’s turn as Lord Azriel is enjoyable, but brief (he appears in the first 10 minutes and then not again until the end credits, where he and Eddie Murphy do a hilarious cover of “Killing Me Softly” with Elton John on hamonica). Christopher Lee virtually IS God, so you feel bad when he dies at the end. It wasn’t until the closing credits that I realized that the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison was voiced by Richard Dawkins, which made the final battle between the Pope and the Panserbjørne all the more entertaining.
The special effects were good, if not great. The real credit should go to the animal trainers who were able to make those polar bears walk and talk and fight so convincingly. Not since “Benji the Hunted” have animals been so interesting on film.
Overall, if you are looking for a good movie to watch to brainwash the kids into hating religion and cursing the name of God and all that is good and holy in the world, “The Golden Compass” may be your cup of tea. Also a good break-up movie if you’re dating a Baptist.
“The Golden Compass” opens in December, or so we hear.
Anaheim’s Disneyland ride “It’s a Small World” is being shut down for a year for upgrades. Not to add new features, not to change the godawful song… no, the ride is being upgraded because Americans are too fat to ride it.
However, the move is not simply kindness on Disney’s part: last month, a 37-year-old woman from Kentucky burst out of the car she was riding and fell on the tracks because she was “too large to stay inside”, according to a Disneyland spokesman. The woman herself was not harmed, but a group of Japanese tourists (who didn’t realize Tokyo Disneyland is actually more fun) were thrown into the attraction after their car collided with the Kentuckian, with 75-year-old Kazei Takamori being impaled on a Dutch windmill. Shortly thereafter, the ride was closed.
Initially, there were calls to ban Japanese citizens from Disneyland, but eventually cooler heads prevailed and plans were put into motion to make each individual car four times as wide and able to hold the weight of two-and-a-half elephants. Guard rails will also be installed along the route to prevent any more accidents, and Canadian donut company Tim Horton’s has been commissioned to provide a TimBit dispenser in the middle of each car, to entice occupants to stay put.
It is not clear what impact the closure will have on Disneyland’s revenue projections, but the American Psychiatric Association expects it will cut suicide rates by at least half in 2008.
In an attempt to catch up to rival Apple, Dell Computer today announced a new program called “Scarcity 2.0″, which aims to prevent the company from selling more than one computer to each customer.
“Dell was aware they were lagging in terms of mystique,” said Junpa Raji, an analyst with PPG Services, “so they decided to adopt what, on the surface, appears to be contrary to good business practices.”
By selling only a single computer to each customer, Dell hopes to drive up the price of each individual unit, and position themselves as a “trendy” brand, instead of their current image as “cheap and disposable”. In the words of one industry insider: “It was either this or they’d actually have to innovate.”
It was not clear at press time how Dell decides what is a “second” computer for each customer, and what the allowed refresh rate would be. Some tech watchers are concerned that an inability to upgrade might be a hindrance to growing market share, however others have noted that Dell very rarely sees repeat business in the market segment that does not suffer from temporal lobe damage.
Greg Lowenstein, CFO of Atamax Technologies of Westboro, NJ, was one of the first customers to bump into the new program, and had mixed feelings: “On the one hand, they won’t let my company of 400 buy more than a single PC this year. On the other hand, that’s 399 fewer computers I’ll have to watch disintegrate before my eyes over the next few months. So it’s not all bad.”
Dell stock was down 15% on NASDAQ after the announcement.
News today of FEMA officials stacking a press conference with Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson lead to a rebuke from the White House, but insiders tell PTTBT that it will do little to slow the trend of producing “more informative” press functions in the future.
“Most federal agencies now have an entire department set up to concoct fake questions for press conferences,” said the source on condition of anonymity, “FEMA just jumped the gun and rolled it all out at once. But we’ve been at this for close to two years now.”
According to memos acquired by PTTBT, plans call for the phasing out traditional press conferences for staged ones, ending in July 2009. In the meantime, “real” reporters will be handed question sheets to read from, and all follow-up questions will be greeted with laughter and remarks such as “golly” and “you dickens”. Any reporters found to be breaking from the script would be imprisoned in a secret Finnish prison camp for two years.
Understandably, the reaction in the journalism community is mixed. Some networks such as CNN and NBC claim the guidelines will create a media built to pander and bolster government objectives, regardless of the facts. Fox News has also voiced concern, saying “if everyone else does it too, what’ll make us special?”
