Apple to cut UK download prices: Apple is to cut the price it charges in the UK for music downloads from iTunes within six months.
(Via BBC News.)
Another test of this feature.
Filed under: music, technology
December 18, 2007 • 6:33 pm 0
Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny)
…but there’s more to The Google Guy than meets the eye.
SFZC dharma talk 10-28-2007.
Filed under: culture, google, people, popular culture, technology, world peace, zen
May 12, 2007 • 3:02 pm 0
Wii are not amused
I was in the cinema to see Mon meilleur ami and the adverts included one for Sony’s Wii computer games console. Since I don’t know many young people this ad is my only chance to see it in action, not that I give a fig about it really—I should say that up front, I’m not very interested in computer games.
It seems to me that the Wii takes making an idiot out of yourself with a piece of technology to new heights. What I want to get off my chest in this post is perhaps a bit nastier than just saying that however. What I want to say is this: people who play computer games (and who include among their number some with high IQs no doubt) are thereby showing an intellectual inferiority, they are showing a lack of imagination, and a lack of seriousness.
That one can want to interact with a machine in this way is a clear sign that one is, at best, no better than a child in intellectual terms, and that one is in all likelihood a simpleton.
Okay this is pure prejudice based on some fantasy of myself being intellectually superior to Wii owners. I’ve admitted that I know few people of the generation who are likely to play with this technology. And yet I couldn’t help reacting in this way as I saw in the ad people standing in front of their TV weilding their mighty Wii handset in combat against some stupid pixellated pixie with a sword.
More generally the use of computers to aid banks in keeping data on customers in order to provide better information to those same customers on their products, well it’s all so petty and meaningless. Whatever happened to the sunny optimism conjured up in Donald Fagen’s IGY
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
Well actually I’m not too sure about extropian ideas (which the last two lines seem to be expressing now that I look at them again), but the point is that Sony want you chained to your TV set—and what is that going to do to your carbon footprint? What I do like about those lines is the bit about compassion and vision. Sadly I see a lack of these in our 21st century world where the convergence of electronics and entertainment seems to me to limit us in our imaginations and free time, and where jobs building systems for banks demean us through sheer banality of the work, again robbing us of precious time as we work hard in order to be able to afford our Wii stations:)
So I know there are some great uses of technology, and of course people can argue very cogently about how great computer games technology is, and yes I’m showing my age and prejudice but there it is. To me computing is about ideas, and ideas are exciting and liberating. Hooking up computers with some games developer’s imagination, or some business man’s concern for the bottom line is just crass.
Filed under: popular culture, prejudices, technology
