MacBook Pro 2009 "review"

You know those Microsoft laptop hunter spots? Apple may already have responded with TV spots of their own, but these MacBook Pros strike back at Microsoft better than any ad can: by doing.

Apple did two things simultaneously that are usually contradictory; they lowered the price of their entire MacBook Pro line while at the same time bumping up the specs. The 15-inch version now starts at $1699 and caps out at $2299, down from $1999 and $2499. What's even nicer is that the 13-inch MacBook—which previously didn't have a Firewire slot or a "nicer" screen—got absorbed into the MacBook Pro family and is now virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the Pro line.

...

So is there anything bad to say about the new MacBook Pro line? No, not really. It's cheaper, faster, has more consumer-friendly features and now even has a 13-inch option for people who need slightly more portability. Those people who were waiting for the second-iteration version of a new hardware design (a pretty smart rule to follow with Apple products in general) before upgrading can safely do so now—and get a better deal in the process.

Read the rest here.

Develop for iPhone OS you damn sheep

Clearly by now, iPhone and iPod Touch devices are not irrelevant in market figures. I mean in WWDC 2009 Apple stated that 40 million (YES MILLIONS) iPhone OS devices have been sold.

This is how the 40 million iPhones and iPod touches, a figure given by Apple at the WWDC Keynote, stack up against actual consoles.

Even though the iPhone has the distinct disadvantage of being a platform that's not purchased just for gaming—pretty much every person who buys a PSP buys it to play games, for example—it's still a pretty damn huge market. Combine this with the fact that the faster graphics support in the iPhone 3GS is going to make it a pretty damn good gaming device, you've got a juicy target for game developers to hit.

Note: sales data was taken from Wikipedia, and in some cases the figures are from as far back as March 2009. There shouldn't be a huge jump between March and May/June numbers, so it's close enough for the ballpark chart we're showing.

Get the original post here.

PS3 and XBOX 360 what?

Stunning Typography Inspiration

Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading, tracking and kerning.

You can get your inspirations here.

Love at first sight :)

NIN ftw

It's been an interesting experiment over the last couple of years or so. Faced with leaving the infrastructure of traditional record labels and figuring out what the right thing to do is in this new world - I found myself realizing that for me to have any concept of how to interact with the community and know what they might want / what they find appropriate, I need to immerse myself in that world and live it for a while.
The reason no record label knows how to market anything to new media is they don't live there. They don't get it because they don't use it. What you've seen happen with the marketing and presentation of NIN over the last years is a direct result of living next to you, listening to you, consuming with you and interacting with you. Directly. There's no handlers or PR people here, it's me and my guys - that's it. There's no real plan, even - it's just trying to do the right thing that respects you the fan, the music, and me the artist. That's the goal - a mutual and shared respect.
When Twitter made it's way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I thought it through and in light of where I was / am in my career I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there's a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I'm not what you projected on me. All expected. I'm not as concerned about "breaking" your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven't noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.
The problem with really getting engaged in a community is getting through the clutter and noise. In a closed environment like nin.com a lot of this can be moderated away, or code can be implemented to make it more difficult for troublemakers to persist. It's tedious and feels like wasted energy doing that shit, but some people exist to ruin it for others - and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there's 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 - 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.
Back to Twitter. I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and "human". I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I'm in love and it's all I think about and that's that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you've projected on me, fair enough - it's probably time for you to leave. You are right, I'm not the same person I was in 1994 (and I'm happy about that). Are you?

Looks like the Metal Sludge contingency has discover Twitter! Finally! For those of you that don't know what this is, please let me explain. Metal Sludge is the home of the absolutely worst people I've ever come across. It's populated mainly by unattractive plump females who publicly fantasize about having sex with guys in bands. Kind of like a role-playing game where people NOBODY will fuck make up stories about their incredible sexual encounters with people they WISH they could fuck. It would be kind of funny in a sad and pathetic way except the fun doesn't stop there - hate and good old-fashioned outright blatant racism are also encouraged to spice things up and remind you how truly ugly these scourges are. TRULY ugly on the inside (the outside is obvious).
Cutter's tip for my friends there: remember to cut along the length of vein, not across. Bigger payoff.
So when you see the new accounts that pop up daily on Twitter spewing exactly the kind of thing I just discussed, usually from picture-less creatively named profiles, spewing hate at Mariqueen and I, take a moment to visualize the sad couple people behind them.
A few years ago some people tuned me in to that world and when I figured out who these people were, I was amazed that I'd been seeing them in the front rows of the shows for months. I really don't understand what kind of "fan" spends that kind of time and money to travel across the country seeing a band, to then dedicate an incredible amount of time and energy into non-stop hate diatribes online. That one puzzles me a little.

Anyway, I'm bored on a long bus drive and there's no real moral to the story here, just writing. I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.

I had thought a while ago about attempting to start a mainstream public forum that required real verification of it's participants for purposes of context. The idea was to have a place where you can actually discuss whatever and have some idea of who you're conversing with. For example, if we were discussing drumming techniques and you can see that someone participating in the discussion is a drum instructor vs. a 13 year old kid Googling answers, you'd have the proper context in which to have a potentially valid discussion. If we were discussing EDLC's heart condition and a real cardiologist speaks up, I'd value his opinion over, say FredFuckFaceWhateverHisLastFuckingNameIs's "opinion". Know what I mean? Anyway, we're in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.

With all of that said, I have business in the real world to attend to including wrapping up the live version of NIN, DOING some cool new shit and spending as much time as possible with the most amazing woman in the world.

You can find the above post in its original form, here.

My favorite line on his whole wall of text?

I will be tuning out of the social networking sites because at the end of the day it's now doing more harm than good in the bigger picture and the experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.

Thank you, Mr. Trent Reznor. You are 100% correct!

WWDC 2009

OMG.

New MacBook Pro line
Upgraded MacBook Air line
Snow Leopard
New iPhone 3GS
The final Safari 4 version

Along, with the silent (again) MacBook White upgrade the other day, the new Apple laptops are kicking ass but taking no names.

Watch the keynote here.

Sorry Micro$oft, Nokia, Palm, et al people but here is a video clip by MC Hammer for you and your fans:



Cheers.

Mac TVXS.gr

Watch and learn more here.

Opera 10 beta

Opera 10 beta at long last its here.

It was like a year ago where I was telling you in a video that I like Opera but its UI has a lot to be desired. Well, guess what?

Love this new UI. At long last it looks like a Mac application, short of ;)

Anyway, give Opera 10 beta a try. You may love it!

Star Wars

This is how the Star Wars EPIC SAGA could continue into the theaters. Do you hear me Mr. George Lucas? This is how you MUST continue your EPIC SAGA of Star Wars.

Video Games | Star Wars: The Old Republic | E3 09: Jedi vs Sith Cinematic HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

E P I C !!!

Goodbye General Motors (and Opel)

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation. Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? History will record this blunder in the same way it now writes about the French building the Maginot Line or how the Romans cluelessly poisoned their own water system with lethal lead in its pipes.

Read the rest here by the amazing Michael Moore.

Also, read the news about GM here and Opel here.

The Empire strikes back?

Whatever. I really can't stand people that push anything Micro$oft related nowadays. Bing this. Zune HD that. Windows Se7en blah-blah.

Can't people REALLY see what M$ is doing? Cheap thrills. Cheap theatrics. Cheap anything. Except their products prices and offerings. Can't anyone else see that? But now, I will let Windows Se7en Starter Edition speak for itself.

You sheep make me sick. Please roll over and die. Or get a new "haircut".

Bad news for Apple and IBM

Sigh.

I just wish that Commodore would still be around to kick asses and take no names. Nah... Not going to happen. People and companies are no longer demanding high quality products with heart and soul built-in. Windows monopoly clearly shows how pathetic and lame we, the human race, truly is.

Amiga 500 ftw... For Life!

It's better with Windows

NOT!

Microsoft and ASUS in May 2009 launched a website to promote Windows on the ASUS EeePC. Traditionally, ASUS has installed their own customized Linux distribution on these machines. ASUS didn’t do a very good job with that distribution, and thus customers believed the machines didn’t work very well. Some of them installed Windows on these machines, adding nearly one third of the purchase price on top of what the hardware costs. Windows did not run very well either.

Then Microsoft entered negotiations with manufacturers of netbooks like the ASUS EeePC. They demanded that netbooks shall never exceed a certain amount of power. They must remain slow little things, and if manufacturers agree, they would be able to buy Windows licenses from Microsoft at lower prices. Needless to say, manufacturers shifted and are now shipping (a butchered version?) of Windows XP on these machines. It was all a great big tactical move for manufacturers to force Microsoft to lower the price on Windows XP licenses — or that is my opinion. They were never interested in doing a good job with Linux.

Now Microsoft and ASUS launched a very misleading website that basically says that the software ASUS themselves shipped with the EeePC is crap, and that people should install Windows on their netbooks. This is very sleazy.

Read the rest here.

Not that I had any respect for ASUS or Micro$oft in the first place but I know that you love them both such sheep that you are. Begone pests.