Archive: April, 2009
The weirdest thing happened on the way to work this morning.
I’m just pasting this in: I was just telling Steve and Gray about it.
traffic was unusually slow:
i saw some lights ahead & tons of cop cars along the opposite side of the highway
on my side, i saw a news truck: the kind w/ the satellite mast
then i saw a white toyota truck on the right side of the opposing lanes
the driver’s door was wide open, and the truck looked like it’d kind of …. settled there. not crashed, but settled.
it was about 3 car widths off the road
angled about 25 degrees away from the road
about 100m back…
in the middle of the highway
the driver was laying there, on his back, covered in a sheet
his feet were both pointed outwards: 180 degrees away from each other
it was unnatural
there was some viscera strewn about
the cops had that side of the highway completely blocked, and were diverting traffic off at the exit prior to the mess
Update: here’s a story about it. Apparently the truck was his, and he was walking on the road when someone hit him and left the scene.
Confirmed: ‘The Hobbit’ Will Be Two Films – Cinematical
Confirmed: ‘The Hobbit’ Will Be Two Films – Cinematical:
[Guillermo] Del Toro: “We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur.”
I was a little bitter when I heard this because it reminds me of what they’re doing w/ Harry Potter, who’s last book will be split into two movies.
Part of me wants to see the whole story as a complete experience, and the inevitable year between movies is sure to annoy me, but it’s a decently long story, and I think I’d rather see them spend the time to do it right.
Sure, they’re trying to milk two box office trips out of the book, but looking at it long term, I’ll be able to watch both movies back-to-back once the bluray comes out. I only hope they don’t take as long to publish the Hobbit blurays as the LoTR box set. And maybe we’ll be lucky enough to not have to deal w/ an extended edition of the Hobbit.
Now that I think about it, I’m almost certain I’m going to skip the LoTR box set that I just blogged about in favor of saving up for the extended editions. I may just get the regular dvds and rip those to the AppleTV to keep me satisfied for the time being.
As a matter of fact: I think they’re in the box of dvds I’m getting from Nut.
LoTR Blu-ray is approaching :’)
‘Lord of the Rings’ Box Art Revealed, Pre-Orders Up | High-Def Digest:
What’s bummin me out right now is that there are seven discs, but the three movie discs have the theatrical releases, and not the extended =/
If the set weren’t a cool hundred bucks, I’d consider getting it anyway, but for now I’m going to (try to) resist it.
*sigh*
Hulu’s back on boxee :)
TUAW‘s running a story on how the boxee devs managed to get around hulu‘s (feeble) attempt at blocking boxee from accessing hulu.
I was more than a little irritated at hulu at first about how they were going after boxee, especially since the ads were still being viewed, and there was really no difference between me watching content on my AppleTV vice a computer+browser, but Brian Brushwood made a GREAT point on TWiT this week: hulu’s not really trying to block boxee, they’re just doing the absolute minimum required to sate the content owners.
Their goal is to keep the content owners at bay just long enough to win the premium streaming content market. Once they win, they can go back to the bargaining table to renegotiate their contracts and start to really push for some of these restrictions to be lifted.
That said, it seems that boxee’s arrived at a solution that’s unbeatable. For hulu to block boxee, they’d have to cut off all of the firefox users, which is probably a significant share of their customers. Given that hulu’s not quite a household name, and that their primary audience are the web cognisanti, I’m willing to bet that their firefox numbers are higher than average.
Either way: cheers to boxee!
Apple’s finally taken an official stance on jailbreaking
Macworld is running a story today about how Apple has changed the conditions of the latest iPhone OS 3.0 NDA to explicitly denounce jailbreaking.
Apple is taking a more aggressive stance against developers who create apps for “jailbroken” iPhones. According to a new report, the Cupertino-based company recently updated its “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement” – the agreement to which all iPhone developers are required to adhere — to explicitly disallow jailbreaking, assisting in jailbreaking, and developing and distributing jailbreak apps. The Ars Technica report says that while previous agreements forbade the creation of apps that violate privacy, facilitate crimes, or violate intellectual property laws, the new one restricts developers from jailbreaking their own phones.
This is complete bullshit. One of the greatest things about OS X is the inclusion of the developer’s tools, allowing you to completely build whatever app you want for yourself if what Apple offers doesn’t suit your needs. Yes, the learning curve is steep, but even if you don’t necessarily have the chops to crank out an app on your own, the ability is there, and the challenge is often taken up by other developers. I happen to buy a LOT of software for OS X, something I nearly never did when I was a pc user, so many years ago.
With this latest move, Apple isn’t actively denying the same functionality on the iPhone — you can download the iPhone dev tools just as easily as you can the Mac ones — but there’s a not-so-subtle difference in the iPhone world. Censorship. Apple controls what apps get put onto the iPhone app store.
My developer argument is purely academic, as I’ve never written an app for either of the platforms, but as a consumer, I’ve been using a lot of the jailbreak functionality in ways that do no harm to Apple. I use a shell program that I prefer over the other free ones on the app store, a calculator that supports RPN, and a backgrounding app that allows my shell to stay open when I need to check my mail (I’ve given up the Super Mario theme and Zelda sound sets I was using last week).
None of these pieces of functionality compete with Apple or take any revenue away from third parties. There are, admittedly, apps in Cydia that do, which brings us to the whole issue here.
Apple has a track record of not allowing apps on the app store that compete w/ them. I get it — it’s their system, they control what’s allowed to go on it. You might be thinking, “If you don’t like it, don’t use the product”. That’s not a bad point, but as a consumer, it’s also our responsibility to voice our displeasure (this counterpoint was made by someone on Buzz Out Loud when a discussion about some other company being heavy-handed came up)
Eff you Apple. Eff you up the a.
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