Carl Johnson

Man, I bet one of my former students, a hearing impaired middle school Japanese girl will totally buy this. She's totally into hamsters. It would not surprise me at all to learn that her mom buys this for her.

I am strongly of the opinion that games should be reviewed in a manner similar to CD reviews. In a CD review, does anyone ever say, "Wow, that's nice fidelty!"? No, they just talk about what other CDs or genres the music reminds you of, and how the album works or doesn't work as a step in the career of the artist. Game reviews should be like that. Give us a flavor for the game, let uus know the major play mechanics, tell us if it works or not, and let us know how it evolves the career of the director and/or the franchise character.

Multi-button mouse!!!!! *head explodes*

Hmm, the Japan store too, but still not US.

Dashboard = Active Desktop. RSS = Channels.

I'm confused by everyone else's complaints. I'll admit, occasionally iPhoto can be a little slow, but usually it snaps out of it works fast enough even on my 12" PowerBook. Also, I've never had an iPhoto crash that I can remember, and I have 8,700 photo, 15GB library. I think a lot of the problems people have with iPhoto are self-inistigated when they decide to start "fixing" how the photos are arranged on the disk. To me, any kind of messing around inside the iPhoto library folder is a mistake. IPhoto has its own logic for how things are arranged-- mess with it at your own peril. Meanwhile, I have had some Tiger troubles with iPhoto, but only with the importing of metadata. I think this is more of a Spotlight problem though. It seems like none of my metadata was being updated, so I had to toss my hard drive's index and reindex from scratch. Since then, things have been better.

If anything, for the first year or two, a PowerPC will be superior to an equivalent Intel box. Why? Because it won't have to emulate anything, so it can take advantage of existing software at full speed. Just look at the leaked benchmarks of the developers boxes-- for un-Intel-ized applications, PowerPC is still the name of the game. PowerPCs will also be able to take advantage of future software, since there's no way any developer will fail to release dual binaries for the next five or more years. Why would you? You'd be cutting your potential audience down for no reason. True, you can't expect any new applications to put effort into creating really detailed Altivec instructions to speed thing up. On the other hand, existing applications won't rip them out either, so it's not like your computer will be any slower. It just won't run future software as quickly as it could. Which is also the case for… hmm… EVERY COMPUTER EVER!

There were rumors of the exact same kind about TiVo and Apple a couple months ago. As I recall, the crux of the Slashdot debate was the idea that Apple could build its own hardware and service more easily that it could buy someone else's, which sounds right to me.

Religious education has gone to poo. It was a crown of thorns (as in, what Jesus wore on the cross), not barbwire. The cover text was "Pray." The point of the cover was that Apple was being 'crucified,' but could possibly rise again from the dead if they followed Wired's advice. Incidentally, that was my first issue of Wired.

I have no beef with Apple selling DRM music if they want to. It's their store, they can sell whatever they want. However, the idea that the government can tell us that we're not allowed to strip the DRM out of our own music files, even if we don't redistribute the files, well, that's just crazy.