Mike Cane posts about a rumored new Widescreen iPod. A Yellow Submarine Themed Widescreen iPod that comes with the entire Beatles catalog from the ITMS. What you say, there’s no Beatles song on the ITMS? Well, stay tuned, because rumor has it within a month, there will be.
Oh yeah, I am all over that.
[ 21-Feb-07: OK, no developments as of yet, but the rumor mill continues to churn. Stay Tuned ]
Terry Pratchett once wrote that his favourite word was “Susurration” and described it thus:
…from the Latin susurruss, whisper or rustling, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a hushed noise.… It’s the noise, in fact, made just after the sword is withdrawn from the stone and just before the cheering starts.
If you’ve not read Terry Pratchett, do. If you have, read him some more.
Here’s a list of the discworld books
A hilarious bit of animation imagining Darth Vader reporting the destruction of the Death Star to the Emperor.
http://moviesandmusic.wordpress.com/2007/01/12/what-really-happened-after-the-death-star-blew-up/
Apple, as you no doubt heard, introduced their long-rumored iPhone yesterday at MacWorld. I won’t bore you with the details, just click the links if you need more info, but a few things stand out.
First of all, the iPhone has no keypad. There is one single button named “Home” that takes you back to the initial screen. The entire UI is integrated into a high resolution 3.5″ touch screen. Interaction with the iphone is simply a matter of touching the screen, and there are even multi-touch features where you can, for example, shrink and grow displayed information by squeezing two fingers together or spreading the fingers apart. The days of T9 or multitap text input are over as the iPhone will pop up a keyboard on the screen when you need to type text.
This, alone, is a stunning feature that would be worthy of a major announcement, but as is usual with Apple, this is just the beginning. A accelerometer is included, so the iPhone knows when you turn it sideways (landscape mode) and will dynamically change the display when you do so. there is a proximity sensor, so when you hold the phone up to your ear it disables the speaker phone, turns off the display, and disables the touch-screen. There’s even an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the display. The bluetooth headset (about the size of the cap off a ball-point pen) turns itself off and on automatically when needed, and the phone itself switches from mobile phone to Wifi internet access dynamically.
But back to this touch screen, Apple has really done something remarkable here as they have, in one short hour, completely redesigned the mobile phone. Say what you will, no future mobile will be free of the effects of yesterday’s announcement. How long will it take before other mobile phone companies are going to try and create copies of this phone? Not long, but fortunately it looks like Apple has a firm hold on a couple hundred patents, so clones will not be possible.
The iPhone is also an iPod nano, with the familiar iPod features one would expect, including a standard dock connector. It also has come features you might not expect, turn the iPhone sideways when you’re in iPod mode, for example, and the disaply changes to a CoverFlow display, showing all your album artworks. The Coverflow on the iPhone is actually better than even in iTunes, as it allows you to select tracks directly from the covers.
But that’s all just frosting. The real advance is in the basic ‘phone’ portion of the iPhone, and those advances are quite simply stunning. The iPhone has been rumored for years, but no one ever dared expect so much. It has every feature you could want in a high-end phone (GMS+EDGE, Quad band, BlueTooth, Wifi, email, etc) but it has it all in a gorgeous package that doesn’t take a CIS degree to figure out. With typical Apple aplomb the thing just does what it should do and, since it is not tied to buttons, it shows you exactly what you need to see on any screen you happen to be on.
The phone will not be available until June as it needs to be submitted to the FCC for certification, and will be out in the Fall in Europe. I will be interested to see how it is marketed in Europe and how much it costs. The US version is a Cingular exclusive, so T-Mobile customers are left out. The other US carriers are not GSM, so they couldn’t use the phone anyway. In Europe, however, mobiles are not sold locked to a single provider like they are in the US. If the price is right, I forsee a lot of t-mobile customers int eh US getting grey-market imports from Europe. I also forsee a lot of T-Mobile customers jumping ship. This is, hands down, the best mobile phone ever, and it’s only going to get better.
Oh, and the “one more thing”? It runs on OS X.
APPL is up about $10 since the start of the Keynote, and is still rising (up over $2 in after-hours trading)
2006 saw the ushering in of YAJB (Yet Another James Bond). I have to say, when I heard the news I was not impressed. I was not one of the legion of Bond fans who were complaining about Daniel Craig (wtf is Daniel Craig was my reaction). I was, actually, not in the legion of Bond fans any more as I thought the character, and the movies, had run their course. Yes, I enjoyed Timothy Dalton’s turn at the role, but I thought the movies had declined to the point where they were little more than live-action cartoons with plots to match. And I think I was right on that score.
But, I admit I was a little intrigued when I found out they were making (remaking, sort of) Casino Royale. The only one of the Ian Fleming books to never be made as a ‘real’ Bond movie we’d only had the very funny 1967 Casino Royale (with David Niven, Woody Allen, and Peter Sellers). Casino Royale is the first of the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, and a book I’d read fairly recently.
So, by the time the movie came out, I was 1) not expecting much and 2) somewhat interested.
First off, it is nice to see that after 40 years and over 20 movies there is finally one movie in which the character of James Bond as written appears. No, really. This is the first Bond movie to actually have James Bond in it.
James Bond in Flemings books was not a dashing handsome posh dandy with some nifty spy gear thrown in. He was a right bastard to the core. A cold and almost sinister anti-hero who was, I suspect, a lot more like a real spu than anything we’d seen in a Bond film previously.
Daniel Craig is an excellent Bond. Daniel Craig is Bond. It is unfair to compare him to his antecedents since he is playing a completely different character, but if forced to say, I would say either he or Timothy Dalton is the best of the bunch, but I would be hard pressed to pick between them. Trouble is, the films with Dalton were simply not as good as this one, through no fault of Mr. Dalton.
The film itself is very good as well. Craig’s performance could have easily been wasted in a poor movie (like, say, most of Timothy Dalton’s), but it is not. In a film that is remarkably close to the 53 year old book we still have a story that works in 2006 with a minimum of change.
Work is already underway for the next Bond film, due in 2008. For the first time since the early 80’s when I heard that Pierce Brosnan would be Bond, before NBC prevented him taking the role, I’m actually really looking forward to a new James Bond film.
A solid +2 (-4/+4 where 0 is average) or 8/10.
The best movie of the year has been out for months, but not in the US. It opened in the UK in September and has had wide release all over Europe, but has barely shown at all in the US. It opened to extremely limited release on Christmas Day (just enough of a release to qualify for the Academy Awards) and is currently in limited (but still very limited) release across the US.
I am talking, of course, of Children of Men, the new film from Alfonso Cuarón (A Little Princess, Y tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine and based on the dystopic novel from PD James. For those few who have read the book, the movie is at once similar at also completely different. If you’ve read the book, you will not know the plot of the movie, although the feeling of the movie will be familiar.
Of course, the feeling of the movie will be familiar to anyone who has seen Rollerball (not the crap remake), Soylent Green, Gattaca or any of a number of other dystopic movies made since the 1970’s.
Clive Owen (Inside Man, Sin City) is absolutely perfect as this washed up former activist who is, like most people around him, simply coasting through the latter days of the human race. He meets up with his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore), who is still very much an active activist and sees a way to make some money and get himself out of his current situation.
Along the way we meet his old friend Jasper (Michael Caine) and we also get to meet a few people in Julian’s group, primarily Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor; Inside Man and Serenity), Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) and Miriam (Pam Ferris; Aunt Marge in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).
Technically the movie is amazing, with a richness of detail that will likely only become apparent after many close viewings with a DVD. The overall feeling of the movie is amazing, and some of the camera work and extended single-shot scenes are remarkable. However, at no time does the feeling that the director is showing off come through. The movie is as it is because that was the best way to tell the story.
As for the story, while the PD James book was more about the nature of humanity and the role of children and parenthood as an essential part of that humanity (or at least that’s how I read it), the movie is much more about racism, fear, hatred, and the sort of fervent fascism that we are starting to see a resurgence of in these early years of the 21st century. Yes, some of these elements where in the novel as well, but the focus has shifted with the movie.
It is, in a very real way, a movie that is an indictment of the present-day political climate, and should serve as a reminder of what sort of future lies at the end of the road we find ourselves on.
I can’t find anything wrong with this movie, and give it a +4 on the +4/-4 scale, where 0 is an average movie. Or, if you prefer, a 10/10.
A Night at the Museum could have been a great movie; it certainly has the cast for it: Ben Stiller, Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs, Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, and Ricky Gervais). That said, it is not a great movie, and I’m certain some movie reviewers expressed their disappointment in not getting a Young Frankenstein with some lower than deserved reviews.
There is nothing wrong with this movie. It sets out to be what it is, and it does so successfully. It is fun and enjoyable and there’s nothing in it, with perhaps the exception of one scene with Attila the Hun, that falls flat or rings hollow. The plot is what it needs to be, and no more. The special effects, which once would have been stunning, are very well done, but nothing we’ve not seen before.
The movie is funny, and has some great moments, most of them involving Wilson, Coogan, or Gervais.
If you are looking for some light comedy fun then this is the movie for you. The movie is rated PG, though the 4 year old I was with loved it just as much as the 9 year old and I didn’t notice anything in it that was inappropriate.
On the old +4/-4 scale, where 0 is average, a +0.5 for this film, or a 6/10.
Rainbow Sphere
