A couple of months ago I went on a limb and purchased a HD movie from the iTunes Store, mostly as an experiment. After checking out the goods, I decided I probably would not be buying any more movies, given subtitles (which are generally a strong requirement for a multi-lingual household) are not available. But I wasn’t ready for the surprise of not being able to watch said movie with or without subtitles at all. It turns out that now that I have upgraded my desktop system (which has a Mini Display Port), the movie will simply not play. Jemery Horwitz has a write up on why this is the case. This is annoying, especially given the fact that the system is Apple branded end to end.

I said this wasn’t a rant on DRM, and it isn’t. I subscribe to the mantra of use what works for you, and this doesn’t work for me, so my response is that I will not be buying any movies. I will live, and the $15 I spent on the movie will have to do for SD (vs HD) for that one movie. Live and learn.

Dumb.

[...] like spinach being good for you because it held the iron your red cells needed. After decades of the disgusting veggie inflicted upon young kids – I remember, a scientist went back to the bench and found out there was no digestible iron whatsoever in spinach. You don’t get calcium by ingesting chalk, you need a calcium compound that’ll get through the sophisticated filters in the digestive system. Eating spinach gives you as much digestible iron as sucking nails.

It’s the little things that make it all worthwhile. Seriously now, the article is a really good read as a whole.

The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.

Dale Andreatta, as quoted by Burkhard Bilger in the New Yorker December 21 issue’s essay Hearth Surgery .

Gizmodo: MacPro vs Hackingtosh

The fine folks at Gizmodo are running story titled The Best Alternatives to Every Apple Product. Curiosity killed the cat. And they nearly killed mine (the curiosity, not the cat). The comparisons are, in general, somewhat bland, but they leave the best for last: the “Mac Pro ($2,500) -> Hackintosh (far less $$$)”.

While the pictures accompanying each item are clearly not intended to be accurately representative (I suppose), the one for the MacPro item is somewhat misleading (or incorrect, depending on your take).

The MacPro on the left is placed opposite to a futuristic-looking system, which does look sassy. The case turns out to be Thermaltake’s Level 10 case. I almost want one. Newegg, always ready to provide some pricing guidance, breaks the news: the case itself sells for $849 (free shipping), but it’s only available as part of a DIY PC Combo. Ah, yes: $4,663.99. I haven’t compared CPU/memory/etc specs: that’s not the point.

Pictures (like, apparently, Gizmodo’s post) are filler, and no one is likely going to argue that they buy Apple products because they’re price sensitive, but pictures also offer context and visual clues (and are supposed to not be, at a minimum, fallacious).

About two years ago I switched from Parallels (which had been working relatively well for me and was, for a while, the only option for the Mac) and went back to VMware (so that I could run VMs elsewhere if I needed to). Parallels 5 came out recently, and they had sent out an offer for a cheap update, so I decided to give them a try. I used their Virtual Machine Transporter to convert a Win7 beta VMware virtual machine, but Parallels ended up choking on it (it went into this loop where it wants to log the user in and out for the changes to the Shared Profile to take effect). I’m on the road, so I gave up quickly: I dislike getting beachballed into oblivion and having my laptop rendered into a hot molten pile of silicon (solid 100% CPU utilization). I uninstalled Parallels, wiped the virtual machine, installed VMware back and started the old VMware-based machine. For whatever reason, now VMware chokes on it too: the endless beachballing, CPU slaughtering… the works.

Sigh.

That’s almost five minutes humanity won’t be able to get back. No Logo comes to mind. I love the bit when they all mumble (chant?) “Microsoft!” (about 1:50 into the video). I once had dinner at a crab restaurant (I think it was Joe’s Crab Shack) in Colorado Springs where the servers did a similar thing. I actually enjoyed it, primarily because I had a beer and some really good food in front of me, and it fit the moment. Not so much at the Microsoft store. Really. Unless they have a beer dispenser somewhere. And it event then…