Cool Toys for Grownups

If anybody is looking to buy me birthday gifts, check out these Cool Toys for Grownups.

Steve Jobs Inadvertantly Kills iTunes

I found Steve Job's open letter (Apple - Thoughts on Music) kind of funny.

What I'm laughing about is that Jobs is basically calling for the destruction of the iTunes Music Store. Think about it. If the record labels decide to just sell open, MP3 files; why do they need iTunes? Wouldn't they just create universalmusic.com, bmgmusic.com, etc. and start selling directly to the consumer? Why make Apple the middle man?

The ONLY reason the big four work with Apple is because iTMS is the ONLY way to sell DRM content to 80% of the portable player market. Heck, anybody can sell content to iPods if you remove the "DRM" requirement. Look at Podcasting. Without DRM the labels would eliminate as many middle men and competition as possible in order to maximize profit. Bye, bye iTMS, Napster, et. al.

I don't think Steve thought this one through. Without DRM, iTMS is only useful as a promotion tool. That might help smaller labels, but the big four don't need a promotion tool. Music promotion is their core business.

DivX at CES

Pure Pwnage visited the DivX booth for 45 minutes to give a rare, insider's commentary on the evolution of the show. The video is also available in HD on the same Stage6 channel. Don't forget to watch Jeremy and Kyle play Wii with Gej and pwn noobs from the CES audience, in part 2 of this video.

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Alternatives to Apple iPhone

If you were excited by the iPhone announcement, you may have missed photos of the LG wide-screen smartphone,LG KE850

The Sony w880 also looks promising.

The OpenMoko FIC Neo1973 Smartphone was announced several months ago and will be available in February, 2007.

As I've pointed out in previous postings, I'm not a big fan of all-in-one devices. Yes, the iPhone includes a camera, a music player, and PDA functionality. However, the 2 Megapixel camera isn't likely to replace my 10 Megapixel Pentax, the 8 Gig music player won't replace my 30 Gig iPod, and iPhone lacks the applications available on the iPaq. I expect my PDA to include Word, Excel, handwriting recognition, DivX Mobile Player, removable memory cards, IRDA, and maybe most importantly, the ability to install 3rd party applications.

Funnier with a Duck?

The Laugh Lab was created to analyze humor among various cultures. Researchers collected a lot of jokes and visitors rated them. Among the findings, ducks were concluded to be the funniest animals. Furthermore, statistically, the best jokes have an average length of 103 words.

However, I noticed that the funniest joke the lab uncovered was only 102 words long and had no mention of a duck. So, by adding the word duck, I have attempted to improve upon the world's funniest joke. Here it is:

A couple of New Jersey duck hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?"

OS X Liger

This picture just cracked me up. FYI, Mac OS X operating system releases are named after cats. There has been Tiger, Panther, and the forth-coming Leopard.

In the movie Napoleon Dynamite, the lead character describes the "Liger" as "pretty much" his favorite animal. It's only natural for Steve Jobs to consider a Liger release.

Wit Winner

It seems that I won a "battle of wits" on another website and I didn't even realize it. I posted a comment back in May, 2005. It wasn't until today that I discoved Chris Dye later recognized my winning contribution.

The way I found out is thanks to Google. I regularly search for other websites that link back to my website just to see who is citing me. You can do this easily with the following Google query: http://google.com/search?q=link:williamfrantz.com

Another lesser known feature of Google is finding pages similar to my own. You can do that with this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=related:williamfrantz.com

Oh, my winning entry went like this:

Invent a cheesy line of dialogue that thankfully was dropped from a movie. Name the movie, the scene, and the line.

"Luke, I'm your father and I built C3PO so he's your half-brother." -- Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back