Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
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Right and Wrong
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The networks are not experimenting. Well, CBS isn't. They are riding their abililty to make money off Mark Burnett laughing at us and treating us like the nitwits most of us are. I stoppped watching his shows when he admitted (4 or 5 years ago, I think) that Survivor was a sham - extras, multiple takes, and constant manipulation by the producers to keep the most ratings friendly people on the island. He admitted this publicly, and people still watch. This, like Road Rules, Jerry Springer, and Big Brother, is not reality TV. It's lightly scripted TV with actors you have never heard of. Makes sense if you think about it - people watch TV to escape reality, right?
So now he has people playing pirate. Make up a game with rules that only make sense if the goal is to create as much political tension as possible and then have the players pretend to be the stupidest thing an adult can pretend to be - remember who you thought the biggest freak was in Dodgeball? Money in the bank in a country where Paris Hilton is bigger news than a Constitutional crisis? Next, he'll return to his roots and have people running around New Zealand pretending to be Hobbits while riding $6,000 bicycles throught the woods.
As for The Riches... its entertaining. I don't have a problem with the accents so much, Minnie's isn't that bad and Eddie's origins are left pretty non-specific so it's possible that he's the brother of the snotty Boston doctor from MASH or something. I don't think anyone else could pull off the "out of his element" feeling as well as he does, since the entire character exists outside his frame of reference - including the fact that he wears pants :) They have developed some interesting and sharp characters and then gotten away from them, and I'm hoping they'll come back to them in Season 2, but they are screwing up the daughter to the point where I don't want to see her anymore. For now, I'll chalk it up to growing pains and the fact that not every show can be written by David Milch or Ed Burns. It's not the best show on TV, no better than the 3rd best show on FX, but it's an entertaining way to kill an hour.
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As a retired veteran of the cell phone races
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can relate to this. Having spent years as the first on my block to have the latest, greatest, coolest phone, I have completed my 12 step program and am now able to ignore the hype, and I can tell you that this disease has nothing to do with Apple since I have never owned anything made by Apple. The turning point for me was seeing $49 Razrs 4 months after spending over $300 on my ultra-cool black Razr.
And Apple is worse than most. The Iphone was shipped crippled, and the smart money says there will be a new and improved version in 6 months - because that's just what Apple does. And everyone is flocking to the store to get one anyway. I'm going to wait until the new version is available in cereal boxes (which should be sometime around Easter) before jumping on the bandwagon this time. Opus, on the other hand, will be camping out at the AT&T store :)
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Whoa
[Read the article: Another iPhone feature -- it crashes!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Man, the Apple fanatics sure are coming out of the woodwork, and of course they have to start defending their god by bashing Microsoft.
A few things to point out, in response to some of these letters:
Smart phones don't have hard drives.
iPhones crashing is a much bigger deal than Windows or Palm phones crashing, for the same reason that long time Mac fanatics had no right to be so smug about plug and play - Apple controls all the hardware. Every Windows or Palm smartphone has a custom built operating system based on Windows or Palm and written by the hardware manufacturer. Apple wrote the OS for the iPhone, and they designed and built all the hardware. Any problems are not just a "that's how smartphones are" thing, they are a design or manufacturing flaw on the part of Apple.
Apple did not write OSx. Not even close. The operating system is FreeBSD, the fastest and most stable operating system in the world, an open source project worked on by incredibly talented people who deserve better than to have the credit for their efforts given to Apple. The window manager was written by NExt, the company that hired Jobs after Apple fired him. Apple did some mild integration work and built a few applets and modules, but saying they wrote OSx is like saying you built your house because you planted a tree in the yard and put up new curtains.
As for Apple being good about fixing issues with their stuff - that has to be a joke. They fixed the constant, ongoing, crippling memory issues they had since the first Macintosh by scrapping their internally built proprietary operating system entirely. That's also how they finally, finally got standards based networking that didn't require everyone to jump through freaking hoops to accomodate the 2 Macs over in marketing that every company seems to have. Only took them, what, 15 years?
Apple does some really cool stuff, and the world is a better place because they are here. But they are far from perfect, they steal and appropriate technology just like any other tech company, they have a long history of shipping stuff way before its ready, and they take an aggressively arrogant attitude towards anyone who points out their flaws - much like their disciples in that regard.
Maybe they will do better if you guys take them down off their pedestal and expect the same things from them as you do from any other company.