Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own John Biggs takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
Like all men of a certain age, I love violence, drugs, and fast cars. But I definitely don’t love Grand Theft Auto IV. Want to know why? Because I’ve become fairly well-versed in the violence and depravity the game promises to simulate — a set of skills I learned, actually, from playing Vice City and the other episodes in this vaunted series — and, in looking at the game, now, from a dispassionate and uninhibited standpoint, I find that it fails on a number of basic levels. The student has, it seems, surpassed the teacher and I worry that others will soon find themselves in the same situation.
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Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own John Biggs takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
What was the first thing you bought in January 1990? If you said “Food” or “a tankful of gas,” you’re lying or weren’t born then. You bought …But Seriously by Phil Collins. On CD.That CD defined that season and everyone — including you — had it. And why? Because it was a disk and you had to have the disk to enjoy the music, right? And the disk is caught up in the music and the music is caught up in the disk. You might have been hungover, in love, or heartsick, but you bought that album, cracked it open, and put it on your Sony CD player and listened and dreamed and cried.
Try doing that with a download. Try hugging your iPod on a cold January morning, realizing that it was just another day in paradise and there were folks out there who had less than even you. Some people didn’t have CD players. Some people couldn’t afford CDs. Phil Collins spoke through that little silver disk. You opened it up and you saw Phil’s face and you knew he understood what it felt like to be cast off, abandoned, poor. Just like Phil. Albeit with considerably more money.
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Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own Devin Coldewey takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
It’s interesting that there is so much noise being made about every revision of every model of every phone out there. Why do we bother? Phones have been the same for years, and they’re perfect. The amount of improvement possible is infinitesimal, especially when compared with the fanfare accompanying every press release. We’ve already reached the pinnacle of engineering and usability with the phones we have, so why bother trying to improve them?
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Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own Devin Coldewey takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
Why are we having a whole week dedicated to this runty OS? You’d think this ridiculous open-source movement was supposed to be the future of computing. Well, it’s time someone took a stand and let the world know what everyone is afraid of saying: Linux sucks. It sucks bad.
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Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own Devin Coldewey takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
Everybody’s all a-twitter about Apple’s latest amazing technology, the incomparable “multi-touch.” But what is it exactly that is so great about this? It’s impressive technically, but it doesn’t really seem to be very handy for much of anything.
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Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own Devin takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
Back in the day, it used to be that you grew up on the prairie, ignorant of anything beyond your direct line of sight. Books were the only method of seeing other countries, and they were, of course, limited and outdated. Serious travel was impossible or impractical; even if you had the money necessary, which was unlikely, you had to budget at least a few months for train travel to anywhere remote, or a year for intercontinental trips by sea. As time wore on commercial air travel became more and more accessible – and in the mid-20th century it became viable for a person of modest means to go world traveling to see all the things they’d read about in books. One would think things would continue in this manner – travel getting easier, cheaper, and more worthwhile, but in fact it’s just the reverse. The advent of the internet and the increasing richness of content has practically obsoleted real travel, and at this point it’s probably more worth it to do a thorough Googling of the place you’re thinking of going instead of, well, going there at all.
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Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own Devin takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.
You’re probably thinking I’m crazy. Well, maybe I am. But that’s just because I have crazy love for HD DVD and have faith that it will end up on top of this little format scuffle. The “coup” by Blu-Ray has inspired some interesting, if misguided satire (Godwin alert), and convinced the easily swayed masses of critics that yes, it’s over. But it’s far from over — and this was only a glancing blow. HD DVD will bounce back for the knockout punch.
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Here at CrunchGear, we try to stay clear of political debates; after all, our mandate is hardware, gadgets, and technological goings-on. So usually, on all the sticky social and foreign policy issues, we stay mum. But when the outcome of the race could affect the entire tech sector, I feel a responsibility to throw our weight behind some candidate or another. In this case, the choice is clear. The Republicans will advance the industry to a whole new level, and create a technological hegemony led by the industry’s biggest leaders and most ruthless corporations. The benefits are obvious and manifold.
Vote Republican and we will witness a tech revolution. Tax cuts for corporations and allowing lobbyists unrestricted access to legislators will grease the wheels of industry and soon all minor players will be crushed under the heel of the majors: Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and all their subsidiaries and manufacturers will run roughshod over the younger companies who have yet to own a single senator or interest group. Good god! you say. It sounds like a calamity more than a revolution! So it seems at first, but by the end of a few years, you will see why I endorsed this course of action. Read More
It’s Smartphones Now week here at CrunchGear, and as you can tell there’s a lot to know and a lot to gain from them. In fact, you could say with some conviction that anyone who is not using a smartphone at this point is either cheap, foolish, or a completely technophobic luddite. I kind of admire the stand you’re taking, guys, but it’s time to acknowledge that you’re fighting the future, and not the way Mulder and Scully did in the X-Files movie. This is a statement of fact: Everybody needs a smartphone, and if you don’t, you’re doing something wrong.
Smartphones are like custom Nikes in a world of 10-peso tourist-shop flip-flops. I can’t think of a reason to pick the flip-flops unless you’re going swimming, and that doesn’t even make sense for the purposes of this metaphor. The point is that smartphones do everything regular phones do, but better, faster, and harder. And entirely separate from that fact, they also do things regular phones don’t even dream of. But Let’s at least be fair and look at the reasons why you might not have a smartphone. Read More
So you’ve got your iPhone and your iPod Touch and your Microsoft Surface, and maybe you’ve got yourself a little pink DS lite. What do these things have in common? Two things: they all share a trendy interface — the touchscreen — and they all will be forgotten in a few years’ time. The touchscreen is a minor blip on the giant radar of human interface devices, and it won’t be long before these fragile, useless contraptions are relegated to the dust bin of history. Why do I take this utterly insane position? The reasons are multifold.
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All day we’re inundated with news about this One Laptop Per Child project. I write up story after story about how these do-gooders are spreading technology to the third world, how interconnectivity and self-organizing networks will change the way these people communicate and allow otherwise deprived children to grow up capable of interacting with computers and thriving in a modern environment. But I have to ask, how exactly do they figure this is going to work when the OLPC hardware is not Vista-Capable?
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I don’t know why people even bother with Halo when all it’s done is rip off Pac-Man. Furthermore, even though Pac-Man predates Bungie’s lauded trilogy by more than two decades, it still trumps it in every gameplay area – all retro nostalgia aside. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at some cold, unyielding facts:
Pac-Man controls better. With zen-like simplicity, the control scheme of Pac-Man is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, like a haiku. A chimp can and has learned to play – and well! – but only a master can grasp the subtleties so cunningly hidden beneath that 4-way joystick. Meanwhile, the nightmarishly complex interacting analog motions of the Xbox’s control sticks, combined with a virtual candy store of colored, lettered, and numbered buttons, makes control of Mr. Chief an inexact science at best, and a sloppy art at worst.
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It’s been a few months since the iPhone first graced the world stage and I’ve owned mine since September, entering the fray only after the price drop made it worth picking up. So here we are, holidays upon us, and the iPhone — actually, probably the Touch — promising to be a big seller for the 16-to-95 set.
Well, friends, I’m going to make a case against the iPhone. Although I believe it’s a break-through product, it is not, in fact, all that and a bag of chips. Even if the chips were good.
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