Tonight, the World's Richest Man will be sitting down with Jon Stewart to promote his latest mediocre product, Microsoft Vista. One hopes Stewart will overcome awe of wealth and summon his writers' best skepticism. A gratuitous Blue Screen of Death or two would be a nice touch. If we had to bet, we'd guess instead an on air air-kiss.



Why write about it all? We're not a tech blog and know little about such things. A change in a Microsoft product is not the seismic event it was 8 or even 10 years ago. But it can still pose challenges to a national economy such as South Korea - which deploys possibly the widest bandwidth in the world (far greater than the U.S.) (The Koreans built all their governmental secure online transactions in 1999 using Microsoft technology which Microsoft changed this version; now none of the secure government transaction sites will work with the new software unil a work around is developed). Still, the Family Values crowd here in the U.S. should be glomming on to this meme. Married couples spend more time with their PC than their spouses, after all.

Read more »

Last season's '24' likely was an impossible act to follow, let alone top. The acting? Inspired. Jean Smart and Gregory Itzen were superb as a totally dysfunctional First Family. William Devane chewed scenery as SecDef and Peter Weller did a terrific villain turn. The nefarious plot was at once elegant yet simple. A Neocon-ish plan to use “Sentox Nerve Gas” to force a president to act after provoking an international incident was in fact masterminded by the POTUS himself. Just expertly crafted manipulative television.



So far it looks like Jack's sixth day is bordering on the self parody. The producers are in a jam, of course. '24' can never become a Sorkin-esque dialogue or character driven show. One imagines the show's bible probably with “There is no more time!” as a header on every page. Plot contrivance as adrenline stimulant has been perfected by the '24' team.

Such a plot driven mechanism is on rails. A monotone “I don't know if I can do this anymore” is about all Sutherland's Bauer can do to even suggest a three dimensional character without destroying the formula. But what can the producers do to up the stimulant if it has already dosed the audience, then again on repeats and yet again on DVDs?

Unfortunately so far, the manipulative choices forced on Jack in the first 4 hours are even more mechanistic and predictable than before. The dispatch of a long time colleague was foreshadowed more heavily than a return of Halley's Comet. The by-now predictable coerced Middle American family confronting a gun toting character reprising essentially Dennis Hopper's “What do you do?” plot device from Speed is now worn thin. At a certain point the audience can be forgiven for simply asking the hyper stereotyped villian to pull the trigger and just end everyone's agony.

Even worse, this White House is bland. For a show like 24, bland is death. In the face of the plot elements laid before them, they are all acting like qualude-chugging participants in an encounter group with a president as soft spoken therapist. Fortunately, word has leaked out that Itzen will re-appear as his wonderfully weasely and manipulative president somehow.

The “shocker” — a small yield nuclear bomb going off in LA — was extremely predictable. The show had no where else to go. Should a Season 7 materialize, an asteroid strike or a plot to foil voting on the Americon Idol finale is about all that is left to top events. We're not prepared to write off the show yet given the early stage and the show's demonstrated expertise at adrenline manipulation. But at least so far, we do have visions of Sutherland putting on water skis . . .

Tags: 24, nuke, Jack Bauer, Fonzi, jump the shark

We had planned to post our item on 'Negropotentate-The Community-And-All-That' today, but something far more transcendent occurred. We speak of Jobs' latest.

Our need for multi-media on the go and office email in and around the Imperial City eventually led us to grab a Windows Mobile 5.0 device when it became available. Blackberries were fine for email but too limited in other respects. Our problems with the 5.0 device we've written about tongue in cheek here.



Make no mistake, it is far better than a Blackberry for mobile email and document generation (although the newer Blackberries are getting better), has a decent keyboard, Wi-Fi so it can speed surf the web, etc. From all across the Imperial City, the device works. But in the end, it is a frustrating, annoying, kludgy . . . Microsoft thing. We've had to exchange it 3 times under warranty. Usually, the rule of thumb with Microsoft is avoid any product 1.0 or even 2.0. By 3.0 they usually get things more or less close to what should have been released at 1.0. But we remain underwhelmed even now.



So this inspires us. A truly mobile data device with intentional and thought out design. Apple (particularly its recently departed Brit head of industrial design Jonathan Ives) has done much to revive and infuse modernist sensibilities into mass culture.

Read more »