[Quote:]

One of Hollywood’s basic tenets is that when things go wrong it’s somebody else’s fault.

Which is why it’s so startling, suddenly, to hear studio executives and producers taking responsibility for the rows of empty seats in movie theaters this year.

“It’s really easy for all of us to blame the condition of the theaters, gas prices, alternative media, the population changes and everything else I’ve heard myself say,” said Sony Pictures Vice Chairman Amy Pascal, whose summer releases “Bewitched” and “Stealth” flopped. “I think it has to do with the movies themselves.”

After months of hand-wringing and doomsday forecasts about the permanent erosion of moviegoing, the lunchtime chatter at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills and other industry haunts has turned decidedly inward. Now, four straight weekends of crowded theaters have forced moguls and creative executives to admit in public what they have spent months avoiding: They were clueless about what audiences wanted.

[Quote:]

This is the case peer-to-peer file sharers have been waiting for. Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage”, and deceptive business practices.

Op 11 oktober bestaat het CDA 25 jaar. Dat lijkt me een uitstekend moment om er mee te stoppen.

[Quote:]

The new season of Saturday Night Live began last night and Robert Smigel’s Saturday Night Fun House on Judge Roberts was spot on. Oooh baby do you like this…

Click on the picture to play the video
Quicktime Video 2.27MB 2’38

Quicktime Required (free download)

I would prefer not to jump into conclusions about the quality of this clip, given the fact that other points of view should be taken into consideration, thus avoiding premature judgement in a case still to be examined….

[Quote:]

1. See news item that Dell had released a new flash-memory-based music player to compete against the iPod Shuffle: the Dell DJ Ditty.

2. Note that no picture of said Ditty accompanies news item.

3. Visit dell.com.

4. Note that no picture of said Ditty appears on front page of dell.com, even after several reloads to cycle through random promotional images.

5. Search for “ditty” in text of front page of dell.com.

6. Note that “ditty” is not found.

7. Begin to suspect that even Dell is not very proud of this device.

8. Visit apple.com.

9. Note prominent and primary emphasis on luscious product porn of new iPod Nano.

10. Hop back to dell.com and search for “Ditty” in site-wide search box.

11. Note vague resemblance to a 50-cent Bic lighter:

    

12. Note footnote attached to claim in “Product Highlights” that the Ditty can pack 220 songs into 512 MB of memory, roughly twice the songs Apple claims can fit on a 512 MB iPod Shuffle.

13. Follow footnote to see explanation that this storage estimate requires encoding songs as 64 kbps WMA, which bit rate is half that of Apple’s default of 128 kbps AAC, and roughly equivalent in fidelity to that of transmissions carried over tin cans and string, but which, perhaps, is not a dirty marketing trick, but, rather, a fair assessment, considering that anyone with such profoundly bad taste in industrial design who would consider purchasing this device probably also has such bad taste in music as not to notice that their 64 kbps-compressed songs sound like mush.

14. Sit back and recall, with tremendously smug satisfaction, a decade’s worth of tech industry punditry holding that superior design would never get Apple anywhere, and that Apple should instead, you know, be more like Dell.

[Quote:]

Boeing and its joint-venture partner Bell Helicopter apologized yesterday for a magazine ad published a month ago – and again this week by mistake – depicting U.S. Special Forces troops rappelling from an Osprey aircraft onto the roof of a mosque.

“It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell,” reads the ad, which ran this week in the National Journal and earlier in the Armed Forces Journal. The ad also stated: “Consider it a gift from above.”

The ad appears at a time when the United States is trying to improve its image in the Muslim world and Boeing seeks to sell its airplanes to Islamic countries.

Advertising that actually shows what the product does and in a truthful, honest way? For shame! Perhaps everyone would feel better if they sugar-coated it and dumbed it down by showing refugees being airlifted out of the Gulf Coast.

Submitted for your approval: Operation Iron Fist which is different from Iron Resolve, Iron Grip, and Iron Hammer.

I wonder what’s next. Operation Iron Cross?