WestAcre TV

FAQs

What is it? Go here.
How can I see it? Watch online or subscribe to the free video podcast.
What’s the release schedule? New episodes every other week. New shorts in between those when we have new ones.
I think it’s awesome and I want to donate a bunch of money. Hmm… Maybe we’ll set something up in the future.
I think your show sucks and I think you suck. Fair enough.

8 cores live on apple.com

Sure it puts you at a $4000 base. But it’s cool. Since everything else looks the same between 4 core and 8 core machines, I’m wondering if it’ll make for an easy upgrade once prices get normal…

8-core macs

The Apple UK store seems to have put up link suggesting 8-core Mac Pros as a configurable option. (The reference has since been removed.)

The crazy thing is that the 4-core is freaking fast already. And on top of that I don’t think I have ever been able to max out all four cores. Ever. (Though an HD render from Final Cut can get it down to 20% Idle, not too shabby). I’m guessing most current software just isn’t able to take full advantage of multi-core systems yet. Or maybe most apps just don’t need those kind of resources.

So if Apple is really planning to release 8-core systems soon, that means they’re also doing quite a bit of software tweaks to take full advantage of multi-core systems, (which at this point includes every Apple computer available). Otherwise what’s the point of an 8-core system? Will Leopard make everything run even faster? Hmm…

neato.

More pics at theforce.net.

an offbeat year for the oscars

Oscar noms came out today and it made me realize I just don’t go to the movies anymore. In the major categories of Actor, Supporting Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress, Best Director and Best Film, I’ve seen a total of two movies: Little Miss Sunshine and The Pursuit of Happyness. And Pursuit is the only one we saw in a theater.

Scanning the list of top box office earners for 2006 doesn’t give us a whole lot of Oscar bait; the top ten films are straight up popcorn fare (though the 2005 top ten wasn’t much different). Last years nominees just felt more fun, mostly because you couldn’t turn on the internets without getting a Brokeback joke in your face. But we also had Crash, Munich, Capote, Walk the Line and Cinderella Man. Big movies with big stars.

Looking at the Best Picture category this year give us Brad’s Babel, Leo’s Departed, Steve Carrell’s Sunshine, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima (they nominated the Japanese edition of his two-part epic!) and The Queen.

Plenty of big names there I guess, but as of today The Departed is the only one to break the $100mil mark, with $123 milion in box office receipts. The others aren’t even close. It seems like just yesterday they were handing out awards to mega movies like Forrest Gump, Titanic, Gladiator, American Beauty and Lord of the Rings.

I’ve always made a point to watch the Oscars, something that stems from a family ritual when I was a kid. I don’t like football. I hate American Idol. But I do like the Oscars. And part of the fun is rooting for films I enjoyed, or booing films I didn’t. I think most people who watch the Oscars feel the same way I do. People like their Oscar scorecards.

The Oscars have typically been a huge ratings draw, but that draw depends on an audience tuning in to root for their favorite team. With so many people using projection based home theater setups (like we do) or gigantic HDTVs, there’s little incentive to go to a theater to pay $25 for a movie and popcorn. And I LOVE seeing movies in a theater! Love it. But the alternative is much more affordable and much more convenient. As the theatrical and DVD window closes, waiting a few months makes a lot of sense.

One of the strategies of getting your film nominated (besides a killer marketing campaign) is releasing it to theaters just in time for nominations. That way it’s fresh in the heads of the nominators. The downside for the Oscar producers is that most people (like me) wait for the DVD, which means no one has seen any of the nominated films (like me). Ratings dip from lack of interest. Hollywood panics and blames interent piracy. Every DVD we rent or buy has an anti-piracy commercial that we can’t skip through, just so we can watch a movie that we paid for. The MPAA gets revenue hungry and starts suing people. There are fires in the streets.

When did I start ranting?

The full nomination list is here.

parallels to run os x on non-apple machines?

This could be interesting…

macworld keynote recap

OK. Engadget has notes on the whole thing here…

My thoughts –

- AppleTV is still really exciting, and it makes sense that it pulls your movies onto the unit’s internal drive. 720p HD is pretty neat, though the 40GB drive is gonna fill fast. Jobs said it will stream from 5 computers but didn’t say if it would stream in HD. With computer monitors getting more and more like TVs this box will have to be less than $300 or offer additional features to catch on, especially considering other options like the XBox 360 that do so much more. The key is convincing people who are already used to watching movies on their computers to move back into the living room, and convincing people who are still using VCRs that they need to get a life and get with technology.

- The iPhone is way slicker than I would have ever expected.

- I want one, but…

- $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8GB seem high considering the required 2 year contract. It is the only cell phone that I’ve ever been excited about, but that’s still a lot of money for a phone.

- How do you keep it from getting all smudged up?

- Guess they got the whole trademark thing taken care of.

- What about the widescreen/touchscreen stand-alone iPod? Is Apple willing to leave out every potential iPod customer who either doesn’t want a phone or is stuck in a contract with another provider?

- The iPhone is definitely the coolest phone on the market, but fails as an iPod compared to the regular iPod lineup. When I can get 80GB for $349, 8GB for $599 doesn’t make sense. Jobs spent a lot of time showing off the media management capabilities (Coverflow!) and widescreen aspect ratio, but what good is it if you can only store 3 movies at a time (at current iTunes Store file sizes)? Is the iPhone trying to be too many things at one time? One of the major complaints with current cell phones is that they all have cameras and music players and Java games, but are crappy phones. Jobs talked a lot about the “phone” feature being the killer app, but I can’t help thinking that things like video playback and the camera added more costs than usability. I love the widescreen video, but with so little storage it will be a juggling act betwen music, movies, photos, apps and OS requirements.

- If it were $299 and $399 I’d be a lot more excited about what essentially comes down to replacing gadgets I already have with something cooler.

- Where’s the Leopard news, Macintosh news and iLife updates? Guess they wanted to keep the spotlight on iPhone, but it would have been nice to hear these things presented in the keynote.

- The 5G iPod has been out way too long without a real update. I’m hoping we’ll see one by the end of the week. Widescreen. 100GB HDD. Touchscreen. No phone features.

Apple.com iPhone page

Apple.com AppleTV page

nintendo ds ipod emulator

Now this is cool…

Thanks to tuaw.com for the link.

omg, apple phone details revealed for realz!

On Sunday’s “Tech Guy on KFI” someone named Victor called in and gave Leo the most comprehensive Apple Phone description I’ve heard yet. Apparently he has a friend who works at Apple who gave him all the details. Pretty specific stuff here. The dual battery thing mirrors what Kevin Rose said on diggnation. And the Zirconium thing mirrors an Apple patent filing that floated around a while back. So, either Victor just pieced together what he found elsewhere and made up the rest, or these are the actual details on the Apple Phone to be revealed at MacWorld next week. Oh, the madness!

- Two models, a 4GB and an 8GB
- 4GB for $275
- 8GB for $335
- CDMA, which means Verizon and/or Sprint service.
- Two batteries, one for the music side and one for the phone side.
- Made of a Zirconium alloy
- .Mac integration (eh…)
- Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR

awards are dumb but sometimes they make you feel good

The Mac Pro received InfoWorld’s 2007 Technology of the Year Award for Best Desktop/Workstation. There’s something comforting about seeing awards for products you’ve already purchased. That isn’t always the case.