In LA

The video quality on youtube sucks, so I’m pleased that there’s now a much better quality version of that first trailer for The Forbidden Kingdom available on Apple’s trailer site.

If you’re hoping for a trailer with more Jackie and Jet, be patient and fear not.

The Jackie Chan and Jet Li film I’ve been working on for the past eight months in China and Los Angeles, The Forbidden Kingdom (Chinese title: 功夫之王), is nearing completion. A couple of months ago, some very pretty footage from the film first appeared on the internet. Now the first actual trailer¹ has surfaced. Enjoy:

Technorati Tags: Chinese, entertainment, film, Hengdian, Panavision Genesis

1. a trailer is an advertisement for an upcoming film [↩]

My first thought upon seeing the name of this product was that finally former two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman had had enough with the iPod craze, and was now selling a grill designed specifically for frying iPods to death, with a sales pitch along the lines of:

The non-stick surface makes it easy for Georgetta to remove well-done iPods from the grill. Any melted white plastic drips down the center channel of the angled grill and into the removable tray for easy cleanup by George VI.

It turns out that my first guess was completely wrong. Here’s part of the actual product description:

The unique appliance not only grills, but it can also provide music to help set the mood–whether romantic or fun and festive during a party. For music capabilities, the unit comes equipped with a 10-watt speaker and the ability to be used with an iPod or MP3 player.

I’ll readily concede that there may be one or two people out there who would really like a large indoor-outdoor electric grill that can also play music, but I’m convinced that the very existence of the George Foreman iPod Grill is a sign that the end is near.

Technorati Tags: Apple, buy.com, cooking, iPod

I don’t have the data to back this up, and am too lazy to gather it, but it feels to me as if the value of Apple’s shares plummet every time they announce a new product, only to recoup their value over the course of the next month.

It appears that I’m not the only person to have noticed this pattern.

The new Macbook Air. Tiny. Great for businessfolk on the go. I wish I could use it, but it’s not an option for me or many other media professionals due to the fact that it cannot be connected to audio and video devices over firewire, lacks gigabit ethernet, and has an Intel integrated graphics chipset. Here’s a more detailed list of my thoughts.

The Great

• Really really tiny for its size –.76″ thick at the back, .16″ at the front. Less than 3 pounds. Should be fun to carry around. I want.
• 45W power supply –should not cause Airplane power outlets to shut down nearly as often as does the MacBook Pro’s 85W power adapter, and the 45W adapter probably takes up much less space in a bag than its chunky 85W cousin. With any luck Apple will go with a thinner and longer power supply to match the laptop’s shape. Has anyone seen the power supply?
• Full size keyboard –Thank god. I’ve used the tiny keyboards on the Sony Vaio subnotebooks, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Yuck.
• 13.3″ 1200×800 resolution LCD screen. LED backlit for instant illumination, low power consumption, and better recyclability (no mercury).
• Runs OS X –I like OS X. It’s Unixy, like my NetBSD box, only with a pretty and functional interface.

Neutrals

• No optical disc –but the MacBook Air comes with new software that allows you to access optical drives on other computers (OS X or Windows) over the wireless network.¹ In all the news about this product that I’ve read and heard, Apple’s people have been careful to only use the word “access”, which to me implies that it is unlikely that it will be possible (at least with this first version of the software) to burn discs on remote computer’s optical drives from a MacBook Air. Apple is likely betting most MacBook Air purchasers either already own a Mac or PC with an optical drive, already download install most of their software over a network, or will buy Apple’s “MacBook Air SuperDrive” for $99. Perhaps other brands of external USB drive will also be supported by the MacBook Air’s version of OS X for reading and writing to discs.
• Storage: slow and fragile vs. fast, non-volatile, and very expensive –1.8″ 80Gb hard drive (standard) or 64Gb flash-based drive. 1.8″ hard drives of the sort used in iPods are slower and more fragile than 2.5″ laptop hard drives, which are in turn less robust than the 3.5″ hard drives in desktop computers. That’s why your friend’s 2-year-old iPod sometimes doesn’t boot, and freezes, and skips. Of course, the small machine requires smaller drives, and this tradeoff is a necessary evil. Data backups will be very important for users of the MacBook Air who opt for the internal hard drive. It’s likely that the hard drive is a stopgap measure and the flash drive, now optional, is the future for this product. Flash drives, like Samsung’s SSD flash drives, use less power than conventional hard drives, provide greater speed, have no moving parts, and have longer life and greater reliability than tiny hard drives. The only problem is that they’re maddeningly expensive right now. Want a flash drive with 14Gb less space than the stock 80Gb hard disk in your Macbook Air? That’ll add $999 to your order.

Negatives

• No Firewire –a dealbreaker for me. Lack of a Firewire 400 port means I can’t use the MacBook Air for video capture, can’t connect external drives of usable speed for video work, very likely can’t boot from external drives, and can’t use Firewire target disk mode for diagnostic and data recovery purposes. Audio professionals, who could probably make use of a silent flash-based tiny laptop for field recording, are also out of luck since most professional audio interfaces require Firewire.
• No ethernet port –not a big problem for business travelers and the average user, since they can get by with wifi or with Apple’s USB 10/100Base-T ethernet dongle, but us media types really like our gigabit ethernet to copy our big files or even use them over a network, and you can’t do that over USB 2.0.
• Not the greatest graphics processor (GPU) –a dealbreaker for me is that the laptop uses an Intel integrated graphics chipset. As far as I know none of the Intel integrated chipsets are usable or certified for use with two applications I use frequently: the Final Cut Studio suite’s “Motion” and “Color”.
• No expansion slot –I didn’t expect one in a subnotebook, but the fact that expansion is only possible through the USB2 port is unfortunate. An ExpressCard slot would offer 2.5 Gbit/s of bandwidth, USB 2.0 only does 480 Mbits/s peak. I wouldn’t bother dreaming of USB 2.0 gigabit ethernet adapters or USB 2.0 eSata adapters, such would be pointless. I could live with this deficit for the size.
• No Firewire port –did I say that already? It still bugs me. A lot.

Ah well. This will be an awesome machine for any non-media-professional who travels a lot or would like a lighter and thinner laptop. It’s a very capable computer for its size.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, unix

1. they never do say whether running this software to make one’s mac or PC host its optical drive for use on a MacBook Air means that the host machine can’t itself use the drive [↩]

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “the most powerful investigative panel in Congress” according to the Gray Lady¹ is spending time investigating whether baseball pitching great Roger Clemens used steroids back in 1998.

If my understanding is correct, this means that my taxes are funding an investigation into whether a ball player took pills and injections with the goal of making him throw a round white object a little faster. While I will grant that one of our government’s core functions is to make sure that the scourge known as the designated hitter rule doesn’t spread beyond the American league…

–but seriously, what an incredible waste of time, resources, and priorities. Let Major League Baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency deal with the case. If the league, a private enterprise, wants to ban the use of such substances, let them spend their own money policing it themselves. It’s bad enough that public money goes to fund sports stadiums for the use of private businesses.

At this rate, the government will soon be holding congressional hearings into whether the gladiators on American Gladiators are juiced, whether Tyra Banks’ breasts are real, or whether members of the Grateful Dead (or their fans) used a lot of LSD.

Should I care more about this? Am I just becoming a cranky old man?

1. the most powerful newspaper in the land, after USA Today and The Onion [↩]

Apple’s publicity strategy for new products often involves keeping information about the products secret until the next major conference or other event at which the press and public gathers. In this way they generate a lot of hype for a relatively low cost.

So the fact that Apple announced the new line of Mac Pro desktop computers a week before the upcoming MacWorld conference tells me two things:

• They want to get this lesser product announcement out of the way so that they have more time to focus on something big.
• They want to get this lesser product announcement out into the press before it is completely overshadowed by the fireball of hype that will be generated by next week’s announcements. Announcing it after the conference’s keynote address will ensure that few will hear of it.

So obviously I’m expecting at least one big, new product announcement next week. If you’re the sort of person who gets excited over such things, I suspect you won’t be disappointed. My hope is for an announcement of the much-rumored new solid-state subnotebook. If other rumors are true, such as that the new machine features a touchscreen (particularly one that can be used with a pressure-sensitive stylus for sketching) or is a tablet rather than a notebook, that’d be even more interesting in an exotic sense, but I think just a really lightweight notebook would be a major-enough announcement to cause Apple to strategically push the Mac Pro news out of the limelight.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, rumor

If you use a mac and are curious about the whole RSS thing, or already read news sites and blogs and whatnot with an RSS reader, you could do worse than download a free copy of NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is awesome, and it’s an app I paid good money for when there were plenty of free alternatives. Now that it’s free, there’s no reason not to give it a spin.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Deals, free, Macintosh, OS X, rss, software

I like the copyright notice/warning at the bottom of designer Rafael Morgan’s web pages (scroll all the way to the bottom).

Technorati Tags: copyright