I’m sitting on a couch in the student union, surfing the web wirelessly and showing off my PowerBook in a prominent location. I don’t normally come here that often because I live on campus and it’s just as easy to go back to my dorm room than to come here and sit down, but class got cancelled today (woo!) so I came over, just to check it out. It’s pretty cool, I really enjoy the multi-level architecture of the place. But what really strikes me is the sheer number of people here sleeping. I looked for a place to sit down and I couldn’t find one at first because all the couches are full of people sacked out. I guess I probably shouldn’t be surprised, I usually take a nap every day (even after a full eight hours of sleep, which I get every night because my first class is at ten, suckers), and it’s pretty much just an extension of what I saw in high school because now there are actual, comfortable places to sleep instead of dirty tiled floors and hard chairs in the cafeteria.
While I was surfing wirelessly, I came upon the unfortunate news that it’s done. It’s sad, too, because the iTMS is really good. However, even though I can assure you that Microsoft’s product will be vastly inferior, in the end, it will win, simply because Microsoft got lucky once (although that luck involved a lot of hard work, drawing pentagrams and selling souls in exchange for immeasurable wealth) and now they’re leveraging that success to take over the world. There’s nothing anyone can do about it: Microsoft has the cash reserves to wait out the competition, even if their store runs at 100% loss. And since they control 90+% of the desktop computing world, their low-quality imitation will be the first thing Joe Blow clicks on when he wants to download music. Certainly Microsoft can’t be faulted for this, who wouldn’t leverage their key assets to create a synergistic platform for success? Apple does the same thing with iTunes: you turn on your Mac and there it is. I guess I’m just mad because Microsoft seems like the big brother who always steals the credit for the younger brother’s success. This big brother is slothful, lazy, stupid, and mean, yet somehow he always wins, perhaps because he’s just bigger. Probably he plays football.
But then, at the end of the movie, the little brother ends up winning because he’s smarter, so he invents some kind of laser cannon to destroy Big Brother. Or, through a series of sad events, Big Brother grows a heart and they end up hugging and playing games down at the arcade. Big Brother even pays for some ice cream, it’s really cool, they’re good friends now. But I think situation A is more likely.
September 2nd, 2004 at 3:57 pm
What happened with the forum? It’s like it just got really screwed up and went to hell, I couldn’t do anything in it anymore….
September 3rd, 2004 at 2:03 pm
The forum has been broken since many months ago. We talked about this, actually. It has to do with the fact that I upgraded PHP and I didn’t upgrade the forum software, and apparently they were incompatible. I never bothered fixing because no one uses the forum, and then I got comments. I’ve removed the connection to the forum software entirely now, so essentially it’s gone for good.
September 5th, 2004 at 10:53 pm
Gotcha, it just looked like random people were still commenting in there, I was momentarily confused…