New Technology Reviews!.: film

Sony Pictures acquires rights to Steve Jobs biopic

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<img alt="" class="aligncenter" height="153" mce_src="http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/2383/jobsbookcoverandspinee.jpg" src="http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/2383/jobsbookcoverandspinee.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-style: initial; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; height: 153px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 8px; max-width: 640px; width: 225px;" width="225" />Sony Pictures has successfully bid for the rights to turn Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs into a motion picture.<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Deadline</span> reports the deal is worth between one to three million dollars and headed by producer Mark Gordon. <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Deadline</span> suspects bidding had already been taking place for film rights, but recent events have intensified interest.</div>
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Sony Pictures is responsible for the Oscar-winning film <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">The Social Network</span>, a semi-biographical account of Mark Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook. Even though Sony Pictures has apparently secured film rights, any film version of <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Steve Jobs</span> is likely to be years away from seeing release in theatres, which may slightly help alleviate the turmoil some of us might feel at the news of this film coming so soon after his death.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Pirates of Silicon Valley</span>, another semi-biographical film portraying a young Steve Jobs, debuted on TNT in 1999. Needless to say, there's a lot of Steve Jobs's life that movie couldn't have covered. As long as the film version of <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Steve Jobs</span> is handled tastefully and with dignity (and isn't released while all of our emotions are still raw), it's got my support.</div>
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Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs will be released October 24.</div>
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Sony Pictures acquires rights to Steve Jobs biopic

Sony Pictures has successfully bid for the rights to turn Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs into a motion picture...

EA founder rehashes 'Apple will falter without Steve Jobs' and other memes

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In a recent interview with Edge Magazine, Electronic Arts founder and current Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins gave his opinions on Apple's App Store and the company's post-Steve Jobs future. In the process, Hawkins managed to cram several tired Apple-related doom-and-gloom memes into only a few hundred words. Let's do a checklist and see how many we can find.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Apple is "closed," and closed is bad:</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yep, right in Hawkins's opening remarks.</div>
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"I think it would be an incredibly positive thing for the industry if Apple decided to support all of the web standards, because then Apple could be the best about everything. Right now they make a conscious choice. They want you to be in the App Store rather than the browser, so they cripple the browser."</div>
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Odd, my iPad doesn't feel particularly "crippled" when I use it to browse the web. Neither does my iPhone. Hmm, what could Hawkins possibly mean?</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Apple is a big meany boo-boo head for not supporting Flash Player in iOS:</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ah, there it is.</div>
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"Flash can actually make a really good game, and with HTML5 you can't do that. But give HTML5 another few years to mature, and that could solve the problem. Or Apple could be more generous about deciding to support more de facto standards like Flash, or at least let it run its course."</div>
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Look at the statistics for mobile video and try to convince me Flash hasn't already run its course. As for games, I'll take a native app that doesn't slow my iPhone to a standstill and chew through 2/3 of my battery in an hour over a Flash-based in-browser game any day. The idea that Apple's ditched Flash because it wants to control the iOS experience is correct, but not for the reasons Hawkins and others have provided. In an interview with Adobe's CEO a couple months ago, Walt Mossberg pointed out that he hasn't used<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">one</span>smartphone that provided him with a positive experience with Flash Player, and Mossberg has pretty much used them all. Apple's "generosity" only goes so far, and anyone who expects the company to sacrifice positive user experience to placate third-party vendors is fooling themselves.</div>
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But that's far too logical of an argument, and logic has no place here, because...</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Steve Jobs is a tyrant, and Apple is a dictatorship:</span>Variations on this constitute the bulk of the Edge interview's excerpt. Hawkins is certainly in a position to know about Steve Jobs's personality traits -- he used to work directly with Jobs -- but where this crosses into meme territory is Hawkins's insistence that Apple as a company is directly tied to the whims of a tyrannical dictator. It's the same story we've heard thousands of times before: Apple is the Chocolate Factory, Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka, and every other soul in Cupertino is a faceless Oompa Loompa without any input into the direction of either the company's products or its overall future. Sure, that's<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">exactly</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>how a business consisting of thousands of individuals becomes the most successful tech company in history. Right. Speaking of which...</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Apple's growth is unsustainable:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>This is the kind of thing that people used to thinking about Apple as a scrappy underdog like to repeat like a mantra. Hawkins isn't any different.</div>
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"If you look at any institution in history -- look at the Roman Empire -- anything in history, and what it looks like when it's peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it's not peaking? The CEO is still alive, let's start there. They invented this tablet thing that's going to be really big. They've done really well by reinventing the phone. They breathed new life into the Mac. They've got this super-high marketing. All these things are about as good as they ever can be -- how much better can it really get?"</div>
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I'm no history major, but even I know that the Roman Empire was already in a centuries-long decline before the Visigoths trashed the place. And if Apple is peaking as Hawkins says, I'd love to see which numbers actually support that theory. Virtually every quarterly financial statement from Apple over the past year has had the word "record" somewhere in the first paragraph. Apple takes in the majority of profits from the smartphone industry while having a relatively small slice of overall market share. It's the same story with PCs; Apple dominates profits in the $1000 and up category. The iPad dominates the tablet market to an even greater extent than the iPod ruled the mp3 player market.</div>
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Apple's overall worth as a US-based company is second only to Exxon, and Apple's even closing in on them.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Exxon</span>, the company responsible for pumping liquid gold out of the ground and transmuting into the life's blood of modern society. And as a widespread meme from last week points out, Apple's cash reserves recently bypassed those of the US Treasury.</div>
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You might look at all this success and conclude that Apple has nowhere to go from here but down. But the only way to do that is to completely ignore the past four years of financial data. If Apple was truly peaking, the influx of dollars would be slowing down, and its profit graph would be either plateauing or declining. The thing is, that's not happening at all. Not even close. But what about the future? Get ready for another meme.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="strong" mce_style="font-weight: bold;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5;">Without Steve Jobs, Apple is doomed:</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>How many times have we heard this one? I've lost count. But here we go again:</div>
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"The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to -- everything does. Everything revolves so much around Steve, and no matter how good his lieutenants are, they're not Steve. None of us is going to live forever, though I hope he lives for a really long time."</div>
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Steve Jobs got the ball rolling on this, yes. But even while he's been on extended medical leave, Apple's momentum hasn't slowed. Like Hawkins, I hope Steve Jobs will be around for a long time, but Apple will not wither on the tree without him. Apple as a company is nothing like Microsoft, where all the forward-looking vision and drive to succeed went out the door with Bill Gates. Steve Jobs has surrounded himself with fellow visionaries, and that's the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">real</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>key to Apple's business success. The idea that one man and only his ideas has made Apple what it is today might make for a compelling David Fincher film someday, but it doesn't jibe with reality.</div>
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The only way I see Apple facing the kind of decline Hawkins talks about, even without Steve Jobs at the helm, is for someone to start<span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">deliberately</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>mis-managing Apple and its assets. How else is a company sitting on a<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia,'Bitstream Charter',serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">$76 billion pile of cash</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>supposed to decline? Don't answer that.</div>
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Razer trots out Transformers 3 Edition DeathAdder, Vespula and laptop case

<div><img alt="" border="1" class="aligncenter" height="88" hspace="4" src="http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/8519/razermice.jpg" style="margin-top: 4px; margin-bottom: 4px; border: 1px solid black;" vspace="4" width="360" /></div><br/>After what we're guessing was a fruitful tie-up with Tron, the fine folks at Razer are back at a similar well; this time, the company's dishing out a limited run of gear that's been splashed with color and branding from the upcoming Michael Bay <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">train wreck</span> blockbuster, Transformers 3. Outside of being doused with red, yellow, silver and purple paint, the special edition DeathAdder mice ($69.99 a pop) are identical to the version already on the market. If that's just not enough, there's also a dual-sided Vespula mouse mat ($44.99) to commemorate the film, not to mention a foursome of colored laptop sleeves ($49.99 each) that'll make public your infatuation. Curiously absent? A handwritten letter of congratulations from Shia LaBeouf.

Razer trots out Transformers 3 Edition DeathAdder, Vespula and laptop case

After what we're guessing was a fruitful tie-up with Tron, the fine folks at Razer are back at a similar well; this time, the company...

Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Year

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If everyone would kindly take a moment away from Googling the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” and swilling cheap champagne directly from the bottle, we’re about to get all nostalgic over here.<br />
It’s been an eventful year in a particular sector of our lives — replete with pathos, passion and that most noble of creatures: cats. The sector to which I refer, of course, is YouTube.<br />
That’s right, folks, we’re about to unleash 11 of our favorite vids from the-soon-to-be-extinct year. (11! Like 2011! And that wasn’t even on purpose!)<br />
So finish up that list of resolutions you’ll never go through with, strap on your sequins/top hat, and let us usher you into the next decade. Who knows what untold wonders await us on that horizon? (Probably more <a href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/20/youtube-cat-videos/">cats</a>.)<br />
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<h4>BED INTRUDER SONG!!!</h4><br />
Jay Irani: I know it's obvious, but I laughed my arse off all year long<br />
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<h4><i>Idiot With a Tripod</i></h4><br />
Charlie White: I love this one -- Roger Ebert thinks it deserves an Oscar. The guy shot and edited it in about a day<br />
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<h4><i>Know Your Meme</i>: Antoine Dodson / Bed Intruder</h4><br />
Erica Swallow: "Bed Intruder Song" is my favorite video of the year, but since we've all seen that, here's a nice investigation of the video phenomena by Rocketboom's Ellie Roundtree. You can run and tell that, homeboy.<br />
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<h4>Eduard Hil` - Vocalise</h4><br />
Todd Wasserman: Trololo, though I guess it technically came out late last year.<br />
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<h4>McDonald's Bag Cat</h4><br />
Lauren Indvik: Video of the year is too daunting a task, so I'm sharing my favorite of the week. I present: McDonald's Bag Cat.<br />
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<h4><i>Mad Men</i> Theme Song ... With a Twist</h4><br />
Radhika Marya: I loved the Old Spice Guy and other big hits like everyone else, but I also loved some smaller gems like this mash-up of RJD2's "A Beautiful Mine" (a.k.a. the <i>Mad Men</i> theme) and pop/jazz standard "Nature Boy." Lovely music, and beautifully shot in one take.<br />
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<h4>Dude You Have No Quran, Auto-Tune Remix</h4><br />
Charlie White: We were quoting that "Dude you have no Koran" guy for weeks, especially after we heard the remix, skillfully done and hilarious.<br />
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<h4>"Wishery" (Disney Remix)</h4><br />
Zachary Sniderman: A smart, nostalgic remix with an equally whimsical video.<br />
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<h4>How To Be Alone</h4><br />
Charlie White: This one was beautifully done.<br />
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<h4>DJ Earworm, "United State of Pop 2010"</h4><br />
Christina Warren: Every year the excellent DJ Earworm creates an epic mashup of the year's top 25 <i>Billboard</i> hits -- and this year's is awesome, as always.<br />
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<h4>Little Jamie Falls Down</h4>

Our Favorite YouTube Videos This Year

If everyone would kindly take a moment away from Googling the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne” and swilling cheap champagne directly from the bot...