Marginal Utility

• The good news: tea-leaf readers report that the Apple Store is coming to Madison (via Badger Blues). The bad news: it's coming to the thoroughly miserable West Towne Mall. Apple would have been an excellent anchor for the new retail space at Hilldale — and having it across the street from work wouldn't suck. Nor, from Apple's perspective, would be having the Sundance Cinema and Whole Foods for neighbors.
• Dep't of self-answering questions: in the Wisconsin State Journal blurb (link n/a), Tom Alesia wonders how Sundance will differentiate itself from the Westgate Art Cinema, just a couple miles southwest. He then describes how Sundance a bar (including a rooftop patio in season) and a cafe, plus the Cap Times account notes the stadium seating — none of which Westgate has. Plus, Sundance will be one minute's walk from the Hilldale Great Dane and Son of Restaurant Muramoto. Go figure.
• All good news: the Sundance Cinema won't show commercials before films. Previews are presumably accepted as part of the experience. To Robert Redford: [smooch].
  
• But I'm really thankful that Marcus Theatres has run Westgate as an art cinema, especially when visiting Delaware (where there's a larger and generally as-well-to-do population) and seeing that the only alternative to multiplex fare is a drive to Philadelphia. There can be benefits to relative remoteness, even though it would be nice to be able to hop on a train and be disgorged in midtown Manhattan a couple hours later.
• Back to Apple: one of the recent Microsoft court cases revealed a memo suggesting that Microsoft had used continued development of Office as a (cough) lever with Apple in the pre-iPod, pre-iMac, pre-OS X 90s, when its future was unclear. Among other gems, Mac Office users were seen as guinea pigs for new Windows Office features. Not obviously featured: gratitude to Mac users for nurturing the Office cash cow when Lotus and WordPerfect ruled the DOS world.
• It's worth remembering that Mac Word 5.0a did almost everything its bloated descendents do (real-time spell check being the major innovation worth the CPU cycles) while running well on computers with one thousandth the processing and storage capacities of contemporary systems.
• One reason I haven't been blogging: learning the ropes of the new rules in Civilization IV. (To Mrs. Coulter: it's truly wise to ban Civ while major real-life projects are a-pending.) Civ IV has been just about as addicting as the original Civilization — which also ran well, back in the early '90s, on computers that couldn't display Civ IV's irritating start-up animations. There's no good reason why the Civ IV game engine couldn't run well (with functional graphics) on the iPhone-minus-the-phone that will presumably be the next-generation iPod. But Civ IV's performance on dual-core Intel Macs is middling, and it's performance on late-generation G5s is appalling.
• Maybe computer science departments should have bloatware remediation courses in their curricula.

Labels: Apple, Cinema, computers, Madison, MSFT, Random Bullets

// posted by Tom Bozzo @ 7:16 AM