Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is going on this week, with Steve Jobs’ keynote this morning. Nothing particularly earth-shattering was announced, but the stuff they did show was cool enough.

I was surprised by my own reaction to the new desktop demo. There’s nothing particularly compelling there, and the transparent menubar is unpleasantly Vista-like, but seeing the demo of the new “Stacks” inexplicably filled me with glee. I’ve been looking for something that does exactly that, and the Apple version is plenty slick. Buying OS X upgrades is mandatory in the Spectre Collie household, so I wasn’t looking for anything to convince me to buy Leopard; I was only looking for stuff that made me look forward to it slightly more.

Releasing Safari for Windows was a really welcome announcement. I tried it on my work machine and was amazed that it renders pages exactly the same as it does in OS X. I’d always just assumed ugly font handling was built into Windows and there was no escaping it, but there it is, running in XP and actually looking like I’m using a computer in 2007. The biggest selling point, of course, is that now the entire internet can see Spectre Collie exactly how it was intended to be seen, and the computer world’s long waking nightmare is at last over.

(And yeah, it’s petty, but his whole “Standard Version,” “Ultimate Version” spiel was pretty damn funny. Especially for those of us who’ve been spending time in the Vista trenches).

What’s not cool, though, is the unprecedented level of spin when it comes to the damn iPhone. Sure, Jobs is known across the internets for his “reality distortion field,” but it’s always been in the realm of good-natured criticism. Apple traditionally does a pretty good job with slick new releases that perform pretty well, and then Jobs comes in and then oversells them just a notch. A feature that would’ve just earned a “huh, that’s kind of cool” suddenly gets upgraded to “OMG THAT’S AWESOME WE LOVE YOU STEVE!!!!!!”

But even the reality distortion field can’t turn a turd into a diamond. It’s pretty insulting that they’d even try to. They’ve been roundly criticized for making the iPhone a closed system; it’s simply not a complete smart phone unless third parties can develop applications for it. Jobs held off mentioning the iPhone until the climax of his keynote, and then made the big dramatic announcement: the iPhone has a web browser!

They would’ve been a lot better off not mentioning it at all, because the end result just makes them look silly at best, intentionally deceptive at worst. “No SDK Required” the slide says. “Sweet.” “You can start building your apps today.” “You can run your applications on Safari until the hardware is released.” “An awesome way to write apps for iPhone.” Bull.

Requiring apps to run on a remote server makes distribution simple, they claim. What it does is makes it so you can’t run third-party apps without a network connection. So you’d better be near a WiFi hotspot, or be ready to pay AT&T’s likely exhorbitant data rates (which haven’t been announced yet, as far as I’ve seen). And forget running anything useful while you’re stuck on a plane flight.

Having no access to the local data store gives excellent security, they claim. What it means is that your apps can’t access anything that would be useful to have on a mobile device, like your To-Do list, calendar, notes, tracks on your iPod, or photos. Unless you want to keep them on a remote server and only have access to them when you’re connected to the internet.

They’ve been struggling to figure out how to support outside development without compromising security or network integrity, they claim. Which is total bullshit; they’ve been struggling to figure out how to avoid giving up any of Apple’s opportunities to sell stuff through the iTunes Store, and AT&T’s opportunities to charge users for as much data access as possible.

All for a device that’s already six hundred dollars plus a two-year contract.

I always thought Apple and I had an agreement. I would keep giving them more and more of my money, and they would provide me with fancy stuff that worked well, and not lie about it. That keynote really hurt. Now I just have to see if I can survive my birthday at the end of the month, two days before the release of the iPhone. When they release a new gadget that every rational part of my brain finds repulsive and a ludicrous waste of money, while the rest of me is drawn like a Visa card-carrying moth to flame. Hopefully there’ll be a run on them, and it’ll be impossible to get one, or else I’m going to enter July feeling really, really stupid.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I lasted about a nanosecond before I broke down and bought a new computer (cat does not come standard). (Actually, cat does not come, period). It’s way more computer than I need — it’s way more computer than most shuttle launches need — and it was way too expensive, but somehow those facts don’t make it any less awesome. Just looking at it, I get a tingling in my extremity.

Keeping up the theme of needless excess, I bought a copy of Windows Vista to install on it. Mac OS X, Vista under Boot Camp, with a Parallels installation to get access without rebooting — it was going to be sheer operating system perfection. Remember that this was before I knew I was going to be working full time at a videogame company, back when I was actually going to have the time and desire to play videogames.

The thing about Vista is that it kinda sucks. I kept hearing how it was supposedly a rip-off of OS X, but I don’t really see it. It’s more like if Donald Trump got a hold of Windows XP. “We’re gonna make it very classy. Get a load of those transparent window borders and tell me that doesn’t make for the finest computing experience there is.”

Back when I was working on an Xbox game, the joke was that Microsoft kept demanding more flair: gameplay was secondary; what mattered was just cramming as many visual effects as you could into the game. It looks like Microsoft extended that same philosophy to their new OS. The fact that you can’t even tell which is the active window is irrelevant; it’s far more important that it looks like glass!

Normally I wouldn’t bitch about gratuitous visual effects; OS X basically pioneered that field (and I still spend minutes dropping widgets onto the dashboard just to see the ripple effect). But even when they’re not actually getting in the way of UI usability — like the active window thing — they’re really all that’s apparent to the user in the upgrade. It just feels like you’ve broken compatibility with most of your existing apps just for the sake of a billion new notification messages and windows that you can see through.

And they still can’t make a standards-compliant web browser. Seriously, how long is it going to take for them to just give up and go with every other browser available?

So it’s kind of garish and ugly, but mostly usable, so it shouldn’t matter all that much since I only use it for games and the occasional work-related task, right? Well, as it turns out, I completely missed the news that you need to buy the most expensive version of Vista in order to run it under virtualization software like Parallels. XP has no such limitation. And, Parallels doesn’t let you boot from your Vista boot camp partition, so if you want to have Boot Camp and Parallels, you have to do another install, which requires another Windows activation. Which I can’t do, because it violates the EULA.

Luckily, Microsoft is there for me: thanks to their innovative Windows BendOverAnywhere program, I can upgrade my copy of Vista to the ULTIMATE MEGAWEAPON version for the low, low price of $158. Which means the secondary just-for-games OS would end up adding over 200 bucks to the cost of the computer. But at least I’d be able to run it under Parallels… or would I? Paying that cost just gets you a download, because you’re only allowed to do it on one machine. And the Parallels VM counts as a separate machine. So installing it there gets me my virtualization-unfriendly version of Vista. Which won’t activate, because it thinks I’m trying to install it on a new computer. (Who knows what would happen if I needed to do a clean re-install of the OS. I’m guessing I’d need another $150 every time I wipe my hard drive?)

(Meanwhile, Parallels is sending me e-mails asking me to send them 40 bucks to upgrade to their newest version, which may or may not solve my problem. Does it let you run off the Boot Camp partition instead of requiring a separate install? No one will say definitively. You can try asking them for support… if you can find their secret forum that isn’t linked from their main page, only from Google searches. And no representatives are on hand there to answer questions. But at least I know that the new version can indeed run Quake 4, so that’s a relief.)

It’d be nice to ask somebody at Microsoft whether the software they’re charging me a couple hundred bucks for will actually run on my machine in the configuration I want. After going through ten pages on their customer support site, I finally get to a page that says it will let me e-mail somebody. As long as I enter my product key, and they determine that the key is valid for support; otherwise it’s $60 per “incident.” I enter the product key, out of pure optimism, and it takes me to a Microsoft SQL Server error page.

So as it stands now, I’m somewhat screwed. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I can determine exactly how much money I’ve wasted. It’s either going to be the cost of Parallels and its upgrade, or the cost of Vista and its upgrade. Until then, it means rebooting the machine every time I want to play a game, at which point it hardly seems worth the effort. Maybe I’m supposed to be spending even more money on the Mac-native versions of these games? Or maybe finding a cheaper and more worthwhile hobby?

I should make it clear that I’m not enough of an Apple fanboy to say that they don’t suck. They do, but in a slightly different way. I’ve complained about the $125 they charge for every yearly OS upgrade, but at this point, all of that seems quaint. As Jon Gruber pointed out in an insightful post on his Daring Fireball blog, Apple is primarily a hardware company, not a software company. And as such, where they truly suck is in the hardware.

It’s all beautifully designed, of course, even the cheese grater. But there’s that deviously-planned obsolescence built right into every one, from the iPod batteries with the lifespans of mayflies, to the exploding laptop batteries, to the laptop latches.

Almost one month to the day after the warranty on my Mac laptop ran out, the latch broke (from what I read on the internet, it’s a very common problem, partly because the latch is ridiculously over-engineered). I put off getting it repaired until now, because I knew that phone support would be useless — the second you connect with a real human, they ask for your credit card number or try to sell you AppleCare. So I finally made an appointment to talk to a Genius. Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, said genius looked at my machine’s serial number, typed it into a database, and told me that it’d be $326 to get fixed. She referred me to a place across town that could probably do it for cheaper. When I got there, they said that they usually ship those repairs directly to Apple and that it’d cost me $426 including parts and labor.

And still, the Apple aura is so persuasive that I sit here typing on a ridiculously over-priced machine that could very well explode at any moment (or more likely, will explode exactly on April 19, 2008), and the only thing I can think of is bitching about Windows.

Update: Man, what’s the computer world coming to when a guy can’t make an over-long, whiny post bitching about cost and incompatiblities anymore? The day after I wrote this, Parallels released the new version of their software. Hidden among the new features is what I think is the most valuable one — being able to use your BootCamp Vista partition. Meaning no additional activation, no copying software over, just the ability to use your Vista stuff within OSX without rebooting. I’ve installed it with no problems, and so far it works mostly like I wanted. (Direct3D isn’t working for me at the moment, but it could very well just be a configuration thing I missed).

Having a piece of software work as advertised, and provide greater compatibility between rival operating systems with a minimum of hassle (if not a minimum of cost)? That sets a very bad precedent for the industry.

It feels wrong, somehow, to find fault with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because at least in principle, its existence is essential. The internet has gotten to be so ubiquitous so quickly, that we need an advocacy group to make sure that technology doesn’t outpace practical concerns like consumers’ rights. And we can’t leave it all to the big corporations and telecommunications companies to control, if only because it would prove all those smarmy cyberpunk and sci-fi authors correct, and they’d be insufferable. Besides, the EFF does more good than harm: while Greenpeace is conducting eco-terrorism and PETA is breaking into companies and freeing test animals, the worst the EFF usually does is whine incessantly about digital rights management.

But sometimes that’s enough. The latest “issue” is the new release of iTunes, which introduced all those promised EMI-published tracks in higher-bitrate, DRM-free forms for 30 cents more a pop. Ars Technica and others pointed out that while the files are without DRM, they do include personal data about the purchaser: your name, and the e-mail address used for your iTunes account. The EFF dug through one of the files and found additional “mystery” data attached.

This alarmed “privacy advocates,” a group which before the ascendency of the internet were known simply as “crazy people.” How dare the Big Brother at Apple insert MY PERSONAL INFORMATION into the Kelly Clarkson White Stripes tracks that I PURCHASED and should have the RIGHT to do WHATEVER I PLEASE with them!

Which is, like so many of the “privacy concerns” vectored by EFF through BoingBoing.net and into the collective paranoid subconscious, so much bullshit. But this is actually harmful bullshit, instead of the typical roll-your-eyes-and-ignore it variety. Because DRM does suck. It’s not the baby-raping, digital ebola virus that Cory Doctorow and his ilk make it out to be, but it is an unnecessary inconvenience. And it does punish the majority of honest people because of the actions of a dishonest minority.

But the latest round of complaints just throws doubt over all of the legitimate complaints about DRM. Because there is absolutely no rational objection to embedding a name and e-mail address into a music file bought over an online service. None. Period. Exclamation point. The only way you could object to this is if you planned to “share” your music with a stranger. And as one of the comments to this post about the non-issue puts it so well: when you agree to the iTunes Store’s EULA, you agree not to distribute your files to anyone else. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. End of story.

The only argument in the DRM “war” that was gaining any traction was the one that said you should be able to listen to music you buy on any device you choose. That’s a totally valid concern, and something worth arguing in favor of. The new scheme lets you do that (almost — the files are still in AAC format instead of the more common MP3). And by complaining about the new scheme, they’re just revealing their earlier arguments to be a lie. “Okay, yeah, we said we just wanted to be able to listen to our songs on non-iPods, but what we really wanted to do was put the songs up on BitTorrent. Which should be OUR RIGHT!!! Information wants to be free! Also: Screw the RIAA!”

The even more bullshit response from the aforementioned privacy advocates just comes across as desperate and silly: “what if somebody steals your iPod?!? They’ll have your e-mail address!” Of course, having a $300 piece of property stolen is more a concern to me than getting some spam e-mail. But wait: “what if they then put the unprotected files up on BitTorrent? I’ll be liable!”

Which as anybody can see is a perfectly valid claim, except they just don’t take it far enough. What if somebody steals my iPod, gets my personal info, then goes and makes a snuff film and puts it up on YouTube, using the song as its soundtrack, then puts “THIS PERSON WAS KILLED BY” followed by my name and e-mail address? Then I’ll be the victim of theft, sued for copyright infringement, and put into prison for murder! And all because of Apple’s greed!

The one thing that becomes clearer and clearer to me is that as fast as technology is progressing, the real advancements are being made in rationalization. I keep reading comments in blogs and message boards making unfathomable leaps in logic, twisting basic ethics to such an obscene degree that it’s unrecognizable as something real human beings would say. And all to justify getting something for nothing — wait, scratch that, not justify it, to make it out as if it were somehow noble. It’s the big corporations who’re to blame, for invading our privacy! If companies didn’t charge so much for this stuff, then we wouldn’t have to take it! It’s not hurting the artists, it’s only hurting the people who are making money off of those artists’ effort! We’re sticking it to The Man!

My favorite of the moment is the argument that because digital media is infinitely reproducible, making a copy of it without paying for it is not stealing. You can try to point out that while the song/videogame/TV show may be infinitely reproducible, the work that people put into paying for it, making it, and distributing it is not. And when honest people pay for a CD, DVD, or download, they’re compensating the creators for their effort, not for the actual physical media. But we’ll have none of that! Now that we’re in the digital world, the rules have changed, and your 20th century notions of theft and property and copyright and even currency are no longer valid!

At least, until it comes to them. Then the old rules apply. It doesn’t matter what the EULA says, they bought that CD, DVD, or download, so they own it. All of a sudden, it goes from being infinitely reproducible to being very tangible, and they’re entitled to do whatever they would do with a bookshelf or a car, like re-sell it to somebody else or let someone else “borrow” it. The thing that had no value when it belonged to the publishers, suddenly has a very real value.

And at that point I just get frustrated and give up, before the more traditional attempts at justification (”the people that pirate software wouldn’t have bought it anyway!”) set in. So I just have two things to say:

1. If you’re going to take something without paying, a.k.a. steal, then just do it, dammit, and then shut the hell up about it. Don’t try to couch it in bullshit about your rights as a consumer, or as an attack on an unehtical publisher, or say that it’s okay because it doesn’t really hurt anyone else. Hurting artists’ & publishers’ financial livelihood is one thing, but the damage you’re doing to the public perception of ethics is even worse.
   The one thing everybody can agree on is that there’s no 100% fool-proof technology against piracy. So the only real defense we have against it is the fact that most people are honest and will pay for good work. Don’t try to chip away at that.
2. When I’m doing a vanity search on Google and come up with entry after entry after entry with a “cracked” version of a game that I invested months if not years of my time and huge chunks of my sanity into creating, I don’t think, “Ha ha, way to stick it to those greedy publisher fatcats!” or even “Oh well. You probably wouldn’t have bought it anyway.” I think that I want to start punching you in the face and never stop.

Disclaimer: That picture of the Hamburglar is copyrighted by the McDonald’s corporation. Fair use! I know my rights!

When I was in high school, the rival school from across town put on a production of Godspell that rocked my world. I loved the music, I loved the concept behind the show, I bought the soundtrack and memorized it. When I went to college in New York, I spent my dining hall money to see the off-Broadway revival of it at least three times. I loved — and still do — how the show could be so unabashedly corny and goofy and still manage to be profound in its simplicity.

But that was a long time ago, and by the time it was actually practical to see the movie version (they didn’t have them new-fangled DVDs when I went to high school), I’d already lost interest. I finally watched the movie today, and I’m actually glad I waited for it.

To give a little perspective: the play originally premiered the month before I was born, and the movie came out when I was two years old. So by the time I saw it in high school, it was already on the south side of “quaint.” Jesus as a clown, the apostles as face-painted hippies, and the crucifixion taking place on an electric fence to show how it’s all “urban” — that must’ve seemed so daring fifteen years ago!

Now, fifteen years after that, the movie somehow manages to feel even older than a retelling actually set in Judea would seem. The cast all look like the random people from the Summer of Love footage you see in ads for Best of the 60s compilation albums. And it’s all filmed in the Sesame Street school of cinematography. At times you feel like you’re watching the Gospel of Saint Matthew as Performed by The Bloodhound Gang from “3-2-1 Contact”, with familiar faces bouncing up and jarring you out of your sense of proper time and place — Jesus is Sydney Bristow’s dad, and there’s the Chief from “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego!”

But ultimately, what dates the movie isn’t its music, or the fact that so many of the cast have now passed away, or even its visuals, but its very existence. It’s not just the case that this movie wasn’t made within the past 10 years; I’d say that this movie couldn’t have been made within the past 10 years.

Obviously, there’s all the skipping and dancing and rainbows and face paint, the hippie beards and white-guy afros, and the mugging the camera and lots of “funny” voices. But what most jarringly knocks the audience back into the present is when the cast performs the vaudevillian song “All for the Best” and delivers the climax with a wacky song-and-dance number at the top of the World Trade Center, still under construction.

There’s not a lot that can knock the wind out of a revival more effectively than that. A song about the promise of greater rewards in heaven, delivered from the top of a destroyed building by a cast of people almost half of whom are now dead.

Watching the rest of the movie in that frame of mind gives it more weight than any production of the play I’d ever seen. Although I love the play, I’ve never actually been moved by it — I’ve always seen it as a celebration of the gospels, not a passion play. It’s the musical theater version of The Living Bible: a simple, effective reiteration of Christ’s teachings, presented in an entertaining and contemporary (or at least more contemporary) format.

You watch it to get happy. To be reassured that somebody 2000 years ago really did have it all figured out, and it all really is as simple as He says: Love God with all your heart and soul, and love thy neighbor as thyself. Everything else is based on that.

The crucifixion scene during the finale has traditionally been the point in the show where I start looking at my watch. Yeah, yeah, it’s all very sad, but we all know there’s a happy ending — He comes back! Speed it up and sing “Day by Day” again. But now, for the first time, I finally get what that scene is supposed to make you feel: a profound sense of loss.

And loss on several levels. The most obvious and direct one, the loss of that connection to God or a more general loss of faith. I’ve frequently heard people describe religion (or at least the Judeo-Christian side of things) in terms of “abandonment”; there’s the line in the song “Get Together” that says, “When the one who left us here returns for us at last.” It’s always just seemed like a clever turn of phrase until now, when you look around and have to wonder, does anybody really get it anymore?

When we’re in the middle of a war where both sides are claiming to be fighting in God’s name, but the side that I’m helping to pay for is supposedly the God who made pretty clear His views on killing, loving your enemy, and turning the other cheek. And it’s gone on for so long, has been so perpetuated by fear and paranoia and a desperate desire for control, and is now so lacking in objective or purpose, that even if did at one point have some sliver of moral justification, that’s long gone.

And the world hasn’t stopped for it, there’s been no clear sign of a favorable outcome, no sense of “fighting the good fight.” Instead, the world has kept on cranking, adjusting itself back to the status quo. To the point that the phrase “I had to re-think a lot of things after 9/11″ has become a cliche, saying nothing more than that the speaker is oblivious and hopelessly self-important.

I hate to sound even remotely like Pat Robertson, but I’ve got to ask: if we can fuck things up this badly and still just tool along and not be smited, is He even paying attention anymore? Is having to take my shoes off at the airport the only sign of divine retribution?

And then of course there’s the sorry state of religion in America. Where Christianity has been twisted and distorted to such a degree that something like Godspell, which should be like mainlining pure undiluted Christian concentrate, would be rejected as absurd or downright sinful. To start with, there’s all the rainbows and the skipping and prancing around Manhattan, plus it’s musical theater — you know what that means. All that talk about love is all well and good, as long as you’re loving the right people.

And it’s got to be said: the movie makes Jesus out to be kind of a pussy. Nowadays you’ve got to see Action Jesus, who gets nails graphically driven into his body and then says, “Is that all you got?” And dispense with those pansy-ass beatitudes; what we want to see is people getting their what for after the Rapture comes, when all the bad shit goes down. Godspell may have been acceptable in the 70s, but now in 2007 it’s got entirely too much hugging. Jesus weren’t no retard, and he weren’t no homo, and he sure as hell wasn’t some damn hippie.

Here’s an idea for a short film: start in the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You hear a ringing sound from one of the crates. A workman enters from offscreen. He listens at each crate for several minutes before finally finding the right one. He blows a thick layer of dust off the top, then pulls out a crowbar and pries off the lid. Inside is the Ark of the Covenant. He lifts the lid of the Ark a little bit and the ringing stops. He listens for a moment, nods his head silently, then closes the Ark again. Once he has the crate lid back in place, he leaves the warehouse. He walks down the long corridor to his desk and picks up a phone. He dials a number, waits a moment, then says: “Jesus just called. He wants His religion back.”

As long as I’m pointing fingers, how about a little condemnation of the secular world? The real reason you’d never see a movie like Godspell today is because a bunch of hippies in rainbow-colored costumes skipping through Manhattan singing songs about Jesus is as much of an anathema to the secular crowd as it would be to self-described fundamentalist Christians. Probably even moreso: the fundamentalists would call it sacrilege to portray Jesus as a clown (even though come on: a heart and clown tears? That couldn’t be more obvious or appropriate); while everybody else would object to the concept of clowns in general. And both sides would object to a baptism scene that looks like the opening credits of “Friends.”

The movie commits the unforgiveable sin: it’s completely and unapologetically earnest. Jesus Christ Superstar has always been the more popular of the two “early 70s Jesus musicals,” and I’d bet a million bucks it’s because of the tone of that play. It’s more ironic. It makes plays at depth by putting the focus on Judas and by raising the question of whether Jesus was the Messiah or “just” a great teacher. It’s the hipster version of the Passion, that gets rock stars to play the leads, while Godspell is for the musical theater set.

We’re in an environment that’s so cynical and so polarized, that even the most simple and understated expressions of faith are grounds for dismissal. I’m guilty of it too. I’ve seen so many schmaltzy or oversimplified or dogmatic examples of glurge that I get antsy at even the first sign of a capitalized “He.” And I’ve been preached at by hypocrites and pedants so many times, that I immediately turn off when hearing anyone’s interpretation of religion that’s not my own. And it’s a shame, because when it’s expressed the right way, without judgement and spin, it’s amazingly reassuring. It’s supposed to be a message of inclusion, a reminder that all of us are just trying to figure out what the point of all this is, and this is what we’ve learned so far.

Sure, there’s a lot that’s painfully corny in Godspell. (And while I’m criticizing, I should mention that when watching it now, you quickly forget that Victor Garber was in Titanic and “Alias” and just concentrate on the fact that he’s overwhelmingly creepy in the movie). But it’s necessary to make the whole thing work. Without that sense of fearlessness, that sense that if we fail, we’re going to fail spectacularly, the movie would feel detached and hopelessly dated.

As it stands, the movie is hopefully dated. You’re never allowed to forget for a second that this is an artifact of the early 70s. But the message is so pure and unencumbered by irony and cynicism, that you start to ignore the aspects that are dated, and focus on all of the stuff that’s still relevant.

Now of course, cynicism isn’t a recent invention. Reading this curmudgeonly review of the movie from the time of its release actually made me feel a little bit better. Vincent Canby said he wasn’t buying the purported innocence and naivete of the movie for one second; it wasn’t about Jesus at all, but an ironic performance about show business itself. The playwright used the Gospel of St. Matthew simply because it was in the public domain and he could avoid copyright concerns.

Which, if nothing else, proves that people have always been able to miss the point and assume that everybody’s trying to pull one over on them. And if things aren’t getting better in that regard, then at least they’re not getting worse.