Those of you under twenty-five may have never heard of DIVX, and apparently the folks at Amazon.com haven’t been keeping up with their I love the ’90s marathons, because they recently launched Kindle.
First, allow me to say how glad I am that Amazon came out with Kindle. Someone had to make a bold, expensive, ironic statement about how frivolous technology has become. I’m relieved that Amazon is poking fun at how boner-town everyone gets over something because it’s digital, or wireless, or in Kindle’s case, both; regardless of whether or not it actually does anything.
This brings me to DIVX; a piece of technology you’ve never heard of – well, you’ve heard of the DIVX Codec, which is so named because the original item called DIVX was so lame that they’re not even protecting the trademark.
Essentially, DIVX took something extremely simple, like renting a DVD, and for quite a bit of money, made it extremely complicated. See, first you’d buy a DIVX enhanced DVD player, which cost about $200 more than a plain ol’ player. Then, you had to go to the store and buy DIVX discs of the films you wanted to see, like Dirty Work, for $6.99 each. That price came with 24 hours of “unlock” or “rental” time – but you always owned the disc. So, if you wanted to watch Dirty Work again, you could unlock another 24-hours for $2.00 or something. You could totally-unlock the disc at any time for the price of a standard DVD, but it would still only work on YOUR DIVX player, which, by the way, always had to be hooked to phone-line.
Like I said, complicated, expensive … useless.
Kindle is the future of books, or specifically “e-books,” because the word “e-book” is almost as retarded as the Kindle. Is it a book or is it electronic? It really can’t be both, I’m sorry. Sometimes I read stuff, like literature or blogs on my Laptop, but it’s certainly not a book. We don’t call MP3s “e-cds,” because we’re not morons, or communists.
I’ll let Amazon tell you about Kindle in their own words; the following are direct quotes from their video advertisement.
“Kindle is a wireless reading device with no computers, cables or syncing required.”
Now, try it this way,
“A Book is a wireless reading device with no computers, cables or syncing required.”
Hmm … maybe we should add to that;
“A Book is a wireless reading device with no computers, cables, syncing, batteries, chargers, memory cards, WiFi or four-hundred-dollars required.”
Amazon goes on to say, “Kindle’s digital ink reads like paper,” which I don’t even have to swap for you, and makes me wonder if Amazon’s marketing department says things aloud before they print them, or have opposable thumbs.
So, Amazon wants to sell us a book, with a screen to break, a battery to run out, another charger to lose, that we can’t read on takeoffs or landings for twenty times the cost of a first-edition hard-cover. Oh yeah, literature not-included.
Thank you Amazon.com; until now, I had to use DIVX as the pinnacle example of a frivolous use of technology for technology’s sake – and no one had ever heard of it.
Posted by c007km