Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own John Biggs takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.

Like all men of a certain age, I love violence, drugs, and fast cars. But I definitely don’t love Grand Theft Auto IV. Want to know why? Because I’ve become fairly well-versed in the violence and depravity the game promises to simulate — a set of skills I learned, actually, from playing Vice City and the other episodes in this vaunted series — and, in looking at the game, now, from a dispassionate and uninhibited standpoint, I find that it fails on a number of basic levels. The student has, it seems, surpassed the teacher and I worry that others will soon find themselves in the same situation.

First, the carjackings are too easy. In real life, carjacking is a difficult proposition at best. It is a careful dance, choreographed in a haze of Olde English and pot, and must be blocked like a Elizabethan drama. You, the driver, sit quietly at a stop-light. My posse rolls up and whips out a gun, encouraging you you to leave the car. One of my crew comes around to your car and drives off, the light still red. I threaten you with death or sexual violation if you tell the police. And we’re off, playing a jaunty tune on the radio. The chop shop is usually down the way and we can pull in, tear down your car, and prep for another bout in a few hours. It’s hard work and this game makes it looks easy: move to car, open door, convince mark to leave car, and drive away. That is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, dangerous.

Because games lead directly to sexual perversion, I’ve also become well-versed in the art of prostitute wrangling. I have a stable of “ladies,” including Paulo who came from the Dominican Republic and is one of my best “Something different” customer service representatives. While I hoped that GTA IV would expand on the world’s second oldest profession, this game again falls flat. In fact, in the early parts of the game you are encouraged to form a natural loving relationship with a woman. Why? Why bring emotion and feeling into a game that is basically a training system for young pimps?

Finally, I feel that the drug abuse encouraged by the game is the wrong sort. Crack? Cocaine? Who still moves those pharmaceuticals? Meth is the drug of choice these days and there is hardy any mention of this well-known intoxicant in the game. While God will punish the programmers for this oversight, I feel that players must understand that moving snowflakes by the O-Z is no longer as lucrative as it once was. What about human growth hormone? What about snuff film supplies? What about surface-to-air missile sales to unfriendly nations? They rarely, if ever, address this in the games and I find this a horrible oversight.

Video games lead to violence and I’m better for it. But the GTA team hasn’t kept up its end of the bargain. As a professional criminal, I worry that future generations will not be able to use the GTA series to educate and inspire future deviants. The magic of the series used to be its realism and charm. Sadly, however, that charm has lapsed and I encourage violent and mad-eyed youth to turn to comic books and movies for their violent educations and, sadly, to avoid GTA IV.

Welcome to the Unreasonable Stance, where our own John Biggs takes the minority opinion on a tech matter and defends it with convenient data, spun numbers, fanboyism, and insults until he proves, without a doubt, that those that disagree with him are filthy mouth-breathers.

What was the first thing you bought in January 1990? If you said “Food” or “a tankful of gas,” you’re lying or weren’t born then. You bought …But Seriously by Phil Collins. On CD.That CD defined that season and everyone — including you — had it. And why? Because it was a disk and you had to have the disk to enjoy the music, right? And the disk is caught up in the music and the music is caught up in the disk. You might have been hungover, in love, or heartsick, but you bought that album, cracked it open, and put it on your Sony CD player and listened and dreamed and cried.

Try doing that with a download. Try hugging your iPod on a cold January morning, realizing that it was just another day in paradise and there were folks out there who had less than even you. Some people didn’t have CD players. Some people couldn’t afford CDs. Phil Collins spoke through that little silver disk. You opened it up and you saw Phil’s face and you knew he understood what it felt like to be cast off, abandoned, poor. Just like Phil. Albeit with considerably more money.

The CD and the DVD and, soon, Blu-Ray is more than just a flat piece of metal sandwiched betwixt plastic sheets. It’s art made flesh, the corporeal expression of the record executive’s art. You can no sooner sell a song divorced of its shiny plastic coating than you can sell a pair of shoes without a leather upper and a soft, creamy rubber sole. The medium, buds, is the message.

What we fail to understand — and what the record and movie execs do understand — is that access to media should be difficult. You should go through the same heart-wrenching creative birth pangs Phil Collins or Marilyn Manson or Pat Boone goes through every time you go to buy an album. You need to feel alienated at the store, used and misused at the register, and then elated when the finished product finally plops down on the passenger seat of your Ford Probe and you drive home for a bit of solitary listening. Wayne Newton didn’t sing so you could just click a button and download his oeuvre. He sang so a man in a plant in Budapest can stamp out CDs and send those CDs to Scranton and you can go buy that CD. The cast of Police Academy had to suffer to make that movie so it’s the least you can do not to go to a garage sale and buy a used copy on DVD. You go to Tower Records and… wait… you go to Circuit City… wait. You go to Best Buy and maybe Wal-Mart for a while and buy it, pay the tax, and own the music the way Bootsy Collins does. You pay to live the music.

I feel sorry for record labels and movie studios. People like you feel you should get everything for free, every day of the week. You don’t walk up to a theatre expecting to let in with a smile and wave. You pay. You don’t walk up to a hurdy-gurdy player expecting him to dance a jig and twirl out a tune without a tuppence thrown into his jaunty cap. You don’t expect the man who owns a black bear cub to make that black bear cub ride a bicycle without you paying a few kopeks for his trouble? Yet you expect an entire industry to bow down to your every whim — today music on computers, tomorrow on microwaves, the next day on satellites whooshing through space — if you won’t buy their bits of plastic. Is it any wonder that downloading and freeloading have the same number of syllables? You are swine.

It’s interesting that there is so much noise being made about every revision of every model of every phone out there. Why do we bother? Phones have been the same for years, and they’re perfect. The amount of improvement possible is infinitesimal, especially when compared with the fanfare accompanying every press release. We’ve already reached the pinnacle of engineering and usability with the phones we have, so why bother trying to improve them?

Let’s take a look at why this is true. First of all, honestly, is your phone not small enough? I often lose my Samsung Trace in my wallet. My Helio Ocean could be a little thinner, but it’s being revised soon and really most of its functionality is still there in the remarkably small Mysto. But basically their form factors are flawless — to say nothing of the iPhone’s. And I already have both!

What are you hoping “next generation” phones will do? Rock you to sleep? Test for poison? A phone is a phone, and every service you could possibly want is already integrated into this generation of mobiles. You can call anyone in the world from wherever you are. You can check your email, send messages, order pizza, even watch porn. Many phones now have GPS built in, that was pretty much the last piece of the puzzle. Do you need an office suite on your phone? No. Do you need any games more complicated than Bejeweled or Tetris? No. Do you need an integrated taser? Maybe. But really, no matter how much stuff you pack in there, it will never make you as cool as Michael Douglas, and he was phone-cool back when when “bricking” phones meant getting some mortar and building a house with them.

A lot of people are pumped for the big cameras in newer phones. The next generation will have five megapixels! Joy! Of course, the lens is the same one you’d find on a $6 disposable so your pictures will look just as good. And have fun viewing them on a small screen made for showing numbers. The PMP aspect of phones has reached its peak as well; the iPod Touch is a great little gadget, but it’s incompatible with the growing presence of HD. Unless you’ve got yourself one of these, you’re not getting the color and resolution you deserve.

By the way, don’t forget that every useless feature you gain, be it torrent downloading, video wallpaper, or Wi-max capability, every single thing is providing another drain on the battery. And I think we’ve all seen Moore’s law and the convergence trend overtake battery technology. My Trace will last for days and days without a charge. Can you say the same about your iPhone? Just wait for the 3G version or the new Instinct to turn in some honest battery usage reports. You’re going to spend more time tethered to an outlet than actually using the thing.

Seriously. All these people are getting excited over microscopic improvements, or over features they won’t use or will only be able to use for an hour before they’re out of juice. Current phones are tiny, durable, and last forever. The fantasy phones people seem to want can’t be smaller, can only get more fragile, and will die in hours. Everything you need from your phone is in the phone you have in your pocket right now, or at the very most, is available at the your local mobile retailer for a bill or two. And everyone at CTIA and all the other summits, conferences, and trade shows is part of the problem. Stop glorifying this excess. The phones are all right!

Yes, I know, the pac-phone in the top picture is an advanced Linux-based smart phone. But it looks old school if you squint. How come GIS has no side views of old clamshells?

Why are we having a whole week dedicated to this runty OS? You’d think this ridiculous open-source movement was supposed to be the future of computing. Well, it’s time someone took a stand and let the world know what everyone is afraid of saying: Linux sucks. It sucks bad.

I can’t think of a single reason to prefer this motley conglomeration of oddly-named, half-functional applications over an established, warrantee-backed, proven and solid operating system like Windows XP, or Vista.

Let’s be fair, though, and check out the reasons people like these various Linuxes. Surely one of the big draws has to be how free they and their software are. Great! Of course, you can pick up XP for a song these days, or why not Windows 98SE or ME? They work just fine and I see ‘em in bargain bins all the time. Money saved by switching to Linux: $2.99! And the software? True, Photoshop costs hundreds of dollars. But you’re almost certainly going to be getting that cost covered by work, because you don’t really need Photoshop for day-to-day stuff. That’s what Paint is for. And even if you do need to use it at home, you’re probably rich enough to afford it.

Oh, but the wealth of programs available for Linux-based systems! So they say, but how many of them are MIDI composers with command-line interfaces? That wipes out about 40% of the apps available right there, and what about text editors — they make up a solid third of the library right there. The list of everyday, usable applications is no longer than Windows’, and even then there’s the issue of installing them. Nobody wants to spend all their time compiling things or work out exactly which libraries and repositories they need to have access to. Are you crazy? Here’s how it works: go to download.com, type in “cd burner program,” and get whatever’s got the editor’s choice award because those guys know their stuff. Or, failing that, I’ve heard there’s a bay somewhere that has lots of software just floating around.

The whole open source thing bugs me, too. These people are hocking their shady programs, probably built up lego-style from stolen Windows code, and hoping someone will download it and show it to Google or Facebook developers so they can get a job. And if not, there’s always that “donate” button. How can people be so greedy?

Linux sucks for games. What have you got available to Linux systems? Oh, Tux Racer. And don’t forget about America’s Army! Of course, there’s that program Wine, but first there’s the whole hassle of getting it configured right, and then you have to ask yourself, “Did I spend $300 on a new Radeon so I could emulate the latest games?” The answer, my friend, is no. And that’s okay.

So configurable! All those options, right out there in the open. All you have to do is “sudo rub-tummy-pat-head ramalamadingdong -j -5 -343 +$^^ (gno)” and you’re set. The console is straightforward and powerful. Don’t you just love it when this is the interface for your OS:

I hear a lot of servers are switching over to Linux, whatever that means. Whatever helps you sleep at night, guys. I personally would sleep better knowing an enormous corporation is standing behind each one of my boxes like a guardian angel, ready to help me out with well-trained staff in call centers throughout India. As for requests per second and all that technical stuff, I’m going to make an educated guess that that’s mainly to do with the hardware and what’s running on it just changes the error message when it fails.

I wouldn’t recommend Linux to my worst enemy. And as you can imagine I don’t like that guy very much. It’s a jumbled mess of heterogeneous, larval-stage software and overspecialized toys for coders, and there’s less fun to be had on it than OS X. Why do people use it? For the same reason people grow mustaches: chicks dig it.

Everybody’s all a-twitter about Apple’s latest amazing technology, the incomparable “multi-touch.” But what is it exactly that is so great about this? It’s impressive technically, but it doesn’t really seem to be very handy for much of anything.

I’m no enemy of change, or of progress. I welcome more Hertz, higher bandwidth, and slicker interfaces as much as the next guy, and when I saw the YouTube videos of Jeff Han and Perceptive Pixel, I was convinced that the Minority Report era had arrived. But my expectations have had to be adjusted every time reality takes another bite out of fantasy. One moment I’m sweeping my hands across a wall-sized display, soon it’s downsized to picking wines on a cocktail arcade cabinet, and now I’ve been reduced to using a stamp-sized touchpad(.mov) to rotate my photos.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea is cool, but the way it’s being implemented by Apple is pretty weak sauce. What functionality, exactly, is being added here? The ability to pinch and swipe? I can see how an analog zoom might be kind of nice, but it’s really an incredibly small feature. And swiping? Is swiping through your photos really more intuitive or faster than looking at thumbnails? I think not. In fact, while the technology has been promoted as a totally next-generation interface, it’s really only an incremental step forward — where it isn’t a step back.

Apple forcing people to use their new and often deeply flawed products goes back a long way. I can’t be the only one who likes the first iPod’s physical wheel. The dock is another example of how to pretend to innovation while miring the consumer in problematic design masked by eye candy. Multi-touch is just the latest and most high tech wool being pulled over our eyes.

Absent a touchscreen, multi-touch is severely limited in its applications. You can’t, for example, grab two windows at once to switch their positions, because you can’t have two cursors and you don’t know where your “other” finger will show up on screen. You can’t draw with it or select text or parts of images with any kind of speed or accuracy. Because you can’t see where your fingers are on the screen itself, the gestures are limited to relative movements instead of the absolute gestures like you might find on Microsoft’s Surface.

They could have made this into an amazing and versatile tool, but for some reason practicality isn’t in Apple’s playbook lately. Here’s an idea, just off the top of my head: Put three fingers down. Move your index finger down and it pulls down the Apple menu. Selects when you lift up your finger. Or use your middle finger to pull down the application menu, your ring finger to pull down file or whatever. Why isn’t this the new thing you can do? I can already rotate my photos quickly and easily, or do pixel-perfect orientations with the align tool. Why do you need to add another way? Yet I’ve been pulling down menus the same old-fashioned way for going on 20 years now. Why not really revolutionize something, Apple? Why not think differently and change the game like you used to? You disappoint me.

Of course, the benefit of going there is that you will actually be there. But ask yourself why you want to be there? You want to see the sights, to hear the people, to taste the food. But we live in a world of both technological marvels and international urban communities. Put on a pith helmet, go down to your local Eritrean cuisine place, and flip open that laptop. What with Wikipedia, National Geographic, Flickr, YouTube, and everything else, you’ll learn more about the culture and see more of the sights over dinner than you would on a two-week tour. Ask the manager to tell you about life in Africa. You’ll be doing more than 90% of travelers anyway. Think of the average tourist’s : fly to the airport, take an AC-cooled cab to the air-conditioned hotel room, then go on an air-conditioned tour and take the same pictures as everyone else, eat some dumbed-down local food, then spend the evening with a bunch of other tourists, reading Stephen King by the pool.

The point is that we hardly leave our homes when we travel now anyway. So why bother doing it? You’re not going to discover and excavate a new temple. You’re not going to carry on a steamy affair with a local princess and move on to save the world, a la Final Fantasy. But you are going to set yourself back a thousand clams and cause yourself a lot of stress. You will face Montezuma (or the Maharaja’s) revenge, and you may even be disappointed with your destination. Why bother? From your desk or a cafe you can see everything worthwhile, and do it on your terms.

You’re probably thinking I’m crazy. Well, maybe I am. But that’s just because I have crazy love for HD DVD and have faith that it will end up on top of this little format scuffle. The “coup” by Blu-Ray has inspired some interesting, if misguided satire (Godwin alert), and convinced the easily swayed masses of critics that yes, it’s over. But it’s far from over — and this was only a glancing blow. HD DVD will bounce back for the knockout punch.

They’ve still got a war chest, and they’re still willing to throw down, as we saw during the Super Bowl. $30 mil? No problem. When you’ve got $150 HD DVD players selling like hotcakes, you can afford to drop that kind of cheese. Sure, the PS3 is now coming into its own and is the “best Blu-Ray player,” but is your dad going to buy a $500 game console when all he wants to do is watch the Bourne Trilogy in HD? No, he’s going to go to Best Buy and pick up an HD DVD player and a ton of movies that are already out — as you know, HD DVD still has a tremendous selection despite some studios’ vacillating loyalties.

That’s a key point: an installed base. $150 is a birthday present, it’s practically an impulse buy. And the studios aren’t going to ignore the millions who decide that they’d rather go HD DVD and put that other $300 towards, oh, I don’t know, movies.

So what else is at that price point? Well, the Apple TV for one thing. But streaming video is still a pipe dream. People like discs (call it “force of habit”) and they don’t like being told when and where they can watch their movies. Apple TV is great for what it is, but a recent test of HD streaming video was worrying; people aren’t getting what they think they’re paying for just yet. It’ll get better, sure, but people have money now, and HD DVD’s superior compression puts its image quality above Blu-Ray, to say nothing of shady streaming stuff.

At this point, the studio count doesn’t even matter. They all hauled butt to get the best movies they had released for either player or both, so 90% of the library is ready to go; the rest is new releases, and who wants those? And with an installed user base growing with every bill-and-a-half set-top box, distributors can’t afford to ignore the whole market segment. Anyway, Paramount is still hanging out, and I don’t know if you’ve heard of a little thing called Star Trek, but combined with Iron Man and Cloverfield, I think we’ve got a pretty solid season coming up.

So don’t lose hope, HD DVD lovers. We, with our cheap players, great image quality, and solid library, will overcome. The studios are a fickle lot but they’ll soon realize their mistake. Microsoft (and possibly Micrahoo!soft) has got our back, and if all else fails, we’ll always have Transformers.

Vote Republican and we will witness a tech revolution. Tax cuts for corporations and allowing lobbyists unrestricted access to legislators will grease the wheels of industry and soon all minor players will be crushed under the heel of the majors: Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and all their subsidiaries and manufacturers will run roughshod over the younger companies who have yet to own a single senator or interest group. Good god! you say. It sounds like a calamity more than a revolution! So it seems at first, but by the end of a few years, you will see why I endorsed this course of action.

As people have arrived voluntarily at a restrictive two-party system in which the main difference is in which income segment gets bigger tax breaks, and in which innovation is stifled in favor of pandering and satisfying special interests, so will we model the tech industry: monolithic companies like great nations, tentacular with arms and divisions, will meet all needs and provide the comfort of small improvements on the products you already own and know. Because the post-9/11 technological world is like the political landscape: tumultuous and unpredictable. People will appreciate a little security, and planned obsolescence will become either universal or cease to exist, depending on your perspective.

What we need now is not innovation, but standards. As the smaller companies are eliminated, the number of drivers, interfaces, and proprietary workflows will dwindle until there are only a few. No longer will you have to worry about converting your video from AVI to MPG or from composite to DVI; there will be only one cable, and there will be only one codec. And who wouldn’t want that?

In the interest of security, a state operating system will be named. After all, the cyber-terrorists will find us vulnerable in our state of division – only in unification will we find safety. Obviously, Vista will be the OS of choice, though OSX will be allowed to remain as a niche OS, though Mac users will be put on a(nother) watch list for endangering their data-neighbors. I know we don’t all agree that Vista is the best option, but when it’s the only option I’m sure you’ll find it quite useable. We might even get a discount on state-sponsored software! And America’s Army will come pre-installed on every computer.

The progressive policies of people like Barack Obama will lead to nothing but chaos. With a hundred thousand companies inventing, coding and refining, it will be impossible for the consumer to choose the best! And free, open source software will provide another confounding factor: code junkies slapping together Franken-apps ridden with borrowed structures and designed for interoperability instead of standalone functionality. The internet will descend into madness: a primordial ooze of blogs, user-generated content, and ideologically dangerous social networks. But we have a choice. With a bought candidate like Huckabee whose main interest is in satisfying his campaign contributors and establishing a unified American culture, the tech majors will be able to curb competition and dominate the market completely.

So if you favor a vast wilderness of formats, a free market of ideas, and the endless tail-eating of free and open source software’s constant self-improvement, go with TechCrunch’s recommendation of Obama or even McCain. But if you’re tired of choice, happy with the status quo (whatever they tell you it is), and don’t mind stepping on the little guy every once in a while, vote as Right as you can. You probably won’t regret it!

Unreasonable Stance is a column in which one CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.

Smartphones are like custom Nikes in a world of 10-peso tourist-shop flip-flops. I can’t think of a reason to pick the flip-flops unless you’re going swimming, and that doesn’t even make sense for the purposes of this metaphor. The point is that smartphones do everything regular phones do, but better, faster, and harder. And entirely separate from that fact, they also do things regular phones don’t even dream of. But Let’s at least be fair and look at the reasons why you might not have a smartphone.

Can’t afford it? Well, you pay $60/mo. for your 1000 minutes and unlimited texts, and you probably paid $50-100 for a relatively nice phone, a RAZR or something no doubt. Well, if you check out our Smartphones Now features, you’ll find you can get a Palm Centro for $100 and a plan with Sprint for about $80.

An extra $20 a month is not going to break the bank, fools. Admit it, you’re being cheap. Next time you take a girl out on a date, cook her dinner instead – there, you saved that $20, plus she thinks you’re the man. Ladies, that works for you too. The cost is negligible, and I won’t accept it as an excuse.

You say you don’t need it? Please, I think I know what you need. What does your phone do, call people? Send messages that you have to type out with the number keys? Wow, welcome to the year 2002! Seriously, let’s take a look at what’s on offer here:

Service	Your phone	Smartphone
Calls people	Yes	Yes
Sends messages	Using number keys	Using QWERTY
Web Browser	None, or crippled	Full HTML, native or Opera
Cool 3rd party apps	Not likely	Tons
GPS	No chance	Free and built-in
Media Player	Cheesy, crippled if even present	Full-on
Use as laptop modem	Please	Costs an extra $15 but yeah
Other stuff	There is no other stuff	List goes on forever

It’s almost 2008, and when your phone can have most of the useful capabilities of a laptop and for a fraction of the price, to choose not to use a smartphone would be most illogical.

Buying a regular phone is like investing in brontosaurus futures. You might as well get a rotary phone for all the use you’re going to get out of a standard flip-phone. My phone can practically run Crysis, and they’re still trying to get Tetris working properly on yours. You could be carrying Wikipedia, Google Maps, 20 games, Myspace, your work and home email, and so on around with you, in a package just a little bigger than your current phone. My list of apps is probably longer than your actual phone. And why not? None of these features are extraneous, none are unnecessary – all are essential for everyday use anywhere other than the farm. Furthermore, the almost excessively usable UIs in such mobile OSes as Windows Mobile 5 and Symbian make navigating all this rich content as easy as taking candy from a sleeping baby. If you don’t have a smartphone, or don’t at the very least want one by now, the only explanation is that you’re an anachronism, a luddite grubbing around at the bottom of the technological latter for fear of being too awesome.

The whole world is moving to smartphones. They’re not just for business guys any more – there’s far more to them than just checking your office email. In Japan they’re already on a next-gen network, doing two-way video chat and buying pop with their mobiles – and this comes standard. Of course, we don’t have that functionality in the USA or too many other places yet – and why do you think that is? Because of people like you, pouring money into an archaic system that’s nothing more than a telecom scam to keep their old network in place. So not only is it cost-effective and practical to get a smartphone, it’s also a moral imperative.

It’s been shown that people using smartphones are rated as more attractive by the opposite sex and more intimidating by rivals. This comes as no surprise, since a smartphone is a statement of competence and capability. Once merely the sign of a pompous showoff trying to impress everyone else in the Starbucks line, now they are a necessity and a gift to humanity. So I say this to you: get a smartphone, or at least make a show of trying, or risk being rightly labeled as a bumbling technophobe and social failure.

Unreasonable Stance is a column in which one CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.

Touchscreens and their relatives have been around for a long time. For more than a decade, the touchscreen’s little brother, the touchpad, has dominated the laptop pointer motion sector. To be honest, it wasn’t even necessary, as the precision and comfort provided by the pointer nubbin on so many Thinkpads is still amazing. Not to mention the fact that so much space is wasted on either side of the touchpad. From a design perspective, the touchpad was a disaster. And I don’t even want to think about the wear and tear on my poor finger pads from all the swiping back and forth – I’ve probably had to regrow my fingerprint 20 times since they changed from the nubbin. And don’t get me started on the iPod’s scroll wheel – we all know it was better when it actually spun.

So we’ve moved up from the touchpad to the touchscreen, now. Durability is the first thing. You’ve got sensitive electronics millimeters from your fingernails, styluses (styli?), pens, and Swiss Army knives. What are the chances of that complex fabric of resistors and pressure detectors is going to remain unscathed for long? This is a dangerous world we live in, and when the most complicated and essential part of your gadget is located right there on the outside, you’re just asking for trouble. Next problem: satisfaction! It just doesn’t feel right to touch something that doesn’t give any affection back. Face it, people like buttons, plus they have seniority. You know when you’ve clicked them, they don’t move around, and they’re always in the same place. Touchscreens have been at checkout counters for years and they still can’t get the buttons straight, but when you’ve got a physical numberic keypad, along with “yes/enter” and “no/cancel” buttons, there’s no way to get it wrong.

And let’s look at the evidence around us: touchscreens have been available for a long time, but how many do you own and actually use? I notice your keyboard is covered in little buttons. Your mouse has buttons, not to mention the fact that it’s a hundred times more sensitive and responsive than a touchscreen. There are buttons on your monitor, your TV controller, your gamepad, and you know that in the situation room under the White House, there’s a big red button - not a touchscreen with “launch/don’t launch” options on it. There are even buttons on your iPhone.

Lastly, let’s look at the future: do you see touchscreens anywhere in it? Yeah, if you believe Minority Report, which was probably funded by the Scientologist-dominated touchscreen lobby. But if you believe Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell, we’re gonna move right past touchscreens to the real deal where you won’t have to worry about rubbing your fingertips off onto some dirty screen, because you’ll be surfing the net using your mind. Even before we reach that point, stuff like the Wii and Logitech MX Air have the right idea, taking natural movements and gestures and making them into either shorthand for actions or precision pointing machines. The touchscreen is a flash in the pan, people, and buttons aren’t going anywhere.

Unreasonable Stance is a column in which one CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.

When their candy computer gets trampled by a wildebeast, I bet those kids are going to be wishing they had Volume Shadow Copy going on their external hard drive. They’re going to be wishing real hard — but no amount of wishing can put a “Vista-Capable” sticker on that green machine.

I appreciate the effort these OLPC guys are putting out to arm each kid with a state-of-the-art etch-a-sketch, but let’s face it: without training on the world’s gold standard OS, they’re going to be totally unprepared when they arrive for a job interview a year from now, and show themselves completely incapable of organizing their Sidebar. Of course, I guess the businesses might be running XP — yeah right!

Unreasonable Stance is a column in which one CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.

Pac-Man controls better. With zen-like simplicity, the control scheme of Pac-Man is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, like a haiku. A chimp can and has learned to play – and well! – but only a master can grasp the subtleties so cunningly hidden beneath that 4-way joystick. Meanwhile, the nightmarishly complex interacting analog motions of the Xbox’s control sticks, combined with a virtual candy store of colored, lettered, and numbered buttons, makes control of Mr. Chief an inexact science at best, and a sloppy art at worst.

Pac-Man looks better. Take a gander at this screenshot – I dare you to count the objects on screen. The pellets alone defy enumeration. Notice, as well, the vibrant and well-chosen color scheme and (if you can) imagine the smooth animation giving life to each character. Halo, by comparison, is mostly green and gray, the diluted colors of diluted art direction. Not only that, but your viewpoint is limited to what is in front of you, while Pac-Man lets you enjoy the entire game world at once.

Which has better graphics? Ummm… Pac-Man is in color! Duh!

Pac-Man plays better. What is it exactly that Halo‘s much-touted AI allows its 3 types of enemies to do? Hide behind rocks? Shoot in your general direction? Bravo, Bungie! The mental capacity of a caterpillar, brilliantly emulated by the wonders of modern technology. Pac-Man, however, not only boasts more kinds of enemies (4), but a greater variety of behavior. Each ghost has its own personality, offering both varied gameplay and food for deep thought: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde each represent a different fundamental philosophy in the face of danger. Who do you identify with? The warrior? The copycat? The lurker? Or perhaps… the coward?

Is there anything at which Halo betters Pac-Man? I will admit that in its storyline, Halo approaches this. But the skill with which Pac-Man completely, but almost undetectably, lampoons the modern human condition is too much for Halo‘s space-opera yarn to aspire to, despite its epic scope. Pac-Man established video games as serious narrative art, and when Ms. Pac-Man was released in 1982, it showed they could be sexy, too.

But let’s be even-handed here; what are some of the criticisms of Pac-Man? “It’s the same level, over and over!” Oh wait, that’s a criticism of Halo. “The main character doesn’t have a face!” Oops, Halo again! You see, you can’t fight it. Even after 20 years of “innovation,” Halo can’t take on Pac-Man on a level playing field.

Unreasonable Stance is a column in which on CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.

It’s been a few months since the iPhone first graced the world stage and I’ve owned mine since September, entering the fray only after the price drop made it worth picking up. So here we are, holidays upon us, and the iPhone — actually, probably the Touch — promising to be a big seller for the 16-to-95 set.

Well, friends, I’m going to make a case against the iPhone. Although I believe it’s a break-through product, it is not, in fact, all that and a bag of chips. Even if the chips were good.

What is the iPhone? It’s a PDA disguised as a media device disguised as the second coming of Jeebus. While I own one and use one, there are phones out there that do a better job at everything the iPhone does without complaint. Need email? Get a Blackberry. Need instant messaging? Get a Sidekick. Need an operating system so poorly designed that it causes physical illness? Get anything running Windows Mobile 6. Just rethink your iPhone purchase.

Apple is good at a few things. They make icons pop and move like Sugar Ray and can make a photo-realistic icon like nobody else. Sure, we’re big Apple lovers over here at CG, but let’s run down the RAZR spec list and the iPhone spec list and see what this $99 (free with rebate) phone has on the iPhone.

So there you have it, friends. Do you like apples? How do you like them apples.