Word: plasticizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Words: Plastic Logic What everyone really wants, of course, is the iPod of e?readers. It was Steve Jobs who first understood the power of a killer device. After he created the iPod and linked it to the iTunes Music Store, people started paying for songs again, and to date, Apple has sold more than 6 billion of them. Jobs duplicated that model with the Apple App Store, which offers more than 15,000 apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Might Apple be able to work the same magic for the publishing industry? Jobs once said...
Even more industry buzz these days surrounds Plastic Logic, a Silicon Valley stealth start-up just north of Apple. Everything in the reader it's developing will be made of plastic, from its non-LCD screen to its transistors. Recently I got a look at a Plastic Logic prototype. Like the iPhone, it's little more than a touchscreen, 8.5 in. by 11 in. (22 cm by 28 cm), linked wirelessly (like the Kindle) via a high-speed cellular network to a store that will support on-demand transactions of under a dollar. There are just two problems. Because everything...
Other sonic tricks have had their moment--notably Peter Frampton's "talk- box," a plastic tube that made his guitar sound as if it were talking--but in skilled hands, Auto-Tune is the rare gimmick that can lead to innovation. On T-Pain's latest album, Thr33 Ringz, tracks like "Karaoke" and "Chopped N Skrewed" literally bounce between notes, giving the record a kids-on--Pop Rocks exuberance. Using the same program, West's 808s & Heartbreak is the complete opposite--angsty, slow and brutally introspective. West sings throughout, and while he couldn't have hit most of the notes...
...computer and map out songs on a visual grid. You can cut at one point on the grid and paste at another, just as in word-processing, but making sure the cuts match up requires the even pitch that Auto-Tune provides. "It usually ends up just like plastic surgery," says a Grammy-winning recording engineer. "You haul out Auto-Tune to make one thing better, but then it's very hard to resist the temptation to spruce up the whole vocal, give everything a little nip-tuck." Like plastic surgery, he adds, more people have had it than...
Which is not to say that wanting cosmetic surgery is necessarily a sign of illness. The Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery paper makes the point that most of those who have realistic expectations about what cosmetic procedures can accomplish are happy with the results. They know they won't look like a supermodel even if the best surgeon is wielding the scalpel. Rivers says that everyone can "be beautiful," which just isn't true, at least not on the surface. The beautiful wouldn't look beautiful unless they looked better than the rest of us. But I do agree with Rivers...