Why Most of the Tech Media Should Be Launched Into the Sun

November 16th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk
aihomepage

In the run-up to today’s mas­sive Apple announce­ment (it’s just the Beatles in iTunes) I noticed the fol­low­ing pair of head­lines on AppleInsider’s homepage.


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Fuck Jizzmodo

April 20th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

I’m not going to go into specifics about what hap­pened, or the time­line of events. If you fol­low Mac news you know what I’m talk­ing about, if you don’t then here is a quick run­down. Jizzmodo (I hereby refuse to ever type Gizmodo again) posted a story with details and pic­tures of a pur­ported pro­to­type next-generation iPhone. It was then revealed that Jizzmodo paid an unnamed party who had stolen (yes, stolen) the phone from an Apple engi­neer for the device. Jizzmodo then felt com­pelled to pub­licly humil­i­ate the poor bas­tard who had the phone stolen from him.

Jizzmodo’s behav­ior in this mat­ter has been rep­re­hen­si­ble, and through­out has been laden with the douchebag atti­tude that they seem to think passes for wit. And let’s be absolutely clear here. This isn’t an “Apple’s tyran­ni­cal secrecy” issue here. It could be any company’s prod­uct and I would feel the same way about the shit-smears at Jizz. Because, in the end, it’s not about the leak. I mean, whoop-ti-fucking-do, we now have “con­fir­ma­tion” of a fea­ture set that any­one with a halfway func­tion­ing pre-frontal cor­tex could have pre­dicted. And if you think that the case is some­thing that Jonny Ive would put

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Dave Winer Is Terminally Confused

April 6th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

While I grind out the soul crush­ing weeks until I can actu­ally have my iPad I’ve been wait­ing for that one spe­cial iPad arti­cle that would unleash my cre­ative rage. The blog post with that cer­tain some­thing that would push it above the gen­eral morass of inanity that we’ll be scream­ing about on Ye Olde Angry Mac Bastards pod­cast this week. Thank Satan for that cranky old fuck­wit Dave Winer for step­ping up to the plate for me. The head­line is: Is iPad a game-changer?

Of course, with that head­line you know you’re in for a world of stu­pid. First we have the clas­sic troll method of pre­sent­ing your the­sis in the form of the neg­a­tive response to the ques­tion you’ve posed. Of course Dave Winer doesn’t think that the iPad is a game changer, only a drool­ing fool would ever expect that. Also, side note to Dave: “is the iPad a game changer?” Fuck man, arti­cles aren’t just the things that you pre­tend to read Playboy for! Second, who gives a monkey’s fuck if the iPad is a “game-changer”? What the fuck is a “game-changer” any­way. Try eval­u­at­ing the iPad based on some­thing other than straw­man arguments

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The Holy Grail of Dumbassery

March 16th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Sweet mer­ci­ful Allah! This post (and the related com­ments) on Prince McDildo’s Roughly Drafted site is the per­fect storm of dip­shit­tery. It’s got it all: con­spir­acy, tech­ni­cal inac­cu­racy, reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism, global cli­mate change denial and cre­ation­ism. It’s like a rift opened between our uni­verse and a uni­verse of pure stupid.

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Occam’s Razor Is Rusty

March 8th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

It’s no stun­ning rev­e­la­tion to reg­u­lar read­ers that I think that there is an appalling lack of crit­i­cal think­ing skills amongst the so-called “experts” who make up the tech press. With very few excep­tions the default process for the tech media seems to be to run sto­ries with­out the slight­est hint of inves­ti­ga­tion, ver­i­fi­ca­tion, or even inde­pen­dent thought. Case in point, a story that began mak­ing the rounds last week about Apple exert­ing it’s DRACONIAN CONTROL to remove all WiFi “snif­fer” appli­ca­tions. A typ­i­cally crap­tac­u­lar exam­ple of the “report­ing” sur­round­ing the issue can be found in this arti­cle at the Cult of Mac blog. To quote:

Apple sent a note to the devel­oper of WiFi-Where on Wednesday say­ing their app has been removed because it uses “a pri­vate frame­work to access wifi information.”

What this pri­vate frame­work is, nei­ther Apple nor the devel­oper explain.

The prob­lem is the sec­ond sen­tence. Apple, of course isn’t explain­ing what the “pri­vate frame­work” is, because Apple hasn’t offered any fuck­ing com­ment on this sit­u­a­tion. Nor should they. Apple rejects hun­dreds of appli­ca­tions a week. They owe expla­na­tions to the devel­op­ers, but not to ran­dom blog­gers and jour­nal­ists. More impor­tantly though,

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iPad, Letters.app and Nerd Myopia

February 1st, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

As any­one read­ing this blog is almost cer­tainly aware, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad last week; and the tech world col­lec­tively lost their fuck­ing minds. As I’ve already opined, I think that Fraser Speirs has writ­ten the best analy­sis of the col­lec­tive pants-shitting and I would highly rec­om­mend read­ing Fraser’s arti­cle if you haven’t already. Flying some­what under the radar dur­ing all this bab­ble was another phe­nom­e­non which I think pro­vides an inter­est­ing par­al­lel to some of the ideas that Fraser artic­u­lates so well.

If you fol­low me on Twitter, you may have noticed ref­er­ences to some­thing called “Letters.app.” For those unaware, here is some back­ground. Earlier this month devel­oper Brent Simmons put out a call-to-arms for the devel­op­ment of a new email client to fit the needs of “devel­op­ers and power-users.” The argu­ment being that all extant instances of email clients (specif­i­cally for the Mac OS, but pre­sum­ably for all plat­forms) are lack­ing in some way that makes them unsuit­able for “devel­op­ers and power-users.” The goal of the project, soon dubbed Letters.app was to har­ness the skills and cre­ativ­ity of the indie Mac devel­op­ment com­mu­nity to build the per­fect beast. Shortly after­wards, the project com­pletely and very publicly

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iPads, “Hackers” and the Death of Computing

January 29th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Inevitably, amongst the rest of the inane wail­ing about the iPad in the last 48 hours, the old “closed sys­tem” meme has reared its tired head. The par­tic­u­lar form of that meme that I want to focus on is a par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing vari­ant and one that is best expressed by Alex Payne in his blog post On the iPad. In yon­der post Alex makes the assertion:

The thing that both­ers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real com­puter as a kid, I’d never be a pro­gram­mer today. I’d never have had the abil­ity to run what­ever stu­pid, poten­tially harm­ful, hugely edu­ca­tional pro­grams I could down­load or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tin­ker on the com­puter at all hours with­out wak­ing my par­ents. The iPad may be a boon to tra­di­tional educ­tion, inso­far as it allows for mul­ti­me­dia text­books and such, but in its cur­rent form, it’s a detri­ment to the sort of hacker cul­ture that has pro­pelled the dig­i­tal economy.

Perhaps, but let me counter with a bit of my own his­tory. My first computer

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The Calm Before the Storm

January 26th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk
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Well, my lovelies, tomor­row all will be revealed. I’m about to ensconce myself within the med­i­ta­tion cham­ber of the Fortress of Disquietude until the magic hour is upon us. See you on the other side.

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Today’s New Media Douchebag Moment…

January 13th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk
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…cour­tesy of Scoble. Short ver­sion: I’ve been to China twice in my life­time. Now let me spend 1150 words pon­tif­i­cat­ing about how busi­ness is done there. Oh, and my com­menters are syco­phan­tic dipshits.

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Erica Rides the Crazy Train, Again

January 12th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

As if to taunt me, TUAW just ran another arti­cle from prog­nos­ti­ca­tor extra­or­di­naire Erica Sadun that bog­gles the mind: Enough already with the dra­con­ian NDAs, Apple. This time, instead of con­sult­ing her crys­tal ball about the myth­i­cal iTablet, Erica takes time out of her busy sched­ule of huff­ing glue to com­plain about the NDA that Apple has slapped on on the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK. You know, the SDK that doesn’t fuck­ing exist yet.

Enough of this crap. Speculation about a prod­uct that Apple almost cer­tainly will intro­duce in the next month is one thing, but this bla­tant link-baiting is ridiculous.

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