Erica Sadun: Nostradumbass

Supposedly Erica Sadun is some sort of high poten­tate of the iPhone devel­op­ment com­mu­nity, which I guess explains why pub­li­ca­tions like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) go to her for com­men­tary. But, given the fact that she has the log­i­cal skills of a young-earth cre­ation­ist, they should really stop. Case in point: an arti­cle posted today on TUAW titled App Store approvals and the tablet: why it mat­ters. That’s right kid­dies, it’s another arti­cle about unicorns.

Erica starts out with an observation:

When iTunes Connect returned after its Christmas break, devel­op­ers noticed that things had changed quite a bit on the App Store approval front. Applications that had for­merly taken ten to four­teen days to work through review were now get­ting processed in a cou­ple of days or less. The upshot? Happier devel­op­ers, bet­ter bug releases for users, and a health­ier App Store ecosystem.

Good so far, this is fac­tual and draws a con­clu­sion that fol­lows log­i­cally from the premise. The rail-jumping begins imme­di­ately after:

There’s another con­se­quence of the new, speed­ier approvals: the tablet. With the device due to ship March/April (late Q1, early Q2), and no announced 4.0 SDK, devel­op­ers were left won­der­ing how

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Huhwhat?

For the love of Satan, is it really too much to ask that sites that pur­port to report on tech­ni­cal mat­ters do at least a lit­tle research or even have the slight­est clue about what they’re talk­ing about? Case in point: this arti­cle by Stan Schroeder on Mashable. I really don’t give two shits about the fact that Roy Batty’s great-grandpappy runs Flash, but this quote enrages me.

If you’re an iPhone owner, you prob­a­bly don’t want to hear about Flash. Full sup­port for Adobe’s rich media tech­nol­ogy has been promised for the iPhone many times, but it’s still not there yet.

Really Stan? Full sup­port for Flash on the iPhone has been promised? Who made those fuck­ing promises Stan? Because it sure as hell wasn’t Apple. You know Apple, don’t you Stan? The mother-fuckers who con­trol every bit of soft­ware that makes it onto the iPhone.

For fuck’s sake, how hard is it really to actu­ally have some min­i­mal under­stand­ing about a topic before you start spout­ing off about it? At this rate I might as well start a blog detail­ing my expe­ri­ences as a poor black share-cropper in 1940’s Alabama. I have about as much expe­ri­ence with

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A New Low for TechCrunch

Gods know I hate TechCrunch. Fuck, they’re prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for at least a third of the mate­r­ial for the Angry Mac Bastards pod­cast. But yes­ter­day, TechCrunch and Erik Schonfeld sank to an abysmal new low.

In the arti­cle, which is so dis­jointed and point­less that it makes the aver­age third – grader’s book report look like a master’s the­sis, Shonfeld cas­ti­gates DeviantART (an online artis­tic com­mu­nity com­posed of user – sub­mit­ted works) for the fact that the one hun­dred mil­lionth user sub­mis­sion, or “devi­a­tion” as they are styled, hap­pens to be a gay sex story. I hon­estly can’t get what Shonfeld is going on about here. Is he offended by the sub­ject mat­ter, or just jeal­ous that the peo­ple at DeviantArt actu­ally pro­duce some­thing other than pro­pa­ganda for Google and end­less com­edy mate­r­ial for those of us bag­ging on the CrunchPad? Or, as is most likely given that this is TecCrunch, is he just trolling for links to keep his mas­ter Arrington from bust­ing out the cat-o-nine-tails and pun­ish­ment dildo?

Whatever the moti­va­tion, the arti­cle is rep­re­hen­si­ble. Seriously, how dare a jumped up tabloid like TechCrunch crit­i­cize DeviantART. It’s true that a large chunk of the mate­r­ial on DeviantART

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Damned if You Do…

Since essen­tially Day One of the iPhone saga there have been con­stant com­plaints about AT&T’s ser­vice. While I reject the a pri­ori con­clu­sion that any net­work that merely pos­sesses the prop­erty of “not-AT&T” would nec­es­sar­ily be bet­ter, no one in their right mind would attempt to argue that every­thing has been rain­bows and uni­corn jiz­zum. That’s why it’s heart­en­ing to see things like the email I received recently from AT&T inform­ing me of a new cell tower being deployed in my neigh­bor­hood, or the release of the AT&T Marks the Spot app in the App Store [iTunes link]. It’s a bril­liant idea really, use the power of crowd-sourcing to gather the data needed to effi­ciently upgrade your infra­struc­ture. Scoble must be giddy.

Of course, noth­ing can appease the per­pet­ual whin­ers and AT&T bash­ers; so The Unofficial Apple Web Log ran this turd by Mel Martin yes­ter­day: AT&T offers app so you can report crappy ser­vice. Huh?

The dumb starts quickly:

In one of life’s supreme ironies, AT&T today posted an iPhone app that allows you to report sub­stan­dard ser­vice. That’s right folks. Got a dropped call? No recep­tion? AT&T Marks the Spot … is designed to get that

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Case in Point

No sooner do I com­ment on the overly cred­u­lous com­men­tary being offered up by the techno-sphere regard­ing the ChromeOS announce­ment than I notice this wretchedly mis-titled arti­cle over at TechCrunch: “Google Is Keeping Chrome OS Simple. Maybe Too Simple.

Now, to be fair, this is Erick Schonfeld, and his deep abid­ing love of the Google-cock is well doc­u­mented, so I shouldn’t be sur­prised. But quotes like this really take things to a new level:

Rather than sup­port Android apps and other sorts of apps, there is only one kind of app Google is inter­ested in: the Web app. Chrome OS is all about mak­ing Web apps the only apps you will ever need. Which kind of makes you won­der how long we’ll need Android apps, or iPhone apps for that mat­ter, because you know it is only a mat­ter of time before a phone comes out run­ning on Chrome OS.

Seriously, Chrome web apps are now going to erad­i­cate stand­alone Android or iPhone apps? The same web apps that Steve Jobs pro­posed two years ago and was widely, and rightly derided over? Web apps cer­tainly have their place, but to even sug­gest that a phone run­ning noth­ing

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Morons

blurb

PC World dou­bles down on the stu­pid. Fuck you Ian Paul you cheap twat.

Ride of the Entitletards

So, the dip-shits at Psystar had their day in court, and the court punched them square in the junk. You can read all about the legal deci­sion at Groklaw. But I don’t want to write about the deci­sion itself. Suffice it to say that I agree with the Groklaw analy­sis. No, I want to com­ment on the absolutely exe­crable com­men­tary on the deci­sion from the retards at PC World.

As always with this sort of puke, the stu­pid starts right away with the headline:

Apple Wins Hollow Victory In Psystar Ruling

Really, a “hol­low vic­tory?” I rather imag­ine that Apple doesn’t see the absolute destruc­tion of Psystar as a “hol­low vic­tory.” Nor do I imag­ine that they’re any­thing but orgas­mic to have a court uphold their argu­ments regard­ing the enforce­abil­ity of the OS X End User License Agreement (EULA) as it per­tains to third-party resellers. So, over­all not so “hol­low” after all.

But the stu­pid don’t stop there. The first para­graph re-introduces us to an old friend:

A fed­eral judge has ruled in Apple’s favor in its law­suit against Mac-clone maker Psystar. Prevailing in the court bat­tle seems like it should be a good thing, but what Apple

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Rob Enderle Is a Fucking Madman

Presented, with­out addi­tional com­ment, the open­ing para­graph of Rob’s lat­est flight of fancy:

This is likely to point with Apple this month as they sit stunned that Windows 7 is doing so well and they are left look­ing fool­ish with prod­ucts priced out of the seg­ment. Their big news this week was a cou­ple of PCs, a new key­board and a multi-touch mouse. This last will likely go down in his­tory as one of the lamest devices yet as they should know, given the iPhone, that touch is con­nected to the screen and not any­thing else. They likely would have done bet­ter putting fir on the damn thing and build­ing it to fart the star span­gled ban­ner at least that would have been patriotic.

Can some­one check and make sure that Rob isn’t hav­ing a psy­chotic episode?

Wah, Wah, Wah Goes the Pundit.

I debated doing a proper tear – down of this piece of self – indul­gent tripe from the usu­ally a bit more astute than this Merlin Mann. It cer­tainly has all of the tropes that send me into parox­ysms of rage: Apple as cult, the impli­ca­tion that Snow Leopard is just a “ser­vice pack,” the inabil­ity to under­stand Apple’s mar­ket­ing of Snow Leopard, douchebaggy faux – con­ver­sa­tions between the author and an anthro­po­mor­phized Apple. Really, it’s a New Media Douchefestival of delights. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. Instead I’ll offer just a few thoughts.

I get it Merlin, you’re an idiot who rushed into an OS upgrade because, like every other dip – shit in the tech pun­di­toc­racy, you are obsessed with the new shiny and, like a fuck­ing rac­coon, you can’t resist grab­bing for it. I get that, again like the rest of the pun­di­toc­racy you aren’t capa­ble of lis­ten­ing when Apple said clearly that Snow Leopard was not going to be about new fea­tures (except for Exchange). I get that it’s eas­ier to blame Apple instead of your beloved devel­op­ers who couldn’t be arsed to upgrade their soft­ware in time for Snow Leopard,

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Death Panels and Advocate Judges

Presented, for your moral out­rage, one Antonin Scalia, who is of the opin­ion that inno­cence is no bar­rier to impos­ing the death penalty. There is so much to be said about this topic. but I have nei­ther the time nor the avail­able blood pres­sure. I will, how­ever offer these brief thoughts:

This is the true face of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment in America. It’s not the deluded and delu­sional tools who answer Fox News’ call to dis­rupt health­care town halls. It’s not the closet racists who are fast run­ning out of slurs to throw at President Obama, and who seethe in frus­tra­tion at the fact that a nig­ger is in the White House. It’s not even the cor­po­rate douchebags who are will­ing to play nice with any­one as long as the prof­its keep rolling in. All these are either tools or opportunists.

The true face of American con­ser­v­a­tive thought are men like Antonin Scalia. Men who are so absolutely amoral, that to call them “evil” is an insult to true evil. These are men who are so morally bank­rupt, so locked into their psy­chotic fear of los­ing sta­tus and power that they are essen­tially sociopaths. These men can­not be reasoned

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