technology « The Angry Drunk

Why Steve Jobs Is (Legitimately) Pissed at the Media

By The Angry Drunk

I wasn’t present at Friday’s special iPhone 4 Press Conference held by Apple at their Cupertino Campus, but I followed the excellent live coverage from Jason Snell at Macworld. Ignoring the specifics of the announcements (spoiler: there is no fucking recall you fucktards), one thing jumped out at me: Steve Jobs was palpably angry with the media.

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Ian Betteridge Is a Smart Guy

By The Angry Drunk

Insightful commentary from Ian on the myth that “programing” is the only valid form of creativity. I couldn’t agree more.

Gruber Gets It Right

By The Angry Drunk

I haven’t written much about the supposedly impending Apple Tablet device, mainly because I’m not in the business of tech–prognostication. If you’ve listened to the Angry Mac Bastards podcast then you may have heard me express my opinion that there will be an Apple tablet-esque device, and that whatever it is, the ideas being bandied about by the majority of the tech media will be wrong.

Until now that is. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball recently posted an article that I think absolutely nails what the “iTablet” will and won’t be. Seriously, any pundit that claims to know Apple, and then proclaims that the magical mystery device will be an upscaled iPod Touch, or a touch–screen Macbook, or a dedicated ebook reader should have his or her keyboard confiscated.

Terminology Matters

By The Angry Drunk

Everyone’s favorite cranky old jackass Dave Winer is all a’flutter about WordPress and Tumblr implementing the Twitter API in a post titled How open standards are created. The meat of his post is a bunch of typical Winer bullshit about how wonderful it is that WordPress and Tumblr have implemented the Twitter API (which is true) and how that fact may well make the Twitter API and open standard.

I’m going to ignore, for the time being, the patent absurdity of Dave’s assertion. Last time I checked, for something to be an “open standard” it had to be both open, which The Twitter API hardly is; and a standard, which I don’t think being used by yourself, and two blog hosting companies qualifies as. It’s not really that that irks me about this piece.

What bugs me here is something that Winer does incessantly, and really chaps my ass. He completely misuses and conflates two different technical terms. To quote:

If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We’d have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.

No, Dave we wouldn’t. The Twitter API is just that, an Application Programming Interface. FTP, HTTP and RSS

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History Lesson

By The Angry Drunk

Brilliant article from Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica examining the issues surrounding government regulation of the Internet though the lens of the issues surrounding the telegraph system. I think that, all too often, the tech punditocracy tends to ignore the thousands of years of human history that proceeded the last decade.

Scott Moritz: Idiotic Douchebag or Moronic Cock-Sucker? You Decide

By The Angry Drunk

Jesus fuck me Christ! I’ve read some stupid crap, from some stupid fucking “writers” over the years, but the unadulterated shit that Scott Moritz spews out has got to take the cake. Seriously, if you are stupid enough to make a single stock trade based on the tripe that this Uncle Fester looking douche-nozzle vomits forth you deserve to not only lose your money, but to be drug out onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and shot in the head.

Last week we had this idiotic turd of an article reporting on the iPhone 3.0 preview event. Here’s a clue Scott. When you can’t even get the basic facts of the fucking story correct, you should probably just go hang yourself. Hint, the iPhone push notification service isn’t being provided by Meebo you fuckwad.

But Scott isn’t content to just be a talentless inattentive hack. No, he’s going for the gold with this unfathomably insane piece of drivel. I’ll start with the headline itself.

Apple’s Netbook Foray Will Flop

Think about that for a second. Really let it roll around in your head. Yes, Scott (I shave my head so I look like my

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Additional Thoughts on the OpenMac Announcement.

By The Angry Drunk

Update to yesterday’s big Mac story. So, apparently the Psystards (come on, they handed me that one) have vowed to fight Apple in court for their “right” to sell generic PC’s with OS X installed. Amazingly, the blogokleinbottle response has actually been somewhat intelligent, but that’s a rant for another day. What I want to focus on here is a few reasons why Psystar winning a judgement against the clause in the OS X license agreement barring the installation of the OS on non-Apple hardware is a very bad thing.

Should Apple’s restrictions on hardware installation be struck down, I guarantee there would be immediate challenges to the GPL; especially GPLv3, with it’s anti hardware DRM provisions. Currently Apple doesn’t force any sort of activation scheme ala Windows. Instead they trust their users to abide by the terms that they agreed to in the license agreement. In fact, Apple pretty much turns a blind eye to all manner of personal violations of the agreement as long as they don’t affect the bottom line. Once a third party starts making money off of selling OS X “compatible” boxes, I expect product activation to appear in 10.6 as the latest. It gets

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Today’s Winner for “Retarded Business Model” Goes to…

By The Angry Drunk

…The chuckle-heads at Psystar, whose website seems to be down, so here’s a link to the Ars story. It seems these frigtards are selling a Leopard compatible Mac “clone” for four hundred clams. Here’s a quick dramatization of the strategy meeting in Psytar central that resulted in this brave experiment in getting your asses sued off by el jeffe Jobs:

GUY 1: gurgle gurgle gurgle inhale….cough, cough. Hey man, you know what would be really cool? If we slap some commodity PC parts together with an EFI emulator and sell it to run Mac OS X on.

GUY 2: Dude, don’t bogart the bong man. Yeah, that would rock, and we could sell it for, like four hundred bucks.

GUY 1: Oh yeah man. The proponents of free software will buy these like hotcakes. We’ll be striking a blow for freedom.

I don’t know who to pity more. These morons, or any fool who actually orders one of these things.

peace out.

Instant Gratification v.s. Rich Experience

By The Angry Drunk

There was a post on The Apple Blog today that got me thinking. While I disagree with the conclusions that the author draws, I don’t think that this is a case of the usual blogoratti magical thinking. Rather, I think that there is some fundamental missunderstanding of the current market in video entertainment. The author puts forth the premise that iTunes, as well as streaming video services such as Netflix-streaming, and Amazon Unbox have a “glaring gap” compared with DVD/Blue-Ray when it comes to “additional content,” where by additional content we’re refering to things such as alternate endings, deleted scenes, etc. My take on this is that there isn’t a “gap” between iTunes et al and DVD/Blue-Ray; rather, iTunes et al and DVD/Blue-Ray are actually serving seperate needs.

VHS v.s. DVD, a Historical Perspective

Admittedly, this isn’t a direct analogy, but I think that it helps to illustrate my point. Odd as it may sound now, when DVD was first introduced there were pundits who claimed that it would fail to topple VHS as a force in the market. One of the reasons provided was that VHS was a read/write media; and people would

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Translation Services

By The Angry Drunk

Just a quick translation from CEO-speak to English of the recent comments from the CEO’s of Mozilla and eMusic (I’m not linking, google them yourselves).