I was trying to get to itunes.berkeley.edu. You know, the university, the alma mater, UCB. When iTunes opened there was no Berkeley, but there was that obnoxious iTunes store. Apple has become just another pushy marketer jamming condensed music down a blissful public’s insatiable gorge.
Apple has become that pervasive green gas that seeps under doors in the old sci-fi movies—you can’t escape it. It’s going to get you and eat your brain.
I have a few Apple products myself, including the iPhone. It was a nice clean phone when I got it. But everytime I plug it in I get a new, crasser interface. “Buy! Buy! Buy!,” it screams. Now there’s a tacky AppStore icon cluttering up the front.
What’s happened to Apple? They should READ THIS.
The next thing I expect is to see the ShamWow guy doing iTouch ads. He’s pretty good, and perfectly suited for the new Apple marketing blitz. iTunesWoW!
As I’ve always suspected, some of those long-winded “balanced” reviews on Amazon are bogus. I mean the reviews that are well-edited, spelling-corrected, with pros and cons, bullet points, etc. In the past I’ve seen those reviews and wondered, “Who has time to write a professional quality review of a network card?”
It turns out that some unethical companies are hiring ghost writers. Belkin is the most public. Check out this expose of their shady practices.
Amazon has removed the Belkin reviews, but how about all the others still lurking in the manure pile? The old rule still applies: Caveat emptor.
Looking for a Ruby cheat sheet suitable for the Ruby class I teach, I ended up at a site that had this “share me” icon palette.
Is sharing a victim of over population? When will the sharing lemmings start to eat each other?
How many have you used? I’ve never used any.
In my work I have to use lots of browsers to make sure our pages are gorgeous (or at least acceptable) everywhere. We’re targeting Firefox 3, IE 6 and 7, and Safari Mac. Others, including Opera, IE 8, Chrome, and FF2, are not in our test matrix. Neither is Safari Windows.
All the same, I cranked up Safari Windows today and went to the Apple site. Here’s what I got.
It looks like the Apple guys don’t have Safari Windows in their matrix, either. There’s the irony I was looking for.
Emacs is still hanging in there against all the new kids on the block. Whenever a new editor arrives and receives raves from the script kiddies, the Emacs crones will crow “Emacs has that…20 years ago.”
When Texmate made it big as a Rails editor, the Emacs gurus, said, “We can do all that stuff, too…20 years ago.”
It all reminds me of that “Simpsons Did It” episode of South Park. Whatever adventure Stan, Kyle and Cartman would think of, someone taunt, “Simpsons did it,” and stiffle any effort to put a fresh face on an old joke.
So the Emacs crowd is in the the catbird seat, lording it over the new guys. But maybe there’s one thing that Emacs has to offer than the new guys can’t come close to. It’s the “sex” man page.
Yep. Only an Emacs developer would need a man page for sex. Not to mention the man pages for “condom” and “celibacy.” They’re all right there is the GNU source code. The authors are anonymous, but I suspect the they were either Beavis or Butthead. You can read these amusing historical documents yourself. Just look in the etc/ directory of the Emacs source code or, for the sexy man page only, go here.
Any stroll through GNU land would be incomplete without a glimpse into the Master’s lair at www.richardstallman.org. You will never find a nerdier personal ad than this…ever.
