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My Feeds: Select: All 95 subscriptions, None, Unassigned A to Z Kids Stuff children http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/atoz.xml ABC News: Top Stories news http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/fp_rss20.xml About Computing Center technology http://z.about.com/6/g/pcworld/b/rss2.xml About.com Archaeology Archaeology http://z.about.com/6/g/archaeology/b/rss2.xml All Things Digital technology http://feeds.allthingsd.com/atd-feed/ Archaeology News Archaeology news http://www.topix.net/rss/science/archaeology.xml Ars Technica tech news http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf ArsTechnica: Security Content Security technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/security BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition U.K. http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition Science/Nature http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/science/nature/rss.xml Boing Boing odd http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag Breaking News: CBSNews.com news http://www.cbsnews.com/feeds/rss/main.rss Breitbart.tv varied news topics http://www.breitbart.com/xml/recentvideo.xml ChannelWeb Complete Feed Computer news http://www.crn.com/cwb/globalcontent/cweball/index.xml;jsessionid=L0I1HBDQISHBCQSNDLQSKH0CJUNN2JVN Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories news http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/top.rss CNN.com - Offbeat odd http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_offbeat.rss CNN.com - Politics politics http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_allpolitics.rss CNN.com - U.S. U.S. news http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_us.rss Computerworld Breaking News technology http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/News Cool Tools technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolTools Courant.com - Connecticut News Ct. news http://feeds.courant.com/Courant/ConnecticutNews Defense Tech U.S. defense news http://www.defensetech.org/index.rdf Discovery News - Technology technology http://dsc.discovery.com/news/subjects/technology/xdb/topstories.xml Drudge Report news http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedPalooza/lwDu Dvorak Uncensored news http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?feed=rss2 Engadget robots & gadgets http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml Extremetech technology http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/extreme.xml Fark.com news http://www.pluck.com/rss/fark.rss FileForum software http://fileforum.b

Ironically though, the Wall Street Journal, pride of the überrightwing Murdoch Empire -- News Corpse International -- is still as M$ fan boy as any good rightwinger should be.

According to this article, "Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg flirts with Ubuntu" Walt Mossberg is in Apple's camp. He tried a Dell preloaded with Ubuntu and he wasn't too happy, er said it isn't ready for most users yet.

That snippet really sums up the quality of the linked article.
In both the linked pages from the Wired article, it is explained in the first paragraph that, yes, this is inspired by Luke's prosthetic hand. All Things Digital article, Gizmodo article.

All of them knew going in that Yahoo had to voluntarily cooperate. So they know that Balmer[sic] is not to blame. So they are not going to dismiss him. They are going to go to plan B: the hostile takeover.

None of Microsoft stockholders would blame Ballmer for anything, what he did (publicly retracting the offer) was just another part of the plan to acquire Yahoo. Have you seen the stock price of Yahoo! after the announcement? gone from $28 to $23.

After Yahoo! stock holders (some of them quite famous) grill and dispose of Jerry Yang, they will put another CEO who is willing to cooperate with Microsoft. Of course this time, the price per stock will be lower than he initial offering.

Probably not the best place to mention McCain, considering he opposes network neutrality

Don't know if its been posted otherwise in this discussion, but Walt Mossberg compared it to what the wired phone system was before Ma Bell was broken up, and calls them "the new Soviet ministries".

The article also quotes Steve Jobs calling them the "four orifices"
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20050602/carriers-veto-hampers-innovation/
http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071021/free-my-phone/
http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071130/cellphone-perestroika/

Don't know if its been posted otherwise in this discussion, but Walt Mossberg compared it to what the wired phone system was before Ma Bell was broken up, and calls them "the new Soviet ministries".

The article also quotes Steve Jobs calling them the "four orifices"
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20050602/carriers-veto-hampers-innovation/
http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071021/free-my-phone/
http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071130/cellphone-perestroika/

Don't know if its been posted otherwise in this discussion, but Walt Mossberg compared it to what the wired phone system was before Ma Bell was broken up, and calls them "the new Soviet ministries".

The article also quotes Steve Jobs calling them the "four orifices"
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20050602/carriers-veto-hampers-innovation/
http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071021/free-my-phone/
http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071130/cellphone-perestroika/

The reviews linked on Amazon are "all pretty positive". Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says it sucks.

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20071129/amazons-kindle-makes-buying-e-books-easy-reading-them-hard/

Now here's the key point that has come up time and time and time and time again. APPLE IS A HARDWARE COMPANY!!! Software is an afterthought to them. They do a damned good job with software, but still, it's not their primary concern. Their primary concern is selling Macs. So keeping that in mind, the fact that they still support half a decade old hardware is saying something. Claim they're evil, say they need to support Linux, they need to sell cheaper computers, etc.

Now here's the key point that has come up time and time and time and time again. APPLE IS A HARDWARE COMPANY!!! Software is an afterthought to them. They do a damned good job with software, but still, it's not their primary concern. Their primary concern is selling Macs. So keeping that in mind, the fact that they still support half a decade old hardware is saying something. Claim they're evil, say they need to support Linux, they need to sell cheaper computers, etc.

Why do people persist in beating this dead horse? Apple is most emphatically *NOT* a software company. They are a hardware company.

http://mossblog.allthingsd.com/20071021/free-my-phone/ and I couldn't agree more. The cell providers are a bad joke.

It would be nice if what you are saying is true. Unfortunately, I've had first-hand experience some time ago of what I claim. The first-hand experience was with national publications. That's publications with an "s" on the end.

As I said, I've had first-hand experience too, with my own stories getting killed, and I know national publications that have done all kinds of things for the benefit of their advertisers. But you didn't have first-hand experience with the Wall Street Journal. And for you to accuse Mossberg of doing that is unfair (and libelous).

all kinds of paranoid bullshit..
Call me all the names you want, but it doesn't change the facts, as they happened, to me.

The point you keep missing is that nothing happened to you with the WSJ. Just because other national newspapers do that, it doesn't follow that the WSJ does it too. That's the point of the WSJ. That's why I pay $100 a year for the WSJ online when I could get every other major newspaper free.

Your insults are distasteful and prevent any kind of discussion of the facts. They also reflect poorly on you and expose your unfounded personal bias in this situation.

Let's talk about distasteful insults. Your accusations of Mossberg being influenced by his advertisers and taking payoffs are also distasteful insults (and libelous). Ditto unfounded personal bias etc.

WSJ did write unfavorable reviews
It's not an unfavorable review. Dings, nitpicks, whatever you want to call them are sprinkled throughout the review. Just enough to firmly place the product in the also-ran category. No, there's no quid-pro-quo, but our fine representatives in the House and Senate would say that there aren't any quid-pro-quo's there either.

Payoffs to senators and representatives are reported on public documents (and some of the illegal payments are disclosed in court), so we know that senators and representatives are getting money.

I don't know Mossberg personally, and I wouldn't cover up for him if he was doing it, but I have never heard any evidence that he ever took money from a subject that he was writing about, or that he was influenced by his advertisers. (If you know of any evidence I'd like to hear it. But you don't.) So there's no quid.

Payoffs like this can't be kept secret
Here's a tip. How/Why do you think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates end up at his fine high-priced seminar event this year? http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/ Is there a smoking gun somewhere? No, probably not. Does it look like elephant sh!t? Does it smell like elephant sh!t? Based on my first-hand experience, it looks and smells like it.

You're claiming that Mossberg is influenced by advertisers and takes money from the people he writes about. This doesn't support that claim at all. This is a WSJ-sponsored conference, and the WSJ -- his employer -- asked Mossberg, and Kara Swisher, to moderate a panel. Jobs and Gates knew that their buyers and investors read the WSJ, so were willing to come to that event as a way of getting their word across to their buyers and investors. That also doesn't support that claim. The WSJ invited them because Jobs and Gates had useful information for their readers and the attendees at that conference. There is absolutely nothing improper or covert here.

I've organized meetings where I invited WSJ reporters to speak, and they showed up without any payoffs.

-I don't buy/read the WSJ,

Is it fair for you to attack the WSJ and Mossberg without actually reading what they print? You're admitting that you're attacking them without knowing the basic facts -- their writing -- about them.

I've got another crazy story for you: It's 1986 and a plane full of weapons crashes in Ni

It would be nice if what you are saying is true. Unfortunately, I've had first-hand experience some time ago of what I claim. The first-hand experience was with national publications. That's publications with an "s" on the end.

all kinds of paranoid bullshit..
Call me all the names you want, but it doesn't change the facts, as they happened, to me. Your insults are distasteful and prevent any kind of discussion of the facts. They also reflect poorly on you and expose your unfounded personal bias in this situation.

WSJ did write unfavorable reviews
It's not an unfavorable review. Dings, nitpicks, whatever you want to call them are sprinkled throughout the review. Just enough to firmly place the product in the also-ran category. No, there's no quid-pro-quo, but our fine representatives in the House and Senate would say that there aren't any quid-pro-quo's there either.

Payoffs like this can't be kept secret
Here's a tip. How/Why do you think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates end up at his fine high-priced seminar event this year? http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/ Is there a smoking gun somewhere? No, probably not. Does it look like elephant sh!t? Does it smell like elephant sh!t? Based on my first-hand experience, it looks and smells like it.

you're too insignificant for them to be concerned with.
You are right in a way beyond your shallow personal attack.
-I don't buy/read the WSJ, nor do I consume buy, much less read equipment reviews anywhere else because of my first-hand experience in PR. I'm not a customer, they don't want to hear from me.

I've got another crazy story for you: It's 1986 and a plane full of weapons crashes in Nicaragua. The pilot claims the CIA is involved. Based on your very personal, emotional response, it's reasonable to believe you would call him a crackpot too. Don't give it another thought. Except you just missed the political story of the decade.

...You know, it's interesting. The PC has proved to be very resilient because, as Bill said earlier, I mean, the death of the PC has been predicted every few years. --Steve Jobs.

http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/

Walt Mossberg
http://walt.allthingsd.com/

Harvey Rosenfield:
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/about/
(scroll down about one-third of the page)

I think Dvorak was right, although maybe not for the correct reasons or based on solid evidence. That changed yesterday.

Comments that talk about how Safari on Windows is a quality product meant to drive the halo effect or that Apple is hypocritical for pushing their own design standards on Windows completely miss the point. Safari on Windows is not about the browser, it is for driving and course-correcting efforts to bring the Apple development platform to Windows. Why? So they can adopt it if necessary.

Some background first. The recent D5 hosted Jobs-Gates interview had both participants talking about ongoing partnership. Jobs stated repeatedly that Apple is a software company and he described how the software in the user space (e.g., iLife, iWork, Finder) is what people are buying into on the Mac. Value delivered by Apple comes in the form of good design and polish sense, not what kernel their software runs on.

When you look at iTunes and Safari on Windows, what do you see? Apple (not native Windows) font rendering, Core Animation effects (Cover Flow), compositing effects (inline find with Safari 3). There is a lot of infrastructure coming over to Windows from Mac OS X to support these products. (I believe such an assumption is valid because the smartest way to develop cross-platform applications is to minimize differences in the code base, keeping impedance matching in abstraction layers.) Now that Vista is a technical match (and goes beyond in some cases) for OS X with features Apple cares about (e.g., WPF), how long will it be until Apple can deliver a complete platform on both operating systems? As they do this, they increasingly marginalize the significance of what you find under the hood. No mainstream user is going to care if Finder runs on a FreeBSD or NT derivative.

As Microsoft has already done a lot of work bringing Vista on-par with OS X, it makes little sense for Apple to continue investing money in duplicating the effort. Their sobering strategy may be to focus on dealing directly with users and leave the operating system drudgery to another company with resources to burn. If they continue on this path, the remaining technical barriers will be gone. For a long time, it was processor architecture. Now they are chipping away library and framework barriers by introducing what amounts to a Macintosh application runtime environment on Windows. Given enough time and real-world experience porting their frameworks, it could eventually come down to another check-box option for universal binaries.

When they reach that point, Mac OS XI could very easily be NT under the covers.

In the iPhone Ad called "Calamari," the user has the area around Moscone Recreation Area up on the phone, and does a search for "Seafood." One of the hits, the closest one, is "Pacific Catch," around the corner of Fillmore St and Lombard St.

Here's the thing though; it you go to Google Maps and search for"Seafood" right in that area where it found Pacific Catch, it doesn't find Pacific Catch. It does find a bunch of other hits for "Seafood" that are much closer than the other ones the iPhone found, but doesn't find Pacific Catch. If you search Google Maps in a browser for "Pacific Catch," it finds it right there where the iPhone found it and gives you all the same info the iPhone did.

So why does the iPhone's version of Google Maps find Pacific Catch by searching for "Seafood," when the browser version doesn't. In fact, the whole results list has very little overlap when you put the same map area shown on the iPhone up in Google Maps in a browser and perform the same search.

In his interview with Bill Gates and Walt Mossberg last week at D5, Jobs said that the iPhone Maps software was written by Apple and Google was very impressed with it, but that it just interface with the usual Google Maps API's. So I'm surprised it gives such different results, especially categorizing a restaurant under "Seafood" that the browser version of Google Maps doesn't. How does it know?

12:25 p.m.: Jobs says Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June as planned.
Walt: Like the last day of June?
Jobs: (Laughs) Yeah, probably.

Watch the beginning of the video on this link. Mossberg asks him if the debate on frivolous software patents is anywhere on his radar and McCain says "No" in a manner that is very dissmissive of Mossberg's nerd question. I was a McCain supporter before, but after watching this interview he comes off as totally clueless about technology. You'd think he'd get someone to at least brief him before going to this event.

I'd rather an idiot who might do the right thing by accident than someone who will maliciously undermine their competition (McCain said that he would bring the successful people into Washington, who we all know would make themselves more successful with their newfound influence).

BTW, Mod the article down, McCain didn't say anything like that. He laughed at the suggestion of Secretary of State!

You must have missed it. After ten long years, Steve has admitted his secret marriage to Bill.

I have a few interesting quotes for you:
"And we had really bet our future on the Macintosh being successful, and then, hopefully, graphics interfaces in general being successful, but first and foremost, the thing that would popularize that being the Macintosh." -- Bill Gates about the original Macintosh

"Well, Apple did the Mac itself, but we got Bill and his team involved to write these applications. We were doing a few apps ourselves. We did MacPaint, MacDraw and stuff like that, but Bill and his team did some great work." -- Steve Jobs about the applications for the original Macintosh

"And it was also important that, you know, Microsoft was the biggest software developer outside of Apple developing for the Mac." -- Steve Jobs about his return to Apple in 1997

"We continued to do Macintosh software. Excel, which Steve and I introduced together in New York City, that was kind of a fun event, that went on and did very well." -- Bill Gates about Excel on the Macintosh... which was one of the Mac's very first applications

Source: Gates and Jobs at D5

transcript here

Was he Steve Wozniak? http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/video-steve-jobs -and-bill-gates-together-part-7-of-7/

Would have been more interesting if Bill Gates had spoken with Fake Steve Jobs. This would have been possible since Gates claims I'm not Fake Steve Jobs.

Office 2007 is actually crushing everything else. It is making people excited about an office suite again (which is pretty amazing, actually).

Yes, cursing is an expression of excitement. Witness Fanboy Mossberg's reaction and judge for yourself:

In my own tests, I was cursing the program for weeks because I couldnt find familiar functions and commands, even though Microsoft provides lots of help and guidance.

Wouldn't it be a better idea to spend those weeks learning something like Open Office on GNU/Linux? After spending six years on XP, anyone in a hurry to get better software is going to find it in the free world before they fork over the cash for a Vista Heavy Metal Super Computer.

Vista is not selling as well as XP did and may go the way of the Zune. M$ has stuffed it's channels and is doing all the usual PR blitz but they can't change reality. When you say:

It [Vista] works perfectly.

you are flying in the face of reviews and personal experience. Despite the low expectations most M$ users have, I have yet to meet anyone who says that Vista just works. Most have stories like this.