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Apple Lawyering Up On "Fake Steve Jobs"
An anonymous reader sends us to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for a developing situation. Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs, made a post earlier today revealing that Apple was offering him some money (in the wake of the ThinkSecret shutdown) to close down his blog. He said he was interested in taking it. A few hours later, Lyons posted again revealing that Apple's lawyers had contacted him angrily, saying the details of the deal were supposed to remain private. Fake Steve replied 'we either deal out in the open, completely transparently, or we don't deal.' A third post gives details of Apple's lawyers' next response, going totally medieval on him. Since then the situation has calmed down a bit.
So you're comparing two hardware companies against a software company that ripped both of them off, and declaring the software company a winner because other hardware companies were more competitive later? Don't you realize how retarded that is?
Imagine a scenario where rather than only having competition in hardware through the 90s, we'd also had competition in software. Oh, imagine that! Perhaps competition would have advanced the state of the art in software has it did in hardware.
Then, rather than talking about how Cyrix and AMD and Intel and PowerPC fostered competition in CPUs, and RAM vendors challenged each other to deliver better prices and higher densities, and the same thing in video GPUs with Nvidia and ATI, and the same thing in manufacturing efficiencies advanced by Compaq and then Dell...
WE'D HAVE HAD FUCKING SOFTWARE THAT WASN'T ALL SHIT FROM MICROSOFT.
Unpack your fucking colon retard. The PC didn't make progress because of Microsoft, but in spite of it. Apple took software from the simple 70s command line to the Lisa, the Mac, and 32-bit color QuickDraw in the 80s. Then it sat back and didn't do much. Microsoft took over, and continued selling an inferior clone of the DOS command line throughout the 90s, with a ripped off, albeit shittier, version of Apple's UI on top. For ten years! It also delivered a really bad VMS clone called NT, which was almost unusable until 2000. Ten years of nothing. It did make a lot of promises though.
NeXT, OS/2, Solaris, and others all delivered superior software for desktop PCs in the 90s but Microsoft worked hard to prevent any market competition.
In the 2000s, more nothing. Promises about Longhorn that took a half decade to deliver. Once Apple started running again, it delivered Mac OS X in rapid succession over the same period with 6 major releases, 40 service packs, a port to a new desktop hardware platform, and a mobile platform. Microsoft hasn't done anything with its great "Windows technology" but copy existing products. And you're impressed?
That's why you need to retire.
SCO, Linux, and Microsoft in the History of OS: 1990s
I don't need a new reason to vilify Apple. Their shitty history is more then enough reason. I so long for the days when I can buy an Apple for 2x what it should cost so that I can run 4 pieces of software all provided by Apple while smiling about what a great experience it is to live in the Apple womb.
And as other have pointed out he wasn't writing In Character so even if I was familiar with the blog, I'd have been fooled.
I expect fake stories to make it through on April fools day. While an occasional few get through, and this could be one of them, it doesn't put the blame on the reader for falling for it.
Yeah right, DOS remained DOS for ten years because Microsoft had to support so many PC makers. Nice one.
The NT equivalent to a userland was shit because it had to run on so many different workstation class PCs. Right.
Cairo was vapor for 7 years because it had to account for all the vapor hardware it would run on. Same thing for Longhorn ten years later!
You have answers for everything! But I've heard them before because they are all moron Windows-infatuated apologies I've already taken apart.
Telephones all worked under AT&T too, they just didn't make much technical progress. Mobile phones work under the oligarchy of shitty service providers too. And Cable works. But they're all anti-competitive shit that makes very little progress.
My grandma is dead, but I'd buy old ladies a Mac so they can use a computer rather than fight off viruses. And when I say old ladies, I wasn't extending the offer to you. I don't like you so much, as you're a bit of an ignorant ass defending shit.
I mean that in the best possible way.
Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source
It is popular among Windows Enthusiasts to dismiss Apple's use of open source as both a self-serving crutch to offset the company's imagined inability to write its own code-insisting that Mac OS X is really just FreeBSD with some extra graphics tacked on is a common meme among certain wags-and also a one-sided grab that takes more than it gives. In reality, Apple does a variety of things for the open source community that are often ignored. Here's a closer look.
Crikey - use of the word "cunt" getting +4 funny. Slashdot's grown-ups having the day off?
Right, because this story was on par with "aliens make contact with Earth" being posted on the Onion.
Apple buying someone out, then threatening them when it went public is SOOOOOOOOOO unbelievable that only a fool would believe it.
What a bunch of condescending idiots some of you are.
Actually, if you look at the actual history of the period and not just the 'Microsoft vs. Apple' rewrite of things, you will discover that Microsoft was the entity that finally stood up to Apple's legal operation and won. Prior to the Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard NewWave case, Apple had already run all the other PC clone GUI vendors out of the market. There were several other competing GUI layers for MS-DOS machines, including GEM, and Apple's legal muscle ran them out of the business.
In effect, what Apple did was clear the floor so that Windows could take over the entire GUI market on the x86 platform. Uhhh, thanks Apple.
They were and are a pack of festering lawers and 'Intellectual Property' profiteers. Don't some of you still REMEMBER the position that Free Software folks took against Apple back in the day? There are essays by Stallman on the topic that seemlingly few people remember. It wasn't any different than the kind of position the FSF still takes today. Apple's operation is just as repulsive today.