CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday - After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future, and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a 10-Q with the Securities Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy.
"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!â
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole."
Sergey Brin of Google said, "Of course, we're still not evil. You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
"OK, fuck it, we're evil. But you don't care because our stuff is sooo good. It works well. So bend over and TAKE IT from our patents. Or we'll make you use a Windows CE phone instead."
Mac users are surprised when things don't work well and smoothly; Windows users are surprised when they do. Microsoft wouldn't have had half the trouble with antitrust and crappy Seinfeld ads if their stuff actually worked.
Same with Google. "Sure, you're worried about our tentacles in your life. But it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Muwaaaaahahaha."
"Vista's slow, it's fat, my software doesn't work, I can't get drivers, the User Access Control's a pain in the ass and my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?"
Like X, it's a matter of a vital developer community. X.org keeps to MIT/X11/BSD-style permissive licenses, but is unlikely to fork as long as the developer community is vital and active - a vendor proprietary fork is counterproductive because changes won't make it back into the ever-changing main tree. Even XFree86's license change was just the last straw - the devs were already pissed off at the impossibility of getting code into the damn server.
There's hardly a "Wikipedia replacement" that hasn't started from trying to make a welcoming environment for authors. Wikipedia, however, is popular because it's what readers want. Writers are important, but way less so than the readers.
If readers wanted ten articles on one topic, they'd just click the first ten Google hits. It's like meta-search engines in the 1990s that gave you results from ten bad pre-Google search engines in the hope you might find a damn thing, when the real answer was one search engine that didn't suck.
Many people bitch and moan about Wikipedia, usually those who couldn't work well enough with others. But it's a top 10 site not because it lifted a finger to be, but because it actually works well enough to produce a good-enough first port of call.
More usefully: I see there's Familiar Linux for ARM-based WinCE handhelds - a tweaked Debian for ARM - but it doesn't appear to have been updated for a year.
Why yes, I want a WINDOWS experience. It will involve bending shoes together. Or something.
What on earth? Windows CE is a fabulous example of software that sells in magazines and looks good on feature lists but basically doesn't bloody work. There's a reason the accursed iPhone is so popular, and especially so with anyone who's suffered a WinCE phone and done the wince of WinCE.
"We owe it all to the bedrock of our economy: the ordinary hard-working taxpayer. You resisted the siren call of credit cards, lived within your means to save for a rainy day, never took out an interest-only mortgage, credit score to make Jesus cry. Without taking every penny you saved over the $100,000 guarantee, we'd never have made it. And the best bit is, we know you'll still vote Republican! God bless you all!"
Slashdot Mirror
(And I've just noticed that should be a Form 8-K, not 10-Q. Bah!)
CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday - After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future, and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a 10-Q with the Securities Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy.
"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!â
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole."
Sergey Brin of Google said, "Of course, we're still not evil. You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."
"OK, fuck it, we're evil. But you don't care because our stuff is sooo good. It works well. So bend over and TAKE IT from our patents. Or we'll make you use a Windows CE phone instead."
Mac users are surprised when things don't work well and smoothly; Windows users are surprised when they do. Microsoft wouldn't have had half the trouble with antitrust and crappy Seinfeld ads if their stuff actually worked.
Same with Google. "Sure, you're worried about our tentacles in your life. But it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Muwaaaaahahaha."
VLC.
'Cos, y'know, it's not like you can just install VLC from Synaptic.
(VLC is also my favourite media and DVD player on Mac.)
Apple needs to offer Seinfeld $10 million just to stick it to Microsoft.
"I'm a PC ... and I run Ubuntu."
"Vista's slow, it's fat, my software doesn't work, I can't get drivers, the User Access Control's a pain in the ass and my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?"
"... The Aristocrats!"
Like X, it's a matter of a vital developer community. X.org keeps to MIT/X11/BSD-style permissive licenses, but is unlikely to fork as long as the developer community is vital and active - a vendor proprietary fork is counterproductive because changes won't make it back into the ever-changing main tree. Even XFree86's license change was just the last straw - the devs were already pissed off at the impossibility of getting code into the damn server.
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2008/08/27/forget-the-writers/
There's hardly a "Wikipedia replacement" that hasn't started from trying to make a welcoming environment for authors. Wikipedia, however, is popular because it's what readers want. Writers are important, but way less so than the readers.
If readers wanted ten articles on one topic, they'd just click the first ten Google hits. It's like meta-search engines in the 1990s that gave you results from ten bad pre-Google search engines in the hope you might find a damn thing, when the real answer was one search engine that didn't suck.
Many people bitch and moan about Wikipedia, usually those who couldn't work well enough with others. But it's a top 10 site not because it lifted a finger to be, but because it actually works well enough to produce a good-enough first port of call.
It is vitally important that people write letters - actual paper letters, with a stamp - to their MPs, Congressmen or equivalent. MAKE NOISE.
argh. I meant to post this to the next story. Never mind, it applies to this one too! Where applicable.
It is vitally important that people write letters - actual paper letters, with a stamp - to their MPs, Congressmen or equivalent. MAKE NOISE.
Yep. In my experience it's memory that's key - FF3 will run quite snappily on a Pentium II if it's got >=512MB of memory.
How many projects to get Mozilla on mobiles have they started so far? Whatever happened to MiniMo?
I suspect this'll happen when mobiles have enough memory to just run Firefox.
You've now put into my head the notion of sex toys running Windows CE.
BAD TOUCH!
*applause*
More usefully: I see there's Familiar Linux for ARM-based WinCE handhelds - a tweaked Debian for ARM - but it doesn't appear to have been updated for a year.
Why yes, I want a WINDOWS experience. It will involve bending shoes together. Or something.
What on earth? Windows CE is a fabulous example of software that sells in magazines and looks good on feature lists but basically doesn't bloody work. There's a reason the accursed iPhone is so popular, and especially so with anyone who's suffered a WinCE phone and done the wince of WinCE.
Mod parent up!
Written up. Critiques welcomed.
I toldja - they shoulda gone with a real comedian.
I was looking for them working their way back through the comedic genius of history ... perhaps W.C. Fields next. All the way back to Aristophanes.
Or, in a more famous joke:
"Vista's slow, it's fat, I can't get drivers, my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?"
"... The Aristocrats!"
Is it too off-topic to say that I deeply and sincerely wish Dick Fold and crew wouldn't keep their accumulated stash but would actually suffer the consequences of their bad decisions? Y'know, it'd just be nice for once.
I mean, look at the guy. He just needs a cuddly fluffy cat and a drinking womanising British spy held at gunpoint by his henchmen.
"We owe it all to the bedrock of our economy: the ordinary hard-working taxpayer. You resisted the siren call of credit cards, lived within your means to save for a rainy day, never took out an interest-only mortgage, credit score to make Jesus cry. Without taking every penny you saved over the $100,000 guarantee, we'd never have made it. And the best bit is, we know you'll still vote Republican! God bless you all!"
When two cars crash into each other, oil and petrol go all over the road. So, er, work with me here!