Tag: stupid

Google doodle drama

last week’s decision to honor the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch — the second “g” in Google was replaced with a drawing of the Soviet satellite — is being blasted by some conservatives. Not only did Google honor an achievement by a totalitarian regime that was our Cold War enemy, they griped, but it did so without having ever altered its logo to commemorate US military personnel on Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

such insecurity

Girl games

Ubisoft have a series of games about to come out for girls. Entitled “Imagine”, there’s a spark of hope .. but it turns out that the series is going to primarily consist of shopping, fashion, animals and babies. Oh yes. But the worst bit about this is, not really the fact that there are going to be shopping games – WoW is at least 40% shopping, frankly – or fashion games (ditto), but that Ubisoft seem to think that this is only what girls like

shaping up the next generation suburban breeders

Lying Media

American media is complicit in an immoral propaganda campaign against China. Now that 2 Chinese officials are dead over the fiasco, the Vice President of Mattel admits that the news was all lies. “The vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers.” It’s a bad day indeed for America when the VP of a toy company comes across as being more honest and transparent than the American media.

2007-11-30: another industry that deserves to, and will, die.

Now I want to highlight the subscription offers that magazines send through the mail. They’re full of lies. Here’s one I got today, which I’ve taken the liberty of annotating:


2013-03-28: when legacy media feeds technopanic you gotta wonder about ulterior motives. creating fear to stave off christensen style obsolescence?

What’s not OK is a company trying to scare the internet’s residents thinking they’re the residents of Dresden in order to drum up business. There are plenty of scary things, people, and plots online. There are plenty of bad guys. There are plenty of attacks. There will be plenty more. If you’re in the anti-hacker business, business has no signs of slowing down. So if your product is worth a damn, you shouldn’t have to lie to the internet to sell it. Don’t believe the hype.

2014-02-10:

The gardener used a “lawn mower” to “mow” the lawn.

technopanic at moribund organizations like the NYT runs very deep indeed.
2019-06-12:

Yes, the world has changed. But the NYT seems to think that the government should now just force the internet companies to hand over money after their own members spent years twiddling their thumbs and squandering any attempt to build up loyal followings and sustainable business models. It’s not easy to keep a media business sustainable these days, but so much of it has to do with those companies refusing to recognize how the internet was changing the business, and how to take advantage of those changes.

Mall Cop School

“Extremely quietly, a Maryland school district has launched the first public high school in the country dedicated to teaching homeland security. “From all I could tell researching the piece, this doesn’t mean questioning assumptions about national security and so forth — it means funneling 15-year-olds into a very profitable industry, and providing future workers for the companies that comprise it. Creepy/lousy.”

continuing the tradition of staffing this industry with illerates

More than 200 colleges have created homeland-security degree and certificate programs since 9/11

the us “education” system is worthless.

Crimes Against Humanity

If you think you’ve seen bizarre lawsuits before, check this one out. Pennsylvania resident Dylan Stephen Jayne is suing Google for crimes against humanity and is asking the court for $5b in damages. The charge: his social security number, when turned upside down and scrambled spells Google. I don’t think Google will have a lot to worry about with this case, but it does make you wonder why mental health services aren’t more readily available in the United States.

and i wonder why my tax money is wasted on clowns like this

Hulu Doomed?

NBC will start offering its top television shows as ad-supported downloads this fall from the NBC Direct website. The announcement is a major setback for the NBC/ News Corp joint venture Hulu, which was originally set up to offer this very content. The announcement also follows on from NBC’s decision to discontinue offering its TV shows via iTunes by the end of the year.

what are those assclowns doing to The Office? i was willing to pay for it on itunes, but now they force me into bittorrent.

Suit Dreams

Domain Workbench would hand enterprise software design to businesspeople. Here’s how it works: Users write clear directions in text, spreadsheet, or flowchart-like forms describing what the software should do. In some cases, they can use an interface where lines are drawn between boxes and documents to establish the relationships and rules that an application must follow. The information is sent to a code generator, which spits out the 1000s of lines necessary to build the application. Intentional users must still have a software engineer on hand to help set up the programming language and to tweak it anytime a variable changes.

pfft. typical suit wanking fantasies. “no programming skills necessary”. simonyi has been hyping this vaporware for almost 10 years now, where is it?

MPAA busted

Media Defender, a notorious anti piracy gang working for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, just launched their very own video upload service called miivi.comâ. The sole purpose of the site is to trap people into uploading copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so.

MPAA goons busted. ha