Freetards turn on Negroponte

Well it's a full-blown civil war raging among the OLPC team. Check out this stunning article where one of the freetards goes to town on Negroponte and says he and others will now follow Walter Bender, the other leader of OLPC, who has left in a huff after battling with Negroponte. How hilarious is this? The project isn't even modestly successful -- in fact it's been a dismal failure -- but in true freetard fashion, it's already forking. Now we'll have two ridiculously understaffed pointless projects and they'll be competing with each other instead of working together. Great work, shitheads! Have any of you seen Life of Brian? Remember the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea and the Judean Popular People's Front?

Splitters!

So why are the freetards turning on Saint Nicholas? Double-N's big sin, in their eyes, is not that he made a shitty computer that doesn't work and nobody wants; it's that he's now decided to run Windows on it. God knows I hate Windows as much as anyone (and more than most) but does this not kind of lay bare a really unpleasant truth about the OLPC project -- namely that it was never about education or poverty or helping kids and was, rather, all about a bunch of amateur techies trying to prove that they could make a better computer than Microsoft and Intel?

Guess what, freetard morons. You couldn't. You didn't. What's worse is that even now, when the Third World "customers" you thought you were "helping" are telling you, explicitly, that they want Windows, you're still in denial. You'd rather kill yourselves than design and deliver the product that these developing countries actually want.

Meanwhile your pals at Asus and Intel will charge ahead with their cheapo machines that actually work, while you dickheads sit in Cambridge examining your butts with your thumbs. It's like Beastmaster once said to me: It's not that we're so smart; we've just been really lucky in our choice of enemies.

UPDATE: Now Richard Stallman is weighing in on the OLPC-Windows controversy.

Ina Fried's iPod -- appearances can be deceiving

So Ina Fried of CNET bought a refurbished iPod from Buy.com and it arrived looking fine but in fact it was loaded with a virus. Buy.com replaced the bad unit, but still, Ina is upset. Just goes to show. Things aren't always what they seem. And don't buy refurbished Apple products from anyone but Apple.

Sarah Lacy's shameless attempt to get mentioned on GoFugYourself.com

What in the name of sweet holy Buddha is this woman wearing? I mean seriously. The shiny blue headband. The weird shirt with the colored circles. The yellow skirt. She's either rushing straight from her show to an audition for the next Brady Bunch reunion movie, or she's trying to get on GoFugYourself (which by the way today has a photo of Lindsay Lohan looking rather, well, floppy. Go see for yourself.)

Anyway, my goodness. I mean I love Sarah Lacy. I adore her. But what won't this woman do for attention? Plus she does a great job of talking all over her guests in this clip. My fave part is when Sarah starts holding forth about the things that happened to entrepreneurs in the late 90s. Check out the astonished expressions on the two middle-aged VCs who sit there having Sarah explain stuff to them. Priceless.

Dear Canadians: You're getting iPhone. Now will you please stop bugging me?

See here. We're shipping iPhone to Canada later this year. So please stop your letter-writing campaign, okay? You can't believe how much crap we get from angry Canadians whining about the iPhone. We've had to set up a special department and buy extra shredders to handle any mail that comes in with a Canadian postmark.

Much love, former Pixar CFO whose name I can't quite remember anymore

So the feds are still walking around trying to bust people over this options backdating stuff but so far they're just focusing their energy on random underlings like some woman who used to be CFO of Pixar. Peter Oppenheimer just came in to tell me about it. I was like, Who? What's her name? Honestly, I don't remember ever working with anyone by that name, or ever telling that person how to dish out options or what date to put on them. I just don't. No recollection. Complete blank. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Not funny, Lenovo

Our intelligence operatives in China came across this video which apparently is making the rounds among contract manufacturers and component suppliers. No idea where it came from but it looks like a case of Lenovo trying to coast on our momentum and pretend they're as cool as we are when it comes to design. Whatevs. MacBook Air is still the kewlest lapotop on the market. As for Lenovo, look, they do nice work but in terms of image and corporate narrative, they're the PRC and we're the Dalai Lama. No way will Lenovo ever win a cool kid contest with us. Namaste, Lenovo. I honor the place where my work and your imitation become one.

Alley Insider creates Bubble 2.0 keepsake

Silicon Alley Insider has published "an index of the world's most valuable digital startups." See here. Basically it's a list of pie-in-the-sky valuations for companies like Facebook and LinkedIn.

To make it fresh and dynamic, they somehow yoked these made-up numbers to the NASDAQ so their made-up numbers change into new made-up numbers all day long. That way all these little freaks working for worthless companies will click on that list all day long, like lab rats trying to get another hit of cocaine, thereby generating loads of stupid traffic for Alley Insider. And trust me, that's the real point of this list. It's a cheap ploy for ginning up traffic.

Money quote about the dynamic bullshit valuation changes: "This will tell you how much your stock options are worth right now," they say.

Folks, if you're working at any of these "digital startups" you really don't need Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider index to tell you what your options are worth right now. I'll tell you the answer right now. They're worth nothing. That's for most of you anyway. Because one day very soon this whole crazy mess is going to blow up and you'll be looking for work at Starbucks again, just like you were after the last bubble burst.

My advice? Print out this crazy list and pin it to your wall and wait for the crash. Then you'll have a wonderful keepsake by which to remember Bubble 2.0.


Because if there's any sure sign that the end is near, it's the fact that Henry Blodget is publishing an index with ridiculously high valuations for companies that don't actually make products and don't have revenues. What drives this ridiculous man? Why the obsessive need to hype and tout? Is he not satisfied to have played a starring role in the greatest financial mess of our lifetime? Now he needs to do it again? It's like a real-life version of Groundhog Day. Or one of those rings of hell in Dante's Inferno where people are condemned to keep performing the same sinful acts over and over again into eternity.

I'm told Henry Blodget is driven by a desire to redeem himself. I know what you're wondering: If that's the case why doesn't he go do some kind of charitable work in the Third World instead of touting worthless stocks? (For the answer to that question, see the story of the scorpion and the frog.)

Dear music industry: Bend over, here it comes again.

See this article in Wired claiming that by 2012 the iTunes will have twenty-five percent of all music sales worldwide. Until then the music labels will keep launching their frigtarded online retailers and propping up anyone who competes with us and even trying to put a tax on iPods as a way to rake back money from our hardware sales. To all of which I say simply this: Siooma, you dopes. I pwn you. Get used to it.

Monkey Boy uses a Mac?

Sure looks like it. Unless this is a Photoshop job. To see the original, go here. Photo taken by "Paint.It.Black."

Woz, do not bum out. She is SO not worth it.

So apparently it's official: Woz and Kathy Griffin have split up. Woz, dude, I posted this scary-ass photo of her just so you could remind yourself of how lucky you are to get away from this horrible woman. Seriously, man. You could do so much better than this. And apparently you have, since the story says you're already getting married to someone else. Please tell me it's not iJustine.

Shameless Borg uses Mother's Day gift to win customers

Just when you thought the Borg could not be more cheesy, they outdo themselves. This time it's a Windows Live portrait studio on Union Street in San Francisco, not far from our Chestnut Street store. Deal is you get a free Mother's Day portrait if you sign up for Windows Live. Talk about customer acquisition costs. Question: Does anyone even know what Windows Live actually is? I mean it's been out for years and I still don't get it. I've tried reading their Web site to get info and it just makes me more confused.

And now, just in case you weren't baffled enough already, they've introduced Live Mesh. Or Live Mess, as we call it in Cupertino. What is it? Who knows? Who cares? All I know is it's exactly what you'd expect to get if you took Ray Ozzie, the father of Lotus Notes, and put him in charge of a giant dysfunctional software company. Crazy complicated systems that can't be described in a single sentence, or even a single page for that matter. Remember how many years Lotus spent trying to explain what Lotus Notes was? Then after about a decade they said, "It's email." Whew. Okay. Got it.

You know the big joke among Lotus insiders when Microsoft acquired Ray Ozzie's company, Groove Networks, was that at long last Lotus had triumphed over the Borg. The phone calls went something like this: Good news, comrade. We've finally got them just where we want them!

Back then it was just a joke but you know what? It's starting to sound not so funny. I'd almost believe IBM somehow set it up to get Ozzie planted into the Borg just so he could wreak havoc inside there. One thing is certain -- Microsoft now has contracted a serious case of Ray Ozzie Disease, aka Featuritis Creepionis Complicationibus. And this is only the least of their problems.

But I digress. Good luck with that Mother's Day promo, frigtards.

Foxconn leaks like a sieve

So our wonderful manufacturing partner is spreading word that the 3G iPhone will ship in June. Well thanks for killing off our iPhone sales, jerks. We'll take it out of your pay.

Mentos world record

Love the mint. Be the mint.

Cowardly Journal hacks enlist Times columnist to do their hatchet work

The chickenshit hacks at the Wall Street Journal are having conniptions over the departure of Marcus Brauchli, their managing editor. The hacks are pissed at Brauchli and think he's a coward for quitting his post instead of standing up to new owner Rupert Murdoch. But they're too cowardly to say that out in the open, so instead they get New York Times media columnist David Carr (photo right) to do their hatchet work for them. In today's paper Carr savages Brauchli for taking money from Murdoch ($3 million to $5 million, supposedly) in exchange for going away quietly. Carr quotes Journal hacks who suggest Brauchli is a hypocrite for selling his soul instead of speaking truth to power. The Journal hacks use words like "disgusting" to describe Brauchli's performance.

Curiously, however, those brave Journal hacks all speak on condition of anonymity. Not a single one will put his name to his bashing. Yes, O noble Journal hacks, O defenders of freedom of speech -- speak to us about what is disgusting. Like stabbing your boss in the back, smearing his reputation and scurrying away into the dark like a pack of rats, maybe? And you wonder why people hate the media?

The best part is Carr's last paragraph: "The verdict is already in on one matter: Inside and outside of the paper, there's no confusion about who the paper belongs to. Not the editors who built it, not the reporters who fill it with articles, but the men who bought and paid for it."

Really? You think? Yes, David Carr, the people who own the newspaper own the newspaper. Put a tray under your face to catch the scales as they fall from your eyes, frigtard.

Good news is that soon David Carr will be learning this lesson all over again when the Times gets taken over too. Let's see how brave Carr will be when it's his turn to speak truth to power.

Re: the dismay over events at the Journal, let me say this: There comes a moment in the life of every filthy hack when he finally realizes what business he's actually in -- not the glamorous, rollicking newsman's life depicted in movies like The Front Page and His Girl Friday; not the grandiose investigative heroics of All the President's Men and The Insider; but rather the grubby business of attracting an audience to whom advertising messages can be shown, and performing this task for a tiny fraction of the money your organization intends to generate from those advertisements. In other words, you are a whore. And not even a well-paid one.

Better yet, you are duped into not realizing your whoredom by being flattered and pandered to and spoonfed lies about the importance of what you do. You believe these lies and fill yourself with the notion that you are central to the business at hand -- essential, key, vital, necessary. But then one day, for whatever reason, you see the real nature of your job. You realize that far from being central to the business of journalism you are in fact the piece that could most easily be dispensed with.

Much to your chagrin and dismay you realize that the true heart of your corporation beats not in the newsroom, where you sit, but on the other side of the wall, in that storied realm you've never actually visited but where you are told various dirty people do various dirty things and are paid, you've heard, a great deal more than you are. You've always dismissed those people, thought of them as a pack of glad-handing graspers who were kept on board to keep the ad machine running so that you, Mr. Hack, could carry on the grand important work of Journalism with a capital J.

Then one day you realize you've had it backwards. The beast doesn't exist to support you. You exist to support the beast. They, not you, are running this business, and they laugh at you behind your back and not-so-secretly despise you for being so easily tricked into lining their pockets for them. The truth is right there in front of you! It has been all along! This is all even more hilarious because you make such a big deal about how shrewd and cynical you are; you're the tough guy who cuts through the bullshit and spots the truth. Except when it comes to your own situation, that is.

Suddenly you feel like a puffed-up, pious fool. Which is good, because that is exactly what you are.

My presentations versus Michael Dell's

There's no comparison. Hit the link and check out the slides. What the hell is Michael even trying to express with that slide?

OLPC plagued by "stuck" keys

See here. These POS machines are crapping out because they used shitty parts in the keyboards and now the keys are getting stuck down and you can't get them unstuck. The freetards who bought them now find themselves stuck (sorry) with machines that don't work. Money quote: "Meanwhile, members of the forums are also reporting that by taking the keyboard out of the XO laptop and rubbing on the underlying sensor, you might fix the stuck key, but that's not a 100% solution."

Somehow Intel must be to blame. Or Microsoft. How long till Double-N comes up with some new conspiracy theory?

The Goatberg Game: Fun for everyone

So apparently in the newsroom at the Wall Street Journal they pretty much all hate Goatberg and they have this game they play where every time Goatberg publishes a column they count how many times he uses the word "I" -- and it's usually a lot. They also count up other "me-related" words like me, mine and my. The joke at the Journal is that someday Walt will publish a column where every word is I.

The funny part is how many of these references to himself are absolutely unnecessary. You could take them out and the sentence would not lose anything. Example from his column today about a new cell phone search service: "It’s called ChaCha, and I’ve been testing it out." (Italics mine.)

Really? You've been testing it out? Geez, Walt, it's a good thing you told us that you've been testing it out because if you didn't tell us that we might not have been able to figure that out from the rest of the column where you explain how it works. Anyway, the point is that Walt kind of likes himself. A lot. He's got this little teeny tiny ego problem. And the editors at the Journal can't rein him in because he is the Great and Powerful Goatberg, king of all tech journalists.

Katie and the folks in the PR department just learned about the Goatberg Game from one of the beat reporters at the Journal. Now they're keeping track too.

In case you're wondering, toay's Goatberg column about the ChaCha service contains a total of 841 words, and 13 uses of the first-person pronoun. Not even close to the record, apparently, but still pretty good. Peace out.

Beastmaster, I have made you my bitch

So Microsoft just put out their numbers and they suck. And I've seen some handwringing about how this must mean the economy is having problems but come on. We know what's having problems. It's Vista. And they're not going to have their next version until 2010, and that's according to the Borg itself. Reality is probaby worse.

But let's assume they're right. That means we have two friggin years to keep smoking their weed and stealing their customers. As for that big economic slowdown, you may have noticed that it doesn't seem to be hurting us. Our earnings were up 36%, mostly thanks to Mac sales that are just going crazy. This Windows stumble by the Borg could not have happened at a better time for us, and we are totally capitalizing on it. David Kirkpatrick of Fortune says Apple is "one of the healthiest tech companies I have ever seen."

Namaste, Beastmaster and Fester. I honor the place where your frigtarded engineers and my robust earnings become one.

OLPC: And then there was one

Well it's getting kinda lonely around the Cambridge headquarters of the OLPC craptop intiative. Walter Bender, designer of the device's almost completely unusuable Sugar interface, has resigned. OLPC News reported that Bender was leaving in a huff because Nicholas Negroponte is going to use Windows XP on the green machine. Not so, Bender insists. In his exit statement Bender says two years of non-stop work (imagine that! two whole years) has wiped him out and he needs a break. So, um, he's quitting. Apparently the idea of a vacation did not occur to him. And that's it. His departure follows that of the project's security chief, as well as Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist who won worldwide praise for her work in designing the barely functioning laptop. That leaves Double-N alone at the top, though he's trying to bail too by hiring a CEO to replace him. No word on how his top choice, Kofi Annan, responded to the offer.

I don't like to gloat, but I must say this: I told you so.

Dell vows to keep shipping XP until 2012

So if you were wondering when the successor to Vista will actually appear, and maybe you were a little skeptical when Beastmaster said the world would see Son of Vista by next year, well, you had reason to be skeptical. Dell apparently has told users it will keep shipping XP until 2012. Honestly I can't believe how lucky we are. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Microsoft. Mwah.

Now we're being blamed for the death of television

See this story from the Times of London. Everyone in LA is in a tizzy because American Idol is in a tailspin and nobody is watching TV anymore and oh my God what on earth could be happening. Guy ends by saying that the iPhone has freed people up from their boob tubes. I think he's kidding (kind of) but the fact is, he's right. It's tail wagging the dog time. Technology driving content. People in the 18- to 25-year-old demographic have opted out of mainstream TV and they're never coming back. Kids younger than that never even opted in to mainstream TV to begin with. They are growing up with iPhone as their primary content consumption device. You know why this is? Because ten years ago, or actually twenty years ago, I saw all of this coming. I saw the chips, the software, the memory, the network bandwidth -- I saw the path these technologies were on. I could see how they were evolving and I could map out exactly when each one would become good enough. All I had to do then was wait. And hire some great designers. And scare the shit out of a bunch of engineers. It all worked. Now I am the king of the world. I am a golden god. Bow down, O world, and worship me.

Why I love San Francisco

This sign appeared at a rally in San Francisco over the Tibet-China-Olympics issue. Much love to the brave protester who carried this sign and dared to speak truth to power. Much love to Andrew Sullivan, who got the photo from this guy.

I don't heart New York

So now their crappy schools are refusing to take any more iMacs until we "fix" some supposed "flaw" in our WiFi in Leopard. It's just nuts. There's nothing wrong with Leopard. It's the greatest operating system ever made, by any company, on any computer, ever. It is absolutely perfect in every way. As for the New York school system, well, look. We tried to help these idiots. We reached out a hand and tried to lift them up. But they don't want the help. They like being down in hell, using Windows machines. So fine. Good riddance, I say.

Caveat cloner

More on this Psystar clone Mac thing -- it appears the whole thing might be a scam. Money quote from Larry Dignan of ZDNet: "Is this company run by high school kids? ... I'd steer clear of this miss until Psystar proves itself. I’ve been seduced by a sham $150 laptop before and know the drill with faux vendors."

Dignan asks readers to let him know if they are actually able to buy one of these machines. We here at FSJ would appreciate a heads up too. First one to send proof of purchase (pix, invoice, receipt, whatever) gets a free fake v2 iPhone. And a phone call from Woz.

Quien es mas horrible -- Madonna o iJustine?

I'll admit, I used to find iJustine annoying, not to mention kind of scary with her whole stalker thing. But you know what? I kind of like this video where she's making fun of Madonna, if only because, in my opinion, very few people in the entire world are more awful than Madonna. You go, Justine.

Sleuthing out the v2 iPhone release

Seeking Alpha thinks they've got us. Low iPhone inventory at Apple stores in the United States. Huge discounts from the European carriers who are currently holding most of the inventory -- and the discount programs run until June. Hmmm. What could be happening in June, I wonder? Meanwhile 3G chips have improved and consume less power while offering greater feature integration including full backward compatibility with EDGE so even if the frigtards at AT&T can't get their shit together on their 3G tower build-out, you'll still be doing fine. Okay, Seeking Alpha. You got us. Guilty as charged. And wait till you see this new iPhone. It's mind-blowing. Seriously. I didn't think a device could ever be more beautiful than our original iPhone - and then Jonny and his boys did it. Wow. Every time I use my v2 iPhone I feel this thrill going up my leg, like when Chris Matthews listens to Obama giving a speech. Yeah. It's like that. Obama-esque. Truly.

Woz isn't going to buy a cloned Mac, trust me.

Dudes, please, for the love of all things holy, get a grip. About a zillion of you have sent in links to articles like this one on Ars Technica where Woz is quoted saying he might buy one of these nutso Psystar Mac clones. Quote from the Wozmeister: "I need another tower and I like the price, so I may get one."

People, come on. He's joking. Okay? The guy's rich. He doesn't care what stuff costs. And anyway he gets any Apple product he wants, for no cost. He's punking you, you dumb reporters! He's been doing this stuff for years. It's worse now because he's getting older and he doesn't have much to do and frankly the poor old bastard is bored out of his skull. So when reporters call him he considers it a chance to play a prank on them. He once told a guy from InfoWeek that he'd stopped using toilet paper for environmental reasons, and was only wiping his butt with his bare hand, "like they do in Monaco." The kid printed it. Hilarious.

If you think that's bad you should see what Woz does to telemarketers. He's the only person I know who hasn't had himself put on the "Do Not Call" list. He told me he wished they had a "Please Do Call" list so he could get on it. He does terrible things to them. He'll pretend to be brain damaged, and keep asking them to repeat what they just said. He'll tell them he weighs a thousand pounds and that he's lying in bed eating onion dip out of his navel. He'll make up stories, like he just came inside from burying his neighbor's tiny dog which he accidentally ran over and killed with his lawnmower and he doesn't know if he should tell anyone. Or he and Kathy Griffin will pretend to be having an argument (because it turns out she loves doing this stuff to telemarketers too) and she'll start screaming at him and he'll scream back, telling her to shut up because "I'm trying to help our family by obtaining zero percent APR financing rates on our credit card debt, okay? So just sit your white trash ass back down on that couch and shut your pie hole while I talk some business with this finance person. Okay, sir? You still there? I'm sorry about that. My wife's on new medication and it's just making her crazy. Oh, wait, hold on a sec. No, you shut up, slut! Do not push me, baby. I will knock those teeth out of your head! Okay, sir, are you still there? No, we're fine. Please go ahead. This is important."

Another one is he'll pretend he's elderly -- "Ninety-one years old and still making love once a week to my girlfriend, and she's eighty-three!" -- and then when the telemarketer goes into her rap he'll ask her to hold on a minute and he'll say he's feeling some tightness and pain in his chest and he needs to get his nitroglycerin pills but then he'll pretend he's fallen over and he can't get to his pills and he's having a heart attack and can the woman please call 911 and he starts to tell them the address but then he drops the phone before he can spit it out. And I mean he'll act out the whole thing, lying on the floor, groaning, everything.

The worst one is sometimes if the telemarketer is a woman he'll tell her that his girlfriend recently broke up with him (usually for some bizarre reason, like she fell in love with a carnival midget) and he'll start telling the telemarketer how nice his girlfriend was and how he misses her so much and he keeps calling her and leaving messages and she won't call him back. Then he'll start to cry a little bit and he'll say he's just so lost and lonely and forlorn, and he can't sleep at night -- and then he'll say, "You know, ma'am, you sound really nice. Can I ask what you're wearing? Oh that's nice. Do you mind if I just touch myself while you tell me about the vinyl siding? No please, go on. Really. I want to hear all about it. Uh-huh. Oh. Oh yes. Uh-huh. Vinyl. Never paint again. Lower heating bills. Yes. Yes. That's good. No, please keep talking, I want to hear all about it." Then Kathy will barge in and say, "Tommy, honey, it's time for prayers. Tommy? What are you doing? Are you masturbating again? Are you on the phone? Who are you talking to?" Then she'll grab the phone and say, "Who is this and what are you doing corrupting my son with your filth? Do you realize this boy is fourteen years old? Well I swear you are in huge trouble. I want your name and your supervisor's name and I am calling the police right now. I mean it. As the Lord is my witness, you are going to jail!"

Anyway, trust me. Woz won't be buying a Psystar computer. He's just having some fun with some poor tech reporter. Good one, Woz. You've still got it. You old nut.

Red Hat throws in towel on Linux desktop

Great news, Mac fans! Red Hat is getting out of the desktop OS business, which will make life so much easier for us. No more having to sell against Red Hat. Yay! Red Hat's basic argument is that not enough people want Linux on the desktop -- I know, shocking, right? -- and so they can't make money doing it and because they're a publicly traded company they can't do things that don't make money. See their pathetic statement here. CNET covers it here. As far as we can tell Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has not yet copied the statement into an article of his own. More as this develops.

This is why we love Microsoft

Because honestly, what other company in the world makes videos as cheesy and awful and outdated as this? I mean honestly. It's like they're trying to be awful. And it just keeps helping our business. Leopard anyone?

Rare video of eWeek copycat Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste

Spotted in the wild! It's former eWeek copycat hack Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (aka the King of All Freetard Hacks, aka the founder and self-appointed president of the Internet Press Guild) reporting live from a Linux trade show right before he got axed in a recent round of Ziff-Davis layoffs. You think Ricky Gervais created some excruciating moments in the British version of "The Office"? You ain't seen nothing. Watch this poor frigtard really struggle when he's caught live on camera and isn't allowed to copy from a Red Hat press release. Though you have to admit, the camera really loves him. Note the really professional zoom-in-zoom-out technique of fellow freetard hack (and Slashdot boss and former limo driver) Robin "Roblimo" Miller. To see the original go here.

I am so friggin sick of music companies trying to steal my money

That's what this proposed iPod tax in the UK amounts to. The official line of bullshit is that the ability to copy CDs into digital formats (they call it "format shifting") represents a "value" for which the record companies are not being adequately compensated.

The reality, however, is simply that these dirty scumbag musicians and their filthy swindler record companies figure they don't have enough money already so they want to take a slice of the money I'm getting for my iPods. As if they have anything to do with the design and manufacture of iPods. No. Of course they don't. We design them. We write the software. We run the store. We source the parts and manufacture the iPods and sell them. Nonetheless these assholes want my money because people play their music on my devices. What up with that? Do the makers of TV shows go around saying they want a slice of every television that gets sold?

Thank God the hacks have been utterly dismissive of this ridiculous proposal by the UK music business. Their counterparts in the States just report stuff like this with a straight face, as if maybe it makes sense. Not so the Brits who just spew contempt. My fave is this guy in the Torygraph who says if you're going to tax people for "format shifting" then why not tax them for other things, like the ability to carry a CD out to your car, or to your living room, or the ability to open your patio doors and listen to music outside, or the ability to press "pause" button or even the ability to hear music better if you clean wax from your ears (ie "wax shifting")?

God, I love the Brits. I really do.

The Mac clone dudes are back and now they're calling themselves freedom fighters

See this piece on CNET by Krazy Tom Krazit. Tom is a nitwit but I do agree with his assessment re: the matter of whether or not Apple is operating a monopoly. The freedom fighter Psystar cloners say we are. Krazy Tom says we're not. Anyway I doubt it matters since nobody in their right mind wants a cloned Mac instead of a real one and even if they do, they won't be able to because we are going to bend these dudes over and get medieval on their asses.

Great work, CollegeHumor

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Yet another lame attempt at "humor" from the guys at "CollegeHumor." At least I think it's an attempt at humor since they have "humor" in their name. Or maybe "CollegeDouchebags" was already taken? Honestly, I can't believe Barry Diller was nuts enough to buy this POS company.

Just FYI, the 3G iPhone rocks

I've been using one and I'm just so impressed. Honestly. I wish I could say more, but I can't. Sorry.

On the other hand, I'm not by any means suggesting that you should hold off on an iPhone purchase today and wait for the new model. You should, of course. But I'm not suggesting that.

That is all.

Borg engages in 'suicide marketing'

Very smart piece by Mickey Kaus on Slate about the Borg's evil scheme to goose XP for all it's worth by threatening to inflict Vista on the world at any minute. You can see it here (though you have to scroll down to see it). Kaus says the Borg "cultivate(s) the image of a big, clumsy and greedy organization."

Key word here: Clumsy. See, that's what really scares the shit out of people about the Borg. People can (sort of) deal with the idea of an organization that is big and has too much power, so long as they have some confidence in the giant organization's competence. (Hence the general admiration of Google. And us.) But what people can't tolerate is a big giant robot that keeps tripping over its own big giant robot feet and threatening to topple over and wipe out entire neighborhoods.

This is the biggest challenge that Borgflacks and Borgspinners face and it's one they keep trying to address by planting stories like this one in Fortune last summer where BorgTards acted ten kinds of humble about how Microsoft made all these mistakes in China but eventually learned the error of its ways. Don't think for a minute that Fortune came up this idea. No. It was dreamed up by a team of Borgflacks at Waggener Edstrom and spoonfed to Fortune. The entire point of the exercise was to start transforming the "clumsy giant" image into the "clever, nimble, still-able-to-learn-and-therefore-not-so-scary giant."

This anyway was Katie's analysis at the time and trust me, she's the best in the business when it comes to "shaping corporate narratives," which is what people call this. (If only because it sounds so much better than "getting paid to lie.")

But I digress. Point of the Mickey Kaus piece about Microsoft is that Vista was never intended to be an actual product -- rather, it exists simply to scare the shit out of people and boost sales of XP. I'd never thought of it that way but he kind of has a point. Money quote:

"First, you screw up your major product, replacing it with a fancier version that is widely derided and universally regarded as inferior to its main competitor. But--key point--you keep selling the old, popular product. Then you announce that you'll stop selling the popular product on June 30. This causes a predictable--and highly profitable--surge in sales. ("Last chance to buy Windows XP!") You pocket the millions from those sales, but then at the last minute announce a reprieve. Bowing to customer demand you'll keep selling XP--until you need another little boost in the bottom line, when you will announce once again that you're killing it after a date certain. Last last chance! Really. We mean it this time! Then another reprieve, and another deadline, and another surge of panic buying, etc.--on and on, seemingly ad infinitum (at least if you are a monopoly player like Microsoft)."

God bless you, John Doerr!

John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, your efforts to save the planet by investing in ethanol (and similar efforts by your fellow Valley VCs) are now causing people to starve. Nice work, Valley frigtards. For video of John Doerr crying about global warming, see here. You think he's crying now, too? Now that the big ethanol initiative is fucking up the forests and taking food from people's mouths? Did it ever occur to you idiots that your efforts might have some unintended consequences? Please tell me you did not just rush in with your stupid Valley money and your stupid Valley hubris and fuck up the world's entire food system. Did you? Er ...

FWIW, one thing I love about the Valley is the way the nice folks in Atherton and Woodside will weep over seeing an ice cap melting or snow lines receding in the Alps. I wonder if photographs of actual human beings starving as a result of their investments will have the same effect. Could someone take the above photo and tape it to the door at Kleiner Perkins?

Or maybe this hunger issue could be the next project for Bob Metcalfe and his one pair of glasses to solve. You could create PoverNet, modeled after the Internet, and, um, you know, like, figure out the hunger issue. You could have conferences. With Richard Branson and Jimmy Wales. Lots of PowerPoint slides. Lots of little startups with clever names. Honestly, where's the big VC effort in solving hunger? Why haven't they ever gone after that problem? Oh, right. No money in it.

Someone is out to get me

Check out this article about strange behavior on the Time magazine "Most Influential People" list where suddenly in recent days my ranking plummeted. According to the guy who wrote the piece, it appears that someone is going in and repeatedly giving me the lowest vote possible so as to push me down the list. My bet is it's the Beastmaster. Either that or maybe it's eWeek copy machine operator Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste. I hear he's got some free time on his hands these days.

Dear Facebook kiddies: Be very afraid

Sure, your new COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is the flavor of the month and is getting all sorts of great lovey-dovey press from Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. And right now you all just think it's so cool to have this bona fide grownup taking over and many of you actually feel safer now that you have a mommy on board and you're not depending on Zuckerberg who, let's be frank, hasn't always inspired confidence. Young friends, enjoy the honeymoon while it lasts. Keep zipping around the offices on your ripstik things and scrawling stupid graffiti on the walls and believing it when Sheryl gives you hugs and tells you you're so cool. Because one day soon that shtick is all gonna be over, and mama is gonna bring the hammer down. Trust me, I've seen her in action. I've partied with this woman and I know what she's like. For one thing, she's way smarter than all of you little punks put together. And she will not be afraid to let you know it. For another thing, I once saw her bite a dude. He came up and put his hand on her shoulder at a party. She turned and sank her teeth into his hand, so hard she drew blood. Worse yet, I later found out that the dude was her husband. I'm not making this up.

Anyway, Facebook kiddies, enjoy your time while you can. Right now Sheryl Sandberg is studying you. She's sifting data, combing your code, seeing what kind of car you drive and what hours you work. She's watching you. She's sizing you up. Slowly, one by one, she will start picking you off. Like a predator in one of those sci-fi movies where people keep going missing. Don't believe me? I wouldn't wander off down any hallways alone. And whatever you do, do not put your hand anywhere near her face. I'm serious.

Why did we hire an acquisitions specialist? Just to drive people nuts.

Seriously. See this story about us hiring some big honcho lawyer from HP who oversaw the HP-Compaq merger and now everyone is trying to figure out if we're going on some big spending spree with our $18 billion in cash and if so who are we gonna buy? Which is exactly what we figured would happen which is exactly why we did it. Because come on. Let's be honest. What's it cost us to hire some lawyer? Peanuts in the bigger scheme of things. Totally worth it from a PR perspective and just as a way to freak people out. And who knows? Maybe we'll buy someone big. I doubt it, but you never know.

Google: A certain amount of evil is now OK

That anyway seems to be the gist of the company's new line according to hyena girl Marissa Mayer who apparently told some conference last week that "Don't be evil" was never anything like an official company motto or anything. Now TechCrunch, reading tea leaves, reports here that this isn't Google's way of dumping the motto but just "a venting of a frustration." Money quote: "Google can’t ditch the motto (the press would eat that up), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live up to it." Becoming difficult? Come on. The really amazing thing is that it has taken anyone this long to realize that it was always bullshit, right from the start.

Dell promo: Free pubes with replacement laptop

Check out this horrific customer testimonial. Dell sent a guy a replacement craptop for one that was no good. The replacement arrived with pubes jammed in the keys. You know, I remember Michael Dell doing this to whiny customers back in the days when he was operating out of his college dorm room. But I really thought he'd grown up a bit. Guess not.

BusinessWeek reveals our secret plan to topple the Borg

Dammit, people! Who the hell is leaking to these assholes and letting them publish articles like this one? Somehow they've figured out that Spaces + virtualization + iPhone 2.0 = the foundation of our major assault on Microsoft. Money quote: "The battle ahead seems clear: It's Apple's seamlessly integrated software strategy, minimally sized and maximally efficient, competing against Microsoft's strategy of multiple incompatible, bloated, and fragmented operating systems. It's Apple's growing customer acceptance vs. Microsoft's rising customer pain. By failing to modernize its operating system in a timely way, Microsoft has left its flank wide open for an all-out assault from a once-vanquished rival."

A portfolio of mortgages or the patents behind iPhone? I know which one I'd rather own.

Apparently so does Wall Street, according to this article which points out that Apple's market cap now exceeds that of Citigroup, even though less than two years ago Citigroup's market cap was four times the size of ours. Once again let me say to Apple shareholders: You're welcome.

Gartner predicting the past with 99% certainty

Windows at risk of becoming obsolete? Who knew? Well, check out this story where those big genius analysts at Gartner predict that Windows is "in danger of collapsing" and "risks becoming obsolete." They say this as if it's something that might happen in the future. Weird.

Borg: We're annoying users on purpose

I'm stunned. Talk about honesty. Check out this story where a Borgtard exec tells a conference that the User Account Control in Vista was designed to irritate usrs. Money quote: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious." Congratulations, dudes from Redmond. On this one you've succeeded in a big way.

Zune-atic calls Borg tech support to ask about changing his name to "Microsoft Zune"

Mad props to Engadget for breaking this story. The Zune-tard guy with the Zune tats all over his enormous body calls tech support to ask about changing his name.

To those of you who are wondering: Yes, we're paying this guy to do this. It's payback for what the Borg did to us when they hired Johnny Skidmark during the iPhone launch.

Psystar -- that's a French word meaning "we're about to go out of business."

Ars Technica reports on a $399 Mac clone from a company called Psystar. Oh wait. I just tried to open their web page and it appears to be disconnected. Great work, Apple legal.

Google-Salesforce deal: Somehow the significance is lost on me

So it's all over the news today. Google and Salesforce.com have integrated Google Apps with Salesforce.com CRM software. For the Times story see here. The reason for the deal, says Marc Benioff (at right, riding frigtard machine), is that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." And of course folks like reality-averse Henry Blodget are once again beating the drum about Microsoft being disrupted and how this spells doom for the Borg and this is just huge momentous earth-shattering news.

Really? Because my first reaction was, Who gives a shit? Nobody uses Google Apps. So if I'm a Salesforce user, what's the good news here? That now I can have low-cost access to apps that I've already had access to for nothing and I haven't wanted them? What's next from Benioff? A major integration alliance with Lotus Symphony? Why not get WordPerfect and dBase IV and Borland Quattro and build a total software powerhouse dream team? Then the Borg would be doomed for sure!

The problem with Benioff is that for all his talk about the future, and the "end of software," he's got a bad case of McNealy-itis. That is, he keeps fighting the battles of the last decade, over and over and over again. Meanwhile the Borg has already written off Office. They'll milk it for a few more years but they can see the value going to zero. (They'll never admit that, but they have. Trust me. I've got spies close to Ballmer.) Another problem Benioff has is that his business can't scale. CRM is nice but let's face it, it's CRM. It is what it is. It ain't ever gonna be something that everyone uses. Like an iPod.

Worse yet, Benioff himself is getting disrupted by little guys like SugarCRM. You know why? Because Benioff, ironically, has built his business around a bloated, overly expensive, outdated business model, a model that comes straight out of the late Nineties -- he's running his own data center, and he's using Sun servers and Oracle software. It's like "Back to the Future." Meanwhile the rest of the world has leapt ahead onto Intel architecture and Linux. For Benioff to survive into the era of the cloud he'll have to rip up his entire architecture and rebuild it. Yeah. It's like that. He's stuck. And he knows it. He's not doing cloud computing. He's doing what we all already recognize was a precursor to the cloud. But, um, yeah. Good luck with that "Kill the Borg" strategy.

Girl's got rhythm

This is Hillary doing some funky moves at a senior aerobics class in Philly with some very non-bitter Pennsylvania residents. Happy Sunday.

Steve Ballmer, change agent

Jeez. I take a day off to do some meditating at Green Gulch Farm and come back to find Monkey Boy's mug glaring out from page one of the Journal and a story that says the Microhoo deal is turning into a full-blown clusterfuck. For a teaser of their story go here. Short version: Yahoo is trying to drag AOL and Google into the mess. Google figures it can skirt antitrust regulators by brokering an ad deal instead of doing an outright merger with Yahoo, which is too bad because wouldn't it be a great world if the biggest Internet company had a name like GooHoo? Meanwhile Time-Warner just wants someone, anyone, to take AOL off its hands. AOL should have been taken out back and euthanized years ago. It's a friggin zombie, still roaming the earth and stinking up the joint. Begone, foul site! Meanwhile the Borg wants its analog from the media world -- Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- to join Team Evil, and Rupe sees a chance to unload MySpace before it gets destroyed by Facebook. That anyway seems to be what's going on though who knows? I keep getting this mental image of all these bozos rushing around the top floor of a hotel, zipping in one door and out the other, like a skit from the Three Stooges. Or was it the Marx Brothers?

So I called Monkey Boy to find out what he's doing. It was early but I knew it was okay because he's totally one of these dudes who wakes up before dawn so he can get a jump on the day and start plotting more ways to cheapen and uglify the world for the rest of us. Sure enough he was on his treadmill in his workout room slopping down a bowl of corned beef hash with fried eggs while watching three television sets and two computer screens and memorizing everything. He's like, "You want to know the truth? Okay. Here's the thing. Somebody needed to come into this space and smash some shit together. Understand? I mean there's too many of these companies all doing the same thing, or variations on the same thing, and there's way too much overhang, and AOL shouldn't even fucking exist anymore and MySpace is ridiculous and we're all fighting for the same dollars and this shit has just got to stop and someone needed to toss a grenade into the pit and guess what, I'd rather be the one tossing the grenade than be the one trying to catch it and toss it to someone else before it explodes."

So I asked him how he figures the whole thing will play out and he's like, "Who knows, and who cares? But this shit needs to get shaken up. It's turning into a cesspool. The way we figure it if we stir up the pot at the very least we'll force some of these idiots into forming really stupid alliances or even better maybe they'll actually merge and mess each other up completely. If possible we'd love to push AOL deeper into Google. I'd glue AOL to Eric Schmidt's head if I could. But whatever happens, if we get stumped on Yahoo we'll get portrayed as the poor loser, shunned again, thwarted by some big alliance when really what we've done is forced our competitors to tie themselves into a big huge fucking knot. See the one thing we still have going for us here at Microsoft is that even though people make fun of us and deride us and call us clods, deep down they also still fear us. I mean they really, really fear us. And that fear is something we can use. I don't mean that we're bluffing, because we're not. We'll buy Yahoo, and we'll make the deal work. But if we don't get Yahoo that's okay too because the only way they can escape us is to make a deal that not only fucks them up but also fucks up one or more other players in the space. Geddit?"

So then I asked him why Vista sucks so bad and he says, "Who cares? We'll do another one but the desktop is dead. Office apps are dead. We'll milk them for another five years and we'll use Yahoo to generate ad revenue to get us through the next five or ten years but the real game is a decade out when we'll be running clouds and the Internet will go beyond the browser and beyond the PC and will be embedded into everything. Ambient, persistent connections, with billions of endpoints hooked to the network. You'll be there. But so will we. Wait and see."

Bob Metcalfe and the "one pair of glasses" theory

Look, I love Bob Metcalfe. We used to hang out on his farm and smoke weed and talk about chicks. But when I saw this story on CNET about him today I nearly swooned. Money quote is right at the top: "Bob Metcalfe thinks we'll solve global warming if we take our cue from the Internet." At some show in Boston he "laid out his vision of the `EnerNet,' the concept of applying the lessons of building the Internet to the energy business."

Um, right. The way to solve global warming is to follow the example of the Internet. Just like Andy Grove says the way to fix the pharmaceutical industry is to follow the example of the chip industry. And Nicholas Negroponte thinks the way to solve poverty is to hand out laptops.

I call it the "one pair of glasses" theory. You see it all the time. People know one thing and they think that this one thing can be applied to every problem, because it's the only way they know how to look at the world. They've got one pair of glasses.

Usually the results are just silly but this stuff can be dangerous in the hands of guys who've become fabulously rich with their one pair of glasses and now have too much free time on their hands. (eg, Metcalfe and Grove.) Experience has convinced them that their one pair of glasses is a super-duper magical pair that never fails. And now they've piled up enough money to make themselves into a huge pain in the ass.

With guys like Negroponte it's just kind of sad and/or funny. Double-N hasn't ever succeeded at much of anything but the one thing he knows (or thinks he knows) is computers -- therefore, computers are the key to saving the world. And the key to educating children. Nobody outside the computer industry thinks that. Certainly no schoolteacher thinks that, but how would Negroponte know that since he's never been a schoolteacher and doesn't have a degree in education and I doubt very much he's ever spent much time in a grade-school classroom?

I don't think there's a schoolteacher anywhere who believes the best way to improve education would be to give every student a laptop. (My sense is they'd like the money spent on bigger salaries for teachers.) But that's Negroponte's theory and he's sticking to it. Ditto for his pal Walter Bender from OLPC. Walter has spent his entire adult life cooped up at MIT playing at being a "computer scientist," so of course he thinks computers are the key to fixing every problem. He's got one pair of glasses.

For what it's worth on Metcalfe, okay, look, he invented Ethernet. And he invented Metcalfe's law, which sounds cool even though turns out not to be true. (FYI, cool-sounding slogans and sound bites are Bob's stock in trade. Check out the CNET article to see how he's at it again, saying "greentech" is not a good phrase and we should instead refer to "blue tech" and "black tech." It's a trick he taught me a long time ago for making yourself seem like an expert on something even when you don't know jack shit about it -- you just challenge the terminology and invent a couple of clever terms and next thing you know people are calling you a visionary and an out-of-the-box thinker who's looking at the problem from a fresh angle.)

But I digress. The point is, Ethernet is great stuff and was a big breakthrough -- in 1974 -- and we're all grateful for it. But the fact that some guy invented some computer networking protocol thirty-four years ago doesn't exactly make him an expert on anything else. In fact I'd say Bob has no more standing on global warming or climate science than he does on brain surgery or black holes or the mating habits of silkworms. Nevertheless he'll go on making investments in greentech and giving speeches and mucking around and fucking things up for a while alongside Richard Branson and the rest of his dream team, which includes veterans of Google, Paypal, and Wikipedia, who will of course tell you that the way to solve global warming is to copy Google, Paypal and Wikipedia.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Larry thinks the way to win the America's Cup is to apply the lessons he learned at Oracle. And you know how well that's worked out.

Red Hat hates patents. Sort of.

Classic freetard maneuver today. Red Hat, king of all freetard software makers, put out a statement saying patents are bad and are stifling innovation. (Reprint by Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste is here.) Red Hat also filed an amicus brief in some court case where someone is trying to patent a business method.

Says Red Hat:

"Today the patent system is, if anything, a hindrance to open source. Developers face the risk that the original code they have written in good faith could be deemed to infringe an existing software patent."

Except that:

"Despite the hindrances of the patent system, open source continues to expand at an exponential rate."

And, um:

"Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the event they are faced with a future lawsuit."

To see a list of Red Hat patents and patent applications, go here and here.

FWIW, note how many of these filings contain the phrase "methods and systems" in the title. Ahem.

Some programmer dude says I'm his hero

See here. I'm on a list with Leonardo (not DiCaprio), Isaac Newton, Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse. Not sure who that last one is but here is the money quote about me: "There's no name for what Steve Jobs is, because there hasn't been anyone quite like him before. He doesn't design Apple's products himself. Historically the closest analogy to what he does are the great Renaissance patrons of the arts."

My sentiments exactly. Much love, non-famous programmer dude.

Apple retailTard in England hating on customers

Attention retailTards -- I know our customers are assholes. I know you hate them. I know you hate your jobs. But please don't make videos complaining about them. Bokay? Also, if you do make videos, please don't advocating hitting children. Not cool. Okay? Moshe has been dispatched to take care of this particular shithead. And we've contacted Squirrel Boy to see about having these videos taken down.

This accessory makes me sick

Sure, you get better reception. But at the price of ruining the appearance of your precious God phone. Ugh.

HP, hater of Third World children

Why else would they roll out yet another OLPC killer? The HP mini notebook weighs less than 3 pounds, costs $500 with Linux on it, and is aimed at schoolkids. How dare they? Don't they know that Nicholas Negroponte has already solved this problem? Why are they working so hard to undermine him?

The worst iPhone review so far

From Singapore. Check out the nails. And the eyelashes. Apparently this woman is a very well-known blogger over there. God I hate bloggers. Much love to Timothy for the reference.

Infection spreads: Borg releases more trade secrets

See here. They're trying to appease antitrust goons. But the idea that now more people will be building MicroTard-style products terrifies me. This is progress?

Moshe got to Mossberg; Mossberg retracts 3G iPhone statement

Silicon Alley Insider gets the story here. Walt says he has no actual knowledge of when the 3G iPhone will ship despite having mouthed off about it a couple days ago. Says Walt: "If I knew when this date was, why would I announce it in the middle of a sentence at the Finnish embassy, rather than report it in the Wall Street Journal?" Yeah. Because Walt is all about putting Journal readers first. So on the day that the 3G iPhone does finally ship, and Walt runs his review on that very same day, maybe someone should write to the Journal and ask him how long he's been using that new iPhone and why he didn't tell his Journal readers all about it the moment it arrived.

Hunting for camel toads

Don't know if you can read this clip but it's worth checking out. Some kid was visiting a relative and she found a note where he was telling his friends about going to the pool to check out "camel toads." Relative got worried that this was some kind of drug reference and wrote to the local "Ask Leslie" advice lady. "Please let me know what camel toads are and how I might be able to tell if he is smoking, taking or licking them." Ahem. This must have been a prank, right?

Open letter to Apple employees

Dear acolytes:
Tomorrow the Olympic torch will be carried through San Francisco. Many of you have expressed interest in disrupting this event. We share your outrage and so have declared tomorrow an official company holiday for those employees who wish to participate in protests. Please make arrangements with your supervisor or manager and be sure to check with our Protest Office for tips on staying safe when confronting the Chinese special forces and various assorted fascist pigs who will be helping them carry out this sickening display of oppression. The Protest Office also will provide you with an Apple hotline phone number for you to call in case of arrest. Our team of lawyers will be on hand with bail money to make your stay in jail as brief as possible. Ja'Red (above) will be leading a special flying squadron. Look for him tomorrow and follow him into battle. Free Tibet! Peace out.

Dear Jerry Yang: Bend over and take it like a man

Well the Microhoo deal has reached the really sad, ugly phase. Just to bring you up to speed: A few days ago Monkey Boy said he's sick of waiting and gave Yahoo an ultimatum -- make a deal in three weeks or we come down there with machine guns blazing and Operation Lebensraum goes into effect. Then Jerry Yang fired back saying the Borg bid undervalues Yahoo. Funny claim, that, since, um, nobody else wants to buy Yahoo at any price and last I knew when you're selling something, like a car or a house, it's only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. (This is the argument Larry used in reducing the taxes on his house recently.)

So now poor Jerry is getting weird and desperate. He's trolling the Valley like a cheap tranny hooker down in the Tenderloin rushing up to cars at red lights and trying to land one last trick before the sun comes up. I mean he's calling everyone. He's calling VCs and private equity guys. He's calling investment bankers. He's calling Facebook and Google and Intel and AMD and Amazon and HP and IBM and Gateway and Dell. He's calling Masayoshi Son. He's calling Chinese government officials (argument being "Hey, we already have such a great working relationship.")

Of course he's calling me. Just like he called me when his troops needed a pep talk last year. He's like, Steve, dude, I'll do whatever I need to do. You want me to mow your lawn? Wash your car? Steve, I'm sitting here wearing a skirt, okay? You know what I'm saying? You understand me? Don't make me spell it out, man. Just please please please save me from the Beastmaster.

My feeling is this. First of all, we don't have enough money to buy Yahoo, and even if we did, I don't want to own Yahoo. Second of all, there's this little thing called karma and maybe somehow in some twisted way this is your payback for what you did to those Chinese dissidents. (Also see here.)

Jerry, let me tell you what everyone in the Valley is saying to each other but is too polite to say to you: You mis-managed your way into this mess, so mis-manage your way out of it. You screwed up, and now you've been sent to prison, and your cellmate is this big scary crazy dude who wants to mess with you big-time, and nobody is going to get you out of it.

Jerry, I hate to say this, but it's time to bend over and take it like a man.

(Much love to Art Director Jason for the Photoshop work.)

Goatberg, put a friggin sock in it

So my good friend Goatberg is out blabbing about the 3G iPhone and saying we'll ship one in sixty days. Um, dude, what part of "non-disclosure agreement" do you not understand? Anyway, folks, there's nothing to worry about, and we're not doing a 3G iPhone in 60 days, or maybe we are, but not really, so keep buying the one that's out there, seriously, there's no reason not to, because even if we do put out a 3G iPhone we'll probably offer some kind of price protection or trade-in deal for people who've bought iPhones within the past 30 or 60 days or something. Don't hold me to it but that's what I'd think might be very likely or something. Peace.

FYI, Goatberg is being flown to the Valley tonight for a little chat. More as this develops.

Fatties invade Regent Street store in London

Much love to dear reader Liam for alerting us to this invasion of overweight people in our London stores. This one was spotted beaching herself on a MacBook Pro in the Regent Street emporium. I've got Ron Johnson looking into how this happened. Our staff members are trained in all locations to shoo away people who look and dress like this. ("Please keep London tidy?" I'll say.) We also train all staff members to never allow photographs to be taken inside a store. Moshe has been dispatched. Heads will be rolling tomorrow. Take my word for it. Peace out.

Surrender, Fester!

Some filthy hack at ZDNet calls on Ballmer to resign. Says the Borg has missed out on the ultra-low-cost PC thing and is scrambling to use XP to fight off Linux and "Vista is a slow-motion disaster." Money quote: "Steve, resign. If you can’t do that, at least stop obsessing over Google. Focus Microsoft on building great software. That is a game you can win."

Borg scrambles to erase the stink of Vista

Now Gates says they'll have Windows 7 next year, where previously they'd said they wouldn't have the next crappy iteration of Windows until 2010. "I'm superenthused about what it will do in lots of ways," the Beastmaster sayeth. By which I think he means they've totally redesigned the blue screen of death to make it more visually appealing. And there's a whole new set of driver issues and weird crashes and stalls. And performance will be down by an extra 10%. Can't wait! Seriously.

Meanwhile if you're really interested in software gorpspeak, this guy claims to have some inside dope on what Windows 7 is going to look like. Thanks to the folks who sent me this link but I must admit I didn't read it, only because I really don't care what Windows 7 will look like. And I'm super busy. Okay?

Much love to Katie and her team for this fantastic product placement

Honestly, we're everywhere these days.

Frigtarded record labels keep trying to kill us. It won't work.

Now they're teaming up with MySpace. It won't work. They must know it. They're throwing everything they can at us, and we just keep steaming ahead. We're now the full-blown undisputed #1 king of music retailing. And these morons at the record labels are crapping in their Italian suits. Phil Schiller calls what they're doing the "Gulliver strategy." They know none of these ridiculous deals is an iTune killer. But they figure if they just make enough of these little deals with everyone in sight then maybe they can slow us down a little bit or trip us up.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. These dopes are getting what they deserved. They saw digital music coming years ago. Just like we did. But they couldn't figure out how to do it, and/or they couldn't be bothered to invest in building out an infrastructure to sell music online. They couldn't write the software and build the store and figure out the pricing model. Because you know what? It's hard. And it seemed like a real big risk, a big investment that might not pay off. So they balked. And we did it for them. We wrote the code. We built the store. We built the players. We did the hard work. We took the big risk that they didn't want to take. Now we're reaping the reward. And these shitheads are running around with their hair on fire now that they realize they've lost control of their industry.

Now, desperate and cornered, they want to kneecap us by making deals with anybody who's not Apple. Today it's MySpace. Tomorrow it will be someone else. All I can say is, play on, you bastards. Keep fiddling while your business burns. Keep making deals with idiots. We'll just keep doing what we're doing, and we'll be here waiting when you come crawling back on your knees to us. Meanwhile, peace out and namaste. I honor the place where your back catalog and my net income become one.

Dell has become the Hillary Clinton of computers

It's over. They can't win. They've lost. But they keep plugging on. Even John C. Dvorak is taking shots at them. So you know it's bad. And they're now boosting layoffs above the 8,800-employee figure they originally announced. Geez, you know what? If I owned Dell I'd shut the place down and give the money back to the shareholders. Let's face it, Dell. You've been pwned. Ha! I love it.

Crap in a box: Borg to make `containerized data center.'

See here. Now you can get your Windows goodness delivered by the truckload. Great news for frigtards everywhere. Meanwhile My Little Pony is crying foul, saying Sun did this first and has some kind of patents on the concept which, because they are now the leading proponents of free and open source software, they will be using to sue Microsoft.

We haven't broken ground on our new campus yet. Fortune thinks this is news.

See here. They did a whole story on how we haven't even applied for permits for our new campus even though I spoke to the Cupertino city council about it two whole years ago. (We have been kinda busy these past two years. Little thing called the iPhone. And another little thing called Leopard. Maybe you've heard of them?)

Anyway, my question to Fortune is simply this: Why is this news? Why is Fortune running this story? Guess it's a slow week for business hacks, but still. Come on.

Then a bunch of us just sat down for our daily half hour of collaborative silent contemplation and then when we were done I said, Hey, we should think of other things that have not happened and send them to Fortune as a list of story ideas.

Anyone want to help out? We'll forward to Jon Fortt so he can make his page count next week.

We look like idiots in this battle with New York over a trademark

I told Katie this was going to backfire on us. Some group in New York called GreeNYC wants to use a logo (right) that looks kinda sorta maybe not really like our Apple logo. Wired has the story here. We're trying to stop them. Which puts us in a fight against (a) a group of greenie do-gooders; and (b) a city with millions of people who we hope will buy products from our big shiny stores. Smart move, Apple lawyers. FWIW, the Jobsmeister voted nay on this because frankly I don't think anyone is going to confuse a big, dirty, filthy, grubby, violent East Coast city with the clear, spare Zen-like tranquility of our retail temples. Frankly according to our research our Fifth Avenue store is now the #1 tourist attraction in New York, ahead of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Even ahead of the Carnegie Deli. Nevertheless the legal big brains said we had to fight this or we could lose our logo or something. So we did it. I'm sorry. I really am. Wasn't my fault. Just want to be clear on that.

This "leak" to Ars Technica was on purpose

I know everyone is huffing and puffing about how Ars Technica got a leaked memo from inside Apple which claims we are now ahead of Wal-Mart in selling music. I know what you're wondering, and yes, we leaked it to them on purpose. Now we're going to have to fire the leaker just to keep up appearances. Money quote from A.T.: "The fact that a digital-only retailer has ascended to the top of the sales charts is not unexpected, but it does demonstrate just how much the music landscape has changed since the beginning of the decade."

Yeah. And guess who was the only one to see, early on, how this landscape would change and what it would look like. To all of you who are also Apple shareholders, let me say once again: You're welcome.

Google putting up fence and gate to keep execs from leaving

Squirrel Boy is in a friggin panic. He's got execs bailing out left and right. Yesterday it was his CIO and VP of engineering. I talked to him last night and he's like, Dude, we give these idiots free lobster tails for lunch; we do their laundry and cut their hair; we've got pony rides on Tuesday afternoons. And we still can't keep them. What the hell is going on? What do I have to do? Put up gates and guard shacks and those tire shredder things that they use at car rental places? Why is this happening to me?

So I told him the truth. I was like, Well, for one thing, you're kind of pompous and self-centered and people don't like you, and worse, you're a terrible CEO and you don't have any clue about how to run that place and in fact you're not running it, Larry is, but just the fact that you all have to pretend that you run it speaks volumes about how messed up the place truly is. It's not a company, it's a cult, and frankly I can appreciate that because we're a cult too and the fact is that cults are easier to run than companies. But you're running a cult of children. And not just any children. You've got children of the corn type children.

You've got these weirdly smart and semi-nasty super-spoiled children who really believe they're superior beings who shouldn't have to work too hard and who really don't take criticism well (because they've never received any in their sheltered little lives, and it just totally knocks them on their ass) and on top of all that they are almost entirely incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. You've got an entire corporate culture built on ADHD and entitlement. Nice work, frigtard.

Plus you make a big deal of only hiring these super-high-IQ kiddies and the fact is that most of them truly are smart, but then you put them into this horribly dull and easy drone work on AdWords and AdSense and they're all bored to tears and totally disappointed because they really really really thought they were going to do something meaningful with their lives and now they're just worker bees -- pampered worker bees, sure, but still -- and maybe they should have taken that offer from McKinsey but they really thought Google was going to be so cool and blah blah blah.

And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world's smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. Think of all the really interesting and important things that this pool of brainpower could be addressing.

So then I was done. Eric was just sitting there. I said, So? What do you think?

He goes, I think we're going to put in the tire shredders. Okay. Thanks for the call. Talk to you soon.

News flash: iPhone users are young, rich and smarter than you

See a piece by Dan Farber of ZDNet here. I'm a little disappointed that Dan chose to place us next to a BMW. Because to be honest I wouldn't be caught dead in a Bimmer. Really.

I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to learn about these IBM bid-rigging allegations

See here. The O.B. (Original Borg) has been suspended from seeking business with the federal government as part of an investigation into allegations of bid-rigging on a deal with the EPA. Really? IBM? Cheating? You've got to be kidding. No way. Uh-huh. I mean it's not like they've got a history of doing stuff like this.

Only kidding. Look, I've been battling these guys since the Seventies. There's nobody on earth I trust less, other than Finns. But that's a different story. I just called Jerry York and told him about this and he said, "Sleazy stuff like this never would have happened when Lou Gerstner and I were running the place." Then we both burst out laughing.

Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste is at it again

A while back the FSJ Spotlight Team revealed that noted freetard hack Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols -- a writer for eWeek, author of the Linux Watch website, and founder/president of the Internet Press Guild -- was lifting chunks of press releases and putting them into his stories, verbatim, under his byline. We found about a dozen examples (see the "Copygate" label below to follow the whole sad tale, or just click here.)

Well, for a while Mr. Cut-and-Paste cleaned up his act. Sort of. He still kept lifting big chunks of releases, but he at least took the time to put these entire paragraphs into quote marks, though in one case he was sloppy enough to carry over the lifted material with typo intact. Ahem.

Well, I just got an update from Iulia and Natasha in Krasnodar, who say: "Guess what, Dear Leader? That fucker at eWeek is at it again."

Check out this press release from Red Hat and this article about Red Hat's earnings which carried the byline of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. You might notice a few similarities:

Red Hat
At year end, the company's total deferred revenue balance was $472.9 million, an increase of 40% on a year-over-year basis and 12% sequentially. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of February 29, 2008 were $1.3 billion.

Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste
At year end, the company's total deferred revenue balance was $472.9 million, an increase of 40% on a year-over-year basis and 12% sequentially. Total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of February 29, 2008 were $1.3 billion.

Or check this out:

Red Hat
Non-GAAP operating cash flow, as detailed in the tables below, totaled $71.6 million or approximately 50% of revenue for the quarter and $264.3 million for the full year.

Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste
The 2008 fiscal year's non-GAAP operating cash flow totaled $71.6 million, or approximately 50 percent of revenue for the quarter and $264.3 million for the full year.

Also see this March 18 press release from Novell and this article by Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste.

Novell:
In addition, the companies plan to optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center infrastructure requirements, further promote SAP® Business All-in-One solutions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise and collaborate within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program to help strengthen customers related to the SAP governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices.

Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste:
According to the press release, Novell and SAP will optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center applications, further promote SAP's SUSE Linux-based Business All-in-One solutions and work within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program on behalf of customers in ways related to SAP's GRC (governance, risk and compliance) practices.

Or see this March 11 press release and this March 11 article by Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste.

LinMin
LBMP can remotely provision (natively install and configure Linux and customer-specified applications) as well as image (snapshot and rollback entire systems for disaster recovery and clone systems for mass deployment) servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. LBMP enables systems to be rapidly deployed, repurposed and recovered.

Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste:
According to the company, LBMP can be used to remotely provision-that is, natively install and configure Linux and customer-specified applications-and image systems. These images can then be used for rollbacks or to clone servers, PCs, appliances and virtual machines for mass deployment.

LinMin
An annual subscription to LBMP costs $100 for 10 client systems, $400 for 100 client systems and $750 for 250 clients systems. Perpetual licenses are also available.

Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste
An annual subscription to LBMP costs $100 for 10 client systems, $400 for 100 client systems and $750 for 250 client systems. Perpetual licenses are also available.

Katie says she's never seen anything like it. She says someone at eWeek needs to sit down and give this guy some kind of tutorial or something.

Unbreakable Linux?

That's Larry's slogan but maybe you've heard of the huge security breach at this supermarket chain called Hannaford. Millions of customer records compromised. Guess which OS they switched to a few years ago, garnering huge amounts of praise from the freetard hackery?


For example, see this article, called "Grocer rings up savings with Linux cash registers," which features a photo of the company's brave pioneering CIO, Bill Homa (right). Wanna guess how long this risk-taking tech exec will have his job? Or see this triumphant press release from IBM announcing that Hannaford had just installed a gorgeous new IBM mainframe running Linux as part of a "multi-year IT transformation" at the company. Money quote: "Now all Hannaford's partner and supplier data, inventory controls, and payment and order processing run simultaneously on 23 separate and secure [shurely shome mishtake, ed.] partitions on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and z/OS on the single System z9."

But wait. I thought Linux had magical powers and couldn't be hacked. I asked Larry about it. His response? "No comment."

Strangely, there's also been no mention of the Hannaford situation from freetard hack Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Linux-Watch. I mean, one of the biggest and best-known early adopters of Linux suffers a massive security breach, and it's not worth a mention? Funny that.

Rest of world just now grasping what we saw five years ago

Smartphones will rule the world. Money quote: "The title of a slide used in Clifford's presentation was "Brands are Transitioning From the Desk to the Hand." The slide contained a who's-who list of Internet properties, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, and the usual suspects, and was making the point that the PC is not the only avenue to the Internet."

Yeah. That's why we put so much effort into iPhone. And yeah, for the record, we knew this was going to happen a long time ago.