The internet is a scary place... But the ipad and iphone is here to save us!

from Stardock Forums

Check out this AWFUL New York Times article guys and girls...  Even apple fanboys should be ashamed of this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-medium-t.html

The Web is a teeming commercial city. It’s haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects. Malware and spam have turned living conditions in many quarters unsafe and unsanitary. Bullies and hucksters roam the streets. An entrenched population of rowdy, polyglot rabble seems to dominate major sites.

People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. 

But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates.

In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.

Apps sparkle like sapphires and emeralds for people bored by the junky nondesign of monster sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, eBay, YouTube and PayPal.

The App Store must rank among the most carefully policed software platforms in history,” the technology writer Steven Johnson recently noted in The Times. Policed why? To maintain the App Store’s separateness from the open Web, of course, and to drive up the perceived value of the store’s offerings. Perception, after all, is everything: many apps are to the Web as bottled water is to tap — an inventive and proprietary new way of decanting, packaging and pricing something that could once be had free.

off-topic
35,922 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

I will never buy any of that crap.

Reply #2 from Demigod Forums Top

racism, blatant lies, and obvious excessive advertising all rolled into one.. sweet.

It's like those mass produced infomercial websites that all follow the same template to sell different things, but from the NY Times and worse.

If it wasn't the NY Times, I'd say some troll wrote that article to draw responses.  But then.. NY Times is laying ppl off and dwindling last I heard, perhaps this was some journalist on her way out and wanted to leave with a crappy article to make the Times look bad.  

Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top

HOw soon we forget.  Does not anyone remember how AO-HELL was going to save us from the big bad web?  The game has not changed, just the players. ;)

Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top

Not surprising that the NYT would take such a view.  They view the federal government much the same way they view Apple's App Store - here to protect us from ourselves.

And, to them, that's a good thing - 'cause we're all just toooo stupid to take care of ourselves (unless we're an elite writer for NYT).

Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

The problem with that sort of view, is that this 'elite' writer is obviously too stupid for her own good.

Reply #6 from JoeUser Forums Top

It actually kind of fits in with the campaign currently going on to convince us we need them to filter information for us.  Just another aspect of the last gasps of dying media, a media that can't figure out how it lost control over its product, or why.  So they want to take money from us rather than earn it now, to keep themselves ensconced in their fairyland.

Sorry a little OT.  Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Reply #7 from Demigod Forums Top

:hrmph:

I request that Stardock change the code for this smiley to :mac-user:

Reply #8 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting TheDarkKnight2008, reply 5
The problem with that sort of view, is that this 'elite' writer is obviously too stupid for her own good.

This sums up the general opinion I have of Mac users who like to say how smarter Mac, and it's customes, are than the "commoners".  It's a business strategy by Mac to convince the lemmings that they're better than the other animals.  It's sad when people don't just buy in to it, but actually believe it enough to defend it.

The internet is an open platform, and it has its good and its bad.  A smart person is one who can seperate one from the other.  I'll accept the 4chan scum if it means I get a sourceforge in return.

Reply #9 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting ZehDon, reply 8

  I'll accept the 4chan scum if it means I get a sourceforge in return.

That's kind of unfair. Half the boards on 4chan are actually useful.

Reply #10 from JoeUser Forums Top

This sums up the general opinion I have of Mac users who like to say how smarter Mac, and it's customes, are than the "commoners". It's a business strategy by Mac to convince the lemmings that they're better than the other animals.

Hardly any wonder that JObs is a big democrat since they hold the same view.

 But in one respect, Apple and MS are the exact same.  They both tried to circumvent the internet with their own machinations.  The only difference is that MS realized the stupidity of their error before APple did.

Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting OMG_Splitshadow, reply 9

[quote who="ZehDon"]
  I'll accept the 4chan scum if it means I get a sourceforge in return.

That's kind of unfair. Half the boards on 4chan are actually useful.[/quote]

Indeed, as a fan of 40k I find /tg/ to be epic, because otherwise I wouldn't have stuff like Creed's Tactical Genius and the Angry Marines.  1d4chan (the /tg/ wiki) is awesome too because it takes all the various writefaggotry and drawfaggotry (those are the actual /tg/ terms by the way, no offense to homosexuals intended on my part) of /tg/ and assembles it all in a nice wiki format.