Speaking about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is the No. 1 cause of Mac crashes, [Adobe CEO Shantanu] Narayen says if Adobe crashes Apple, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system.”
— Wall Street Journal

Seriously, Mr. Narayen?

You really think that when, you have an operating system based on technology that’s been stable for generations, even before Apple existed, and it runs all of Adobe’s other products just fine, but only Flash seems to repeatedly eat up CPU cycles and crash, over and over and over again, that you can keep a straight face while blaming the operating system?!

It’s time to quit defending a very poor decision.  Adobe’s products were expensive but wonderful, before Flash was allowed to infiltrate your product line. Now, they’re even more expensive, but bloated and lack innovation or serious thought to updating your code to modern standards.  You’re basing your future on a product that people hated from its very inception, isn’t stable no matter how much you wish to insist otherwise, and frankly, we’re tired of it. No one believes you. It’s time to quit barking, and fix your broken product!

A while back I ranted about the complete and utter usefulness of senate and congressional hearings, and how they just end up being a dog & pony show for polticians to try and look good to the public as they grill the Bad Guys in testimony, while in fact doing absolutely nothing of real use.

Well, they’re still grandstanding. As if we haven’t figured it out by now, after 2+ years of a crappy economy, the Senate is just now “getting to the bottom of” that Big Bad Financial Scandal. In particular, the Goldman Sachs thing.

My prediction: Next week, the Senate will open hearings on indecency and profane language on cable news networks. Because today during that Goldman Sachs Senate hearing, this went out over the airwaves, uttered by a senator. Into people’s homes, into workplaces and offices, in waiting rooms and airports, and certainly within earshot of children…

WARNING: AUDIO IS NSFW

No, I’m no prude. The profanities spill out of my mouth so often that sailors blush. But these lawmakers are the same people who get all in a huff over indecency in the media now and then. Shouldn’t they practice what they preach? We certainly could’ve gotten the gist of the message without the “s” bomb landing on TV at least 5 times in less than two minutes.

That was a shitty thing for Carl Levin to do, if you ask me.

Just sayin’…

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, and this isn’t a doctored photo.  You are in fact looking some dude “carving” sculptures of turkeys and bears with a chainsaw, while kids are riding an elephant in the background.  Welcome to New Jersey.

Specifically, welcome to the New Jersey State Fair, also known as the Sussex County Farm & Horse Show, held every fall.  Indeed, most people who don’t live in NJ think the place is only smokestacks, garbage dumps and Mafia families.  But believe it or not, we actually have trees and plants!  And Farms!  With real animals!

This fair actually melds a lot of different state pastimes together: old style carnival rides and attractions, “shore food” (even though it’s not near the shore), and agriculture. This is the place where all the city slickers and suburbanites can see the more rural side of the state.

There was also plenty of random stuff too. There were robots (yes, robots!). there was an old beekeeper who kept getting stung by his very angry bees. And various random but interesting farm equipment.

Lots of additional photos of random events at the 2009 fair appear after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you who have been following my site for a while know that I’ve had a bit of a transformation occur over the past three years in terms of my opinion of Apple products. When the iPhone was first announced in January of 2007, I pretty much vowed that I would never get such a piece of junk. I even re-christened it, in childish anti-fanboy fashion.  Everyone from site viewers to my own girlfriend heard my endless rantings about how this was going to be a totaly flop and why my Windows Mobile device was just fine enough for me, kthnx.

Well, that lasted all of a month after the iPhone actually hit stores.  And ever since then, I’ve paid penance for my misdeed buy buying the newest and coolest iPhone every time Steve Jobs decides to tweak the damned thing.

So, it would stand to reason that when the iPad came out, I would be a little more cautious.  And in fact, I was.   Although I was once again highly skeptical of the iPad, I said nothing on here, and pretty much kept my poker face on until I could get my hands on one.  Sure enough, i fell under Apple’s spell again.  Almost.

I haven’t bought one yet.  But I’d say I’m on the fence about whether I should get one for a very important reason: my Macbook Pro was recently stolen, leaving me (at least temporarily) laptopless.  And now I’m stuck in a dilemna: should I blow a ton of cash, load up the credit card and buy one the new MacBook Pros when they next get a refresh?  Or, will an iPad give me just enough (at considerably less cost) when I’m mobile to keep me going until I’m back at home doing serious computing on my desktop?

One thing is for sure: I am not happy with some of the editorializing people are doing about this product. To whit: this Freetard on Boinboing who is telling people not only why he isn’t getting an iPad, but why you should be a responsible consumer and not get one too.

I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

This is where Free Software advocates  annoy me, and where they fail in the message every time.  It’s understandable that they have strong opinions and fervently embrace their ideas to the point where it’s a religion.  But calling the people you’re trying to appeal to a bunch of scatterbrained, mindless sheep is not the way to win them over.

I love free software.  When I’m not on my mac, I’m using Linux (specifically, ubuntu, which I highly recommend).  But I also understand that not every single thing that I buy, or that works well for that matter, is going to be completely open and tweakable.  Sometimes the best stuff is designed and built by people, and even business, who intend to make money, and doing that requires at least a partial closing of their architecture to users’ prying eyes.

Some people refuse to buy such products.  More power to them!  I wish them luck endlessly updating their configuration files and recompiling their linux kernel for the umpteenth time.  I on the other, sometimes prefer to use products that allow me to do actual work. And it would appear that Apple’s products, closed as they may be, permit me to do that with a minimum of fuss.  I challenged the free software community to permit people like me to always be able to do the same on their platforms.  After decades of development, they just aren’t there yet,