Steve Jobs ordered Apple ads off Fox News

NetworkWorld ^ | 5/6/13 | Paul McNamara

[The Duke]

I’m sure that Samsung’s advertising will *MORE* than compensate.

[jwalsh07]

Bill Gates was not and never has been an engineer unless you get engineering degrees at exclusive prep schools.

[jwalsh07]

You bought the overpriced Mac. I’ve never bought an Apple Product and never will. But worship what and who you will. Freedom of religion is a principle of America. Or it used to be.

[Borges]

Bill Gates was still making modifications to the Microsoft code up until the late 1980s. He was a software engineer.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

You bought the overpriced Mac. I’ve never bought an Apple Product and never will. But worship what and who you will. Freedom of religion is a principle of America. Or it used to be.

Depending on who’s doing the math, Macs have been overpriced - or Windows PCs haven't delivered the value because of their ridiculous vulnerability to viruses. Compared to OS X, which is built on Unix - an OS which was built from the ground up to provide a stable platform for each user in a multiuser environment. And whether we think we like it or not, when we are online we are in a multiuser environment.

I use a Mac, and I ignore all breathless warnings that the sky is falling and my Mac is being compromised by viruses. Is that stupid? Yeah, it is possible that one day the sky will fall - but in the meantime I know that if I allow myself to be stampeded by every alarum, I will sucker for a Trojan Horse. I know that, because I have already done it once, back when I had a PC. And the vector the trojan horse used was precisely my fear of viruses. The Mac is vulnerable to the trojan horse, because the trojan horse attacks the user, not the machine. The Mac is vulnerable to a trojan horse because every computer is, if it provides the user with any flexibility at all.

In saying that, I am struck with the thought that the “virus” or “trojan horse" paradigm applies perfectly to “the MSM” (or, as I’ve begun to refer to it, “Conspiracy Journalism”). Society (not government, society) constructed a communication system, which can be viewed as a prototype of a computer. Initially it consisted of a bunch of independent printers publishing newspapers. Those printers communicated to the public, and also communicated with each other (in part through the medium of government-subsidized mailing of newspapers amongst themselves). The individual printers were nodes in the system. The system developed tremendously with the advent of the telegraph in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The medium, hardware wise, was the telegraph - but in software, the medium was the Associated Press.

Originally the nodes of the system, the individual printers, placed their stamp firmly on the entire paper - the papers were small, they published relatively infrequently, and the papers were about the opinions of their printers as much as they were about the news. A lot like talk radio, for example. But since the printing presses were write-only, they naturally were primarily useful to the printer as a way of publishing their ideas. Inherently, the readers are - readers, and write little, and what they do write is at the sufferance of the printer as to whether it gets a wide audience.

The AP, though, was a new way for the reporters of a given newspaper to get more audience. In conjunction with the AP, high-speed printing presses (even more write-only, for the printers, and even more read-only, for the audience) created the modern newspaper with AP content from far-flung sources. What could go wrong?    

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)

What went wrong with the PC was that it was designed for a single user, with no robustness to the possibility that others than the owner would have the ability to induce processes which were intended for the parasitic external “user” rather than, or even in opposition to, the owner of the PC. We call them viruses or trojans. The owner, as he conceives himself, of the individual PC in the network finds his PC to be part of something which he does not, and cannot expect to, fully understand. The news consumer, likewise, thinks he is buying something he is in control of but which, with all its nodes, has hidden agendas within it of which the news consumer/voter may be dimly aware of or totally ignorant. Your “argument” is the equivalent of a liberal calling a conservative a racist. Possibly there’s some truth in the charge, because there’s plenty of human fallibility to go around. But it’s irrelevant to the point under discussion, and a clear indication that the conservative has made his point.