DISQUS

Welcome back FSJ!

I think that FJY probably too accurately captured the character of RJY i.e. boring and indecisive, which doesn't make for such a great read.

No reflection on the writing here, which was brilliant as usual - unfortunately it was just that the source material was very uninspiring.

Thanks also to the afterlifeofgeorgecarlin who has written probably the best comment ever in this blog.

I think that the joy of tech satire fails here.

Churchill's speech rallied the UK in a very dark time and we successfully held off the Nazi aerial invasion (yes, with US bank loans etc. etc.) which resulted in Hitler postponing a naval invasion of the UK.

Somehow, I don't think that Jerry Yang is going to pull a similar feat off. Therefore the juxtaposition of him and one of the most famous war-time leaders of the 20th century doesn't quite work...

Probably presenting Jerry as the less-well known leader before Churchill, Chamberlain would've worked better - he visited Hitler, thrashed out a guarantee that Hitler had peaceable intentions and on his return to the UK proudly declared that there was 'peace in our time!'.

Then Hitler invaded Poland soon after...

'Personally I'm halfway tempted to just let these idiots like Jackson and Icahn take the place over and watch them mess the whole thing up.'

you meant it could get worse? i find that hard to believe fj

i'm glad that you're in lower caps jerry/fsj (or is it fj now?).

i think that everyone knew that yahoo was in safe hands when you sent out an important communique without capitilzation - you know, that thing that most 8 year olds have managed to master.

keep it up! no caps please - we need the authentic voice of jerry!

Is Cormac McCarthy writing this blog now?

Just don't say 'Boom!' today, FSJ or things might literally go, well you know...

It's nice to see that not everyone interested in technology has completely lost their perspective.

From reading Techmeme, you'd think that Twitter outage ranked up there with the mass loss of life in the recent environmental disasters in Burma and China.

I can hardly bear to watch her on TV - the naked desire for power for power's sake I find sickening.

Breaking news Twitards - absolutely no-one apart from fellow Twitards are remotely interested in what you have to say.

You know all that energy you expend over Twitter's uptime? Absolutely no-one else cares apart from your fellow ADHD suffers.

I know it's hard to imagine, but most of your fellow humans are trying to either stay alive and find enough food to feed their families or are worrying about the growing environmental and political problems that we all face.

Don't worry that millions of people are living under oppressive regimes or are victims of environmental disasters.

Please continue informing us all of Twitter's downtime and how upset it makes you - it;s refreshing to see that at least some of us still retain some perspective.

As others have said, it might help if there are good products behind the advertising too and sadly that is not the case.

It seems like another era - well, it probably is - when I willingly gave up Netscape 4 for IE4 and then IE5 because IE at that time was simply better. I can barely believe that that was the case given the state of IE nowadays.

Not to mention Windows 95, which at the time was pretty amazing. Again, I can barely believe that given the state of Windows nowadays.

How could a company built on software seemingly forget how to do it properly?

How did someone so clueless get to be a billionaire?

Still it gives me hope - if I continue to be fairly incompetent, maybe I'll be able to coin it in like Jerry...

I almost wish that I owned shares in Yahoo, just so I could sue them over this.

Sun is one of those companies that seem utterly pointless now.

How and why are they still going?

Could we start calling newspapers 'Viewspapers'?

I've always found it troubling that people actually think that what is written in them approaches an objective view of what's going on in the world.

Just out of frame is another equally ill-informed banner:

'Would we have allowed communist Russia to host the Olympics?'

At least when most of the developing world is slowly starving to death they'll be able to blog about it on one of Negroponte's XO laptops.

FSJ, I think that you should design the next verson of (the) iPhone firmware to brick the phone if this is detected.

If people are too lazy to develop good taste, or if they're unfortunate enough to be born without it, they should have it forced upon them.

Time to get the waterboard out...

I'd rather George W Bush stayed president for a 3rd term than for Hilary to win the White House.

Just because a book is very clever and written by a very clever person doesn't mean that it's 'good'. I'm glad that you had the courage to say that even though Umberto Eco is an intellectual giant that his book still sucks. Everyone knows that 'The Name of the Rose' was far better...

Thanks for sharing FSJ - it's only since I started reading your blog that I've realized that being obscenely wealthy is not as blissful as it seems.

Which Fighter Jet do you choose? Which 16th Century Shogun's castle to do you base the design of your home on? What furnishings should you choose and what material should they be made of? And how do you source craftsman that can build royal Japanese Palaces in the authentic way?

These are all tough choices and situations and I don't envy you or Larry one bit.

Has anyone ever heard of something called 'personal responsibility' i.e. that *you* are in fact responsible for clicking 'OK' in Software Update?

What's scary is that global warming as a phenomenon is 99.999% certain according to the majority of scientists whose jobs it it to know about these things and the west's elite either:

- Think up ways to make money off the disaster
- Try and motivate everyone through carbon trading

I.e. no one is standing up and saying 'Woah, our whole way off life is destroying the planet - and therefore us. Shall we stop and have a think a while maybe?'

FSJ - I think that you should embark on a programme of building monolithic shiny objects in the face of our impending doom - think Easter Island meets '2001' meets 'IPhone'.

Then millenia from now, when aliens visit our Mars-like world after we've completed messed it up they'll be able to say:

'Wow these guys really sucked with managing the environment, but they had universe-class industrial design!'

FSJ, you had a lucky escape - it was one of the most boring books that I've read in my life.

I shall summarize it for you:

'If you believe in conspiracy theories, you are a fool.'

It also has lots of post-structuralist stuff about the relationship between knowledge and power and stuff like that, but to be honest you're better off reading 'The Name of the Rose' if you like that sort of thing.

However, I'm not sure if the typography in that book is up to your standard either...

It sounds like a tech version of 'Moonlighting'.