Disqus - Latest Comments for richardmnixon

Re: Shock: Pogue bashes MacBook Air

richardmnixon — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:45:27 -0000

I predicted Pogue would go Rogue after being exposed as an Apple shill. I did it in a commentary that Jobso refused to publish here. (He still owes me the kill fee -- I'm sending some Cubans over to collect.)

Apple needs to get busy destroying Pogue's credibility, though now it's probably too late.

Re: You're welcome

richardmnixon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:59:30 -0000

And $1000 invested in December 2007, when AAPL was at $200, would be worth $925 today. Way to move sideways, Jobs! Not sure I'd go long on Apple with its prospects so intimately tied to Jobso's "hormone imbalances" and its P/E at 32.

Re: As soon as we break free of AT&T, our stock is headed to the moon

richardmnixon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:13:45 -0000

"if we can break free of our exclusive deals with AT&T and other carriers, we can more than double our market share"

Which just raises the obvious question: why did Jobs, the master strategist, ever agree to an exclusive deal with AT&T in the first place? And if the Mac OS could break free from its exclusive deal with Apple, it could have 90% market share, but we all know that's never gonna happen.

If Jobs had had me on his board, I could have triangulated the Russia and China of telecom carriers -- AT&T and Verizon -- and screwed 'em both. Hard.

Re: And somewhere Sarah Palin is laughing her evil laugh

richardmnixon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:27:55 -0000

More likely it's the vast left-wing conspiracy getting some payback for an entire year of Clinton/Lewinsky jokes. The only question is whether Jack Parr and Hugh Downs will be doing Lewinsky-style jokes about Letterman, and I'll answer the question: of course not. These show business types always tear the man in the arena to pieces but protect each other. Hoover had files on Letterman going back to his appearances on the Sonny and Cher show, and sent them to all the talk show writers, but not a peep for forty years.

Re: My latest guest appearance on Huffington Post

richardmnixon — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:58:13 -0000

I see deep synergies between Fake Steve and Arianna Huffington. Is there anyone who _doesn't_ write for HuffPo?

Ask her how her ex-husband Mike is doing.

Re: We're making some changes here

richardmnixon — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:57:07 -0000

I wonder how FSJ will punish these good deeds by two naive young kids. And it looks like RSJ needs to get busy blocking the Mac version of Mozy.

Re: An unintentionally scary video about alternative energy

richardmnixon — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:40:01 -0000

"...shows every president since Gerald Ford saying the exact same goddamn thing..."

Every president since Ford. Now let me see, who was president before Ford? Don't tell me -- it's on the tip of my tongue.

Face it, folks. I was the last non-phony president this country had. Just look at the sorry parade of airheads and hucksters that followed me.

Re: Nobody seems to realize the true significance of the Tablet

richardmnixon — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:03:30 -0000

I'll tell you why the publishing industry isn't cooperating: because the real revolution is that old-style news aggregations called "newspapers" and "magazines" are obsolete. Today, people weave their way through many publications and have loyalty to none. They look at Google News or search for stuff they're interested in, regardless of where it is. The job of editors has been reduced to proofreading and fact-checking (with the latter done grudgingly if at all).

Newspapers are like movie studios now: people don't subscribe to Paramount and then choose from their lineup of movies. People don't want to subscribe to Wired just to read the sad/funny article about how screwed up Craigslist is. Magazines are the record albums of publishing, and now we want to download single tracks.

The death of magazines and newspapers explains a lot of the bitterness of people like Pogue, Dan Lyons, Mossberg, etc.

Re: DVD Jon can doubleTwist on my cock

richardmnixon — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:28:53 -0000

Like all idealists, Jobs has definitely become the very thing he most reviles. His problem isn't the growing legion of DVD Jons out there. His problem is his own self-destructive tendencies -- something I know a little about.

Jobs' enemies won't destroy Apple -- only Jobs can do that. Rejecting iPhone apps for political reasons is a good first step. Lying to the press is another good move. Jobs should settle any doubts once and for all by holding a press conference and saying flat out, "I'm not a crook."

Then, to revive the people's faith in him, Jobs should do some events with Billy Graham:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Freetard developer argues with Palm, and frankly I'm not sure which one to hate most

richardmnixon — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:19:20 -0000

Is that Jerry Pournelle's son? Or is that Jerry?

Re: College kids: Kindle blows

richardmnixon — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:30:07 -0000

No, it was Curtis LeMay who said, "Any sufficiently advanced weapons system is indistinguishable from the wrath of God." Of course the Viet Cong don't believe in a real god, otherwise the war would've been over in 1969.

But "iPad" -- I like it. Feminine hygiene product.

Re: 2 billion App Store downloads -- why no one can catch us

richardmnixon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:45:54 -0000

That's exactly the kind of elitist jingoism (read: Appleism) that ends up losing the game to Windows, or in this case, Android. You might want to read the Economist report. If you think no one's making money from phones in poor countries, with the potential to make much more, guess again. Banking and payments on phones are set to become a huge business in the developing world.

Dime-store phones have a way of getting features that were formerly high-end. And when there's actual competition among hardware manufacturers within a given platform, this tends to drive prices down. Of course this phenomenon doesn't occur in Apple's socialist paradise.

Apple loves to wall itself into sterile, high-margin, effete niches while other companies actually change the world. And in Apple's little world, the First Amendment has been repealed:
http://www.wired.com/epicen...
http://gigaom.com/2009/08/0...

Android-based phones or some other platform may actually fulfill the goals of OLPC and make money for everyone in the process -- no sanctimonious charity needed. The world shouldn't hold its breath waiting for Apple to do it.

Re: 2 billion App Store downloads -- why no one can catch us

richardmnixon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:06:51 -0000

Don't worry, Jobs'll figure out a way to fuck this up the same way he fucked up the Mac and left it forever consigned to a 10% market share.

Besides, the big growth in mobile phones is happening in what is euphemistically referred to nowadays as the "developing world." Kissinger and I used to call it the Brown World. (See http://www.economist.com/sp... ) How many iPhones is Jobs selling in Tanzania? None, because Apple's huge margins don't work there. You might as well expect Tesla to sell $100,000 electric cars in Somalia.

Re: R.I.P., William Safire

richardmnixon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:32:27 -0000

We only kept Safire on to drive Pat Buchanan crazy. We kept Buchanan on the payroll just to drive Safire and Kissinger crazy. Did this win me any praise from the anti-defamation crowd? Course not.

Bill was approached by Kelloggs to make a breakfast cereal called "Nattering Nabobs." He wanted to do it, but I reminded him that he wrote that as work-for-hire, so I owned the copyright. Now Julie and Tricia own it, and they want to open a chain of diners called "Nabob's," but apparently Bob's Big Boy is threatening to sue.

Re: Just FYI, everyone at Apple hates these goddamn fanboys

richardmnixon — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:17:16 -0000

Someone needs to preserve all these comments to memorialize the precise moment when western civilization died. Not that I don't find the end of civilization hilarious.

Re: I just met Joe Biden

richardmnixon — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:29:47 -0000

Jobs is the last guy who should be telling us to worry about succession problems. Biden could do a Ford-level job as caretaker until 2012, at which point the Republicans might nominate a grown-up to run against him, like maybe two up-and-comers who worked for me named Rumsfeld or Cheney. But if a grassy knoll ever took out Jobso, the dream would die, capitalism would return to Cupertino, and the Great Silent Majority would finally be able to afford a Macbook. I shudder at the thought. A computer "for the rest of us" for the rest of us.

Incidentally, I convinced Caleb Boggs not to retire and to run against Biden in 1972. I didn't think a thirty-year-old Florsheim salesman like Biden stood a chance, but he pulled a Kennedy and "won" by 3,000 "votes" that all just happened to be cast by AFL-CIO members. Delaware's dirtier than Chicago.

Re: Oh snap! Tattletale Palm gets bitch-slapped for snitching

richardmnixon — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:00:19 -0000

Dude, search eBay for PowerMac G5s and then for Quadra 950s. Of course the price for a G5 has fallen pretty fast lately.

Re: Pogue comes clean

richardmnixon — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:58:34 -0000

Gawker had a pretty good rejoinder to this:
http://gawker.com/5365105/d...

Where were writers like you during Watergate when I wanted to talk about the benefits of my opening to China?

If the Times really wanted to come clean here, they could run your stuff under the legend, "Advertisement." Or maybe rename your column to "David Pogue gets friendly with huge technology companies with tenuous relationships to the truth, that advertise in the Times."

Re: Pogue comes clean

richardmnixon — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:52:03 -0000

Yeah, that's the trend: the line between advertising and editorial getting fainter and fainter in an environment of corporate-dominated media. Even Barry Diller worries about that, and he's not exactly known for good taste.

Re: Oh snap! Tattletale Palm gets bitch-slapped for snitching

richardmnixon — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:25:59 -0000

Next up: Apple prevents iTunes from working with any iPod/iPhone that's more than a year old, the same way Snow Leopard doesn't work on $5000 PowerMac G5s.

Re: Pogue comes clean

richardmnixon — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:02:51 -0000

Boy, you might just want to look first at Pogue's attitude. FSJ may be being a bit of an asshole about it -- and after all that's why he fits his character here -- but David Pogue is a cheerleader, not a serious writer.

If there wasn't so much of this kind of fluff passed off as news all over the place, it might not be so maddening, but technology coverage and business coverage is often like this. Among other things, this is where bubbles come from. But most people seem to like it that way. A few of us like to see the press call bullshit.

Re: Pogue comes clean

richardmnixon — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:21:31 -0000

Well, exactly. He's not a journalist -- he's a critic. So picture Roger Ebert putting two big thumbs up his own ass in his review of "Star Wars: Lucas's Revenge on His Fans" at the same time he's selling his own line of "Star Wars" action figures. No problem, right?

At least when I was resigning in disgrace I wasn't doing with an eye toward receiving royalties on the Frost interviews and my memoirs.

Re: Apple retail employees are threatening a walk-out

richardmnixon — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:44:01 -0000

It was the former head of the Screen Actor's Guild, Ronald Wilson Reagan, who fired the air traffic controllers union. He then went on to play President Alzheimer in a romantic comedy called "The Iran-Contra Scandal," which even John Dean said was far worse than "Knute Rockne, All American" or Watergate. Then Dean said that Bush's son was worse than Watergate. Now he's saying Poguegate is worse than Watergate.

But isn't it an error of style for Jobs to actually tell people they're fired? Doesn't he usually just change the locks and let 'em take the hint? Or accept a freelancer submission and not even bother to say he's decided not to run it?

Re: You're late to the party, HuffPostTech. Apple invented "technology is anthroplogy"

richardmnixon — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:33:36 -0000

Jobs doesn't seem to understand the problem with religions: they all contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Just look at the evangelical wackos who hijacked the Republican party after I was hounded from office. They had a good run and then ran the damn thing straight off a cliff. If Jobs wants to pander forever to a minority fringe, that's his privilege, but it doesn't exactly jibe with his professed desire to "make a dent in the universe." Just wait until the tech equivalent of Sarah Palin takes over the reigns Apple amid another "hormone imbalance" in old Jobso -- I understand Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are looking for work.

And Jobs hasn't noticed another trend: a strong counter-reaction against all religions, including Appleism. More people than ever are thinking with the left side of their brains, which has to be considered a strong "sell" signal for AAPL shares. Bookstores are selling far more books by strident atheists than David Pogue paeans to Snow Leopard for cultists to jerk off to.
http://www.amazon.com/God-N...
http://www.amazon.com/End-F...
http://www.amazon.com/God-D...

This could be Microsoft's main advantage: they're never going to inspire a cult, no matter how many tent revivals its leader holds:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Microsoft is sort of like me: unloved, but somehow winning by a landslide.

Re: Ask a birther

richardmnixon — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:16:24 -0000

Christ, I thought Orly Taitz was her porn name, like Mama Cass or Tiny Tim.