Category: Mac Blogs

Shield laws trump EEEEEEEVERYTHING!

So seemingly say Arnold Kim and ZDNet.

Arnold Kim approvingly links to this piece on ZDNet which claims the real story is that the police failed to identify Jason Chen as a journalist.

Well, maybe that’s just because they’ve read Gizmodo before.

Ha-ha! Ahhh… the Macalope kids Gizmodo because they have no journalistic integrity.

OK, look, the horny one is not a lawyer — neither is Kim (he’s actually a doctor) or ZDNet’s Sam Diaz — but he’ll weigh in on this under the legal precedent of “they started it” (see the case of George “Spanky” McFarland vs. Tommy “Butch” Bond, 1932).

Perhaps the police didn’t note that Chen was a journalist… because it doesn’t matter. Diaz raises this possibility but still goes on for a thousand words about how journalists need protections. Journalists do not need protections from breaking the law. No one does.

The Macalope had previously stipulated the point that it seems unnecessary for the police to have busted Chen’s door down. But now we know that the other half of this equation — the goofballs who were shopping the phone around the more sleazy elements of the supposedly irreproachable journalistic world — ran from police and attempted to hide the evidence of their malfeasance. The police had reasonable cause to suspect there was something going on here that the parties involved with had a desire to cover up and may have felt Chen would do the same.

The brown and furry one knows any number of real journalists and when he described the situation to one who was previously unfamiliar with it, she listened patiently and then openly gasped when he told her Gizmodo paid for the phone. Real journalists to do not pay their sources for information, let alone traffic with them in misappropriated property. The Macalope does not understand the knee-jerk effort by more respectable elements of the journalist community to come to the aid of Gizmodo in this case.

Again: not a lawyer. This is just the opinion of this mythical beast, which is worth little more than the pixels it’s displayed with.

Q&A with Rentzsch

The Macalope asks Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch some questions about canceling C4.

The Macalope felt Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch’s explanation of why he was canceling the C4 conference left some unanswered questions, so he took them to the man himself.
_________________

MACALOPE: As the guy behind ClickToFlash (thank you for that, by the way), you don’t seem to have any real love of Adobe’s great gift to the Internet (which they made purely out of the goodness of their hearts, they’ll have you know). So the Macalope is assuming this is less about Flash and more about the free market principles violated by Section 3.3.1. Is that a fair statement? Anything you’d like to add to that?

RENTZSCH: It isn’t about flash (you’ve already noticed ClickToFlash) or free market principles (though I believe Apple will eventually need to tear down the walls on their garden under competitive pressure), it’s about advancing software engineering.

Apple has a bad track record of advancing software engineering. Objective-C 2.0 catches them up to 1995. 3.3.1 means we’ll be forever behind the curve.

MacRuby is the most exciting thing in a decade to come to Apple programmers. Politically iPhone devs can’t use it thanks to 3.3.1 (whether it’s ready for iPhone technically is another discussion).

MACALOPE: The majority of developers are probably not incensed by Section 3.3.1 because they never planned to use a cross-platform IDE anyway and have experienced years of abuse at the hands of Flash. So why should they care?

RENTZSCH: It’s not about cross-platform. It’s about writing Mac and iPhone software *better*. Less code. Less crashes. Faster-than-C runtime speed. Much greater dev speed.

Look, code is UI to programmers. Apple devs have been stuck on Windows 3.11. 3.3.1 means things won’t be getting better.

MACALOPE: It doesn’t seem to the Macalope like anything’s going to change until developers start walking. Any plans on getting out of the business of developing on Apple’s platforms or focusing on other platforms?

RENTZSCH: I’ve always done both Mac and Web programming. The brain damage in both communities tends to counteract the other. I’m focusing more on the web now, specifically Cappuccino and node.js. It’s feels great. Haven’t felt this good in years.

MACALOPE: The Macalope hasn’t followed your blog or Twitter closely but he did go back over them and didn’t see a huge amount of commentary on 3.3.1. Have you opined on it elsewhere? If not, doesn’t it seem odd to expect outrage from the rest of the development community when you yourself haven’t been noticeably vocal about it until now?

RENTZSCH: I usually yell about Apple stuff.

3.3.1 broke my spirit to the extent I gave up.

__________

The Macalope thanks Wolf for his responses. Also, he’s got a brief follow-up posted to his blog now which clarifies his position further.