Back in 1980 or so, I was trying to sell computers. Our store didn’t have the rights to the Mac, but we did have Apple II and Apple III in our store. I gave up trying to sell computers after somebody walked into the store and said, “I want to buy a computer that I don’t have to learn how to use;” I told him there’s no such animal, and he said he was gonna go buy a Mac because the ads said he wouldn’t have to learn how to use it.
Things haven’t changed much in 28 years.
Macs came out in Jan of 84 so they are now 25. Around the same time Apple put out the Lisa which was $10k and similar to a Mac but it was a bomb, very few people bought them.
a Dutch news site recently posted the Onion’s clip about a little girl who was collecting money to run a McCain hate ad. I’m looking for it but it seems they withdrew it in shame. I remember though that the first ten people posting comments at that site thought it was ridiculous that parents allowed their kid to do that before someone came along to point out it was not actually true.
Apprently this tech writer believed it.
That wouldn’t be the first or only time that a website posted a link to an Onion piece, and the first knee-jerk reactions were by people who actually thought it was real.
Given the editorial comment in parentheses at the end of the entry, I’m inclined to believe the writer’s tongue was welded to the inside of his cheek while writing it.
Me too, but what does 5k on Digg mean?
That editorial comment was added after the fact. On Digg there was screenshot of the original without the final comment. I see no reason to think it was tongue-in-cheek. Might have been, I guess, but he wrote it too straight up to be effective.
It was the end of the piece where the news reader said with a concerned look on her face:
“Coming up: Police warn that the sudoku kiiller will kill either one, four or nine victims next.”
That completely killed me, I nearly fell off my chair.
Priceless.
The editorial comment was <<Ah, so this is your cunning new way of getting back at me. Thanks a bunch, at least it got you 5k on Digg.>> It seems that the editor thinks the author isn’t actually serious.
I still don’t know what 5k on Digg means.
As of right now, the article has 6313 “diggs” on digg.com. I would imagine that at the time the comment was written, it was closer to 5k diggs.
Yeah, that was fucking hilarious, in the old Onion tradition of ludicrous but snappy headlines with no story, where the fun is in imagining the backstory yourself.
“The absinthe arrived by airmail.”
That was one of the better Onion videos/articles I’ve seen recently.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at: by default, the iPhone actually corrects misspellings in some cases (though not as egregious as you’ve made here), it takes more time to capitalize in the middle of words (and thus would tend to discourage that habit), capitalizes words at the beginning of sentences, capitalizes standalone "i"s, and adds apostrophes in commonly used words. So while people may continue to “write” like that, their messages would likely be substantially improved by using the iPhone.
And…that means?
You can read their long description here but the short version is Digg.com is a web site that compiles popular content on the web. Next time you’re out surfing around look at the blogs and articles and you’ll frequently see “Digg this” button to press if you want to report it as popular. The higher the Diggs the more notice it is getting.
You’ve heard people talk about how many hits a web site gets. A “Digg” is similar.
The point about conditioning people to spell badly may be wrong, but I think DMark was on to something about Apple being a company that tries to produce technology that requires little to no understanding of how it works. Obviously for a lot of people (particularly Apple patrons) that’s a big selling point, but for those of us that are a bit more tech savvy it’s a limitation.
Again, that fake comment about buying anything Apple makes that is shiny rings quite true when you consider how the iPhone became the “must have” gadget amongst people who care about such things. You’d think it was the only next gen phone out there or phone capable of using the net/playing music or something. Talking to people who are interested in having one a major selling point of the device seemed to be that it was cool, rather than what it could do better than its competitor models (which makes me a little :dubious: considering its astronomical launch price).
For me the Onion can be very hit or miss, but that was great.