You probably heard of Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, the former Forbes writer. He’s built a justified reputation for using his blog to do a kind of Steve Jobs pastiche, by turns analytical, satirical, occasionally vulgar and, yes, insulting every possible target in the Valley and in the MSM (Mainstream Media).
You’ll recall I criticized the New York Times’ bosses and one of their writers, Brad Stone, in a July 2009 Monday Note titled “Brilliant insights at the NYT”. In it, as a NYT fan, I worried about the quality of reporting, concerned with the superficiality of Silicon Valley coverage, bemoaning the formulaic cut-and-past jog of quoting anal-ysts and other “usual suspects”.
Well, read this Fake Steve Jobs piece. There, Dan Lyons gives another example of the MSM missing key information, the OfferPal scams, and insights, how game companies “game” users and how social networks can put an end to such practices. For short, the scammers are companies such as OfferPal tempting on-line game users with offers for more weapons or more lives while sending a stealth tentacle into their wallets by tricking them into expensive subscription “deals”.
The NYT’s problem is it wrote a fairly positive article on the new Virtual Goods Economy while totally missing the ongoing scams controversy. See Silicon Watcher’s overview here.
Fake Steve Jobs is worth adding to your list of RSS feeds (Google Reader is a good way to manage those). Lately, Dan Lyons wrote another tart and insightful analysis of big company (IBM in this case) PR practices here. Enjoy! —JLG@mondaynote.com
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“Adobe has learned some important market lessons in the past year and Apple has had some senior management changes,” Mr. Warnock said, referring to the resignation of Jean-Louis Gassee, Apple’s overseer of technologies, who had urged the break with Adobe.
The Executive Computer;
On the Font Battlefront, an Uneasy Truce Raises Hopes
By PETER H. LEWIS
Published: October 14, 1990
http://query.nytimes.com
Hello Jean-Louis,
Both Frédéric Filloux, you, and Daniel Lyons are quite correct in criticising the technical reviewers who are responsible for software criticism. You claim that the techniical reviews are uninformed, and not only that but as often as not dishonest. But the situation of the software reviewer is not much different that the situation was for the Encyclopoedists of which more below. Meanwhile, to answer an attack by a counterattack: Would you agree to participate in a public panel on the project you managed at Apple? The project, announced in the summer of 1989 Apple WWDC and in the fall of 1989 at Seybold and in the New York Times, was to drive a drawing model for compositionthat would preserve the soruce character string intact. You left Apple and in December 1990, Adobe published Appendix E of the PostScript Language Reference, second edition, according to which “Adobe Offices” should be spellt “Adobe OYces”.
You write about the possibility of PDF as document model and a portable tablet as display model, but you do not write that formal typography is unsearchable. You can check for youself in five minutes flat with Apple Advanced Typography (Apple TrueType 2) and Microsoft/Adobe OpenType (Microsoft TrueType 2) is not searchable when composed in Apple TextEdit, Apple iWork, Microsoft Word for Macintosh 2008 and more. You have WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get as between display and print, but you do not have WYSIWYS What You See Is What You Search.
The fact is that a page description can draw a glyph irrespective of whether that glyph references a correct public character code, an incorrect public character code, an incorrect private character code, or no character code at all. The consequence of the failure of the 1989 project has been the chaotification of formal composition of the writing systems of the European Union and the United States. In 1992, there were 12000 Type 1 products. In 1993, there were 13000 Type 1 products. In 1994, there were about two dozen TrueType 2 products for non-destructive drawing of formal composition. In 1999, Type 1 development was discontinued, but immediately a switch was made to Microsoft TrueType 2 (aka OpenType) Adobe implemented drawing of ligatures, small capitals and so forth by direct depiction onto the Private Use Area of ISO-IEC 10646. Criticised in Seybold in 2002, this has continued into 2009.
Denise Diderot in his article on Art (including the mechanical arts, what we call engineering) wrote, “Let us at last give the artisans their due. The liberal arts have adequately sung their own praises; they must now use their remaining voice to celebrate the mechanical arts. It is for the liberal arts to lift the mechanical arts from the contempt in which prejudice has for so long held them … We need a man to rise up in the academies and go down to the workshops and gather material about the arts to be set out in a book.”
Of course, the challenge that confronted Diderot was the challenge that confronts today’s software reviewer. Diderot was confronted by the guild instinct that considers technologies, tools and techniques to be trade secrets, not to be made the subject rationalisation and publication of uniform industrial practice. A great many artisans neither understood what they did nor wanted to understand. Diderot wrote, “[He who criticisices us] will learn by his own experience to thank us for the things done well and pardon us for those done ill. Especially will he learn, after having for some time gone from workshop to workshop with cash in his hand and after having paid dearly for the most preposterous misinformation, what sort of people craftsmen are, and where they look upon any person who interrogates them with any curiousity as an emissary of the tax farmers, or as a worker who wants to open shop.”
Best wishes,
Henrik Holmegaard
would-be technical writer
(who learnt English as a kid, in khakis, in Kenya, in the Colonies and has had little French since prep school)
great article
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