The Patriot Act

For Anya Major wherever she may be.

Get It Try It

The Apple 1984 ad revisited.

The guards wear black riot police uniforms and helmets with visors covering their faces. They're armed with large night sticks.

Anya Major's running towards a large hall filled with people with shaved heads, wearing dusty coveralls, sitting on benches facing a large video screen. All the viewers appear to be male.

On the screen the giant image of a 'Big Brother' speaking in loud tones exhorts the audience to support the cause.

In almost all respects this is the picture of Apple today.

It's rather surprising in retrospect that not a single one of the hysterical Kool-Aid Gang deigned to discuss the issues at hand in the case of Apple's Cross Platform Bait & Switch. Had Apple pulled a bait and switch on their NeXT software programmers?

Then again it's not surprising at all: for that's exactly what they did. The one year they were teaching everyone their mantra about cross platform; the next year they did the same; the year after that they did it again - and only gradually did the reality set in: there would be no cross platform anything anywhere.

OpenStep was cross platform by specification; Gil Amelio wanted cross platform; but of course he was ousted. And the new plans of Apple only became known over time - over a long period of time.

Apple have a responsibility to stockholders and have systematically given their stockholders the short end of the stick. 'This is the way we do business and it's the only way we'll ever do business.' But this way of doing business is so stillborn even Adobe can't support it. And Steve Jobs knows the score, for back in the days of NeXT he quipped that his new company would either be the last able to maintain a hardware lockin or the first to fail at it. And today Apple instead have limericks - yes limericks bloody limericks - embedded in their kernel BEGGING people to not 'steal' - to not port their precious OS to other hardware platforms.

Talk about being ridiculous. Here the whole world is waiting for a way out from Windows and OpenStep is there ready to run and this weird company in Cupertino are doing all they can - even to the detriment of their stockholders - to stop this from happening.

But you can't mention this. If you're a developer or a trainer and you want - you need - a significant demographic to do anything; if you care about your colleagues stuck on Windows using their abortive .NET and C# and dreaming of the day they can get out; if you have any compassion whatsoever for people of all walks of life anywhere who'd just like to use this Internet for something useful aside from downloading antivirus updates and weeding spam and phishing expeditions out of their mailboxes, aside from continually consulting malware lists to see if they're infected again - a world where an estimated 80% of these users are infected with 30 pieces of malware, often fighting each other with available CPU for dominance of the target machine - if you have any compassion or understanding for any of that then you have to ask yourself why a company like Apple continually make the wrong financial decisions, simultaneously the wrong decisions for humanity as a whole.

Cults never understand basic things. They don't understand logic. They have only an emotional investment in their objects of worship. There is no objectivity at all. Years ago Maccies were despising the Unix underpinnings of their OS; today they flaunt it in the face of users of other platforms. [And still don't have a clue what it is.]

Researchers have come to some remarkable conclusions as regards these weirdos. For one they can't be counted on to even see how stupid they are. Studies have shown that the incorrigibly stupid have little or no inkling how stupid they are. They're also the loudest protesters at anything. What's really worrying is that they assume everyone else is on their nonexistent intellectual plane.

It's only the smarter who look at other viewpoints and show caution.

But it's easy to see which individuals are cultists and which are free thinkers. For free thinkers generally don't like joining cults. Coincidentally they're often more articulate, can type better, misspell things only infrequently - and in general have a higher level of education, a level they appreciate.

The cultists - the snobs and fanboys - don't know how to type, couldn't get a page online if they didn't have WordPress, and can't spell their own names the same way twice.

It's actually rather easy to separate the wheat from the chaff: look for the fools.

The US Patriot Act is a controversial law. As is much that's happened in that country over the past eight years. Today it's OK to out anyone as not being a 'patriot' if their views don't fall in line with the White House. Yet those very same people continually protest they're bigger and better patriots than the people accusing them: they're the ones responsible for the true 'patriot acts'.

Someone who objects to the way Apple do business; who objects to there being a sick cult surrounding a bloody computer; someone who understands the technology involved and wants to see that technology spread for the good of all - that person is not being unpatriotic any more than someone who doesn't like war or the Halliburton administration in the US capital is being unpatriotic.

And yes there are vile people calling out their neighbours because they refuse to follow the accepted political line; just as there were isolated groups in Germany in the 1930s who were persecuted for warning others of the impending nightmare; and there are Maccie fanboys who think any word found anywhere at all in any context is capable of being a threat to their One Sick Faith. But they're all essentially the same thing.

Some people drink the Kool-Aid. [Or was it FlavorAid? Or was it - Welch's Grape Juice?]

Some don't.

The issues at hand won't be discussed - and not only because there's nothing to discuss: they won't be discussed because these sickos can't stand the thought these issues are out there. They could discuss whether reneging on repeated promises of cross platform was good or bad but even that they won't touch. For no one would be so foolish as to argue against cross platform. It means more money for the company, more money for the stockholders, and a better world. It's obviously good.

In the face of facts you can't dismiss there's only one thing you can do: cry foul and obfuscate the issues. Which is again exactly what these insects have done. They whine and stomp and scream not because there's been a foul but because they know how stupid and pathetic they really are. And they need to change the subject real fast. In the world of 'Think Different' the most important thing is to learn to 'Think Same'.

Those people in the 1984 video? Those are Apple users. Actually they weren't. They were British hooligans who already looked [and behaved] like Apple users and were tempted by a bit of pocket cash.

Most people knowing of this ad presume the speech given by the gestalt onscreen is talking about 'the other side'. But rereading those words again today puts things in a new and clearer light.

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thought is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail.

Now the above of course is excerpted from the 1984 television advertisement. It is reproduced at Wikipedia; but it remains to see if any of the fanboys will cry foul again, mutter 'DMCA', and claim 'theft'. After all their Directive is to prevail and secure their world from 'the pests purveying contradictory thoughts' - for they in their sackcloth [dusty coveralls] are the true patriots and don't you forget it.



And the worst of it is this. None of those attacked by Apple in that ad or by their 'beige shirt' fanboys have ever been guilty of any of that. The IBM PC was built from off the shelf components and once past the BIOS eminently cloned; Microsoft's systems and software run on almost everyone's hardware; it's only Apple practicing this 'garden of pure ideology' whilst at the same time accusing everyone else of practicing it.

How clever.

And in the face of impending bankruptcy in 1996 - and with a 'free thinker' temporarily at the helm - they were forced for their own survival to purchase a technology built in the same spirit: an open technology, a 'free thinking' technology. And of course they ended up doing what anyone should have predicted they'd do.

Your turn, shitheads. Try to stay on topic this time.

See Also
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