Cogs can think.

Yeah I’m slightly drunk right now– Just been reading the comments on the IE-Firefox story on OSNews, and obviously I got accused of being pro-MS and anti-Linux / FSF / RMS / GPL / whateverotherfcukingossacronymsonecanfindthesedays. It’s part of being the managing editor of one of the most popular alt. OS websites in the world. Big fcuking deal.

It does bother me some bits, though, you know. I get accused of being pro-MS, even though I detest Windows because I get annoyed while using it (no zealous reasons for that, I’m just not accustomed to it anymore, I’ll probably start having less and less problems with it after using it for a few weeks). I’m typing this post on a damned and hyped browser (Firefox), on a damned and hyped Linux distro (Ubuntu) using a damned and hyped mouse (Apple’s Mighty Mouse).

Fcuk you all. I’m not pro or anti anything.

And yes, I can still see my room spinning. And look mom, no typos!

create your own visited countries map

Old, but new to my blog.

Obviously, very uneven. A lot of vacations I want to make: from Philadelphia to Los Angeles by car, New York, Greenland, Canada, Antarctica, Australia, China, and so much more.

I’m really dissapointed by the Dutch lower house. Yesterday, they failed to do what almost 80% of the Dutch people wanted: the leaving of our secretary of justice.

Several extremely bad things have happened at the Public Prosecution Service during a certain case, which resulted in an innocent man being sent to prison for 4 years. This man supposedly killed a little boy– he didn’t do it. How did he end up in prison then? Because the PPS held back vital information. Yes, you hear it right. They held back information that would’ve kept this man out of prison.

He only got released after the real killer turned himself in. If that hadn’t happened, then all this would’ve never seen the light of day. This is the millionth time there is something wrong at the justice dpt.

Several parties in the lower house supported a “motie van wantrouwen” (basically something that if enough people support it, means the firing of the secretary of justice). However, not enough. Why didn’t other parties support this? Easy. They are afraid. All this might lead to the government falling– and seeing the impopularity of the current government, the parties that make up this government are too afraid to hold new elections. So, they will not take the risk, and prefer to leave a failing secretary in office.

It is getting harder and harder for me to find a party which I support. They are all so weak, so full of shit, it’s just not funny anymore. This will be a true problem when new elections come; I feel it as my obligation to vote, however, I have no idea on which party!

Fcuk politics.

I am not at all happy with Apple’s actions towards the press, in particular towards ThinkSecret. First, let me briefly explain what all this is about.

What many people do not know, is that quite often employees have to sign a document called a ‘non-disclosure agreement’, or NDA for short. For instance, when someone applies for a job in which he’ll come in contact with sensitive marketing strategies, product information, or other secret documents, the company he’s applying for will ask him to sign an NDA– which basically means that that someone will not be allowed to talk about the matters covered by the NDA for a certain period of time. In itself I find this a perfectly normal way of protecting company secrets; I have no moral troubles at all with these procedures.

However, people can brake NDAs. Meaning, they do talk about matters covered by the NDA. This is contract breach, and as such can be legal action taken against. Makes perfect sense. Person A signs contract with person B, person A violates contract, person B sues person A. Decent logic, as far as I’m concerned.

But, what about the people person A told the secrets to? Are the receivers at fault?

The case with Apple is extra interesting because the receiving party is a journalist body. Should this journalist body, in this case ThinkSecret, be forced to disclose the names and so forth of the person TS got the insider information from?

Of course they shouldn’t. Because if the press cannot guarantee anonimity to its sources… Then the press will be unable to do its job properly. If the press cannot tap anomymous sources, then there is no way for the press to investigate delicate matters that NEED to see the light of day.

I find it very dangerous that the court of the United States has chosen sides with Apple. This is a direct attack on the free press, and Apple is doing this on purpose to silence Apple media. Apple’s marketing strategy is largely based upon surprise, and newssites ‘ruining’ these surprises are a problem to this strategy.

I’m lucky to be living in the Netherlands. Let’s hope our justice system doesn’t Americanify.

Had a really good day at university today. I got to know this really nice girl, Nancy. We almost have the exact same interests! Tarantino movies, going to the US, Kubrick movies, digitally animated movies (ie. Finding Nemo)… You name it! It was almost scary :).

Pretty cool :).

Work starts in an hour, I’ll be done at 18:00.

Rejected ads from Sun. These guys have humour!

Office 12 is really starting to look neat. Microsoft has completely revamped the interface from the ground up– for the better. Take a look here. Especially Outlook 12 looks extremely clean. I already liked the interface of the previous Outlook (vertical preview pane is the best thing to come to a mail client in ages, too bad Mail.app and Evolution don’t have it), but Outlook 12 is much, much better. Of course I first have to use it before judging its behaviour, but if the behaviour is as good as it looks…

All this is really starting to make me excited about Vista and Office 12. I think I’ll be buying a new x86 when Vista comes out– I think the cost will be justified. MS really seems to be putting a lot of effort into all this.

Sun is quite a cool company! They flew a plane over Dell’s headquarters– see the pics and read the comments here.

This is my new and improved blog. Here is a repost from my other blog, so you know what this is all about. Have fun.

As you surely’ve seen by now, I have changed a few things on my blog.

I renamed my blog to “Cogs can think.” It stems from this post, and I really like the analogy of the world being a huge clockwork of stupidity, in which we are nothing but mere cogs, without a true free will, all connected to one another. Every action has an equal reaction.

I thought of this analogy myself (ahey), but I’m pretty sure on what it’s based: “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland”, and part II, “Through The Looking Glass” (previous entry about dear Alice).

So, what is the goal of my ramblings and rants here? Well, a lot has happened in my personal life this year– my mother’s illness, me quitting psychology, taking on a new study– and it’s really miraculous to see how I’ve changed in that period; from a kid, to more of a, dare I say it, grown-up. Well, sort of. The real Thom is still there– I’ll never really grow up. What were you thinking.

I’m trying to understand what makes the clockwork of stupidity tick. The world, politics, music, film, social life, computing, automotive, all from my very own paradigm. And on this blog, screw everybody else’s.

That’s it, basically. Oh, and in the future I might buy me a nice domain name, put Wordpress on it, and stop leaching off of Google.

I can be contacted in various ways, IM, email, normal mail, and phone, but I prefer you use email (remove the two ampersands, spam protection). Check the sidebar for contact information.

This is going to be a very boring blog post. You can stop reading this now if you’re not interested in OSNews. In this post I will explain everything about the “dispute” between me and Kelly McNeill, managing editor of osViews.com.

OSNews is anti-Mac

All this started with an email (in forwarded nature due to me forwarding it from my iBook to my Linux box) from Kelly to the osnews-crew mailinglist, in which he claimed that OSNews was deliberately having an anti-Apple stance, and he listed the last four Apple newsitems in a big and bold font. He then listed a few newsitems in that email that should’ve been posted on OSNews.

I kindly replied, explaining why the newsitems he listed in that email weren’t posted. The ‘Amazon top seller’s list’-item was deemed inappropriate because a top seller’s list doesn’t mean anything, especially if it’s from a site that is mostly US-only. The item on Apple’s 64bit breakage *was* posted on OSNews, just first as an item they broke 64bit support, and shortly after in another item that they had fixed it. The iPod patent thing has little to do with operating systems; other than that, Andrew submitted a similar item the day before (I wouldn’t have posted that item either, but hey, Andrew has the right ti post whatever he wants, I’m not responsible for that. It’s called diversity and that’s a good thing). Finally, I didn’t post his last suggestion because I’ve grown weary of analysts; they usually say a lot of fantastic stuff, but it rarely turns out. Other than that, th eitem was about hardware, not about OSs.

So, a decent justification of why I dismissed those items. Yet, the tone was set. OSNews “goes out of [its] way to only report negative things about [Apple]”. Right. That’s probably why me, David, Andrew and Eugenia all use Macs.

Then, Kelly started submitting the exact same newsitems he posts on osV to OSN. Now, I turned almost all of them down. While I for each item obviously had specific reasons to put them down, the general reason was that osV is a very biased site. Almost all content on osV is anti-MS and pro-Apple. Also, most of the items aren’t newsworthy anyway, pro-Apple/anti-MS or not. A few examples:

Example I
Example II
Example II
Example IV

Now, obviously, not all items on osV suck; that might be because some of the items I post on OSN, gets posted a few hours later on osV. It’s just that the items that Kelly submits to OSN, suck. I cannot help it.

He then got another crazy idea in his head. I’ll get to that shortly.

Original content

During this, another thing played. osV, just like OSN, sometimes publishes original content. Now, that’s a thing I applaud. However, the original content on osV is, well, quite often very low. Two times in a row, osV published very bad articles, full of factual errors and mistakes. The most notable one was about BeOS– this article got submitted by Kelly to OSN– and Andrew, not very knowledgeable about BeOS, put it up on OSN’s frontpage. A few hours later, when I read the article, I was shocked. It was so full of errors, it just wasn;t funny anymore. Anyway, I wasn’t the only one who saw that, as many people in OSN’s comment’s section thought the same. As a consequence, the article was removed from osV. I let the item on OSN stay up, and asked the people to simply start a discussion on BeOS and Zeta. This happened.

Another article from osV with a lot of factual errors made it into OSNews (about QNX, I believe). This was the drop for me. I imposed a direct ban on any original content from osV; I did not want any more of that crap on OSN. I think you guys can agree with me that that is the wisest thing to do, hmm? It’s better to prevent than to heal, as we Dutch say.

Another crazy idea

Now, let’s get to that crazy idea I just mentioned. As I said, Kelly started submitting dozens of items (he even counted (!) them, ~100!), and almost all of them were turned down by me, because of mostly similar reasons as I mentioned in my paragraph on that first email he sent me.

This gave him a crazy idea. He IMd me, saying that I was turning down his items because they came from him. As tempting as that may sound, that obviously wasn’t true. I turned his items down, like I turned down a gazillion other items, because I simply didn’t found them important enough to be published on a *general* newssite about operating systems. It’s like someone in Cupertino letting one rip constitutes as news, according to Kelly.

So, a few days ago, when he again submitted a whole batch of items, I decided to email him, carefully explaining why each of them was turned down. Obviously, to no avail. He had already made up his mind: I turn down newsitems just because they come from him. A large email discussion followed, in which he accused me of being biased, he accused me of purposefully turning down items because they came from him. As “proof”, he stated that some items I had turned down, a few days later got published when they were submitted by someone else. Naturally I asked him to present me with examples; up until now he has failed to do so.

Kelly’s views

In that large email discussion, he explained why osV is per definition less biased than OSN, because osV publishes newsitems as soon as they get submitted a few times by readers. And since OSN does not do that, OSN is biased. So, I asked him if there is any form of control over what get’s submitted to osV’s front page; suprisingly, he said that he decides what goes up and what doesn’t. Most sane people will already see that this makes osV exactly the same as OSNews; with the only difference that OSNews has 140 000 readers, and 5 times as many editors than osV.

So, I presented him with an example. I know out of experience that Kelly is very active in fighting the opinion that Macs are expensive. So, I said to him “So, if I were to submit under 5 different names a piece that confirms that Apple stuff is more expensive, you’d agree with it and post it.” Not surprisingly, he responded: “If Macs were indeed more expensive and it was submitted 5 times then yes, that would be a newsworthy news item.”

So, there I nailed him. If Macs are expensive or not is a completely subjective matter; to some, they are, to other, they aren’t. As with anything that costs money, something’s ‘expensive-ness’ is dependent on a multitude of factors, including income, perceived value of the goods, and much, much more.

Yet, his bias that Macs are not expensive stops him from posting any articles claiming otherwise. You get how completely fcuked up that is, don’t you?

The aftermath

The aftermath is the email I posted on my blog here. I sincerely felt insulted by all his accusations. However, the reply to this email literally is completely out-of-this-world. A few quotes:

When did I insult or make any false accusations toward you?

You DID in fact choose to not publish many of the links I submitted because they came from me. If it bruises your ego too much to admit that, don’t bother. It’s pretty obvious to the both of us, and now since you’ve decided to include the rest of OS News editors in our conversation, I’m sure it has become glaringly obvious to them as well.

Somehow our friend decided that I admitted to not posting his items due to the items coming from his hand… I could post all the emails on this blog, but you can take my word for it. I obviously did not admit to anything, as there is nothing to admit to. I did, however, without any form of secrecy, explained why I put a ban on osV’s original content (he even tried to lie about the articles that were removed from his site due to their factual errors).

I simply pointed out 4 links on OS News that showed a trend in the style of publishing links of which I had a problem with and you took it personally. I even apologized if you took it the wrong way. However, you took it personal and decided that you weren’t going to publish any of the links I sent in.

Again, he promotes his own sick ideas as facts. Very, very disturbing.

I could go on for another ten pages about this, but I think most of you have seen enough.

—

Now, as that email I published on my blog already explained, I feel truly offended by this guy’s sick ideas. I put so much effort into making OSN a balanced, fair, fun place to visit– and then, when some guy comes along, promoting his own sick assumptions as fact, putting words in my mouth I never said, playing the supreme being and innocent victim, it just hurts.

I can take criticism– when it’s founded. I surely will admit any mistakes I make. I am arrogant sometimes, and I can be very stubborn– but anyone who’s involved with me for a longer time knows that I *will* swallow my pride if someone truly points out errors or mistakes on my part.

I’m trying to put this issue to rest now. OSN is bigger, badder, and more fun than it has ever been nowadays. There are five honest people working on making OSN the best place for news on the alternative computing scene– and many people can attest that we’re doing a good job. Of course we have our deficiencies, but we’re not afraid to admit them.

As long as your critique is founded.