Author Archive

Dave Gets Truthy on the AP

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Via an email earlier this week:

In his most recent post Winer makes the following claim:

Financially, things are looking terrible at AP — as at other news organizations. There’s a general downward trend in the economics of news, and that’s amplified by the downturn in the economy. If we could see AP’s balance sheet, we might conceive of something desperate ourselves…

In the comments, an astute reader notes:

You can read the AP’s balance sheet, Dave, and it’s not at all in bad shape as you claim.

link

In fact, revenues were up and the AP is in the black, despite it being a non-profit and only needing to break even. AP makes money selling content, not something many people can claim.

Dave’s response seems worth an EoW blog post, IMHO.

So what was Dave’s response?

Then there must be something else they saw that made them freak.

The strong reaction was observable. The reason for it, not so clear.

Which is basically his way of saying “I’m still right, even if my facts are wrong.”

Thanks for the email!

How Dave Loses Arguments

Friday, March 20th, 2009

It happens all the time. Dave writes something, someone thinks about it and decides he’s missing something, they comment, and Dave takes issue with them not patting him on the back to tell him how smart he is, and a lively debate ensues. The most entertaining feature of these debates is that he’s terrible at it because he refuses to accept that maybe he missed something.

This thread, which was pointed out by a commenter on the last post is as perfect an example as there is.

(more…)

Dave on Twitter’s Suggested Users List

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Examples of Dave’s double standards (one for him, one for everyone else) are easy to come by. Few are as stark as his recent crusade against the hegemony of twitter follow suggestions. Rogers Cadenhead fills us in on an interesting back story, for those who didn’t already know it: Dave sold default subscriptions in Radio.

I wasn’t on that list. I poured a lot of effort into Radio, and while I wasn’t in the top tier of bloggers I was solidly second-tier. Former MTV veejay Adam Curry was on the list, and in July 2003 he revealed why — he secretly paid Winer $10,000:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I’ve been delighted with my purchase and although I haven’t checked recently, I’m pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. …

The $10k didn’t ‘just’ give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I’ve built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

So when Winer was in the same position as Twitter, his software included a paid placement, something he never disclosed to his users.

(more…)

Surprise! Nobody Cares About Frontier!

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

This is truly shocking:

had hoped to lead a discussion at this year’s OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux . . . it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux — so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn’t recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O’Reilly doesn’t seem to like me these days, or whatever — I don’t know

Basically he wanted a conference to give him a session to try to recruit people to port a niche, sparsely-used, archaic novelty application to Linux. As though there aren’t enough of those. Shocking when such a panel wasn’t immediately instituted. I’m sure it’s because O’Reilly hates Dave.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that nobody would show up to such a session.

Dave’s Virus Problem

Monday, March 9th, 2009

I don’t get it. How does someone who claims to be a programmer and technologist end up with a rootkit almost as soon as he plugs it into a network? In a great many years of windows computing, I have yet to come within spitting distance of a rootkit. That’s not because I’m especially clever, it’s because, as a general rule, you get those sorts of things from doing things you shouldn’t be doing to begin with. Pirating software and movies, for example. Visiting questionable websites. Et cetera.

What on earth is Dave doing with his PC?

(One thing he’s doing with it is contributing to increased costs for amazon: by returning a product he broke 1 2). These will be good things to keep in mind the next time he calls out some company for shitty customer service: he’s the guy that abuses the system and ruins things for everyone. He’s the kind of guy who is a reason for shitty customer service.

Dave Releases Tweet Pirating Software

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

As we’ve already covered Dave’s most recent OPML editor extension’s sole purpose is to rehost the copyrighted material of other people. Unsurprisingly, he does so without permission.

Now, he’s decided to make the ability to steal and re-host other people’s tweets widely available.

If you’re still not sold on the copyright, take a look at this passage from Dave when it was about his content:

The next step is to look at the copyright issues his service raises. They are quite interesting. Scripting News, both in HTML and RSS, has a clear copyright on it. Should I have a say in publications created from my content? I generally don’t mind, but shouldn’t I have to give permission? Suppose a magazine started publishing all my writing. Would I have recourse? I am not a lawyer, but it seems clear that I would. Is Pilgrim somehow immune to copyright law? I’d love to hear the legal theory that allows him to do what he’s doing with my work.

So . . . is Dave “somehow immune to copyright law?”

Brilliant Postulate

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Quoth Dave:

I have a postulate that if very few people do something then it must be hard, and therefore whoever is doing it must be smart.

More proof that Dave doesn’t even give a first thought to the things that he writes on Scripting.com, let alone a second thought.

Paying To Read Your Own Blog

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Today while I was running I spit a pool of saliva orders of magnitude deeper than most of what Dave puts into his blog. Case in point, today:

Do I have to pay to read my own blog?

And if so, who gets the money?

I don’t recall receiving any checks from Amazon.

News flash, Dave, you already pay to read your own blog. You know how you’re always whining about how much you pay Comcast for how badly they supposedly treat you? Guess what! If you stopped paying them, you wouldn’t be able to read your blog on that connection any more. Same with your cell phone, DSL, and so-on.

They’re called “service providers” for a reason.

Dear Dave: Kill Yourself

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

We’ve seen it before. Ridiculous, far-fetched nonsense spilling out on Scripting.com for the purpose of eliciting a reaction. It’s a simple formula. All you have to do is say the first crazy-ass thing that comes to your mind with nary a thought as to the reality of it.

Today’s “brilliant” idea is, guess what! Overpopulation caused the economic decline because we subconsciously know that the world has too many people on it:

Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn’t growth the whole problem? Shouldn’t we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.

The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we’re adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can’t sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven’t done anything to limit growth.

Ignoring the bizarre link between the economy and Al Gore’s hyperbole, I still don’t get it. Even if we assume as fact that we are irreparably destroying our environment — neither the “irreparably” nor the “destroying” part are agreed-upon fact — there’s been no credible source saying that we can’t grow in an environmentally friendly way.

But, Dave, I support you in your endeavor to lower the world’s population. Since population growth is nothing more a greater birth rate than mortality rate, and we can’t stop people (at least in the U.S.) from having more kids, the only factor left at our disposal is impacting the death rate.

Mahatma Gandhi is quoting as having said “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Dave: be the change you want to see in the world: kill yourself. Thanks.

Massive Copyright Infringement

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

Today Dave admitted to engaging in a whole hell of a lot of copyright infringement:

In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.

You can find the folder of archives here:

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/

Alright, so everyone Dave follows has had their Tweets stolen and re-hosted elsewhere. Why? Because Dave feels like it.

No regard for their intellectual property rights whatsoever. Selfish, but not at all surprising.

Someone Dave follows should send a DMCA takedown notice to Amazon. That could be entertaining.