Crazy Apple News Site

Following yesterday’s announcement about Apple’s retroactive releases, a group of people decided to forge their way into the past and start the open-source Classilla project.

According to their website, the Classilla project is in love with the very European, very OS9-friendly iCab browser; a program that has been ready for 1989 for the past five years.

Classilla is designed to bring the modern benefits of Mozilla-based browsers back to people still living in the 90′s, thus freeing them from the terrors that we all lived through in those days.¹

It’s heartwarming to see people following the great ones at Apple and push the boarders backwards as well as forward.  If this trend continues we can look back and see a day where nobody using a Mac will have ever had to utter the words, “I just installed Internet Explorer on my Mac!”

1. That’s right. I’m looking at you, blink tag! And don’t try to shuffle off the page, marquee!  You know what you did. [↩]

When we learned that Microsoft had created a line of “retro” t-shirts, we had some difficult questions to answer.

The first of which was not, “do we make fun of Microsoft for this odd new advertising medium/revenue stream?” Of course we’re going to make fun of them for it.  That’s a given.  No, the question is “how are we going to make fun of Microsoft for this odd new advertising medium/revenue stream?”

I mean, we could take the obvious route: “These t-shirts crash 30% less than Windows Vista! Just like DOS!”

Or the closely related: “And unlike DOS, these shirts are guaranteed to be bug-free!”

Or even: “These shirts are guaranteed to {expletive deleted} destroy Google!”

And we decided to step around the whole “Softwear by Microsoft: celebrating the last time we made an OS that worked the way it was supposed to,” territory.

None of these are the route we decided to take.  No, we have a much higher, more subtle method of mocking the largest, most influential, most myopic software company in the world in mind.

Stay tuned to this RSS feed to see what we did come up with!

And no, we aren’t going to Photoshop Steve Ballmer’s head onto the body of some twenty-year-old model who is wearing one of these shirts.  So just get that image out of your head right now.

Firefox 3, the latest version of Mozilla’s legendary open source browser, is the first of the ‘Fox dynasty to make peace with OSX.

For years Firefox on the Mac has been ugly, ugly like a duck covered in oil and thrown off the back of a truck into a pile of herring innards that have been sitting by the side of the road from the toxic-waste-spewing EEA violators.  But now, all is sweetness and light.   Firefox has beautiful cocoa widgets and a new theme that looks so Leopard-y that Safari is kinda jealous.

Safari, meanwhile, is promising that good things are coming “real soon now™ ”, while the ‘Fox is running around the world like a marathon runner with a jet pack.  No, two jet packs, a transporter, and, like, a freakin’ laser cannon.  Rumors of the download site being down all morning on the big day are completely untrue and were made up by Hillary Clinton to ruin Firefox’s reputation.  Firefox is awesome.

Out-positive that, Walt Mossberg.

Unix is user friendly…its just selective about who its friends are.
To err is human…to really foul up requires the root password.
Perl, the only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption

Sad news from the world of open source computing today as Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and principle author of the GNU Public License, was put to sleep.

“It was for his own good, really,” remarked Eric S. Raymond.  ”He was getting, well, rabid is the only way to describe it.  I mean, some of the things he wanted to put into GPL 3.0 were just strange. I won’t get into specifics, but where would we even find a kangaroo suit in Linus Torvalds’ size?”

Raymond assured us that it was done in the most humane way possible. “We brought him into a nice living room with Charles in Charge on the TV. He loved Charles in Charge…” Raymond paused for a moment, his eyes moist. “Sorry…  Anyway, while he was distracted by the antics of the lovable Scott Baio and Nicole Eggert, a technician came in behind him and injected 40,000 lines of pure Windows ME source code into his beard.  Richard was gone before the second commercial break.”  Tears were running openly down his face at this point. “We’ll miss you, big guy.”

In recent months Stallman’s mental stability has weakened, as evidenced by a recent manifesto calling for a change in the name of most operating systems:

In order to underscore the role that GPL’d software plays in our lives, we need to convey to people the idea that the GNU foundation is at the heart of all good software. To this end we need to use the following names:

• All IBM Products will be called “Prison/DOS”
• FreeBSD will be called “GNU/FreeBSD”
• OpenBSD will be called “GNU/OpenBSD”
• No, SERIOUSLY, call it GNU/Linux!  Stop laughing at me!  I mean it!
• OSX has been heavily influenced by free software.  It should be called GNU.5/OSX.  
• Windows will be called “Spawn of Satan”.

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