I … I can’t … I …

in•fa•mous |ˈinfəməs| adj. 1. well known for some bad quality or deed : an infamous war criminal. 2. wicked; abominable : the medical council disqualified him for infamous misconduct.
New Oxford American Dictionary

Perhaps not the right word in this case. Hitler is infamous. Stalin is infamous. Bush and Cheney are infamous. The season finale of one of the better sci-fi shows in recent history is more of a melancholic event than an infamous one.

I make one vague blog post late one night and someone has to take it to the extreme and slam me with half-baked ideas gleened from the post.

When I read that, all I could think was “What the hell are you talking about?” I called out one overcooked GUI on an undercooked program and suddenly I hate all Core Data programs and think like a Windows developer? Seriously, dude, what the fuck?

That was a late-night rant about three different programs, and only Cha-Ching was mentioned. The bad database and slowness were in two other programs I decided not to mention because it was CC that set my mind in motion on the rant in the first place. (It was iBank, if you really must know.)

People are slow. The masses that comment at Digg and Apple Defects especially so. Two words are being thrown around that are really being used out of context in all the discussion about MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Yellow Journalism

When someone accuses you of yellow journalism, you have been accused of whoring the truth. You are not being called a liar, or being told that anything you said is factually incorrect. What’s being said is that you’re saying it out of context, missing data, or using a small data set to imply a much larger problem than really exists.

If I said that Apple iBook G3s had a far-reaching video problem and that one should question Apple’s design of the product, that would be correct as there is ample evidence to support that. In fact, if I were to talk about such a thing I could prevent the accusation of yellow journalism by actually quoting and naming sources and making myself available for contact about the issue.

Yeah, okay, just kidding; you still have a worthless degree. But apparently that’s because you don’t need to know the English language to get a job in an industry that relies on it.

We get a decent amount of PR-style mail at MG, like other Mac sites, because people are of the odd impression that we actually care that someone’s released a product. (MG is not a news site.) What amazes me about this is that, beyond not understanding where they should send PR releases, a great number of them quite impressively destroy the English language … in the actual release.

As an unwilling example, I present one received today. The commentary around the two-paragraph release was the culprit; whoever wrote the actual release went for the real high school diploma and not the GED (yes, child, the comment form is below, have fun).

Apple posted some really handy debugging tips on their developer site a little while ago. Worth a look.

And remember, kids, come April Fool’s you need to find at least one person you hate and add NSQuitAfterLaunch to their @~/.MacOSX/environment.plist@ file…