Sic
Admittedly, it’s a low blow to hit someone on a typo, but the Macalope just couldn’t pass this one up. Here’s George Ou complaining about Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads:
And you get your IT security information from commercials now? Yes they conveyed the idea pretty well, but then again so did Joseph Gerbils.
The Macalope’s really not sure which is funnier — the thought of rodent propagandists or unironically equating Apple to an organization that orchestrated the murder of millions.
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[…] The Macalope » Blog Archive » Sic “Admittedly, it’s a low blow to hit someone on a typo, but the Macalope just couldn’t pass this one up. Here’s George Ou complaining about Apple’s “Get a Mac” ads” (tags: Apple Mac GetaMac advertisements Macalope GeorgeOu Ou Goebbels propaganda misspelling sic) […]
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[…] 43f Links for Tuesday, March 20th Leo Laporte – The Tech Guy 333 This week, I talked with Leo about how to leave an excellent voicemail message. (start @ 59:15) (tagged: tumble howto voicemail phones twit.tv leolaporte) Google Adds Decorative Themes to Site “Users are asked to enter their ZIP code so the digital drawings change from day to night and fluctuate with the weather.” (tagged: ui themes google) The Macalope: Sic My goodness. Where to begin? (tagged: rodents godwinslaw apple macalope) Roundup: 17 interviews with GTD master, David Allen Dang! That’s a lot of interviews. I wonder if there could be a drinking game in here somewhere. (tagged: linkpiles interviews davidallen gtd) […]
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[…] Sponsored by << Sic 20 Mar 2007 Nazi Apple supermen are our superiors Posted in Wireless, Silly Pundits by The Macalope at 1:04 pm | […]
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[…] From the Macalope: And you get your IT security information from commercials now? Yes they conveyed the idea pretty well, but then again so did Joseph Gerbils. […]
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[…] Incidentally, the most hysterical example evah of Godwin’s Law was executed by a former ZDNet blogger you might have heard of. […]
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[…] June 16, 2010 by The Macalope They are sometimes hysterical. […]
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I think that should go into John Gruber’s Jackass of the Week nomination basket.
The comments further down are almost as funny; his backspin is incredible. And he claims to be an ‘IT guy’! Oy! If he’s an IT guy, I’m playing right field for the New York Yankees!
Is he supposed to write about Goebels ? In that case, the obvious Godwin point comment aside, the comparison is certainly sick…
Reminds me of a guy I knew on IRC who claimed “aprishiated” was a typo. Umm, there’s a difference between a typo and not knowing how to spell something. Or, for the NSFW version: http://www.bash.org/?5300.
Good point, Dan. The Macalope was probably being a little generous.
That’s not “a typo” (especially as he repeated it in a followup). That’s being too poorly educated to know how to spell Goebbels, pretending to be educated enough to know about Goebbels, and being too lazy to even google the spelling. (Granted, he’d have had a hard time finding it if he was going from “Gerbils”.)
It’s so far beyond “it would be funny if it weren’t so sad” that it’s back to funny again.
Well it’s not hard to see the point that he’s *trying* to make: the popularity of an advertisement does not imply that the message is true. Yes, it was a terrible example.
As far as the typo is concerned, he probably typed Gebbils by mistake, and the spell checker turned that to Gerbils. Or something. It’s an easy name to screw up.
rahrens said:
I think that should go into John Gruber’s Jackass of the Week nomination basket.
Your wish has been granted.
It’s not funny at all. And you shouldn’t have linked to that article. Once again, his utter stupidity makes him successful — as far as page views are concerned.
If ZDNet was a responsible company, they would have dropped that moron by now.
Please, all you Mac bloggers, do the worst thing imaginable to this guy: Ignore him. Completely. Never write a line about him again. Ever.
I want to click on the link to see how stupid the rest of the article is, but I don’t want to give him page hits.
Ou, it hurts.
“Gerbils” LMFAO
What a maroon.
(Granted, he’d have had a hard time finding it if he was going from “Gerbils”.)
Not if he knew anything about the man. Just tried a search for “nazi propaganda chief” in Google and the first page returned was the Joseph Goebbels entry at Wikipedia.
Well, Ed, to be fair, he did know enough to know that he’s the moral and ethical equivalent of Steve Jobs.
So…
Ah, but who would want to ignore these people, our precious funboys! Of course, Dvorak spoilt the fun a little, by pretending that he was actually smart, which I am not too convinced about, but that’s another story.
This li’l Ou-thang here is so much beyond stupidity that I began to suspect that we have another Dvorak on our hands, but without the finesse (sic!) of him, but let us give him time to prove himself.
And if all else fails, we have Enderle.
Are there any runners ups? New candidates? Paul Thurrott doesn’t convince me. I suspect the man is intelligent, after all.
Ed: but for all we know maybe he thinks Joseph Gerbils was the inventor of the greatest advertising slogans from the 1960s or something 🙂
Thanks ‘lope,
There goes my Karma again. This time I am NOT clicking through. Turdbot is not getting a pageview from this kid.
What a dork.
Oops. I confused Ou with Turdbot. Well, it doesn’t matter. They’re the same, anyway.
Mr. (Herr?) Gerbils is more famous than you might think …
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=Joseph+Gerbils&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
SteveM
Obviously George Ou intended to say Adolf Hamster.
I envisioned that scene from “Downfall” chipmunk style!
That’s Adolf Hilltiller.
I agree this guy is a moron, but not for the “Gerbils” misnomer. That just makes him ignorant of history. If you read his article you’ll find he’s also ignorant of the present:
“I don’t really care how many times people say “oh but UAC bothers you for no reason” because it’s simply not true. Anyone who says that hasn’t used Vista and they don’t really know what they’re talking about.”
Mr Ou cannot deal with beauty, simplicity and ease of use, maybe even freedom ; he has a hive mindset. That’s why he was unconsciously thinking of Gœbbels.
OMFG! I don’t know which is more frightening: that a ‘professional’ journalist/critic actually is so ignorant of modern history that he actually confuses a Nazi propagandist for a rodent or that, using Google, I see he is far from alone. Only Americans can be this stupid and in such numbers. I fear for this nation. I really do. I really, really do. Well, not as much as I fear Adolph Hamster and the rebirth of the Third Rake
Me thinks Ou made a Freudian slip, he must have been daydreaming of Richard Gere at the time.
Digginestdogg said: “Only Americans can be this stupid and in such numbers. I fear for this nation.”
I disagree. Stupidity is equally distributed amongst all nations !
It’s not his fault! He used SpellCheck!
Sorry, I can’t resist:
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10533-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31611&messageID=582694&start=155
George Ou is now claiming secret information from Maynor will be released in “this week”.
Too fun.
Oh my god. That’s a scary Google search.
This is said Gerbil coming to you direct from George Ou’s rectum…..
‘Joseph Gerbils’ looks like the name of a character from an Ubisoft game for the Wii. With his three hilarious sidekicks Heinrich Chimpler, Hermann Gorilla, and Erwin Camel. Also starring: Albert Spermwhale and Rudolf Bass.
Joseph ‘Gerbils’ McCallan was Ou’s roommate in college. This is all just a big misunderstanding.
As a propagandist for “the vole”, George Ou knows all about rodents.
That reminds me, Live OneCare is so bad as so far from being of production quality that Microsoft might be said to be treating its users like Guinea Pigs:
http://opinion.zdnet.co.uk/leader/0,1000002208,39286244,00.htm
And the Register is reporting that Microsoft’s Live Search is really ratty, too:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/20/windows_live_malware/
Not that any of that is likely to worry George Coypu, or whatever his name is.
Gilles says: I disagree. Stupidity is equally distributed amongst all nations !
Equal distribution of stupidity will end up in big nations having more stupidity. And nations with big teeshirt sizes will have even more stupidity. And that is what makes it really, really scary.
Ou seems keen on destroying any shred of credibility he has. Equating Apple with the Nazi party? What can he do for a punchline? Call the tens of millions of dead a bunch of losers?
George Ou must retract this comment, or be branded a fool.
Oh, boy! Secret information! Could it save — or destroy — the world…?
I don’t know what Ou actually looks like (I suspect he has a picture in his column but I don’t bother giving him page hits so I don’t know). But I keep thinking of him as the crazy Malibu-driving scientist in Repo Man. “Oh, you don’t want to look in the trunk…”
I get all my information and news from infomercials. Apparently this is a questionable practice?
So does George have a self contradictory agrument via Godwin’s Law?
It’s amazing. I’ve never seen someone lose an argument so fast.
Thanks, Marc! John has a great track record at picking up all the jackasses in this industry, but of course, George Ou is just TOO easy to watch!
George Ou is the Dan Quayle of the IT industry. Or is it Ballmer I’m thinking of?
Shouldn’t your headline be “Sick” ? 😉
Georgy is at it again eh? Honestly if you don’t think the ads are funny you should lighten up a bit. It’s just an OS.
Ou’s post has been deleted
Jeremy said:
March 20th, 2007 at 7:36 am
So does George have a self contradictory agrument via Godwin’s Law?
It’s amazing. I’ve never seen someone lose an argument so fast.
It’s called Ou’s Corollary:
As an online discussion grows stupider, the probability of a comparison involving Rodents approaches one.
As usual, this “tinfoil hat” website doesn’t do much of anything other then rail against reality.
Ah, good old George. Apparently some folks above don’t know that he was shown the cyber-door at ZDNet a while back. Trooper that he was, even after losing the gig, he would come back and add comments here and there.
I think my favorite series he ran was the one where he wanted to prove Office’s superiority over OpenOffice.org by clocking their start up times.
Suffice it to say it would have a monumental goon-up if the people who wrote the operating system hadn’t grooved it for their office suite. I also suspect that the xml in a zip file structure which OOo had and which Office was to adopt in the next iteration may require more time to parse, especially as xml is so verbose. Maybe Office on Windows is truly the best on the best.
But, all good experiments may be duplicated and so I tried Office on my desktop system at the time which was, um, FreeBSD 5.x, no lie. OpenOffice.org was slow at about two minutes. Office 2003, though, at last look still hasn’t opened, so I’m afraid I can’t publish results.
Good times. Sweet memories, because when we’re talking about office suites, then the Microsoft advocates stand fully behind the concept that “if you get more, it’s worth paying more.” Maybe we can all get along.
What a total and utter melon.
The spell checker catches typos but not thinkos.
By George! Ou…ch… intelligence has suffered.
Google search for “nazi propagandist” returns Joseph Goebbels on the second place – as a subentry of Nazi propaganda wikipedia entry.
But then “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Godwin’s law of Internet discussions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law