“The assault on reason isn’t just a political phenomenon. Microsoft has long been developing its own cast of apologists who have eked out full time careers in the field of sputtering out ignorant, unfounded claims with such insistence and volume that the undecided simply have no alternative but to line up and applaud their seemingly convincing rhetoric. Among them is George Ou, who unsurprisingly blogs for CNET’s ZDNet branded website,” Daniel Eran writes for RoughlyDrafted.
“Take Microsoft’s need for constant, high pitched spin to detract from its grave mistakes and regular failures and combine it with ZDNet’s unapologetically desperate brand of sensational headline writing, and you have fertile ground for arrogant morons ready and willing to say anything and everything. High up on the moron pile is George Ou, a blogger billed as a ‘Technical Director of ZDNet,'” Eran writes.
Eran writes, “It’s not just technical issues that Ou fails to grasp. After readers questioned his use of the word ‘couple’ to refer to a half dozen, Ou answered, ‘Learn English: A few would mean 1-3. A couple would mean 4-9.'”
Eran writes, “Ou’s reputation as a shoddy writer of fact-refuting, intellectually embarrassing misinformation earns both him and ZDNet the dishonor of a Zoon award nomination for spectacularly bad work in promoting the regression of human achievement.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
George Ou has one rare, remarkable, and routinely-employed talent: he can make Rob Enderle look like a tech genius.
@ Mystery: I get it, and you don’t.
Zune Tang has to vent, and this is his alter-ego.
Come on man…
Its better than the zune awards they give out…for services to brown
Knock knock, “who’s there?”
“George”
“George who?”
“no George Ou.”
“Better call a doctor”
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
“Which doctor?”
“No, a Time Lord”.
@Me in LA
Zune Tang has much more class.
<sig> Do not mess with wizards for they may become ethereal and even more difficult to grasp. <endsig>
“That’s when I need a couple stiff drinks”
yeah, about 8 is my limit too….
>>>
“That’s when I need a couple stiff drinks”
yeah, about 8 is my limit too..
<<<
Wuss.
Magic Word: Yeah, a couple quarts of vodka. I’m “covered.”
The Ou starts now.
<<<
>>>
“That’s when I need a couple stiff drinks”
yeah, about 8 is my limit too..
<<<
Wuss.
Magic Word: Yeah, a couple quarts of vodka. I’m “covered.”
<<<
I’ve got you all beat. I’m dead and still drunk.
Magic Word: My “strength” is in multiple nyms.
Vista was only delayed a “couple” of times.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
I’m from Rho’ Disland. A cuppla-three drinks and I’m stiff as a f’in board. Y’know?
This site could use a couple of Zoon awards. I’ve never seen so many twisted facts and lies written on one website. The idiots trying to protect the new iMovie as a great product and then try to convince us that it is ok to remove features because the product became too “professional”. There are so many problems with Apple products that it is easy to see why they have such a large legal staff. Someone found out the truth, quick – sue them into oblivion.
I wonder when this site hands out the kool-aid so people don’t come to their senses and purchase the only operating system powerful enough to be used by virtually every company on the planet – Microsoft Windows.
@Mac Realist
Good to see an MS troll* turn up on this thread, we were wondering where you had got to.
Where have you been, “I’ve never seen so many twisted facts and lies written on one website”, may I recommend Fox News, or even http://www.enderlegroup.com/ so many twisted facts that you couldn’t poop on them all (that’s a real MDN regular inside joke).
Companies are quite welcome to stick with (stick it out with) Microsoft, after all they have (soon to be unemployed) MCSE shills embedded already to recommend the latest service pack/bug fix or even better paid ‘upgrade’ from their lords and masters in Redmond. Real people choose Macs.
In respect of the size of Apple’s legal team I suggest you compare with Microsoft’s legal team, in fact compare with Microsoft’s gestation, search for “Preston Gates Ellis”. To save you the trouble I’ll even offer you a link, here, http://www.evergreenpolitics.com/ep/2006/01/how_preston_gat.html
In fact probably more people choose Macs than PCs given that (a) most windows machines are sold to business and recommended by their in-house mole aka MCSE, and (b) most of the rest erroneously are advised that there is no choice.
I hope your paycheck is good, savor it, there may not be many more fortcoming.
*You are so off-base that I suspect sarcasm and parody confused, if this is the case may I suggest you take some hints from the beloved Zune Tang, here’s a link to show you how it is done: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:macdailynews.com+"zune+tang"&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Did I take the troll bait?
@Gandalf,
Did I take the troll bait?
Took it, chewed it up, and spit it back in his face – well said.
@Gandalf – I’d say you turned the troll to stone, but that would be, like, ewww, super-geeky.
I stand by my comment early on Roughly Drafted’s forum post about the article: If he’s creating the Zoon award, then the first recipient must be Rob “Hurricane Warning” Enderle. Not George Ou, not Paul Thurrott, not Troy Wolverton. A glance at MDN-rival The Mac Observer’s now-justifiably-retired Apple Death Knell Counter will show that Rob has it aced. He’s the Hitchcock, Kubrick and Spielberg of Apple trolls all rolled into one. Here’s to ya, Enderle Group! Buy Mary a drink for me!
And yes, the real Zune Tang, and not the counterfeits that have been posting dick jokes recently, is a great Mac-using alter-ego troll. He keeps me entertained, still, until the day that Sputnik© returns to this forum in glory, to take his children home when the lion lays down with the lamb.
—
I tend to drink on Friday nights.
—
Magic word is “george”, swear to God — Okay, MDN, you’re just stacking the deck here.
MDN – good show in removing all falsely represented inappropriate comments. Your respect for the readership is noted.
The original context of usage for “couple” was “A couple of days”.
Let’s see, that’s not referring to the vector analysis definition of opposing forces creating a torque. That’s certainly not referring to a man and woman in a relationship. Hmm, let’s look up the dictionary.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/couple
“14. a couple of, more than two, but not many, of; a small number of; a few: It will take a couple of days for the package to get there. Also, a couple.”
Ah and here’s more:
“—Usage note The phrase a couple of has been in standard use for centuries, especially with measurements of time and distance and in referring to amounts of money: They walked a couple of miles in silence. Repairs will probably cost a couple of hundred dollars. The phrase is used in all but the most formal speech and writing. The shortened phrase a couple, without of (The gas station is a couple miles from here), is an Americanism of recent development that occurs chiefly in informal speech or representations of speech. Without a following noun, the phrase is highly informal: Jack shouldn’t drive. I think he’s had a couple. (Here the noun drinks is omitted.)”.
Any of you people here want to argue otherwise?
“Any of you people here want to argue otherwise?”
Argue what, George?
Even when the word “couple” is not meant to be taken literally as a specific cardinal number (ie, two), it still implies two or nearly two. When someone tells me a package is arriving in “a couple of days”, that implies: a. that the estimation of time is imprecise (because I wasn’t told “two days”) and that b. it might be three days. It certainly does not imply 4-9 days or half a dozen (unless we’re talking about FedEx).
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
The second part of your reference (the “Ah and here’s more:”) adds absolutely nothing to your “argument”. Here, the reference to “couple” is used where measurement or size is not strictly important. The word could just as well be replaced by “some” or “a few”. But as you were implying cardinality in your context, there is stil no way “couple” would mean 4-9. You are trying to impose some sort of equivalence for which there is none (beyond the primary sense that couple = 2).
Sorry George.
George [assuming the email address isn’t bogus]:
So the only thing you can find to quibble about in the whole of Daniel Eran’s piece is semantics around your incorrect use of the word ‘couple’. Is that it? I have to assume English isn’t your first language as your knowledge of it is so poor. Particularly as your claim of ‘couple’ being a recent Americanism is inaccurate also. It stems from Middle English [and that usually means derived from old French, in particular the noun cople and the verb copler. And in those times [and current English] it always meant ‘two’.
However, I’m happy to take it that the rest of Eran’s piece is therefore accurate [as it tends to be]. You must be really proud of yourself.
Ooh, careful. George might considered these written threads to be “slander”.
I seriously doubt he’ll comment on the more important points in Eran’s article.
Come off it ladies, George Ou is to Microsoft what MDN is to Apple. It is nothing to get your panties in a bunch about.
The Ou Starts Now?
“Take (their) need for constant, high pitched spin to detract from (their) grave mistakes and regular failures and combine it with (the media’s) unapologetically desperate brand of sensational headline writing, and you have fertile ground for arrogant morons ready and willing to say anything and everything.”
Are we talking tech or politics?
Ballmer/Gates 2012…
“So the only thing you can find to quibble about in the whole of Daniel Eran’s piece is semantics around your incorrect use of the word ‘couple’. Is that it? I have to assume English isn’t your first language as your knowledge of it is so poor. Particularly as your claim of ‘couple’ being a recent Americanism is inaccurate also. It stems from Middle English [and that usually means derived from old French, in particular the noun cople and the verb copler. And in those times [and current English] it always meant ‘two’.”
There are many errors in Daniel’s hit piece, not just the stupid semantics argument on “couple”. I don’t really want to continue debating whether the informal usage of “a couple of days” means 2 or more than 2.
“However, I’m happy to take it that the rest of Eran’s piece is therefore accurate [as it tends to be]. You must be really proud of yourself.”
That’s a real cheapshot without even looking at the facts.
1. I did not stack the deck against the Mac by disabling sub-pixel. I have at least 2 Macs in the SF CNET office building that have 24″ Dell LCDs running an obvious LCD resolution of 1920×1200 16:10 aspect ratio. Mac OS X default automatic mode had sub-pixel rendering off which is optimized for CRT. This is despite the fact that I can’t think of any CRTs that use this aspect ratio or resolution. So the default automatic setting failed, it was not an attempt to cripple and sabotage the Mac.
2. As soon as people complained about this, a second set of samples that were LCD-optimized were added to the blog within 10 hours of the original posting to be as fair as possible. The results were still not as readable as the Vista fonts and most experts agree this was because of Apple’s design decision to be faithful to the purity of typography rather than deal with the limitations of the pixel grid. I never represented this as incompetence or ignorance on Apple’s part; just that it was a design decision geared for Desktop Publishing and not web browsing. This design decision in my opinion was the wrong decision since we’re talking about a web browser where readability should take priority over the purity of typography.
3. Apple did orchestrate a smear attack on two security researchers. I presented letters from Apple and I have off-the-record confirmation from Apple employees.
4. I’ve praised Apple’s iMac form factor (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=666), praised the iPhone (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=671), and I’ve called MS Office a zero-day liability (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=390). That is hardly the action of an “MS Shill” that Daniel Eran painted across my face.
OS X does a lot of things better than Windows (such as Expose versus the useless Flip3D feature in Vista). But most people who care about readability first and foremost in their web browser believe that Vista font rendering (while it runs roughshod over Typography) is more pragmatic since it’s easier on the eyes and there have been many scientific studies to confirm this. It’s just silly that you would represent someone as a shill for simply saying that Vista ClearType is more readable which is confirmed by science. I’ve got crazy Mac cultists who read that Eran hit piece emailing me to go die. It’s an Operating System people, get a grip! Nobody insulted your wife or your mother.
“A couple would mean 4-9.” So if a married couple is between 4-9 people, that makes two people getting married just seem so . . . . . wrong. Don’t you think?
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
en
Thanks, George, for your reasonable response.
“It’s an Operating System people, get a grip!”
Good point.
George, when you present paid opinion as facts you are shill and you deserve to be called out for that.
‘Shill’ can also be used pejoratively to describe a critic who appears either all-too-eager to heap glowing praise upon mediocre offerings, or who acts as an apologist for glaring flaws. In this sense, they would be an implicit ‘shill’ for the industry at large, as their income is tied to its prosperity.
– Wikipedia
In the future please try to research and write articles I might be actually interested in reading and try to stay out of the politics of technology. If your Editor insists you fill columns with needless controversy that will create traffic, you should hand in your resignation and find an outlet where you are not forced to invent facts and pervert information at the expense of your credibility as a journalist.