by Robert X. Cringely®

Apple goes mobile, Disney’s less than noble

analysis
Jan 12, 20072 mins

The big question: Will Jobs ditch the jeans and the turtleneck?

Apple Computer is now Apple Inc. That was the news from Macworld Expo, where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, not to be confused with the iPhone that Cisco’s Linksys division announced last month. I hear Jobs has challenged Cisco CEO John Chambers to a game of rock-paper-scissors for rights to the name.

The devil wears mouse ears: Media blog Spocko’s Brain was shut down last week after its owner posted recordings from ABC Radio affiliate KSFO. The files featured the station’s radio hosts condoning torture, promoting the murder of U.S. journalists, and advocating violence against Muslims and African-Americans. Spocko is hoping to convince advertisers to ditch the DJs. ABC parent Disney had its lawyers (the firm of Goofy, Grumpy, and McDuck) send a nastygram to Spocko’s Web host, demanding the files be removed. Shortly thereafter his blog was sent to Never Never Land. He’s since relocated his blog to spockosbrain.com. Other bloggers responded to Spocko’s call by mashing up the recordings and posting on YouTube. Apparently promoting torture, murder, and racism over the airwaves is A-OK; posting snippets of them to a Web site is not. Welcome to the wonderful world of Disney.

Browser bowser: Cringester Stephen M. was outfitting a new Lenovo ThinkPad T60p for a customer when he installed 220MB worth of Windows Updates, including Internet Explorer 7. He launched the browser and got a screen full of nothing. When he contacted Lenovo support, he was told that “because of a known issue, IE7 doesn’t work with the T60p’s image model.” (A Lenovo spokesperson says ThinkPads do support IE7, despite my tipster’s claim.) He had to downgrade to IE6 and put a sticky note on the system warning its owner against upgrading. Maybe all PC makers should follow his example.

Jock therapy: On-demand software vendor NetSuite has added Oakland A’s GM and well-known stat geek Billy Beane to its board of directors. I understand the board also approved some procedural changes to its meetings as well: Tobacco spitting and crotch scratching are now permitted.

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