Joshua Topolsky

Here’s an email I received last night. I think I really understand where this person is coming from.

Dear Josh,

You, my dear, are a fugging idiot. I heard you on the podcast. “Landscape keyboards are too wide”? WTF? And i thought you liked good keyboards. They are large and comfortable to use, and make you look like a power user. I have not seen any portrait keyboard phone that looks like it would be comfortable to type on. Especially Palm’s keyboards. Those buttons are tiny as hell and look horrible to use. Landscape keyboard phones make you more of a power user, and they look good, too. And also, on the issue of “the iPhone’s keyboard is the best virtual keyboard ever….well, what makes it better than HTC’s Hero keyboard? Better autocorrect? Can you prove that? Bigger letters I think would be the only advantage, past that, it is HTC’s all the way. You can add words to the custom dictionary, you have different suggestions as you type, it is more sensitive to taps. What is wrong with your brain? Just because you’re ugly as hell doesn’t mean you have to be stupid as hell as well, but it seems you are. Landscape keyboards are easily more useful than portrait, unless you are a baby and have tiny hands. Portait keyboards are good for babies, they are nice and cramped.
They are not for men. Of course, you aren’t a man, so I don’t think that matters anyway.

Thanks for this, A. Walters. I’ll take that constructive criticism to heart!

Update: I just received a very nice apology. That’s a start!

Trying out a little something different here. I’m hoping I can publish to Wordpress then beam the RSS to Tumblr which will shoot the content on over to Twitter… which eventually hits Facebook. Will this work? Let’s find out. Together!

I’ll be nice, I’m including a delightful image.

Some of you may be wondering why you’re not seeing the latest piece of Digg’s news-puzzle — the DiggBar — on Engadget. Let me explain.

If you’ve seen the tool in action, then you know that it appears to offer an easy way to read an article you might want to Digg by providing you with a dropdown toolbar and a shortened URL — all courtesy of digg.com. It’s certainly a super solution for making users aware of related stories on the site and generally keeping them in the Digg ecosystem… but that’s part of the problem.

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

Maybe that’s okay for users who aren’t really paying attention to where they’ve arrived or where they’re going while reading news — but we consider that information valuable, and don’t wish to obfuscate it.

In our opinion, the DiggBar takes Digg’s approach to news gathering and dissemination one step too far. By hijacking URLs, they complicate an end-user’s experience on our site, and from a publishing standpoint, we think it’s a step backwards to mask the content you’re visiting with shortened URLs from an unrelated site. See John Gruber’s excellent piece on this which gets a bit more technical, and this Search Engine Land post which gets really technical.

Ultimately, this is both a technical and philosophical decision. We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.

So here’s how our solution works: If you follow one of our links from Digg — and you have the DiggBar active on your account — it now redirects to our original URL. You’ll see the DiggBar for a moment, but ultimately end up at the original content you clicked on in the first place.

Which is how it’s supposed to work, mind you.

I just want to get a hold of the big guy and ask him (or her, whatever you prefer) why my blog got all hacked and whatnot. Not only is that not classy, it’s super annoying, stupid, and totally not-awesome (as we say around here — Australian accent only).

Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is this: stranger or bot who is responsible for this hack, if I ever find you, I will kill you, your family, and anyone who has ever met any member of your family. Then I will kill your pets no matter how cute they are. Then I will blow up the planet Earth.

Gino Felino (Steven Seagal) is an NYPD detective from Brooklyn who knows everyone and everything in his neighborhood. He grew up in the neighborhood as a poor kid surrounded by wiseguys and made men but decided to become a cop. Gino has ties to everyone in the neighborhood, including the mob, and he has an understanding with them that neither will harm the other.

In the opening scene of the movie, Gino and his partner Bobby are waiting to bust up a multi-million dollar drug deal. Gino sees a pimp beating up a woman and intervenes; Gino promptly disposes of him. When he throws the pimp through the windshield of his car, we see red pimp shoes sticking out and then the iconic shot from the point of view of inside the car of Seagal scowling.

Shortly afterwards, we see the film’s main villain, Richie Madano (William Forsythe), murdering Gino’s parter Bobby Lupo on 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in broad daylight in front of his wife, Laurie, and his two kids. Everyone knows that the killer is Richie, a crack addict who has been Gino’s and Bobby’s enemy since childhood.

Gino knows Richie is not going to leave the neighborhood and he tells his captain (Jerry Orbach) that all he needs is an unmarked police car and a 12-gauge shotgun. His Captain gives him the clearance, providing Gino with a Remington 870 pump action shotgun and a brand new 1988 Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 from the Brooklyn 65th precinct. Gino visits his mob connection Frankie and his boss Don Vittorio to tell them that he is going to find Richie, while they want their own revenge on him for killing a cop on their streets. Gino starts the hunt for Richie at a bar run by Richie’s brother Vinnie Madano. Vinnie and his friends all refuse to provide information, so Gino assaults all of them until they (including the local legend known as “Sticks”) are all left bloodied on the floor. He still doesn’t know where Richie is, but their attitude problem has been taken care of. This scene is also known for its use of the Sicilian terms “Fanocch” (short for fanocchio, meaning faggot) and “Minchia” (dick) several times. Furthermore, Seagal also utters the movie’s most famous and dramatic line with “Anybody seen Richie? Anybody know why Richie did Bobby Lupo?”

By now you’ve probably seen the story reported by Gizmodo that Steve Jobs (and Apple) have pulled out of Macworld this year because of Jobs’ dire health condition. Apparently, this piece of info — brought to the site’s doorstep by an anonymous source — has caused quite a stir. Like our own misreporting on Apple in 2007 (a report backed up by internal documents and direct Apple employee feedback), the company’s stock took a noticeable dip, mainstream media outlets picked up the story, and the requisite sensational Digg headline went straight to the front page.

Here’s something about the story you probably don’t know: We received a similar tip from the same tipster weeks ago — a reliable contact who just recently provided us with leaks of new Apple hardware before it was announced. This is a rock solid tipster when it comes to images of gear, but beyond that, we don’t know anything about the person. They may be a dock worker or technician… or they might be Jobs’ personal assistant. It’s unlikely that it’s the latter, but the point I’m trying to illustrate should be clear: the source of this rumor can’t be verified as having a single credible piece of knowledge about Steve Jobs’ health.

Now, I’m not saying they’re not right — they could be Jobs’ personal doctor, and they could be at his bedside right this moment. What I’m saying is that we don’t really have any reason to speculate about Steve Jobs’ health except to say that about six months ago some people who saw him said he looked thin, and in 2004 he had (and recovered from) pancreatic cancer. Your metrics may be different from mine, but that doesn’t place someone on their deathbed or make them too unhealthy to speak to a large group of people. Apple has reasonable excuses for not wanting to be part of Macworld any longer that are far less exciting than imminent death.

To give you an idea of how rumors are treated at Engadget: if someone writes to us and says they’ve seen, oh… say, the Zunephone, yet provides no physical evidence, and no credentials that we can verify which would give them access to that kind of information, we simply don’t run the story. And getting a photo of a piece of hardware versus knowing the specific details of a very private person’s medical health are two very different things.

Part of the problem here lies with Apple, of course. The company has so furiously cultivated a culture of secrecy that it makes it near impossible to get a straight answer out of them unless it’s expressly on their terms. From developers down to Apple’s PR, words and actions from Cupertino can be opaque to a point of frustration. A protectionist view of proprietary systems and new developments is one thing, but withholding reasonable information from shareholders and making fervent fans jump through arcane hoops gets tiring. Speculation doesn’t spring out of what we know — it comes from what we don’t know. Like Joe Nocera noted in his NYT article (yes, the one where Jobs called him a “slime bucket”), only on Jobs’ terms — off the record — could he be privy to information which would put rumors about the CEO’s health to rest once and for all.

But ultimately, no one is asking you not to speculate or question a company’s motives or actions — that curiosity is what drives some of our best stories. What I am asking is for you to use a bit of common sense when it comes to rumors without some verifiable information that backs them up. Just because someone says it, and just because it’s written, it doesn’t mean it’s true — and that’s doubly the case if you read it on an LCD display.

But look on the bright side, AAPL only finished $.32 down yesterday.

Pure, pure brilliance. The Dark Knight as an NES game. I want to play this so badly.