USA Today falls foul of Jobs' Mob

Tech hack Andrew Kantor penned an ode to a supercomputer at Virginia Tech called System X which was composed of 1100 Macintosh G5 XServe computers, here. He made the fatal mistake of failing to actually praise the Macintosh anywhere in the yarn.

The first response he got was from the editors of Mac Daily News. They shot off a diatribe entitled "USA Today writer attempts to downplay Apple's role in Virgina [sic] Tech supercomputer."

In the article they claimed that his column was an "insidious" and an "underhanded Anti-Apple/Mac article" which was designed to tell the vast amount of McPaper readers that Apple Macs aren't for them.

Now perhaps we should have warned Andrew that the penalty for failing to mention Apple in a story without the use of over the top praise as prescribed by Steve Jobs is a fatwa.

Sure enough the letters started arriving at USA Today to a reporter who clearly was not ready for the brand of Apple fundamentalism currently out there.

Andrew said that his article seemed to have unforgivable sins in the eyes of the Apple mob.

It was about a supercomputer and didn't play up the Mac role to their satisfaction. Secondly he said that the super macs used by Virginia Tech were unavailable to 'little people' - they weren't when he wrote the story but they are now.

Thirdly by referring to Apple users as little people he insulted those who were over six foot (no really). He said that the Macs were running at 2.3GHz when the Mac folks insisted, incorrectly, that they run at 2.5 GHz.

Andrew seems a little surprised at the assumption that he is 'anti-mac' and the Apple nutters who write to him seem to think he is. In fact he is an Apple user and although he hates the OS9, which he uses at work, he thinks that Apple did a brilliant job with OSX.

He was also amazed at the language which is fairly typical of the posts we get here at the INQ whenever we mention an Apple story.

Prose like "you suck, you f--n little b--f-... "F-K YOU, F-K YOUF-K YOUF-K YOUF-K..." And so on, for several more lines. Another Mac user calling him/her/itself "rp" had this to say: "Wake up an [sic] smell the roses a-hole. PC's [sic] are far behind Macs. Get you [sic] f-king s-t straight you f-king geek."

In one note Andrew was pointed to a pro-Mac article: "This guy is up for the next Pulitzer you f-king fat pig faced gay b-tch c-t bag pole smoking mofo. Take notes you a-hole." Clearly Apples are being used by creative and articulate people channelling Oscar Wilde.

Andrew's full tale of woe can be found here. µ