John Gruber can be unfair too.
Daring Fireball is a site I frequently read. John Gruber links to, and comments on, a lot of interesting things on Daring Fireball. Just the other day, John linked to and commented on an interesting piece in Good Magazine. The piece describes the base measurement of the metric system (the meter) in a series of info graphics. Here is what he said:
What’s a Meter? ★
Good Magazine on the history of the official definition of the meter. Includes this humiliating nugget: “There are only three countries that do not use the metric system: Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States.”
(Thanks to Rab Barari.) #
It’s concise, clear and even has a friendly nod to Rab Barari, who ostensibly mailed him the link.
For those of you who haven’t read Daring Fireball, you should know that John Gruber follows Apple. He calls journalists out when they write up silly biased articles about Apple’s products.That’s a good thing. He does it so much in fact, that he even has a feature “Jackass of the week” for very silly journalists. It can, and has been, awarded several times a week. But — John Gruber can be a Jackass too.
He recently wrote the following:
Adobe Adds H.264 Support to Flash Player 9 ★
My bet is that it performs like total crap, at least on OS X, but I’d love to be proven wrong. #
And bam! He slams a great development in video on the web in one sentence — just like that. Sure, Flash reportedly performs weakly on OS X. The Flash Player Beta — which includes the H.264 — is right there to download.
He could have, at the very least, tried it and reported his findings before slamming it. Otherwise, it’s just weak conjecture. Just like the conjecture from the hack journalists or (shudder) hack scientists he so rightly calls out.