Dysmey Blog Archives > The iPad: For the Rest of Them
Rupert Murdoch, again displaying his remarkable ignorance of how the Web works, repeats in Washington the falsehood that he had pronounced in Beijing last year: Google is his enemy because it steals his news. And this time he throws in Microsoft's Bing for good measure. (→, then →) And, in what seems to be the most damaging endorsement for any piece of hardware, Murdoch said that the iPad was a
wonderful tool
for listening to music, watching videos and reading newspapers.
Again, I do not understand why the robots.txt files in all the murdochist sites, like the Wall Street Journal and the London Times, are not set up thus to keep Google out.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
ACAP-crawler: *
ACAP-disallow-crawler: /
Unless the people who run the sites are that technically illiterate, even of their own superfluous ACAP crap, which Google and Bing do not recognize.
Of course, it is possible that the iPad is not meant to be worked on by hackers, makers or other such enthusiasts. It is not meant to have apps like the iPhone or iPod. It is not meant for us. It is meant for the Big Content folks, like the newspapers and the record labels and Hollywood, in order to push their crap in a way that they find acceptable.
If that is the case, it is okay, I suppose. Let the huffings of Puff the Magic Murdoch scare away Google and Microsoft and the open-source community and anyone else who might want to conceivably want to write programs for the iPad. Let the iPad be the exclusive domain of Apple and those specially chosen by Apple to build applications for the iPad.
Let us get on with our lives, and get over the fact that the Apple iPad is a toy for the middle classes and up. The iPad is for the rest … of them.