And I’m impressed you caught my paraphrasing of the “frightened scratching baboons” from the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the scribes of Sumer predict that the simplified, but time intensive, hieroglyphs will prevent universal literacy and keep the ability to read and write in the hands of a powerful few. Not that many people are up on Ancient Mesopotamian literature nowadays. Good for you!

So when people compare someone to Cassandra, they’re saying they shouldn’t be believed? That’s actually ironic.

Not necessarily, it just refers to someone who’s always predicting doom and isn’t believed because they’re dismissed as crazy. Maybe “scared coding monkeys” is the more accurate mythological allusion.

The scared coding monkeys are wrong though. If a kid’s gonna code, a kid’s gonna code. Hell, I grew-up with computers from the age of six, had a systems analyst mom, to this day associate programming with free candy and still never felt the urge to code, ever. Whenever my mom would start to explain what she did my eyes would start to glaze like a doughnut on a Krispy Kreme conveyor belt. The little brother on the other hand, total Linux fanboy. Ya either got it, or ya ain’t.

You know what was a great kids’ film? Dumbo. Yes it had racist crows, but “Pink Elephants on Parade” is one of the best animated sequences ever.

That’s exactly why I picked Shark Tale, because I wanted to go on record and declare that one doesn’t need to be a member of the target market themselves to objectively look at something and evaluate it.

But you did evaluate the iPad, and you said “It was fine. It was good.”

I guess I don’t get what you’re talking about. If you’re not talking about the quality or potential of the iPad itself, or how likely it is to be a seller, then I don’t know what you think Apple “botched,” or how you think Apple could’ve “fixed” it. Especially if it’s gotten enough “market penetration” in less than one week to be on the front pages of newspapers and mentioned on television and asked about by moms who don’t read tech blogs.

There’s this whole sea of iPad letdown out there — much more so than with any other Apple announcement I can remember

Then you don’t remember the iPod launch, which is why I posted the link to those archives. Or the first iMac, which everyone said was a disaster because it didn’t have a floppy drive. Or any product which removes a FireWire connection. Apple fans complain; that’s what they (we) do. And Apple over-exaggerates; that’s what they do, and that’s why everybody reads the “magical and revolutionary” spiel and moves on to “how would I use one of these?”

Like I said, I’m disappointed that there’s no pressure-sensitive Wacom-designed digitizer on the thing. But I’m not arrogant enough to assume that Apple failed by not including one, or that everybody wants the same thing I want out of it.

And you picked a bad example, because every account I’ve heard (again, I haven’t seen it myself) says that Shark Tale failed not because it was a kids’ movie, but because it was a bad movie.

That’s exactly why I picked Shark Tale, because I wanted to go on record and declare that one doesn’t need to be a member of the target market themselves to objectively look at something and evaluate it.

Several times you’ve compared initial skepticism (like to the iPod announcement) to the product’s eventual success, and I want to point out:

1. Eventual success isn’t what I was talking about. I was specifically talking about the launch.

2. But If you do want to look at success, I’m not about to call AOL a great product just because it had billions of dollars in revenue 10 year ago. I’m not going to say Vista wasn’t botched just because it’s on millions and millions of machines (and that I’m happily using it on my current laptop at the moment).

3. The iPad’s not released, so there is no “eventual success” to look at yet. So if that’s how you want to measure things, it is too soon to claim they *didn’t* botch it.

There’s this whole sea of iPad letdown out there — much more so than with any other Apple announcement I can remember — and it’s not just the usual whiners. It’s a lot of apple fans themselves. It turned out to be way less of a product than even the pro-apple sites were hoping it to be. Even the biggest of apple fans are struggling with apple’s “magical” tag line.

There is no way Apple was aiming for this, and this is why I say they botched it. I’m not talking about the quality of the iPad itself or iPad’s predicted eventual success.

Also, isn’t Cassandra the seeress who foresaw the fall of Troy only no one believed her ’cause she didn’t put out for Apollo? So are you agreeing with those anti-hacker people or not?

I’m disagreeing with the people who are complaining that the iPad will be the downfall of hacking and computer programming. Cassandra in the myth turned out to be correct, but as I understand it, “Cassandra” is now used to refer to anyone who’s constantly predicting doom, whether it’s accurate or not. (Like narcissists are obsessed with themselves in general, not just their appearance like Narcissus was).

It sounds like you’re saying they didn’t botch anything since we’re not the target market. The same could be said about Dreamworks CGI movies since they’re aimed at little kids, but that doesn’t get around the fact that The Adult World At Large seems to agree they make shitty movies. Shark Tale was a total turd, saying “it’s for kids!” doesn’t really negate that.

Did you see Shark Tale? I didn’t, and I wouldn’t begrudge anybody who hadn’t. But then, I wouldn’t go around declaring that Dreamworks had absolutely screwed the pooch on that one unless I knew for sure that it was an objectively bad movie. No, you can’t just say “it’s for kids” and turn a bad movie into a good one. But neither can you say that a movie aimed at kids is automatically bad just because it’s not targeted at you. And you picked a bad example, because every account I’ve heard (again, I haven’t seen it myself) says that Shark Tale failed not because it was a kids’ movie, but because it was a bad movie.

It’d be more like my saying that “Mad Men” fails because it doesn’t have time travel or robots. I could stamp my feet and insist that period piece character studies are not mutually exclusive with time travel and robots, and there’s no reason that they couldn’t have included both. I could point to all of my friends on the Time Travel Robots Message Board who make fun of the show and then infer that that has anything to do with the show’s ratings. I could complain that I never would’ve gotten into time travel and robots if my parents had only let me watch “Mad Men,” and that AMC is ushering in a dark future in which we’re not allowed to watch TV shows about time travel and robots.

Or I could acknowledge that it’s a fine series that does exactly what it needs to for its target audience, and I’m just not in that audience. They didn’t botch anything unless they released an inferior product, or unless they tried to market a product that nobody paid attention to.