Build Date: Fri Aug 14 15:50:30 2026 UTC
Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunist land crab, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm.
-- WSB
Red Herring must DIE DIE DIE
1999-07-18 19:27:46
So anyone who works in the techno-techno industry knows that Red Herring is not just a magazine and not just a Web site. It's an evil MIND-SAPPING RADIO STATION that sends waves of STUPID into the BRAINSTEMS of MARKETING PEOPLE everywhere. They MUST BE STOPPED!
For those of you who are fortunate enough not to know, Red Herring is the technology magazine for dipshits with Stanford MBAs who don't know jack about technology. Its basic purpose is to whip these brain-damaged lapdogs into a blood frenzy about totally useless and essentially boring new tech -- e.g., portals, push technology, XML, or whatever. For some reason, the Dockers set just eats this shit up.
I dunno what it is about Red Herring. Most business magazines have techno-techno stuff just like this now, but Red Herring in particular just gets my goat for some reason. I think it might just be the widespread success of the virulent Red Herring meme. Of all the dog-whippers, Red Herring is the best.
Like, every time that I am in a meeting across the table from some stupid guy from Marketing who says, "Marketing thinks we should use PUSH TECHNOLOGY" or "Marketing believes that a LINUX DEPLOYMENT is important at this juncture," I hear "Our Red Herring overlords have decreed that XML is our new god. All hail XML!"
I think the NUMBER ONE THING that hackers and geeks could do right now to make our lives more pleasant is to buy Red Herring and drastically change its editorial policy. Like, start having stories about how good it is for ROI to let your staff play Starcraft on HEAT. Or about how the hot new market is in Open Source software, and how it's crucial that all engineers have properly dicked-with .emacs files.
I think we could have those greasy-haired Polo-wearing lapdogs eating out of our hands in no time.

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