Update: anyone arriving at this article today, it was written as a reaction to utterly distasteful and disrespectful articles doing the rounds at the time, speculating on Jobs’s health. Jobs died on October 5, 2011, two-and-a-half years later. He never did get well, but I hope the time he had between this article being written and the day of his death were full of joy.

It’s true: Steve Jobs—Apple messiah and all-round clever chap—is going to shuffle off his mortal coil, kick the bucket, and generally become an ex-Jobs. But here’s the thing: it’s probably not going to happen this week, this month or even this year. The guy’s had and survived cancer, now clearly has a medical problem that means he’s not getting nutrients from food, and is under a lot of constant stress that’s making his condition worse. The most obvious medical advice for such a thing: take a break—a long one—until you’re well again.

Of course, the latest from Apple sent the stock markets crazy, due to idiots somehow equating Apple with Jobs. Sure, Jobs ‘saved’ Apple to some extent during his return, but many forget that Apple now is Jobs, in the sense that his personality is directly infused into company procedures and processes. In other words, even though Jobs won’t be at Apple for the forseeable future, Apple still is Jobs anyway. It’s hardly the most confusing concept in the world, but a lot of people appear to be having trouble understanding this basic fact. (Also, publications and analysts that continue to rattle off ‘Apple needs to start thinking about a successor’ garbage, please shoot yourself—anyone who genuinely believes that Apple has no contingency plans doesn’t deserve the tag ‘journalist’ or ‘analyst’. In fact, they barely qualify for ‘sentient’.)

So: Tim Cook will take over for a while (a safe pair of hands, to say the least), and Apple will continue working on products already devised for the next 18 months, during which time Jobs will still be directly involved in important strategic decisions anyway. And even if, God forbid, Jobs does end up bowing out in a very final sense sooner than expected, Apple’s got the likes of Cook, Ive and Schiller to see the company onwards.

In the meantime, here’s hoping publications finally get bored of the speculation and rather morbid obsession of “Will he? Won’t he?” surrounding Jobs. Maybe one of them will even have enough guts and integrity—and I know this is unlikely, but what the hell—to merely publish a piece with four simple words: Get well soon, Steve.

The latest Popbitch reports on a new BBC3 ‘observational gameshow’, Clever vs. Stupid. Apparently, it sets challenges for two teams, one formed from stereotypically clever people (academics) and one from stupid people (presumably, chavs, tactfully referred to on the show as ‘stupids’).

Unless I’ve taken leave of my senses, isn’t this the original pitch for QI, but without the amusing celeb types (clever or otherwise)? Still, good to see BBC3 has enough time for recycling panel show ideas and making them worse, rather than just being busy ruining perfectly good pilot shows by removing the darkness and ideally suited actors.

Although the reports of Macworld’s might be spot-on

Once again, the sky is falling in Apple-land. The Cupertino giant’s announcement yesterday that Macworld Expo 2009 would be its last and that Phil Schiller would deliver the final keynote rather than Steve Jobs sent the rumour mill into a frenzy. Clearly, Steve must be at death’s door, right?

Alternatively, rumour-mongers, think about it for just a second, using your brain. Apple is quitting the Macworld Expo, but not its own (increasingly frequent) announcements and launch events. It’s not prepping for Steve Jobs’ death—it’s prepping for Macworld’s, and in a fairly spiteful manner. Consider this: Jobs doesn’t do this keynote, thereby massively lowering expectations and downplaying the event. You can bet he’ll be fronting the next ‘Apple keynote’, though.

Game turns child into evil swearing little shitbag

As part of its long-standing quest to vilify every videogame ever produced (in fact, everything fun ever created), righteous hatemonger ‘newspaper’ the Daily Mail earlier this week published a story about a mother’s fury over a Nintendo DS Scrabble game that taught her son “vile swear words”. (And in the Daily Mail’s usual sterling reporting, it’s amusing to note that the game in question is Scrabble 2007—there’s nothing like getting the scoop on a new product, and this article is nothing like getting a scoop on a new product.)

Of course, it’s implausible that Mrs Carrington’s eight-year-old could have discovered these words by any other means. Although it’s not mentioned in the article, it’s safe to assume that he’ll now need life-long counselling having been exposed to ‘toke’, ‘tits’ and ‘shit’. (Choice quote: “Shit had come up as well. I was absolutely mortified.” I’ll bet. You don’t want shit coming up when you’re playing a videogame—it can really knock you off your stride.)

Following Britain’s typical dive into knee-jerk reactionism, the mother has now banned her son from playing the virtual wordgame, which has been linked to people becoming slightly more educated, and is therefore reprehensible and evil. Publisher Ubisoft’s response about the ‘junior’ option that removes naughty words was met by a typically Daily Mail-style retort from Carrington: “I read the booklet that came with it, and there was no mention of a junior version. It should be made much clearer.” This is fair enough—after all, it’s really hard to spot the ‘Junior mode’ checkbox that’s directly under the player’s name when you’re picking a profile on first launching the game.

Translation: “I can’t be arsed to play real Scrabble with my son, so I threw this game at him, without actually bothering to in any way check it first. And now my little baby is surrounded by tits and shit, and the only way to deal with this is to get those true bastions of public decency and morality involved—the Daily Mail”.

My opinion: it’s a fucking disgrace. (Now, had she moaned at length about Scrabble 2007’s lack of single-console multiplayer support, I’d have been right behind her. IN A NON-OFFENSIVE MANNER.)

Although Internet Explorer’s marketshare slide isn’t proving steep, it almost seems irreversible at this point. Latest trend charts now put IE’s share under 70% for the first time in many years. Interestingly, Chrome’s near-1% doesn’t appear to have been at the expense of Safari and Firefox either, since both are well up on January 2008.

It remains to be seen how Internet Explorer 8 will affect these figures, but for designers still mulling over whether to make the leap to standards compliance and stop designing for the largest market, the path is now clear. Once, you might have been unconvinced by the ‘one in ten using something other than IE’ argument, but with a third of users now browsing with something other than Microsoft’s giant, it’d be absurd to author web pages in any other manner.