Muchas gracias! I try to take that approach to life in general. I'm a pessimist, but at least I know how to have fun with negativity! George Carlin rules! X()
Shit, the biggest problem I've seen is that the experience people my age have with Macs is from school, and these are always the piss poor mid-1990s Performas and LCs (there were some good ones, like the Quadra 840av, Power Mac 8100, but overall, many Macs of that era are a pox on the house of Apple). Said Macs are maintained by incompetent minions of drones. They're not even IT guys.
These things are miraculously running the original install of System 7.5 (hueh) on 4MB of RAM, and they're trying to use Word 6. All of them have ethernet cards, but for some reason, they use LocalTalk adapters... even on the odd G3 that manages to slip in.
The combination of underpowered hardware and bug-ridden system software and apps leaves the things in shambles. Combine this with people who are too stupid to even be allowed to use a computer. We had one teacher who kept a box of straight pins so that people could eject floppy disks manually using the eject hole... circumventing the OS's eject. Then these people complained when they'd crash, say that they hate floppies anyway, then bitch about the four new G4s because they don't have floppy drives.
The Mac labs are never maintained, and the ones that do work... only do because there's one teacher who's a dedicated Machead (if you're reading this, Mr. Hamlin at MUSH, big cheer to you =^) and on their own time maintains it.
Just to show you... I go over to a friend's room, and her roommate is there. I pull out my 3400 and the roommate looks at it, gets this look on her face like she saw a giant green turd, and says "why do you have one of those pieces of junk?"
I ignored her... and then watched as my friend struggles to get Sun's JDK to work on XP... then... almost as if God decided to play a practical joke... the roommate's shiny, new HP 'book takes a shit on itself. XP crashes four times in a row at startup, then she restarts and it hollers "MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM"
Boy, I feel bad for having this "piece of junk" Apple.
I'd love to hear other stories of Mac bashing by the ignorant. It's so funny to hear the same four things just said over and over like a broken record.
When will people just realise that the platform wars are becoming meaningless? We've now got a universal OS (UNIX). The difference boils down to the processor, the name on the outside of the case, and the way the system look on the screen. Underneath, it's all the same.
Like someone says in their sig... IF IT AIN'T UNIX, FUCK IT!
[ September 29, 2002: Message edited by: The Jimmy James ]
