“I’ll see your twenty and raise you twenty. Baaaaa.”
I guess I’m one of the few freaks who actually likes PCs and Microsoft.
My boss is a Mac cultist of the most brainwashed sort. One of the flock of individuals. What’s always funny is when he wants to show us something really cool that a Mac can do that a PC can’t. When he goes to dempnstrate, the Mac will crash or otherwise fail to do what he intended. In the meantime, I’ll do the same thing on my PC without working up a sweat. My boss will always walk away from these humiliations by reciting the anti-PC screed.
I wouldn’t want to use some corporate IT Department’s standard Mac build, either. It must be a Mac, but it must also have that hideous cartoonish Aqua replaced with Classic Platinum; it must have DefaultFolder, QuicKeys, FruitMenu, XRay, WindowShade X, iClock, WeatherPop, and X-Assist installed on it. And that damn Dock has to go (stupid freaking imitation-Windows thing occupying my lower screen getitoff getitoff getitoff!!!).
So why is corporate IT so rigid about this? They think I’ve got cooties on my machine? (I worked at BBDO from '00 - '02, that’s not exactly a mom-n-pop operation, and I was in the IT department. Or maybe that actually helps, to be in the IT Department? We make 'em rules, we no follow 'em rules ourselves, etc? Either way…
::makes note to self w/regards to future inteviews. not being able to supply my own computer is a dealbreaker::
I don’t think I will ever understand the irrational hatred many (most) people have for Microsoft. Their biggest crime seems to be that they are successful enough to dominate the market.
My father is a MS hater. When I ask him why he uses Windows and Office he tells me there is no alternative and that MS have a monopoly. Despite Linux, Open Office, and Apple.
The main problem i have is that they do dominate the market… and use it to keep others out. Linux, OpenOffice, and the like are wonderful, i use them whenever i can… but if a teacher requires me to hand in a Word file… well, since MS won’t release specs for Word files, and they are the standard… i need to use Word.
(Yes, OpenOffice can save Word format… but it’s a bit iffy…)
That said, i keep my open source preaching down to the occasional half-joking comment, and only where it’s appropriate…
I know, it is so very weird. With most Microsoft Users ( when I was growing up it was called IBM’s) they just have a computer. They don’t love their computer, they are not devoted to it, they do nto try to convert others to their use and they don’t really care what others are using.
But, MAC users, for 20 years now, have always been very aggressive about their use of the MAC. It seems as if they are the Jehovah’s witnesses of computers.
Do you mean Mac hardware or software? I’m pretty sure people make Mac software all the time… OS X is unix based, and has a lot of unix software ported to it.
But the mac does help illustrate what i was talking about… For best compatibility, guess what software you need on a Mac?
MS Word and Windows Media Player.
(Ok, you don’t need WMP, I’m pretty sure the codecs have been reverse engineered by now… but the fact that they had to be reverse engineered is what bugs me.)
I was not aware that Apple software was simple to replicate either. Quicktime is a royal pain in the ass compared to other formats. There are not many good alternate player for the windows world for quicktime format.
You have a point… Apple may very well be as bad as Microsoft… but Apple isn’t big enough to force stuff like MS does.
Plus i have to give some credit to Apple for using open source code, and admitting to it, which is better than windows did.
Without wanting to hijack this away from the excellent point the OP has; do you really think OpenOffice is “wonderful”? As someone who works constantly with Linux on any amount of hardware, I’m well acquainted with its pros and cons, and the only word I’d use to describe OpenOffice is “godawful”. It’s like a committee of undermotivated gibbons sat down and decided to deliberately replicate all of the design mistakes Microsoft have lovingly included in Office over the years.
Now, I really don’t expect any relative newcomer to take on Excel; it’s a truly superior product that deserves its dominance on merit alone, which isn’t something you can frequently say about MS products. So let’s ignore the fact that OO.o Calc is pretty rubbish by comparison. No, I’d like to know why OO.o Writer appears to be a duplication of everything crap about Word, Microsoft’s worst paid product ever with the possible exception of Windows ME. For fuck’s sake, they even went to the bother of writing a “competitor” to Clippy, the single worst UI misstep since the rear-fastening brassiere. Oh, but it’s a lightbulb; that’s gotta be less annoying, right? Yeesh. Writer is every bit as horrific as Word, without the benefits of popularity. What a waste.
Have I misunderstood, or are you suggesting Microsoft have used open source code without acknowledgement? D’y have a cite for that at all?
Alright, i will grant, feature wise, word is easier to use. my “wonderful” comment was more towards the idea of it. I agree it needs some work.
As for the second part, i remember reading about an open source coder who found his name mentioned in a EULA, the reason being they used a bit of code he wrote and released… but i can’t find it. Bleh. Sorry about that. That said, it’s not so much them using it that would bother me, but using it while saying how bad open source is…
I don’t work with a whole lot of complicated spreadsheets, so Calc does the job.
Writer, however, kicks Word’s ass up and down the block, especially when you use it like it’s intended. The style support is actually worth using, once you get the hang of it, and actually start writing like you mean to separate your content from your presentation.
I also like that it uses Open Document as the default format. It’s just XML, and is relatively trivial to parse for other purposes with a few shell scripts.
At my last job, we had a multi-hundred-page beast of a Word doc that was our primary source of customer-facing documentation for a certain system. Word isn’t very good at working with files bigger than maybe 40 pages, and the whole thing was just a mess on its own. People had done things like manually create section headings with the font controls. Somebody’s installation of Word would just eat it and puke it back out at least once a month, and we had to pull it off of backup tapes at least once a year when it became hopelessly corrupt.
I got them to import the whole sumbitch in to OO Write and style it properly. From there, they could easily print it to PDF for distribution. I also began writing some scripts to parse out zipped XML to use in a online knowledgebase. I got pulled away for something else before I could put the solid couple of days it would have taken to complete it, but it would have been sweet, and virtually impossible with Word. Oh well.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to throw out the, “Get a Mac, end of problem,” line every time someone has a problem either. Sometimes it’s okay, often it’s not. I personally don’t care what OS people use, but it’s frustrating to hear someone bitch about their computer problems and then go back to Windows for another beating. It’s like watching a person in an abusive relationship or something. “It only crashes and erases my data because it loves me. It’s really a nice operating system, it just has a few problems when it’s been networking too much.”
Two things, it’s Mac or Macintosh; MAC is a line of makeup. It’s not an acronym.
Second, you don’t find that kind of brand loyalty without a reason. Ever wonder why Windows users don’t love their OS? Apple does a lot of stuff right. People who have bought Apple computers like that they don’t have to fight the system to get things done. They keep buying the computers because of their user experience. Quite a few of them stopped dealing with Windows because of their user experience. Makes you think, no?
I talk up any product I’ve had good experiences with. Lots of other people do that too. People who drop a product are particularly effusive in their praise of whatever they adopted in its place. After all, if they were happy with A they wouldn’t have switched to B, which means that B has some things they prefer to A. When someone bitches about a problem they have, I’ll tell them what I did to fix it. For Mac users, the problem’s solution was to buy a Mac, thus the proselytizing.
My comment was really made in a lighthearted manner, so please don’t take it too seriously. Nonetheless, I just remember some funny stories over the years. My husband used to live with two other roomates who were “Priests of Mac”. Everything was Mac this and Mac that, even when he and his friends had no problem with their systems (they were not big time programmers, just home users). Since games were the big thing at the time, it always seemed like there was some “IBM” envy going on.
I remember some funny little pardoy commercials about Mac games, “They have great games for the Mac, like Warcraft, Breakout and, er… Super-breakout.”
My comment was really made in a lighthearted manner, so please don’t take it too seriously. Nonetheless, I just remember some funny stories over the years. My husband used to live with two other roomates who were “Priests of Mac”. Everything was Mac this and Mac that, even when he and his friends had no problem with their systems (they were not big time programmers, just home users), and they were not even talking about computers at the time when the priests chose to attempt a conversion.
Since games were the big thing at the time, it always seemed like there was some “IBM” envy going on. I remember some funny little pardoy commercials about Mac games, “They have great games for the Mac, like Warcraft, Breakout and, er… Super-breakout.”
Oh, by the way, I know Mac is not an acronym. I just capitalized it for whatever reason. For the sake of the “priests of Mac” I have stopped doing so in this thread. I am sorry for the heresy. Please don’t call down the lightning in the name of the “Bringer of Problem Free Programming”.
