Mac Haters of the World, Unite!

My name is P******* and I am a Windows XP user. And I use, and appreciate to some extent, IE, and lots of other Microsoft products, including MS-SQL, and Windows 2000 Server with the Active Directory, which, after tweaking a bit, works fine. Yes, XP has fluff, unneeded services, service packs, security issues ( at least until Saint Spybot showed up–send the dude a check) and, well, minor problems, at least for the newbies who aren’t aware of a few tricks to get XP–even Home– purring.

And, yes, count me as one who detests Macs. Not only the old drag and drop, and go-out-for-a -burger- while-the- file-downloads Apples and Macs, with screens about the size of a wallet, and a little blinking cursor moving like worm across the page, but the supposedly new, fast OS/X or Tiger OS, or Cobra OS/XII or whatever lame Silicon Wally brand name has been given to the latest Mac sled.

The Mac sled does appeal to some degree: it certainly costs a lot more than some PC with the generic Windows XP, so it must be fast and high-end, right. Cool kids with Ipods who drink frappiccinos in like Palo Alto use Macs. One would thus think the new Macs rock. But that isn’t the case.

They are big, and they are slow (at least the ones that cost like $2500.00 are slow–at 4 grand I wager its up to like my $600.00 PC Athlon speed). The browser, if you can locate it (somewhere near “Dock” I think) is, horrors, Netscape or Godzilla or something unfamiliar (the ‘zilla things generally come up as viruses in my spy -ware detection app.) Where the heck is IE? Who knows. Maybe the slowness is due to all the perfidious “graphics” apps and so forth: and that is part of the problem. Mac management seems to think anyone using a box is like some online Picasso working on his newest Mahster-piece: No. We are at work, or in offices, not in ateliers, Mr. Jobs.

And Mac people (some of them are tolerable, but thankfully are mostly centered around Mt. View and downtown SF) are not so easy to deal with. First they hate a Windoze people–even those few who might read Kerouac, listen to the Grateful Dead, and never vote GOP–even more than the corp. Windows bottom-line guys hate them. They are mostly, as they say in El Lay, “creatives.” Generally creatives are not doing much with networking, or protocols, or data-bases, UNIX or DOS, or security or code of any sort (I always thought Maccies were all javaheads, but later find out that they hate java too, for some unknown reason): they are working with Photoshop or maybe javascript or some open source freak code They are animating things: maybe putting together a groovalicious South Park-like episode or video for the office reggae band.

Mac creatives are not hacking or cracking like decent LA sharkie types might (yes Windows is probably the preferred choice for southside scum); instead they sort of work for much nobler ideals: implementing a type of Mt. View-o-polis where everyone works as graphix or web designers in small, soon-to-fail corps (upstarts, as they say) and plays in some rock band in penisula cafes at night while hot bi-sexual divorcees gaze at them in the cool evening--On second thought, that doesn't sound so bad, if one could afford a house anywhere within 20 miles of Stanford.