“I bought an Apple [Macintosh]. ‘Wimp,’ said a computer geek at work. I sensed the fear. You see, he makes his living from the Microsoft Industrial Complex. It has piled so many worthless programs into your computer that an entire digital bureaucracy has developed in the hard drive to manage it. And like any bureaucracy it is unwieldy, inefficient and impenetrable,” Mike Thomas writes for The Orlando Sentinel.
Thomas writes, “Hence, we must have geeks to serve as our intermediaries. Lots of geeks. Every time the evil geeks in Singapore find another hole in Windows, through which they can invade our homes, it creates more jobs for the good geeks. The entire national economy, in fact, depends on the incompetence of Microsoft. If everyone switched to Apple, the unemployment rate would skyrocket and we would fall into a depression. The government would be forced to give away Microsoft-based computers to stimulate the economy.”
“Be that as it may, I wanted a computer that would obey me at least as well as my Labrador puppy. I spent most of my time with the old computer trying to figure out how to do stuff rather than actually doing it,” Thomas writes. “God bless Apple.”
Full article, highly recommended, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Welcome, Brother Thomas! We see you are doubting no longer. Go forth and spread the Word. Your rewards today are numerous, they will take the form of MDN referrals. Okay, who’s NeXT?
Its happening…..
wait, it just occurred to me…. what does he have against Singapore…. hackers are world wide, no?
I think he’s referring to the last widespread Windows worm was created by a hacker in Singapore.
I have nothing against Singapore–been there three times. Hey Singapore, keep producing those Windows viruses.
“digital bureaucracy”
LOL I like that. Well put, and a succint description of the Windows ecology.
I had just read this from a link in Macsurfer and was going to pass it on to you MDN because it was exceptional. You beat me to the punch.
I just read Thomas’ piece. Not only is it very amusing, he accurately describes the attractions of the Mac in a nicely written column.
That would be a really cool feature… a referral section. Like a box where you type in e-mail addresses, and it automatically sends an e-mail to them containing information on why Macs are better, important “Switch” website links, and other information that would make them want to switch. It would be like a mass marketing campaign!
-Russell
The upswing is undeniable. What I find so interesting is the constant negative criticism waged against Apple for more than a decade and the fairly suden– but understandable– shift in tone toward the company. It’s exciting.
Momentum on our side, Apple’s execution of user-friendly technology now will likely take hold relatively quickly. Seemingly the hurdle of “proving itself” to the masses is being jumped and I, for one, cannot wait to see what comes next.
R&D numbers are always high at Apple. As their revenue increases, so will R&D. Makes me antsy for the future.
OMG, I have never seen such a concise article express so much! This is the article to forward to your Windows using friends people!
My brother abandoned the Mac for Windows about 8 years ago, and in a lot of ways has been almost anti-Mac. Well, rather, he just was convinced of the many myths like most other people. He bought $5000 in Apple stock the day of the keynote when the price dropped. Now all of a sudden he welcomes all the Mac info I’m providing him because it makes him feel better about his investment instead of taking it as an attack of his choice of platform.
Regardless of why he is interested once again in Apple, the fact that he is listening means there is a good chance his eyes will be opened and maybe, just maybe his next computer purchase will have an Apple logo on it. It’s possible that me letting him use my old 1G 5GB iPod for a couple of months may have also helped.
Brought to you by the word “learned”: “Has my brother finally learned to trust me about Apple?”
I have a Labrador. She is sweet but has the attention span of a Baywatch actor. My Mac is far more inclined to do what I tell it. Not as lovable, to be sure, but at least the Mac does not wallow in cow shit
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hagar57,
LOL! At least your Lab only wallows in cow shit; my German Shepherds prefer roadkill, the riper the better. Bastards.
Guys, one must remember Apple haven’t always had the best OS out there. To me, that came with OS X. OS 9 and before were great, easy to use (certainly compared to Windows/MSDOS), but under the hood, systems pre OS X was seriously flawed. They crashed, had conflicts with desk accessories and so on. Not pretty. Even Win 95 had better multi-tasking abilities. It took until OS 8 to get multi-threaded Finder copies!
The Mac OS was designed for a machine with 128Kb, and that affected many of the decisions made in the underlying system. I suspect many of these issues weren’t corrected in later years when more memory was available (late ’80s/early ’90s) Apple knew about the flaws and were actively rewriting the OS into a more modern system (eg. Copeland project). It’s ironic, but the Lisa was technically better in some of the Mac’s deficient areas (eg multitasking), but it required 1Mb RAM which was crazy at the time for a personal computer.
Anyway, my point is, the press will latch onto their old “pre OS X/Steve Jobs return” opinions as though they still hold true today. They probably don’t delve deep enough or understand enough about the implications of OS X being Unix based. Or of the technical brilliance behind the system – and with new technologies like Core Image and so on, it’s going to blow away Windows and everything else.
(Oh, Microsoft will certainly copy what Apple have done, but it’ll be a huge mess. OS X runs quite well on a 500Mhz laptop with 512Mb RAM… Longhorn will require a machine with 6 times as much CPU power and 4 times as much RAM. Everyone will goo and gaa when they see it, and we’ll say “Transparent windows? – had them since 2001”)
PC rules. Bullshit all the way. Been saying this for 3 years on this mindless pumper moron site.
Apple has lost … lost … market share every single year in the last 3 years. You dumb morons keep saying they will rule, and you are wrong.
Keep dreaming, sheep. Keep 3%, succeed if you will in music (becasue of the PC platform), and shut the fuck up.
Nonesense has a good point: PC apologists are idiots.
Seriously, no offense, Nonesense. If you hate Macs so much, have you been reading MDN in order to copy Apple’s ideas?
If so, is your real name “Michael Dell”?
i’ve been hearing about transparent windows in OSX, but how do i get that? or how do i make it happen? i dont really know what these people are talking about. i also heard about windows that gradually fade out when ur not using it. is this true? somehow, i never come across it on Panther. help me out cuz i wanna check out and use this feature.
Now drink the Kool-Aid.
i keed
I’m going to have to print out this article and past it up in the photo lab at work right next to the Airport Extreme bast station we put up and tech support is threatening to take down. We secretly put it up against their wishes.
When we move to a new building next year we will have to secretly put it up again. Anyone know how to hide the Airport signal so the tech service people can’t see it?
Eric,
Transparent windows is a technology that is possible on Mac OS X. Office 2004 used it with the palettes. You could set the timing in the preferences too.
I saw it on other software before, such as “Transparent dock”. You were able to set the % of transparency of a window within the app.
Transparent windows usually depend on whether the authors of an application have provided access to that feature via a preference item.
Terminal and Fire both have settings to do it, and MS Word fades the palettes. There would be others I’m sure.
Transparent Windows aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Eye Candy? Sure.. it looks slick.. alot of apps, esp. open-source, have Opacity options and they do look slick, but the bottom line is.. an active window should have a background.. whether it’s an IM client or a Word Processing program, an active App should have some clean opaque background…
I assume you’re asking because Longhorn will have see through Windows all over the place… Trust me.. That feature is going to get old in about 3 minutes.
Even the way MS Office does it with tiny windows, would get incredibly frustrating with bigger Windows…
thanks guys
it seems like Office for Mac would be in the forefront of taking advantage of these slick new features on the Mac so they can reverse engineer the workings behind it to integrate them into Windows.
DO NOT SPREAD THE WORD.
(Spread the Pages�)
actually, I stopped using MS Office altogether in favor of AppleWorks, so, I just have to look elsewhere for applications that take advantage of windows that fade out.
Eric24601, try WindowShade from http://www.unsanity.com. It handles finder window transparencies. It does get old after a while.