4 Oct
2010
4 Oct
'10
9:10 a.m.
On Oct 4, 2010, at 7:42 AM, Jules Richardson wrote:
Tom Uban wrote:
Choice of device or operating system should be based on the intended user and workload
required. It's not a religion. Saying "I am typing this on a mac..." to
qualify bashing someone for their choice is like saying "I have a few black friends
too..." to qualify racism. It's hollow and cliche and nobody believes it. You
just sound like a dope to everyone except other people who share your bias.
I have a Mac and it pays my bills. When I go home I run Windows for playing games. I have
a Wii and a Playstation 3 and an iPhone, all of which are hacked for various reasons. Here
at work we have many Windows machines and many Linux machines. Each item is picked for
their intended task and workload. Some of these workloads are more clearly defined than
others, and some of them exist just for entertainment value, but none of them is
"better" than the others. You can't say with any sort of accuracy that
device X is stupid and useless in all situations because you don't know every possible
user/workload combination in existence. Nor can you say that item X is better than item Y
in all respects for every workload because everything is designed differently by different
people for different goals. It's like saying a crescent wrench is always better than a
Vise Grip. They may look vaguely similar, they may have the same user in mind, but they
were designed with two different tasks in mind, so trying to compare them and speak
authoritatively about this comparison is flawed and intellectually dishonest.
As with many on this list, we have been using
computers pretty much since their inception. And while
I too am typing this on a MacBook Pro, which I do like for the most part, my experience
with Apple
products is that they are about 90%. They get the basics right and the potential for
being really
great is there, but there are always a handful of gee wouldn't it be nice if this
application did
this, etc.
They could rule to world if only they could get past their smug sense of, "we know
your needs better than you do"...