CAD fucking rocks. lol.

[Eric]

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/index. ... &date=last

Hit back if you're not on their mac strip. ;p

[Eric]

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/241489

And bonus flash! WTF

[SineSwiper]

Heh, nice.

[ManaMan]

A "Big-boy computer" hehehe...

[Kupek]

A "Big-boy computer" hehehe... :D

Every person I know who uses a Mac is either a Computer Science graduate student, a Computer Science professor, a senior software developer, or a system administrator. All have at least a BS in Computer Science.

[Lox]

A "Big-boy computer" hehehe...

Every person I know who uses a Mac is either a Computer Science graduate student, a Computer Science professor, a senior software developer, or a system administrator. All have at least a BS in Computer Science.

You know what a joke is, right? You know, J-O-K-E?

[Kupek]

You know what a joke is, right? You know, J-O-K-E? :)

Quite aware. However, when finding the joke funny requires feigning ignorance on my part, it's not a good joke.

[Lox]

You know what a joke is, right? You know, J-O-K-E?

Quite aware. However, when finding the joke funny requires feigning ignorance on my part, it's not a good joke.

Holy crap, dude. Lighten up.

And, actually, I'd disagree. Some jokes are simply meant to be funny because they are an exaggeration of something. At least that's the sense I get from this strip.

I don't get the impression that he actually dislikes Mac's in any way but was merely using the fact that many tech people look down on them to make a joke. You can't argue that they do regardless of how many people you know who are IT professionals and use Mac's. I know just as many who have an abnormal bias against them.

I hate overanalyzing comics.

[Don]

Like Kupek, I have no idea how this is supposed to be funny. The Mac demographics are quite elitist.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

I, uh, don't get it?

[Kupek]

Holy crap, dude. Lighten up. :)

The issue isn't that I'm offended in any way. The issue is that if I have to pretend to not know something that I do know, then the joke is not funny. I actually think it's worthwhile to determine <i>why</i> something is funny. From a collection of essays by Douglas Adams called <a href=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 507846>The Salmon of Doubt</a> (which is an excellent collection, independent of this discussion):

There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation. “These scientists eh? They’re so stupid! You know those black box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know they’re meant to be indestructible? It’s always the thing that doesn’t get smashed? So why don’t they make the planes out of the same stuff?” The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, how they couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn’t really work because flight recorders are made out titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium they’d be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place?

I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb, in other words they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive behaviour you should try living with it) that didn’t rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.

I'm quite aware of the bias against Macs you speak of. From what I can tell, it's a result of ignorance and a misplaced feeling of superiority stemming from a basic knowledge of computers. In that comic, if I laugh at anyone, I laugh at the two workers for having this irrational attitude.

[Nev]

I think you're supposed to laugh at them, Kup...

[Kupek]

I think you're supposed to laugh at them, Kup...

I think it's clear through facial expressions and who gets the punchline that you're supposed to laugh at the anonymous Mac user. It helps I have enough knowledge of the strip to know that one of the workers is a main character in the strip who is generally the smart one in an Abbot and Costello type pairing.

[Nev]

Well, does that mean you can't laugh at them anyway?

[Flip]

Did someone say macintosh? http://www.arbay.com/stuff/macparody.htm

[SineSwiper]

Did someone say macintosh? http://www.arbay.com/stuff/macparody.htm

God, I love that movie. I can't watch it enough. "It's the update manager bouncing up and down like a Jack Russel fucking terrier!"

Every person I know who uses a Mac is either a Computer Science graduate student, a Computer Science professor, a senior software developer, or a system administrator. All have at least a BS in Computer Science.

There are also plenty of professors, scientists, etc. that believe in Creationism, too.

Kupek, lighten up. I could give two shits about how many professors use a Macintosh. It's a universally known fact that Macs aren't as customizable as PCs, and Macs were designed for idiots. Granted, Windows isn't fucking rocket science, but at least you can get into the advanced parts of the OS. Also, parents usually bought Macintoshs for their kids because they used them in school, so Macs generally have a kiddie image, anyway.

Wow, I didn't know you were a closet Mac zealot.

[SineSwiper]

Also:

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=arc ... 2002-11-26

[Kupek]

Kupek, lighten up. I could give two shits about how many professors use a Macintosh. It's a universally known fact that Macs aren't as customizable as PCs, and Macs were designed for idiots.

Hardware wise, yeah, they aren't as customizable. But I don't see how that's relevant. Designed for idiots? No. It's not designed for idiots any more than KDE or Gnome is. (And unlike KDE or Gnome, it actually works. Yes, I use KDE on a regular basis, and I'm generally aggrivated by it in some way.)

Granted, Windows isn't fucking rocket science, but at least you can get into the advanced parts of the OS.

Dude. It's <i>Unix</i>. There's a program called "Terminal." Open it up and you can do everything you can normally do on a Unix system. Have you ever actually used OSX or read anything about its internals?

Wow, I didn't know you were a closet Mac zealot.

I don't own any Apple products. The OSes I use on a regular basis are Windows and Linux. But if I were to buy a computer tomorrow, it would be a Mac because I think it's the best desktop OS around. If you think that makes me a zealot, fine, run with it. My view is that it's just a fucking computer, and yours and others tendency to trash talk it has no legitamite basis. I think you have an irrational and uneducated opinion, and a superiority complex about computers, so we're all even.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

Have you ever actually used OSX or read anything about its internals?

It's Sine, of course he hasn't.

I have an iMac and a PC that boots between Windows (for WOW) and Debian (for work, and which, if I recall correctly, Sine thought was too terrifying to install). I enjoy OS X and Debian about equally as much. OS X is a fully functioning Porsche, and Linux is like the half-assembled hotrod I enjoy tooling around with in the garage.

I tolerate Windows :).

[SineSwiper]

Again, OSX was a desperate move to scrap their own OS and go steal the nearest UNIX OS. (Funny, just like Microsoft...) Thank god FreeBSD is GNU, and fortunately, BSD is benefitting from their work. Now, they can say that their OS is more advanced, even though all of the advanced parts of the OS was simply the stuff from FreeBSD. It was a move to get some of the geeks back, and it worked.

On the surface, however, it's still the same idiotic interface. To install Office: drag CD into hard drive. That's it. On a basic level, it's ingenius because it's so simple to do, as a one-step operation. But, what if I want to partially install Office, or change where Office is going to go? This is what I'm talking about lacking advanced level operations. For others, that video Flip posted had some good examples. For techies, OS9/OSX is very dumbed-down.

Take the one-button mouse, for example. I don't care that you can buy a two-button version. It's the fact that the one-button version is still the default, despite that technology has progressed beyond that. (And their hockey puck design is further proof that they will toss out usability in favor of style. Even the eMac variant is ugly engineering, with a button that rocks the entire mouse.) Their reasoning: by forcing the mouse to one-button, it forces software developers to invent better ways to perform functions besides using context menus. Why is Apple playing mind games with the software developers? I like context menus. They are an easy way to get specific functions for the item that I'm looking for. And for the record, their reasoning is flawed: developers are putting in context menus anyway, so by having a one-button mouse forces people to use an Apple key on one hand and a mouse button on the other. (Nevermind the lack of a mouse wheel.)

I consider Apple to be the AOL of computers. In fact, I think that's a very good comparison. AOL is "so easy to use", yet it's too easy to use that it loses the ability to appeal to the higher level of users. Actual Internet users don't want a combo app that dials in for you, browses, checks mail, etc.

[Andrew, Killer Bee]

Sine, you've really got no idea, but I guess that's okay. Enjoy your ignorance.