My “tech guy” at work says he’ll disembowel the first person who forces him to install Vista on anything.  Microsoft is a pimp and PCs are whores.  Call me a hippie, but I love my Mac.  She’s good to me.

An insightful story! As a human-computer interaction researcher, though, I have dream of making lasting “marriages” possible.

With a few free hours this morning I grabbed my coffee and sat down in front of the computer fully expecting some meaningful interaction. Up popped the Google search page when, as my hands eagerly assumed the position on the keyboard, I realized that my mind was a blank. I stared at the cursor blinking in the search box. What am I interested in this morning? With a world of information at my fingertips, upon what learning adventure shall I embark today?

With each blink of the waiting cursor my cognitive void became more apparent. I stared harder, hoping to kick start my curiosity, expecting to will something to mind. But nothing came. Blank. Blink. Blank. Blink. Soon it dawned on me that I was experiencing that same helpless feeling I used to get when my wife would innocently ask, “What are you thinking, honey?” I used to think it was her question that was the problem. I used to think it was her interest in me, her desire to be a part of my every moment, that caused my brain to go numb. I used to think that if she would just leave me alone I would have the time to think the great thoughts that I knew were trying to get out.

Now I know different. Now I realize that my dullness was not the result of being annoyed. I was dull because I am dull. All along, it’s been my problem.

Thank you Google! By being there for me you’ve taught me a great lesson. I can be a better person. A better husband.

Now, Google, one more thing: will you help me search for my darling wife?

Richard Davis,
you’ve got an interesting profession.  Working in graphic design and being online frequently, I’m much closer to my computer than I’d like.  When I needed to cut something out of a newspaper once, I reached up to my left, about shoulder height, where my marquee/cropping tool in Photoshop should be.  More recently while reading a paperback book, I tried to type my “Option-F” shortcut (which brings up a “Find” tool to search the current page for a word).

I don’t know that I need to be any closer to my computer.  As is, I’m becoming reflexively Luddite in my lifestyle choices.  While I do have a small portable DVD player to watch a movie now and then, I haven’t owned a television in almost three years now.  I don’t expect to own one anytime soon.

I have heard nothing good, and many things bad, about Windows Vista.  Don’t buy it (or otherwise install it), or have anything to do with it at all, would be my advice.  Boycott Vista!

Mr. Hayes!
“Microsoft is a pimp and PCs are whores.  Call me a hippie, but I love my Mac.”

Haven’t you noticed? The great innovation for Mac in the last year or so is that the new Macs run on Intel chips (’Macs are now twice as fast!’) and they can run Windows, if you buy the helper program. Maybe that’ll help them eat into that 97% of the market they don’t have. They even stopped calling themselves Apple (stolen from the Beatles, including logo) Computer; the iPod (oops, sorry, Creative, we’ll pay you $100 million) business is their biggest business right now, with the iPhone (oops, sorry Infogear and Cisco)
Apple wouldn’t even exist right now if Microsoft hadn’t bailed them out 10 years ago, and promised to keep writing their software for them. The things you have to do to pretend you have a competitor…

Get a Mac, or run Linux!  You Windows sheeple complain and complain, but you will never consider any alternatives.  You are not the man in this marriage, you are a battered woman who will not leave her abusive husband.

Thanks for the comic relief, Mr. Grace.  Yolur column was entertaining.

What’s funny to me is how anyone could still be a windows user after XP arrived on the scene.  XP convinced me that Microsoft will never manage to create an operating system which doesn’t use most of a computer’s resources to run the OS.

I switched to Puppy Linux less than a year after being forcibly exposed to XP.  Switching to Vista doesn’t interest me in the least.  An OS which requires a minimum of 2ghz RAM can’t be good for anything other than showing off for itself.

Mister Burch,
Intel’s chips are not faster than the PowerPC.  Apple switched in order to make a play for Microsoft’s customers.  You can run Windows on a Mac now at full speed.  You don’t need to buy the “helper program”, whatever that is (please explain).  You can use Apple’s Boot Camp program to boot into Windows.  Also, Windows doesn’t have 97 percent market share.  Also, they are still called Apple, moron.  If they are not called Apple, what is the name of the company?  The Beatles did not invent apples, and they lost their ridiculous lawsuit.  The iPod is not their biggest business right now, the Macintosh is, although it is getting close since the iPod is so successful, unlike the Zune.  Microsoft didn’t save Apple ten years ago.  Apple had five billion dollars in cash and no debt.  They were not going out of business, but their business was stagnant.  Microsoft “invested” 150 million dollars in Apple because they were infringing on Apple’s patents.  150 million dollars was pocket change to Apple, then and now.  Microsoft was never going to kill Microsoft Office for the Mac.  They made and make billions of dollars per year from Office on the Mac.  That’s a lot of money even for Microsoft.  They need the money to replace the sixteen billion dollars they have lost on the X-Box.  Get a clue, pal.

Thank you, Paul, for correcting Mr. Burch.  I’ve been a Mac user for over twenty years and I can say without equivocation that they provide a better “computer experience” than PC’s (to which, alas, I am consistently exposed).  Nothing is perfect, of course, but the choice, in a sane world, would not be difficult.

But ought this not to be an opportunity for sensible conservatives to draw the appropriate conclusion:  Kerry, Bush, Windows, Lite beer, the Yankees.  Isn’t it enormously clear that America gets what it so richly deserves?  And good and hard as Mencken said.  A great opportunity, it seems to me, to discuss the perils of populism…

Vista is a virus, an STD (Seriously terrible data).  I would no more install anything from Redmond than I would lease out my wife.

Even so, Microsoft’s offerings are like the greenhouse flowers that usually die even with great care, and even when they don’t die are often sick and wilt as time goes by.  Linux may be more like a weed, but weeds are going to be around long after the monocultured fecalware has gone extinct.

There are tiny linuxes, huge linuxes, linuxes for PDAs and mainframes.  It is slowly encroaching every ecological niche.

Apple at least has a Posix/unix core, which makes it much more stable (I’m typing this on my MacBook Pro).

Vista was 8 billion dollars to make DRM lock in content and make sure you activate.  Maybe several times, each time giving much $ to Microsoft, and so you can’t play HD DVDs except on expensive hardware or with crippled, fuzzy imaging.  And so you can’t copy Zune music.  Otherwise it is XP with the previous generation of apple’s innovations gotten wrong (Apple’s animations and transparency have function, Microsoft’s imitation is just eye-candy, e.g. windows shrink to their place on the dock so you know where they are, while Microsoft menus just take forever fading in and out).

Mr. Burch,
It appears we’ve both struck nerves amongst the readers.  I’ve run PCs and Macs side-by-side for over a decade.  Consistently, the PCs have problems that the Macs simply don’t.  These debates often go towards the technical side, and in these debates I fail miserably because I am woefully lacking in the technical knowledge of the inner working of computers.  That’s one of the reasons I like Macs.  I just plug it in and it works.

I don’t argue with you in the least that Microsoft’s products are more popular.  However, ubiquity and marketing savvy don’t compensate for poor product quality.

The day I have a PC that doesn’t require constant attention (as opposed to no attention) to keep free of viruses and bloat-ware, I’ll consider your arguments.  Until then, I’ll continue to use PCs as little as possible, I’ll continue to enjoy my hassle-free Mac.
Thanks,
Chris

I had the honour, and the horror, of attending upon the assorted demises of Mr. Grace’s many mechanical wives. With admirable discretion - men who whine on about the flaws and faults of their ex-wives say far more about themselves than the woman in question - Mr. Grace does not tell the half of it.

Multiplied by the hundreds of thousands or now, likely, the millions and it is difficult to see how Microsoft can be anything but a negative factor in productivity and GDP.

Get a Mac I said. Mr. Grace fought on. He was not one to put away a wife merely because she could neither cook nor clean nor bear fruit. The phone lines to Bangelore ran hot with Mr. Grace’s good willed attempt to find a way, any way, to keep hope, if not love, alive.

But, as he writes, in the end he had no choice but to junk a perfectly good computer and buy a new one so as to be able to run a perfectly dreadful OS. Which, no doubt, was precisely what Mr. Gates had in mind.

Hello Paul:
Apple is not called Apple Computer, it’s just called Apple. And it’s not nice to call people morons, unless I suppose you’re an Apple fan; this seems to be a common characteristic/affliction of ‘them’. But PC people have manners, so I’ll refain from replying in kind.
I’ll just touch on a few of the more obvious points in question…

The Beatles did not lose their lawsuit.  In 1981 and in 1991, Apple Computer paid Apple Corps a total of about 27 million dollars in settlement. The original settlement was based on Apple using the name and logo, but could not get into the music business with it. The later settlement was based on Apple violating the terms of the original agreement.
Oh well, at least they paid licencing fees to use ‘Mighty Mouse’ and didn’t run into problems there.
Quote from AppleInsider(dot)com, who are Apple fans:
According to research firm Gartner, worldwide PC shipments totaled 57 million units in the first quarter of 2006, representing a 13.1 percent increase over the same period last year. But in that time, Apple’s share of the worldwide market slipped from 2.2 percent to a mere 2.0 percent, the firm’s data shows.

Similarly, Apple’s share of the personal computer market in the United States also remains relatively flat at 3.6 percent. Although this figure is down from 3.8 percent in the first quarter of 2005, Gartner’s data indicates that Apple gained one tenth of a percent in share over the fourth quarter of 2005.

And from the same website:
“It’s fast,” said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel’s Pentium processors. “Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5.” In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes “as little as 10 seconds” to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.
Also, Apple has been saying in their ads that the Intel-based system is faster, and Apple wouldn’t lie in their ads would they? Would they?

Cheers,
Robt

Mister Burch,
I misread your sentence, and thought you were a moron.  I apologize.  Maybe I am a moron, but you have to admit it was a poorly worded sentence, and I quote “They even stopped calling themselves Apple (stolen from the Beatles, including logo) Computer”.
I stand by my statement that the Beatles did not invent the fruit apple or the word apple.  Yes, the greedy Beatles (all you need is cash) won the lawsuit twenty five years ago, but lost the most recent one.  All of the lawsuits were ridiculous.  The Beatles lost the last lawsuit because when they settled one of the previous ones, the settlement stated that Apple could not sell music on physical media, but could sell music over the internet, which was actually pretty good lawyering by Apple for once.  This explains why with the U2 iPod you had to download the U2 music from the iTunes store.  It could not be preloaded onto the iPod.
As for the PowerPC, it is now at almost 5 GigaHertz and dual core.  It is more than keeping pace with Intel.
I am, however, as shocked as you are that a huge corporation would make exaggerated claims about their product.  Shame on you Apple.  Microsoft, Intel, and Dell would never do that.
Anyway, use what you want, I don’t care.
Cheers,
Paul

A final note…
All the Apple desktop and MacBook laptop products use the Intel dual core chip. They discontinued use of the Motorola/IBM processer in 2006.

Robt

Robt,
Silly me, I thought you were criticizing the PowerPC chip, when in fact you were criticizing Apple for having their new computers run faster on their old computers.
Anyway, congratulations.  You have managed to make what should have been a discussion of the joys of Windows Vista into one about how much you hate Apple.
Paul

I’ll bet Taki’s parties are like this - everybody ends up fighting, while having a good time doing it.
Thanks to the great man for inviting us!