Avoid this URL. It will make you angry.

But it will have everyone else in stitches. (Warning, it's a three-minute mpeg-like dealie.)

[Via Paul Hsieh]

That was modestly humorous, but:
1. It needed to be shorter
2. It is Windows Media Video, not MPEG.

I thought it was more than modestly humrous. Note Rand said "it was an mpeg-like thingie."

Gotta warn us about the F'bombs.

Is this supposed to play in Windows Media player with just sound, no images? On my Powerbook, that's how it played.

Technosapien,

You got just audio because you are using a MAC. You idiot.

Actually, I think you (and I) were blessed by not having video because it saved us from seeing depictions of a drooling, slobbering idiot.

The guy that put that together is not too smart if that's the best he can do, (probably rode to school on a very short bus).

But it doesn't make me MAD, it makes me laugh, smugly, at teh stupidy of the opposition. (If only there weren't so MANY of them.)

I wonder, though, with something like 95% of the market, why DOS users still feel the need to denigrate the Mac. Must be an inferiority complex. :)

I agree with Gary. It was obviously supposed to be funny that he edited the video on a Mac so that was why you couldn't see it.

Following along, the guy mixed up Mac OS9, Mac OS X, and Windows. It's pretty clear he hasn't used a Mac for more than five minutes ever. It didn't make me angry, it made me laugh at the loopiness of PC Weenies.

Hey, I'm a Mac user from the Dark Ages (95) and a Mac user now, and I thought it was funny. I'm always up for a good rant.

I know for a fact that Macs are horribly unstable. I've been running FCP on my Quicksilver for a year now, and I have had two -- not just one, but TWO -- kernel panics. Can you believe that? I've had to restart TWICE!

Gee, that was, uhm, err, funny? No, no.... That's not quite the right word. Hmmm. Let me think ... no, not funny.... Oh! I know!

STUPID!

Yeah! That's it!

C'mon Rand. If you are going to attempt to denigrate the Mac, at least try using, uhm, what are those again...? Oh, yeah.

FACTS!

I've got 3 Macs in the house. I thought the rant was funny.

Also have a Dell/Windows98 machine. It's so weird -- and so clunky -- after OS X.

It certainly jibed with my few "opportunities" to use a Mac. I've always found them extremely counterintuitive, but then, I don't mind command lines.

FWIW, I don't think the words "computer" and "intuitive" should ever be paired: it's an automatic oxymoron.

After all, for creatures who evolved on grasslands, hitting something with a stick to make it stop moving or climbing a tree to avoid a predator is intuitive; clicking on a little deformed square to make something appear or dragging something to a trash can to make it disappear, isn't.

That isn't to say one interface isn't easier to use than another, or easier to guess one's way through. But never "intuitive."

Just my rant...

Rand, if you find a mac counter-intuitive it is because you have trained yourself to do things the Windows way. Actual intuitiveness has nothing to do with it.

The rant reminds me of Bill Maher's political humor. I know too much to find it funny anymore. Too much of this rant was simply untrue that the few funny bits were lost.

Phelps your two kernel panics is particularly funny after Gates admitted 5% of Windows machines crash more than twice a day.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2003/07/25.6.shtml

I haven't had a kernel panic or a system crash since I moved over to OSx. Unix is rock solid.

I found Macs counterintuitive (or at least, not intuitive) long before Windows was invented. I'm not big on icons--I always thought that we invented the alphabet so we could come up with better ways of communicating than with hieroglyphics...

Command line interfaces-- let's see now. My first exposure to them was on a DEC TOPS-10 system that used 110 baud teletypes as terminals back in 1978. Coupled with TECO as your editor, it worked great!

Even better than a command line was another Apple product that died an undeserved death-- the MPW Shell. You got all the malefits (opposite of benefits) of a command line if that's what you wanted, but for the rest of us it included a real text editor, output designed to be reused as input, user customized menus, lots of scripting, and a great help system--Commando (add an ellipsis character to a command and hit enter. You get a dialog box with all the possible params. Set the ones you need and you can either execute it or write it back out to your worksheet for further use.)

Unfortunately, when Apple introduced the PowerPC, they got out of the development tools biz, and that was so long ago that it escaped the attention of the open source people as something they could imitate.

As for some people finding command lines better- I find them like having to describe in detail how to perform every step of a task every time you do it. One wrong character an you get to start over (especially with the ones that have yet to discover the wonders of cursor control keys.) They also shift all the effort of providing an interface from your program to the user's memory. Any first year CS student or self-taught manager can write a program that can handle an interface that consists of nothing more than argv and argc.

(And the best way to keep a GatesBox from crashing is to not use it for much. The one at work I only use for the company bug tracking software has been continuously up for months.)

In that case you should prefer Macs or Linux where you can do everything from the command line if you want. ;^)

Oh, and in defense of icons, a picture is (can be) worth a thousand words.

Yes, in some cases a picture can be worth a thousand words, but in the case of Macs, my experience was that it had a negative value...

"It's pretty clear he hasn't used a Mac for more than five minutes ever."

It's probably cuz he couldn't get it to run for more than 5 minutes lol. And what's with the whole "getting old" thing? I deal with a few iMacs and know many others that own some, and their excuse for it crashing every two minutes is "It's just getting old. It does that."

I'm not against all macs in general, I just wish that they'd produce computers that were actually stable. Don't know how much work I've lost due to crashes on Macs. You can argue that a PC is just as bad - But that's generally user error more than anything. At least Windows has a word processor that can run for more than 20 minutes straight.