I get particularly pissed off by people who talk about how they HATE computers, and you can tell that they've never even tried to learn how computers work. I work with this woman who just saves files anywhere she feels like and makes random copies of files in weird places, and then gets annoyed when she can't find a file or "the computer" keeps opening up an OLD version of the file. Grrrrr.
I think we should discourage this idea that computers are simple, friendly things. They require small amounts of effort and understanding to operate and maintain.
Certainly, Macs go a LONG way to make the whole experience easier, and I can understand how Windows can discourage people from NOT understanding their computers.
OK ive got some cracking tales to tell you from this side of the water..
First one is my mother-in-law, she has had a Mac 7100 for about 4 to 5 year now I think.
It is/was fine for Word prosseing and the like but she and her Hub got a DV cam, and guest what they want to edit Video now, so she asks me what to get. Easy i say a nice iMac DV or push the boat out and get a PowerMac with a DVDr ooooh make your own DVD's !
The next thing I her is that she has been talking to her works 'IT guy', who told her " You bought a MAC!! god you shot yourself in the foot there! haha, Mac's are slow and dont work with anything... No dont buy another one! I tell you what I can build you a Fast PC for much less and that can do all you DV editing on that ..." the Spec he gave had 5200 rpm 10gb hard disk! No fire wire !!? a DVD rom.. but no cdr or DVDr for that matter.. in fact when she went back and pushed him on the DVDr he told her that no company shipped PC with those they cost about 4 grand !! oh and he had never heard of firewire but he knew what i-Link was!!!!!!!!!!
The other one was in my local PC world they had the same own brand USB cable labeled 'Made for Windows" then in small print at the bottom "compatible with Mac' this was for sale at £12 .
Now next to this they had the same cable But Labeled the other way around ' Made for Mac' compatible with Windows' this was £15 though??
When I asked the assistant why they where different prices he told me that the Mac usb a Different format USB cable !!!! mmm
'So then' I asked "In what way does Apple usage differ from the USB Standard ?" he ran off to get the manager.
Who when pushed emitted there was no difference and they just put the price up because it had MAC on it !!!
Second....its MIDNIGHT! i am tired and i have to drive 8 miles home in a car that i don't know if its even going to start up half the time.
[snip]
please people, cut the late night fast food place workers some slack.....don't wait till the last minute....<hr></blockquote>
My heart truly bleeds.
[note: totally off-topic, essentially pointless ranting to follow.]
<abe simpson voice>
Ya wanna know what's wrong with this country? I'll tell you what's wrong with this country -- it's snivelling little twits like you, who constantly whine and bitch about every godd*amn little inconvenience in their life. It's always "more more more, me me me". God forbid you should ever have to suffer even the slightest bit.
You want some examples of sh*tty jobs? Here you go:
1. (my brother) How would you like to work 12 hours straight, desperately trying to save the life of one of your "customers" who has a knife sticking out of his heart, which was put there by his old lady and which coincidentally also goes through the jail house tattoo on his chest which reads "I LOVE PUSSY". And if you didn't get enough job satisfaction from making sure this guy gets to live another day, imagine when a couple of days later you check on said customer, and for no particular reason he vows to hunt you down and kill you. (OK, so maybe making $100k+/year compensates a lot for this, but still, things like this can make work less than pleasant. Getting to see parents watch their 6 year old kids die lingering and agonizing deaths is also perhaps as unpleasent as having to stay late to close down the Subway)
2. (my mother) How 'bout busting you as$ all summer long hoeing, weeding, and chopping tobacco? And when you're not doing that, you're doing fun things like cleaning up pig sh*t, or walking 5 miles in the snow to catch the school bus. And your employer is too poor to give you much of anything for your holiday bonus other than socks and underwear. And this would be a step up from your previous job (see below).
3. (my grandmother) Here's another fun job -- imagine working for someone who invaded your country, killed half of the people in your town, then trucked you several hundred miles (while being bombed and strafed by the airforce of you home country) to work 14-16 hour days in a factory, and where you and your daughter often have nothing but boiled turnips to eat for days. And imagine that you never know when said employer is going to take you and you daughter out and shoot you in the head.
4. Or how 'bout owning a Subway, and not being able to find employees who won't drive away those customers who have the nerve to come in expecting to order food during business hours?
Have you ever wondered why many people in the rest of the world hate us?
</abe simpson voice>
[Christ, at the ripe old age of 32 I've officially become a crotchety old geezer, haven't I?]
shit dude, sorry i ever mentioned the fast food thing. that one got out of hand quickly.
so doesn't it bother anyone else that MS has decided that idiot is a bad word, and we shouldn't have adjectives for it? that pisses me off.
or for example "ignorant" now gives you
unaware
uninformed
badly informed
that's total bullshit. those three are the only three words similar to ignorant? what a load of crap. and a bunch of PC ones to boot.
here's what i should have gotten
ignorant;
nescient;
unknowing
unaware
unacquainted
unapprized
unwitting
unweeting
unconscious
witless
weetless
a stranger to
unconversant
uninformed
uncultivated
unversed
uninstructed
untaught
uninitiated
untutored
unschooled
misguided
unenglightened
Phillistine
behind the age
shallow
superficial
green
rude
empty
half-learned
illiterate
unread
uninformed
uneducated
unlearned
unlettered
unbookish
empty-headed
pedantic
in the dark
benighted
belated
blinded
blindfolded
hoodwinked
misinformed
au bout de son latin
at the end of his tether
at fault
at sea (uncertain)
caught tripping.
50+ adjectives there. and this is off a free site. MS is pure evil i'm telling you. working on controlling the words we use now baby. go read 1984 and shudder.
Well, unfortunately the competition (StarOffice) isn't even making a Mac version at this point. Which really doesn't make sense. But I guess that's another topic.
What do you guys expect out of users that posess an ignorance (not to be confused with 'Stupidity'?)
That said, I'd like to make the point that I've heard some amazingly dumb things come out of the mouth of Mac users as well. Not just the technically uninclined but also from more experienced users.
Having said that, I'll return you all to your back-patting generalizations now
Yesterday my friend calls me from the Mac lab at my school. The janitor had let him in since school was closed on Saturday. He wanted to edit a movie he made on his camera in iMovie. he says, "ok, I have my Firewire camera, and I hooked up a USB cable to the Mac and opened iMovie. Nothing happend!!!" So I said, "Dude, you hooked a USB cable to it. you need a Firewire cable!"
FRIEND: "what's that?"
ME: "it's the one with a connecter that looks like a house."
FRIEND: "oh, I don't have one. Damn, Macs suck, PCs are so much better at this stuff!"
ME: "than why are you using a Mac?"
FRIEND: "cause the PC doesn't have firewire or movie software."
ME: "oh, so the PC can't edit movie and yet it's better. I see. Tell ya what. Go to CompUSA and pick up a firewire cable, I'm sure they'll help you find what you are looking for. Make sure to tell them that it's for a Mac."
My sister is very anti-Mac because she decided she was going into the dot-bomb world, took some HTML classes and considers herself a computer expert. That, and she met her husband online. :eek:
Anyhoo, I sent off my Christmas list to her and my parents via e-mail. Since I feel compelled to make my ideas for gifts as specific as possible in certain cases (I'm the kid who got Photon growing up instead of Laser Tag like all the other kids), I sent it via e-mail with links and some pasted images of the stuff I was thinking of. To make a short story long, her e-mail app can't read the inline images for whatever reason, the e-mail was garbled on her end. On the other hand, my AOL using old folks had no problem with it. But she calls my parents to send them that my e-mail was scrambled and blamed on the fact that it's a "Mac e-mail" and she would meticulously decrypt it. Now my Dad does the sensible thing and checks his e-mail and it's fine for him. But I of course got testy little messages from her about being aware of what platform she (and the rest of the world) uses and to be more careful next time. Some things aren't worth fighting over.
This girl got pissed at me cause she emailed me a pic of her and I couldn't open it. It was like .ART or some crap, who's ever heard of that format? She got an attitude with me cause I said I couldn't open and asked what in the world .ART was.
<strong>This girl got pissed at me cause she emailed me a pic of her and I couldn't open it. It was like .ART or some crap, who's ever heard of that format? She got an attitude with me cause I said I couldn't open and asked what in the world .ART was.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hate when that happens. There's so many things that people send me that I can't open. That's one of the only problems with Macs, they don't open all formats.
Comments
<strong>hey lurker, type in idiot on the Mac version and see what it comes up with. the PC one gives you nothing.</strong><hr></blockquote>
There are no synonyms for "idiot" on the Mac version either.
I think a person that doesn't know Word has a thesaurus is hardly qualified to make judgements about it on either platform.
As well, 'omniscient' would have been a better word, IMO. Omnipotence was not required in the descibed scenario.
I think we should discourage this idea that computers are simple, friendly things. They require small amounts of effort and understanding to operate and maintain.
Certainly, Macs go a LONG way to make the whole experience easier, and I can understand how Windows can discourage people from NOT understanding their computers.
First one is my mother-in-law, she has had a Mac 7100 for about 4 to 5 year now I think.
It is/was fine for Word prosseing and the like but she and her Hub got a DV cam, and guest what they want to edit Video now, so she asks me what to get. Easy i say a nice iMac DV or push the boat out and get a PowerMac with a DVDr ooooh make your own DVD's !
The next thing I her is that she has been talking to her works 'IT guy', who told her " You bought a MAC!! god you shot yourself in the foot there! haha, Mac's are slow and dont work with anything... No dont buy another one! I tell you what I can build you a Fast PC for much less and that can do all you DV editing on that ..." the Spec he gave had 5200 rpm 10gb hard disk! No fire wire !!? a DVD rom.. but no cdr or DVDr for that matter.. in fact when she went back and pushed him on the DVDr he told her that no company shipped PC with those they cost about 4 grand !! oh and he had never heard of firewire but he knew what i-Link was!!!!!!!!!!
The other one was in my local PC world they had the same own brand USB cable labeled 'Made for Windows" then in small print at the bottom "compatible with Mac' this was for sale at £12 .
Now next to this they had the same cable But Labeled the other way around ' Made for Mac' compatible with Windows' this was £15 though??
When I asked the assistant why they where different prices he told me that the Mac usb a Different format USB cable !!!! mmm
'So then' I asked "In what way does Apple usage differ from the USB Standard ?" he ran off to get the manager.
Who when pushed emitted there was no difference and they just put the price up because it had MAC on it !!!
This is what we are up against people !!
Second....its MIDNIGHT! i am tired and i have to drive 8 miles home in a car that i don't know if its even going to start up half the time.
[snip]
please people, cut the late night fast food place workers some slack.....don't wait till the last minute....<hr></blockquote>
My heart truly bleeds.
[note: totally off-topic, essentially pointless ranting to follow.]
<abe simpson voice>
Ya wanna know what's wrong with this country? I'll tell you what's wrong with this country -- it's snivelling little twits like you, who constantly whine and bitch about every godd*amn little inconvenience in their life. It's always "more more more, me me me". God forbid you should ever have to suffer even the slightest bit.
You want some examples of sh*tty jobs? Here you go:
1. (my brother) How would you like to work 12 hours straight, desperately trying to save the life of one of your "customers" who has a knife sticking out of his heart, which was put there by his old lady and which coincidentally also goes through the jail house tattoo on his chest which reads "I LOVE PUSSY". And if you didn't get enough job satisfaction from making sure this guy gets to live another day, imagine when a couple of days later you check on said customer, and for no particular reason he vows to hunt you down and kill you. (OK, so maybe making $100k+/year compensates a lot for this, but still, things like this can make work less than pleasant. Getting to see parents watch their 6 year old kids die lingering and agonizing deaths is also perhaps as unpleasent as having to stay late to close down the Subway)
2. (my mother) How 'bout busting you as$ all summer long hoeing, weeding, and chopping tobacco? And when you're not doing that, you're doing fun things like cleaning up pig sh*t, or walking 5 miles in the snow to catch the school bus. And your employer is too poor to give you much of anything for your holiday bonus other than socks and underwear. And this would be a step up from your previous job (see below).
3. (my grandmother) Here's another fun job -- imagine working for someone who invaded your country, killed half of the people in your town, then trucked you several hundred miles (while being bombed and strafed by the airforce of you home country) to work 14-16 hour days in a factory, and where you and your daughter often have nothing but boiled turnips to eat for days. And imagine that you never know when said employer is going to take you and you daughter out and shoot you in the head.
4. Or how 'bout owning a Subway, and not being able to find employees who won't drive away those customers who have the nerve to come in expecting to order food during business hours?
Have you ever wondered why many people in the rest of the world hate us?
</abe simpson voice>
[Christ, at the ripe old age of 32 I've officially become a crotchety old geezer, haven't I?]
o'o'a'a
[ 12-12-2001: Message edited by: o'o'a'a ]</p>
so doesn't it bother anyone else that MS has decided that idiot is a bad word, and we shouldn't have adjectives for it? that pisses me off.
or for example "ignorant" now gives you
unaware
uninformed
badly informed
that's total bullshit. those three are the only three words similar to ignorant? what a load of crap. and a bunch of PC ones to boot.
here's what i should have gotten
ignorant;
nescient;
unknowing
unaware
unacquainted
unapprized
unwitting
unweeting
unconscious
witless
weetless
a stranger to
unconversant
uninformed
uncultivated
unversed
uninstructed
untaught
uninitiated
untutored
unschooled
misguided
unenglightened
Phillistine
behind the age
shallow
superficial
green
rude
empty
half-learned
illiterate
unread
uninformed
uneducated
unlearned
unlettered
unbookish
empty-headed
pedantic
in the dark
benighted
belated
blinded
blindfolded
hoodwinked
misinformed
au bout de son latin
at the end of his tether
at fault
at sea (uncertain)
caught tripping.
50+ adjectives there. and this is off a free site. MS is pure evil i'm telling you. working on controlling the words we use now baby. go read 1984 and shudder.
-alcimedes
shit dude, sorry i ever mentioned the fast food thing. that one got out of hand quickly.
<hr></blockquote>
Bleah. I'm just doin' what I can to make sure that nowhere is free fom "all Afghanistan, all the time (TM)."
But, slightly less off topic:
Microsoft is evil.
Apple is evil.
And anyone who expresses a whit of "allegience" to Microsoft or Apple is an idiot.
In fact, this really can be generalized to:
O'o'a'a's Law -- Anyone who feels affinity with or has loyalty to a Fortune 500 company is an idiot.
tweet, tweet
o'o'a'a
btw, what's the AppleWorks thesaurus like?
el chango el subjecto.
<a href="http://www.it-director.com/article.php?id=2418"; target="_blank">http://www.it-director.com/article.php?id=2418</a>;
It's free though. So try it out and let us know what you think.
[ 12-12-2001: Message edited by: seb ]</p>
What do you guys expect out of users that posess an ignorance (not to be confused with 'Stupidity'?)
That said, I'd like to make the point that I've heard some amazingly dumb things come out of the mouth of Mac users as well. Not just the technically uninclined but also from more experienced users.
Having said that, I'll return you all to your back-patting generalizations now
Yesterday my friend calls me from the Mac lab at my school. The janitor had let him in since school was closed on Saturday. He wanted to edit a movie he made on his camera in iMovie. he says, "ok, I have my Firewire camera, and I hooked up a USB cable to the Mac and opened iMovie. Nothing happend!!!" So I said, "Dude, you hooked a USB cable to it. you need a Firewire cable!"
FRIEND: "what's that?"
ME: "it's the one with a connecter that looks like a house."
FRIEND: "oh, I don't have one. Damn, Macs suck, PCs are so much better at this stuff!"
ME: "than why are you using a Mac?"
FRIEND: "cause the PC doesn't have firewire or movie software."
ME: "oh, so the PC can't edit movie and yet it's better. I see. Tell ya what. Go to CompUSA and pick up a firewire cable, I'm sure they'll help you find what you are looking for. Make sure to tell them that it's for a Mac."
Anyhoo, I sent off my Christmas list to her and my parents via e-mail. Since I feel compelled to make my ideas for gifts as specific as possible in certain cases (I'm the kid who got Photon growing up instead of Laser Tag like all the other kids), I sent it via e-mail with links and some pasted images of the stuff I was thinking of. To make a short story long, her e-mail app can't read the inline images for whatever reason, the e-mail was garbled on her end. On the other hand, my AOL using old folks had no problem with it. But she calls my parents to send them that my e-mail was scrambled and blamed on the fact that it's a "Mac e-mail" and she would meticulously decrypt it. Now my Dad does the sensible thing and checks his e-mail and it's fine for him. But I of course got testy little messages from her about being aware of what platform she (and the rest of the world) uses and to be more careful next time. Some things aren't worth fighting over.
"*ahem*, not everyone uses Windows"
<strong>This girl got pissed at me cause she emailed me a pic of her and I couldn't open it. It was like .ART or some crap, who's ever heard of that format? She got an attitude with me cause I said I couldn't open and asked what in the world .ART was.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I hate when that happens. There's so many things that people send me that I can't open. That's one of the only problems with Macs, they don't open all formats.
There you go, TigerWoods.