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You're failing to see the whole point. Stop thinking current, start thinking future (what the article is talking about btw). 5 or 10 years down the line it would be entirely possibly, and quite likely, for a company like google to put out a 50 or 100 dollar 'netbook' that boots off their servers. No need for an expensive SSD or hard drive. Need more storage? Pay 5 dollars to upgrade for an extra 20gb. Need to work on your project without access? Pop in you 512mb memory stick and boot/save from there.

Isn't this what most people claim they need? Stop being so short-sighted and imagine the possibilities. This author has some interesting ideas.

it isn't? http://www.kottke.org/04/04/google-operating-system

Actually, yes they do.
Just like people die of smoking - the smoking doesn't kill them, but the effects of smoking do.

We could look at the dangerous effects of jet lag here...
And we can look at a bit of an unconfirmed urban legend here(but also not disproven, I just can't find an original article)...

And we can see the long term effects of jetlag (Thanks to mice... Surprisingly... NOT) here...

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks would be the link you're after.

I found it somewhat amusing that I'm reading this thread as I'm working on a project that uses Postgres on Mac. I came here to post the same joke but you beat me by a long shot.

todo: insert joke about my Mac taking over 20 minutes to post a comment

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/

Whoa, a lot of people dont get this at all. Here's a hint.

He's just recycling an old joke. I found a copy of it here: http://kottke.org/order/apple - scroll to the bottom to see the original "I don't want to start a holy war..." troll. :-)

LOL, best troll EVER.

Not only is this a simple edit of the classic Mac troll(scroll to the bottom), but he gets modded insightful and 8 people take him seriously. Very good job sir.

How can it possibly be a "rip off" if it's the SAME GUY DOING BOTH COMMERCIALS

I'll endevour to try harder in the future. I'm giving your bite a 9/10, only because you smugly pointed out the link to AOL while completely missing the fact you're responding to a rehashed version of the (admittedly classic) 17 meg troll. You totally blew it by posting anonymously though.

Chin up, EFG!

This troll has been going around the slashdots for near on ten years now.

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks

I believe this is the original version. You can see that with a little modification it becomes an easy trap for internoobs, producing much lulz.

The original submission:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to an SMB share that disappeared...

Congratulations, you've just become the latest victim of a rather old troll/joke. The fact that it's a nearly verbatim copy of an old troll makes it sort of funny. Also people occasionally mod Insightful or Interesting to boost karma, since the Funny mod carries no karma bonus.

Other people have already pointed out that the group "Slashdot mods" consist of more than one person, so I'll just skip straight to pointing out that this is a very old and common Slashdot joke (Google reports 54 results). I can't find the original Slashdot posting, but it appears to originate from this 1998 blog post.

It's an old troll, just updated for Vista, gods people.
This thing is almost ten years old.

The original rant may be found here.

I'm sure the editors here would disagree.

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks

Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the OP to you? It gets posted (usually in a modified form) as a rather amusing troll in most Mac-related discussions here nowadays. The "SWITCHEUR" troll is pretty funny too.

Check this out

I think it's from a troll-bot that uses a search engine without parsing any dates.

A quick stroll down memory lane (thanks Google) yields one date of "November 25, 1998 at 08:25 am" That's nearly 9 years (which is like 2^9 in computer years) but even in 1998 these were old, old systems.

See: http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks

The Prius gets 55 MPG, the Geo metro and Honda civic in the late 80's and early 90 got mid 50's.

Problem is, those cars oftentimes didn't have (or were only available as really expensive options):
anti-lock brakes
airbags of any kind
air conditioning
power steering
automatic transmission
reinforced construction (side-impact door beams, etc.)

All of that stuff above is expected as standard these days by consumers, and in the USA, some of those safety features are now legally required (e.g. the airbags). All of that extra stuff costs in terms of weight, and a double-digit horsepower engine simply won't cut these days with the amount of relative heft a car has to pull. Try dropping that 3 cylinder, 49 horsepower engine (from the [Chevrolet] Geo Metro XFi from your example) into its nearest new generation model, the Chevy Aveo, and see if you can get up to modern expressway speeds without worrying about meeting the business end of a Kenworth.

Personally, I wouldn't mind using that Geo Metro XFi to commute to and from work, but I wouldn't want to drive it on a roadtrip through, let's say, Texas in August (75 mph speed limits with no A/C and marauding Chevy Silverados and Ford F-150s going 85 or 90 -- forget it, I'll rent). It all depends on what the consumer wants these days for modern automobiles, and it becomes another "Pick Two" scenario.

Tom and Ray ("Click and Clack") of CarTalk fame has a lot more on this.

Finally, a chance to turn the tables...


I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Dell (a Core 2 Duo w/1 Gig of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my G3 iMac, running OS9.2, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.


(the original rant)

was it? i didn't see anything before the turn of the century on usenet.

http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks

Whoosh!

Back when it was titled "My Mac Sucks" we called this a "troll".

Now it's "interesting"?

I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista box for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder.

you copied a old text. Vista has problems like confirming you want to run a program and then confirm it again (UAC and so), you went for some free karma....

it's perfect! ;-)

Just like in some smaller places, they use days to test something on one or two computers. When it works they spend an hour putting it on all 500 company desktops, most of the time just waiting for network transfers and rebooting.

Wikipedia sez: "The My freelance gig in front of a Mac trolls appear in virtually every discussion about Apple Computer. The troll claims to have witnessed <the latest Apple hardware> taking 20 minutes to copy a 17 MB file from one folder to another and proceeds to question all Apple users as to their platform choice. It is a straight forward copy-and-paste from a weblog entry by Jason Kottke. It has also led to some very inspired and amusing parodies."

Seems "My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums." would be more appropriate. ;-)

http://www.kottke.org/05/08/googleos-webos

Heh, why? Kottke's prime contribution to the technical Mac community is linking to John Gruber. :-) Oh, and penning this.

I can't believe they left out Jason Kottke! I think the voting was rigged!

If you prefer rather twee nerd-pop, there's always Barcelona's 'I've Got The Password To Your Shell Account', mentioned here.

The Google Browser

GooOS, the Google Operating System

The Google Cube & GooOS

The Google Browser

GooOS, the Google Operating System

The Google Cube & GooOS

Good luck with that. On the Mac it takes well over 20 minutes to copy a 17 meg file from one hard drive to another. Twenty minutes. :)

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Now he says 2 people switched from Mac to Linux? And it's newsworthy? Fuck, almost every /. Apple story has half a dozen people that make the same claim.

Who cares? Well, some very smart people do. (Of those, Tim Bray himself switching as well.)

Whether you personally know or respect Mark, Tim and Cory, they're being looked to by a huge amount of others for guidance. This isn't a lightly made switch - "oh you know, I have a spare box lying around and I'm going to see how this shiny new OS works out, and then next week I'll go and play with Gentoo, and I've always been meaning to give Solaris a try as well". This is people with a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, having spent their whole life on Macs, deciding that enough is enough, that the bough has broken, and that they care more about their data than about anything else. They all have a huge following, and their thoughts will reverberate.

Most people who will actually read their thoughts (rather than going for the knee-jerk "no, it's Monday so apple is good!" slashdot reaction that I've seen far too many posters here resort to) will probably be set thinking because of it. And everyone will make up their own minds, and most people will probably decide not to switch, for reasons that for them will be very valid. But you can sure as hell bet that the importance of open data formats and lack of DRM will become more of a talking point in the months to come, and that if Apple doesn't heed this warning, more and more people will come to the same conclusions as Mark, Time and Cory have.

(If you want to get the whole story, I'd read the following articles in this order:

1. Mark Pilgrim: Bye Apple
2. Mark Pilgrim: When the Bough Breaks
3. John Gruber: And Oranges
4. Mark Pilgrim: Juggling Oranges
5. Tim Bray: Time to Switch?
6. Cory Doctorow: Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users

Why not provide a link to the original. Oh, wait, I know. . . BBEdit was struggling to keep up as you were typing the post. =)

When I installed the Windows Vista Beta, there was a segment in the EULA expressly saying that you can't copy the fonts
Easy to figure out why...

Funny that the core web fonts have been discontinued by MS as well. Sadly, the font industry is riddled with companies stealing each other's fonts all the time.

I like google as much as the next /.er,

Do not talk for me, as I do not like Google too much, for one they treat their customer pretty bad. To the extent that they prohibit criticism of their AdSense "service" terms and conditions on participating sites..

And then some, their search engine is sucking a bit too much lately (personally I think search.yahoo.com returns more relevant results). And as you state, they are focusing in nothing and trying to compete with every technology available. As has been stated before they are a public company and as this they enter into the set named "Corporations" which only target and focus is to get more money for the shareholders. When their usual "ways" (i.e. the initial things they did to get money as Adsense in searches) stops to work they cant help but look for other ways of revenew, or die.

So, behold the new Google Inc. 10 years from now (if not less) Google will be what IBM was 20 years ago, and what Microsoft has been these 10 years.

(go ahead mod my day)

Here's the link to the original and beloved troll. =)

Argh, when I read this:

Right now, i am copying 4GB of files off a usb disk to a network share.

... I thought I was bumping into another variation of the freelance gig troll :) Not that it isn't funny...

You have just replied to a very old troll, which originated here, if I'm not mistaken :)

You have just replied to a very old troll, which originated here, if I'm not mistaken :D

Ace, you made me laugh out loud with that. You really aren't goot at spotting trolls. Even if you aren't familiar with the the original, that 486 should have tripped some alarms...

So I gave you a funny with my last mod point in my other account.

Thanks!

CT

You fucking dick! (Yes, I know you're female, but still . . .You fucking dick!)

WHY did I have to click on that link? You hosed safari for almost 5 minutes. I felt like I was on Kottke's legendary Mac (Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Text Wrangler is straining to keep up as I type this.)

OK, you're not a dick. You're the famous and awesome Dana, who got OS X running on an LC or an si (I forget exactly). I apologize, I was just blowing off steam. I need more RAM. {sigh}

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you iPod fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iPod (a 5th gen model w/ 60 GB) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg song from itunes to the ipod. 20 minutes. At home, on my Creative MuVo running on USB 1, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPod, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, iTunes will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Firefox is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various iPods , but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an iPod that has run faster than its iRiver counterpart, despite the iPods' faster chip architecture. My zen nomad jukebox with 6 gigs of HDD runs faster than this dual core 80mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the iPod is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a iPod over other faster, cheaper, more stable players.

[Original version here]