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x180 writes "Those goofy hackers over at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego this week have, in a spate of fun, put together a series of Switch ad spoofs for the geeky ones. Writes Rael Dornfest in his blog, 'You've no doubt seen Apple's fabulous Switch campaign commercials. But what of the others? The geeky ones. The scripters. The sysadmins in their server cages. The command-line jockeys. Those through whom the source flows openly.' See the stories of hackers chucking Emacs in favor of Vi, leaving Perl to explore Python, and leaving the familiar home of Unix to play with XP." These, of course, aren't the only switch parodies. Their numbers are Legion.
An article on Yahoo News today about Northgate's new "challenge" to Apple with their all-in-one computer/home multimedia machine (Personally, I think it looks sort of a combo iMac/eMac ... an eiMac) was the latest example to my mind.
Flat screens were unusual and esoteric. Apple makes them defacto with the iMac; now they are expected, necessary. MP3 players externally were the size of walkmen (and internally not much better then zip disks), connected via USB (if you were lucky) and were incredibly kludgy. Out comes the iPod; everyone is racing to remake/top them.
I remember when the beige computer makers tried to reinvent their products with translucent plastic as if that was the key to the original iMac/G3s. I remember how desperate and sad Windows 1 - 3.1 were in their attempts to approach the simple elegance of the Mac OS. I remember how many Gnome/KDE Aqua themes were floating about (and still are, slightly under the radar) after OS X was unveiled.
My point: however much Linux drives the geek masses forward in their open source quest, Apple is the internalized mental image that a majority of people hold when they think of the next step in computing. Not just civilians: examine the Aqua themed page that you're reading right now.
(For every "too damn expensive, one button mouse" geek dismisser, I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook, and wish they could have back all the months it took them to try and configure their window manager to approach the functionality of Aqua out of the box).
Maybe there are a lot of switch ads because people find them annoying and stupid?
... an eiMac) was the latest example to my mind.
An article [yahoo.com] on Yahoo News today about Northgate's new "challenge" to Apple with their all-in-one computer/home multimedia machine [northgate.com] (Personally, I think it looks sort of a combo iMac/eMac
Well of course you do. But to me, it just looks like any other 'all in one' PC. There's no rounded bulb like the old school imac/emac, there's no swivel stand like the new imacs. There are lots of
MP3 players externally were the size of walkmen (and internally not much better then zip disks), connected via USB (if you were lucky) and were incredibly kludge. Out comes the iPod; everyone is racing to remake/top them.
That's not true either. There were, and still are, a lot of mp3 players that were a lot smaller then the iPod, True all of the 'hard drive' mp3 players around were big and clunky, but not all mp3 players.
Yeh, the iPod has a nice design, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all that Mac zealots seem to think it is. A nice refinement, but hardly revolutionary
(For every "too damn expensive, one button mouse" geek dismisser, I wonder how many are willing to admit that they drool at night at the thought of owning a TI Powerbook, and wish they could have back all the months it took them to try and configure their window manager to approach the functionality of Aqua out of the box).
No, my Sony Vaio SR is good enough for me, and smaller and lighter then an ibook with all the video editing capabilities (Firewire and all). And yes, it has more then two buttons.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
chrisd is posting it, and he is featured in one of the "funny" switch ads. how cute.
The middle mind speaks!
No, you asked a stupid question, and you got a stupid answer. I mean, it's not like I care what you personally think, but generally stupid questions should be indicated as such. Software is software, and any abitrary piece of code can be duplicated, simulated, or imitated on any other computing platform (hell where would Microsoft be today if that weren't true?). The question isn't what you can do, it's how well you can do it. Though I suppose anything that works is "good enough" for sheep^H^H^H^H^HWindows users.