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Return of the Mac
Ben Gutierrez writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on the Return of the Mac which begins with: 'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.' Tim O'Reilly said some similar things in Watching Alpha Geeks . From the article: "My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."
But iBooks are ugly. Powerbooks don't look like a cheap toy.
Wow. You are awesome. Just incredible. You use your current computer WITHOUT a mouse, monitor and keyboard? Wow. Can you bestow your super powers on us mere mortals?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Who said anything about buying one every month?
You're the stupid prick that claims to want one. If you want one, earn some money and buy one you lazy twat.
That was classic intercourse!
I heard the big news last week that Air America Radio just got their seventh listener.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I was there when the Mac was introduced (we got to see a pre-release model). I was using it on-and-off during the 90's. It's not even worth disputing Graham's confused and erroneous ramblings point-by-point. Maybe Graham's view is warped by his Lisp view of things: the Macintosh has been a long-term haven for Lisp hackers, both because MCL was pretty good and because Lisp hackers didn't have much of an alternative when all the other commercial choices tanked.
But one point is important, and that's Graham's promotion of OSX as BSD-based and open. Graham is a long-term Lisp hacker, and until Lisp became commercially worthless, all good Lisp implementations were proprietary and commercial. Graham apparently hasn't cared about platforms being open in the past, and he has been part of a crowd that has been railing against UNIX/C for twenty years. When he promotes OSX because it has BSD underpinnings and is supposedly "open", I think he is just catering to the crowd and reiterating things people want to hear; he doesn't really care whether they are true as long as they promote his currently favorite pet platform.
Whether Graham is disingenuous or merely confused, it's important to be clear about OSX. While parts of OSX are "open" and Apple is smart enough to reuse useful open source software (they just don't have the resources to do everything themselves), crucial parts of OSX are not open, among them the GUI, the graphics subsystem, and the toolkits. Apple has been quite clear about the fact that they view these parts as the value proposition of their platform, and they have been defending it.
Use OSX if you like, but don't try to pretend that it's an "open" choice.
I think you're completely missing the point of the original poster. They were saying "Last year's Usenix conference was full of Powerbooks. Most of the top dogs in the industry." You consider the "top dogs" at the Usenix conference "smart"? Are you out of your mind? I'm talking about academia and the like. Some people at Usenix fall into that category, sure, but most are hasbeens and never-wasses deparately clinging onto 20-year old patents to make a quick buck.
"I said that when you see somebody smarter than you carrying a Powerbook, you notice."
Personally, I don't take notice of the kind of computer someone is using. I take notice with what they use it for. Someone can pull out a 286 orange-screen CGA bricktop for all I care. If they got it to do something insanely cool, like squeeze significant performance out of it, that's worth seeing. Seeing someone carry a Powerbook (which, incidentally, I see a lot of PR and politicians use -- do we also consider them smart?) doesn't qualify.
"Okay, so your definition of "smarter" hinges around having a pathological interest in stuff that's utterly obsolete and of no practical use to anybody."
No practical use? Gee... all these kids I hire for their exceptional assembly programming skills, who honed their skills taking apart Speak and Spells, obviously don't belong in crafting 64-bit chips, correct? I'll just take a Powerbook user with a flashy case.
"You know, I really wish your nickname were literally true."
You know, I wish yours wasn't. You spout just about the same amount of bullshit as the tube.