Slashdot Mirror
HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders
eastbayted writes "According to InfoWorld.com, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz boasts in his public blog that his company has bought a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, for $6,000. Sun staffers then went on to bedeck and photograph the dual portrait in pro-Sun paraphernalia. As a parting shot at HP, Schwartz notes in his post how popular a download Solaris is for HP server owners. Taking the bait, HP VP of Marketing Eric Kintz responds in his own blog that Sun's actions were 'a nice stunt' and that 'I never met Bill or Dave, but I bet neither of them would have approved paying thousands for representations of themselves.' He also cites an IDC report about how HP-UX dominates the Unix market over IBM and Sun." Update: 08/28 04:43 GMT by Z : Fixed confusing headline.
You will have to forgive me. My definition of PC user has expanded in the past couple of years from big-haired douchebags from Wintel who trolled Tekserve at night trying to get through Crystal Quest or Inside Macintosh. (Ahh, the '80s.) I now use "PC user" as a general term to describe the wannabes who exhibit an attitude of "Yeah, we cool. We're Mac users," when they are clearly from some other part of the universe.
However, to prevent further confusion from the teeming masses, I will use the term poseur. Or in this case, switcheurs. These are the dunderheads who proclaim their trendiness because they use a Mac even though they were probably maximizing their windows until last week.
They try to act counterculture by making comments about good taste and how everything is beige, and think of themselves as nonconformists, which is laughable since all they are doing is conforming to another lifestyle.
What is really pathetic is when these expatriates proclaim their love for their adopted platform. When I hear it I cringe and automatically think of that Daphna Kalfon song "I Love My Mac." Not that there is anything wrong with Daphna.
That phrase reeks of such vomit-inducing pretension. You think you are cooler than the rest of the world because of your computer? Because of your zero-button mouse? Because of the fact that you have to manually sort the Desktop because you don't understand the Mac's right-handed icon arrangement? Where I come from, this is called "trying too hard."
The Mac platform today is ground zero for the switcheur epidemic, which means more tourists and more expatriates moving in. It has become way too mainstream and too damn self-congratulatory to live here. And with more corporate giants moving in, the Mac is so ovah.
On the plus side, you could probably use it to scare away crows. And everything else.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.