Mac Chatter - The Best & Worst Mac Forum Posts From Around The Web

by , 10:00 AM EST, February 4th, 2002

Our new Mac Chatter series gathers up some of the juiciest, silliest, most outrageous, and most interesting discussion about the Mac industry from around the Web. Raena Armitage scours the forums, message boards, and article comments from some of the most (and least) popular hangouts in the Mac Web and beyond.

Please note that we have left the quoted posts "as-is," including bad punctuation, bad spelling, and bad writing.

Legend has it that there are some cultures whose calendars, like the Chinese lunar year, cycle around the regular and inevitable succession of Apple lawsuits. This time, legacy Mac owners are suing Apple for the cost of their entire computer, because OS X doesn't run so well on it. (Surpriiiise.) 'pathogen' over at the MacNN forums sums it up nice and clean-like:

It's an UPGRADE of personal choice for these early G3's... and if OS X dissatisfies you, then only sue to be reimbursed the price of OS X... not your G3. Because if you stayed with OS 8.1 to 9.1, you would have all the functionality you were ever promised when you bought your pre-OS X G3.

As for speed, the multi-tasking does result in a slow down for some things because they no longer have priority, but I for one will vouch that when you use command-line in the terminal and in some specific instances, OS X is much faster.

This law suit stinks of over zealous mac users who bought into too much peripherally generated hype.

Preach on, brother!

Speaking of lawsuits, you better watch what you say over at Slashdot, where citing Bill Gates in a Red Herring article brought the following wrath down upon unsuspecting readers:

Your listening license agreement specifically forbids quoting, citing, referring to, or referencing Mr. Gates in any context that has not been Microsoft approved and certified. As Slashdot falls under neither category, quoting Mr. Gates on this site is a license violation that may result in responses such as but not limited to prosecution, abortion of listening rights, or death by electrocution. Please cease all unauthorized quotational operations immediately, or we will be forced to take remonstrative actions.

Thank you, have a nice day.

So sue me. *rimshot*

Meanwhile, for all you old-school Apple fans out there who have moved to OS X and miss the friendly face of Clarus the Dogcow, you'll be pleased to know that MacSlash posted this link proving the Dogcow lives. Just watch out for the party pooper in the peanut gallery...

Nowhere on the author's site does it say the author got Apple's permission to do this

This is important as Clarus is property of Apple Computer, Inc. and a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc

Most of the comments on VersionTracker raise this issue.

Note: I downloaded it to see if the documentation says anything but, nooooo

*grumbles* Well, excuuuuuse me.

Those of you who keep an eye on ZDNet will know that David Coursey, a longtime PC user, has been taking the Mac challenge for a month, to see if he could stand to be on a Mac full time. So far he's not doing too bad, but as always it's mixed opinions in the Talkback forums. Reader Jacquis Lewis fights the good fight for developers:

If, If, if, if, Read IF IF IF the current state of platform distribution was not an issue , If todays market politics & economics did not matter. In this hypothetical situation for purely Technical reasons I belive that ALL developers challanged to produce the best solution product that could be made with what is avaliable on the market today, all developers would with out a doubt chose the Mac platform. It is everything developers say they want. Fully Object-Oriented based language and integrated development environment. Unix power and stabality, SMP and Cluster ready hardware. Fully scriptable & automatable platform due to unequaled hardware/software integration advantages .

So I stand by what I said.

ALL DEVELOPERS TODAY WOULD CHOOSE THE MAC AS THEIR SOLUTION PLATFORM TODAY. (barring todays code deployment liabalities due to the mac's relative small market penatration)

The Current Mac Platform is EVERY developers Dream come True!

Apple has made great strides in working with developers since the return of Steve Jobs, but the sad truth is that Microsoft does a MUCH better job of coddling its developers. Why, look at the tumbling routine that Steve Ballmer performs for them!

From the other side of that coin comes this comment from a MacNN forum member calling himself "Developer." He seems to take a less sanguine look at Apple's efforts from this thread about customer feedback:

Yeah, Apple is listening.

I told them I don't like TextEdit et al. to rely on the filename extension only to identify its files, and now they hide them for me"

Hold on a second, I need to wipe up this big pile of sarcasm that spilt everywhere...

In our own forums, we're working hard to get OS X working on everything from iPods to penguins. Observers spazum64 and x136 are leading the pack:

On a TI-83 calculator...


...and a genuine iWatchman device!

Bring on the GIMP!

Finally, you can tell when a forum is scraping the bottom of the talent barrel when someone posts a poll like this one. Wait, that's not necessarily true... perhaps it's some British humour thing. What are arsebiscuits, anyway? If you find out, or if you've spotted any other cool discussions, I'd love to hear about it.