Mac Chatter - Good Advice, Bad Advice, & One Heck Of A Scary Fairy Tale

by , 11:00 AM EST, February 18th, 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.

Hey kids! There's still snow in the ground in some parts of the world, but it's already that time of year where the young'uns have got to get on the stick and start applying for summer internships. Where else is there for a Mac addict to go, but to Apple?

That's the topic over at Ask MacSlash this week, and advice from the Slashers ranges from the encouraging (from gropo):

There's a difference between persuing a job at 1 Infinite Loop and at one of the 30+ retail stores throughout the U.S. As for the retail stores, they most likely field a deluge of Resume's and Cover Letters on a weekly basis, so the best option is to try and track down the branch manager and politely and cunningly request consideration for the position at hand.

Perhaps your cover letter didn't pique anyone's interest in the hiring department in the first place. They're looking for extremely vibrant personalities who put out sub-Jobsian levels of Reality Distortion Field™ waves, so keep that in mind as you formulate your plan of attack.

--to the lame (from mclaren):

You could always bang Jobs daughter : ) If you were good she could tell her daddy about a cool mac guy..

O... kay. Thank you, gropo, for the cool advice. And thank you, mclaren, for the... er, never mind.
(By the way, job seekers - don't forget about Apple's employment site.)

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At Slashdot, the topic of the week was OS X on Intel, prompted by Cringely's latest offering. Let's step into fantasy-land for a minute with Slashdotter MinaCyn:

Let us humor poor, deluded Robert X. and imagine for a moment Apple on x86 hardware.

Can you hear it?

That giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of all the developers at Microsoft being pulled off their Apple assignments and reassigned to the XBox.

The vast majority of Mac users use:

Internet Explorer for browsing (Poof!)

Outlook for e-mail (Poof!)

MS Office for word processing, etc (Poof!)
It is also the sound of Microsoft technology being withheld/withdrawn from any ISV that supports the Mac on x86.

That wailing and gnashing of teeth you hear is the sound OEMs that have offered the Mac desktop make when BillG tells them the price of Windows has been tripled. It is also the sound sysadmins make when they discover the time trying to integrate Mac/x86 into the network has also tripled.

That hysterical laughter you hear is Microsoft top brass laughing at the pathetic stooges at DOJ. You can just hear how ludicrous the DOJ case would sound: "Your Honor, I know we said before that Microsoft was exerting monopoly power by developing competing software, but this time we will argue that by refusing to develope IE/Outlook/Office for the Mac, Microsoft is again exerting monopoly power." And the DOJ will get handled yet again.\That gurgling sound you hear is the sound of Apple's cash reserves going down the drain as former stockholders place their money in safer havens, like Enron or Pets.com.

Eeeeeeeep. That's put me right off contemplating OS X on a cheapo x86 box for life, methinks.

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Fans (and "fans") of iBrotha's columns here know all too well the flaming that goes on in his article responses. Here's a classy piece from a gentleman named James:

the "editors" and "writers" here really lack self-perspective...racheal is right...btw, brian, how can someone know that an article is crap without reading it? Tis a dumb point you make...just look at what's happening...the issue is supposedly about apples new ads (and your non-pulizter prize winning writer couldnt even get that url right) and we are talking about jeff goldbloom and rodney's pulling the race card...what a bunch of losers without self-perspective...dont quit your day jobs...lol...getting readers doesnt mean you serve up quality...only thing descent about this site is its news updates..the rest is emotive mumbo jumbo...

With insightful commentary like that, mmmmhm. Boy, I know I'm hurt.
[Editor's Note: I too am deeply wounded.]

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Lastly, we wanted to take out a moment for the absurd. The folks at MacNN's forums got clever with Photoshop and made a "secret hidden Preference Pane" for Mac OS X that showed all sorts of hidden features you could access for Apple's NeXT OS. Those features include things like checkboxes for "Freeze on PPP connections," and "Spinning beachball ever ___ minutes." While most of the replies in the thread took it as the funny joke it is, one MacNN forum member took it a step further with what we hope was a shining bit of Jeff K!!11!!!!!11! inspired humor. From sophus:

Thiss is wery god news! Butt were can i find it? i reelly want to make changis so my machine can worke faster and beter. i are very angry with ppp-hanging my machine. i looked everywere but can not find this. is this maybe coming with versjon 10.2? how for did apple do this i dont understand!
sorry for my english.

Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find me some self perspective now. If James or anyone else would care to help me out, you know what to do. Catch you next week.