RESIGNATION OF STEVE JOBS!! &A#JD1Tg!d8

Fer shur.

Well, anyone who wants a DIY PC that is.

Excuse me? Mac buyers and users are 'Elitists'?

Disagree. Thrifty? Yes. Demand quality? Yes. Demand real 'Plug and Play'? Yes. Into elegant design? Yes.

Elitist? No.

Thus the existence of comp.sys.mac.advocacy! We Mac users most definitely post here because we want to 'Share The Joy!' and nothing less. No snobs allowed.

It's called 'Plug and PRAY' and it still exists on Windows PCs.

Well, this is not exactly true. Apple do indeed write all drivers specific to all the hardware inside a Mac. As for peripherals, the drivers are the responsibility of the manufacturer. There are such things as crap drivers for Mac. I recently ran into one from ADS for one of their PCMCIA cards. Meanwhile the exact same driver works like a charm with their PCI card.

WHAT?! You got this concept from what planet? Certainly Mr. Jobs never quite took the spiritual path to enlightenment, gave away all his wealth, shaved his head and went about chanting 'Hari Krishna' begging for food. He's made a LOT of money. But how does Apple's path to superior computer architecture and operating system, in coordination for complete control of nearly all the variables, equate to GREED by ANYONE? Who is being parasitized here? I can point to MILLIONS being parasitized by Bill Gates and his VERY greedy-incompetent company. But Apple? Jobs? I don't think so.

No way is Apple perfect. In the future there WILL be better alternatives (DAMMIT!). But by FAR Apple took the better path to computer progress. --------------------

Now we veer into Off Topic territory:

Consider me prescient, but I knew way back in the day, that the computers I was using were crap. I used them grudgingly and waited very impatiently for them to get-the-hell better.

I learned programming on this horrifying mainframes that forced you to punch out a big computer card just to write a single (1) line of code. If you mis-typed even one character in your program you were royally f*cked. Pure drudgery and pain.

My actual first desktop computer was a DEC Rainbow. What a POS! But it worked. No way did I rave about it. I hated it. But it did what menial little things CLI computers could do in those days.

My second computer was an IBM XT. Another POS! I hated it. But programming was getting more interesting at that time, you could actually put something useful onto a floppy, so I put up with it.

Then I got a Macintosh SE. I RAVED!!!!! about it!!!!!

Real computers had arrived, for my taste anyway. And they got dramatically better. But I have to say, I have such nostalgia for that old SE! It had a measly 8 MB of RAM, an incomprehensibly small hard drive, 1.4 MB floppy drives. You'd think it would make me ill to remember. But it allowed my imagination to fly compared to the sh*t before it.

Today that experience lives on, in 256 colors, on my now antiquated Palm IIIc which is still my constant companion and still works great. It has the same lousy 8MB of memory, but it does me just fine for keeping my brain on time, keeping my address book up to date, writing documents, (I love WordSmith), playing those cute old 2D games, and thanks to a cute little camera add-on that Kodak created, it even lets me take web quality pictures! Palms only got better. Lesser imitations abound.

-- Fortune Magazine, 11-29-05: What's your computer setup today? Frederick Brooks: I happily use a Macintosh. It's not been equalled for ease of use, and I want my computer to be a tool, not a challenge. Frederick Brooks is the author of 'The Mythical Man Month'. He spearheaded the movement to modernize computer software engineering in 1975