Tuesday, December 11, 2007

That is just stupid

What does "baby," mean, anyways?

Computers are tools. A tool is measured by its effectiveness. Provided someone is able to accomplish their tasks without difficulties, and reasonably quickly, what is being "babied"?

Perhaps you are referring to Apple's penchant for what, to somoene whose eyes grew up on MS products, appear to be cutsy or somehow un-serious graphics. This is a reasonable complaint, I do in fact find a lot of things on the Mac unenjoyable to look at. But, for general artistic style, I think Mac does have the upper-hand... certainly people will 'play' with their Macs much more than with their PCs, which, while I think they have a cleaner and more useful interface, are decidedly un-fun to use.

But, again, baby? All that could possibly mean is that they let you do complicated things without exposing the complexity. But that's impossible. You can't hide the complexity of a truly complex task, if you can, then the task isn't complicated. You might, perhaps, complain that a Mac "hides" all the good stuff, and to my eye it does, but I'm sure someone who is very well acquianted with the Mac knows where to find all the appropriate system settings. And the CLI is close enough to bash that I've never had any trouble with it (or is it bash? They did get Leopard certified as a Unix, so it may well be. I dunno).

1 comment:

  1. I concede. Your argument is the superior one.

    -Hal Pratt

    ReplyDelete