Operating system religious wars

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Operating systems religious wars take place where ever nerds gather; internet-forums, game stores, postgraduate offices and RationalWiki. There are largely two camps; The Mac Users and The Windows Users. The fact that these words are capitalised emphasises the religious zeal with which these positions are held. They argue constantly about which is the superior operating systems, always over looking the fact that a) all computers when you get right down to it are shitty, and b) there is an alternative in Linux.

Contents

[edit] Windows

Windows is famed for being on 90% of the world's computers, for its pathetic attempts at user friendliness (remember Clippy), and for making any change to software or hardware as difficult as possible.

[edit] Windows Users

Windows user are characterised by the following properties,

  1. Swearing, usually at what the computer is doing wrong/the difficult way.
  2. Being your average office drone.
  3. Calling IT support because there is something wrong.
  4. Assuming that any application will run on their machine.

[edit] Macs

Macs are famed for their user friendliness and innovative user interface. This, however, prevents the users from actually having to know how their computer works making them counterproductive for software development.[1]

[edit] Mac Users

Mac users are characterised by the following properties:

  1. Over emotional attachment to what is actually a machine.
  2. Calling IT support because there is something wrong with them because they can't find out how to set the printer to two-sided.
  3. Generally being complete tossers, except of course for Stephen Fry and Douglas Adams who has a get out of jail free card for reasons of being Stephen Fry and Douglas Adams. [2]
  4. Owning iEverything even though they are just like (or sometimes worse than) any other, mobile phone, mp3 player, etc.
  5. Thinking that BSOD is some kind of sexual fetish.
  6. Really scary Mac users are a twisted hybrid of Mac addicts and Unix geeks who can tie a cherry stem in a knot with nothing but an AppleEvent-aware Perl script.

[edit] Linux

Most Linux boxes were Windows boxes before their owners revolted.

[edit] Linux Users

Linux users are characterized by the following properties:

  1. An unhealthy desire to recompile the kernel at every opportunity.
  2. A disdain for newcomers who don't know how to recompile the kernel
  3. Constantly rebuilding their machines because a kernel recompile failed
  4. Believing a Windowing System is a very clever way of having lots of command lines on screen at the same time. Like screen only less clever.

[edit] Unix

Unix boxes are big, black and live in caves called Data Centres

[edit] Unix Users

Unix users are characterized by the following properties

  1. Not knowing how to use a GUI even if they had one.
  2. Considering anything less than a Tb to be small beer.
  3. Feeling totally superior to mere users
  4. Getting pissed off when, at a party, someone says "I hear you work with computers - can you fix my internet connection?"

[edit] RationalWiki's position

RationalWiki does not endorse any specific operating system and believes people who argue over it should get a life. That said:

  • RationalWiki prefers Windows because, uh, it... well, it has the best games.
  • RationalWiki prefers Mac OSX because it was designed by people who are rather anal about interface design and coherency and evolved to fit the needs of the very demanding graphic design, publishing, and multimedia markets, as well as the lucrative sitting-in-a-cafe-looking-cool market.
  • RationalWiki also prefers Linux because it's open source — wait, let's repeat that: open source — and almost anything you need to do that doesn't involve gaming or custom applications that are written by sub-par vendors who won't even release the specs can be done with something you download for free.
  • RationalWiki also prefers Unix because it was written by techies for techies and everything is a file.
  • RationalWiki prefers BSD Unix in particular, because if there's a platform that doesn't run NetBSD at the very least, it's not worth using.[3]
  • RationalWiki prefers DR-DOS running on an Osbourne for obvious reasons.
  • RationalWiki prefers the Commodore 64 because there's nothing a programmer on a modern platform can do that a C64 developer can't do in half the memory, in 8-bit machine language, with a dark ages character set and some truly hairy raster interrupt tricks.
  • RationalWiki prefers analogue. Especially where thermionic valves are involved.

We do, however, laugh heartily at Amiga users because they compensate for their persecution complex by collecting Transformers, working at porn studios, and writing furry comics. What's that about being ten years ahead of their time and being the first multimedia-specific computer? Nah. Couldn't be.

[edit] And if that wasn't enough

Don't forget to have friendly discussions about

  • The one true brace (Use Psion's bracing style to annoy people, thanks.)
  • emacs vs vi
  • GUI vs command line
  • The computer religious wars of the 1980s
  • Tabs versus spaces. Burn the heretics who say the tab key should emit between two and four spaces!
  • Linux is a Communist plot. Please report anyone using it to homeland security so they can be dealt with by our friends at Blackwater.

[edit] Road map to peace

Here at RationalWiki we are about conflict resolution so we propose the following,

  1. Type your documents in LaTeX (there is a version for every system) and build to PDF (so the poor Mac Users don't have to open postscripts),
  2. If you must use a WYSIWYG word processor, then use Opendocument Format (ODF) and then build to PDF,
  3. Use comma separated variable spreadsheets,
  4. Send plain text emails

[edit] The origins of computer related religious wars

Apropos of nothing, simply because I'm wildly enamoured of the anecdote, I present evidence that computer geeks arguing over trivialities is as old as the programmable computer: 

The English mathematician Charles Babbage, who conceived programmable computation, 
wrote to the young poet Tennyson. "In your otherwise beautiful poem," he said, "one verse reads,

    Every moment dies a man,
    Every moment one is born. 

" ... If this were true," he went on, "the population of the world would be at a 
standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next edition of your poem should read]:"

    Every moment dies a man,
    Every moment 1 1/16 is born. 

"Strictly speaking," Babbage added, "the actual figure is so long I cannot get it
into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ The users, that is, not the developers. The Mac actually has quite a few bells and whistles that Windows has never quite been able to equal -- AppleScript, for one. Also, OS X is Unix. Has the trademark and everything.
  2. ↑ Channelling Andrew Schlafly: According to my Dad, who was at university with him, Douglas Adams was in fact an utter tosser.
  3. ↑ Everything runs NetBSD if you need it to. PCs. Macs. Amigas. Toasters. Teddy bears. Chuck Norris. (Well, at least it would be better than what he's running now.)
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