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Obama is a Mac...
... and Hillary is a PC. The NYT had an article about this back before Super Tuesday. It was a bit whimsical, but there is something to it.
For PC, one might also substitute 'Windows' or 'Microsoft', and instead of Mac we could use 'OS X' or 'Apple' without breaking the analogy.
Hillary is the established product, "no one got fired for choosing Microsoft". But like Microsoft, Hillary is no longer the hungry upstart, she is the wealthy behemoth whose number one asset is its brand name. And the times they are a-changin'. Like Microsoft, Hillary is stuck in the nineties.
Obama on the other hand is like Apple, not afraid to - dare I say it - Think Different. Like Apple, Obama appeals to the latte-sipping, Prius-driving liberal elitists - in other words, the well educated, professional, successful crowd. Obama is doing the unthinkable, taking on the Goliath by putting together a better strategy and a better product. People who try Obama don't want to go back to Hillary anymore because Obama is just so much more modern, slicker, powerful, sexier and better. Obama is the wave of the future.
The PC is the reliable, hard working computer with solutions for everything and 35 years of experience... yet people go for the Mac because it offers a better way to get things done. Windows is the system that knows better than its users (Vista UAC, anyone?) while Mac simply offers superior design and clean break from old baggage from the last century.
Here's hoping that the Windows establishment won't be able to cling to power and will be overtaken by the sleek felines (Leopard, Tiger et al.). Out with the old, in with the new!
Enough torturing metaphors. If you're a Mac-loving elitist, please recommend this post. But if you're not, you can recommend it too - big tent and all.
Comments (103)
Except MS is the one I can afford, whose workings I understand, and whose willingness to license other makers to use it allowed the lower cost. Apple is the secretive one, unwilling to share, whose upgrades always required new applications to run on ti, instead of backward compatibility being built it. Analogy is weak.
My experience was Mac was mainly different in styling. It crashed easily for me, too.
April 19, 2008 5:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh no, now people will think I actually meant this silly analogy seriously!
But honestly, with Vista Microsoft completely lost me. It is terrible, the activation nonsense sucks, UAC is utter waste of time, inability to control my own computer pisses me off, and on top of that the thing is dog slow. With 64-bit Windows, backwards compatibility goes out of the window to a large extent as well.
Apple may be secretive, but at least it's not trying to destroy the competition with underhanded tactics (like a certain candidate we know).
I don't know when you used a Mac but keep in mind that OS X is massively different from previous versions. And it's been nothing but rock solid for me. OS 9 and older were junk in many ways.
April 19, 2008 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
X was stronger, yes.
And I thought about it more and would say a more accurate description of my view is I like the IBM part more than the MS part. I stay a ways back from the cutting edge, both in hardware and software. I used Win98 until about a year ago. I'm now using XP Pro.
April 19, 2008 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hear ya. The last (and first) time I bought a complete PC was 15 years ago. Since then I've been building my own, and it's definitely great to be able to do do that.
The only catch is that the abundance of cheap components for IBM compatibles also causes all the compatibility and driver problems that people so hate about PCs.
April 20, 2008 4:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
eah, FreeBSD Unix (the kernel of Mac OS X) is definitely a closed system, despite the source code being available for download. And no-one except the most devout Apple lover knows how to program Unix, despite it being 98+% compatible at the programming level with Linux.
April 20, 2008 1:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Vista Microsoft sux. Just S.U.X.
I'm so glad that I did not load it on to my uncle's computer here. He would have disowned me after he returns from his sabbatical. My laptop was utterly out of control after I installed it. It got so bad that I had to take it home over Christmas to have my older brother (a software designer) take it off for me. Believe me, my next computer will be a Mac. And I do think that Obama is like a Mac. Like a Mac he's got game, he's smart, glitzy, brainy, thinks fast, capable of multiple views, has great programs which are designed better. And yes, Mac's are sexier.
I'm not going to comment on Hillary Clinton.
However, McWarmonger is MS-DOS with hopes of becoming Vista Microsoft with the help of Carly (R-Formerly of HP).
April 20, 2008 3:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
And what about that 7% of marketshare? How do you work that into the metaphor?
April 20, 2008 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a misconception. The OS X kernel is not (Free)BSD. It's based on the Mach microkernel and it does contain a good-sized chunk of BSD code to implement BSD syscalls. And it of course includes a lot of Apple code to implement things like HFS+.
In userland, there is indeed a lot of FreeBSD code on OS X. Most of the UNIX stuff (from the shell to man pages) came from FreeBSD.
I'm not a devout Apple lover (I just like their stuff) and I definitely can program UNIX. Judging from the amount of techies I've seen traveling with their Mac laptops, I can't be the only one.
April 20, 2008 4:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama is Linux, not OS X. It's a collaborative project.
April 19, 2008 5:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fair point. Though keep in mind that Darwin is open source and there is much UNIXy goodness in OS X.
But you do agree that Hillary is Microsoft?
April 19, 2008 6:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, she is. She's Windows 3.1.
April 19, 2008 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was thinking more Windows ME. :D
April 19, 2008 6:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
You guys are being really mean now! Windows 3.1 and Me were both terrible pieces of crock - though Windows Me's saving grace was that hardly anyone used it.
April 19, 2008 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had Windows 2 or maybe even 1. It was basically MS-DOS, but it had this really cool feature, where, if the computer crashed, it would show a little stick figure falling off a cliff.
April 19, 2008 6:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
So McCain would be DOS 1.0?
April 19, 2008 10:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
McCain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mechanical_calculating_machine.jpg
April 20, 2008 1:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Looks about the right age.
April 20, 2008 4:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
And it still works, as long as you only ask it to do one thing.
April 20, 2008 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
McCain is a punchcard.
April 20, 2008 9:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
McCain is an abacus!
April 20, 2008 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
McCain's an Abacus.
April 20, 2008 12:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, the MS comparison is apt. A big difference between GNU/Linux and OS X/BSD is the GNU and OS X parts of it. To wit, GNU/Linux is open source (GNU) built on top of open source (Linux). OS X/BSD is closed source (OS X) built on top of open source (BSD Unix). If I were a Clinton supporter, I'm sure I could find some unfortunate comparison in OS X/BSD, but I've already given them too many ideas…
April 19, 2008 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) on the Mach kernel:
"Frankly, I think it's a piece of crap. It contains all the design mistakes you can make, and manages to even make up a few of its own."
April 19, 2008 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately for Torvalds, the most widely used UNIX platform these days is OS X and not Linux. Linus just gets all irrational when he hears the word "microkernel" (or "kernel debugger", for that matter). His exchange with Andy Tanenbaum is legendary.
OS X is actually a really weird mix - part Mach, part BSD, part NeXTStep/OpenStep, part Mac OS. It's kind of incredible that the thing works as well as it does.
April 19, 2008 6:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget the marvelous HFS+ file system, which should have been completely updated when Apple moved to UNIX. I can't tell you how much data I've lost due to stupid problems like volume bitmap corruption and garbage like that.
April 19, 2008 6:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've only ever owned an Intel based Mac... Apple must have worked the kinks out by then. Never had any problems worth mentioning, knock on wood.
April 19, 2008 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm just cranky because my iBook died this week. Bad logicboard. Out of warranty. Sucks.
April 19, 2008 6:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
You have company on the motherboard death. Both my colleague at work and my mother had that happen, with iMacs.
I mentioned upthread I like the hardware more than the software with IBMs. Mainly I liked kludging together from parts, saved me lots of money. I also use clean non-proprietary setups, no Dell stuff or such. I just load the OS onto an empty drive. Runs fantastically, these days, if one is generic. It is the branded computers that are clunky and slow.
Thanks be to Adobe and Digidesign (ProTools) for cross-platform compatibility.
April 19, 2008 8:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me know when you've built your first laptop.
*:o)
April 20, 2008 9:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly.
April 20, 2008 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, puhleez. Let's not get a nerd war started here.
April 19, 2008 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right. We need to talk more about politics ;)
April 19, 2008 6:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Still my favorite Mac ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDMeCRekRR0
April 19, 2008 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually Hillary's campaign seems to be having as many glitches, crashes, and other problems as the Windows VISTA platform.
This is the kind of thing that happens when an old product tries to release a new version without adequate testing and analysis....
April 19, 2008 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
As far as I'm concerned, ALL computers are cool as hell. I'm on my new Dell laptop right now (I actually had to pay extra to get Windows XP instead of Vista), but I do all my music stuff on a Mac (running Panther because I hated Tiger). I don't understand why people get so worked up over one platform or the other. They're all so cool I can't believe it sometimes. I just installed Ubuntu on an old box I had lying around, and that's really great too.
April 19, 2008 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Burn him!
April 19, 2008 6:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some people probably can't understand why anyone would get so worked up about politicians - they're all the same anyway...
I love old software. Looking at something from 1990 and thinking, wow, it could do all that! And it's so unbelievably fast (on a 2GHz box, mind you)! Old hardware is even cooler, like PS/2 systems from the 1980s or PowerPCs and Alphas from the 1990s. Or my old C64, still ticking after all those years.
Virtual machines are goodness. I can install and run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, DOS, whatever. It's interesting to see how different people solve the same problems in different ways. And nearly all of those OSes can run Firefox, which is pretty cool too.
April 19, 2008 6:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I started on a Timex Sinclair 1000. I even bought the printer. :)
April 19, 2008 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ah, a slightly modified version of the Sinclair ZX-81. I have many fond memories of the ZX-81 and Spectrum. A Z80 CPU, 48KB memory, color TV and a tape deck for storage... what more does one need? Right, a joystick for games!
The Sinclairs were huge in the UK and pretty popular in continental Europe. On the other hand, Apple II was nearly unknown in Europe. The C64 was massively popular, especially in Germany and Scandinavia. Replaced by the Amiga in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
April 19, 2008 6:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
We got our first computer sometime in the late 70s. It was a Compucolor II. I wrote an algorithm on it to generate the bifurcation diagram. It took more than 24 hours to complete. When we got our Apple IIe, I then re-wrote it on that computer, and it completed in less than 2 hours. On modern computers, it now runs in about a second.
Now get off my grass!
April 19, 2008 6:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow it's true.
They grow up so fast.
April 19, 2008 11:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
BTW paying extra to get XP instead of Vista is just SO totally wrong that it's not even funny. Of course, in Soviet Union, it would probably be normal...
April 19, 2008 6:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't really care as long as it's *nix-ish. Without Office and DirectX, Windows would be dead be now. I like OS X, Linux, BSD, you name it.
Hopefully OpenDocument will kill the stranglehold of Microsoft's proprietary document formats. I don't see any such hope for DirectX at the moment. John Carmack did a great job of championing OpenGL for a long time, but those days are long gone.
April 19, 2008 9:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
15 years later still running XF86Config and praying it recognizes that monitor. Oops, it didn't, not even a generic little 15" LCD display. Sigh
April 20, 2008 5:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
When was the last time you installed X? 1999?
April 20, 2008 10:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
The new old crap display was last fall.
April 20, 2008 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
What distro were you using? I haven't had detection issues since way before X.org and every modern distro I'm aware of is just fine when it comes to display detection (meaning I haven't had to write a config for X in years). Maybe you're using a wacky old off-brand display?
April 20, 2008 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ubuntu Feisty in this case.
April 20, 2008 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
The real danger to Windows as a gaming platform is PS3 and Wii. But I don't think consoles will completely displace PCs as gaming devices anytime soon.
April 20, 2008 5:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
The reason I run Windows:
1). QuickBooks. The Mac version sucks.
2). Dreamweaver. The Mac version sucks.
3). Text editors. BBEdit is a joke and I'm usually not in the mood to deal with vim or emacs. There are a million awesome text editors for Windows.
4). Outlook. My business runs on Outlook. Without it, life is not worth living.
The reason I own Macs:
1). Pro Tools. It won't run on my Vostro.
2). Macs are pretty.
April 20, 2008 9:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't slander emacs by putting it in the same sentence as vim.
What text editor are you using that could possibly be better than emacs?
Even vim (once you've learned the arcane keystrokes) is better than any typical text editor for Windows (although you can get emacs and vi/vim for Windows). Regular expressions? Easy-to-use macros?
Now I'm just waiting for some vi snob to make the usual claim: "emacs is a great operating system that needs a decent text editor".
April 20, 2008 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Recommended by a Mac-loving elitist that doesn't really miss fixing other people's C/C++ code to get his Linux box to work properly.
April 19, 2008 9:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Would this analogy cast Wright as Richard Stallman? Discuss.
April 19, 2008 10:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
More like Eben Moglen, I think.
April 20, 2008 1:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
DOS = Dirty Operating System :) Looks like Hillary and McCain.
April 20, 2008 1:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama's a Mac? Figures.
April 20, 2008 2:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
If only you could go "CRTL" + "ALT" + "DELETE" on the Bush machine. But no we have to wait 4 years to reboot the machine.
April 20, 2008 2:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
MacOS X is basically NextStep OS from what, 1992? 1993 if you refer to the x86 version.
Change? I think not.
Vista, however, is a Trojan masking as a new OS version.
XP SP2 is a stable operating system that has its flaws, but provides stable decent performance that people and business have come to expect, and functions globally with similar results.
XP server scales for business while leaving XP desktop acceptable for the average user. Kind of the best compromise for "Professional meets populist". Perhaps not "best of class" in either range, but the best single system cross-over solution.
April 20, 2008 5:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're basically clueless. Yes, OS X contains a number of technologies that originated in NeXTStep. But OS X is NeXTStep about as much as Windows XP is MS-DOS.
April 20, 2008 9:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
No. It's not.
April 20, 2008 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're smoking rocks. OS X is based on the Darwin project, which uses the Mach kernel designed at Carnegie Mellon and the FreeBSD 6.0 userland. 10.5 is completely POSIX compliant. The user interface, Aqua, and the SDK, Cocoa, are the only parts that are really proprietary (unless you want to get into application level stuff like QuickTime). With the addition of Xcode, OS X has a suite of open source development tools that rivals every modern Linux distribution and includes gcc, perl, python, ruby, etc.
While XP is arguably the best release of Windows for the desktop, this didn't become the case until SP1. The first release was a nightmare and for a long time sticking with 2000 was practically mandatory if for no other reason than for proper driver support. By the way, you can pretty much count on this being the case every time a new release of Windows rolls out.
There is no such thing as "XP Server". Perhaps you mean Windows Server 2003, and you've obviously never been responsible for actually having to making the damned thing scale.
Are your political views as ill-informed as your technological views?
April 20, 2008 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
You've been reading my email?
I've been replacing W2K and W2K3 servers with SUSE 10.1 wherever possible. Including Xen virtualization. Slick stuff.
No way am I installing W2K8 in a production environment until SP1 and 1+ years of public beta testing disguised as the gold release.
April 20, 2008 11:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, server 2003 is basically XP server, whatever marketing finally named it (.NET server at one point). NextStep like OSX was also based on the mach kernel and BSD, using Display Postscript for its windowing and Object Oriented C (OOC), posix, running gcc/g++ as the compiler (I ported Perl to it some 16 years ago as well), though it looks like NetInfo finally got replaced in OSX 10.5. DOS didn't have networking or a windowing environment or similar file system or similar registry to XP, was 16-bit, had completely different memory models, etc. so hard to see how DOS=XP is the same as NextStep=MacOSX. People can laugh about XP/2003's scalability, but as of 3 years ago it's the most shipped server in the world (if Unix & Linux are counted separate, a bit behind in #2 if counted together). So somebody knows how to use it even if the elitists on this blog can't stand it. And yeah, these are the kind of ill-informed opinions I offer about everything. I suppose someone will challenge me on the beauty of TeX soon and tell me that emacs is better than Word. Fighting the 90's all over again.
April 20, 2008 1:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's Objective C, not Object Oriented C. Did NeXTStep have QuickTime? Quartz? Core Audio/Image/Animation? Somehow I doubt that.
At any rate, I'm not sure I get your point. Are you saying OS X is bad because some of the technologies it uses first showed up in the 1990s? By that metric, XP would be pretty bad too, since it's not that different from NT 3.1 which came out in 1993 - after many delays (work on NT started way back in 1988).
As for fighting the 90s all over again... that sounds like Hillary!
April 20, 2008 1:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Somehow I doubt that" - is it so much to expect that someone out arguing out on the internets might actually look something up if they don't know? Wikipedia: NextStep. Google: NextStep. Quartz is a PDF display, the obvious successor to NextStep's Display Postscript graphics, since Adobe had moved on and PDF is basically a subset of Postscript.
And what does Quicktime have to do with Mac OS X? It runs on Windows as well, maybe even Linux. Yes, Nextstep had very good audio, video and graphics support for a 1992/1993 desktop machine. Also, NextStep's development tools, including Web development, were excellent at the time.
So my whole point is Mac OS X isn't a terribly new idea. In fact it's still very very similar to Nextstep even if its performance is better, and its running on Intel isn't even new - Nextstep rounded that bend in 1993.
April 20, 2008 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
QuickTime is not simply just a video player.
There are some old ideas that are still very good ideas. Calculus comes to mind. Maybe Microsoft will someday finish up borrowing all of the good ideas from UNIX and elsewhere. It usually takes them a good decade or so at least to catch up. They were ten years behind on the GUI. It took them until NT to implement any kind of half-way sensible permissions system (and two-way password hashes are still foolish) and until XP to make it mainstream. It also took until XP to incorporate a packet filter. They were going to tackle the file-system in Vista, but that proved to be too hard for them apparently. Maybe sometime after 2010 Windows users will finally get filesystem features that the rest of the world has been enjoying for quite some time.
It sort of reminds me of how programming languages are almost done adopting all of the features of LISP, which has been around since the 1960s. I think we'll pretty much be there once true macros start to flourish. It was fun to see people look on the OO model as a new invention when Java hit the scene.
April 20, 2008 5:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
QT is not simply a video player, but I don't see how it has much to do with "Mac OS X" as an intrinsic piece of the operating system. I also wouldn't praise Apple too much on the file system front - ACL's didn't come until 2005.
Anyway, perhaps I should rephrase my original intent - Mac OS X is essentially NextStep 5.0 or so. They are closer cousins than say Windows 3.0 and Windows XP to each other. NextStep was purchased to be Mac's next OS, and it shows. NextStep was a truly impressive piece of work at the time, and its biggest limitations were the hardware it ran on, and even there, my Next TurboColor was quite the performer for a desktop machine.
April 20, 2008 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, NextStep was purchased when Steve Jobs came back. Next and Apple came from the same minds.
HFS+ certainly isn't the most advanced filesystem in the world. Microsoft dropped the ball on WinFS in Vista and Apple dropped the ball on finally bringing ZFS and/or XFS on board (even though Schwartz was promising that we would see ZFS in 10.5). You can get ZFS support in Leopard now, but it has to be installed by hand. Definitely not ready for grandma.
April 20, 2008 6:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, NextStep was another Jobs brainchild (alas, hardware missing a floppy, but I digress) and the reason for getting Jobs back - NextStep ran on Motorola hardware, had an upgrade path to Intel if needed, had various development pieces available. In the end I think rolling out Mac OS X took longer than they expected (BeOS might have been faster even with from-the-bottom rewrites, but sounds like Gassee wanted too much money without a track record). Anyway, I think we more or less agree.
April 20, 2008 7:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Uh, let's call that "Objective C", not "Object Oriented C".
April 20, 2008 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
*raises hand*
Emacs/TeX is so much better than Word it hurts. For compatibility with the rest of the world, however, OO.o is the winner.
However, I won't hold it against you, as I suspect that even the majority of Obama supporters use Word. *sigh*
April 20, 2008 5:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know, I'm a bit shocked (in a good way) to see how many people around here know more than a little about computers.
I haven't needed to produce printed documents in a while (e-mail/HTML/wikis rule), but when I did, TeX always served me very well. I guess it's the difference between a program that was designed to typeset books and a program where typesetting was just an afterthought.
It may not surprise you that the book I'm reading right now is called "Mastering Regular Expressions".
April 20, 2008 5:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, a lot has happened in the last three years (especially in the Linux world). Also, many operations are locked into Microsoft's server offerings at this point due to adopting technologies like Active Directory and IIS/ASP. It's not easy to migrate away from these architectures.
There's a funny parallel here as well, going back to original post: People can laugh about Obama's ability, but as of seven weeks ago Obama was the most voted for candidate in nation.
So you're an Obama supporter now, yeah?
April 20, 2008 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
People can talk about "change" and whiz-bang new features, but in the end they tend to go with stability, incremental change and something they know. Compatibility and not retraining are 2 very compelling business issues. And every new model is a potential Vista. Let's see the oBama when it's been on the market a while - until then, it's still a .0 release.
April 20, 2008 7:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Go check out and recommend:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/sen-clinton-may-have-secured-m.php
I haven't laughed so hard in weeks.
April 20, 2008 5:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ralph Nader is obviously a Linux - infinitely superior, used by only a tiny fraction of people, and prepared to remind everyone that PC/HRC and Mac/Obama both suck.
April 20, 2008 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
And universally beloved for his smug arrogance.
April 20, 2008 11:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
exactly!
April 20, 2008 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Seems more like an Amiga to me. Old, beloved by a tiny circle of people far out of the mainstream, who bemoan that Amiga didn't catch on like other models did when (they claim) the Amiga was so superior.
April 20, 2008 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hillary is a Commodore 64.
Barack Obama is a Super Computer.
April 20, 2008 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hillary is a Cray-1. Barack is a Beowulf Cluster.
April 20, 2008 11:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have no idea what any of you guys are talking about. God I'm old.
April 20, 2008 1:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
You don't have to be old not to understand this stuff, believe me
April 20, 2008 2:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
LOL
Indeed - and it seems that getting rid of the Penn trojan virus did nothing to improve the system.
April 20, 2008 1:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
When you tell a Mac to shut down, it shuts down.
When you tell a PC to shut down, it gives you an argument.
'nuff said.
April 20, 2008 2:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
And the beauty of the modern Mac is that I can still issue:
shutdown -h NOW
April 20, 2008 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I am beginning to really hate these kinds of quotes(and yes I know you didnt write this Codegen). But these analogies have been written all over the internet and I dont understand why anyone, even journalists or regular folk continue to use "Prius-driving liberal elitists" and other such things. As if thats Obama's only crowd. You would do better to simple state that alot of people from various backgrounds like Obama.
All of the black americans that like Obama in major cities like North Carolina, the inner cities of New York, Boston, Ohio etc etc are poor black/white areas. This whole assumption that only well off middle class people like Obama is nuts to me.
And the # of times I have seen in articles saying that specifically, black americans who like Obama are well off, is...well....very weird. Considering just 4 years ago the question on the candidates would be "how do we get the poor/innercity and or black and hispanic vote". Now that those of us in that circle like Obama, we are all "well off middle class elitists".
Give me a damn break.
April 20, 2008 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course people from various backgrounds like Obama. But the "latte-sipping Prius-driving liberal elitist" shtick is so stupid that it's funny.
What I don't get is this: If the middle class elite is for Obama (and is that really true?), how is that a bad thing?
April 20, 2008 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a PC user who has always heard that Macs perform better. But Obama certainly didn't perform well when the questions finally got tough in the ABC debate. Does Mac complain about the market being unfair and negative toward its product? I can't really recall the makers of Mac ever whining. And even if they did, did whining make Mac the choice of most computer users? Not to my knowledge.
April 20, 2008 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure I really get this line of argument. Didn't Hillary spend like a month volubly complaining, even during debates, that the press was being harder on her than they were on Obama?
April 20, 2008 4:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's one of my favorite things about you, Josh. You're a journalist with a memory.
April 20, 2008 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama is a Mac.
Hillary is a table-top Ms Pac Man.
Obama is a shot of fine scotch, but not too fine.
Hillary is a glass of box wine.
Obama is Lucky Strike Cigarettes.
Hillary is Virginia Slims.
Obama is Mary Ann.
Hillary is the mother-in-law on "Bewitched."
Obama is a hamburger cooked by your grandfather on the backyard grill in 1973.
Hillary is potato salad bought in the store readymade.
Obama is The Rolling Stones.
Hillary is the Bay City Rollers.
Etc.
April 20, 2008 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought the knock-out blow was grandpa's BBQ.
Then came the Bay City Rollers.
April 20, 2008 6:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks Bat Guano! NOW I get it (I think)
April 20, 2008 4:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
@allsben, Nope, Nader is Linux, Obama is Mac OS, evolving from OS 9 to OS X Leopard in front of our eyes with more to come, and Clinton is Windows 3, regressing back to DOS.
Linux could never give a decent speech. It's interface is the product of many nerds, concentrating on engineering details of little interest to users. When design is unified, tested with users, and subject to the approval of exactly one person, you'll get something that works easily at all levels, in all details. Leopard gives one hell of a speech, not too many details, with plenty of inspiration for all.
Underneath, in the kernels, system routines, etc., Linux is Bill Clinton, dictator of its domain, whereas OS X, with its cooperating parts taken from here and there but cohering is like the underbelly of the Obama campaign.
Those are the opinions of one who's been working professionally with computers from the '60s.
April 20, 2008 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
since the '60s. I use modern computers now.
April 20, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama ain't a Mac...He's a PC clone. A Hillary clone.
April 20, 2008 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Go back to your abacus.
April 20, 2008 5:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I give him props for sticking to the theme and for originality. It also echoes a claim I've heard other Clinton supporters make—that Obama steals all of Hillary's ideas. I disagree with the sentiment, but approve of the attempt.
April 20, 2008 5:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
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