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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Jerry, welcome to my world
Spurred on by his annoying friend Peter G., BYTE columnist, technology pundit, and award-winning science fiction author Jerry Pournelle has decided to revisit the world of the Mac over a decade after giving up on the platform. Needless to say, he's run into all kinds of problems in the last few weeks, which he's documenting on his Web site. But Jerry is discovering, inevitably, and as I did, the dark side of the Mac, which is it's overly-enthusiastic followers, who troll the Web looking for anything even remotely anti-Mac, so they can lambast any poor fool who would attempt to chip away at the Mac's perfect exterior. "What I am being told by the Mac community is that if it don't go perfectly, first time, there's something wrong with me: this despite my having the advice of some of the best people in the business," he writes. "And note the language. I am never merely wrong, I am always wrong-headed and worthy of contempt ... the Mac gurus are now saying that the answers to all problems are found in a couple of minutes with google, and I am an idiot for not knowing it. That sort of smug superiority is common, and one reason why it's a big temptation to abandon the whole thing ... I wonder at people who need to belittle others to salvage their own intellectual self esteem, and why [they] congregate where they do." So do I, Jerry, and what's classic is that I can be criticized for calling such people to the carpet.

But Pournelle really hits the nail on the head in one comment, and I only have to look painfully at some of the feedback to my own articles about inductive UI to see the truth in this: "For the Mac enthusiasts who would like to see more Mac users: realistically you have two sources, people who have never used computers before, and Windows users. You might think about the implications of that." In other words, most Mac fanatics (and most "Mac users," really) are very technical people, and they have literally no understanding or memory of what it's like to be new to computing, or to the Mac. And they spend an awful lot of time heckling people who have honestly had problems making the Mac work well. Good strategy, guys.

[ Posted at 10:11 AM | Permalink ]