Why PC's are evil : Greg Laden's Blog

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Why PC's are evil

Category: Technology
Posted on: April 17, 2008 1:00 AM, by Greg Laden

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I always root for the Windows guy in those commercials. I live for the day when he punches out that smug Mac twit.

Posted by: Romeo Vitelli | April 17, 2008 7:24 AM

As someone with a foot in all the camps, (PC, Mac, Linux/Unix, VMS!) I don't see a particular brand as evil, but only because I don't believe in good and evil except in one particular case:

Marketing Departments are the root of all evil!

As Scott Adams wrote oh so many years ago:

It might seem like criminal fraud but it's not; it's marketing!

Posted by: Onkel Bob | April 17, 2008 12:56 PM

As an RSI sufferer, I think any computer that forces me to use a keyboard is evil. It turns out that a Windows PC offers me both excellent speech recognition (with Dragon Naturally Speaking) and excellent handwriting recognition, not to mention the ability to use a pen as a mouse (I find that a pen is much more natural and less hurty than a mouse).

On the other hand, you can't reasonably use either a Mac or a Linux machine without a keyboard and mouse. So they are, by my definition, evil.

Posted by: D'oh! | April 17, 2008 1:25 PM

Actually, MacSpeech Dictate has licensed Dragon from Nuance. Nuance's ViaVoice was their previous speech recognition contender for Macs, so it seems a little odd to blame Apple for its usability. And plenty of people, including my SO, use Wacom tablets (with pens) for art and navigation. I use a trackball, since it least aggravates my old injuries.

I also know legally blind people who prefer Macs for the accommodations they afford. Their zoom utilities are great, and if you haven't heard their newest speech-reading voice, you should. I hadn't considered that there would be an uncanny valley in speech too.

I know these are all Mac examples, but it's what I've known best and longest. To be fair, plenty of my friends are also perfectly happy with their PCs--running Linux.

Posted by: Stephanie Z | April 17, 2008 2:59 PM

Yes, I've seen the same thing: Macs can do the accessibility thing quite well. Linux also has accessibility features.

I don't know about the specific issue of RSI, mouse, and keyboard use compared across the systems, however.

Posted by: Greg Laden | April 17, 2008 3:15 PM

Dragon kicks everybody's butt on speech recognition, hands down. Sorry, that was kind of taken for granted in my first post. My friend who uses it (tendinitis) adores it and reviewers use it as their standard when testing other applications. It would be fair (if painful) to say that no one has yet developed a Dragon killer.

I just don't think it's fair to point to Apple or Linux and cry "evil" because Nuance hasn't offered versions on other platforms or (as far as I know) made any of their code available for open source development on platforms they're not developing for.

Posted by: Stephanie Z | April 17, 2008 6:03 PM