February 15 You don't have to duck logic long before you realize the Mac community has gone off the deep end. Last time I wandered into the Yahoo message board for their APPL financial section, I happend on thier current topic for debate. Zips vs Syquest. What the hell? It's not no longer nerdy enough to endlessly harrange people for their choice in computers, but now there's a healthy flame war being decided on computer peripherals. I mean this is pure spooky fucking wierd. It's no longer analogous to a bizzare cult of people who support Sony brand VCR's flame-baiting Panisonic VCR owners, it's now about the goddamn video tape used in them. This is scary - very scary. But to make matters worse, for a whole second I acutally noticed odd paralells in the pattern of suckers who endlessly prattle on about how much better it is to spend 1 thousand dollars more on computers emblazoned with fruit, and those who think Syquest is deserving of the time of day. The only reason it was interresting outside of the fright-zone, was the fact that I'd been subjected to Syquests flood of crap in the early 90's in my line of work - graphic design and color production. Back then those drives were so expensive, and so failure prone that we had a pile of gold bricks cluttering trash bins every day from a whole host of clients - all of which then had to call out the emergency patrol to resend their data. In all of these cases it was the inherint design flaw of having a rigid form of Winchester-like hard drive trying to brave the elements outside of a clean-room environment. There was one other competitor Iomega, who had a floppy like design that served well due to using the Bernulli principle. This means if there's crap on the surface, the disk falls away from the heads. Very neat, and unfortunately slow to come to market to stave off any competition from Syquest's entrenched marketshare. What broke their stranglehold on the graphics industry as well as others was Iomega's Zip format. Like the PC vs Mac wars, this one was won on price and Iomega dropped a nuclear device right into Syquests lap. Just like the MacJihad that touts an infinite lifespan with the creative community because of "quality" Syquest found themselves with a frying pan in the face due to people jumping ship from 700 dollar-plus drives and 100 dollar media to cheap 200 dollar Zip drives and 10 buck media. Now the shoe is on the other foot. While Syquest may be trying to foist themselves as faster, they're still not cheaper to the basic Zip product, which is so cheap that it's now bundled with many PC's as well as Macs. Brother, when you have a standard for more than 4 years, you're out of the 8-track biz for good. The wierdness is that naturally those Mac owners that are stuck with Syquest are gnashing their teeth over reality, much in the same way their running defeatest logic against the Wintel community. "It's sucks", "it's available everywhere and ergo - sucks", "it's not as fast/cool/neat as the crap I'm stuck with". Sound familiar? Funny thing is, aside from no one giving a damn about Syquest vs Zips, it's an ironic testimony to the same drivel that they foist on the Wintel community every day. The BBBS is living proof. No one gives a damn anymore, and the e-mail bombs, the spam, the mail-floods are all sad testimony to the plight of the damned. When no one gives a crap about anything but you and your cult-like friends, you need to get new friends - and FAST.

February 16 You know it's going to be damn ironic for the MacJihadists as the Apple tragedy shifts into high gear. I mean there's a reason I don't favor techie arguments much - if ever - in my column. It's because if you're splitting MIPS you're missing the forest from the trees. Here's some firewood to burn on. With the retail presence shrinking people won't be seeing Macs, even badly represented Macintoshes in person very much. With only direct-mail and a single retailer hawking computer fruit, you've basically got the same real-world mindshare reserved for porno video tapes and the like. So if the computers are in essance harder to find, what's next on the hit parade? How about price. If you steal a Mac from some luckless owner, I suppose it's actually possible for people to pay less than a grand for a complete Apple system with monitor. Unfortunately this isn't the case for the buyer. And with current news reports, it's the under 1500 and under 1000 dollar crowd that is pushing the expansion of the computer market into more businesses and homes than ever before. This is ironic because less than 2 years ago, it was pretty much the common sense argument that the computer market had hit some kind of ceiling and the industry was going to have to fight themselves on margins of price and components to exploit the upgrade market till the end of time. What they discovered was that cheap computers, regardless of horsepower, are what people want. The horsepower argument is invalid because people know that Porche's are nice enough cars, but really can't justify getting one to take Junior to school and to commute groceries in. Even in instances when people aren't eating off gold-flatware on the table, it just doesn't make any goddamn sense to do otherwise. Also relevant, outside of bloatware, there's no reason to have a 5 grand computer sitting around doing 3D screensavers when all you're doing is Quicken and Microsoft Word. But somehow, if you buy within your means or relevant usage you run afoul of MacNazi inferiority complexes and teeth-gnashing. They want you to spend 2 grand more on a computer that sells so well that direct mail is your only avenue of getting a good price. They want you to buy a computer from a failing company that is publically shakey due to them having to disclose numbers to the SEC about their critical health. They want you to buy a lumbering beast with an inherintly outdated OS, that's more expensive and is undersupported, so they can be your friend. With friends like these who needs enemies?