Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2012-11-01
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2012-11-01

by shaenon on November 1, 2012 at 12:00 am
Chapter: Railway Children
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Discussion (28) ¬

  1. Anderson
    November 1, 2012, 12:49 am | # | Reply

    Depends, are we talking “Windows 7”, “Vista” or “BOB” here?

  2. Andrew
    November 1, 2012, 1:01 am | # | Reply

    Actually, the latest joke is Windows 8.

  3. Eddurd
    November 1, 2012, 2:24 am | # | Reply

    (TUNE: “Sing A Song”, The Carpenters)

    Bing … Bing is wrong!
    Poor results, takes too long!
    Poor as Yahoo once was …
    Even AskJeeves outdoes!

    Bing … Bing is wrong!
    Go with Google, that’s how I wrote this song!
    Though Microsoft has monopolies
    More brutal than Mao Zhedong,
    Still, Bing … Bing is wrong!

    • Manifesta
      November 1, 2012, 5:58 am | # | Reply

      Bravo! Google will want to license this for its next ad.

    • Andrew
      November 1, 2012, 1:26 pm | # | Reply

      Ed? Google is on line one. They want to pay you for those lyrics with a room full of balls. I’m not sure what that’s about, but it sounds intriguing.

  4. Wayne Zombie
    November 1, 2012, 8:24 am | # | Reply

    Makes me glad I went Mac 5 years ago, got my new 27″ i7 iMac last week and the memory upgrade to take it to 16 gig should arrive today or tomorrow.

    Of course, insurance required a lightning strike and a 25′ chunk of pine to get blown through my roof before they bought it for me.

    • kag
      November 1, 2012, 9:56 am | # | Reply

      Starts poking through scrap for an aluminum pole to tie to my old macbook…

    • Smithnik
      November 1, 2012, 10:14 am | # | Reply

      Sounds like an unusual policy.
      “Following any electrical act of nature, we will replace your computer monitor with one whose diagonal size, in inches, is numerically no more than two great than the size, in feet, of the largest object which has impacted your house.”

      • Wayne Zombie
        November 1, 2012, 4:24 pm | # | Reply

        Well, the original computer was a MacBook Pro connected to a 24″ monitor. When the power surge hit, it actually scorched the power jack and blew out the sound card, so a tech says that the system will definitely fail at some point. Fortunately we had full replacement value on our homeowner’s policy. So the 24″ monitor, which might also have been damaged, was within 1″ of your numerical specification.

        • Anderson
          November 1, 2012, 4:39 pm | # | Reply

          My family (apart from my mother) moved away from Macs years ago, but one of our two (incredibly awesome) Mac 7.5’s back in the 90’s had the motherboard mysteriously detonate one day after being taken to the shop for repairs. It was never quite the same afterwards….although it actually somehow managed to boot afterwards. They don’t make computers like that any more….

          Also: Dualbooting Win7 and Linux is awesome. While it’s hard to find a really nice, accessible linux distribution out there among the overly specialised, buggy or flawed versions..there’s a few really nice ones. And combine that with Win7 for coursework and games that won’t run on linux, and I’m sorted. Apart from the disintegrating screen on this thing, but I can’t blame the OS for that. I have to say though….for all Win8 has its (numerous and glaring) faults, it’s probably still better than Vista.

  5. Dewy
    November 1, 2012, 8:43 am | # | Reply

    I’m donning my fireproof pants as I write this (and that’s pretty difficult!) I actually feel sorry for MS products sometimes. Really I do. Don’t get me wrong, they deserve quite a bit of scorn for some of their bugs and security holes but the sheer amount of rage and hate for them is quite staggering and I don’t understand it. They are products for the masses that allow us to create such fabulous things for a reasonable price. I understand the Apple is better than MS argument but for a LONG time Apple has been unaffordable by most people. Heck, it still is. So what causes this hate? I have no idea.

    So there, I said it. Flame on.

    • Dewy
      November 1, 2012, 8:48 am | # | Reply

      Side note: Boy, does Windows 8 suck or what? Amiright?

      • Andrew
        November 1, 2012, 1:23 pm | # | Reply

        Yeah, you’re right. When the Fry’s computer expert can’t figure out how to switch it to the “classic” look on Windows 8, I’m done looking at Windows 8.

    • Rex Vivat
      November 1, 2012, 10:31 am | # | Reply

      I like to rap on microsoft like everyone else, but I actually prefer using windows than the rest of the current options. I don’t want to have to spend a lot of money on an apple product (also, a lot of the old programs I’ve come to know and love are only compatible with windows…) and as for linux… I really don’t understand how people can stand it. If I want to have some lunch, I do NOT want to first be forced to manufacture the table, forge the pan, and then cook my own food.

      • Wayne Zombie
        November 1, 2012, 10:55 am | # | Reply

        Agreed. Use whatever works for you. I still use Win 7, but usually in a VM on my Mac. I switched because I got tired of Windows crashing and needing to be reinstalled, and the longer productive life of the hardware made the additional cost feel much more reasonable. My MacBook Pro was enjoying a second life as a desktop connected to a 24″ monitor when it suffered lightning damage, it was 5 years old and I’ve never had a PC laptop last more than 3. I don’t abuse my equipment, but it has to travel well and I’ve yet to find a PC that traveled as well as an aluminum-bodied MacBook.

      • Andy4Hire
        November 1, 2012, 5:02 pm | # | Reply

        For the most part, Rex, I agree, but to be fair there are a *few* Linux distributions that are approximately as user-friendly right from the beginning as Windows and MacOS. There are others created precisely for the sort of people who do like to manufacture the table, forge the pan, and cook their own food, of course. But somebody like me who knows just enough about computers to check his e-mail can still install and use *some* Linux distributions without having to learn a whole new skill set.

        But on the whole, yes, I take your point. Windows is familiar, is easy to use (mostly), and runs an awful lot of decent programs that don’t work on other platforms, and Windows machines are cheaper than their Apple counterparts by a factor of a lot.

    • Tetra Valent
      November 1, 2012, 3:21 pm | # | Reply

      Office has been MS’s flagship product and cash cow for 20 years. It’s good when it works, but they have finally bloated and ribboned it to death. Meanwhile, the Linux world seems never to have understood what Access even does, in order to produce a replacement.

      But wow, where to start?

      The callous and arrogant disregard for the low quality of their products? (“That’s not a bug, that’s a *feature*!”)
      The flagrant rejection of security concerns in order to get every possible feature to work by default, while making it nearly impossible to find and disable features the user does not want?

      The holier-than-thou attitude regarding features and configuration (alluded to above by Unity), including built-in spyware?

      The blatantly anti-competitive software bundling and deals with w/ hardware manufacturers that killed competition (aided by the fact that the Antitrust Division was stripped to the bone throughout the 80’s and early 90’s)?

      Sadly, the only significant competition for OSes has been:

      – Apple, who has always been obsessed with form to the detriment of function (serious users need Page Up/Down keys, for example),

      – Linux, whose developers are in their own only-good-if-it’s-open-source world (what Rex Vivat said), and

      – IBM, who abandoned the superior OS2 to chase profits in the services industry.

      And, frankly, NONE of the vendors knows how to do security properly. (Do you know how many websites can turn on your laptop camera? It’s not Adobe’s fault.
      )

      So I keep going back to Windoze and try to whip it into submission.

      • Wayne Zombie
        November 1, 2012, 5:12 pm | # | Reply

        The solution for web cam activation is a piece of tape.

        IBM never understood microcomputers until it was far too late, which was a shame. OS/2 was a great operating system, but it was co-developed with Microsoft, and MS evolved it in to NT with the help of some Dec engineers who brought some PDP tech with them.

        • Anderson
          November 1, 2012, 8:45 pm | # | Reply

          Actually, changing operating systems a few times works as well sometimes. I lost the webcam drivers on this thing when I swapped to Ubuntu from vista, and voila……no more webcam when I put Win7 on it.

          Downside being it’s *actually* no webcam, not just a security feature.

  6. bergerjacques
    November 1, 2012, 8:46 am | # | Reply

    I have lit my Bic lighter for this war of flame.

    • Wayne Zombie
      November 1, 2012, 10:55 am | # | Reply

      A can of WD-40 along with that lighter will do wonders…

      • Andrew
        November 1, 2012, 1:29 pm | # | Reply

        Do you have to shake the can first before using the lighter?

  7. Anon, a mouse
    November 1, 2012, 11:31 am | # | Reply

    Bonding through humor and a shared feeling of superiority over something/someone else… Wars have been averted this way before, you know.

    Squee! UNITY living up to the full potential her name! 😛

    • Manifesta
      November 1, 2012, 7:08 pm | # | Reply

      Best. Screen. Name. Ever!

    • Antaeus Feldspar
      November 2, 2012, 6:37 pm | # | Reply

      Actually, I read it initially as sarcasm – GODOT doesn’t necessarily like organic creatures, and here’s an organic creature dissing … well, if not a fellow computer creature, at least something in the same family. I didn’t think until later that GODOT might actually mean “haha, good one! Let’s bond over this.”

      That’s the problem with pareidolia, it’s so hard to make out tone of voice…

  8. Treesong
    November 1, 2012, 5:12 pm | # | Reply

    Sorry to go off topic, but…I’ve wondered since their last encounter why Unity didn’t just get a bag of brains and munch them on the way to the rendezvous with Ruby to keep the old neurons firing. GODOT could be clouding her mind, perhaps, but despite Ginny’s fretting I don’t think we’ve seen any indication of GODOT’s being able to do more than text overlays. And after all, a bacronym generator doesn’t need anything more than a crude text interface.

    Probably moot, though, because GODOT’s jeremiad should have Unity well on her way to understanding GODOT and finding a cure. My thoughts: since language failed GODOT, give it better language. The acronym that tore it to pieces was probably some made-up impossible challenge like ZZXJOANW = a Maori fife and drum corps. (We’ll never know, because if they ever showed it to us, someone would bacronymize it.) So I prescribe a supplementary English/Chinese dictionary with Pinyin romanization. That has lots of rare-letter starts, Qi Xiang Ju and like that, which should handle whatever some wiseass threw in.

    And going even further afield: Unity has shown one of the two cartoon signs of massively increased intelligence: esoteric technical knowledge coming out of nowhere. But it’s hard to detect the other in word balloons, so I have to ask: is she speaking with an English accent?

  9. Challeron
    November 1, 2012, 5:51 pm | # | Reply

    So … my suggestion that Violet Bee might be the one who keeps Unity’s message intact might actually come true?…

  10. awgiedawgie
    February 22, 2016, 4:14 am | # | Reply

    “Let’s rag on Bing”… so many options, so little time. Bing is an abomination.

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