Your Mac-- Male or Female? :)

What sex is your Mac?

  • Male

  • Female

  • I... just... can't... decide...

  • Aw, who cares, anyway?

Results are only viewable after voting.
In German a computer is a Rechner or a Computer, both masculine

Surely the verb 'to compute' has some equivalent in Latin, and so 'one who computes' would be a computer. Would the gender then depend on whether the person doing the computer were a man or a woman? I don't know any Latin myself, so perhaps someone can fill me in
 
I have to say I've never really thought about this, but I voted "female", mainly because personally I'd rather have my computer be female. I dunno; my cube is really attractive, so maybe that has something to do with it. :p Nothing to do with the accessories argument though.

Although the names of the partitions are C3P0 and HAL 9000, so I suppose I need to think of new names for them. :p Anyone want to think of some good names (no, not "Britney" or "Celine", thank you)?

How's this to spark some debate:

Originally from the ITS connection
As you are aware, ships have long been characterized as being female. Recently, a group of computer scientists (all males) announced that computers should also be referred to as being female. Their reasons for drawing this conclusion follow:

1. No one but their Creator understands their internal logic.
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3. The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative as, "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you."
4. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
5. As soon as you commit to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

However, another group of computer scientists (all female) think that computers should be referred to as if they were male:

1. They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
2. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.
3. As soon as you commit to one you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.
4. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
5. Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the night.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by TommyWillB
Aren't their languages that have gender for everything (le Car)?

What gender do these languages say a Mac is?

When a new thing comes into being, who decides its gender? How?
Click to expand...

several languages have grammatical gender, these come to mind at the moment:
German, Russian, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish (and several others). What determines teh gender of the mac is the gender of teh word computer. L'ordinateur, it would be in french, ordinateur is masculine, this "mac" would be masculine.

gender is basically decided upon by the ending of a word. Anything that ends in an A for example is feminine (although there are some exceptions like "dedyshka" in russian that means grandfather).
 
Both my PowerBook and my Quicksilver are male, but I think they actually are gay.

My iMac is...uhm....don't know, never looked. My B&W G3 is male, but dresses like he is female (thought they other gay Macs don't want to play with him).
 
Mine is male... definitively! And it's named "Marvin". I'm not gay either, but its my buddy so to speak. And it does a man's work too! Here's an excerpt from my console log... as you can see, the name is quite fitting (ref. "the Hitchiker's guide to the Galaxy")

I'm not getting you down at all, am I?
I'll just stick my head in a bucket of water
I'll be in the corner
.....

you get the point
 
Yeah, with the 512 MB of RAM... I can just see "Brain the size of a planet and I get brought down here for this?" :)

I caught the Zaphod reference btw... mine is named Trillian :)

Lots of Hitchhiker's Guide fans here, I guess...
 
My PowerMac is Male and his name is PoDFP, short for "Poorly Designed Front Plastic" due to the highly visible plastic stress marks around drive/speaker/button openings.
 
The funny thing about the console messages was they appeared after I had "named" him. Immediately I was dumbstruck, thinking my TiBook had gotten a life of its own, taking on the "Marvin" robot character from Hitchiker's. Kinda fun... I think its the Samba Server that outputs these messages, but I don't know for sure. It would have been fun to have the computer output them to the desktop. Kinda like floating text over all windows that dissapears after a few seconds ;-) Or perhaps a screensaver? Anybody know if the statements are in a resource file, or are they perhaps hardcoded somewhere in the Samba distro?
 
The source of these messages was pinned down in another thread -- it turned out to be the beta Logitech driver.

Here's the link
 
Originally posted by Bluefusion
In Spanish, a computer is "computadora" which I assume is feminine. I don't know the French word.
Click to expand...

Hehè ... computadora is feminine, right. And in one Spanish Mac board you couldn't talk about computers, the word was censured so it looks like com****dora :D

In Italian and Portuguese the computers are male. In Italian only Suns are female.

My computer is now in English mainly so for the language it doesn't have the sex. But I'm sure he (it) is male as I spend so much time with it (him). Besides, I understand the computers so they have to be males - I simply don't understand the females ... :p
 
Ok, let me explain why my Mac is a girl...

Her name is The Monster, she runs Veronica (OS 8.6's code name), have the Kathy sexy voice saying marry me every hour, have a red hair girl icon and she (like Bad Religion's I love my computer song says) can be my princess and she can be my whore... Hell yeah, who's showing me nrop? Her... She's Punk as hell, kinda like the Hardcore Punk chick mentioned earlier in this thread. And yeah, I love her, she truely rocks! :D

BTW, Computer in french is Ordinateur... I like computer better to tell you the truth... :)
 
Alice is her name. From Alice in wonderland and from the Roger Zelazny book-title "come back to the killing ground, Alice my love".

At first It was my sony-ericsson that was called Alice... but now they are both called Alice. Since there are Seven Alices in the Zelazny book, i thought it was ok. :)
 
...my TiBook is! :D

And while I am the Green Hulk he is the Gray version of me... Smaller with less power than mine, sometimes smarter than I am but in the end we are the same:
The Incredible HULK ;)

Alter egos can be a VERY confusing thing :confused:

Trust me! :D
 
My iMac is named "Spielberg," but I call it a bitch whenever it acts up. This computer remains generically named.

In Spanish, "puta" = "whore" so you're basically saying "com-whore-dora" (which, oddly enough, sounds right... :eek:).

I, too, am a Douglas Adams fan. I haven't read those books in so long; I should go back and re-read all the Hitchhiker books.
 
Originally posted by Giaguara
Hehè ... computadora is feminine, right. And in one Spanish Mac board you couldn't talk about computers, the word was censured so it looks like com****dora :D

In Italian and Portuguese the computers are male. In Italian only Suns are female.

My computer is now in English mainly so for the language it doesn't have the sex. But I'm sure he (it) is male as I spend so much time with it (him). Besides, I understand the computers so they have to be males - I simply don't understand the females ... :p
Click to expand...

In French it's "ordinateur", which the one who puts everything in the right order, or who brings order into things. Therefore at home Macs should be females, and at work they should be males... or is it the other way around ?
 
In "Computer Love" by Kraftwerk, the computer is female :rolleyes:

My computer is a static piece of metal and plastic. AFAIK I say "He" when I personnalize him (esp. when agry at him). Rest fot the time, it's "the computer". :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top