Goon approved
From Applepedia
Items that pass a rigorous battery of tests to prove their durability, reliability, and value are considered to be Goon approved. In other words, it has to be cheap cheap cheap. Goon approved items will also tend to be anything that is really old, crappy, and for some reason perceived as vintage even though any normal person would perceive it as nothing more than a complete waste of space that can easily be replaced by some $10 thing from the store. Goons eat this stuff up (literally, they eat it).
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G O O N A P P R O V E D
Dell 2005FPW/2007WFP
A monitor, I guess. Achieved goon approval because it serves the purposes of being big enough to replace human contact and because of Dell's constant coupon barrage and abysmal quality control makes them as cheap as possible.
IKEA Jerker
A shitty desk. Multiple tiers of modular shelving for Cheeto storage. Also it's called "Jerker" which is what most goons will be doing in front of it all day and night.
IBM Model M
Loud as fuck buckling-spring keyboard. Lacks windows and command keys. Inferior to the Apple Extended Keyboard and every other keyboard you can't kill a buffalo with.
Dreamhost
Cheap, can't run SQL for shit. Typical load averages are multiples of 20.
HP LaserJet 4/5
300,000 pages, cost $10, is the size of a copier. Need I say more?
Ubuntu Linux
It's so easy, even your grandmother could install it!
Xbox Media Center
Impress the girlies with your grey-market hardware that plays pirated cam rips you download from WDMA.
Linksys WRT54G (v4 AND BELOW ONLY!!!)
DD-WRT
DD-WRT is the solution to all of your wireless networking problems. All of them.
m0n0wall
m0n0wall is for fixing all your networking problems that aren't fixed by DD-WRT.
Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer v3.0
Versions 1.0 and 2.0 are also acceptable, but nothing beyond. If you can find a used one at a tag sale, even better!
Logitech speakers
Applies doubly to the sort of idiot computer-sound audiophiles that are convinced they can hear the difference between a 384-bit MP3 and a 256-bit AAC.
Windows
Perceived to be cheap because it comes with every Dell. Also the best way to be elitist is to embrace what everyone else is using, but pretend you know more about it than they do.
Media Player Classic + DefilerPack
God goons are so stupid; it never ceases to blow my mind. Rather than use an excellent media player such as VLC that comes with every codec under the sun and the added bonus of not sucking, goons choose to use Media Player Classic. It's a shitty throwback to the version of media player that came with Windows 2000 that is perceived to be lightweight and good. Then they install DefilerPack which is some crappy glorified tarball of codecs that will probably screw up your system because MPC can't play anything out of the box. Inevitably people somehow fail to get it working and post threads in SH/SC about how they tried installing MPC and DP and it doesn't work. I seriously can't believe this shit sometimes. It makes about as much sense as using foobar2000 and spending half a day configuring it. Seriously, why would you spend *any* time configuring a music player?
Radium
SA Admin. Goons are convinced that he is the best of the best, despite constantly broken features (search, which is part of a $10 add-on, was broken for months), and random unplanned downtime. Maybe if they sucked it up, quit their jobs at Best Buy that they took for the 10% employee discount and because no one else would hire them with 15 tattoos and no experience, and got jobs in the real world, they would notice that random, unexplained downtime is not the sign of a great administrator.
PHP
If something needs to be programmed, PHP is the way to go, bar none! It's completely free and full of security holes, which makes it perfect for half-baked, incomplete goon programming projects! Also, despite the complete lack of anything resembling good practice in PHP tutorials and books, it makes a great first language.
ASP.NET
Goons bitten by PHP have moved on to dragging and dropping closed-source "controls" in Visual Studio to build ugly web pages that won't work without javascript and a 20kb VIEWSTATE form field inlined into every single page. Remember, if you can't have your ass owned by a software monopoly, you shouldn't be making web pages anyways.
Wikipedia
It's accurate enough. Also useful for proving your point, somehow. Especially when you've just edited the article to make sure it proves your point.
Winamp/Foobar2000
Just as long as it isn't iTunes because heaven forbid an application handles one's shitty music collection better than the user. For some reason foobar requires a substantial time investment to get configured to not look like complete shit and to be usable. Goons of course perceive this as a strength.
Your Mom
Because she's cheap, cheap, cheap.
Dumpster Diving
I know, it's horrific. But goons seem to love it because not only can you get all kinds of stuff that other people threw away, you can also get free food! Yes, there are in fact goons that presumably own a computer with internet access (I guess they could be posting from the library though, but they must have a credit card or they wouldn't have a forums account) and their main method of obtaining nourishment is to wait until late at night and hurl themselves into giant metal trash heaps to find the food that you and I have discarded alongside our used condoms and petri dishes filled with E.coli. Seriously. Don't believe me? Post a fucking thread in GBS asking about the practice and watch them come out of the woodwork. If this doesn't illustrate the type of person that defines themselves as "goons" than nothing will.
