What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?

chrisd writes "The Edge 2008 question (with answers) is in. This year, the question is: 'What did you change your mind about and why?'. Answers are featured from scientists as diverse as Richard Dawkins, Simon Baron-Cohen, George Church, David Brin, J. Craig Venter and the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, among others. Very interesting to read. For instance, Stewart Brand writes that he now realizes that 'Good old stuff sucks' and Sam Harris has decided that 'Mother Nature is Not Our Friend.' What did Slashdot readers change their minds about in 2007?"

Comments

scientist?!

[callmetheraven]

Calling David Brin a scientist is like calling Josef Stalin a humanitarian.
Brin is the King of Hacks.

Re:Weed

[shawn443]

Wow, just 4 years after you decided girls didn't have cooties. Congratulations on your 16th birthday. This same post in 2020, you decide you no longer like drugs because your wife won't let you.

That Slashdot was still a technology site...

[Nova Express]

...rather than an endless Bush-bashing, liberal circle-jerk where any anti-Bush conspiracy theory, no matter how ridiculous, gets modded up and any dissenting opinion gets modded down. There's just no way to avoid the fact that Slashdot is now the latter, which is a very sad development for long time Slashdotters like myself.

You may now commence modding me down...

Re:Linux

[carpe_noctem]

Funny... 2007 was the year that I basically turned my back on open source software and the linux movement. Granted, there are a few OSS communities out there that I still really support (SVN, for starters), but the whole thing has started to leave a bitter aftertaste in my mouth.

Why, you ask?

Quite simple, really... quality vs. philosophy. As I've moved into the pro audio industry, where linux has essentially no foothold at all, the claims of people spouting that OSS is the solution for "everything" have made me realize how absurd the argument is. There are, of course, good examples of OSS software out there, but the problem lies in the fact that it comes down to a big moral battlefield for people, and they forget that a lot of the software that they so vigorously defend just plain sucks. The idea that the source code of a program can be made available to others at no extra cost is a powerful one. However, the idea that distributing one's software in a big 'ol tarball to be compiled by the user is simply idiotic, and I do not miss the hours of fighting to get package X to compile correctly with library Y with configuration Z. Even binary distribution in linux sucks, and inevitably, users that wonder off the beaten path end up having to build the software that they need by hand.

The irony is, in the computer audio industry, there are those who spend more time and money on new digital toys than actually making music. Likewise, it seems that the OSS community is flooded with too many opinionated geeks, and not enough developers. The result is, expectably, crap.

Anyways, sorry for the rant; feel free to flame on. At the end of the day, I am a better and more productive programmer and musician, most of that due to my subconscious switch away from OSS and to other tools that actually do what I need, even if they cost me a bit of dough.