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Linus says Linux is fun
tknockers writes
"News.com has a story about how Linus describes
Linux as being "fun". He even goes on to say that in 150
years our lives will only be motivated by fear of
boredom. "
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Exactly my point. The Romans falled because they were so preoccupied by "having fun". A society were entertainement is the only important moral value is a really decadent society (funnily enough, the US is leading the way in entertainement...)
You forgot the pseudo-laws that say that:
a) Evolution goes faster than we expect (Linux is an example)
b) We will live longer than we expect (due to (a) applied to medicine)
This mean we will live in that future... Scary...
I use linux everyday, but I've never thought of it as a "fun" OS. The BeOS is much closer to my idea of a fun OS.
He was actually saying that people make entertainment a priority once they can take survival (food, shelter) for granted. The people in boring menial jobs obviously cannot. If you're in a menial job but have the financial resources to support yourself, you would likely take another job at less pay because it's more interesting. Basicaly, people consider survival first, before social and entertainment issues.
Although menial jobs and the lower class have always existed, as more and more things are automated, it's likely that the menial jobs will slowly shift towards entertainment. They would still be considered "lower class" but would be orientated towards providing entertainment to others. As the cost of providing survival becomes proportionaly less, the amount of "work" needed to earn a living is likely to decrease and be replaced with less boring "work".
-- From Berkeley
Linux claims that people will take less money for an interesting job, because entertainment is more important than survival. This seems to imply that work is the only joy in life. I would like to think that the money I make can be used for more than vital needs. In fact, I'd prefer a high paying jod for two reasons. ... stuff that Linus seems to despise!
1) I don't need to work as many hours. That leaves more time for pure leisure time.
2) More money => More fun. Entertainment costs, but thats ok. I like earning money because I can go on vacation, I can go out,
Of course you can't. And neither can anyone disprove it. It's therefore a quite useless statement, except to those who like the sound of the words for the aesthetic or artistic value.
Think about it.
. . . . "with your Gin'n'tonic Futon Brain!"
"Positronic Photon Brain, you idiot!"
(Seraphita and Tolone, Xenogears)
And then enjoy "fun" it brings. However, Linus talked about the future (>150 years). I hope we have found a better way than the money system or at least have found a better way to distribute money among the world population.
Well, Linus argued that "looking for sex" changes from a survival necessity (reproduction) to a social need (people have sex to maintain relationships) to entertainment.
He also argued that pure thought is entertainment: thus, mathematics is entertaining. It also sometimes is interesting, but it isn't fulfilling desperate needs.
Definitely. It was actually a shame how many people walked out immediately after Linus spoke. Pam Samuelson was actually one of the most interesting speakers, although the other couple were quite interesting, too.
One line synopses:
Manuel Castells: "The network society means that the income gap increases; corporations that are flexible, or can make themselves flexible [e.g. IBM] survive and become extremely powerful by JIT supplies, ability to play governments against each other..."
Ilkka Tuomi: "Finnish people have a national agenda toward technology; are likely to innovate due to homogeniety, small national size, national wealth"
Samuelson: "Despite the anarchists' most sincere wishes, the internet has, and will continue acquire regulation, both fundamental [restrictions on the technologies; implicit assumptions in the protocols], internal [sysadmins, network pressures], and external [US congress]. It is important to know what these rules are, and to understand how to influence them to build a coherent policy."
There is also the aspect of social status. Is being a janitor really all that "simple" or unsophisticated? No, but our society considers cleaning up after other people's messes to be a low-status occupation.
Maybe someone values the freedom to do their job without being watched more than they value being constantly entertained by it. This has to do with individual differences and individual preferences, and does not falsify Linus' theory.
Linus is not saying that everyone is identical. Changes in society do not requiure a 100% vote. It boils down to individual utility. What Linus is saying is that there are some things (like survival) that everyone wants. He postulates that communication is also on that list, and suggests that as a society 'develops', some general efficiency (and i use this term loosely) increases to the point that the REST of everyone's utility function begins to drive behavior to the point where it is noticable in the form of "social trends".
I'm sure Linus' modest salary helps assuage the pain of accepting money for working on what he loves.
The rest of us will simply have to tolerate so-called "money" in order to support our so-called "family"--
This is hilarious! Made it worth wading through the rest of this crap.
You are reading too much in Linus's words.
The greatest amount of satisfaction comes
from being able to contribute, being able to
help others, being able to make a difference
in other's life for the better. Also, rewards
come in the form of words of appreciation,
gratitude and respect.
The free software coders like Linus, Larry Wall,
and others derive tremendous amount of
satisfaction and motivation from the fact
that the general population is finding
their work useful.
That's why they keep on improving their
work and they don't abandon their
projects as soon as it feel tedious.
Linus is doing Linux for 8 years and he still
says it is great fun.
Of course your unconvinced you got it all wrong.
Hierarchy of needs meant, that you don't start
worrying about stage 2 until you get stage 1
taken care of. Ie food, shelter comes first
entertainment last. And this doesn't go just for
advanced societies.
Me too... I designed a Website for our dept to use gater all information that we need in one place..basically bookmarks and frams which is easy to do.. now they offer me a position to make a offcial looking website but they use front page.. told him Using a WYSIWYG editor is boreing I like to type my own page. I like to use Hippy or HomeSite 4.01 and Cute HTML type and learn the codes.. ;-)
told them.. i'm sorry i started in dos too bad it went away. Now I'm learning Linux!!!! typeing commands and editing conf files using Vi editor is fun. cuz not everybody can do it.
My webserver was Apache for Win32..it have cool conf file that i have to edit to configure the server. so i'm sure that file is updated correctly. and don't use any driver in windows/system directory..
If you don't know anything else but working at Burger joint that all you can do. What I trying to say here is if you have knowlege,experience, some paper that say you know this then you have more choices. They probably don't.
Some people who working in Burger joint they work there becasue they like the job.. like to talk to peoples there, asking question like "W'you like Fries with that" etc. May be they like their sopicicated Cash register also.
Nice artical man. I conversate about this subject before with afew peoples, I have to show them this artical.
for me.. Machines! they don't save time. They just make you more productive, also waste more time.
I need to learn more english
E.G.
So I was on 28.8 connection to internet, slow can't do much but can't d/l big Demo Games, softwares, MM etc.
Cables was offered I thought I'll save time because of its speed. No I spent 2x more a day on the Net now. But I got a lots of things done that are needed to be done on Net. So I can watch TV.. Oh yeah.. I don't have no more time.
Time is hard to explain.
A lots of Jobs.
Maybe its time to plan my own counsulting company that support Linux in my local area.
Near the end of the panel, some guy went up there asking Linus to clarify his 'prediction' of the
future.
Linus simply responded, practically, that these changes aren't going to happen anytime soon, and
that he hoped that the opportunities that are given to the more fortunate would trickle down
to those without.
In the end, he's just a (uber)hacker just like anyone else offering his opinion on his version
of utopia. (+ as mentioned before, a good marketing gimmick...)
One thing that has to be pointed out in this discussion of "boredom" is that computer and other hi-tech toys doesn't always equal to excitements.
Furthermore, cleaning toilets may be carry more excitements to some than playing video games.
Methinks the kids here are too spoilt. They have no inkling of what "R*E*S*P*E*C*T" means already.
To work at a job, no matter how hi-tech, or how well-paid it is, if one has no respect for his/her own job, one will be bored to death. On the other hand, low-tech jobs like flipping burgers may give the sense of "FULFILLMENT" that no hi-tech junkies can imagine.
I was a poor student, and I worked my ass off in all types of odd jobs, including flippping burgers and yes, cleaning toilets. Today I am working in the hi-tech arena, but it doesn't mean I will forget my low-tech past.
First, comparing Linus T. to Einstein is a wee bit of a stretch. Second, who is qualified to be a pacifist? Politicians? Is there some special training required to become a pacifist?
Just because Einstein was a great physicist doesn't imply that he was wrong when talking about other things.
At the bottom line, sex is -required- in order to
pass your own genes on beyond your death, so your
body is 'tuned' in order to take it as something
needed (after food, but before a lot of things).
One problem with the sex drive (in men in particular), is people will become addicted to
whatever they use to satisfy it -- be it porn,
nymphomania, onanism or paedophilia.
help me, i'm afraid. linus is starting to sound like RMS day by day.
1000-years ago: you worked 12 hours a day just to eat.
Now: After 8 hours work, I stop by BestBuy to see what video games are on sale this week.
People who say devices don't save time should get a historical context. In the time of Jesus, people didn't hang out at the mall all day, and things definately were not as fun as they are now.
Thing is, once you've got your pocket nano assembler your not going to need any things ever again. Except for atoms to build new things, and the good place to find a wide variety of atoms is...ta-da, the dump. You could even recycle your own feces, build food out of it maybe (sorry if that sounds gross, but if you could, would you not want to?)
Linus said that sex started out as a need (for survival of the species or one's own genes), and progressed to a social activity (relationships) and then to entertainment. Thus, Linus's Law.
Wow... what a concept. People do something because it's fun? WOW. Christ, you would figure that the Linux guru himself would come up with something a little more intelligent than that.
Stephenson's _Diamond Age_ is a more accurate prediction of the future, methinks. _Snow Crash_ is satire; _Diamond Age_ is the blueprint for a new social order, provided nanotechnology becomes practical that is.
I think the issue is not necessarily 'employed' but 'meaningfully employed'. Think about how much the population of the US is taxed in order to support a huge corps of bureaucrats, inspectors, functionaries, and other assorted paper-pushers, all of whom would probably have to find other work if we had a choice about what to spend our money on. They're employed, but they aren't really _productive_ in the sense of "adding value to society". I mean, what's the War on (Some) Drugs but a giant WPA project for cops and prisons?
*sigh* Exploitation, n.: what happens when a First World company employs a Third World worker and an unrelated First World person decides he doesn't like the situation.
While I will agree with you that colonialism has pervasive, invidious, and long-lasting effects (my favorite example: in the 1500s, Japan and Indonesia were both feudal, agrarian societies at about the same technological level; Indonesia became a colony, while Japan shut its doors to Westerners; by 1900, the effects were pretty clear...) it can't be blamed for everything. E.g.: South Korea vs. North Korea. As recently as 1944 the whole of Korea was pretty much in the same boat. Today, despite having been, arguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _its_ patron state! And don't forget, the USA was once a colony, not so different from many other New World colonies. Explaining why we came out on top requires a deeper explanation than "colonialism and imperialism bad".
Let's examine current "exploitation", though. Suppose the US corporation Giganticorp sets up a factory in Malaysia, paying its workers X amount per hour, to make products which are then shipped back to the US. It's not clear precisely who loses here. Giganticorp pays less for manufacturing than it would for a US factory; these profits are passed either to the consumer in the form of lower costs, or the stockholders. The workers have a job that they would presumably not have otherwise; this money passes from the US economy into the Malaysian economy. The Malaysian government probably takes its share in taxes too. Plus, of course, there are all the associated costs and the jobs those create: electricity, shipping, etc. It's not clear who is being "exploited" here. (And yet somehow the Western world is portrayed as the one getting rich off this.) Are the wages great? Are the working conditions fantastic? Probably not. But then we have to ask why it is that the workers take the jobs. Is it unreasonable to assume that they regard the jobs as preferable to whatever else they have an opportunity to do? This is perhaps the most irritating thing about Western liberalism in this area: it reduces the people it supposedly is the most concerned about, the "exploited" workers, to the level of children or morons, portraying them not as rational human beings making choices, but as objects used by Westerners. (Interesting that it always requires Westerners to "save" the people, no matter what the problem or the time...)
If the working conditions are frankly _abusive_, or the workers are forcibly prevented from organizing, yes, this is a problem - _but then the issue of First World/Third World is a red herring_. These things would be abuses wherever they occurred; there's nothing about the FW/TW relationship that makes these abuses peculiar to that relationship. If the government of Malaysia is corrupt and permits or even commits abuses against the workers, for the sake of having Giganticorp remain there, then yes, this is a Bad Thing - but again, it's nothing inherent to the relationship.
And lastly, on a more empirical note, people on all sides of the debate should learn to take a longer view of the issue. Three hundred years ago, life expectancy in the US was much lower than it is today, formal education much rarer, and the nation in general less wealthy. Is the argument that we became so by "exploiting" others? A thousand years ago Europe was a ridiculous little backwater; the Middle East and Asia were richer and more stable. And someday the tables will turn again...just as we leapfrogged them, so they will leapfrog us again.
(Two good resources, in parting: _Weapons_of_the_Weak, by James C. Scott, and _All_the_Trouble_In_the_World_, by PJ O'Rourke.)
It seems Linux is going the same way as M$: intent on destroying the opposition and leaving users no choice in operating systems, and furthermore commenting on social implications much like Bill Gates does with his books along the line of "One Web, One Program, One whatever". (Eeeerie and spooky)
/.-maintainers could make an icon just like the Bill G. icon with a Borg implant in it, but now with Linus on it.
Now Linus is starting to comment on social issues.
You know, the fun stuff is all fine and well, but there are people (like me) who can't afford to walk out on a job that's boring. I've got bills to pay and kids to feed. And my kids having a good life is more important to me than having fun at my job.
Next to this, people who accept lower pay because they just want to have a fun job are stupid and should brush up on job negotiation skills.
If a company needs a UNIX/Linux expert, they better well damn pay for it.
And...who invented the fact of incorporating "fun" into business plans? I mean: in every single company description I read, I encounter the word "fun" a million times: a fun working enviroment, we must have fun! And we must have it now!
Fun is something you can't force: it comes with the atmosphere, the people. Fun is what you make of it. If you're looking bored and grumpy all day coz you have to use NT or any other non-UNIX/Linux stuff, it's sure there's no fun: a collection of grumpy and bored programmers in a room.
Don't get me wrong, Linux is an amazing technical achievement and surely has an enormous impact on the way we see software/project-development management and development frameworks/co-operation styles, but keep off the social issues Linus.
Maybe you
Dude, that was discovered years and years ago.
Anyone who has taken an economics class knows about this: it's called Maslow's Law.
The only economic law that holds IMHO, for many areas in business, society and now computing.
the Linux people are more open than the Windows people (asking questions, etc.) Many people who use linux are arseholes, just as many windows users are. In my experience, University HelpDesk, Macintosh users are the worst of them all.
you can learn how it works easily I'm not so sure about this. linux is quite a beast. The only reason you can learn how it works more quickly than windows/mac is that you can never really learn how they work internally without source code. Linux is the only software that i feel i know internally and it was not easy to come to that understanding. the linux kernel is hundreds of thousands of seemingly endless lines of code.
I agree that we will all seek fun things, but the majority of the world cares very little about programing, except that the program does infact work. If linux does achieve world domination, many people will have the same working knowledge of it that they do of windows, that is: there is a desktop, i click and double click, maybe i even drap and drop a little... source code? what's that?
The question many you have to ask is: Are there tasks which exist which are wholly worth doing, and neccessary for society to function, yet no one finds them interesting or fun?
How about proper documentation and user interface coding for Linux apps? (half serious) Certainly no robot is going to do that. Better examples are perhaps things like taking out the garbage, policing high schools, and having sex with your wife.
I get a little antsy when I read about the wonders of this wonderful star-trek like society where everyone does what's fun, no one hates their job, and boredom is the only enemy.
You know, everything ceases to be fun and interesting after awhile. What happens then? You just abandon your task and leave everyone who depended on you wanting? Where's responsibility?
Let's say you found the ZNOME project, an extension to GNOME. It's the hottest thing, and you are one of the hottest coders, the lead maintainer, and pretty much responsible for the success of the project and its management.
Then, you decide you are bored of it, and quit all of a sudden? Sure, other people can take your place, but you still do damage in your wake. If Linus, Miguel, Rasterman, etc all totally abandoned their projects to get more interesting research jobs, would none of you feel let down or complain?
There comes a point in every project, like after 80% of it is done, and that last 20% of polish seems to be like the last mile in a marathon. It's boring sometimes, it hurts, you wish you could do something else.
Are we heading to a society where no on can be depended on to finish a task because it might become boring, irritating, or uninteresting?
Perhaps this is the WHOLE ESSENCE OF Open Source.
I get a flash of energy, I feel like coding up the 513th CD Player applet, this time using GTK and XML for some strange reason. I get it 70% done to where it's workable, but then I get bored and release it without documentation or any usability and hope someone else is interested enough to finish the work for me?
It seems like the MTV Attention Deficit Order society to me.
I'm picturing an eBay for kidnappers.
This is completely wrong.
First of all, one of the major causes for instability and "civil wars" on third world countries is the intervention of former colonial powers. You know, like the US arming guerrillas to overthrow a government that puts its people's interests above those of US corporations. Or supporting a brutal, murderous dictatorship because it supports corporations robbing the people. Can you say Guatemala, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Indonesia, etc.?
Also, the industrialized nations put great economic pressure on the third world. Suppose you are the president of a third world republic, and you want to develop your country. You need capital to do this, which you lack. So you turn to the financial institutions of the industrialized world for help (World Bank, International Money Fund, etc.). They might offer you money, if they like you, but, you have to comply with several conditions: you have to set up a "free market economy", eliminating governmental subsidies, opening up you country's economy to external investors, and eliminating tariff protections for your country's products.
Which means that foreign investors get the upper hand at every stage--- they have more capital than local investors, and there are no compensating government subsidies for the locals, so they get beat on investments; since you have no import tariffs, your local products can't compete against those from first world companies (which are frequently subsidized by governments). The outcome is all too familiar.
The exploitation is clearly still there.
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100-\infty% is a better estimate. The factory wouldn't be here and the prospective employees, lacking the money for the overseas trip, would need to find employment in the local economy.
Well, if the industrialized countries didn't try so goddamned hard to undermine the local economies, maybe this would be an argument.
But, as it stands, this argument loses legitimacy with every dollar (pound, franc, mark, whatever) spent by the first-world on guerrillas, dictators, bribes, and economic advantages.
---
MYou are taking my logic backwards ("p implies q" does not imply "q implies p"). I don't hold that if an economy is subsidized, it will bloom. I only hold that subsidies are an advantage many US corporations have, that is systematically denied to count ries that wish to receive economic aid.
Today, despite having been, a rguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _ its_ patron state!
I think the fact the US came out on top, and not, say, Brazil, is due mainly to historical reasons. (Anyway, the fact the West ern world came out on top could very well be an historical accident. What if the Persians had beat the Greeks? What is Charles Martel (?) had not beat the Moors in France in 753 A.D.?)
However, this is not what I set out to do. I set out to explain why the Western powers stay on top, not why they came to be on top. My position is that there is a strong economic and militaty pressure to keep them down.
Let's examine current "exploitation", though. Suppose the US corporation Giganticorp sets up a factory in Malaysia, paying its workers X amount per hour, to make products which are then shipped back to the US. It's not clear precisely who loses here. Giganticorp pays less for manufacturing than it would for a US factory; these profits are passed either to the consumer in the form of lower costs, or the stockholders. The workers have a job that they would presumably not have otherwise; this money passes from the US economy into the Malaysian economy. The Malaysian government probably takes its share in taxes too. Plus, of course, there are all the associated costs and the jobs those create: electricity, shipping, etc. It's not clear who is being "exploited" here.
It is clear who is getting exploited. Those who are doing most of the work for the least pay.
(And yet somehow the Western world is po rtrayed as the one getting rich off this.)
This is not a "portrait"; this is a fact. How much money do you think corporations get out of the goods produced in the third world? How much stays in the local economy?
But then we have to ask why it is that the workers take the jobs. Is it unreasonable to assume that they regard the jobs as preferable to whatever else they have an opportunity to do?
What about the opportunities that the industrial powers have systematically tried to kill for third world workers? Like, union organization, popular democratic movements, and so on. The industrialized nations have a long story of attacking these movements in the third world, by means of tactics like supporting oppressive dictatorships, by terrorism, or by infiltrating popular movements.
Thus you are taking "opportunities" in a much too narrow sense here. If you mean "opportunities" as in the choices they have within the political and economical circumstances the first world countries actively attemp to restrict them to, well, then the "opportunities" (a horrible euphemism here, I think: working for 15 cents an hour, 12-14 hours a day, at some menial job, making some american executive earn millions a year, and missing out on chances to work to improve living conditions for their own country) are preferable. However, when you step out of that narrow view, you realize that these people's real opportunities are squashed by the power of a ruthless economical elite at every step of their lives.
This is perhaps the most irritating thing about Western liberalism in this area: it reduces the people it supposedly is the most concerned about, the "exploited" workers, to the level of children or morons, portraying them not as rational human beings making choices, but as objects used by Westerners. (Interesting that it always requires Westerners to "save" the people, no matter what the problem or the time...)
I don't see where my argument is reducing them to children or morons. I just argued that current first world economic, military and politic policies are directed towards keeping the third world poor, so that the industrial economic elite can profit. This has nothing to do with the great talents of third world people.
And I don't necessarily ask anyone to "save" the third world. I ask, as a minimum, not to screw them over. That's very different.
If the working conditions are frankly _abusive_, or the workers are forcibly prevented from organizing, yes, this is a problem - _but then the issue of First World/Third World is a red herring_. These things would be abuses wherever they occurred; there's nothing about the FW/TW relationship that makes these abuses peculiar to that relationship. If the government of Malaysia is corrupt and permits or even commits abuses against the workers, for the sake of having Giganticorp remain there, then yes, this is a Bad Thing - but again, it's nothing inherent to the relationship.
The possibility to abuse is inherent to the relationship. The power to abuse is inherent to the relationship, that's why. These relationships were set up by force, and are kept as they are by force, be it exerted by explicit means (shooting union leaders) or implicit (threats of firing workers, depriving them oif their means for subsistence).
You talk about laboral abuses as if something incidental when they occur in third world countries (they can, and do occur, in the first world). Then, why is it that the industrial powers, and in particular the US, support governments that permit and encourage such abuses, and attack those who resist them? Think Guatemala, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua.
Three hundred years ago, life expectancy in the US was much lower than it is today, formal education much rarer, and the nation in general less wealthy. Is the argument that we became so by "exploiting" others?
In great part, yes. The native americans were forcefully expelled from their lands, which, in the case of the south, were planted by black slaves.
The US is also a militaristic power that derives great riches from the sales of military equipment. More often than not, to third world nations with questionable human rights records.
But of course, history is always more complex than that.
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I would have to point out to everyone that, hey, there's a world outside the industrialized nations (hell, considering the /. demographics, outside the USA, I'd say). Where do third world countries fit into this whole story?
The economical abundance of the industrialized countries, and the concommitant techonological advances, like it or not have been built on the exploitation and pauperization of the third world.
The driving motor for technological advance, in general (apart from the possible intentions of individual inventors) has not been a desire to make people have more time for entertainment, but rather to diminish the wage costs of production. Yes, the reason the money for developing and building industrial robots has appeared is not because the industry wants laid-off workers to have fun in the free time the robots create for them...
And don't get me started in the american "entertainment" industry.
All this is just an egotistical "I just wanna have fun" fantasy, with no concern for reality. In fact, I think that a society where everyone could just have fun would take a lot of work to set up and maintain, and not the kind of work doable by a machine. Yeah, for example, can anyone here volunteer to learn Yoruba and translate all the Linux documentation into it, so Yoruba speakers get the same opportunities for fun we do? Care to coordinate the translations for the thousands of langauges found in the world? Hell, for that matter, care to coordinate translations of all documentation in your system for all languages spoken in the USA?
BTW, try reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, you might find it interesting. It describes a society somewhat along "entertainment" lines (although people still work).
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isn't everything, especially if you hate your job the way I hated my last one. I mean, just
imagine admining NT -- getting paged at night two or three times a week 'cause IIS died, etc.
Even in the job I'm in now, which is at a mostly-NT shop, I'll only work on projects that
are based around Linux or some other stable operating system. I want to do cool things, not
put out a bunch of fires!
Linux restores the good 'ol days where the OS didn't try to keep you from working.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Linus doesn't explicitly state that we'll all have so much free time in the future that we'll be bored. And that's a good thing too because it's not true. If we look back at the labor saving devices invented in the last 200 years, it boggles the mind. Yet today we still mostly work for a living. Many people work longer hours than ever as companies shed as many employees as the possibly can. The fact is that labor saving devices don't exist in a vacuum. They are part of the fabric of our society. Computerization both changes society and is moulded by society.
I highly recommend the essay Speeding Towards Meaninglessness: Why Labor Saving Devices Don't Save Time. It's part of Steve Talbott's NETFUTURE site, which I've recommended on this forum before. Steve is a pseudo-luddite and an enviro-weenie who worships primitive cultures, but he and his contributors do have a lot to add to our understanding of the affect of technology on human existencs.
Posted by k150:
;) but i like that linus, unlike g4Ý3Z or mr inventor/vp, made useful points.. about society. i did not mind at all that technology wasn't covered. my was the nokia guy with overhead presentation longwinded! i fell asleep. i am a polisci major anyway.
you gave a good summary of the seminar/lecture/panel...
i went with some friends b/c i saw a poster that said "linus torvalds to speak today, pauley ballroom, 1pm"... and we got to listen to a bunch of other people before him
k
I think something in the California water must have gotten to Linus. I'm worried about the future of the kernel.
Meet the new future, same as the old future.--
--
=8^
Arguably, the recent trend is toward an increase in the percentages of the lower class; manufacturing jobs get shifted from the First World to the Third World, creating an overall erosion in per-hour earnings for many, many people, offset by the creation of a relative handful of middle/upper class incomes in the emerging economies. It ultimately results in a shrinkage (per 1,000 population) in the audiences for entertainers to entertain.
This apparently means we'll have eleventy-gazillion bad pop singers in this Grand Future. The notion that "entertainin' th' rich folks" is some sort of great improvement is neither true nor a new concept. Some slaves were entertainers in the US, IIRC; a step up from menial labor, but at the end of the day, you're still a slave.
Alongside this, the history of modern professional sport has its roots in "entertainin' massa'n'his friends" (the 20th Century racial slur "lawn jockey" has its roots in those horrid statues "commemorating" those early athletes); post-slavery, many boxers, basketball players, baseball players, etc, found sports a better gig than working in the coalmines, but the pay wasn't all that good -- you still had to get a job in the offseason, and you still were quite likely to be poor after your sports career was over. Back to the coalmines, if some serious sports injury didn't preclude that... It wasn't until the latter half of this century that athletes could even begin to think of sports as a lucrative career, and that really didn't come to fruition until the last 25 years.
And that lucrativeness comes, in part, from the exclusivity -- there's no way that eleventy-gazillion goaltenders will be a workable possibility, just as there can't be 17,305 songs or movies in the Top Ten.
And if you think entertainment is "fun", you try working roomfuls of middle-aged, middle-class drunks (or their equally putrid offspring) for a living.
Maybe we can have a dozen restaurants at every street corner. And, of course, that will trigger a growth industry in teaching people how to say "Would you like more coffee, sir?"
Let a thousand theme parks bloom...
In this sort of future, I see an increase in guerrillas, both in the First and Third World; no matter how many ways you find to say "Let Them Eat Cake", the result is you're pissing off more and more people. Beware the Critical Mass(es).
Linus is a great hacker, but a lousy futurist; of course, I won't be able to prove it for another 150 years.
--
--
=8^
Good sex and good conversation should do more than fulfill a social need, it should be fun. If you start to think about sex as something you do because you have to get laid from time to time, you'll be less likely to experiment and you won't get as much out of it.
--
Xenu loves you!
is a whole hell of a lot more useful than Quake skills, to be quite frank. Hell, you can pimp your kinks out a lot easier than Quake skills.
;-P.
I liked those Romans, they had their priorities straight. OTOH most people seem to think of programming as something twisted and perverted (witness VB "programmers") so maybe we can just lump real programming in there with hot wax and ball gags
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
How does this affect me now, half a decade after the primary concerns which prompted the development of these devices have evaporated? I, and millions of others, have the opportunity to take a "job" in an industry which offers exciting things. I enjoy my work; it certainly doesn't bore me. That's what those archaic devices provided me.
What's wrong with decadence and sexual perversion? ;)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Madonna today announced that sex is fun, and noted chef Paul Purdom, taking his queue from Madonna and Linus, affirmed his conviction that eating is fun. Journalists and sociologists everywhere were stunned by the news. "So this explains why people spend so much time hacking, eating, and doing the nasty with each other!" said noted techno-journalist Jon Katz. "I knew there had to be some kind of motivator." Katz added that he doesn't understand why people don't spend more time "doing the nasty" with robots, since he considers this activity to be fun, as well.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Note HEAVY sarcasm
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Actually, that pretty well describes my present life, except for the vomiting part. See? The degeneration is already upon us! Oh me, oh my. I never knew so much hard work would lead to degeneracy.
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
That's cool; we need a certain number of managers, accountants, construction workers, and so on. There are construction workers out there who are getting paid more than I (a 22-year-old system administrator in a college town, granted) make. My tai chi instructor is one. ;)
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Lead plumbing may have destroyed the Roman empire.
:)
17 inch particle accelerators and bad ergonomics may destroy us as our "information society" (from Al Gore buzzword bingo) enslaves us in a pattern of BSOD reinforced behavior.
Linux and wearable computers will save the world.
Wine jugs coated with lead-based glazes, on the other hand...
That creativity article you mentioned brings up a darn good point..
Humans are at the mercy of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle! If you try to ask someone philosophically why they act the way they do, they'll slightly change the way they act to accomodate this new-found knowledge (they now know more about why they act the way they do). Their position stays the same (right where you stopped them to ask them the question), but their actions change.
It's a slight deviation from the conclusion that this article was taking, but it works once you think about it!
Right! He won the Nobel Peace prize. But lots of people had already made the obvious observation that above ground nuclear testing causes fallout. Pauling used his status as a famous scientist to get governments to listen to him, while the same governments wouldn't listen to (less famous) people more qualified on the results of nuclear testing.
Well, I've never quite understood why people treat the opinion of experts as more than cocktail party chatter when they talk about matters beyond their field of expertise. For example, pacifists love to quote Albert Einstein and Linus Pauling as if the fact that these great scientists were pacifists meant something. As far as I can tell, neither relativity nor the nature of the chemical bond has any bearing on the subject.
Of course everyone talks about matters beyond their training. Linus (Torvalds, that is, Pauling is dead) has a perfect right to chatter about anything at all if he so wishes. But just because he's one hell of a programmer doesn't give him magical insights into other affairs.
Linus Pauling is a poor example for your argument; he did after all win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards nuclear disarmament as well as his Nodel Prize in Chemistry for working out the structure of proteins.
On the other hand, I've always thought of Linux as a fun OS. Yeah, BeOS is pretty cool, but I'd rather play with Linux. I think it's the ability to tinker with the source code that attracts me.
.)
In fact, I was just telling my supervisor how much fun Linux is. I even came in on my day of to upgrade a kernel -- off the clock! (I sure wouldn't volunteer to install an NT Service Pack this way, though . .
Of course, we all are entitled to our own opinion. If you think BeOS or MacOS or whatever is fun, more power to ya!
At least we don't have lead plumbing for bringing us drinking water. :-)
(Of course, I can't pronounce half the ingredients in half my meals these days... Maybe I should start shopping at Whole Foods or something.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
What was the example?
---------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage,
One might argue that if people are no longer struggling to survive and as such they will gravitate towards "non-boring" jobs... then you might arrive at the conclusion that open-source is the first of a long series of social changes which will be taking place in both mainstream, and computing culture.
However, the fundamental logic flaw here is.. event A is not linked to event B. People may not be dependent on "surviving" with a job.. but that does not necessarily mean that as a result, they will seek out non-boring jobs. There may be a group of people that seek more money, and will sacrifice personal satisfaction at the job to get it.
Linus makes a good point, but don't take it at face value.
--
'nuff said. If the project was motivated by the Mighty Buck, it would never have gotten to where it is today. Linus started developing Linux because he didn't want to pay the insane prices for a UNIX system.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I'm sorry but this article, and the philosophy it espouses is dangerous.
It's okay when read in a reflective mood, "just to keep things in perspective". But taking it serious would be foolish.
Primitive cultures were and are NOT peaceful idyllic communities.
They are disease ridden hell pits of starvation and oppression. Take some time and look into the conditions in which lower class India live. The cow dung used to cook emits poison toxins which slowly kill as they heat. Furthermore if you want to see real inquity, between sexes and ages that's your place.
I'll take this 'hi-tech' society anyday. Where I can seek out the few like minded people that exist in this world, where I can spend hours everyday experimenting and creating, exercising my mind. After considering the alternatives I think it's a pretty good way to live.
Well, read Jack Vance's "The Demon Princes",
which has exactly that - a hostage interchange which auctions off hostages if the ransom isn't being paid in time...
There was quite a bit more to the panel than you gather from the news.com article. Linus spent much of his time providing examples for "Linus's Law" which said that the only three things that motivate people are 1. Survival (food, shelter, etc...), 2. Social Needs (communication, relationships, sex), and 3. Entertainment. He then pointed out how many things move from a survival stage, to social, and then eventually entertainment, as do societies (e.g. the romans). He said something like "First you worry about surviving, then about your social communications with others, and then you end up partying all night." But he wasn't the only interesting one on the panel - there were a few others including Prof. Castells who talked about the need for worrying about the application for technology both in schools and in society at large, instead of just dumping it there and expecting the best to come out of it. He gave an example of how a good technology such as email introduced in the wrong way to a society can be turned in the wrong direction easily. He also stressed that schools shouldn't just be wired, but provide a system for using the internet that they're connected to. Overall an interesting talk, but its focus was more on society than on technology, and my feeling was that there were a lot of folks there just for Linus's talk.
Yeah, right.
Rome is full of them, bonehead!
Actually, ITALY is full of them.
Sheesh...
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
colour me unconvinced. this "Hierarchy of Needs" seems to mean that in advanced societies people give more of their attention to the "higher" levels. as far as i can see, this is 1) not quite true, and 2) not the same as what Linus is saying. switching from "looking for food & sex" to "looking for entertainment" (even assuming the switch is made; i'm extremely doubtful about the sex part) doesn't actually go up in any way, unless the entertainment itself is "up there". now, in Linus' case it is, because Linus is a hacker and hackers will consider "entertainment" things that they actually ifnd interesting. but that's not what is being sold as "entertainment" out there. in an "entertainment" society, people will (and do) mostly relieve their boredom with time wasters, not with meaningful thought/exploration/discipline/etc. technology makes life easier, but I don't see it making society any wiser (and complexity does not equal wisdom).
The way around it is to have 'more important' people give the robot an order not to obey other people when those people tell it to destroy itself. If you have a hierarchy of people, it works pretty well.
As for Asimov, well, he was a sci-fi writer. And about 100 other kinds too. :)
Seriously, if you haven't seen a book by him, then...well...I don't believe you. He wrote something like 200 of them. :)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
>>You should be on the lookout for a Caesar if you want to draw parallels :P
Gee, what did Caeser do? Overreach his military power and spread his standing army out all over the map?
Any government we know doing that? Nah....
Historians have found that the lead water pipes the Romans used also contributed quite a bit to the downfall, seeing as how it made everyone freakin' insane.
Europe and other third world countries have more 'make work' than we have in the US. Their state welfare programs are far larger, and they only aggravate unemployment problems. In France and Germany for example, there are many employment laws that make it difficult to fire an employee. As a result, the employeer thinks twice before hiring a potential employee. This has a large impact on small businesses.
I'm installing Linux for the first time this coming week... I hope I can wholeheartedly agree with Linus. : ) -am
Playing quake is fine by me.
Boredom is the worst thing. I can take stress, lack of sleep, pain, whatever.. but not being bored. I hate being bored. Working this boring job annoys me because it uses enough of my attention span to make it hard to just sit and think but not enough to interest me. It doesn't pay to well either. Hey somebody offer me twice the money to play w/ Linux all day! Please! I'm actually thinking of quitting this techie job to go work at a pizza place because I like making pizza. Anybody need a code hacking pizza guy who has read Snow Crash and the Diamond Age way to much? :) If required I can learn to use swords too.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
365 books (I think).
One for every day of the year...
:)
Probably not... then it would be Windows.
:P
æeee!
I don't know about you, but I find there are other drawing factors to Linux:
:)
- it's interesting to learn
- the Linux people are more open than the Windows people (asking questions, etc.)
- you can learn how it works easily
- and dammit, I guess it is fun to use
æeee!
You shouldn't shortchange Einstein in the pacifism stakes either. He recognised that his work in some way contributed to the development of nuclear weapons, and urged Roosevelt or Truman (can't remember which) to step up the effort to develop the Big One before the Axis powers did. Perhaps this isn't an act of pacifism, but then again it may well have led to the lesser of two evils.
Einstein was placed in a position where he was forced to consider the enormous implications (killing tens of thousands of Japanese) of his work and take some responsibility for it. This position gave him more than a little authority and credibility to speak on such subjects IMHO.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Linus is an UberHacker and deserves his place among the elite of 1990's info tech.
Where sociology is concerned, he's an amateur. His "insights" aren't exactly revelatory.
People are still working in jobs they hate to feed their kids. The world's still full of hate, war, and suffering.
Many rock stars freely dispense social and political opinions. Too many people lap thes up uncritically.
I'll listen to Linus talk about computers until the sun goes red giant. But when he ends up on the Tonight show dispensing opinions about other stuff, I'm reaching for the remote.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
But lead water pipes may have been a problem for the British !
My family home was built in 1867. During some renovations in 1995 we were still removing old lead water pipes from the building , even today it is a lead pipe that gets the water into the house!
The roman civilization had also become mostly a welfare state. Things like the coliseum were built to give the mostly unemployed citzenship something to do.
Of course we may not be as far from that as most would like to think.
Why the deuce was this comment moderated down? It was relevant, and made a good point!
iSKUNK!
Linus's Law (as you describe it, anyway) is just a simplifed version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I don't remember how it goes exactly, but at the bottom you have survival (food, sex, etc.), a couple steps up you have emotional security, and then at the very top there's self-actualization. There's five levels in all, but the others escape me at this moment :-]
I have to agree, things may very well be moving toward the higher, more interesting levels. The way I see it, technology can either 1) make us into more productive workers, and/or 2) ease the drudgery of life to let us focus more energy on fun things (like Linux!)
From the Industrial Revolution to now, it's been #1 for the most part-- but maybe, just maybe, the tables are turning . . . .
iSKUNK!
What we see is a historic paradigm shift in the allocation of resources. A developer of free software is not motivated by money. My sole motivation is certainly not money (even though I am attending business school). The current monetary driven economic models can not capture this.
. html)
But don't despair a model called "attention economy" is underway (guess what, they won't teach you that at business school, but you can learn about it on the Web at http://www.heise.de/tp/english/special/eco/6097/1
In my country (Germany) and in most of Europe I see a society emerge that is primarily motivated by having fun. And by the way: Being creative, learning cool technology and discover scientific insights is big fun!
Their jobs are not going to exist until eternity.
Many things done here by humans are done by machines in my country e.g. trash cans in the village my parents live in have to be put on the street in a certain angle when the trash pick-up truck comes, because a robot arm is picking it up.
A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in computer science (he's from Poland originally) couldn't believe his eyes when we passed a construction crew here in NY state, because there were two guys who's only job was obviously to hold up a sign and serve as provisional traffic light. Even in socialistic Poland they had real provisional traffic lights doing this laughable job.
That is part of the reason why unemployment is higher in Europe, and without a welfare system it would result in social unrest.
I'm in the process of turning down a similar jobb. For me, it would also pay twice as much as I make now. It would even let me work with GNU/Linux, but.. it just doesn't interest me. So why do it?
I believe we see this in quite a lot of modern companies where you try to create a fun and creative atmosphere instead of the standard cubicle 8am-5pm workdays.
You can't buy creativity for money. On a related note, I'd like to mention ``Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain'' which was written by Alfie Kohn for the Boston Globe. Even if it's more than ten years old, it is worth reading.
16 years of being bored,
My window's open,
Forget the door!
..about comic books. Scott McCloud's excellent _Understanding Comics_ also contains a history of art in general, and goes through the three things humans do. With cavemen. Good book, sure amazon or whatnot has it.
when Push Comes to Shove
That is a good point. And I also think you have to take into account what sort of "fun" one is talking about.
Linus was talking about the fun of a challenge. Something many of us are familiar with by using-learning/helping to build open source s/w. Although I'm sure we could all name a whole whack of other examples (like learning history!). I think this is "good fun" which makes one grow and (usually) develop relationships with other "good fun" sorts of people.
The other type of fun is passive - a life revolving around the modern colleseum - mindless television and blockbuster hollywood movies and little else. If people end up getting all their fun from these "bad fun" activites I think this can be... problematic.
(?)
Just a theory off the top of my head. Feel free to tear it apart.
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
Here's the "I feel lucky" link from Google for this hierarchy of needs thing:
Google Link
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
BNW, however, sees the end of us beeing based upon capitalism and consumption. I think of how the "castes" are provided with "entertainment" and something inside me SCREAMS middle-class suburbia and mass-consumption/mass-media. Think 20-20, America's Funniest Videos, McDonald's, the latest greatest summer "blockbuster," or latest Hit-Of-The-Minute pop music crap.
*shudder*
-- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Some pre-technological communities had (fewer have) remarkably high average standards of living - I am blanking out on the names, but as an anthro prof pointed out, the bones left behind do tell you how old people got and whether they died of malnutrition or violence.
But idyllic peaceful cultures are almost certainly on good cropland, and can't defend themselves well against unpleasant invaders.
I can't speak for all of these people, but I do believe that they probably do not really find their jobs interesting. What, you ask, can we do about uninteresting repetitive manual labor type jobs? Robots. No wages, no healthcare benefits to pay, work incessantly without complaints, doing exactly as they are told. Nobody should have to work a job that a robot can do unless they are particularly interested.
What makes you think that our society is any better than ancient societies?
We will have robots!
This isn't going to last forever. Some other civilization, thousands, even hundreds, of years later will be completly different ... and they won't have Linux ( ... pitty).
You speak of the coming age of robots, who will one day no longer have a need for humans. Will their positron brains run Linux?
Linux does make computing (on a PC at least,) fun..
:o)
It's fun to learn about something that works properly..
"You'll take a job that doesn't pay as well
because it's more interesting," Torvalds said.
A perfect example.. I've turned down two jobs that pay
twice what I'm getting now, simply because they didn't interest
me,( and I wouldn't get to use Linux all the time
Everyone's actions are driven by satisfaction - just that different people enjoy different things. You may enjoy getting the guts of the worlds 513th CD player to work, someone else may enjoy addign the chrome, and someone else writing the documentation.
;-)
Note also that pleasure is a complicated many faceted thing... Helping others may appear to be altruistic, but people only do it because it makes them feel good. Finishing the last 10% if a project may be a grind, but many people do it because of the satisfaction of completion/whatever - maybe the source of pleasure is different from then first 90%, but it's still pleasure driven.
Certainly open source projects may seem more haphazard than things we are forced to do professionally, but the level of effort/completion put into them is really globally optimized!... If the 70% complete status of a project sufficiently annoys someone, then it will rise to the level where completing it is becomes the most satisfying thing they cad do - and they will do it.
BTW, do you _really_ think a robot could replace you in having sex with your wife? Sounds like you need to use a little imagination or whipped cream!
You're right. I was thinking the same thing. I learned about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in 7th Grade. When diagramed, you have a triangle, split horizontally into several sections. The base of the triangle (the largest section) is food, then second is reproduction, third is something, fourth is soomething and fifth (as you said) is self-actualization. Now doesn't this contradict what Linus said about the future and what people will concentrate on? I'm hoping that people won't be THAT stupid as to not even realize what their needs and prioraties are. I think all this popularity is getting the Linus' head ... "Linus' Law" ??? give a break.
I think (or at least hope) that the future will be something like that portrayed in the book "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson. Giant superpowers like the US will break up into hundreds of commercially owned states. Each state has its citizens, who pay that state's owner ... in return, the state gives them what they want. Don't like what your state's giving you? Go become a citizen of another state ... provided you can afford to. This way, everyone will be more or less happy, because it's TOTALY decentralized government. Maybe not as SAFE as current government ... but a happier place for those who can afford to enter the preferable states.
I can see his point ... to an extent. This is somewhat near sighted. What does Linus propose? If janitors, bus drivers and the people who work and McDonalds don't think their jobs are interesting they will quite? Because by then people will be more interested in being entertained than staying alive or getting food?
... it's all a phase in the greater picture. This isn't going to last forever. Some other civilization, thousands, even hundreds, of years later will be completly different ... and they won't have Linux ( ... pitty).
Perhaps you propose that such classes will not exsist in future times. This too could be quite near sighted. Society has exsisted for thousands and thousands of years, and there have always been lower class workers who didn't work for 'fun', but rather out of need. What makes you think that our society is any better than ancient societies? It's not technology, I'll give you that much. Ancient civilizations have accomplished things which we cannot even begin explain, despite our 'more sophisticated' way of doing things.
The computer, the Internet
Our culture is heading the way of the Romans, we need to adopt useful hobbies instead of becoming decadent and sexually perverted. I think we should all play quake. That will keep us from being bored :-)
When a society is decadent and sexually perverse, it sends out a really big signal to allthe barbarians in the world that says "Come, take my money, rape my woman, and kill me slowly."
Also, sometimes, it causes fire to come down from heaven and turn everyone into molten lava (i.e. Soddom and Gomorrah (spelling?)).
Other than that, I guess nothing is wrong with it.
While I think Linus has some amazing talents his
quotes about a entertainment oriented society are
short sighted. There will always be ditch diggers in the world. And people who just plain enjoy ditch digging. I Do unix sysadmin work. I love my job, but some days I long for a simpler more mindless job. Like fry guy:) But, then I look at all the fun things I want to do with my life.
Just learned to scuba dive, want to learn how to fly a plane, helicopter, climb a mountain..etc. All of these things cost big bucks and can only be done by someone with a high paying job. So I will always stick in the technology fields to make the money necessary to enjoy my life. Like the article said.. Money cant buy happiness but those who say that usually dont have any. Conviently i have found a job I like and pays well, but if it didnt
I could see myself taking another more boring job to make the money necessary to enjoy my free time more. Work is a way for me to enjoy my free time.. It just so happens that i enjoy work as well. Lots of other people arent so lucky.
Frankly, I think my life is already motivated by a fear of boredom.
It has pretty much been observed here that there will always be people (in this age, and in those to come) who will work out of necessity and survival... we're nowhere close to a utopian sort of "entertainment society" that Linus envisions for us in 150 years or so. There are still plenty of problems in the world for us to deal with... overpopulation, pollution, war, hate, ect. Marx's ideal of "ultimate communism" was for every individual in the society to do whatever work they wanted, almost spontaneously. So a person could one week be a painter, and the next a journalist, and then after that be a plumber, and pursue whatever whims, fancies, or passions that they may have at the time. Linus seems to think, that somehow, we will achieve something like this state of society, where we will do what we do in pursuit of 'entertainment'... where we will do things because of the challenge, or the fun, and that the other needs of society will somehow be fulfilled with a minimal percentage of the population toiling with jobs and lives they are not really happy with. After all, there are plenty of jobs that I can think of where it is difficult for me imagine many people thinking of them as highly fulfilling, challenging, and fun. Maybe technology will get rid of all these unpopular occupations, but I sincerely doubt it... at least for a good long while (longer perhaps than the human race will be able to sustain itself without destroying itself.)
;) It has nothing to do with not being intelligent, or even with not being interested in the technical functioning of computers. I've been using PCs since the age of 9, and have a fairly respectable degree of experience using/troubleshooting/maintaining them (probably not nearly as much as the average slashdot reader, but probably more than the average C|Net reader) and I have to say that my experiences with Linux have been anything but fun. I've had a great deal of difficultly getting all the elements of a what I'd call a 'functional' computer working under Linux on my PC, and for some reason (which I'm sure is my fault,) Linux is able 10 times more unstable for me than Windows 95 is (lockups nearly every session.) Right now I just have been unable to muster the discipline to make a great effort to understand Linux. I defintely need to buy another Linux book (lost the one I had) and make friends with a Linux guru or two before I move on... and even then, I'm not optimistic (as I once was) that learning Linux will be a bright and fun experience. Meanwhile, using Windows, for me, is a pretty entertaining experience.
:)
Also, as has been pretty much observed, many people do not need to enjoy or have a real passion for their jobs. People are willing to do something they do not particularly enjoy for a living, in exchange for the net result of having more freedom intellectually, finanically, or in deciding in how to spend one's time.
Finally I'd like to add that Linux is not fun for everybody. Linus seems to be saying that Linux is fun for programmers, which I wouldn't personally disagree with, but for the average person, I think it needs to be understood, playing around with a complex OS (as great as the OS may be) is not their idea of fun.
BTW, sorry for the length of this post. I'm not very good at being concise, which is one reason (of a few) reasons I'm very shy about posting here.