It's like you wrote that straight out of my brain. After having LinkedIn deemed necessary by Yet Another Recruiter the other day, I signed up last week... and it felt terrible. I've resisted the reeking phoniness of Facebook et al, despite being ironically ridiculed by damned near everyone I know, since the start of this appalling revolution in social networking, and now I'm conscientiously signing up to a site that uses the term "Action Items" in its navigation menu? Naturally, since I signed up, a cavalcade of people with names I vaguely remember from my working past suddenly want to be my "friend" without being my friend. I grit my teeth and acquiesce, because more connections make me look good.
So, I did it, but it's about as sincere as spooning with a hooker. I'm dead-certain that myself and the parent poster aren't the only two who have signed up for the same reasons, and I can easily imagine that the eventual backlash against LinkedIn will arise from an increasing number of users who are there due to professional compulsion and have zero interest in any of its God-damned "Action Items."
Might I suggest doing business with spammers a crime instead?
No joke, why not chase down those that utilize these networks and prosecute them?
Because the first time... the VERY FIRST TIME... someone is charged with doing business with a spammer, the media will turn that person into an innocent victim who's being railroaded by an overzealous legal system. There is absolutely no way in this universe that attacking those who patronize spammers will do anything but unleash a cavalcade of tearful support for the "victims." It happens all the time in the Nigerian scams... despite having thrown $200,000 down the toilet out of pure stupidity and greed, the gullible morons are still presented as being kind, typical people who are taken for a ride by an evil scammer, and the conclusion tends to be... it could happen to anyone. Anyone with an IQ of about 75, that is.
Punishing the "victims" will absolutely not work in this world where personal accountability is head-first down a well.
I'm personally offended that someone as thoroughly stupid as you clearly are (having read your embarrassingly idiotic comparison) has sullied the name of such an eminent philosopher.
Why don't you take on the name of some fucking video game character or something else that might more accurately represent your hilariously stunted intellect? Just a thought.
You, personally, make the entire open source "community" look bad.
Dude, don't you know that it's Slashdot-hip to be ultra-paranoid about absolutely everything? Picking and choosing your encryption needs based upon, gasp, practicality and with an eye toward efficient use of your technological resources isn't going to win you any points around this place.
Just a heads-up before you get scorched and jabbed for taking a level-headed approach to something.
People don't stay away from the polls because they're apathetic, they stay away because they know they have no real voice. Both candidates against legalizing something you love? Why vote?
No! That simply can't be it. It's apathy! Bad voter! BAD! There is absolutely no way it's due to having appalling choices or ones that are so similar to each other that they're effectively interchangeable. It also has nothing to do with an endless cycle of "whomever gets voted in winds up screwing the people" or political corruption that's so pervasive that utterly nobody is surprised when it becomes public for any given politician.
Yep, Microsoft is fantastically smart. At sales and marketing.
Look around and you'll find that, historically, the front runners in virtually any industry are often more skilled in these two areas than in the actual craft itself. Examples? No problem --
1) GM. Nobody will ever accuse GM of crafting fine cars, yet they ruled the automotive roost for decades because they were very good at selling garbage.
2) SONY consumer electronics. One of the most ubiquitous names at the top of the consumer electronics industry actually builds very, very average products.
3) Motorola mobile phones. Again, perhaps the most ubiquitous name in the industry, but more as a result of marketing than objective quality.
If you're going to spout eye-rolling baloney like that, then I think you should take it all the way:
So please, name one software product of any consequence (meaning, fifty liners don't count), that has a UI, that has ever, throughout all the history of meaningful software, been absolutely free of gotchas. I've been hammering away at these damned electronic boxes for 19 years, both privately and professionally, and I have yet to ever see even one that didn't offer up *something* stupid. For the size and complexity of the applications that Microsoft produces, they have no more idiocy than anything else.
But, since you're obviously so plugged into the mind of Microsoft (much like the other million Slashdotters), I'll wait here while you put your money where your mouth is.
The question was, sorta, when did people start wanting to be stupid, and why?
I think this is the easiest part of the equation to figure out -- the mainstream acceptance of rap and "thug life" culture. If you listen to ten rap songs (sucker for punishment?), I guarantee that at least 80% of those will allude to gettin' rich (and/or famous, and/or laid) without being educated. It's not *just* that they talk about success without "typical" education, it's that they often specifically target the white-collar world as being a bunch of pocket-protected nerds who can't dance. I don't think that anyone can argue that 50 Cent portrays an image of hilarious stupidity, yet also significant riches and affluence -- those who are either young enough or stupid enough to use him as a role model aren't likely to be staring down the barrel of too many microscopes in that particular pursuit.
Let's face one fact: a typical education > career progression is about the least exciting path to financial success in the world. It's the case objectively, and severely exaggerated when placed next to being a celebrity, a gangster or an extreeeeeeeme athlete of some kind. Hell, if I could reasonably make the same living getting drunk every night on stage while some attractive young lady in the audience flashed her wares at me and licked her lips, I think... yeah, I probably would leave this cubicle career behind. In about one thousandth of a second.
You know what makes Apple laptops appealing? They're sexy. I have yet to see a laptop from any other manufacturer that isn't littered with switches, logos, useless blinking lights, multicolored plastic and all kinds of other things that make it look childish or amateurish. I don't have any experience with Mac laptops earlier than the era of the first iBooks and Powerbooks of the same vintage, but they've blown everything else out of the water in terms of refinement and elegance since. They feel like expensive machines, even if they're not. For example, this Macbook (and my old Powerbook) are quieter than any other portable computers I've used from other manufacturers. It's not even close. I wasn't even sure the G3 Powerbook had a fan until I went in to add RAM.
So, a Mac may not offer something that's technically superior (virtually all laptops are made in the same small collection of Asian factories anyway) or magically unbreakable, but you certainly will get something with more "curb appeal." In a world where most manufacturers offer pricing and features that are +/- small percentages of each other, it comes down to the intangibles. In most such cases, Macs win.
I'm not so sure if following distance would play a meaningful role, frankly. Consider how often you'll see this scenario:
Car B is following car A at a reasonable distance on a city street. Car A begins to gradually slow down for whatever reason. The driver of car B, whether due to lack of attention or just brutal stupidity, doesn't slow down until it's necessary to apply the brakes strongly. Car B applies the brakes strongly, as do all the cars behind car B who can't see what's going on in front of him and have thus had no time to prepare.
So, in summary, even when not tailgating, drivers seem to "prefer" using the brakes at the last minute instead of just getting off the gas and allowing the engine compression and transmission drag to slow down in a less "panicky" way. I think it's similar to how you'll often see a driver accelerate toward a red light and then use the brakes at the last minute. Why? I don't know, but I could guess... (coughminivanorunnecessarilyhugetruckcough)
If you're lucky, the light may even turn green as you're coasting and you'll not need the brakes at all (this means more to those of us who drive manual transmissions).
If the gigantic bills stuck, yes, but they would never stick. The first time someone received a $10,000 invoice for all the e-mail his computer sent out because it was compromised, he'd wind up on TV being portrayed as the innocent victim who was waylaid by the evil hacker. Odds are, there would be some kind of public outcry that threatened the reputation of whatever governing body was responsible for collecting the fee, and the jackass would wind up paying not one cent.
It happens all the time. Gullible morons who get swindled somehow due to their own greed or stupidity are constantly portrayed as honest, hard-working victims by the media. Look what happens the next time some idiot in your local area loses a few thousand to Nigerian scammers, despite the fact that the scam is so old by now that most multi-celled organisms know that it's a bunch of baloney. Invariably, he or she will wind up on the news, holding a fake check, mewling about how it seemed genuine and real while other idiots nod gravely into their TV.
Personal accountability is a bloated corpse, my friend, so you can "charge" whatever you like for e-mail... it will just make a bunch of ISPs (or whomever is supposed to collect) look like the devil for trying to actually take money from allegedly bright, intelligent, honest people who just got taken for an "unavoidable" ride.
Also, I have noticed that the BBC online management is now prepared to lie more - witness them claiming that news.bbc.co.uk has 'about 600' GNU/Linux users. Umm, yeah.
Do you have *any* proof that this is a lie, or is it just because their claim doesn't jive with what you really, really want to be true? I'll wait here for your evidence...
Here's my question, and it's sincere, because I'm not a Facebook member:
Why is any of that desirable? Honestly. I graduated from high-school in 1993, and I have a current e-mail address and phone number for the dozen-or-so people who still matter to me from those days. When we move, change contact information, or whatever, we send our little group a quick notification, and life moves on. Why on Earth would I want to be contacted out of the blue fifteen years later by someone who probably hasn't crossed my mind since graduation night (or insert whatever non-school equivalent event suits your purpose)?
An example: my sister is a member. Perhaps six months ago, one of my first real girlfriends from the ninth grade in 1989 sent her a message asking how to find me on Facebook, so that we could catch up. Catch up with what? We haven't spoken in *at least* ten years, and she's apparently churned out a few kids in her mining-town trailer park about a thousand miles from here. We're total strangers by this point with utterly nothing in common, and yet people find it scintillating to imagine this kind of scenario through the magic of Facebook? "So, how have the last ten years of your life been? Oh, fifty pounds you've put on... isn't that something? Four kids? Fantastic." Is that what they call a "reconnection?" No thanks.
Maybe I'm just not much of a sentimental, but if a friendship hasn't stood the tests of time organically, why should I suddenly be excited to drag the corpse up out of its well-deserved grave with Facebook? Some of my closest friends live hundreds of miles away, yet we stay close because of things in common and, you know, other friendship qualities. The most important of these is a willingness to put a little, tiny bit of work into actually being a friend. Maybe that means visiting every couple years, or maybe it's even something as small as keeping my phone number and e-mail information written down somewhere and using either or both from time to time. I do those things for them. Relationships that don't have those qualities are about the last things I want to pursue, and Facebook seems to make it way too easy to be a "friend" without being a friend.
Until people just start biting the bullet and switching...
Ooh, doesn't THAT sound like a pleasant experience! Until it's a) simple, b) more positive than negative (Slashdot politics completely aside, because nobody in the real world cares about those things in the least) and c) relatively seamless, businesses will never, ever, ever switch. Ever. And, presently, none of those three items apply.
Ha ha! Awesome. Those idiotic analogies always drive me nuts. The "full-grown elephants" one is another. How many adolescent-elephants does that equal? How about adult-but-undersized elephants?
Sigh. Remember when people were expected to consider things for themselves, without infantile illustrations for the lowest common denominator?
Well, it's not mentioned, but it should be -- automotive technology. If you're not insanely jealous of the vehicles and powertrain options that Europe and Asia get that North America doesn't, then you're part of the reason why things have stagnated here for so long.
Absolutely true, and frustratingly so. Although, there are an increasing number of solutions. For the average HTPC that really only has a hard drive and a DVD player as internal power consumers, the PicoPSU works really well. It's utterly tiny, cheap, and fanless. Add to that the fact that 2.5" drives are getting up around the 200GB range commonly, and that laptop DVD drives can be quite easily adapted, and the Mac Mini finally has some reasonable competition.
Now, if there was only a software solution that was a) simple, b) elegant and c) relatively stable, I'd be in heaven. Media Portal is in the neighborhood, but it's starting to develop the endlessly irritating feature bloat that seems to permeate this genre of software for some reason. I don't give a hobo's crap about visualizations, PVR capability or an endless collection of useless plugins that don't work, but I seem to be completely alone in that desire. If I could configure Front Row *at all* it would be the perfect solution... the Leopard version threatens to address this problem, but I guess we'll see. Sadly, Minis ain't as cheap as DIY hardware...
The problem is that's not a business. Who, in their right mind, would devote thousands of development hours cobbling something together, then cast it into the wind where basement developers use "what they want, and [get] rid of what they don't?" That's charity. I have no problem with the spirit of this OSS thing, but it's laughable to imagine that there's any kind of business potential in releasing things into the wild where they're instantly ripped apart as you've described.
I know, I know -- there are other ways to make money with Linux (something I feel isn't proven yet), but I keep seeing this expectation --and I don't put your post in that category, since you're just speculating-- that companies will be dying to do what you've suggested in your example. Unless they're either very stupid or very philanthropic, it will never happen. Idealism be damned -- a successful business cannot care what benefits everyone, unless it benefits them first.
And, you know, even some geeks like having things that just work. There was a time when I'd build my own computer and spend every waking hour monkeying with the thing to make it perform 0.5% better in a specific task. Maybe I'm just getting too old for that, or maybe my interests have just shifted, but this Macbook I have, which doesn't really require anything of me to perform properly every day, is a needed breath of fresh air.
I think the big shift for me was during college, when my Frankenstein computer failed during the one particularly hectic spring essay rush. I bought a Dell laptop because it was cheap and could be at my door in three days. Since then, I've never built a "main" computer again. I still have my HTPC project and a few other things, but it's really, really nice to know that I have one computer that will always work when I need to actually, you know, DO something that matters. No driver headaches, no dodgy hardware, no constant configuration. I open the lid, do my thing, then close the lid. Although I have become a real Mac fan, this isn't a pro-Mac post at all... it's a post in strong favour of things that don't require me to screw around. If I WANT to screw around, I will, but at least the choice is mine now. I've put that same principle into play in what I drive, too. I have a 2000 Mazda Protege, which never fails, as my daily driver. Then, I have a 1988 Nissan Pathfinder with 31" tires, a lift, etc for those days where I feel like tinkering. That truck sits apart for weeks if I don't feel like getting my hands dirty, and you know why? Because it can -- I don't need it to get me to work. It's beautiful. If you can afford it, life really is better when you don't have to drive the project (both literally and as a metaphor for computers).
Frankly, even if it costs me my Geek Card, I'm never going back to the "old way."
Ay-men, brother. I have used every major OS out there, and I've never seen anything that can touch the uptime of a properly configured Netware server. Even running on garbage, underspecced hardware, I've personally seen Netware 4.x and 5.x run for years uninterrupted without breaking a sweat more times than I can bother to count.
I'll pour out a little liquor for the "real" Netware on this, its death day, for that operating system let me sleep soundly through the night more often than anything else when I was an on-call network admin a few years ago. Netware, I salute you... Salut!
I think you need to draw a distinction between people practicing writing as an art/hobby and those who make it their profession.
I'm not sure if you really can do this clearly, though. I am a technical writer by trade, and a creative writer in my spare time. I think I have to apply some of the "love" and artistry to my technical documents, or it would be the dullest profession in the world. Even when writing an agonizingly boring document about power supplies or God-knows-what, I still try to craft paragraphs that read well and flow nicely. I still take pride in *how* my documents appear, not just whether they're accurate. A chimp with a spell-checker can do that.
Similarly, I try to write my creative stuff with an eye toward professionalism. It's never just stream of consciousness, because a chimp could do that, too. I got a really nice compliment from an editor once who said that I, among all his other writers, adapted myself remarkably quickly to a point where he hardly had to touch the articles I submitted. I attribute his compliment to the fact that I think about the structure of what I write just as much as the content itself, and I paid attention to changes he made. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think creative writing that's worth a pound of salt is ever purely creative.
So, I don't know if there really is a division between artistic and professional writers. If a person is purely on one side of that fence, they're probably not very good at what they do. That's the problem with the Internet, in my opinion; it gives a public stage to those who haven't earned it, and I do think it degrades the whole thing to some degree.
However, there is something to be said for negative comparisons. My articles look a lot better when placed next to that of some hack in the newspaper, and maybe that's where Internet Author Darwinism could help to spotlight authors who are actually skilled and care about the craft. I'm not sure if this positive effect is overwhelmed by the problem of having fifty million voices all shouting at once, but it's the best outcome I can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like you wrote that straight out of my brain. After having LinkedIn deemed necessary by Yet Another Recruiter the other day, I signed up last week... and it felt terrible. I've resisted the reeking phoniness of Facebook et al, despite being ironically ridiculed by damned near everyone I know, since the start of this appalling revolution in social networking, and now I'm conscientiously signing up to a site that uses the term "Action Items" in its navigation menu? Naturally, since I signed up, a cavalcade of people with names I vaguely remember from my working past suddenly want to be my "friend" without being my friend. I grit my teeth and acquiesce, because more connections make me look good.
So, I did it, but it's about as sincere as spooning with a hooker. I'm dead-certain that myself and the parent poster aren't the only two who have signed up for the same reasons, and I can easily imagine that the eventual backlash against LinkedIn will arise from an increasing number of users who are there due to professional compulsion and have zero interest in any of its God-damned "Action Items."
Because the first time... the VERY FIRST TIME... someone is charged with doing business with a spammer, the media will turn that person into an innocent victim who's being railroaded by an overzealous legal system. There is absolutely no way in this universe that attacking those who patronize spammers will do anything but unleash a cavalcade of tearful support for the "victims." It happens all the time in the Nigerian scams... despite having thrown $200,000 down the toilet out of pure stupidity and greed, the gullible morons are still presented as being kind, typical people who are taken for a ride by an evil scammer, and the conclusion tends to be... it could happen to anyone. Anyone with an IQ of about 75, that is.
Punishing the "victims" will absolutely not work in this world where personal accountability is head-first down a well.
I'm personally offended that someone as thoroughly stupid as you clearly are (having read your embarrassingly idiotic comparison) has sullied the name of such an eminent philosopher.
Why don't you take on the name of some fucking video game character or something else that might more accurately represent your hilariously stunted intellect? Just a thought.
You, personally, make the entire open source "community" look bad.
Dude, don't you know that it's Slashdot-hip to be ultra-paranoid about absolutely everything? Picking and choosing your encryption needs based upon, gasp, practicality and with an eye toward efficient use of your technological resources isn't going to win you any points around this place.
Just a heads-up before you get scorched and jabbed for taking a level-headed approach to something.
Obviously, you've never worked in any kind of support scenario -- absolutely none of the assumptions you made are anywhere near correct.
People don't stay away from the polls because they're apathetic, they stay away because they know they have no real voice. Both candidates against legalizing something you love? Why vote?
No! That simply can't be it. It's apathy! Bad voter! BAD! There is absolutely no way it's due to having appalling choices or ones that are so similar to each other that they're effectively interchangeable. It also has nothing to do with an endless cycle of "whomever gets voted in winds up screwing the people" or political corruption that's so pervasive that utterly nobody is surprised when it becomes public for any given politician.
Nope. It's your fault as a voter for not caring.
Yep, Microsoft is fantastically smart. At sales and marketing.
Look around and you'll find that, historically, the front runners in virtually any industry are often more skilled in these two areas than in the actual craft itself. Examples? No problem --
1) GM. Nobody will ever accuse GM of crafting fine cars, yet they ruled the automotive roost for decades because they were very good at selling garbage.
2) SONY consumer electronics. One of the most ubiquitous names at the top of the consumer electronics industry actually builds very, very average products.
3) Motorola mobile phones. Again, perhaps the most ubiquitous name in the industry, but more as a result of marketing than objective quality.
If you're going to spout eye-rolling baloney like that, then I think you should take it all the way:
So please, name one software product of any consequence (meaning, fifty liners don't count), that has a UI, that has ever, throughout all the history of meaningful software, been absolutely free of gotchas. I've been hammering away at these damned electronic boxes for 19 years, both privately and professionally, and I have yet to ever see even one that didn't offer up *something* stupid. For the size and complexity of the applications that Microsoft produces, they have no more idiocy than anything else.
But, since you're obviously so plugged into the mind of Microsoft (much like the other million Slashdotters), I'll wait here while you put your money where your mouth is.
The question was, sorta, when did people start wanting to be stupid, and why?
I think this is the easiest part of the equation to figure out -- the mainstream acceptance of rap and "thug life" culture. If you listen to ten rap songs (sucker for punishment?), I guarantee that at least 80% of those will allude to gettin' rich (and/or famous, and/or laid) without being educated. It's not *just* that they talk about success without "typical" education, it's that they often specifically target the white-collar world as being a bunch of pocket-protected nerds who can't dance. I don't think that anyone can argue that 50 Cent portrays an image of hilarious stupidity, yet also significant riches and affluence -- those who are either young enough or stupid enough to use him as a role model aren't likely to be staring down the barrel of too many microscopes in that particular pursuit.
Let's face one fact: a typical education > career progression is about the least exciting path to financial success in the world. It's the case objectively, and severely exaggerated when placed next to being a celebrity, a gangster or an extreeeeeeeme athlete of some kind. Hell, if I could reasonably make the same living getting drunk every night on stage while some attractive young lady in the audience flashed her wares at me and licked her lips, I think... yeah, I probably would leave this cubicle career behind. In about one thousandth of a second.
You know what makes Apple laptops appealing? They're sexy. I have yet to see a laptop from any other manufacturer that isn't littered with switches, logos, useless blinking lights, multicolored plastic and all kinds of other things that make it look childish or amateurish. I don't have any experience with Mac laptops earlier than the era of the first iBooks and Powerbooks of the same vintage, but they've blown everything else out of the water in terms of refinement and elegance since. They feel like expensive machines, even if they're not. For example, this Macbook (and my old Powerbook) are quieter than any other portable computers I've used from other manufacturers. It's not even close. I wasn't even sure the G3 Powerbook had a fan until I went in to add RAM.
So, a Mac may not offer something that's technically superior (virtually all laptops are made in the same small collection of Asian factories anyway) or magically unbreakable, but you certainly will get something with more "curb appeal." In a world where most manufacturers offer pricing and features that are +/- small percentages of each other, it comes down to the intangibles. In most such cases, Macs win.
I'm not so sure if following distance would play a meaningful role, frankly. Consider how often you'll see this scenario:
Car B is following car A at a reasonable distance on a city street. Car A begins to gradually slow down for whatever reason. The driver of car B, whether due to lack of attention or just brutal stupidity, doesn't slow down until it's necessary to apply the brakes strongly. Car B applies the brakes strongly, as do all the cars behind car B who can't see what's going on in front of him and have thus had no time to prepare.
So, in summary, even when not tailgating, drivers seem to "prefer" using the brakes at the last minute instead of just getting off the gas and allowing the engine compression and transmission drag to slow down in a less "panicky" way. I think it's similar to how you'll often see a driver accelerate toward a red light and then use the brakes at the last minute. Why? I don't know, but I could guess... (coughminivanorunnecessarilyhugetruckcough)
If you're lucky, the light may even turn green as you're coasting and you'll not need the brakes at all (this means more to those of us who drive manual transmissions).
If the gigantic bills stuck, yes, but they would never stick. The first time someone received a $10,000 invoice for all the e-mail his computer sent out because it was compromised, he'd wind up on TV being portrayed as the innocent victim who was waylaid by the evil hacker. Odds are, there would be some kind of public outcry that threatened the reputation of whatever governing body was responsible for collecting the fee, and the jackass would wind up paying not one cent.
It happens all the time. Gullible morons who get swindled somehow due to their own greed or stupidity are constantly portrayed as honest, hard-working victims by the media. Look what happens the next time some idiot in your local area loses a few thousand to Nigerian scammers, despite the fact that the scam is so old by now that most multi-celled organisms know that it's a bunch of baloney. Invariably, he or she will wind up on the news, holding a fake check, mewling about how it seemed genuine and real while other idiots nod gravely into their TV.
Personal accountability is a bloated corpse, my friend, so you can "charge" whatever you like for e-mail... it will just make a bunch of ISPs (or whomever is supposed to collect) look like the devil for trying to actually take money from allegedly bright, intelligent, honest people who just got taken for an "unavoidable" ride.
Well, fair enough -- I'm wrong. The comment to which I responded sounded like wishful thinking to me.
Also, I have noticed that the BBC online management is now prepared to lie more - witness them claiming that news.bbc.co.uk has 'about 600' GNU/Linux users. Umm, yeah.
Do you have *any* proof that this is a lie, or is it just because their claim doesn't jive with what you really, really want to be true? I'll wait here for your evidence...
Here's my question, and it's sincere, because I'm not a Facebook member:
Why is any of that desirable? Honestly. I graduated from high-school in 1993, and I have a current e-mail address and phone number for the dozen-or-so people who still matter to me from those days. When we move, change contact information, or whatever, we send our little group a quick notification, and life moves on. Why on Earth would I want to be contacted out of the blue fifteen years later by someone who probably hasn't crossed my mind since graduation night (or insert whatever non-school equivalent event suits your purpose)?
An example: my sister is a member. Perhaps six months ago, one of my first real girlfriends from the ninth grade in 1989 sent her a message asking how to find me on Facebook, so that we could catch up. Catch up with what? We haven't spoken in *at least* ten years, and she's apparently churned out a few kids in her mining-town trailer park about a thousand miles from here. We're total strangers by this point with utterly nothing in common, and yet people find it scintillating to imagine this kind of scenario through the magic of Facebook? "So, how have the last ten years of your life been? Oh, fifty pounds you've put on... isn't that something? Four kids? Fantastic." Is that what they call a "reconnection?" No thanks.
Maybe I'm just not much of a sentimental, but if a friendship hasn't stood the tests of time organically, why should I suddenly be excited to drag the corpse up out of its well-deserved grave with Facebook? Some of my closest friends live hundreds of miles away, yet we stay close because of things in common and, you know, other friendship qualities. The most important of these is a willingness to put a little, tiny bit of work into actually being a friend. Maybe that means visiting every couple years, or maybe it's even something as small as keeping my phone number and e-mail information written down somewhere and using either or both from time to time. I do those things for them. Relationships that don't have those qualities are about the last things I want to pursue, and Facebook seems to make it way too easy to be a "friend" without being a friend.
Until people just start biting the bullet and switching...
Ooh, doesn't THAT sound like a pleasant experience! Until it's a) simple, b) more positive than negative (Slashdot politics completely aside, because nobody in the real world cares about those things in the least) and c) relatively seamless, businesses will never, ever, ever switch. Ever. And, presently, none of those three items apply.
Ha ha! Awesome. Those idiotic analogies always drive me nuts. The "full-grown elephants" one is another. How many adolescent-elephants does that equal? How about adult-but-undersized elephants?
Sigh. Remember when people were expected to consider things for themselves, without infantile illustrations for the lowest common denominator?
Well, it's not mentioned, but it should be -- automotive technology. If you're not insanely jealous of the vehicles and powertrain options that Europe and Asia get that North America doesn't, then you're part of the reason why things have stagnated here for so long.
Absolutely true, and frustratingly so. Although, there are an increasing number of solutions. For the average HTPC that really only has a hard drive and a DVD player as internal power consumers, the PicoPSU works really well. It's utterly tiny, cheap, and fanless. Add to that the fact that 2.5" drives are getting up around the 200GB range commonly, and that laptop DVD drives can be quite easily adapted, and the Mac Mini finally has some reasonable competition.
Now, if there was only a software solution that was a) simple, b) elegant and c) relatively stable, I'd be in heaven. Media Portal is in the neighborhood, but it's starting to develop the endlessly irritating feature bloat that seems to permeate this genre of software for some reason. I don't give a hobo's crap about visualizations, PVR capability or an endless collection of useless plugins that don't work, but I seem to be completely alone in that desire. If I could configure Front Row *at all* it would be the perfect solution... the Leopard version threatens to address this problem, but I guess we'll see. Sadly, Minis ain't as cheap as DIY hardware...
What's the big problem?
The problem is that's not a business. Who, in their right mind, would devote thousands of development hours cobbling something together, then cast it into the wind where basement developers use "what they want, and [get] rid of what they don't?" That's charity. I have no problem with the spirit of this OSS thing, but it's laughable to imagine that there's any kind of business potential in releasing things into the wild where they're instantly ripped apart as you've described.
I know, I know -- there are other ways to make money with Linux (something I feel isn't proven yet), but I keep seeing this expectation --and I don't put your post in that category, since you're just speculating-- that companies will be dying to do what you've suggested in your example. Unless they're either very stupid or very philanthropic, it will never happen. Idealism be damned -- a successful business cannot care what benefits everyone, unless it benefits them first.
... when they'll STILL be running RedHat 9.
And, you know, even some geeks like having things that just work. There was a time when I'd build my own computer and spend every waking hour monkeying with the thing to make it perform 0.5% better in a specific task. Maybe I'm just getting too old for that, or maybe my interests have just shifted, but this Macbook I have, which doesn't really require anything of me to perform properly every day, is a needed breath of fresh air.
I think the big shift for me was during college, when my Frankenstein computer failed during the one particularly hectic spring essay rush. I bought a Dell laptop because it was cheap and could be at my door in three days. Since then, I've never built a "main" computer again. I still have my HTPC project and a few other things, but it's really, really nice to know that I have one computer that will always work when I need to actually, you know, DO something that matters. No driver headaches, no dodgy hardware, no constant configuration. I open the lid, do my thing, then close the lid. Although I have become a real Mac fan, this isn't a pro-Mac post at all... it's a post in strong favour of things that don't require me to screw around. If I WANT to screw around, I will, but at least the choice is mine now. I've put that same principle into play in what I drive, too. I have a 2000 Mazda Protege, which never fails, as my daily driver. Then, I have a 1988 Nissan Pathfinder with 31" tires, a lift, etc for those days where I feel like tinkering. That truck sits apart for weeks if I don't feel like getting my hands dirty, and you know why? Because it can -- I don't need it to get me to work. It's beautiful. If you can afford it, life really is better when you don't have to drive the project (both literally and as a metaphor for computers).
Frankly, even if it costs me my Geek Card, I'm never going back to the "old way."
Ay-men, brother. I have used every major OS out there, and I've never seen anything that can touch the uptime of a properly configured Netware server. Even running on garbage, underspecced hardware, I've personally seen Netware 4.x and 5.x run for years uninterrupted without breaking a sweat more times than I can bother to count.
I'll pour out a little liquor for the "real" Netware on this, its death day, for that operating system let me sleep soundly through the night more often than anything else when I was an on-call network admin a few years ago. Netware, I salute you... Salut!
"Gawkshuns"
Yuck.
I think you need to draw a distinction between people practicing writing as an art/hobby and those who make it their profession.
I'm not sure if you really can do this clearly, though. I am a technical writer by trade, and a creative writer in my spare time. I think I have to apply some of the "love" and artistry to my technical documents, or it would be the dullest profession in the world. Even when writing an agonizingly boring document about power supplies or God-knows-what, I still try to craft paragraphs that read well and flow nicely. I still take pride in *how* my documents appear, not just whether they're accurate. A chimp with a spell-checker can do that.
Similarly, I try to write my creative stuff with an eye toward professionalism. It's never just stream of consciousness, because a chimp could do that, too. I got a really nice compliment from an editor once who said that I, among all his other writers, adapted myself remarkably quickly to a point where he hardly had to touch the articles I submitted. I attribute his compliment to the fact that I think about the structure of what I write just as much as the content itself, and I paid attention to changes he made. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think creative writing that's worth a pound of salt is ever purely creative.
So, I don't know if there really is a division between artistic and professional writers. If a person is purely on one side of that fence, they're probably not very good at what they do. That's the problem with the Internet, in my opinion; it gives a public stage to those who haven't earned it, and I do think it degrades the whole thing to some degree.
However, there is something to be said for negative comparisons. My articles look a lot better when placed next to that of some hack in the newspaper, and maybe that's where Internet Author Darwinism could help to spotlight authors who are actually skilled and care about the craft. I'm not sure if this positive effect is overwhelmed by the problem of having fifty million voices all shouting at once, but it's the best outcome I can think of.