It's not just Windows where this is the accepted practice. On multiple occasions I've brought in ailing MacBooks (and MacBook Pros) to the Apple store and the only advice the "geniuses" have had for fixing the problem has been a clean reinstall.
It's frustrating, yes. But I don't think the problem is the product, nor the industry. The real problem is that operating systems are complex beasts. The consumer has spoken quite clearly that the most important thing is new features and functionality, not stability. Someday hopefully we'll have our cake and eat it too, but for the time being I don't think we'll be getting away from these issues.
Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing...
When I see facts like the one quoted above, I begin to suspect that I'm being fleeced. For 90% of the arguments listed in the article, I have no basis for comparison, so to some degree I must accept them as fact for the moment. However, I do know something about the deep ocean and about deep ocean temperatures. Namely, that the temperatures in the deep ocean are almost solely controlled by the fact that there are thousands of pounds of pressure at depth and water is in its most tightly compacted state at "barely above freezing", around 2 to 3 degrees C. So great, thank you wise author for pointing out that the laws of chemistry have not changed, water still reacts to pressure the same as it always has.
Now that I've got one "fact" that I know is being mis-used, time to close the article and go back Science, Nature, or some other peer-reviewed publication. I don't know enough to pick out the rest of the biased information, but I do have a suspicion that they're there.
We've reached the point where all-volunteer, non-commercial unix-style Operating Systems are drowning in personality conflicts; and the only technical strides and achievements are coming largely from private companies (Sun, Redhat).
This quaint social experiment of altruistic development has shown two things: as much as you may dislike corporate culture, corporate structure and the incentive of a paycheck are what is needed to gain any sort of professional-quality software going out of the door on a regular basis.
I just want to point out the fact that this does not mean open source development as a business model is bad. But yeah, it's gotta be a "business model", i.e. it's gotta bring home the bacon. I work in Ocean Science and I know quite a few open source developers who spend all their time writting open source code, but they get paid for it. They're working in a small enough market that the big fish don't bother going after it, or because they know more about the domain so they have an advantage. But operating systems aren't like that, the OS market is one of the tastiest treats out there, and all the fish want it. All the quality open source products I can think of have businesses paying to help support the development costs (firefox, eclipse, etc), but operatings systems don't lend themselves as well to that type of sponsorship (especially because the market is so flooded).
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It's not just Windows where this is the accepted practice. On multiple occasions I've brought in ailing MacBooks (and MacBook Pros) to the Apple store and the only advice the "geniuses" have had for fixing the problem has been a clean reinstall.
It's frustrating, yes. But I don't think the problem is the product, nor the industry. The real problem is that operating systems are complex beasts. The consumer has spoken quite clearly that the most important thing is new features and functionality, not stability. Someday hopefully we'll have our cake and eat it too, but for the time being I don't think we'll be getting away from these issues.
I just want to point out the fact that this does not mean open source development as a business model is bad. But yeah, it's gotta be a "business model", i.e. it's gotta bring home the bacon. I work in Ocean Science and I know quite a few open source developers who spend all their time writting open source code, but they get paid for it. They're working in a small enough market that the big fish don't bother going after it, or because they know more about the domain so they have an advantage. But operating systems aren't like that, the OS market is one of the tastiest treats out there, and all the fish want it. All the quality open source products I can think of have businesses paying to help support the development costs (firefox, eclipse, etc), but operatings systems don't lend themselves as well to that type of sponsorship (especially because the market is so flooded).
... it has the potential to be a lot funner than ...
funner is not a word!
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fun1.htm
p.s. Yeah, I'm an asshole in real life too