Michelle Malkin is a conservative blogger and TV "personality" with a bachelors degree in English, while Paul Krugman is a nobel laureate in Economics. While both may have their biases, I would most certainly give the analyses put forth by the latter infinitely more weight than those of the former.
They didn't spend $600m on the website. That figure comes from an open service contract with CGI that predates the ACA by a considerable amount of time. The amount of the contract spent on developing the healthcare.gov site is estimated to be between $70m - $125m; still not cheap, but definitely not on the order of half a billion dollars.
What strikes me here is that Microsoft could potentially make more money selling "we won't sue you" certificates to [Novell] Linux users than the companies actually providing *real* support for said systems...
I don't think it's so much a case of elitism -- it's just that not every application needs to be overburdened by a complete GUI frontend. The documentation for PostgreSQL is quite rich actually: see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/ind ex.html for the latest sets. The amount of work that goes into detailing nearly every aspect of configuring, running, and working with this database system would seem to indicate that the developers are far from lazy. Not bothering to read said documentation on the other hand...
There is also an extremely helpful set of mailing lists, wikis, and related sites (such as the General Bits site: http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/ ) such that keys to the "mysteries" of various parameters and how to tweak one's server for best performance are quite readily available.
There is a mod to the GIMP (gimpshop found here ) that remaps the menus to match those of Photoshop so the learning curve for GIMP is not really that bad at all; i.e. there really would not be that much to "learn".
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Michelle Malkin is a conservative blogger and TV "personality" with a bachelors degree in English, while Paul Krugman is a nobel laureate in Economics. While both may have their biases, I would most certainly give the analyses put forth by the latter infinitely more weight than those of the former.
They didn't spend $600m on the website. That figure comes from an open service contract with CGI that predates the ACA by a considerable amount of time. The amount of the contract spent on developing the healthcare.gov site is estimated to be between $70m - $125m; still not cheap, but definitely not on the order of half a billion dollars.
What strikes me here is that Microsoft could potentially make more money selling "we won't sue you" certificates to [Novell] Linux users than the companies actually providing *real* support for said systems ...
I don't think it's so much a case of elitism -- it's just that not every application needs to be overburdened by a complete GUI frontend. The documentation for PostgreSQL is quite rich actually: see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/ind ex.html for the latest sets. The amount of work that goes into detailing nearly every aspect of configuring, running, and working with this database system would seem to indicate that the developers are far from lazy. Not bothering to read said documentation on the other hand ...
There is also an extremely helpful set of mailing lists, wikis, and related sites (such as the General Bits site: http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/ ) such that keys to the "mysteries" of various parameters and how to tweak one's server for best performance are quite readily available.
There is a mod to the GIMP (gimpshop found here ) that remaps the menus to match those of Photoshop so the learning curve for GIMP is not really that bad at all; i.e. there really would not be that much to "learn".