Well, I *did* warn you. Yeah, I genuinely find my relationship with technology to be… conflicted. I think it’s fair to say that I’m an IT “expert” (having stored my original programs on cards and paper tapes and stayed current with it for these… uh… gad… 30 years?), and yet, the stuff makes me crazy– both in that it wastes my irretrievable LifeMinutes(tm) and that I can’t stop messing with it. Yet, I find the economics of it (or the Gates-Jobs-Torvalds drama) completely uninteresting. Not insignificant; just boring.

Really, I think your case is exactly what I meant to write about… I deleted an awful lot of that post. I really like the idealistic idea of an open source software movement– people from all over the world, working together, to produce something that genuinely serves the end user (person) without the always-corrupting profit motive. Unfortunately, the existing ragtag band of kids could never coordinate their efforts under a unified vision of “usability,” and that’s what would really help “the People”. Instead, they fall back on technical advances. That’s easy for your average ADD-affected coder type. It’s objective. Make this card show that effect. Make that virtual guest OS perform X on this benchmark. See this rock? Move it over there.

No need for empathy. No need to talk to other humans or take a shower.

What’s really necessary is for the whole seething crowd to get behind someone saying “this has to be drop-dead easy to install, configure, and use.” That’s infinitely harder than just spec’ing out “speeds and feeds.” Clearly, They have the time. Today, I can write with fire (yes, actual computer-rendered pretend fire) on my new interface. I can make it snow, too. I can even flip a little animated cube with my live desktops displayed on it. No one needs that stuff in the slightest, but They found the time to make it happen. On the other hand, configuring two monitors (a pretty common task, these days) is like brain surgery. Setting up your average mainstream printer? Forget it. G-d forbid you have a wireless print server or pen tablet. Reading the “troubleshooting” forums is an unpleasant exposure to humans with a complete inability to interact civilly with their fellow being.

It’s OK that the complicated stuff (e.g., virtualization, setting up a mail server, super-special hardware) takes a degree in Computer Science. It’s great that you can do it at all. Really. Most of it is seriously inferior on the commercial platforms. But the 95% of what anyone does– setting up printers, basic networks, video cards in likely scenarios, nice looking desktops, sound, etc.– should be hammered on until it just works. Imagine if the only complaints people had were that they couldn’t set up a IPSec VPN with NAT pass-through easy enough. Think of all the jobs those kids would get then!

The fact of the matter is that the people involved, generally speaking, are volunteers, and so they’re going to work on whatever they feel like working on– see earlier comment on empathy. Larger visions of genuinely holding out a hand to Jane Q. Public are not on the agenda, nor were they originally. Linus Torvalds famously said: “This is a program for hackers by a hacker.”

That says nothing whatsoever about helping the masses held for ransom under the oppressive thumb of oligarchical software vendors. Today, I’d rework his statement as “This is a program for corporations by unpaid software engineers.” Makes sense. At the most basic level, the developers are mostly young people looking for work. The whole open-source movement has been co-opted into a distributed commercial support organization; it’s the software capitalist’s wet dream, and they all think they’re pulling one over on The Man.

That rant is a good example of why… while I think everyone can and should grow their own vegetables… I need to hide my cognitively dissonant technology posts where only the truly skin-flakes-in-the-ears, mochacchino-stained-tshirt-wearing, nose-picking dorks will look for them. You were collateral damage. I’m sorry.

I am still running with XP Pro on my ancient (5 years old) PC. I am not a system/admin person, so am constantly annoyed by whatever OS I am using at the time. I am sure that I have lots of little self installed pieces of software running around like naughty gremlins all over my PC.

I also have a PC laptop (not my best purchase) and a large boat-anchor eMac sitting here in my office. I got the used eMac just so I could run some Mac specific software and familiarize myself a bit more with Macs. I figured it was useful to be at least “bi-lingual”.

All that non-mainstream stuff you mention above, well, that’s just not an option for people who don’t breathe that kinda nerdiness day in and day out. Sadly, for the normal person (sigh, yes…ok…me), the dream of having a computer/laptop that is speedy, functional, doesn’t corrupt documents, give weird errors or seize up randomly just isn’t in the cards for someone who isn’t immediately willing to trust something called “jaunty jackelope”.
p.s. I HATE DESTEST ABHOR WANT TO VOMIT ON stupid Vista. I will be jumping off that sinking ship as quickly as I can, but sadly it will only be to jump onto the next Windows release. Some people never learn, do they?