[geeks] Can't decide on an OS

[Mouse]

> Writing software was unnecessarily hard 20 years ago because of the
> high cost of compilers and the gated availability of import libraries
> and header files.  Now it's unnecessarily hard because of trusted
> computing, code signing, walled-garden "app" stores, etc.

Well, today, it's not writing software that's hard but writing software
to run on locked-down platforms.

Of course, for some people and/or some purposes, all platforms worth
writing for are.

>> Excellent.  Where?
> [...]

Saved.  Thank you.  I'll have to dig through that soon and see if
perhaps I can do something useful with recent hardware.

>> Not quite - if documentation is not available, you have much better
>> customer lockin for the vendor-provided software.
> Maybe, but it seems like the documentation started drying up about
> when the intellectual property nonsense got out of hand.

Yes, but I think that's more because they're both correlated with the
realization that information qua information was becoming valuable and
would become more so, coupled with a failure to realize some of the
ways in which information is not like physical property and thus
attempting to apply old mindsets to a new world without first checking
that they really do apply.

>> I don't know whether I could make a living at [music], but it's
>> getting to the point where I have to get out of the hostile system
>> computing has become even if it means walking out onto the ice floe.
> Why is it so hostile, from your point of view?  What is so
> inescapable?

The September that never ended - when the net, and the culture that
co-arose with it, was invaded and overrun; I feel like a member of an
invaded and conquered people.  The disaster that is Internet
governance; as I said in a blah post, "[T]hat's what happens when you
put the US Department of Commerce in charge of something: it turns into
a vehicle for making money, and everything else be damned.  As long as
it doesn't collapse so far that it stops making money for the top
levels, there's nothing wrong with it.".  That's not a network I want
to have anything to do with, but there are no alternatives, so not
having anything to do with it means taking Hobson's choice.  The Web's
disastrous dominance, to the point where people actually advertise
Internet access with a straight face when all they actually offer is
Web access.

It's less directly computer-related, but the rise of the Corporate
State is another part of it.  Computers are related mostly in that
they're force multipliers and thus very useful tools for those who are
interested in using force of one sort or another.

And it's inescapable in that it's utterly pervasive in North American
society.  It's to the point where it's starting to get difficult to
find _any_ job that doesn't demand I use some God-damned Web crap that,
of course, doesn't work at all without Javascript and who knows what
all else.  I've started telling some people (like utility companies)
that for their purposes I should be considered computerless - but even
then, when I call their phone lines I regularly have to put up with
fifteen to thirty seconds of advertising for their Web crap before it
says anything of non-negative value to me.

Oh, just go read my blah.  http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/
is the main page - note that the posts are reverse chronological, so to
read them in order, start at the bottom.  There aren't all that many
posts, and they're mostly reasonably small.  (It's also available by
anonymous FTP, on the off chance someone wants to read it who feels as
I do about the Web - I just have a bozohttpd serving up my anonymous
FTP area over HTTP, so you can get stuff from, eg,
ftp.rodents-montreal.org:/mouse/blah/index.html equally well.)

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
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