[geeks] Can't decide on an OS

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sat, 28 Sep 2013, Mouse wrote:

> 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.

That depends on if you're writing software for other people to use, I
suppose.  I notice a theme here.

>> 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.

While I can empathize with the feeling of having one's elite club overrun
by the mundane masses, you may as well count me among the invaders.
Writing software that uses HTTP as a transport has been a huge part of my
career, and I ran for four years the technical side of a company whose
sole business was letting just about anyone on the net who was willing to
pay their way.

Technologies, as a general rule, are morally neutral; it is the people
who wield them that determine how they impact the rest of us.  The
majority of people on the new Internet are not using it to annoy the
old-timers.  They merely see a different set of use cases which enhance
their lives.  How is that so awful?  Sure, they're being passive eyeball
vendors for the likes of Facebook and DoubleClick, and they're not
contributing anything to the network as a whole, but they're not taking
anything away, either.

> "[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,

I will never defend the US government's interference in the governance of
the network, but there's also no federal mandate that the network continue
to exist at the sole pleasure of shareholder value.  Nor is there any
active mechanism in place to degrade the network to keep overhead low.
That's more-or-less a conspiracy among network "service" providers.

There's a meter-wide conduit of fiber-optic cable about 2km from my house
running from Austin to Houston (at least; it probably continues in both
directions), but AT&T can barely manage a halfway stable 400kb uplink for
me.  That's not the US Department of Commerce; that's AT&T's corporate
greed and the network of interlocking "memoranda of
understanding"/"franchise agreements" between local governments and the
local-monopoly telecom providers preventing others from competing.

This continues as you get closer to the backbone.  The blank-cheque
peering agreements that built the network are being replaced by threats of
intra-backbone billing because no one wants to be the first to spend
profits on expansion.

> 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.

The fact is that the web is "good enough" for most people right now.  It
has its quirks, but the platform itself isn't too bad.  Having a lexical
scope for differentiation of services (rather than "well known" ports) is
really pretty nice.  Having content negotiation (including compression) as
part of the connection is rather convenient.  The statelessness gets
annoying, but it offers many of the same scalability propositions as
functional programming.

> 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.

If I may, I'd like to offer the hardest and least-comforting lesson that
life continues to teach me:  You can't go back.

Everything we love and cherish will change and eventually fade away.  You
can either cope with that and learn to embrace the change, or you can die
with it.

For now, we're stuck with x86-based and ARM-based microcomputers and a
redundant network transport layer that uses angle brackets to delimit
poorly-spelled insipid comments and sent by 12-year-olds.  That's reality.
All the cool computer architectures are dead, along with many of the
people who did the foundational work on them, and they've been replaced by
handheld appliances people use to trade animated pictures of cats.

Now, we can wallow in that until the world has sufficiently passed us by
like veterans of a forgotten war, or we can run away to something
completely foreign, or we can look at the beauty that has sprung from this
new reality.

If I choose, I can have every service I commonly use billed to a credit
card, and have the associated paperwork arrive in such a way that I
dedicate a backed-up part of my computer to holding it, so that:

   1. Things are paid on-time, without my having to spend two evenings a
      month writing cheques.
   2. When doing my taxes, I don't have to fish for anything in filing
      cabinets and boxes.
   3. I don't have to worry about pests, the passage of time, and the
      elements destroying my records.  I can further safeguard these
      records by writing a copy to DVD and putting the disc in my bank's
      vault.
   4. I don't have to worry about an unscrupulous person intercepting
      paperwork that sits unmonitored in an unlocked box in front of my
      house.

This is a good thing!  This saves me possibly two weeks every year in
paperwork and tax preparation time, and the technology that made this
possible is the very one you dislike so strongly.  Sure, this _could_ be
done via email and customer service associates manually taking my
instructions via the telephone, but the automated nature of trading
documents over the web makes the value proposition positive for both the
vendor _and_ me.

...which is why it happened, and is why companies are begging their
customers to accept delivery[0] of paperwork via email or their web sites.
Companies would love to ditch their mailrooms and gigantic Xerox printers
and the increasingly-unreliable postal services.  However, trading it for
a call centre of customer service reps to manage email addresses and FTP
accounts wouldn't be an improvement.

Consider also, the modern political movements that have sprung up simply
because there isn't a per-person cost (either in time or resources) to
contact a bunch of people and coordinate activities.  Occupy would not
have happened without the web.  The Arab spring may have happened without
the web, but it'd have been a lot more dangerous getting bootstrapped.

These are people working to genuinely benefit themselves and their
countrymen, and their work is made lighter by this usurping technology
merely because it is accessible.

The cop-watch movement would not have started without the web, and it's
come at a time where a rise in "less than lethal" enforcement tools, "pain
compliance" policies, and an increasing number of PTSD-affected former
military have all become common in police forces.  This is a movement that
may well be saving lives, and it's fueled by LiveLeak and YouTube.  This
would NOT work over an all-or-nothing transport like FTP, and it certainly
wouldn't work over netnews.

Record labels and pop superstars with awful music are being replaced by
personalized distribution of music from tiny independent artists to
smaller groups of dedicated fans.  This is a revolution in a stagnant
industry (specifically, one that was very hard to get established in) that
was catering only to the lowest denominator, and it wouldn't have happened
without a ubiquitous and affordable multicast communications technology
that anyone could use without needing to understand the inner workings.
This is directly improving the ecosystem of one of the oldest appreciated
arts of our species.


Or, you could retreat to music.  However, I hear all the real music has
been replaced by this 12-semitone chromatic garbage that any drooling
moron can learn to play.


[0] Note: I would MUCH rather have PDFs sent to me in PGP-encrypted email
     rather than my having to periodically visit a website to download
     them.  Perhaps that'll happen someday.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "No matter how much the government controls...any
Elgin, TX         %  problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of
USA               |  freedom that remains."         --Sheldon Richman