[geeks] Can't decide on an OS

[Jonathan Groll]

On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 14:02:30 -0500 (CDT), Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Sep 2013, Mouse wrote:

> 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 people who did the foundational work on them, and they've been replaced by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.

It is for emails like this that I read this mailing list. I would
press the "plus one" buttom if I were a content consumer, but then I
wouldn't be able to say how succinctly the above paragraph managed to
capture my transient thoughts.

 
> 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.

Now, why did you have to ruin the perfect email by mentioning taxes?
Yes, it is a real use case. However, most of us hardly feel that
improving the efficiency of tax collection is making the world a
better place!

> 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.


I too have been taken with this subthread within a subthread. Where
does life continue after computers? They have been an obsession of
mine since I was a child, so they're as much a formative factor making
me who I am as they are tools that I use to get my work done.
However, I can't help but ask myself if I would be happier working in
academia than working in a computer related job. Part of the problem
lies with the idea of being in management, I guess. And part of the
problem lies in the repetitive nature of some computer work, moreso
than in the changing landscape of technology. And the allure of
bringing computers to bear on whatever I do in my next problem domain
means that I cannot escape them. 

Cheers,
Jonathan
--
jjg: Jonathan J. Groll : groll co za
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