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____/ Homer on Monday 05 Oct 2009 23:58 : \____
> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>
>> Cuisine is one thing and linguistics is another. At some stage,
>> learning almost- extinct languages can be similar to mastering
>> ancient Egyptian (like Shampoleon) and trying to /reconstruct/
>> culture when older generations are long gone. Most culture is encoded
>> in a language with unique connotations.
>
> In terms of computing, society may have already crossed that threshold.
> We seem to have forgotten the point that computers are supposed to be
> tools that provide a /better/ way of doing things (automation, fast
> calculation), but instead they've become something that's more of a
> burden than a relief, for the ~90% who run Windows, anyway. Instead of
> speeding things up, using Windows can often actually slow things down,
> when you're having to battle viruses, crashes and bloated software.
>
> Something has definitely been lost in translation.
>
> Getting back the original goal, instead of pursuing this greed-driven
> obsession with (mostly dysfunctional) "features" protected by Draconian
> restrictions, is going to take a radical shift in habits, away from the
> self-indulgent and unproductive aesthetics of unsubstantial glamour and
> gloss on the Windows platform, to the raw power of something like
> GNU/Linux. But people seem chronically apathetic and ambivalent; they'd
> happily endure the tortures of Windows rather than learn something else.
>
>> Then there's the issues of formats in the digital world. The
>> Redmondians want the British Library to encode everything as
>> "Microsoftian" for future archaeologists specialising in COM and
>> Rubbish to reconstruct in a very lossy fashion. Just remember to tell
>> them to squeeze in some imaginary (yet "superb") leap years...
>
> The Microsoft-ification of the software industry (or more precisely, the
> Wintel-ification of the computer industry), is the root of the problem.
> That duopoly has held back the industry, and society's progress, for
> three decades, by eroding the substance of computing, and replacing it
> with buzzwords and lipstick, much like the Disney-fication of literature
> reduces it to mindless pulp. The fact that this pulp is presented in a
> proprietary format, is the least of our problems. It exists, it is
> consumed by an apathetic and weak-minded public, it's ubiquitous, and
> it's protected by a sort of racketeering operation that inhibits
> alternatives and discourages autonomous thinking. That habit, and that
> protection racket, must be broken, before the field of computing
> devolves into something only suitable for chimps.
Microsoft's CEO uses Windows.
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Here be hills, there be dragons!
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
roy pts/0 :0 Mon Oct 5 10:17 still logged in
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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