Thu, 20 Jan 2005
I thought of this after a rather emotional conflict with a radio group I'm involved with.
When obsolete technology is elevated to the highest priority, it is too
common to regard ignorance as a virtue and not a limitation.
Nostolgia is a very common thing. And nostolgia is quite a good thing to
keep close to your heart. But nostolgia is a particularly human and
emotional charactaristic. When it is attached to machines everything
goes wrong. I recently had to explain to a friend who is installing
Debian GNU/Linux for the first time. He
asked me what is better,
Gnome or
KDE. I couldn't come up with an answer. I
prefer Gnome but I also use Knoppix for a
project of mine and I'm pretty
familliar with KDE because of it. In the end I could only say "know
thyself". Then that kicked off way too many things to think about.
Computers aren't just machines. They are so generic and can perform so
much utility in our lives they have become personal. The complexity of
breaking anything that involves a personal computer down to "is
better than
" is so large it's futile. You can't
possible come to any meaningful conclusions. This argument takes many
forms. I call it a
Sucks vs Rules
argument but the folks on #debian at irc.freenode.net might call it a
poll and thusly a useless question which they deride. So there is no
right answer to our personal computer question because it's so
very personal.
I can make my own conclusions from this. Using information is hard.
Personal computers make that easier but your personal amount of
willingness to deal with certian external factors and the time you are
willing to spend influence it greatly. If you are looking for the answer
to a sucks vs rules question you probably will never find it and you
will have to investigate further or just forget it and stick with
what's cool. Coolness
looks a lot different when it's
obsolete.
posted at: 02:28 | path:
/theory |
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