v-s.net v0.6

Saturday, 5:41 pm in Geeking

In Understanding Power, Chomsky talks about the reason as to why there’s no real political discourse anymore. Basically, the theory is that any discourse that does exist already has its limits predefined. A simple example would be that things are generally along the lines of ‘should we’ or ‘shouldn’t we’, there’s rarely a mention of any kind of third (let alone fourth or fifth) way. In other words, things are dichotomous and the two outcomes are already presupplied.

In a lot of ways, I think this has seeped into the geek community. It’s either “you’re for mac” or “you’re for microsoft” or you’re against on or the other or all. It’s Us versus Them. Now, I’m no great fan of economic rationalism, but the way I see it is that computers are a market, and, as such, there’s scope to have a number of different systems doing different things. One operating system can’t possibly hope to cover the whole market (well, I guess it can but not particularly well; competition theory and all that whatever).

Which is why the stupidity surrounding a lot of OS wars annoys me to the point of ~braken [h]-style violent shaking, because it’s based on a pure bloody-minded refusal to see things any other way. Not only that, but the geeks doing the arguing get bogged down in the semantics of insults and definitions and flatly refuse to look at anything from any kind of external standpoint. And because of this, they always have one little specific example which they’ll use to justify a general statement (this is generally along the lines of “My mum can use UNIX/Linux/Mac OSX, so it’s obviously superior as a personal user desktop than Windows”). Which will get stuck in their head over and over again and rotate faster than a washing machine in a spin cycle.

Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux and Other… None of these systems are perfect and each fits a different set of users and a different set of circumstances. I wouldn’t play Morrowind on a SPARC but I wouldn’t host a website on my Windows box, either. I wouldn’t use the old Mac OSes if my life depended on it because I personally think they suck harder than a starving lamprey. Though, to its credit, the old Macs did used to have Nigel’s World and Malestrom (which I’ve also used on Linux). And Macs also used to have an edge over PCs as far as commerical graphics went, though this has largly been lost to Unix as far as I know. Apple also understand style and ‘ambience’ better than the haphazard PC market, which works both for and against it. Windows has problems but is ubiquitous, which means that it is, on the whole, more convienient than either Unix or Mac. And even though Unix technically has more software written for it than any other platform, Windows software is more likely to be the kind that people like my mum is going to want to use (mum does not, for example, really want a dozen different types of compiler, but is quite keen on Hoyle Solitare).

But apparently, holding opinions like this (that everything’s good for something, and that nothing’s good for everything) isn’t bloody valid with other geeks.

And that really pisses me off beyond belief.

• Tags » advocacy, apple, geeking, linux, noam chompsky, opinions, os wars, unix, windows
• Mood » still fuming
• Music » Maria Bello, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)"