Mitchell Brown wrote:
>
> Thanks to hype0 for sending this to me. It made my day :)
>
>
>
> MGBs, TANKS, AND BATMOBILES
>
> Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up
> these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of
> my friends' dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage.
> Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would
> take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild
> youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a
> madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust
> of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin
> Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.
>
> In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people's
> relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long
> way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a
> lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh
> and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of
> an oppressed minority group.
>
> The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very
> important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that
> counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. /But it was fun to drive/.
> It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones,
> every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's
> hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it.
> The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us
> passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere--about as
> interesting as peering over someone's shoulder while he punches
> numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an /experience/.
> For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a
> larger realm, and doing things that he couldn't do unassisted.
>
> The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so
> let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive
> summary of our situation today.
>
> Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are
> situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the
> others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles
> (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke
> you could easily fix them.
>
> There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one
> day began selling motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively
> styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they
> worked was something of a mystery.
>
> The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the
> original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg
> contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it
> to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear
> goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple
> owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the
> windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared
> with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.
>
> Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a
> colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal
> of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and
> it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a
> hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT)
> which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little
> more reliable.
>
> Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has
> changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled
> sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have
> had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long
> that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making
> bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
>
> On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along
> more recently.
>
> One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the
> BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans,
> better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as
> reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
>
> With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and
> which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees,
> and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The
> people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned,
> cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S.
> Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated
> technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army
> tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break
> down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets,
> and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being
> cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of
> them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the
> ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away
> for free.
>
> Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety
> percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station
> wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other
> dealerships.
>
> Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan,
> pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy
> the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the
> opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior
> vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.
>
> The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut
> who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to
> accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.
>
> The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is
> staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with
> bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible
> situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:
>
> Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks!
> It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety
> miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
>
> Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is
> true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
>
> Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
>
> Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes
> wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here,
> and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours,
> listening to elevator music."
>
> Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send
> volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
>
> Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"
>
> Bullhorn: "But..."
>
> Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>
Here are my "dos centavos":
I have been using Linux since 1993/1994. I have always used slackware
(and only briefly used debian/Stormix while building their Firewall/VPN
server). Although Linux has gotten easier to install and maintain, it
does still requires a basic understanding of computers to make full
use of it. Until Linux is 100% idiot-proof and supports as many devices
as Windows does (right out of the box), it will be relegated to the
"Gourmet" user...
To paraphrase Friedrich W. Nietzsche: Every advance in human society is
only made possible when and if the powerful elite deems it necessary, or
convenient...(EVERY elevation of the type "man," has hitherto been the
work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be...). Not until
the business world (not just a few; but a concerned, unified effort) see
the economic benefits(to themselves; not the consumer) of promoting
Linux as a viable alternative (and Linux continues to mature into a
true user-friendly OS) will it reach the critical mass it needs to
"compete" against the StationWagon dealership...Not matter how cool it
is to drive a tank on the freeway (or how nice it's to blow s**t up with it)
--
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=
----------------------Juan Alberto Cirez---------------------
------------------Phone: +1(780)742-8860---------------------
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=
Wide and Open Northern Alberta, Canada.
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=
_______________________________________________
clug-talk mailing list
[email protected]
http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php)
**Please remove these lines when replying
