I love Apple computers, but they don’t seem to love me in return. I’ve just had my fourth major computer crash in 18 months – this one on a second iBook that replaced the lemon that suffered the first three crashes. Sorry for the offline absence. I’ve now secured a loaner and will be filing from it over the next few days.
I'm deliberately not linking to the article, because the rest of it has nothing to do with Apple.
My point is that while I've had freeze-ups plenty of times, I have not had a "major" computer crash (something that set me back more than a few minutes) on any Windows platform after Win95.
If you use a computer for word processing, email, web, and other routine stuff (as opposed to using it to test bleeding-edge software or applications), you really should not have to suffer through a "major" computer crash. Should you?
What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.
This is exactly my view of the cultural difference between open source programmers and proprietary programmers. One group is geeks writing software for geeks. The other group is geeks writing software for suits.
David Weinberger obviously has been bought off by the evil empire. In the comment section on this post, he writes,
As for getting linux: I have linux on a separate machine. As a desktop system (gnome and kde) I've found that it's far less stable than XP. Not only do I have to spend hours finding the command line commands for doing simple things, but the system freezes and crashes frequently. E.g., I just had to reboot in order to restore sound. Now, it turns out that I could also just have killed the right process (artsd? something like that), but how the hell am I supposed to know which is the sound processing process? So, while linux is rock solid as a server, my experience as a desktop end user is that it's not yet ready for desktop end users.
Megan ('Jane Galt') McArdle says that the SCO lawsuit will damage Linux regardless of how it comes out, because it creates a potential liability for any Linux user with deep pockets.
I think you'll see corporations taking a pass on open source software. Because for corporations, the real problem with this lawsuit is not a few lines of stolen computer code, which is why HP's attempt to stop the damage by indemnifying its Linux customers against SCO is unlikely to work. The real problem is this: if you're an IT manager deciding whether or not to purchase a Linux machine, how can you be sure that those stolen lines are the only ones?
Corporations simply can't afford the risk of a lawsuit, even if the cost of a non-open-source OS is several hundred dollars higher. At the corporate level, lawsuits are expensive and distracting, even if you win. And at the IT manager level, telling the board that your hot new installation just embroiled the company in a legal battle is a career killer.
I would agree that the last thing that a corporation needs is risk of a lawsuit that is completely unrelated to its core mission. But I did not realize that this is a potential with Linux.
I think that of all the pros and cons of open source, this legal threat is the most unfair. In fact, my general feeling is that lawsuits are rarely a tool for achieving justice. I do not think that the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit had any potential for public benefit (although it certainly had the potential to benefit Microsoft's competitors), and I feel even more strongly that the Linux lawsuit has no potential for public benefit.
The buyers of Microsoft software are consenting adults. That does not mean that all Microsoft users are happy -- if you work for an organization that standardizes on Microsoft, you may have had no voice in the decision. Still, somebody somewhere looked at the trade-offs and decided to purchase software from Microsoft instead of a competitor.
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