[FoRK] More iPhone analysis

[Jeff Bone]

On Mar 7, 2008, at 9:39 PM, Tom Higgins wrote:

> So Apples got the uber  marketing of the sheeple crowd, historically
> the mass lumpen..or as Jean Shepherd calls em ...the Slob.  Cool.
> Meanwhile for those who are actually interested in thinking
> different...the frontier has long since moved on. Surprises me forkers
> have not.

This is too easy, Tom.  Not a useful generalization.

Take my present employer, for example.  Smartest and most eclectic  
group of folks I've ever worked with, despite having spend over a  
decade building my own teams before landing at RGM:  a hodgepodge  
collection of PhDs and college dropouts, computer scientists and  
economists, quantum chemists and physicists, stock car racers and  
national championship on- and off-road cyclists.

We're all Macs on the desktop / laptop.

Why?  Because we all came to largely the same conclusion several years  
ago (indeed, before I got there, it was a happy coincidence from my  
perspective.)  Namely, that (a) hacking, science and software  
engineering all suffer horribly on Windows, and (b) Linux just  
requires too much fucking around for us to have any patience with it  
on our desktops and laptops.  In particular, both the "R" in RGM and I  
had independently arrived at the very same three basic complaints  
through experience:  configuring Cinerama to work on X was a giant  
time sync, and getting wi-fi switching and power management working  
reliably on Linux laptops was a fucking pain.  OS X was, at the end of  
the day, the desktop- and laptop-capable UNIX that "just worked."

My life's too busy to fuck w/ desktop Linux anymore.  (Newer  
distributions may not offer the same degree of constant friction that  
earlier ones did, but they also fail to offer a compelling reason to  
switch away.)

Does that make us "sheeple?"  I don't think so.  It's merely a  
practical choice;  I'm interesting in getting things done, and for me  
that means doing things on the command line *other* than constantly  
playing sysadmin.


jb