Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 21:43:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Better than politics!

"Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu> wrote:

> OS wars!
> http://srom.zgp.org/

After four years out of work, I decided to hold my nose and accept a
Windows-based job.  After all, I wouldn't be *programming* the thing.
I'd just be using an *application* on it.  It would be like living in
an apartment whose kitchen was completely infested with rats, roaches,
and other vermin, by never using the kitchen.

It's not that easy.  Two weeks after I learned Total Eclipse, I was
reassigned to work in Microsoft Word, with the explanation that I
didn't need to learn it, as it was "intuitive".

Right.  Intuitive for Martians, maybe.  And as full of bugs as a
cicada year.  If I look at a file without touching it, and then exit,
it asks me if I want to save the changes.  If the hard disk is full,
it won't let me save to a diskette, because the hard disk is full.

Hard disk full?  That brings us to today.  I got little done because
the 19 gigabyte hard drive was full.  It kept flashing colorful
animated warning messages at me, but neglected to tell me anything
*useful*, such as where all the space had gone.  19 gigs is, after
all, an *enormous* amount of space.  All I'd been producing was text
files.  19 gigs would take well over a *century* of non-stop typing
to fill.

We finally had to call in an outside expert who found hundreds
of enormous junk .WAV files that one of the applications had
spontaneously barfed up into a hidden directory without telling
anyone.  Even if I'd know about them, I didn't have privileges
to delete them.  Sigh.

Well, I'm paid just the same.  If they ever want to instantly more
than double my productivity, they can get me some decent tools.
Ones which are *free*, unlike the abomination from Redmond.

I like Charlie Stross's theory that Windows is a plot to save mankind
from emergent AI by retarding progress and by causing the best minds
to be repelled by computers and work in some other field.  It makes
more sense than any other theory for how anything so awful ever
caught on.

Fortunately, I'm a fast learner.  Editing in Word isn't much harder
than holding all one's coversations in Pig Latin, or writing backwards
with one's non-dominant hand, or riding a bicycle on slick ice.  At
least not once I figured out how to get it to display light text on a
dark bacground rather than the default eye-hurting inverse video that
was like trying to spend all day reading text on a lit fluorescent bulb.