Concern

Once again, I am drunk, and am composing something. Something far less full of self-pity this time:

Mac OS X has too many fatal flaws. Things get hung up, stuck, way too easily. The system is a resource hog. Running a reasonable number of programs brings the system to its knees, gives me a spinning beachball of death just trying to wake the system up from the screen saver (not even sleep!).

Windows is probably worse here, but still, we can do better.

Leopard seems like a further departure; more half-baked features, clogging memory, slowing the system down, and generally making the system unusable. We don’t fucking want a system that has everything; we want a fucking system that lets us get things done.

Getting things done; on Windows, this mostly meant companies pandering to what’s most universally accepted (Microsoft), and so, to collaborate and get things done, you had to have Microsoft. But Windows presents SO many barriers towards productivity; viruses, spyware, problems caused by anti-virus software, corporate integration and interaction, all of this is bookkeeping, bureaucracy, that all gets in the way of progress and productivity.

Your system is your own; even in a corporate environment, your system must be your own for you to be productive. Corporate hegemony solves the problem of Windows bugs and malware; but your system must be your own, must be under your exclusive control, for you to reach your potential. You need a “hands-off” way of managing IT; let employee X handle his own system, let him get his work done, and just make sure he can’t harm anyone else’s productivity.

Yeah, but: do people need to be managed? Do they need hand-holding, admonishment, punishment, to use computers effectively? Maybe some do. But if they are a danger, that’s the fault of you from making them dangerous, not any fault of theirs, not any fault that you must pin on the rest of your user base, because you can’t help but run to the lowest common denominator among your people.

Maybe if you just had smarter people, maybe if everyone you had was just a little smarter and more careful, you could avoid this. But, well…

Maybe with time computer literacy will mature, and people will be able to both get their work done without needing constant guidance, and will neither need constant monitoring for bad or naive behavior. Maybe. It would have to happen eventually, I’d think, or else those too immature, too naive, would be eaten alive by this boiling pot of evil and opportunity for exploitation, so they’d eventually adapt and evolve to handle such danger.

But WOE be on you software engineers! Still! For letting your systems allow people to be victimized! It is hard — I know this all too well — it is hard given what we have to work with, to make things easy to use for people, while keeping them secure in their usage, but it is still, nevertheless, our fault. It is hard to deeply understand what people need, when we are preoccupied with bonuses, with that startup idea we had, with free lunch and all the bullshit that goes along with being an engineer in this dysfunctional but still special place here in California, in America, in the World.

(this has not been edited. *hic*)