Steve Mansfield writes:
| Can we agree to move all the OS-upmanship to a separate mailing list that
| we can choose whether or not to subscribe to?
Probably not. ;-)
I'm not sure I'd want such segregation. Something that I've noticed
over the years is that I've learned a lot from the "My favorite _____
is better than yours" discussions. True, such unsupported claims are
not worth much. But it's fairly common for people to challenge such
claims, and the attempts to support them very often impart useful
information.
One of my favorite examples is the "editor wars" that have plagued a
lot of mailing lists and newsgroups over the years. I've been mostly
a vi user, but I'd have to say that the documentation for it is
crummy. This is similar to other editors, of course, especially the
supposedly user-friendly ones of recent years. The way I've learned
to use a lot of the more powerful features is by watching when
someone says "My favorite editor can do _____ and vi can't." Some vi
partisan would then respond with an explanation of how to do it, and
I'd now know how to do it. This has slowly made me a vi "power user".
The suppression of this sort of discussion is a serious loss to those
of us who are trying to learn something more than the most basic uses
of our tools. I've long been a unix user/hacker, but with the huge
number of Windoze machines about, there's an obvious value to me in
learning to use them, primitive and limiting though they may be.
There are lots of things that are "trivial" on unix systems that I
don't have a clue how to do on Windoze. The problem is the usual:
Either it's not documented, or I haven't yet stumbled across the
documentation. Or it really can't be done.
In many cases, some of the same things can be done. But it seems that
the usual phenomenon is rife: If you ask how to do it, you get
useless answers, mixed with insults. So what you do is claim that "my
OS can do it but Windoze can't." This is a challenge, and so very
often some more experienced user will proceed to show how ignorant
you are by explaining how to do it. And you've tricked them into
teaching you something. You just need a sufficiently thick skin to
casually ignore the insults that come with the lesson.
Long-time users of the Net will recognize this as a well-established
approach, routinely used by most of the more experienced users of all
sorts of computer systems. There's no shortage of arrogance among the
unix crowd, of course, which is as annoying to unix users as it is to
all others. But you can't stop this attitude; all you can do is hide
or suppress it, and then you can't learn anything. Because it often
turns out that the most arrogant are also the most knowledgeable.
If the Microsoft users go off in a huff and create their own forum,
we will all lose. The main value of abc is as a universal music
notation that works everywhere. Feedback from users of different
kinds of abc software has been valuable in the past, and will be
valuable in the future. Comparing interactions with the OS is
especially valuable, even if done in a not-so-friendly tone. In the
longer run, if we want the OS problems fixed, it will only happen if
there are public discussions. Otherwise, the vendors will just use
their usual "We don't have any complaints" arguments against users
who want improvements.
Something I see from being the one who instigated the abc Tune Finder
is that most of the abc web sites out there are running a unix-like
OS. No surprise here. There are a few Microsoft and Macintosh sites,
accounting for maybe 5% of the online tunes. The network security
folks have been telling us for years that the biggest security
problem on the net is with "monocultures", which can be easily
attacked once a single hole is found. It would be better for everyone
if we had a wider variety of machines serving up files. The slow
growth of linux and apache as the "standard" web server may be
gratifying to linux partisans, but it is a huge security risk. So I'd
like to find ways of persuading users of non-unix (and non-linux) OSs
to put their tunes on their own server. Doing so would inevitably
lead to more "OS wars", but I'd consider this a benefit. And if abc
users do this, they will also end up putting pressure on their
vendors to fix some of the problems that prevent Windoze and the Mac
from being used more as web servers.
In any case, if there's a Windoze feechur that really is better than
how I'd do it on a unix-like system, I'd prefer to hear about it,
even if it's told in an insulting fashion. And maybe I'd go off and
do my own time-and-motion study, to see if it really is better.
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