I would not necessarily equate geekiness with the desire / willingness to struggle with crap technology. As time goes on I crave (but rarely find) simplicity and elegance.
Funnily enough I was thinking about this on a long drive yesterday. On the way back I was more sensible and bought a 'best of Pet Shop Boys' CD and played selected tracks over and over again very loudly which took my mind off the 'what draws people to awful bizarre technologies?' question.
I have reached the stage where I do not really think very much of Windows or Linux and I have an irrational hatred of Macs (though the rational hatred that underlies the irrational is more than adequate).
My position is essentially 'I hate the 3 /4 main things (depending on whether you count Linux and BSD as two choices!) and I am not a big enough masochist to try anything more obscure'. I think that this position is a perfectly defensible one, I have always felt that hatred of all available alternatives without supporting or presenting any rational alternative is perfectly valid.
I did actually get Linux running on a spare PC, I think I ended up with Suse, and for email, web-browsing, watching downloaded stuff and DVDs, downloading pictures from digital cameras etc. It was fine in its way and actually better than I was expecting - my main exposure to Unix was in the early to mid 90s, the last time it was fashionable in other words. The OS and applications reminded me a lot of MacOS and MacOS shareware circa 1992 in terms of both utility and feel. Once the novelty wore off I found it was taking up valuable lounge space and so it was junked.
I saw MacOS X at the same time as t__m__i and I thought that the kit looked fairly pretty but I got the sense of a seething morass bubbling away under the surface. I recommend you spend the money on cheese and hats instead (you are not a vegan IIRC otherwise I would have to suggest something other than cheese, possibly chocolate).
(2nd attempt at posting with bizarre word substitution removed)
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chiming
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Date: July 30th, 2004 11:26 am (UTC)From:Funnily enough I was thinking about this on a long drive yesterday. On the way back I was more sensible and bought a 'best of Pet Shop Boys' CD and played selected tracks over and over again very loudly which took my mind off the 'what draws people to awful bizarre technologies?' question.
I have reached the stage where I do not really think very much of Windows or Linux and I have an irrational hatred of Macs (though the rational hatred that underlies the irrational is more than adequate).
My position is essentially 'I hate the 3 /4 main things (depending on whether you count Linux and BSD as two choices!) and I am not a big enough masochist to try anything more obscure'. I think that this position is a perfectly defensible one, I have always felt that hatred of all available alternatives without supporting or presenting any rational alternative is perfectly valid.
I did actually get Linux running on a spare PC, I think I ended up with Suse, and for email, web-browsing, watching downloaded stuff and DVDs, downloading pictures from digital cameras etc. It was fine in its way and actually better than I was expecting - my main exposure to Unix was in the early to mid 90s, the last time it was fashionable in other words. The OS and applications reminded me a lot of MacOS and MacOS shareware circa 1992 in terms of both utility and feel. Once the novelty wore off I found it was taking up valuable lounge space and so it was junked.
I saw MacOS X at the same time as t__m__i and I thought that the kit looked fairly pretty but I got the sense of a seething morass bubbling away under the surface. I recommend you spend the money on cheese and hats instead (you are not a vegan IIRC otherwise I would have to suggest something other than cheese, possibly chocolate).
(2nd attempt at posting with bizarre word substitution removed)