giorgos keramidas

You are missing an important point. Not everyone does things
*only* to improve one's society, as you have written elsethread:

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:09:24 -0400
From: Ken Tilton <kentilton@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively? Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <WTdvg.126$OQ2.19@fe08.lga>

No, I want the yobbos to buy commercial licenses and continue
slaving away at SBCL, Slime, and OpenMCL.

Those toys are neat fun and educational and all that good
stuff, but for real work they should be using grown-up
tools. For their own good, and for the good of society.

kenny

It took me 2 days to just get my head around the Slackware
installer, in 1995. I had tons of fun in the process, and
I even managed *NOT* to trach my Windows installation.
Amazing stuff, really!

Having said that, how long do you think it takes to the average
Windows user to install his first web-camera driver in 2006? How
about a printer driver? Or a USB DSL-modem wannabe, that hangs
up every now or then? Do you seriously think they are having
*any* fun in the process? Somehow, I doubt it.

Are these hours going to be considered a waste that should have
been spent doing things that improve our society?

Extending this logic even further, is every hour "wasted"
watching soccer also a crime against society's potential for
improvement?

Why do you think so?

ken tilton

It was a long thread, you may have missed that the impetus was a young
Bolshevik taking me to task for not benefitting society just so I could
make money. And then I found the same nonsense in Stallman's silly manifesto.

Yeah, it was tough, my manual dexterity is excellent but I never seem to
get USB plugs lined up with the socket at the exact angle +/- .01
degrees required to get the damn things in, let alone guess at which way
is up--so useful that they could not work out how to make them up-less.
Other than that, sorry, It Just Worked.

Never installed one, they are all there already (yes, taking up half my
hard drive, but then I do not think there is enough pron video out there
to fill up my lowend drive.

I am not sure anything other than DSL can be blamed for anything having
to do with DSL.

Somehow i am afraid you are making this all up. Sure, Windows sucks, but
it also Just Works with an ineluctable one or two percent of
irritating but non-obstructing suckiness. Until three years later you
cannot stand it anymore and buy a new Dell. Life is good.

Ah, a classic Usenet Black Hole -- or is it Supernova? An attempt by a
black hole to explode into a supernova new thread? Why talk about soccer
when you could be talking about the issue: how many hours has "free
software" sucked out of everybody's lives? Would you rather be talking
about software than that stupid manifesto? if so, understood.

kt

--
Cells: http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/

"I'll say I'm losing my grip, and it feels terrific."
-- Smiling husband to scowling wife, New Yorker cartoon

giorgos keramidas

This has rarely been my experience, but YMMV, of course.


So your Dell-preinstalled Windows copy has every printer driver
that has ever been out there, and all that will ever be? Why do
I find it hard to fall for that?

I bet I've been called for support by Windows-using friends far
more times than you have probably bought a new system. Buying a
new preinstalled Windows laptop may sound very logical and easy
to do if you live one block away from Fry's, but you are either
deliberately or out of ignorance forgetting that not all the
world lives so close to a computer hardware depot, the entire
world is not the same and not everyone has an extra USD $800 to
throw away every week or so, because a new Windows Trojan has
been unleashed on the unsuspecting masses of the network.

This means that a lot of people, developers or not, will not have
the money to buy a new system whenever their printer driver or
USB camera misbehaves. And that's *precisely* where your
argument of "buy a new one" falls over in its effort to support
that spending time to properly configure and set up a system
(open source or not) is a waste of time, sorry...

Because you are characterizing hours and days spent improving a
free software package as "worthless waste of time". By bringing
up just one example of the billions of ways we humans have
invented to *really* waste our time, all I'm trying to say is
that what you consider a "waste of time" others may call
"entertainment", "learning" or even just "leisurely hacking away
a merry Saturday afternoon".

Time wasted for one, may be time well spent for another.