[LINK] PCs wasting our lives...

[Ash Nallawalla]

> From: Howard Lowndes
> On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Chirgwin, Richard wrote:

> > The gist of the blog is that Marshall Brain logged a 
> > month's PC-based 
> > time-wasting (repairs, upgrades and so on); it came to 11 1/2 hours.

> ...so why does he continue to use M$
> 
> My Linux systems needs attention occasionally when Snort 
> overflows (I must script something to handle that one - one 
> day; normal time to fix is 30 seconds of script and about 5 
> minutes of running same); and the only other problem is 
> filtering spam that has beaten the filters (I must find out 
> why spamassassin is not learning)

If PCs are wasting our lives, why is Brain wasting more time writing about it?

I wasn't disappointed (anticipating the usual Mac and Linux comparisons). :-)

I suspect that if his family were just given Linux PCs, Brain would have an even
bigger blog.

I read only a couple of his "repairs" in detail and my advice to him is to go join
a user group or visit annoyances.org or wherever such people hang out to drown
their sorrows.  He has clearly too much time on his hands (or this is a clever way
to get many hits on his page).  It is difficult to compare PCs with any other
consumer grade device.  People sometimes compare them with cars - "If Microsoft
designed cars..." - but cars don't have onboard computers where you can load
software written by anyone on the planet or that catch ten viruses driving down
the freeway.

Linkers know that the real problem is that people fall victim to clever marketing
and the rest is owing to an unwillingness to be different.  The irony is that the
IBM PC (hardware) was "open source" at a time when the Mac ought to have been open
source too.

- Ash