So, I’m in the middle of resurrecting my computer after it suffered a fatal bout of Windowsitis, and while letting off steam to my dad have some unexpected insights based on an IT metaphor.<\/p>\n
I was testing three operating systems (OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Vista) and a virtualisation tool.\u00a0 It was glitching at the multiboot setup – wanting the option of choosing which OS to boot but giving Vista the impression it was exclusive.\u00a0 While skirting the bounds of good IT practice the Windows recovery option, skipped a step and then another and started to wipe the drive …<\/p>\n
I stopped it, but too late.\u00a0 The partition table was gone.\u00a0 Now, I could spend a tediaous day manually discovering the partition table (guessed from my knowledge of teh approximate partitioning) or start clean.\u00a0 Which is what I did.<\/p>\n
The reinstall was not painless, because Vista wants to take over the whole drive.\u00a0 And after all three are installed, Vista is complaining again.\u00a0 I’m deciding whether or not to scap MS for good.\u00a0 Dad calls, and I was just telling him the story:<\/p>\n
“Its so annoying – you’ve got this fancy user intyerface uphere, but at the bottom, at its foundation, its core its very primitive and its badly designed.\u00a0 Its sitting on a weak foundation.\u00a0 Now by Win7 they might have plastered over it enough, but I doubt it.<\/p>\n
“The problem is that at teh very beginning it wants exclusivity and control – it takes control from the user.\u00a0 (Remember the movie Tron?)\u00a0 It asks a complicated question and wamnts a simple answer.\u00a0 Its like it says, ‘what’s the meaning of life’ and expects the answer 1.\u00a0 Any other answer is wrong and it takes over to make the answer 1.\u00a0 The open system (linux distribution) doesn’t ask big picture questions; it would say would you like to erase your whole drive or not, and if you answer no, it would ask if you want to erase some of your drive, and then how much and where …<\/p>\n
The IT metaphor is a metaphor for modern humanity.\u00a0 We ask a big picture question and we want an easy answer.\u00a0 “What is the meaning of life?”\u00a0 Eat! Get rich!\u00a0 Look fancy! are the answers we like, want and listen to.\u00a0 We have little time for the right answer, the open answer – “it depends”.<\/p>\n
So, for a fun, trouble free IT experience dump Windows, go open source.<\/p>\n
And to find meaning in life, face up to difficult answers – “it depends”.<\/p>\n
Accept that the answer might be 0 and you have to keep looking for 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I’m in the middle of resurrecting my computer after it suffered a fatal bout of Windowsitis, and while letting off steam to my dad have some unexpected insights based on an IT metaphor. I was testing three operating systems (OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Vista) and a virtualisation tool.\u00a0 It was glitching at the multiboot setup – …
Continue reading What Is the Meaning Of Life? 1 or 0?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,26,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-perspective","category-ict","category-holonics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hwcd-m7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1371"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1373,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1371\/revisions\/1373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}