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Why Windows Rules: the QWERTY phenomenon?
Ralf Maximus:
Paul, I respect your deep knowledge. You have a very precise style of laying out facts that is a pleasure to read.
But. I feel like you're fixating on key words in my text (e.g. "upgrade", "lynx") and running with those, breaking things down to the subatomic level and reassembling them differently than I meant. Obviously I am not able to articulate my real point: that O/S agnostism is something to strive for, and spending time worrying about why Windows both rules and sucks at the same time is not productive. I view that as a failure on my part, as I pride myself on communications skills. Maybe as we get to know each others' posting style this will ease somewhat -- I'm really a nice guy, and I'm sure you are too. No harm, no foul.
But for now I will bow out of this thread, declare you the winner of a debate I didn't even know I was participating in, and let things go.
40hz:
Ralf: There's nothing wrong with having an opinion, or a strong feeling about something. But the one thing you can expect at DC is to have your opinions challenged and debated. It's pretty much in the nature of the place from what I can tell.
I've had my butt handed to me on more than one occasion when I've posted something on DC that I either: didn't properly think through, articulate clearly, or double-check for accuracy. And I've benefited from that experience. I know it's improved my forum skills - and it's definitely encouraged me to become (with mixed success) a better writer.
It's also made me painfully aware of how easy it is to fall into the trap of truthiness. (see quotes below*)
Don't bow out (or yield) if you think you've been misunderstood. It's not a competition. We're all seeking clarity here, no matter how divergent our points of view. So please, get in there with your facts and rationale for why you've formed the opinion you have - and share it with the rest of us.
Look at it this way: You may be right. :)
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*
http://www.wikiality.com/Truthiness
Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.
~ Stephen Colbert
October 17, 2005 The Colbert Report[/b]
Truthiness is the reality that is intuitively known without regard to liberal ideals such as reason and logic. It is the truth that is felt deep down, in the gut. It can't be found in books, which are all facts and no heart (except for the one true book, I Am America (And So Can You!) It is absolute, and can only be infallibly known by the gut of Stephen Colbert. It can only be felt by Americans with huge brass balls.
In the past decade, occurrences of truthiness have tripled in the United States. The rest of the world, sadly, lags far behind.
--- End quote ---
American Dialect Society's Word of the Year
On January 6, 2006, the American Dialect Society announced that truthiness was selected as its 2005 Word of the Year. The Society described its rationale as follows:
"In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on The Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel, truthiness refers to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, 'I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.'"
Apparently after realizing that "truthiness" was found in the Oxford English Dictionary, the Society later changed the wording of this press release on their website, from "First heard on The Colbert Report..." to "Recently popularized on The Colbert Report..."
--- End quote ---
Paul Keith:
Ralf, nice to meet you too, and what 40hz said.
Communication problems weren't totally entirely your fault, I was partly to blame too.
The reason it sounded like I was focusing on key phrases of your argument was because I was.
I do agree with your general premise and in fact, I was originally considering writing something too similar to your reply on the futility of this discussion, decided not to and then I read your reply and pretty much lurked here until I felt your analogy with the browsers read too much historical revisioning compared to the version I knew of that it was worth a rebuttal not necessarily for the goal of winning but to cementify my own thoughts if I'm wrong as well as inform readers/lurkers who chance upon this topic that might not have any true idea and hopefully one way or the other, they get a better version of the events out of reading through the topic.
In hindsight, it would probably have been simpler to imitate f0dder's trail of argument by focusing on the actual QWERTY-DVORAK analogy but at the time, I just felt I had more hands-on opinion of browsers and the idea that QWERTY was inherently flawed compared to DVORAK just left a sour taste in my mouth.
It just comes off like an argument saying ergonomic chairs are much superior to cheaper generic models but often times it turns out that it's my sitting posture that's the problem and was the missing perspective to my dilemmas.
In a way, by following this premise I just felt like it was ignoring the innovations and hardships many distribution developers had done to improve parts of Linux to be better than Windows out of the box which rather than prove the futility of the discussion and treating the topic as a well done analogy, ends up forcing the analogy to be unnecessarily over-thought in my head.
Ralf Maximus:
Thanks for being cool about all this. I understand now what you were trying to accomplish.
However, I'm uncomfortable with the response my simple statement of opinion generated. I've spent entirely too much time defending and explaining a position I don't even care about.
The end result is that I no longer feel qualified to express opinions unless I am prepared to do battle, High School Debate Club style. That's not fun, and not why I come here. I am not a newbie -- check my stats.
So, I'll go back to posting fun/amusing doo-dads and leave the heavy debate to the more qualified.
Have fun.
40hz:
The end result is that I no longer feel qualified to express opinions unless I am prepared to do battle, High School Debate Club style. That's not fun, and not why I come here. I am not a newbie -- check my stats.
So, I'll go back to posting fun/amusing doo-dads and leave the heavy debate to the more qualified.
Have fun.
-Ralf Maximus (December 01, 2008, 03:37 PM)
--- End quote ---
We will. Hope you do too.
Wizard hat, bunny ears, or Jester's cap - whatever you're most comfortable wearing. The dress code is pretty loose around here. ;D
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