Linux to the fore

Linux machines in mass distribution to kids might be the beginning of the end for other OS's (Operating Systems). Once you have people who learn on Linux, they will never go for the others.

Sometimes a fresh start is exactly like this; the old road isn't repaved, it's just bypassed.

As for MS Windows, we have have reached the amazing point where people are willing to pay extra for simplicity, for fewer features. The widespread reaction against Vista proves it, with users going to extra trouble to avoid the new OS. The best a revised version could do would be to provide an installation package that allows for a very stripped-down install. But at this point the code might be so intertwined that it's impossible to go very far in that direction, toward true modularity.

Imagine, for example, a version of MS Word that could be installed in a VERY stripped down form. You would add features only as the proven need arose -- you would go to Help to find something you suddenly needed (say, adding an index or footnotes), and the help page would give you the option of installing that feature. Even after years of use, most people would end up with a very tiny version, nothing like the monstrosity you get now, a vast accretion of features almost nobody ever uses.

These things have grown by a sort of weird, "piling on" version of evolution. It's as though if somebody once needed a third eye in the back of his head, then everybody from then on would have to born with the additional eye. That approach eventually fails because it assumes that there are no costs connected with adding things, when in fact there are costs in operational efficiency, coordination, resource use, and inertia. Which is why nature doesn't do it that way. When cave fish no longer use their eyes, those structures become highly vulnerable to negative selection; eventually the biological resources that were spent on eyes get saved or reallocated to still-necessary functions. The Microsoft approach, by contrast, is not only to maintain eyes that are not used, but to pile on a few extra ones. You know, just in case.

Something about this reminds me of the Roadrunner cartoons, where Wily Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and only then realizes that he's gone too far and is standing on thin air. You see him suddenly realize where he is, but he's gone too far to get back, and down he goes...

Byron

Subprime straight talk

Redistributing wealth from the responsible to the irresponsible. How's that for the social policy process at its very finest?

If I see another sob story on the evening news about some teary-eyed mollusk brain losing a home he could not afford, who compounded his debt by borrowing and then spending every penny of equity out of it, and who then got caught when he wasn't able to flip it in time, I may lose my supper.

In the immortal words of the Fugs, Who dealt this mess, anyway? It all stinks, from beginning to end. It's flagrantly obvious that clueless buyers and greedy lenders is a toxic combination, yet regulators somehow managed to doze through the entire build-up. Now they're running around trying to get the bail-out train cranked up, not because the nit-wits and quick-bucksters deserve it, but just because there are so damned many of them. They're all victims, you see, of each other, forming a daisy chain wrapped around the neck of responsible borrowers, lenders, and, of course, the taxpayers.

What we learn here is that mindless, grasping stupidity in large enough numbers becomes a kind of cunning. There's some irony I can do without.

It does not take a rocket surgeon to recognize that to now reward borrowers and lenders for this kind of behavior will guarantee even larger numbers next time. But, hey, since everybody involved here seems to operate on the time horizon of a four-year-old, what could be less relevant than that?

In "Going Under in a Lexus," Advice Goddess has her say and, boy, so do her commenters.

Byron