The irrepressible Philip Greenspun has made another pronouncement:
[P]eople over the age of 25 shouldn't use Unix/GNU/Linux/whatever, unless they are full-time professional Unix sysadmins.Why? Because a Really Smart (tm) friend of his managed to mangle /etc when he extracted a tar file instead of listing it. Obviously, the solution here is to upgrade to WinXP where thousands of pointless dialog boxes pop up if you're about to do anything dangerous...
The real revelation here is that suffering from MIT Syndrome does not absolve you from being tired or careless.
If those kids would just get back to their 16 hour-a-day jobs, they wouldn't have time to mess around! Plus, in five years, they'll hate computers! Does no one have any work ethic anymore?
Re:Young'uns
pdcawley on 2003-07-19T21:25:49
I find it very, very hard to be civil when discussion some of the hogwash that Greenspun spouts. So I'll shut up about it now.Re:Young'uns
chromatic on 2003-07-20T04:55:44
S'okay. When Ziggy and I are around, we tend to gripe about just about everything everyone's ever said about "the right way to write software". Why, just the other day, I was saying "Incremental delivery? That's just a fancy way of saying you take an afternoon off every week to 'run the build'."
Re:Young'uns
ziggy on 2003-07-20T17:58:00
Who said you had to be civil about Greenspun?I find it very, very hard to be civil when discussion some of the hogwash that Greenspun spouts.:-) The man is so demonstrably brilliant that we ought to listen to him and throw out man-millenia of experience and best practice because brilliant yet aging MIT grads (like him) might make a careless mistake and royally mess up a Unix box. WinXP is obviously so much easier to administer because of all of those thousands of inane dialog boxes, and you can never mess up a Windows box like you could a Unix box, so there's an intuitive benefit there...
Oh, except for the professional Unix sysadmins. All of whom are perpetually under 25, infallable, alert and unstoppable. Until they heed the call to Sanctuary and admit that Win* is just better...
Re:I feel the same way about cars
ziggy on 2003-07-20T18:03:04
Actually, the under 25s should be polite and stop clogging the roads. Boston would be so much more drivable if no one under 25 had a drivers license.And everyone should just make way for the autodidacts who teach themselves how to fly a helicopter. It's really intuitive, isn't it?
Isn't it obvious? Because he's right! Or is it wrong? I didn't go to MIT, so I keep getting those two words confused...Why are we listening to Greenspun, again?
