The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Tue, 16 Dec 2003

Puerile Australianisms

From the Washington Post (warning: irritating registration required):

Patenting Air or Protecting Property?
Information Age Invents a New Problem

By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 11, 2003

Universities, corporations and tens of thousands of Web site providers
across the country probably never imagined they would be rooting for
the pornography industry.

...

Biculturalism

I enjoy reading Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software column. The latest edition is a review of esr's The Art of UNIX Programming from the point of view of a Windows programmer.

His main point is that it is only cultural differences (i.e GUI vs command line) that separate us as programmers. However he nicely provides a counter example to his other point, that "Raymond all too frequently falls into the trap of disparaging the values of other cultures without considering where they came from". He then exclaims that that "the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, 'advocacy,' and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism". Wow.

It's a shame that people emphasise the adversarial nature of Windows and UNIX as the two systems can co-exist quite nicely serving complementary roles within an organisation. Most of this is probably due to Microsoft's continuous output of FUD on the topic which tends to spill over into the mindset of developers on both sides.

Of course it's easy to see that there is bias in both camps, and esr is perhaps not the most restrained of commentators when it comes to pointing out the good and bad points of the two cultures. It's kind of sad to see Joel take esr's UNIX superiority complex at face value though.