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Accordingly, it was the case until recently that the people who wrote manuals and created customer support websites for commercial OSes seemed to have been barred, by their employers' legal or PR departments, from admitting, even obliquely, that the software might contain bugs or that the interface might be suffering from the blinking twelve problem. They couldn't address users' actual difficulties. The manuals and websites were therefore useless, and caused even technically self-assured users to wonder whether they were going subtly insane.
When Apple engages in this sort of corporate behavior, one wants to believe that they are really trying their best. We all want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, because mean old Bill Gates kicked the crap out of them, and because they have good PR. But when Microsoft does it, one almost ca
This approach to dealing with one's customers was straight out of the Central European totalitarianism of the mid-Twentieth Century. The adjectives "Kafkaesque" and "Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't last, any more than the Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a publicly available bug database. It's called something else, and it takes a while to find it, but it's there.
They have, in other words, adapted to the two-tiered Eloi/Morlock structure of technological society. If you're an Eloi you install Windows, follow the instructions, hope for the best, and dumbly suffer when it breaks. If you're a Morlock you go to the website, tell it that you are "advanced," find the bug database, and get the truth straight from some anonymous Microsoft engineer.
But once Microsoft has taken this step, it raises the question, once again, of whether there is any point to being in the OS business at all. Customers might be willing to pay $95 to report a problem to Microsoft if, in return, they get some advice that no other user is getting. This has the useful side effect of keeping the users alienated from one another, which helps maintain the illusion that bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results of those bug reports become openly available on the Microsoft website, everything changes. No one is going to cough up $95 to report a problem when chances are good that some other sucker will do it first, and that instructions on how to fix the bug will then show up, for free, on a public website. And as the size of the bug database grows, it eventually becomes an open admission, on Microsoft's part, that their OSes have just as many bugs as their competitors'. There is no shame in that; as I mentioned, Debian's bug database has logged 32,000 reports so far. But it puts Microsoft on an equal footing with the others and makes it a lot harder for their customers--who want to believe--to believe.
MEMENTO MORI
Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its jargonic opening telegram, it prompts me to log in with a user name and a password. At this point the machine is still ru
Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen, I can only see one command line, and so you might think that I could only interact with one program at a time. But if I hold down the Alt key and then hit the F2 function button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a fresh, blank, black screen with a login prompt at the top of it. I can log in here and start some other program, then hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first screen, which is still doing whatever it was when I left it. Or I can do Alt-F3 and log in to a third screen, or a fourth, or a fifth. On one of these screens I might be logged in as myself, on another as root (the system administrator), on yet another I might be logged on to some other computer over the Internet.
Each of these screens is called, in Unix-speak, a tty, which is an abbreviation for teletype. So when I use my Linux system in this way I am going right back to that small room at Ames High School where I first wrote code twenty-five years ago, except that a tty is quieter and faster than a teletype, and capable of ru
It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure a Linux machine so that it will go directly into a GUI when you boot it up. This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to keep a human skull on his desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The tty screen reminds me that the same thing is true of slick user interfaces.
The X Windows System, which is the GUI of Unix, has to be capable of ru
When I started using Linux this had to be done by hand. I once spent the better part of a month trying to get an oddball monitor to work for me, and filled the better part of a composition book with increasingly desperate scrawled notes. Nowadays, most Linux distributions ship with a program that automatically scans the video card and self-configures the system, so getting X Windows up and ru
At any rate, assuming that my XF86Config file is just so, I enter the command "startx" to launch the X Windows System. The screen blanks out for a minute, the monitor makes strange twitching noises, then reconstitutes itself as a blank gray desktop with a mouse cursor in the middle. At the same time it is launching a window manager. X Windows is pretty low-level software; it provides the infrastructure for a GUI, and it's a heavy industrial infrastructure. But it doesn't do windows. That's handled by another category of application that sits atop X Windows, called a window manager. Several of these are available, all free of course. The classic is twm (Tom's Window Manager) but there is a smaller and supposedly more efficient variant of it called fvwm, which is what I use. I have my eye on a completely different window manager called Enlightenment, which may be the hippest single technology product I have ever seen, in that (a) it is for Linux, (b) it is freeware, (c) it is being developed by a very small number of obsessed hackers, and (d) it looks amazingly cool; it is the sort of window manager that might show up in the backdrop of an Aliens movie.