Linux is a box of loosely-related tools held together with staples and glue. This is fine when the user understands the tools and is holding the glue bottle, but we need to make a more cohesive, robust, and reliable system out of this before it can accommodate average end-users.
Drew DeVault: What desktop Linux needs to succeed in the mainstream
[...] at Versailles, no one of importance speaks quickly and spontaneously, every utterance is planned like a move in a chess game.
Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver
Take their phones away and get ‘em on Windows 98.
a suggestion mentioned in File not found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans by Monica Chin (The Verge)
I'm sorry, but my non-standard upbringing renders that simile utterly meaningless to me.
A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
