Re: sad but true, Linux sucks, a bit

[Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 4:13 AM, Robert Holtzman <holtzm@cox.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 01:07:55PM +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> On Thu, 2014-01-16 at 12:05 -0700, Robert Holtzman wrote:
>> > On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 06:58:11PM +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> > > On Thu, 2014-01-16 at 17:36 +0000, Iain M Conochie wrote:
>> > > > Gazing into my crystal ball, there will be a 3D interface that will
>> > > > blow us all away, and the kids will laugh at us for using a mouse /
>> > > > keyboard.
>> > >
>> > > Not necessarily! We eat using classic knifes since several hundred years
>> > > and btw. a good knife isn't produced by a computer controlled machine,
>> > > but handcrafted by a craftsman.
>> >
>> > But these, sure as hell, aren't sold in grocery stores.
>>
>> Correct! And I suspect that it isn't allowed to sell and buy a good
>> knife in Germany anymore without a "firearms licence" (this joke doesn't
>> work in German, we don't have a "firearms licence", here it's called
>> "weapon license"). IOW to get a good pastry chef's knife you need the
>> same "weapon license" you need for a katana or pump gun. So people are
>> used to use carp to cut a steak and they win the impression, that
>> computer controlled machines can punch out good tools ... they simply
>> don't know how good the quality of tools was just a few decades ago and
>> they believe all the hype that in the digital age everything is better.
>> It simply isn't better, quality of technology nowadays is as worse as it
>> never was before, let alone social quality. When did they build the
>> first katana ;)?
>
> This really belongs on the OT list but I'll reply anyway.
>
> Ralph, do you think monks in a Carpathian monastery lovingly hand
> crafting parts can maintain the same tolerances as CNC machinery can?

A good knife is not made by tolerances measurable by a machine cheap
enough to make "good-enough" knives at cheap prices.

The complex array of sensors and the highly pattern-intensive
calculation that goes on when a good craftsman are not cheap, and not
compact, in any machine we make. We have the general ideas, now,
perhaps for the first time in history, but we are hitting the limits
of the technology, and we are running out of resources just as we
think we are in reach of the holy-grail of duplicating what
$primalCondition has done in creating us.

> Or
> are you against interchangeability?

There is 6-sigma kinds of quality, and there is
tuned-to-the-individual kinds of quality, which is only partially
related to the manufacture of a good knife.

> Assuming they could hold these
> tolerances, how many people/companies could/would pay for them?

No company I know of has the resources necessary to build the machine
theoretically capable of producing a truly good knife and put it into
operation mass-producing truly good knives.

On the other hand, a good-enough knife that can take an edge from a
whetstone can be used as a close approximation to a truly good knife
in our day-to-day consumer-level uses.

> Face it. You can only take this "good old days" schtik so far.

If we use computers in our work, we need to understand the
differences. I remember in the "good-old-days" being told every now
and then by an office worker in some bureaucratic office or other that
my data wouldn't fit in the database records. Sometimes, the humans in
the system were willing to provide work-arounds, sometimes they
weren't. I remember reading accounts in the newspaper of lives lost
because of such bureaucratic intolerances, system intolerances that
were blamed on the computers or the designers of the computer parts of
the system.

And we on this list regularly engage in finding workarounds.

And the so-called "commercial" closed-source "solutions" tend to need
more of this kind of community support than the open-souce so-called
"non"-commercial stuff we are using.

Which is why we keep using it, even though there are continually
voices telling us that the grass is greener on the closed-source,
anti-freedom (non-)solutions side of the fence.

> --
> Bob Holtzman
> Your mail is being read by tight lipped
> NSA agents who fail to see humor in Doctor
> Strangelove
> Key ID 8D549279

So it is a bit of navel-gazing, perhaps, but I think it's on-topic
navel-gazing, myself.

-- 
Joel Rees

Be careful where you see conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart.