The twitter situation

Using twitter the last few days has been moderately interesting, but for the most part I have been reminded why I never used my personal account.  I'm pretty much officially over Twitter (again) already.

Another thing of note is that the amount of visitors we get is at least 300-500 unique ip hits per day, yet we only have gotten 21 followers in the first week.  This tells me that the regular readers here are pretty much as crotchety about social networking as I am.  After all, it does take a specific kind of person to appreciate the angle this blog comes from.  People who think like the Dr. and myself have no time for trends of any type.  While Twitter is one of the better parts of the social networking world, it's still part of a culture that I really cannot relate to.

I can't speak for Dr. Dave, but I am over Twitter already.  I may post something now and then or we may just agree to delete the account.

All I really care to spend free tech time on is writing for this blog and using Linux more.  That is what I shall continue doing.

I tried...  140 characters just isn't for me.  Far too limiting and I also tend to hate popular things by default.

This blog will not make any other attempts at social networking.  All that matters is the forward motion of PowerPC and you can get that right here.

Note:  The twitter account has now been deactivated as of June 21.  


Side note

Debian 7 LXDE is amazingly good BTW.  The stable release was introduced in the recent past.  It puts Lubuntu to shame in terms of pure functionality and reliability.  Debian is not as bleeding edge with the kernel and default app versions as Lubuntu is but it's as rock solid as you can get. 

More on that soon.

The devolution of computing

I have been reflecting a lot lately about the state of computing today.  The state of both the development and the users, along with what drives the majority of people from both groups.  For myself, and anyone who prefers to compute from the drivers seat, the state of things is bad on almost all fronts; at least in terms of mainstream computing.

Computing at a high level in the 70's, 80's, and even the early 90's was much better, because any other users around you were at a high level also.  Almost everyone had real capability to compute far beyond pointing and clicking.  Before the GUI existed you literally had to know command lines, and have a catalog of them in your head at your disposal whenever needed.  There were no guides on websites to copy/paste commands from, which is the peak of text computing skills these days for the pointy clicky imprisoned types.  Even with how far the GUI has come, there are still many capabilities that even the most robust OS's UI would lack.  I have mentioned before that only about 60-70% of the full OS X capability is found in its GUI.  Everything else is accessed from the command line.  It is based on BSD after all.  Text/terminal use is the actual human language of computing, not pointy clicky.  A GUI can only do what it gives you options to click on.  A GUI is essentially just an OS hand holder.  All you need is basic hand-eye coordination, and all it's doing is typing the commands for you while you click away.

The user friendly obsession of MS and Apple software over the last couple decades has truly dumbed down the average user a great deal.  The sad truth is that most people only have the capability to point a mouse, and type in whatever language(s) they're literate in.  The even sadder truth is that some actually mistake this for having computer skills.  Some even go as far as to think such skills qualify them to "help" someone else by sharing their "experience".  Experience based on nothing.  When you can only compute at the level of a person that many would consider computer illiterate, then you have no experience to give. 

I'm sorry, but moving a pointing device around, and being literate in your language, is no type of computer "skill".  People who compute at that level need to keep their devolved computing culture to themselves, and focus on learning new ability, rather than trying to spread devolution.

The devolved ones are on some insane mission to spread their 'newer/faster hardware is always better' illogic, and follow Apple or MS blindly.  No one needs help to do such things, because all it requires is no thought.  Anyone can do that.  Give people true technical insight, not what they can get from a wikipedia or google visit.  If that is where you're getting your "experience" from, then you've turned yourself into a fake, and a redundant fake at that.  Pretty shameful.  I assume the goal was never to be a double negative, but that is the end result for some of you.

The people who spread such things know who they are and they need to stop.  Your blind follower no skill thinking is a cancer to anything that resembles good information.  Stop it please.


Lastly

I am sorry if some of this sounds mean, but every word I have written here is nothing but true.  The truth shall set you free, as the saying goes, is as apt with computing as it is with anything else.

Anyone who feels the desire to help others, needs to first do it with something they can help with.  Something you have legitimate experience, knowledge and insight with.  Not something you wish to, but don't yet have, those qualities with.

Don't pretend or devolve.  Learn.

Stop letting billionaires control how you compute, and keeping most of you in a limited and fearful of evolving type of state.  The very reason most of you don't want to evolve your computing skills is that you've been conditioned to think that computing and real brain work don't go together.  Essentially a mainstream/self-induced computer user lobotomy.  That is the true end result of decades of user friendly obsession by the mainstream.

We're still alive!

It has been over two weeks since our last post, and I wanted to mention what has been going on.

Dr. Dave hurt his back a couple weeks ago, so that has put him out of commission for the time being.  Please join me in wishing him well and hopes for a quick recovery.  I am sure he will be feeling better soon enough.

I myself have been more busy than normal with the OpenBSD project in it's last phase of development.  The last phase (for me at least) is dealing with every bug so this has left my life with zero free time.  In the next week to 10 days I will be 100% done the project and I already have a couple things in mind to write about.