On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 07:45:10AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 04/13/2010 07:33 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> I wouldn't characterize it as a flame war per se. 

I have (regrettably) allowed myself to be caught up in flame wars in
the past, and I agree with gaf; I don't think this is a case of that.
Flame wars generally involve negativity directed at the participants;
personally, all my negativity is directed at the businesses and
business practices being discussed. :)  I think that's also true of
all the other posts in the thread.

> I do see that there is quite a bit of anti-Apple sentiment, as well
> as OpenSource for everything. 

FWIW, I also would not actually put myself in either of these camps.
I don't hate Apple, though I'm not really interested in any of their
non-general-purpose computing devices (i.e. their mobile devices other
than their laptops) for reasons including what's being discussed here.
But as I mentioned, there are other more important ones, like the fact
that they're AT&T only, et. al..  I've owned Apple products in the
past (an apple //c) and been very happy with them; my next laptop may
well be a mac book, for some of the reasons people have mentioned in
this very thread that they like them.  Though, I'm still not convinced
that the price difference vs. a PC-based laptop is really worth it,
especially with the current discussion of high failure rates.  But
whatever... it'll probably be a while before I need to think seriously
about that.

I'm not really open-source for everything either.  Ideally it would be
kind of nice, but (believe it or not!) I'm more practical than that.
I'm also definitely no GPL zealot; the OSS software I've written
myself has all been released under a BSD license.  

All I really want is for a vendor to sell me something at a reasonable
price, and then let me do whatever I want with it.  That's sort of the
definition of property ownership.  Granted, selling goods is different
than selling services, and what we're discussing involves some of
both.  But I think all too often vendors will sell us the bare minimum
of what we want/need for a price that's the absolute maximum they can
squeeze out of us for it.  Value judgement is subjective, and highly
influenced by the alternatives (or lack of them) in the marketplace.  

I'm sick of the "We'll sell you this thing that barely works for a
price you can afford, or for 3x that amount well give you something
that is actually kind of nice" consumer market.  From what I've
seen, most markets have a few dominant vendors that aren't very
different from each other and behave as I described above.  There may
be a handful of  more consumer-friendly alternatives, but most of the
time they still end up being less desirable because they are either
more expensive (often substantially) in a way that's not proportional
to the extra value they provide, or they're comparatively less
capable/compatible in some important way.

It seems the only way I can ever get what *I* want is to either pay a
lot more money than I can justify for it, or to convince the rest of
the world that what they're paying for what they're buying is not a
good value, so that as a market we force the vendors to be better.
I'm not holding my breath... =8^)  [And consequently, I make precious
few purchases these days.]

And my views, while passionately held, are probably exaggerated in
this thread, on account of some of those battles and frustrations I've
had with various businesses very recently, mentioned in my last
post.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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