There seems to be a recent Loon trend towards what I will call “the spiralling argument of despair.” It’s currently visible both on this site (Adam King, Patch Tuesday) and on Binplay.
Basically, if you can no longer heap abuse on Voldemort™ for being evil, then you need to redefine evil. Also, swapping black for white is good.
I think it also shows up in Loonland comments on the recent IE releases. In the case of IE, Microsoft have demolished the traditional argument that “IE isn’t standards-compliant” by actually being more standards-compliant than other browsers (Opera possibly excepted; I’m not up to date). Therefore “standards compliance” is no longer a valid goal.
In the case of Patch Tuesday, the argument that “Microsoft is full of security holes and blue-screens all the time and is full of shit that doesn’t work” has been, brick-by-brick, demolished by a painstaking process of regression testing and bug fixing and incremental development that the FOSS army can only lust after. And lusting after Windows would be evil. Therefore the entire process of bug-fixing (“Patch Tuesday”) is evil and wrong.
And then there’s the vexed question of whether Google (uses FOSS, sort of, but when we say “uses” we mean “is part of the community of,” not “rips off”) is more righteous than Microsoft (which would be truly evil if it used FOSS). I think the approved Gregorian Chant for this one is still under development.
Basically, these guys do not have axioms; they merely have conclusions. It’s a nice, comfortable, and fundamentally anti-intellectual position to put yourself in.
And meanwhile, Microsoft and Apple continue to fix bugs and develop new software, and IBM and Oracle continue to rip off FOSS (and good luck to them — the low-hanging fruit has already been consumed), and a small smelly sad man with terminal unpleasantness of the birkenstock flits from rubber room to rubber room across the seven skies, dispensing the sort of wisdom that once made the Maharishi rich. Well, it’s a life, I suppose. Not particularly an honest one, but there are still signs of germination, so it’s definitely biological in origin.
Comments
Wut?
You said it, Adam.
I even referenced you saying it.
I even explained where you are being intellectually (and in your case I use the word reluctantly) dishonest by painting a straw-man argument that “as all Winbreds will claim” there are no bugs in Windows, and then going on to claim that fixing said bugs is simply awful and against all decent behaviour.
Then again, I prefer “Wut?”
Have you tried running that through a C compiler?
You’d be easier to understand if you didn’t roleplay Victorian British all day.
You’d be far, far less easy to pity if you didn’t roleplay “ignorant moron.”
But don’t let me stop you. It’s all you have left. It has a certain (repugnant) charm.
You are right, I have nothing left. Continue on then.
I was with you up until that last run-on metaphor.
i really don’t see the point of supporting releases for a long period when the bug fixes are in the newer branch. ms, apple, or whoever actually fix the bugs in the older version of the software. if i can just download firefox 9, why the hell should the mozilla team waste time on backporting patches to firefox 3.4?
instead they should make it easier to upgrade.
Wouldn’t you then say that complaints and competition has forced/helped Microsoft to improve IE? I thought that was the whole point, since nobody really wants insecure and none standard compliant browsers to make Internet more messy than it already is.
Hence if a complaint was valid, the more credit to the ones complaining if it’s now fixed. There’s no axiom proving that to be an incorrect interpretation of your text.
@Kim:
Yes, I would say that. I am not ideologically wedded to a particular developmental model: development by criticism seems eminently sensible to me.
The whole point of this post is that if you criticise something and it is fixed, you should be happy. You should not then turn around and say “Oh, but that wasn’t the important thing anyway. What I really objected to was …”
Which is what the Loons do, every time. cf Patch Tuesday as the perfect example.
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