Reading notes

This is yet another reason why Windows is such a dangerous commodity. It lulls us into the pernicious illusion that we can deal with computers without adapting to their logic. By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.

Note that while Mac OS X also provides “colorful screens and buttons,” it also exposes its entire free BSD Unix undercarriage to intellectual discovery, probing, and hacking (in that sense it’s almost indistinguishable from Linux, the self-educational gold standard).

[2004-01-07 update: Well, Linux is the most prevalent self-educational standard, but technically NetBSD qualifies as the self-educational gold standard, I think, as its primary goal is “emphasizing correct design and well written code.” Hence NetBSD code is used to convey exemplary programming in, for example, the Addison Wesley title Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective by Diomidis Spinellis.]

Fortunately, lack of information is not an obstacle to learning about computers. In the west, most people can easily get their hands on books and their eyes on web pages that can take them all the way from complete ignorance to power-user status. But this is not enough on its own; it is also necessary to spend hundreds — no, thousands — of hours at the keyboard. This might sound like hell. But if you want to be truly free, you have no choice but to understand the machines you work with.

Yes! It’s almost indescribably empowering.

[via Tech Observer]