H.G. Wells spoiler (was: Re: [Gllug] Whinge)

Ian Northeast ian at house-from-hell.demon.co.uk
Sat Sep 1 16:47:38 UTC 2001


Stig Brautaset wrote:
> 
> * Chris Ball <chris at void.printf.net> spake thus:
> > On 30 Aug 2001 21:17:34 +0100, gllug at codex.net wrote:
> > > On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, David Damerell wrote
> > > > I know you all know this, but I just wanted to complain. Really. How
> > > > did they conquer the world with this shit?
> > >
> > > to be somewhat less serious, IMHO it's a classic case of heard mentality,
> > > people jump on the MS bandwagon because 'so many other people have' -
> > > 'therefore it must be good'.
> >
> > Neal Stephenson describes it as 'mindshare' in 'In The Beginning..';
> > Windows leading not due to technological superiority - and certainly not
> > superiority cost-wise - but to people writing the drivers, applications
> > (and games!) for Windows due to its popularity. It's a really great
> > book. The other memorable description he used was taken from H. G. Wells
> > 'The Time Machine', which involved two castes of people, the Eloi and
> > the Morlocks. The Morlocks were small in number but powered the Eloi's
> > living. It's an interesting, if ego-flatering analogy to geekdom.:-)
> 
> If you read the book, you might perhaps be suprised to find out that the
> Morlocks actually *ate* the Elois... It turned out the Morlocks where
> masters after all.

Nah.. I don't think the average Windows user would taste good at all.
Certainly my mate Dave, whose Windows PC I keep having to fix because
the latest game or graphics card broke something, is a little wiry bloke
who fixes heavy machinery for a living. I think he'd be a bit tough.

This PC BTW is an example of what this thread started out being about.
It has a cheapo RTL8139 and a BT Speedway ISDN card (old style). Both of
these just drop in and work in Linux. Every time we have to reinstall
this bastard because something else broke it takes major pain, swearing,
goats and chickens and about 2 hours to get them both happily working at
the same time. The process never seems to be the same; last time I was
*sure* that I repeated what had worked the time before, but it failed.

Regards, Ian

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