Recently Observed

Being without car I decided to take a walk over to Wendys. This is the closest fast food place to where I work so it’s not surprising that a lot of SBC/Cingular employees were there. (It’s fascinating how corporate name badges strip away anonymity in public) Two of them were talking at the table next to mine.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Sean’s accomplishment but he used the GUI.”

The speaker then went on to explain that Sean was using Mandrake’s GUI tools and that he didn’t have access to those since he runs FreeBSD. I gather the main problem in all this was a configuration change to Apache that the speaker hadn’t been able to figure out for a day. He explained his reticence towards Linux as “I don’t like not knowing how things work” and his fervor for FreeBSD with “Why do you think places like Yahoo are using FreeBSD instead of Linux? It’s stable.”

I’m pointing this out for a few reasons. When was the last time you were at Wendys and overheard two people discussing Linux vs. FreeBSD? This was certainly my first time, although I’ve heard the discussion in other venues before. Secondly, do GUIs make operating systems unstable? I don’t mean technologically speaking, just that they open up the OS to a new class of user who doesn’t have to know as much. Finally, I have friends who do know their httpd.conf from a hole in the ground and they are unemployed. I know the great gods of capitalism said competition means the best survive but I’m beginning to think perhaps some of the cream of the crop are unemployed and that random chance plays a bigger part in capitalism than hard work and skill.