[Discuss] excuse me?

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-08-15 06:48-0700 pw wrote:

> People tend to learn one way of doing things and then
> stop learning.

Well, at least there is a strong human tendency to stop learning which each
individual should be extremely wary of.  As a case in point, I was exposed
to Unix in the late 80's substantially before bash became popular.  The
favorite shell at that point was tcsh (if anybody remembers it), and I stuck
with it for many years after I moved to Linux which in retrospect was a huge
mistake (I still have a large number of legacy tcsh scripts floating around
which will have to be converted at some point) since bash is so much better.

As a result of that experience and others where I over-committed to my
initial software choice I try to be as careful as possible about such
choices.  For example, I don't want to spend a lot of effort learning a
proprietary application only to have the company pull the rug out from under
me with some change in direction, forced upgrade, buy-out, bankruptcy, or
whatever. That's just one practical argument for free software, but there
are others as well.  There are also political arguments for free software
which appeal to me because I think software freedom is now just as important
as scientific freedom, and without either I think we are headed into the dark
ages.

As a result of both the practical and political arguments I abstain from
proprietary software.  There are some drawbacks to this stand, of course.
For example, this stand means I have to be extremely careful of my hardware
choices or sometimes I even have to delay a hardware purchase until Linux
drivers are available.  But I don't find such purchase care or purchase
delays that much of a burden.  (Others who have an absolute craze for
the latest/greatest hardware will come to a different conclusion.)

When I do have a new software need (such as DVD viewing a few years ago), I
search for free software applications that do what I need, and usually,
there is a choice of such free software packages. So to make my initial
decision between them I try to judge their long-term viability by asking
obvious questions such as whether bugs get fixed in a timely way and whether
there is an active community.  But how well the application works also plays
a huge role.  For example, with DVD viewing I found that the VLC media
player was far superior to other media players at dealing with scratched
DVD's so I am sticking with the "wxvlc" command for the time being to watch
all the (scratched/smudged) DVD movies and DVD television shows that are
available from the public library.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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