

Imagine if your house had Windows - edw519
http://raganwald.posterous.com/imagine-if-your-house-had-windows

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calciphus
But those poor guys in the Apple Orchard...

They don't have bathrooms, because the designer said that it would interrupt
the flow of the house, and that no one uses them anymore. "But we need them",
the home owners said. "No you don't," the developers replied. The residents
have grown accustomed to it and use buckets and sinks instead.

The house has no Windows, so you can't see the Real World. After spending
years saying "You don't need to do that," the Developer finally responds that
you can hang pictures on the wall of what the idealized Real World looks like.
They offer to also sell you a second home over in the Windows development
area, but you're either squatting or paying full price for it.

Recently, the Developer replaced nearly every front door in the community with
a garage door. "It gives you faster access to everything!" he explains. It
opens seemingly at random, and looks nothing like the rest of the house. It's
uncharacteristically gaudy. Most of the residents hide it or pretend it isn't
there.

Every street in the development is named after cats, but there's no sequential
logic to it. When the ISP explains "You need to live north of Tiger to get
high speed internet" in their ads, most people have to pull out a map to
figure out if they can. People have taken to numbering the streets, but those
numbers aren't written on the street signs. Fortunately, it's relatively easy
and cheap to move to another street, but in most cases nothing changes. The
residents claim they know the order, but when anyone comes to visit from out
of town, they are confused and quickly lost, since most of the streets look
the same anyway.

Every 18 months or so, many of the residents bulldoze their entire home and
replace it. They look down on those who don't. If someone hasn't bought a
house recently enough, the developer won't even bring over new furniture, and
the street cleaner begins skipping their house.

All the cars a elegant and beautiful works of glass, wrapped in large, often
gaudy rubber bumpers. Some people even cover their entire car in a bumper
(except the windshield, which gets a gummy sticker). Early buyers of the glass
car need the bumpers to cover a hole where fuel leaks out, but for most, it's
because the glass cars might shatter.

But all the residents of the Orchard are happy. They're a bit stuck up about
how much their homes cost, despite that most people living in the "other"
complex could easily afford it. They write long missives in their local paper
about how bad it is to live in the other community, how they "just don't get
it". They believe the home that suited them is clearly the best choice for
everyone, even businesses. The talk with pride about how much money their
Developer makes, even bragging that he has the highest margins in the
industry, and wear their credit card debt as a badge of pride. To everyone
else, they're an odd but mostly harmless group. But in their echo chamber,
they're the smartest, most progressive, most intelligent and affluent people
in the world, for whom the defining characteristic of their life is who they
bought their house from.

And somewhere, off in the hills, the Unix monastery (which designed and
constructed much of the infrastructure for the Orchard, free of charge, for
the betterment of everyone) lives in hand-built homes, constantly adjusted and
tailored to their needs and whims, and occasionally stripped down to the
foundation and rebuilt just for fun.

~~~
jholman
Although I am _quite_ happy in the Unix monastery, I will note that it does
have a few drawbacks. Of course one is that we don't seem to be quite as good
as the Redwood Forest or the Apple Orchard builder at foundations... every
time you try to build a home on a new tract of land, you find something not-
quite-perfect about the way the home interacts with that land (this is
especially true of mobile pieces of land, known as "icebergs").

Another is that while I'm all for life-long-learning, it's exhausting the
amount of seminars you have to attend to really keep up with modern building
techniques (e.g. composite materials made of beryl, or e.g. quantum
chromodynamic xorgs), which is necessary unless you're willing to live in
somewhat out-of-date cast-offs from elder members of the sect, at their
leisure (they're generous enough to make those donations to novice members
like myself on their own schedule, but they get pretty grouchy pretty fast if
you ask them to customize your house FOR you).

That, and of course as we all know there are a few pieces of furniture that
one just can't fit in through the front door of one's monastic house. For this
purpose I choose to rent a cottage over in the Redwood territory to hold some
of this esoteric furniture. My favourite is this Steam-powered monstrosity
full of Valves, but your aesthetic tastes in furniture may vary.

Ah well. One of the reasons I (mostly) live over here in the monastery is my
irrational faith that work (or at least preemptive laziness) shall set me
free.

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nordsieck
The most maddening part is the control panel. There is absolutely no reason I
can come up with for the seemingly random re-shuffling of names and functions
that comes with each windows upgrade.

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xxxxxxxxx
If you and your neighbors stopped calling the build ten times a day asking him
to do stuff like move the wall over three inches this wouldn't happen any
more.

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mrspandex
Is this specifically about Windows? or about software in general?

I think Microsoft would take it as a compliment that they release too often. I
also think Windows is one of the most backward-compatible systems out there.

~~~
joebadmo
It does seem pretty grumpy. It reminds me of how different people's mindsets
can be regarding software updates. My wife, for example, reacts: "Oh no, an
update." She hates updates and waits as long as possible to do them. I guess
because updates are almost always available at inconvenient times and often
break things.

I, OTOH, usually go: "Ooh, an update!"

And as a Windows user, I've been pretty happy with almost all the improvements
in Win7.

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bradleyland
Well, if you want to apply the inverse of the analogy literally, everyone
would still be using the command line, or, at best, ncurses-style
applications.

~~~
raganwald
If _I_ were to apply the analogy literally, I would suggest most people would
upgrade happily for the first few years after first using an OS, then their
tolerance for change would decline, just as it often does with houses.

They won’t embrace a major change unless their own circumstances undergo a
similar change, such as having their children leave for college. Or in
computers, such as buying a tablet where before they only used a laptop.

~~~
chadgeidel
Of course you are correct. I love change and "new stuff" because I'm a geek
and that's what I do.

My parents (or - even my younger brother who just wants things to work) not so
much.

------
ciupinet
In the late 90s and early 2000s operating systems were compared with airlines,
in a humorous manner: [http://www.webaugur.com/bazaar/53-what-if-operating-
systems-...](http://www.webaugur.com/bazaar/53-what-if-operating-systems-were-
airlines.html). Now it seems that the comparisons have become more serious
than that. I'm using Unix/Linux every day, and I don't feel like I'm living in
a monastery.

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xm1994
How about living in a chrome house? The Developer would just sneak in while I
sleep and update everything without asking. The downside is it would consist
of just one living area. If I were need any specialized rooms like a bathroom
or kitchen they just attach one temporarily and charge me by the hour!

------
danderson00
This theme has been done so many times, it is not even funny any more.
Buggered if I'm going back to House XP, because House 7 shits all over it.
Stop being a Luddite and resisting progress, get used to things changing, it
is inevitable. Windows rocks.

