Ubuntucat

I confess—I love watching the E! True Hollywood Story. I love seeing the stories behind the stars and watching their rises to fame and fortune.

I am baffled by one thing, though. Why do they (either the stars themselves or their friends, family members, managers and agents) keep trying to make it sound as if the stars got to where they are today through hard work and talent alone? Yes, I understand they had to work hard. Yes, I understand a certain degree of talent is necessary to succeed. Still, do you really want to tell me good looks or connections had nothing to do with the road to success? Being the child of another famous actor didn’t open any doors, really? Having perfect bone structure and facial symmetry didn’t do anything for their careers?

Now, again, I’m not saying that you can just coast on your good looks and family connections or money. You have to do something. The acting won’t come by itself. The gigs won’t fall into your lap. But how many good-looking children of famous people are there who tried to break into Hollywood and couldn’t get an audition? I can’t imagine there are that many. There are, however, tens of thousands of ugly people who have no connections but who have talent and probably cannot get an audition.

I’m not going to lie. I’m a child of privilege. My parents both have advanced degrees. I grew up in a rich suburb with a more-than-adequate education system. I know that I’ve been offered a lot of advantages most other people don’t have. Have I had to work? Certainly. I did all my school work and earned the grades I got. And at all the jobs I’ve had I’ve worked as hard as I could. Still, I know that if I had come from a family of poor uneducated parents who didn’t speak English and who brought me up in a neighborhood with a failing school system, I’d have had a lot more obstacles to overcome.

So, folks—don’t lie about the roles of privilege, connections, and good looks in your career paths, especially you Hollywood folks. Yes, I know you’ve probably had to work hard, probably had to work damn hard. But so do many people. Some people work hard all their lives to make minimum wage with no health benefits. Those folks also have talents. Not to discount your hard work…

You would think that self-professed computer nerds and/or geeks would actually read articles instead of just headlines, and you would think that tech journalists would actually try to get across facts instead of just latching on to controversial-sounding sound bytes.

Nope. Unfortunately not.

I’ve seen two major instances of this recently. One is the headline about Linux netbooks being returned at four times the rate of Windows netbooks. Oh, the anti-Linux trolls latched on to that one right away. Well, of course, Linux isn’t usable. People thought they were buying a usable system and then they had to return it because Linux is only for nerds.

Uh, no.

If you read the actual article in question, it’s specifically about the MSI Wind netbooks, and the representative giving the statistics clearly says it’s a matter of people dealing with something unfamiliar and unexpected. Here’s an exact quotation:

People would love to pay $299 or $399 but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store.

And Asus has said the return rates on Linux Eee PCs are about the same as the ones for Windows Eee PCs:

I think the return rate for the Eee PCs are low but I believe the Linux and Windows have similar return rates. We really separate the products into different user groups. A lot of users like the Windows XP, but in Europe a lot of people want the Linux option.

So really what this means is that MSI doesn’t know how to market its products properly, and Asus does (as did Apple with its Think Different campaign). When you have a product that’s unfamiliar to users, you have to do two things to get it to sell.

1. You have to maximize sales with the users who are open to new things.
2. You have to tell the other people that different can be good.

And then there’s the old Mark Shuttleworth “no money in Linux desktop” hype. Yes, Mark Shuttleworth did, in fact, say

I don’t think anyone can make money from the Linux desktop

but when you couple that with

never seen selling shrink-wrapped packages of free software as a workable idea. The only way to build business around software is with [added costs] services

he’s clearly saying that the whole idea of selling software is outmoded. He’s not saying Ubuntu won’t ever make money. He’s saying the money comes from a different place. But people just see the headlines and think, “Ah, so those anticapitalist free software fanboys finally admit there’s no money to be made for open source.”

Just give it a rest. Linux has enough real problems as it is. No need to make up new imaginary problems.

The other day I was talking with a Windows-using friend. She’s using an old laptop of ours, as her newer laptop is having various hardware and software issues. I noticed she was using Chrome, and I asked her how she liked it. She liked it for the most part, except she didn’t like how Google wouldn’t let her organize her own bookmarks. She said she can’t imagine it would be that difficult. I told her it was probably quite the opposite. Google’s “smart” bookmarking in Chrome (with the most frequently visited and most recently visited sites showing up in the Opera-like speed dial page) is probably more difficult to implement (from a programming perspective) than the more traditional bookmark style (organize it yourself).

She then described to me how she organizes her bookmarks, and I was fascinated by her way of thinking about sites. She organizes them based on action (see, shop, read, share, etc.). I organize mine in kind of a strange way too. My bookmarks I organize by how often I view them. So I have a folder full of “weekly” bookmarks and a folder full of “daily” bookmarks. Inside the daily ones, I have my Bloglines reader, which contains all the sites I would ordinarily bookmark except that they have RSS feeds, so I’d prefer Bloglines to keep me informed of when they update instead. So every day, I open all the sites in my daily folder in tabs, and every week I open my weekly bookmarks in tabs. And any non-bookmarked site I visit I just use Google or Firefox’s own “smart” address bar to find.

How do you all (my small set of loyal readers—thanks for visiting!) organize your bookmarks? Or do you bother organizing them at all? Or do you even have bookmarks?

What is art? What is obscenity? When is someone a child? When does someone reach the age of consent? At what stage during pregnancy does human life begin? Is it music or noise? Or both?

Much of debate in public life is about drawing arbitrary lines between labels. Some people think if you allow gays to marry, that’s only one step away from allowing people to marry more than one person legally or marry their pets legally. Others think it’s the logical next step after getting rid of miscegenation laws. Some people think human life begins at conception (when the sperm and egg meet). Others think it happens some time in the middle of the pregnancy. In many places, the age of consent is 18 years of age. So a 17-year-old in a sexually explicit film is legally the victim of child pornography but an 18-year-old in the same film is a consenting adult in a legitimate industry.

We all know that lines can get blurry and, in fact, much of life isn’t about lines but appreciating spectra and variation. One person may reach adulthood at age 13. Another may reach it at age 23. Still another may not reach it ever. One group of people may consider a certain film art, and another group of people may consider the same film obscenity.

The real problem we face is a discomfort with blurriness, spectra, and variation when it comes to law. We already have many “it depends” situations in law, and we don’t want to have an “it depends” that can’t be spelled out in advance, for some reason. If one 12-year-old is old enough to drive, how can you make the case that another 12-year-old is not old enough to drive? Why does your opinion about each kid’s maturity and skill matter in deciding? Instead, the state decides arbitrarily that 15 or 16 or 18 is the cut-off point where someone under that age doesn’t have the physical and mental maturity to handle a motor vehicle, and someone above that age supposedly does.

I don’t have an easy answer. I do think a 7-year-old, no matter how “mature,” is too young to have sex. And I do think that almost all 50-year-olds, no matter how “immature,” are likely to know what they’re getting into if they engage in sex. I know if we draw a line in between that it’ll be arbitrary and if we don’t draw a line, we’ll basically be condoning pedophilia. Same deal with abortion. If I kill an egg and sperm that have just started dividing into two cells and four cells, I don’t really think I’ve murdered a human being (yes, some fringe conservatives on the extreme right might disagree with me, and I would concede in a British accent that “every sperm is sacred, every sperm is good”). But I also don’t think there’s a definite line you can draw in the middle of a pregnancy that is when human life “begins.” There isn’t a moment. Nor was there a moment when I changed from child to adult. I know when I was 6 I was a child. I know now after 30 I’m an adult. But it’s not as if there was one day or even one year that I can say was the threshold I crossed that changed me from child to adult.

As I said before, there are no easy answers. Nevertheless, people should also stop looking for them. There often is no line in life, even if we must draw a line in the law.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been blogging about the US presidential election much. It’s mainly because I think most of what could be said about the election has been said already. And most of it is mudslinging at the other party’s candidate, anyway.

I do want to say one thing before the polls close tomorrow, and that’s this: no matter who wins is going to be in a tough position. And if the winner isn’t able to get the country out of all of these “wars on terror” and the global economic crisis unscathed, it doesn’t mean the other guy would have been able to.

I’m not a big fan of George W. Bush. I haven’t approved of most of his policies or approaches to things. I think he’s made some terrible mistakes as president. Yet I don’t imagine that that automatically means Al Gore or John Kerry would necessarily have done a better job.

I’m a Dennis Kucinich man, and I liked Hillary Clinton while she was still a main contender in the race. But, make no mistake about it, only one of two men will win this election by tomorrow night—John McCain or Barack Obama, and given those choices I definitely prefer Obama.

If McCain wins, though, and we stay in this economic downturn, and the war in Iraq continues for 8 years and even longer, I won’t think, “Well, clearly if Barack Obama had won, all of these problems would have been solved.” Nor should McCain fans, should Obama win, think “Well, clearly if John McCain had won, all of these problems would have been solved.”

The country isn’t doing well, and this is a terrible time for anyone to step into the presidency of the United States of America. I don’t agree with either candidate on everything, and I don’t agree with John McCain on most of the hot-button issues. But I do think both men would try their best to make this country better, and both men would have a hell of a time just keeping us afloat. So godspeed to whomever wins tomorrow.

My two other posts on the election:
Successful politicians will be political
Obama v. McCain – I have to say this before November