Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

The fabled Google Android?  It is entirely the piece of junk one ought to expect from a devel­op­ment process dri­ven by com­mit­tees and steered by non-creative minds.  And it appears that many would-be buy­ers know it. — Stanislav Datskovskiy’s in Non-Apple’s Mis­take

This is the sin­gle best (and short) essay I’ve read on the cur­rent state of com­put­ing that wasn’t writ­ten by John Gru­ber.

What’s really inter­est­ing is the author’s clar­i­fi­ca­tion about the fact that he “loathes Apple prod­ucts”. In a con­ver­sa­tion with George Koko­ris yes­ter­day I got a some­what sim­i­lar impres­sion from his stance on Apple. Oddly, the design, focus and apti­tude as tools that Apple prod­ucts have is com­pletely coher­ent with peo­ple like George who still feel com­pelled to keep them at a distance.

Datskovskiy also says this (as a Mac­Book Air owner):

Edit:
A num­ber of peo­ple link­ing here seem to think that I like Apple or for­give its sins (as if Apple needs my for­give­ness.)  This is a mis­take.  I loathe Apple prod­ucts, and chafe under the straight­jacket of their aes­thetic when­ever I use one.  I sim­ply hap­pen to despise their com­pe­ti­tion that much more.  At least Apple has an aes­thetic.  Its works, how­ever flawed, are the works of a per­son, rather than an amor­phous blob.

I argue that this straight­jacket that Datskovskiy describes is vital for cre­ative minds. Free­dom is of course the ideal of many Mak­ers, but I think it’s often their worse enemy. I take fic­tion as an exam­ple. As a kid I fuck­ing despised all those rules that forced me to stick to an idea per para­graph, I didn’t under­stand why poets were tor­tur­ing them­selves with rhyme schemes and extreme con­ci­sion, I thought TV shows should never end or that episodes should run longer than 45 min­utes. But these iron bars are often there for good rea­son. To keep you focused, to have you think about sub­stance, and stop obsess­ing about form.

In the world of com­put­ers the best highly sub­jec­tive anec­dote I have is my own dad. He started “build­ing” com­put­ers in the 1990’s with Com­paqs. The only prob­lem is that Com­paqs weren’t sup­posed to be built. They were sup­posed to work some­what out of the box. Yet tin­ker­ing wasn’t an option (and you could tell) it was an oblig­a­tion. And my dad got so much into the habit of open­ing up the box to fix what­ever was wrong with hard­ware or soft­ware that he spent more time dis­as­sem­bling his com­put­ers than actu­ally doing what he thought a com­puter would actu­ally help him do when he started.

His focus shifted so much than aside from his day job I don’t think my dad ever did any­thing sub­stan­tial with his home com­put­ers in 15 years. The best exam­ple of this, is that now that he doesn’t have to fuck around with DOS to get Win­dows 3.11, 95, 98 or Me to work with­out, it seems that my dad doesn’t really know how to use a com­puter. He knows how they work, he knows the parts, but he for­got the purpose.

PS: If you think what I mean “trains run on time in a dic­ta­tor­ship”, fuck off.

Posted on Vendredi, avril 16th, 2010 at 6:58 . Filed under Unsorted. Follow responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.