And The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth (Not)

I made a BIG decision this week, to upgrade our web server to one where we had "root" access.

(For the Aussies among you, yes, you're right. "root access" really does mean you get screwed. For the non Aussies among you, a "root" is an Aussie euphamism for "getting to know someone in the biblical sense", a slightly warmer, fuzzier, less offensive "F" word.)

I'm not going to get too technical here, because it's about as interesting as watching mould grow in your shower, but what we're going through right now with this new whiz bang server is an insight into human nature.

Let's talk reality. If you buy a computer today, you have a choice. You can pay Apple for osX and the privilege of being cool, you can pay Microsoft for Vista and the pivilege of being disappointed that you didn't get to say "wow" (but at least there's lots of cool games that will run on your PC), or you can install one of the gazillion versions of unix/linux, with trendy names like 'Ubantu", 'Red Hat' or 'Debian'... for free.

Free.

So why do most of us choose to pay? Because someone else has done the work for us, and turned the computer's operating system into something we can understand. The alternative is so incomprehensible and so difficult to use that once you master it, you get to go back to your Dungeons and Dragons or Second Life pals wearing a T-Shirt with a penguin on it like it's a secret badge of honour.

You get to grow a really bushy beard too, and preach your one true way to the unwashed with all the fervour and zeal you can muster. Secretly, you really don't want them to listen, because if they did, your whole reason for being would end up in the trash can of life.

It can be summed up very simply...

"I know therefore I am"

...and if you know something that others can not possibly learn, then your place in society is assured (even if the only root you'll ever get is at the top level of your directory tree). And if you can wangle your way into a job that has responsibility for purchase decisions, you can guarantee yourself security for life because the way you set up the company server is so complicated that no-one else will ever understand it.

What has made Microsoft successful, apart from the cool eye candy on which the company's products are built, is the fact that even though the operating system gets more complex, the user inteface gets easier and more intuitive.

Steve Jobs built an entire way of life on that philosophy at Apple... complex tasks achieved with maximum simplicity.

Sadly, the opposite is true with unix/linux, (and a thing called "Apache Server" that makes most of the internet run). The more they develop, the more complex they get. That complexity is in inverse proportion to useability. Real users get swept aside in the interests of technological correctness.

Our new, blindingly fast server is like that. It's so magnificently complex, and so brilliantly over-engineered, that it actually won't do what we want it to do. Really. It can't, and what we want to do is not that difficult.

Worse still, because the preachers really don't want you to have the knowledge, they create manuals that are incomprehensible to anyone but the inner circle, sort of what the bible must have been to 12th century peasants . They seem to work on an assumption that you already know what they're trying to tell you. I've got news for you... if I already new, I wouldn't be reading the manual.

Ah well. I have to go now. I have to put an ad online for a server programmer to get it all runing for us.