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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Thursday, January 17, 2002
18:19 - An Emotional Post-Mortem for Be
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23718.html

(top) link
I was never a Be person, but that's only because I never really got around to it. And recently I've read enough about BeOS to know just how cool a thing we had. In the words of the song, don't it always seem to go...?

This article is by an editor at The Register attending an asset-liquidation auction of the now-dead company in a dimly lit storeroom. The people standing in line for their chance to bid have the air of the monks whapping themselves with boards in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "Pie Jesu Domine... <whap> dona eis requiem. <whap>" Idealistic young bit-heads who caught a glimpse of just how good we could have had it, if only the success of the world's companies and technologies wasn't determined by what company was willing to spend the most money to ensure that no competitor would never reach the public's eyes.

We should have taken a lesson from history. Oppressive despotic governments who control the media and never let the masses become aware that there's a huge, rich, free world out there beyond the borders-- they spend so much time building statues and holding tank parades that they don't have any left over for making the nation a place that anybody with a choice would ever want to be. But fortunately for them, the people don't know any better.

And so it is with the computer world. We've spent so many years with our heads encased in papier-mache boxes made of Microsoft's braying propaganda that we not only don't want to give anyone else a chance, we can't. We no longer have the capacity.

Well, we've reaped the reward now, and on the idyllic pasturelands of the alternative operating systems are built the stinking textile mills and coal mines of Windows: it fuels a population, sure, and it makes McDonald's possible. But don't ever go to see where the work actually gets done, where the machines scrape for purchase and a few more square feet of clear land into which to extend themselves. You don't want to see it.

It's enough to make a grown man weep.

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© Brian Tiemann