Matt Asay on Twitter: If you don't like it, it's worth what you paid for it
Someday I'll meet Matt Asay. I'm no tech executive, I appreciate but don't fawn over Macintosh laptops, but I do admire his writing at Cnet.
On Twitter's change of policy for @replies, hiding them from the unwashed Twitter masses unless the individual users are also followers of those receiving said @reply — and the furor following that change, he is a voice of sober- and business-minded reason:
For those who will chime in to voice their serious displeasure that Twitter had the gall to change a service for which these users have paid a whopping $0.00, I have two words:
Pay up.
That's right: pay money so that you actually have the right to voice your displeasure as a customer rather than as a user. Customers have a right to complain about changes of service. It's unclear to me why anyone else would.
This, perhaps, is a budding business plan for Twitter: use a free service as a grand experiment, constantly evolving and changing at Twitter's whim, with a paid service that keeps things constant for customers, and perhaps adds additional functionality or quality of service guarantees for these same customers.
Stuff like this is why I read The Open Road every day.
In other Matt Asay news: Matt claims he's far from famous:
On the Web, however, what passes for "fame" usually isn't. Would you consider me famous? I certainly wouldn't. My kids still get excited when they see my picture on my own computer...in my iPhoto application...displaying pictures I took with my own camera. Me, famous? Not even close. Not even close to close.
Never has the bar to fame been so low.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
What a nice thing to write, and especially in light of how I was complaining about negativity on the Web. Assuming you're in LA, it would be interesting to get together to compare notes on Linux, in particular, since you seem to have a lot more expertise there than I do. I'm there every few months and will remember to ping you in advance.
Matt
Thanks for reading, Matt.
As far as Linux or BSD "expertise" goes, I'm really just another user out there trying to make this stuff work.
I have no super-geek skills, and it's basically a whole lot of trial and error. The point I try to make here is that there should be systems out there with enough usable documentation, be it in FAQs, forums, PDFs or what have you, to allow everybody to set up a FOSS operating environment and have everything work the way it's supposed to without resorting to a whole lot of hackery.
When somebody wants to set up an encrypted partition in OpenBSD, for instance, and the guys on the mailing list say, "read the man page for vnconfig," that says three things about the OS itself and the person writing the reply:
1) It's really hard to set up an encrypted partition in OpenBSD, and for one reason or another, nobody really cares much about it, even though this is supposed to be the most secure OS out there.
2) I really don't know how to do it, even though I consider myself an OpenBSD power user.
3) There really should be both an FAQ on exactly how to do this as well as an option in the installer.
That's why Ubuntu has such an uptake among people. Sure a lot of those forum posts aren't helpful. But there are so many of them, the chances of having an issue solved is pretty good. And the developers are trying to make it easy for users to do the things they want to do, whether it be encrypted folders or partitions, accessing multimedia (including proprietary formats) and getting their video and networking hardware running.
And I make fun of your affection for the Mac, but I understand (and also benefit from) a system that is super-stable, makes working on any kind of multimedia easy (and all the more so if you have all those expensive apps like Photoshop and Final Cut, but also allowing you to use FOSS either natively or through Fink) and generally allows a mortal man or woman to keep the system running.
While I'm pissed at OpenBSD for all the trouble I've had going from 4.4 to 4.5, I'm also thinking about using only long-term-support operating systems for my critical machines, since I really need them to work and can't have downtime while I'm figuring out what the hell to do.
Hence my appreciation for Dag Wieers' recent Planet CentOS post about just those kinds of systems.
Hey, I'm way off-track, but again, thanks for reading Matt. And anybody who wants to know about the business of free, open-source software and what's actually happening on the ground, so to speak, should be reading Matt Asay's The Open Road.
I think what Matt means to say when he claims he's not famous is that blogging about FOSS won't make you rich.
And how.