| General > General Technical Chat |
| Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills? |
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| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: tooki on September 25, 2022, 12:06:28 pm ---<rant>What’s frustrating (and I get this a LOT as an Apple user) is that people will accuse me of being a brand whore, and then use that opinion as reason to dismiss/ignore all the very real, non-branding explanations that I give for why I prefer using them (or why the company has done something). Somehow they can’t accept that anyone would choose (or defend) Apple for any reason other than being a brand whore. They can’t wrap their heads around the fact that different users have different needs and different priorities, and that good products exist for people with those needs and priorities.</rant> --- End quote --- True. Branding is orthogonal to the product quality. If I weren't using Linux or BSD, or if I were back doing Photoshop/Illustrator stuff, I'd prefer a Mac instead of a Windows machine. Macs are good tools for many things, and so is Windows, too. The brand thing is completely separate, in my opinion. But I do insist on taking this further, including personal brands in this. You can have a nice guy, expert in some fields, who makes an inane assertion or deliberate choice in building their own brand or managing publicity. You have to be able to criticize them for it, or you indeed are being directed by the brand and not the observable behaviour. With politicians, this goes to the extreme. I don't know how things are where you all are living, but here, politicians words and their voting actions are two completely different things, and trying to point out the difference here gets me labeled as an extremist, or supporter of their opponents. It is quite depressing, really, how people just seem to accept or ignore this, "because they're a good person" or something along those lines. |
| CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on September 25, 2022, 04:53:21 pm --- --- Quote from: tooki on September 25, 2022, 12:06:28 pm ---<rant>What’s frustrating (and I get this a LOT as an Apple user) is that people will accuse me of being a brand whore, and then use that opinion as reason to dismiss/ignore all the very real, non-branding explanations that I give for why I prefer using them (or why the company has done something). Somehow they can’t accept that anyone would choose (or defend) Apple for any reason other than being a brand whore. They can’t wrap their heads around the fact that different users have different needs and different priorities, and that good products exist for people with those needs and priorities.</rant> --- End quote --- True. Branding is orthogonal to the product quality. If I weren't using Linux or BSD, or if I were back doing Photoshop/Illustrator stuff, I'd prefer a Mac instead of a Windows machine. Macs are good tools for many things, and so is Windows, too. The brand thing is completely separate, in my opinion. But I do insist on taking this further, including personal brands in this. You can have a nice guy, expert in some fields, who makes an inane assertion or deliberate choice in building their own brand or managing publicity. You have to be able to criticize them for it, or you indeed are being directed by the brand and not the observable behaviour. With politicians, this goes to the extreme. I don't know how things are where you all are living, but here, politicians words and their voting actions are two completely different things, and trying to point out the difference here gets me labeled as an extremist, or supporter of their opponents. It is quite depressing, really, how people just seem to accept or ignore this, "because they're a good person" or something along those lines. --- End quote --- Branding is NOT orthogonal to product quality, but is somewhat independent. Product quality is also very difficult to judge. The vast majority of us spend the vast majority of our time in one or another ecosystem and become very familiar with how to operate in that environment. That way of operation is then indeed the best for you. Highest quality for you. Regardless of any intrinsic value. And there is always the variation in tasking. Each of the major ecosystems has advantages for some specific tasks. If those are what you do, that ecosystem is gets "quality" points. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on September 25, 2022, 04:53:21 pm ---With politicians, this goes to the extreme. I don't know how things are where you all are living, but here, politicians words and their voting actions are two completely different things, and trying to point out the difference here gets me labeled as an extremist, or supporter of their opponents. It is quite depressing, really, how people just seem to accept or ignore this, "because they're a good person" or something along those lines. --- End quote --- As a multiple citizen, I vote in two countries: USA and Switzerland. The experience couldn’t be more different. Of course, there are duplicitous politicians here in Switzerland. The big difference is that due to the true direct democracy here, politicians can’t stray too far from what the people (all voters, not just their party’s!) want. At one place I worked here, the CEO of the company (~20 people) is also a politician in the federal parliament. And she said one thing that stuck with me, paraphrased: “If, as a politician here, you want to move things, you can’t do anything too far from what the people want, because then it’ll go to referendum and you, the politician, now have zero say”. In USA it’s completely different: politicians say whatever their constituents want to hear, and then go do whatever the lobbies pay them to do. There was a famous study (Princeton university, I think) that found that will of the 99% has no measurable impact on policy. It’s a farce basically. |
| SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: tooki on September 25, 2022, 06:15:27 pm ---In USA it’s completely different: politicians say whatever their constituents want to hear, and then go do whatever the lobbies pay them to do. There was a famous study (Princeton university, I think) that found that will of the 99% has no measurable impact on policy. It’s a farce basically. --- End quote --- It's the same in most western democracies actually. Switzerland is an exception. I think Iceland is also more democratic. |
| pcprogrammer:
Drifting into politics, but I agree that true democracy is hard to be found, but also rather difficult to uphold. Having to setup a referendum for every decision to be made is hardly doable. In the Netherlands it has happened that a referendum was taken, but the outcome was not what the politicians expected and they just ignored it. That is democracy at work for you :-DD --- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on September 25, 2022, 05:27:07 pm ---Branding is NOT orthogonal to product quality, but is somewhat independent. Product quality is also very difficult to judge. The vast majority of us spend the vast majority of our time in one or another ecosystem and become very familiar with how to operate in that environment. That way of operation is then indeed the best for you. Highest quality for you. Regardless of any intrinsic value. And there is always the variation in tasking. Each of the major ecosystems has advantages for some specific tasks. If those are what you do, that ecosystem is gets "quality" points. --- End quote --- It depends on what you are looking at. Hardware or software. For hardware it is not to hard to test and judge on quality, but software is a whole other ballgame. It definitely depends on what you want from it. To test it you have to have a proper definition of what it is supposed to do, which can mean huge lists of things to test on and try to find bugs in it. In the case of software running on top of an OS, there is yet another factor in the whole judging trajectory. But I do agree that when it works for you, because of your specific use case, you would rate it at a higher quality then someone for whom it does not work as expected for their specific use case. |
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