Too many real estate agents remind me of Rudolf Höss. Höss was a person of contrasts: during the day he would manage Auschwitz while off hours he was a family man. People don’t come in more flawed a form than this one, so it’s good to try and learn from the phenomenon. We all have a sense of morality ingrained in us: we have a sense of what is right and what is wrong; we can instinctively tell when someone is being wronged. Research clearly indicates at the universality of this sense we’re all equipped with through examples with kids that are yet to be exposed to much teaching (in the process proving that morality does not come from religious indoctrination). The puzzle around people like Höss has to do with their ability to suspend this ethical sense in a very selective way; my observations clearly indicate that many real estate agents perform the same suspension of ethics in their course of work. It appears as if in their case it is the lure of cash – plenty of it in one big transaction – that drives this suspension. We’re all guilty of suspending our ethics from time to time. For example, most of us eat meat, a process that requires us to turn a blind eye to the horror that befell the animals we consume, the vast amounts of water and fossil fuels that were consumed in its raising, the damage to the environment the poor animals have made through their various forms of feces, and the forests that often had to be cleared in order to make space for them (to name but a few issues). The element that allows us to get away from these ethical issues the most is the passive nature with which we consume the meat, yet for the real estate agents the experience is not passive at all. Indeed, they are very active in their application of psychological tricks on both buyer and seller, the people they are meant to serve, their paying customers. Just like with Höss before them, I don’t understand how these people are able to sleep at night. How can they live with themselves when they so openly and so frequently break the law, toy with people’s emotions, and blatantly cheat and mistreat them in order to make a buck? In my opinion, one cannot be an ethical person half the time; Höss’ case proves the point quite well. But like it or not, Höss also proves that humans are capable of willingly suspending their sense of ethics. Which is why I was thinking of him – again – as I was telling yet another real estate agent to cut the bullshit yesterday.
The above is obviously a generalization that may apply to some real estate agents but definitely not all of them. There have to be some that still have an operable sense of good and bad about them. In the next post I’ll take you for a look at the real estate agents our home buying adventures have bumped us into thus far as we further explore that unique real estate agent experience.
I have a question to Tony Abbott, Nick Minchin, Wilson Tuckey and all the rest of the Liberal Party members currently wrecking havoc with their party due to their strong “climate change skepticism” and fear for the future of an Australia under an emissions trading scheme: You say you do not accept the science presented to you thus far as evidence for human induced global warming. If that is the case, what more does science need to provide you in order to convince you? When will you cross that threshold of disbelief? I am not expecting an answer and I don’t need one. The sad reality is that we cannot expect science to deliver better evidence than we have so far, so therefore our misguided skeptics are doomed to their disbelief (and let me make it clear: I dislike the use of the word "belief", most often associated with blind faith, in relation to scientific evidence). My point is that when you ask the question the way I just did – as in, what would it take for you to accept the evidence – you realize something that may have not been as clear before: These people will only believe the things they want to believe in. I really feel pity for them.
I do have to add that at the moment I find myself in the same camp as this group of Liberals that I mock/despise: We are united in our opposition to Kevin Rudd’s proposed emissions trading scheme. They think it would ruin Australia’s financial future, while I (and many others like me, such as The Greens and Kenneth Davidson) think this legislation is actually a tool to ensure Australia is stuck with the big polluters for the next few decades; a tool that will not reduce greenhouse emissions even the slightest. So if you wanted proof for the sad state of Australian politics in particular or for the modern age democracy in the age of corporate power in general, you have it all here: I/we have to join forces with the devil in order to achieve what the elected government got elected to do in the first place as it tries to do what the former government (now opposition) promised to do before the elections.
One of the prevailing myths in the world of Aussie real estate is that house prices double every ten years. The myth, supported by the partner myth that house prices never go down, is used to justify investments in real estate above everything else. Like all good myths - say, organized religion - its followers will follow it rain or shine no matter how much or how little sense it makes. Me? I think such claims tend to be as credible as the good old statements about women drivers turn out to be (some of the safest drivers I know are mostly women) or the statements about how good Jews are with money (a far cry from the realities of my Jewish family and friends). So I will attack the myth and set out to disprove it the good old fashioned way: by providing an example for a case where it doesn't apply. And what better example can I provide than my own house? We bought our house 6 years ago and have recently had it valued by two different real estate agencies, both coming with the exact same estimates for the current worth of our house. We also know that our house would not sell for more than the real estate agents have projected because we've seen how neighboring houses perform when sold. So, what are our projected return on investments? Expanded linearly from 6 years to 10, we are looking at between 50% to 60% ROI; very different prospects to the myth's doubling. Even if we assume that we overpaid by 5% when we bought our house - being the naive fools we are - and under the most optimistic selling circumstances, we are still looking at only 75% ROI. Close enough, you say? Well, let me remind you of the subtle issue of stamp duties, the fees we pay to government when we buy the house but don't get back when we sell it. When added to the equation, even the most favorable ROI estimates shrink to 60% while the more realistic ones are just a bit higher than 30%. Let's go a step further and assess the performance of our house investment against inflation. Assuming a 3% CPI rate per year, our ROI shrink to between 2% to 30%, with the more realistic ones at less than 10%. That's nice, but 10% is far from being the greatest investment ever made and is certainly not worthy of the glory granted to real estate investments in Australia. Now you could argue that all of the above is simply the result of us not being good real estate investors; we bought the wrong house. Yes, silly us, we were looking for a place to live in rather than a good investment. Fine. Yet you still have to admit that the "house prices double in 10 years time" rule of thumb has been refuted for what it is: an unfounded urban myth. Or, in the straight talking plain language I much prefer, it's bullshit.
The Victorian Government has just published a registry of the state's schools over the internet, allowing everyone to know how well a certain school is faring against others over a given set of parameters. You can access that registry here. I have a problem with such superficial comparisons between schools. First because I'm not sure the right parameters are being measured and that whatever's measured is measured properly. Second, and more importantly, such comparisons will only make the worse schools even worse as those that have the ability to avoid them will strive harder to do so. Quibbles aside, a registry such as this provides what is, by far, the best resource we have on our hands to determine how good the schools in the given areas where we are currently considering buying a house are. You can say it's an effective real estate guide. As I have explained before, the quality of available state schooling is of utmost importance to us when picking a potential future home. Thus far we had to rely on crude parameters such as word of mouth, quality of internet website and external looks when judging schools, but as much as I find the new registry problematic, it is obvious it is significantly more reliable than the measures we've used till now. So, what did I find when I looked at the registry? The first observation is that the areas we've been looking at so far all sport schools that are either average or above average. The second observation is much more interesting: some of the schools that thus far I used to regard as the worst, to the effect of prejudicing against an entire area, have turned out to actually be the best performers. And what are the lessons here? Simple: Observations made using unsubstantiated data should not be used for making crucial decisions. But the much more interesting observation is this: word of mouth should not be taken too far; the people spreading the words of mouth are obviously people that spread that word of mouth because they feel the need to assure themselves they have made the right decision.
It happened to me again today: someone who hardly knew me has referred to me as a Jew. I guess it goes part and parcel with having a name like Moshe, but I'm still annoyed whenever it happens. The question to ask, therefore, is simple: What is a Jew? The way I see it, the definition of the term is rather lax. You can define a Jew on the grounds of ancestry, culture and/or religious belief; let's have a look at each of those criteria.
If you count being a Jew on racial grounds and go to have a look at my genes then I'm definitely Jewish. Hitler would have sent me off to the gas chambers right away. But then again, so what? What do Jewish genes mean, anyway? It probably comes down to a group of people sharing a very minute amount of common mutations that, in the grand scheme of things, are absolutely meaningless. It's also guaranteed you will find I belong with some other groups of mutations, too, as I doubt my ancestors had always maintained a closed community. So the Nazis might have had their way of looking at races but the rest of us should have moved ahead. If you count being a Jew on culture grounds then you'll find I'm somewhere in the middle. I definitely have Jewish influences in me; it's by far the culture I'm most familiar with. Then again, is there really such a thing as a Jewish culture in the first place, beyond the veil of clichés? I would maintain that I have been much more influenced by Israeli culture than Jewish culture, and as evidence I will point at the undeniable fact that those who regard themselves as Jews outside of Israel live in a different culture to those regarding themselves as Israeli Jews. The diaspora Jews seem to have a chip on their shoulder that forces them to be extra Jewish, perhaps the result of them having to deal with the contradiction of being Jewish yet not wanting to fulfil their belief by living in Israel as well as the result of having to take extra measures to avoid assimilation with the rest of the population. And if it comes down to being an Israeli then I should point at the fact that I am far from being a typical representative of the Israeli culture; that distance between and that culture is one of the main reasons I left Israel behind in the first place. If you count being Jewish on religious grounds then I'm definitely no Jew. Virtually all the world's theists would be far more Jewish than I am, for I will only have faith in things that can be reliably and credibly observed and measured. I gladly put my faith in quarks yet I will never go for the god delusion.
Ultimately, I am of the opinion that it's up to the individual to decide whether they want to be referred to as Jewish or not, the same way as it is up to the individual to determine whether they want to be known as Cat Stevens or Yusuf Islam. And in my case, I don't want to be counted as a Jew. The main reason why I don't want to be counted Jewish is simple: It is not a descriptor that would teach you too much about me; if anything, it will probably mislead you. You can say I'm a member of the homo sapiens species, you can say I'm a male, you can say I'm relatively tall, you can say I love to blog, and you can even say I live in Melbourne but grew up in Israel. All of these observations tell you true objective facts about me. Yet you will gain no reliable information about me by adding that I'm a Jew.
With my Windows Mobile 6.1 mobile phone now on its death bed – it started resetting itself involuntarily several times a day – the question of what its replacements is going to be is more relevant than ever. It’s obvious what it is not going to be. It’s not going to be Windows Mobile! I can actually get my phone fixed under my credit card’s extended warranty policy, but that will only mean that I’ll have a working piece of shit in my hands (and pocket, most of the time) instead of a dead one. I have already reported how it seems like the iPhone is the best of the smartphone lot. It seemed the best, but I cannot say that I’d be happy with the purchase of an iPhone: It’s a lot of money to pay for a very artificially restricted gadget (effectively, $1200 for a 16gb iPhone GS with a two year Virgin Mobile plan incorporating 300mb data allowance). And you hear of the restrictions every day in the news: you hear how Skype has been suffocated, you hear how the big saint Steve Jobs bullies a small time developer into submission, and you wonder why such a flashy device is still not flash enabled and still boasts the copy & paste facilities its latest operating system upgrade offers as anything but an embarrassing fix. Apple, in short, is an evil monopoly that makes the most of its position; it’s just that unlike, say, Microsoft during the Vista era, they actually do have generally good products in their line-up. So I put myself on a mini crusade to find the iPhone killer. I thought I found one in the Nokia N900 and I spent tons of precious time researching the product. However, what I did find was not an iPhone killer, but rather a company – Nokia – that has simply lost its way. If Nokia represents Apple’s competition in the smartphone market then it’s no wonder Apple has become the market's supreme commander.
Let me make it clear. If Nokia’s own reports, videos and images are to be considered credible enough, then its N900 is a mega iPhone killer. Perhaps not in selling figures, but definitely in technical capabilities: It has a Firefox based browser with Flash and all the capabilities you’re used to from your normal PC Firefox (including add-ons) but with a touch screen that allows zooming and tabbing and a lot of nice usability things that so far only the iPhone was capable of delivering. It already has 32gb of memory but you can expand that using a memory card (something Apple won’t allow). It is unlocked, so if you’re overseas you can stick a local SIM in and your phone and cut down global roaming costs. I’ll stop listing the N900’s attributes at this point because they’re not the main point I’m trying to convey. Let’s just say that it’s a mighty phone, by far the best out there. Add to that it being open sourced, based on the Maemo distribution of Linux, and you can appreciate that unlike Apple forcing you to an unbreakable wedding with iTunes, Nokia allows you the freedom to do as you see fit. I could only find two shortcomings with the N900 phone: First, you can’t sync the N900 to Google the way you can sync Google Calendar and contacts to a Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile. Second, Nokia’s applications front, Ovi, is incredibly inferior to Apple’s; there simply is no comparison. Yet, if you ask me, who needs an application shop when you have a full blown web browser at your hands? When it comes to the bigger application, such as GPS navigation, Nokia has basic stuff built in but the iPhone doesn’t, while both charge a lot for the full blown stuff (enough to convince me to just buy the Tomtom Start for $180).
So where does the N900 fail? Well, it doesn’t fail anywhere; it’s Nokia that fails it. First they failed it by announcing it will be released in October 2009 and gradually postponing its actual release; current rumors talk about a February 2010 release. Then they failed it by announcing the N900 will not be sold in Australia, thus demonstrating that Nokia doesn’t want to sell its phones to the consumers but rather to the mobile providers. On their part, the mobile providers are not exactly in love with a phone that has such great VOIP capabilities to cannibalize their business. On its own, the lack of official Aussie imports is not a big deal: I can buy the phone in Amazon for $550 (USD) and have it brought over to Australia using Shipito, a service that already provides me with a mailing address of my own in the USA. The problem is warranty: if things go wrong, I’d have to post the phone to the USA and use Shipito to get it back again. The problem is magnified by the overall lack of reliability of these small gadgets, as demonstrated by my old MP3 player and my current mobile phone (both, interestingly enough, running Windows Mobile) and as demonstrated by the tons of flak Nokia has been receiving on its current flagship smartphone, the N97 (a model everyone recognizes as a failure). The issue is made worse through reports from N900 test users of microphones not working and screens broken on delivery. But then Nokia threw the N900 the killer blow through a notification announcing two punches. The first of the two said that anyone who wants to develop Maemo applications needs a million dollar liability insurance. There goes the option of having an rich application environment ala iTunes’ catalog of application numbering in the six digits! Effectively, this implies there is no future for Maemo; in turn it means there will never be a reason for Google to provide the facilities to sync Maemo phones with its Google Calendar, to name but one example. As far my own N900 prospects are concerned, any ideas I may have still had of buying the phone evaporated with Nokia’s second announcement, saying they will limit updates and applications based on geographical location. Given the phone will not be officially sold in Australia this represents a risk I just cannot take. For Nokia, however, it represents the complete inability of a major company to recognize the internet has unified this world of ours to a point where geographical separation makes no sense to anyone but old dinosaurs like the movie studios who still deploy regional coding on their stuff and then wonder why what they refer to as piracy is so rife. Nokia, it seems, belongs firmly in the company of dinosaurs. If it continues on this path, Nokia will soon be extinct.
So there you go. Unless my current phone does the unexpected and manages to survive until Android comes up with a worthy model, you will soon be looking at a very reluctant owner of an iPhone.
Readers of this blog will know that I am often puzzled and troubled by that common phenomenon by which otherwise sane and healthy people also happen to go after one or another of religious belief. That is, beliefs in the unnatural powers, belief in stuff for which there is absolutely no proof. It's just insane: no one believes a real estate agent, yet most people believe lies of a much greater scale. Troubled by this contradiction, I often go out of my way to point at the rather shaky rational foundations for religious belief. Yet no one listens to me (and the majority of the world’s population doesn’t listen to people who say the same but in a much better way). Why is that? To the rescue comes philosopher Dan Dennett (who has frequented my blogs before). In a lecture presented by The Richard Dawkins Foundation, Dennett offers what seems to be a very sensible explanation to the problem of why people contrive to believe despite their said beliefs' lack of rationality. Essentially, Dennett provides a list of rational reasons for declaring belief; none of those hold water, as he quickly points out, yet they seem rational enough for enough people to happily settle with them. I recommend watching the video despite its length. Note it starts with a long introduction that is not directly related to the topic at hand, since Dennett’s lecture is actually a reward acceptance speech. However, that introduction is quite illuminating by its own rights – especially if you have a thing for goats:
Now, the reason why I have found the video to be quite illuminating is its practical approach to belief. It provides an excellent explanation for the way the believers I am familiar with “work”. Take, as an example, my parents and my parents in law: both believe in the faith their respective accidents of birth got them to (Judaism and Christianity), yet both don't follow their faith beyond the realm of performing rather pagan rituals that work on their sense of belonging to an elite club (say, circumcision and christening, respectively). When questioned about their beliefs (an act that requires persistence as they don't like the shaky foundations of their belief to be tested for weight) they will both do their best to avoid the discussion, thus revealing exactly what Dennett is saying in the video: they don't really believe in all the bullshit; they just believe in believing. And on a personal note, I couldn't avoid noting how my own attitudes towards religion had to contend with the same challenges posed by society's defense mechanisms for religion that Dennett is mentioning: from being shy about my skepticism, as if to avoid hurting anyone's feelings, to being outspoken about it. Today I take pride in the fact that from the internet to the office I work on, no person that knows me can say they don't know what my opinion on religion is.
I thought I'd take a nice and peaceful video of Dylan eating chicken. He was eating lemon pepper chicken on a skewer (aka Shisklik), his favorite dish. He was so peaceful; he was obviously enjoying himself. But he is still a two year old, and he's still trying to show off to the camera. The results speak for themselves:
We just came back from an auction for a really old house on a full plot of land (i.e., a plot that was not subdivided already). We went there to assess our chances for buying an empty plot of land (or what would be an empty plot of land after you pay someone $10,000 to get rid of what ever's on there) and build a house according to our own requirements. That is, a house with less than 72 toilets. As per our standard experience by now, the auction was pretty depressing. The property sold for $655,000, much more than anything that would allow us to build something with more than a tent on it. But that's not my biggest issue with this property or this auction. The auction came down to a battle between a young family (of seemingly Indian origins, for what it's worth) and an investor (driving a convertible Mercedes). The latter won, and it doesn't take much of a genius to figure out he's going to build two units out there and sell them. Now let's do the maths. On one side we have a young family that can just afford to spend $650,000 on buying a house. On the other we have an investor that can spend more: He's going to build two houses on that same plot, with each of them selling for much more than $800,000 (and I'm being conservative here). What does that mean? It means the investor can afford to bid a hell of a lot of money on the auction, enough to drive all families away. It also means that a family with $650,000 - a lot of money by my account - cannot find a place to live in, at least not in this particular area we're talking about. That family will have to venture far far away to areas where the potential profits from subdivisions are too low and/or areas where the previously subdivided houses are affordable. That is, in Melbourne's terms, areas with no infrastructure to support a healthy lifestyle; areas where you can't go anywhere without a car; areas where I wouldn't want to live. And that, my dear readers, is exactly why the Aussie real estate market is fucked up to the core.
ABC news was talking yesterday about the parliament discussion in which Scientology was accused of some horrendous crimes. They went on to interview several parliamentarians, including The Nationals' Barnaby Joyce. Joyce didn't voice his explicit opinion on Scientology, but he did go on to say something about the stupidity of believing in spaceships and aliens. Not that my opinion on Scientology differs much from Joyce's, but I would like to ask him the following: In what way do Scientology's spaceships differ from the following elements of your own belief- -A star racing across the sky to act as a directional beacon -Walking on water -Virgin birth -Turning water into wine?
At this point I have to say that I'm picking on Joyce for a reason. Joyce is an outspoken global warming denialist. He accepts Christianity but denies Scientology despite the two sharing a lot of similar bullshit at their core, and he also rejects what is very nearly scientific fact. I would say Joyce is severely delusional, or at least severely ignorant. If it was up to me, Joyce would be sent back to school to get the education he so badly needs. Yet the Australian people see him fit to be sent to parliament and decide on issues of utmost importance to human civilization as a whole.
My aunt has recently moved out of her old apartment, an apartment where I had spent quite a lot of time as a young boy in the company of her and my late uncle. Today, while at the office and while going through yet another exciting day at the office, I caught myself daydreaming of that gone by era: how I used to play in the apartment, and how doors would be kept open and I would even go and play at neighbours’ apartments. The line of thought caught on as I remembered how small and rather sparse these apartments were; no one I knew at the time has had much in the way of means to spare. Memories of an old gone neighbour showing me photos of his kids floated by and I recalled his stories about raising his kids in his apartment, putting some shame into my current quest for a bigger place to live in and putting the amount of effort we’ve been investing into this quest of ours in context: people lived in much worse conditions than we do now, and yet they flourished and they were happy. And it all took place within my lifetime and within my world. What has happened since to cause the drastic changes in the way we live since? And then it occurred to me: Boredom. When I look back at my early childhood days, the days before responsibilities kicked in, the predominant notion was boredom. TV was available through a single channel that worked for just a few hours a day, books were available at the library only (buying books was quite rare), and films were limited to cinema visits. With the internet having to wait some fifteen to twenty years to emerge, people had only one channel with which they could guarantee an entertaining time: they had to do stuff with one another. Hence the open doors and the open social interactions. Today things are different. I have enough unread books in my personal library to last me a few years. I can listen to the music in my collection for twenty four hours a day over a few months without listening to the same track twice. And while I have a big collection of movies to entertain myself with, I have movies to last a lifetime within easy access. Not to mention video games. And last, but not least, the internet means that the only time I will lack varied entertainment is when something goes wrong with my PC or my internet connection (last time that had happened was due to a blackout taking out most of the state). The result of this transition from the boring world of yesteryear to our packed up world is that our interactions with one another are limited. In order to see someone nowadays we need to book our calendars weeks or even months in advance. People are able to live half way across the world from their families, but when they come for a visit their families will quickly regard them the same way they regard a plant and go kill some brain cells in front of their extra loud TVs. Whereas I used to play outside quite a lot as a child, nowadays you hardly see free roaming kids about; what you do see is fleets of armoured four wheel drives chauffeuring their precious cargo around to ensure they’re on time for their macramé class. I can come up with two things that contributed to this deep social change: The first was gradual but significant technological improvements, the things that allow us to have multiple TV channels all day and all of the night (to name but one example). The second was all of us being significantly better off than we were a few decades ago, providing us with the means with which we can tap on those advanced technologies. In short, what took place was all of us living in what most people would describe as a healthy economy. But is this healthy economy truly contributing to our well being and happiness? I think the answer is a mixed bag. On one hand, it is clear that the exposure to a more stimulating environment is making us smarter overall, at least in certain respects (those that are commonly measured when, say, applying for a university position). On the other hand, we humans are social creatures by definition; none of us would get too far without a social structure around, and there can be no denying the damages caused by this social erosion. Personally, I’m happy to sound like an old man and state that I’m troubled with younger people taking the way things currently are for granted and thinking there is no need and definitely no way to increase social interactions. In the past, parents managed with their babies even though they didn't have disposable nappies because they had lots of help around; now we've lost that loving feeling. Yet are only living the way we do because we’ve shaped our world in this particular way; but we can undo things, if only by a bit, in order to improve this state of affairs.
About a fortnight ago I was sitting here raving about the virtues of Ubuntu’s latest release, Karmic Koala. Two weeks later and I’m regretting my praise. I first noticed something strange was going on when I was deleting files off USB memory sticks. The files would be deleted but memory was not freed up; when I tried to format the USB stick altogether the system wouldn’t let me do so. I dismissed it thinking I was doing something wrong (how very Microsoft-ened I have become!). Then I noticed that my netbook fails to notice the partition on which I keep my music and my videos. This means that while I can use Karmic on the netbook to surf the internet, I cannot use it to play my music while doing so. And then a friend from work whom I convinced to install Ubuntu on his aging laptop told me that since the upgrade to Karmic his wireless modem has stopped working. There's a bit of a catch there, because without the internet connection allowing him to access the internet he's unable to download a solution to his problem...
The real spitting blood experience with Karmic Koala took place yesterday. All I wanted was to print the latest MSY computer parts pricelist through my desktop so I can design my future desktop. You see, the question at hand there is whether to go with an Intel i7 CPU that requires DDR3 memory and as a result more expensive motherboard and RAM, or whether finances are going to restrict me to the inferior (but still quite good) i5 domain. Yet the printouts on my otherwise excellent performing Samsung CLP-310 color laser printer was all gibberish. A few cleared forests later I remembered my wife telling me she had to use Windows XP to print her stuff, so I could only conclude that Karmic Koala’s installation had stepped over the printer’s driver. Not a big deal; all I needed to do was install the printer driver again. And that’s simple: Samsung – praise be the Samsung – actually delivered their printer with a Linux driver in addition to a Windows one. What followed next was a demonstration for why Linux is probably not ready for the big time yet; and when I say big time, I mean the non-geeks out there who couldn’t care less what operating system they use as long as they get things done. I put the Samsung driver CD in my desktop’s DVD drive; nothing happened. I didn’t expect an auto-run to take place, but I did expect a navigation tool to pop up and allow me to browse the contents of the CD. So I opened such a browser manually (it’s called Nautilus, and it’s Ubuntu’s equivalent of Windows Explorer). There I was shocked to find my DVD drive, as well as the other CD drive on my desktop, were left unidentified by Karmic Koala. I couldn’t use them! The next option was to install the generic open source Samsung driver for Linux available on the internet. I installed it twice yet each time I did it the test pages came out all messy again; the generic driver was obviously too generic. I had to use the Samsung one. So the next step was to look over the internet for solutions to the missing DVD drive problem. Only that Firefox was busy uploading photos to Flickr, and for some odd reason uploading photos to Flickr using Firerfox under Ubuntu causes Firefox to freeze; you can’t browse the internet at all until the upload is finished. Great! I went to have a shower while the photo upload was taking place. All freshened up I googled for answers, only to find that missing drives (either CD, hard drives or USB sticks) are a common event with Karmic Koala. Given that Ubuntu is open source software its bug reports are available for everyone to browse, which – while very nice – did not comfort me in the least. I still wanted that pricelist printed! So I reverted to downloading the Samsung driver from the Samsung website and googled for instructions on how to install the driver from an Ubuntu forum (where I found out that Samsung laser printers have been specifically targeted by Karmic Koala’s path of destruction). Eventually, past midnight, I even had my pricelist printed!
The lesson? All these issues I have encountered were not the usual Linux problem of lacking drivers. Missing hard drives and CD drives point at basic problems with the operating system; Karmic Koala is riddled with bugs. Karmic Koala is simply not production ready yet and should not have been released. As I am trying to figure out what my next desktop would require and where I can cut costing corners, the thought that maybe I should invest $150 on the OEM version of Windows 7 Pro, 64 bit, did occur to me. Not for the love of Microsoft, but for the lack of trust worthy alternatives.
A Homo Sapiens from Melbourne, Australia (formerly from Tel Aviv, Israel), Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Local Group.
Likes to think of himself as a skeptic with the occasional sense of wonder, but is more of an imperfect man with an imperfect body.
Too many real estate agents remind me of Rudolf Höss. Höss was a person of contrasts: during the day he would manage Auschwitz while off hours he was a family man. People don’t come in more flawed a form than this one, so it’s good to try and learn from the phenomenon.
