Are you ready to celebrate Hilter and Columbine Shooting Birthdays Tomorrow ? - 4/20

Just like Microsoft, Firefox developers have gotten stuck on the feature-creep treadmill. Instead of fixing incessant crashes and debilitating memory leaks, they add more whiz-bang features to compete with the "enemy". Instead of adding features to make their browser more robust and responsive, they add more crap to make it bigger, slower, and buggier.

Firefox is no longer about doing the right thing. It's now all about one-upping Microsoft at their own stupid game, and the users are suffering for it. Open Source developers, apparently, are no more immune to this competition attitude than the proprietary vendors. There is no longer anything special about Firefox. What's more, they suffer from the syndrome many open source projects suffer from, which is that they prefer to work on the "interesting" bits, rather than spending time adding some polish to make things work WELL.

What I don't understand about most linux users is the "do it for yourself" ideology -- why would I want to put in the time and effort to make an application work (or even to write one myself) when there is a host of closed source alternatives that just work, provided by world leaders such as Microsoft? It's not a laziness thing, I grew up on a farm and now hold a PhD in molecular biology so I am no slouch when it comes to physical or mental work.

When it comes down to whether I can pay for a program that denies me access to the source code, but does its job well or an open source alternative coded by the guy with a hairy back who lives in a basement down the street, I believe it is better to pay for the quality product than get something inferior for free and have to tweak it endlessly in order to get a satisfactory result. Worse still is removing the "personal touches" put into most software of this type. If I suggest something to my boss that contains such choice phrases in the code as "Free Mitnick" (whom I believe to be an incarcerated cyber-terrorist, but feel free to correct me) or "Fuck Bush" (many open-saucers are violent liberalists) my job would be about as secure as a typical linux webserver. This isn't even taking into account the names of the applications themselves: The Gimp (I'm sorry? BDSM on my PC? No thank you.), Felchmale (I think this is a homosexual sex act) and Mencoder (can women use it too?) all come to mind.

What it comes down to at the end of the day is experience. Experience from the coders, marketers, tech support people who are all paid to to their jobs and do them well. Would you want a handjob from a 12 year old prostitute? Even if it was free, would you still take the awkward jerkings of a preteen over a $50 squeeze from a professional? That is how I see this whole debate. Your dick ends up covered in jism at the end, but there is one hell of a difference in the route you took to get there. Of course, some will always prefer the inferior route, in the handjob realm as well as software. In the former situation we call these people paedophiles. What is so different about the second group?