Some times you come across an article in which the author just points something out that you can relate to completely. Such is the case with the article that Otto Stern from The Register wrote about flying and the open source community.It has been written in a humoristic way and at the same time he points out the funny relationship between flying and software (open source to be exact). I am going to quote the funniest part here.
(some parts have been edited to shorten them)
(…)I’m after progress, while these others are happy to wallow in the filth of achievements past.(…)
This brings me to one of the major problems facing America today – the airline industry.
The carriers stand as huge failures from a technology and pure commerce point of view.
During the holidays, you must funnel through massive ticketing and security lines with the masses. Government personnel touch you in gratifying places and force you to remove your shoes. (It’s for this reason that I’ve started selling TSA SUCKS! socks and HANDS OFF, LIBERALS! butt plugs.) The whole process is revolting. Imagine such treatment accompanying the sale of a hamburger or a firearm. You’d never make a single purchase.
And this is just the layer of garbage coating the landfill of an industry.
You have to arrive way early for your flight. Then you sit around with a bunch of jerks who can barely spell the word “fly” let alone figure out the higher math behind the technology. More often than not, the airline has oversold the flight, meaning you don’t even have a seat. Over the busy holidays, this can lead to 40 hour delays with the scum giving you nothing more than a $300 coupon to use their crappy service again. I can’t possibly see how this is legal, but apparently it is.
Then, you get in a plane that flies at pretty much the same speed it was cruising at 20 years ago, if not more.
Not to prattle on, but the state of flight technology is just plain disgusting. These pathetic carriers appear determined to have us leaving late, receiving crappy service, arriving late, having our seats sold out from under our asses, flying slow, eating ass-rankling meals, coughing up $5 for gin and tonics and generally being abused by a dolt collective for the next 100 years. Our only real hope is that the genetic engineers splice out some human wings, while the good folks at Exxon Mobil craft a cow manure-powered jet pack.
No other business – except the blogosphere – could survive on this lack of innovation and tragic service. Imagine me ordering and paying for The Erotic Ins and Outs of Enema Play from Amazon.com and then not receiving the book until 2007 with Amazon compensating me in the meantime by mailing a bag of peanuts, a testicular shock device and an irate civil servant to my door. That’s exactly what flying is like!
The only thing as goat-rendering awful as flying has to be the progression of open source code.
Travel to any open source love site, and you’ll find the freedom fly boys gooing over how quickly they deliver bug fixes, patches and the like. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here typing away on a 128-processor Unix SMP armed with an ultrasonic file system and jet-fueled partitioning system, wondering when the Linux freaks are going to solve their Ubuntu versus Mandriva color scheme debate or maybe even write a printer driver so that something I buy actually works with my open sores PC.
Before pulling away from your crucial Mono project work to write a flame, please hand a normal 25-year-old your Linux box and show them how to connect the system to their bluetooth camera and then smack yourself.
Seriously, open source software progresses at commercial flight speed. I’m not sure the US can take 10 more years of this and remain a productive nation.
I especially can relate to the waiting part, the fact that the speed at which we fly hasn’t changed in 30-40 years (why the hell can’t we go supersonic with better fuel economy?). One of the dumb things I see now is that they try to make checking in go faster (with online check-in), but then you still have to wait at the passport check for hours! It’s ridiculous.
Anyway: my patience will be put to the test later this month: on December 23rd I’ll be flying to Atlanta once again. I guess I will be treathed to some great in-flight hospitality by KLM (at least their alchoholic beverages are free, unlike Delta Airlines).