One of the things I notice is many people in this world seem to be lacking any sort of conviction. See dictionary:
3 a : a strong persuasion or belief
Let me give you some examples. I was in Manila sometime back and ran into one of the guys who is supposedly part of the volunteer Firefox association – some sort of part-time FF evangelist. Cool. While showing me something on his computer I noticed he happened to be using Chrome. I was like dude – get a clue. Either use FF or don’t say you are a FF evangelist. Pretty simple stuff. This guy lacked any sort of conviction whatsoever. Pathetic.
I remember in the early days of my enterprise software career competing with MSFT and having to run around using a Windoze laptop – so we started using Mac, Linux, and even Solaris just to show that if we were going to preach about a world without MSFT then we better be able to practice what we preach.
Whatever. Stallman – you gotta love this guy. If this is not the most direct example of conviction I don’t know what is.
http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/
As creator of GNU this guy seriously lives what he preaches:
I am using a Lemote Yeelong, a netbook with a Loongson chip and a 9-inch display. This is my only computer, and I use it all the time. I chose it because I can run it with 100% free software even at the BIOS level.
Stunning.
I love this:
I spend most of my time using Emacs. I run it on a text console, so that I don’t have to worry about accidentally touching the mouse-pad and moving the pointer, which would be a nuisance. I read and send mail with Emacs (mail is what I do most of the time).
I switch to the X console when I need to do something graphical, such as look at an image or a PDF file.
Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection. Once or twice or maybe three times a day I connect and transfer mail in and out. Before sending mail, I always review and revise the outgoing messages. That gives me a chance to catch mistakes and faux pas.
Loosely translated – I like to get work done rather than play around with twitter and FB.
Stallman rocks. Enuff said!
