Spent some time figuring what type of hacker would be needed to take Unix or Linux to the masses. After stumbling into a webpage, I realized a new kind must be born.
The hacker would agree that smoothing the Unix learning curve for Windows users wouldn't hurt, as long as this "smoothing" does not restrict the Unix hacker. Ultimately, the traditional hacker is unconcerned with what goes on in the arena of the girls, suits, and lusers. At this point, the Unix culture becomes bifurcated -- a new kind of Unix hacker is born, the GUI-oriented Unix developer. The traditional Unix hackers will stay put in their command-line, character-mode world, while the new Unix developers will enable the extension of Unix to the new world of potential users. Unix does have a chance in the platform wars (measuring vigor in terms of number of users, not technical merits) -- not by completely eliminating the old hacker's UI, the Unix shell, but rather, by adding a higher-visibility developer community: a new kind of Unix developer who is adding a Windows-like UI and opening up Unix to the masses. [1]This person is well-versed in GUI terminology. Will speak words differently from a normal backroom hacker, with a personality that can get any ordinary everyday user hooked into the Unix GUI in a short period of time.
IT Job Market Implosion
It looks like the well is about to dry up. Might as well start figuring the alternatives. Queried several jobs banks and all I got was very disappointing numbers. Tough times indeed for software developers. People at headoffice say the market is slow and will be slow in the foreseable future. Now I'm not so sure if I can continue with what I have been doing for years. I'm going to miss it if I'm going to shift to another type of work. Maybe it's just a way of letting go and moving to another kind of job. I'll definitely be programming, but, it's going to be a little different though. There's one word to describe it and it's called Famine.