If I replaced the engine with a better performer every two years and replaced every part that broke with an permanent upgrade, would I care that it was a nine year old car?

no. There is no analogy to be made here. The other guy was flat wrong to conflate today's XP with yesterday's Linux.

Uh, XP from 2001 is a nine year old operating system. It's pretty bad.

XP in 2010 is a what? 2 year old operating system? 2008 was the last major kernel revision, if that's how you want to count.

I can't even begin to count the components that have been upgraded, patched, replaced in XP; the process continues, first Tuesday of every month, like clockwork.

Your comparison is a total bogey strawman. If I were running XP RTM 1, and NEVER upgraded, it might hold some water, and then may I remind you of the INTENSE user-friendlyness and broad, professional service and support available in Linux distros in 2001?

XP is an operating system that has been around for 9 years. It is NOT a nine year old operating system. An operating system is also not a car.

In fact, I'd say they've hammered out quite a few of its problems pretty satisfactorily, which is why so few people are switching.

Its the difference in thinking about it like a nerd person and thinking about it like a business person, then. All I quibble with is your assertion, correct from one perspective, that one should think about what the client is willing to spend on what you are giving them.

"Your time is worth what they think it's worth, and I assure you, you're a hell of a lot cheaper than the alternatives. (And provide better value, considering that half the time you're sitting fixing stuff you're providing a computer class in how to not have this happen again.)"

this is true; its just that to a business person, this is the wrong end of the snake to grab. the right end is "how much money do you want to make?" and then you derive the answer from that point by weighing your skills, what the market is willing to pay, etc., and arrive at a) a target market segment or b) the realiztion you need to make some changes to reach your goal.

see? this is an ontological difference here, and it's why business people succeed despite have little or no actually useful or interesting skills and contributing nothing to mankind, and why geeks fail, despite being bright and competent and doing interesting and valuable things.

we're not in disagreement over the issue, we're is disagreement over how to give advice on it. My advice is, learn fundamental business practices to a high level of competency and follow them, just like you do in app dev. Don't muddle through it by experimenting; learn the rules and apply some rigor to your process when you set up a business.

Good coders don't fumble around trying different shit until it just kind of works, they know how to organize, explain, attack and solve the problem in a structured way. same thing in the money world.

This is categorically untrue. One does in fact set the value of one's time.

You think you're worth $100/hour, you don't take $50. this is an iron law in service work from hairdressers to auto mechanics to software consultants.

the client doesn't set your rates, or you'll work for free. YOU set your rates.

whether or not you have accurately valued your skills, your market and your costs determines how much work you have.

this is why so many, many, many geeks fail at businesses, esp. small businesses. You have no idea how stuff like this works and you end up working for free or or blowing your earnings out of the water with costs.

Medicine is currently more or less based on science, but that only because science has taken such a large role in our brave new society.

Medicine has always been more art than science, famously so; a doctor is not a scientist, even if he researchs and publishes, he's a different animal from a clinical researcher.

Doctors make, and have always made, and will always make, medical decisions on far less verity than any scientist would accept, for obvious reasons. Thanks to modern science, you can almost count on him(or her- new times indeed) not to kill you with the treatment. Our modern doctor has a vast arsenal of sceince based medicine at his disposal, but you may trust that every decision he makes is grounded in nothing more or less than his own hubris, and if you're lucky, his brains and experience and his expertise. Nothing whatsoever to do with science. In point of fact, our medical educational system is mostly designed to weed out the unintelligent, the fools and the irresponsible- aside from basic scientific literacy, that is your guarantee that your doctor won't fuck you up even worse- a general merit system. Works pretty well, actually! Science? Nothing to do with it.

Thanks to, again, modern science, and medical institutions, he is right more often than not, or has the tools to attack a problem he may not be right about, but he is not a scientist. He is an artist.

Picasso has more in common with a doctor than Neil Bohrs by a large margin. Sleep on that before your next checkup, o my brothers.