"How can I stop my employees from fighting over who's the best coder?

I don't care about code one way or another. I own a bakery, all I care about is selling bread. I just hired this CS college dropout because he was my cousin's nephew and I owed him a favor, and the kid turned out to be a good employee. Even suggested we bought a computer for keeping our budget electronically, and that worked out well. So, as I was satisfied with this somewhat bright kid, when I had to replace our janitor, I hired a second CS dropout. The problem is they started disagreeing right away about the most irrelevant things you can imagine and now they bicker all the time, have heated, uncivlized arguments about who is the better coder, what sort of software license works best, their choice of cellphone and whatnot. It's really disturbing the workflow around here. Nothing works properly anymore. For example, I never know whether my computer will have LibreOffice or MS Office installed, which means that at any given day I can open only about half my files properly. My customers are also placing complaints and I'm fed up with the food fights they cause. Can someone tell me how to make them stop or, at least, how to properly discern compatible nerds in the future?"

Pirsig dances a lot around definitions, but he doesn't define quality objectively at all. On the contrary, he defends its subjectivity and subjectivity itself. If you want to talk Pirsig, what I meant is that most consumers seem to view things only in terms of romantic quality and then infer an equal level of classical quality, which is, at best, illogical. Especially when classical and romantic quality are at odds, like in usage of soft plastic or phones that are ready to disassemble upon collision, absorbing kinetic energy, instead of taking it all in, inelastically. A "hard" outer shell is equated to a "good feel" when it's in fact not desirable at all on such devices. Please refer to ZAMM, more specifically the story about his friend that would try to start a hot bike by choking it, then complain about the bike.

By the way, no need to be rude, call my argument a "childish stawman" or act smug by suggesting reading material you assume I'm not familiar with. It's needless hostility, especially when you seem to have simply misunderstood my point (and one of said works).

It already changes things substantially. Think about it: sniper teams will now have to consist of a sniper, a spotter and a debugger.

Also psychology, history, philosophy and sociology majors. Can you imagine how many of them an average munitions factory would have to employ?

Yes, we need a gun that shoots well thought-out theses on a given subject.

Here's a very inform^h^h^h^h^h^h funny interview on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_XZvMwcluEg

Funniest thing I've seen in... well, three days, but only because I saw The Room three days ago. Look at these:

I think that's a great example. A perfectly functional handgun, used by lots of police and armed forces worldwide, but search for "glock feels cheap" and you're sure to find a lot of people whining. Just skimming through a few results, I read "it feels like a toy gun". Well, maybe to the wielder. The guy on the other end of the gun might disagree (quite respectfully, I'd bet). That "toy gun feel", as you mentioned, brings quite a few advantages (and tradeoffs), but some people don't really dig into the particulars of a determined characteristic, they just quickly dismiss as inferior what doesn't fit their often obsolete assumption of how a quality product is expected to be.

I'll take you up on that offer. Why are people so concerned with how things "feel"? It's a phone. It doesn't "feel" like anything. You feel. The device is.

Which leads to the second part: it doesn't "feel plasticky", nor does it "feel cheap". It is plasticky and you think it's cheap because you have equated plastic to inferiority. Which isn't necessarily true. If you have a mobile device that tends to get dropped (or even flung) quite often, guess what sort of body will be better at absorbing shocks: plastic or aluminum.

Plastic can be a wise decision, and because of fashion or just plain wrong generalizations (plastic is - historically, even - often used as a cheaper alternative to better materials) it's apparently now acceptable to "feel" something as "cheap", and that's it. Review sites do it all the time. No further investigation needed; it "feels", therefore it is, in a bizarre twist of Descartes. Give me data, not worthless subjective assumptions. They feel stupid.

That makes sense. So... how long do you think until a Defy-like e-reader hits the shelves?

God, if only. I guess you hever had someone breathing over your neck and saying "hey, don't turn the page yet, I'm not finished".

Is it? Eink readers only draw power from the battery when the page is being flipped, IIRC. So, if you drop it, wouldn't it be like dropping an electrical device on the water while the power is turned off? Unless you turn it on again while it's still wet, there's no harm done. Drying it may take quite a while, though. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I've never actually soaked any electrical devices (I had an opportunity not long ago, but it didn't seem like a good idea at the time) and I have no idea about how the battery would fare. I guess it would depend on the device.

Having said that, there's the aspect of price. Books in English and Spanish tend to be cheaper, but try looking at prices for books in Portuguese or German. They're quite a bit more expensive (for comparison, I bought Moby Dick for $4, in English, while the Portuguese edition was on sale for $25 - that's at the same store), and you may find that a Kindle only amounts to about three or four paperbacks. It's absurd, but reality often is.

It's funny because Steam knows it's being run in Wine (it checks for Wine version, look in Help -> System Information). They don't know anything about your Linux system, though, and I don't know how they use that information.

While i throughly agree with you, the kernel dev in this case is talking to Linus. He didn't even write the book on Linux, he wrote the damn thing itself. He's sort of a living legend, and he's also the guy's boss. When you're that sort of authority figure, it's a bit harder to generate back and forth anger. Grudgeful compliance is the norm. That's why powerful people tend to be assholes - it works.

What did you expect from the folks who named their kids Bryton and Braydon?