[OT] Politics and Programming

[Judy Perry]

And this relates to US politics how exactly?

Judy

On Wed, 13 May 2009, Richmond Mathewson wrote:

> Just had a painful conversation with a Bank of Scotland
> representative to set up online banking; the fact that
> the service representative, every time I said I work
> with Mac and Linux told me "never mind, just use
> Internet Explorer" cost me an extra 15 minutes of
> international rates. Those 'silly' people have just lost
> another customer who will be transferring his (very
> small) savings to HSBC, who are 'cool' with all platforms,
> including RISC OS 5.
>
> 3-4 years ago I produced a modest program for pre-High School
> kids to bone up on their Bulgarian literature (this is what is
> called 'a niche market'). Discs that contained standalones for
> Debian-derivatives as well as Windows ones were returned
> with complaints (the feeling was that because they had
> Linux standalones on them, as well as Windows one this,
> somehow meant they wouldn't work on Windows).
>
> Both of the above are things that happened as a result of
> software decisions; one by the HBOS and one by myself.
>
> Now these may not be 'Political' in the sense of politics,
> but they are political insofar as they affect other people,
> marketing and so on.