practical considerations

a note on the importance of being practical in our approach to technology:

Even if it is tempting to stay in the abstract domain on the subject of technology or new medias, it is possibly the worst error possible. Staying in the abstract ensure that the illusion that 'all is possible through technology' survives uncriticized while a greater commercialisation and closure of information continues. In the art theory domain, technology is often treated as the screen where the writers' phantasms utopian or dystopian are projected.

Costs are reduced but for Linux and all programs, this saving has to be reinvested in time to learn the OS and software.

The unix system often has cryptic commands that are hard to master

The new macosx is a unix based OS and shows promise but is very recent and software made to compile and run on linux on pc hardware might not compile or execute properly.

how to permit artists and coders to survive if everything is given for free?

linux will install on a 486 with 16mb of ram but it will run as a 486 with 16mb of ram :-(. The demands on hardware expenses (the dreaded upgrade cycle) on the user are high as in every technological field

A lot of software is in development and thus unstable, software often calls on other libraries or parts of the OS to be installed in order to run.