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Well that's a shame, had you been able to get past that and finish reading, you'd have seen that his point was people are spending too much time marketing crap products and not enough time building superior ones, which suggests lots of opportunities for the entrepreneurial sort that read Hacker News.

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But since he's basing his lack-of-superior-tools position on what is most likely correlation and not causation, there's a good chance that there isn't actually a lack of superior tools that necessitate these scammer products existing. Usually, this exact complaint amounts to an inability to properly interpret, at least on Linux, the output from free and top, and similar tools on other operating systems. If there is a correlation between memory usage and crashing (and not just "needing" to reboot because you're overreacting from spending too much time looking at your computer's stats and not enough time working), it most likely has to do with a buggy program with a memory leak.

Here's some stereotypical examples, for linux:

http://expert.mandriva.com/question/72043

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/browse_thr...

Next thing you know, these types will find an OS that doesn't efficiently use memory, and they'll wonder why they have so much of this fast memory that isn't being used to start program faster or something.

So while it may be that scam programs and most products are complete and utter crap, we only have ourselves to blame for buying them and supporting the industries that kick us around. You want a chair in 6 weeks, don't buy a chair from a place that takes longer. But you're facing an uphill battle because everyone else continues to support these shitty providers -- people complained about Windows for years and yet no one switched. The Tragedy of the Commons applies to economic and market choice, too.

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