I feel you. After looking into hosting various things on various servers because I was dissatisfied with Blogger, I eventually just took the coward's way out and went with Typepad*. It's worth every penny already. So much easier and y'know, I want it to be easy. I want someone to tell me what's wrong when something goes wrong.

Yes, absolutely.

I am coming to loathe linux with an unexpected passion.

Wow, you people are nuts. I don't want anything important on a computer I can get anywhere near. Particularly not on any physical media I could lose. I trust Google to keep track of things and keep them working way more than I trust me. And my experience of desktop software (using it, writing it, whatever) was always that it was always so much more trouble than it needed to be. Copy protection. Reinstalling. Wizards to tell me how to install things. Crashes. Hangs. Installation B hosing Installation A. Insanely complex feature sets that nonetheless did not do the particular thing I was looking for. Hours on hold to incompetent tech support organizations which would forward me from OS vendor to machine vendor to application vendor and back again. (Shudder).

And what the hell is not to like about MT being on mysql? Try doing "insert into mt_ipbanlist (ipbanlist_blog_id, ipbanlist_ip) select 1, comment_ip from mt_comment where comment_text like '%viagra%'" with your 90s desktop software -- unless the designer of that software thought to make a little dialog box that did that exact thing.

It goes without saying that you're right -- the new thing is bad at being the old thing. In this context, though, I may be one of those people whose ears aren't good enough to catch that warm humanist tube amp glow, and who always scratched my LPs...

(I guess I should clarify, since my comments are somewhat contradictory. Best case is having a clever, low-cost ISP that lets me administer things and do whatever I want through an SSH login -- which is why I use MT rather than Blogger. But worst case is having my data on a physical machine I could spill coffee on (and have to lug wherever I need the data) -- which is why my email is on Gmail, not Thunderbird or (gah) Outlook. A server-centric vendor controlling my data is an intermediate option between hosted code I can see and manipulate but don't have to back up myself (best), and having stuff installed on my desktop (worst).

[Also, name a product from the 90s whose ass Google Earth doesn't kick in any of the regards desktop software is supposed to be good at (performance, usability, reliability, feature set)... while still having the postmodern "purchase? what purchase? install? what install? registration? what registration? lost data? what lost data?" virtues....]

Absolutely agree with you about Unix - wouldn't want it in the house. I nevertheless chose a Unix-based host for Emerald City because it is much less likely to be subject to worm attacks than a Microsoft host.

I too have noticed the flakiness of most software out there, but I don't think it is anything to do with it being Internet/server based. I think it is much more to do with a) it being free, and b) the people who make the free stuff being mainly ubergeeks who don't like writing documentation or fixing bugs when they could be writing new features.

As to mySQL, I'm starting to get quite fond of phpMyAdmin. At least now I can a) see what is in the damn database and b) download a decent backup on a regular basis.

Cheryl, I’d agree except the expensive stuff sucks too. If anything, the more expensive it is (cough Oracle), the more obnoxious it is to install and configure. There’s more documentation, but you still have to read way too much of it to get the job done.

OK, I see what you mean. When you talk about server-based software what I think you are talking about is that great conspiracy whereby software companies make products that needs large numbers of highly trained IT staff to support so that the IT department will carry on buying it rather than the products that users can understand for themselves. That's been around for a long time.

What I was talking about is the new fashion for software products that are free but are built and maintained by groups of enthusiastic amateurs. I couldn't do without these folks, but boy are their products anoying at times.

Belatedly:

I think the real problem here is that software sucks.

Net-based and server-based and enterprise software sucks in all the ways various of y'all described; desktop software sucks in all the ways Ben described. There are very few pieces of software that don't have some huge drawback or other.

That said, having good tools can help a lot. No way would I want to administer a UNIX box, but OS X hides the UNIXy implementation details from me, while still letting me use the command line and UNIX tools if I want 'em. (But that's not to say OS X is perfect, of course; I have UNIX sysadmin friends who own Macs but find the OS extremely frustrating on a daily basis.)

It sounds to me like your issues with MySQL may have more to do with what you said about lack of tools and lack of knowledge of it than with not being easy to understand, back up, fix problems with, etc. When I want to back up my journal database, I go to my PowerBook's command line and type "jjournalbackup" and then enter my password and it backs up the database. (That's an alias for a one-line command that uses mysqldump to dump the contents of a database into an ASCII format that can be used to re-create the database if needed.) And I've gradually gotten used to MySQL, to the point where it feels easy to understand and to fix problems with. Anyway, my real point here is that there are decent database tools that can help you with this stuff -- they suck as much as any other software does, but not too much more.

On the other hand, I don't expect to be messing directly with the database in MT very much, because MT3.2 has a slick and pretty interface that handles most of what I need to do. Its interface for editing templates is still mighty clunky, but I'm hoping I won't have to do that too much. I'm not sure whether it has a backup feature or not; it certainly ought to, but I don't remember seeing one offhand.

Anyway. None of this is meant to be antagonistic; I totally sympathize with dislike of all sorts of things about the way software works, and I know everyone has different gut feelings about what feels right to them. (Like, I'm somewhere between you and Ben on one axis: I really like having all my data on a computer I physically control, but I also really like having my website on a computer that someone else is responsible for administering.) But I do think that sometimes improved tools can make the experience a lot more pleasant.

Mr. Groppi says: "The only redeeming virtue of MySQL is that it's free."

What are you querying with MySQL, anyway? Sorry, I don't use MT -- the only times I've ever had to use SQL, I was querying public databases of tens of millions of objects, with hundreds of entries per object. And then they provided a happy FAQ, with examples of the most useful queries. And even then, if I didn't get it just right, it barfed error messages all over me.

I'm not sure I understand the directory listing issue -- I mean, that's what my entire life looks like. Is it just that it's not all icon-ified?

(Mr. Groppi also says, you were a hell of a lot nicer about your laundry than he would have been. He would have called the cops.)

Jackie: Yeah, it’s largely the icons. (Also the searching.) I’m a very visual person and I’m also not particularly neat. If I can’t see the mess, well . . .

And don’t think I didn’t think about calling the cops. Silly me, I thought maybe if we all just behaved like adults we could put the whole episode behind us.

Jed: I knew someone would eventually say “yes, but if you learned to use MySQL . . .” One word: “discoverable.” No more looking up cryptic and dangerous commands in on-line manuals, thank you very much. I taught myself Emacs; that was enough for me.