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Gentoo Ricer Comparison
Dozix007 writes "The folks over at Funroll-Loops have created a funny comparison between the Ricer fad gripping the US, and Gentoo Linux. In a quote from the site 'Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats...'"
Thanks for your explanation.
You're right, I did not know the origin of the term before posting this, but many people in this thread have been thoughtful enough to point it out to me.
With all due respect, though, I'm not sure it's relevant. We can wax lyrical about the origins of racially insensitive language all we want. After all, nigger (not at all in the same class, I know) comes from a mispronunciation of the Spanish word "negro", which means black and was the socially acceptable way to refer to peoples of African descent for many generations in the US. Given this harmless etymology, does it make sense that it should be considered one of the most vulgar words in the English language?
You see, the thing about these kinds of terms is that it doesn't matter much where the term comes from; what matters is the way it's used. Let's turn this around for a moment. Have you ever been white in Asia? If so, you'll probably be familiar with the terms "gaijin", "waiguk", "laowai", "waiguoren", "guailoh", etc, depending on where you lived. Now (with the exception of perhaps guailoh), all of these terms just mean "foreigner" in their respective languages. Intrinsically, there is nothing wrong with them.
What becomes an issue is the way they are used, you see. They are frequently used with an underlying current of sarcastic bitterness that serves to sting you if you're trying your best not to stand out like a sore thumb in a country where the majority of people don't look like you.
So, the "rice burner" story is interesting, and I believe you, and I'm glad you've educated me on this point. But, pointedly, it's irrelevant. Because when the term ricer is used, or at least in the contexts I've heard it, it uses a conspicuously distinguishable aspect of steryotypical east asian culture (the consumption of rice) and associates it with silly and uninspired modding of cheap cars.
I mean, calling Jews penny-pinching comes from the historical mandate in Europe that prevented non-Christians from being merchants, forcing Jews to enter the banking and money-lending professions. Based in fact; nonetheless tremendously insulting and generally not correct in this day and age.
As a final aside, if the Japanese were adding rice wine into their fuel to increase methanol content, I would be very concerned about them. Methanol is extremely toxic to humans and "rice wine" sounds like something (sake?) that people might actually want to drink. Perhaps you meant "ethanol"? I'm not a modder so this is an honest question.
Abusive humor isn't necessarily a recent phenomenon, and it isn't necessarily an American phenomenon.
Ricer isn't necessarily racist, it is poking fun at people that add "fast looking" things to a car without making it faster. Often, they are people that think they are cool for having non-functional hood scoops or ugly kite rear spoilers on a front drive car. I see it done to American cars too.
**Gentoo is not necessarily good because of the product, but in large part because of the process. When you finish doing a stage whatever (especially 1) install, you end up learning an awful lot about Linux that someone that drops in a SuSe/RedHat/Fedora Core/whatever disk doesn't know. Most experienced Linux users will see that a user that understands whats going on under the hood will fare better than one who gives you a thousand yard stare when you mention the /etc/inittab file.**
did you read the site?
"--teach-me-unix
Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!"
oh well and don't get me started about the guy who insisted that "by not compiling ps/2 support into my mozilla i get a nice speed increase" and all other kind of crazy _MISinformation_ that made no sense at all if you knew even basic principles of how things work.
the quote compilation is fairly old though already(year or more maybe even too)...
(i'm not against gentoo, it's an awfully good system, but then again i'm not particularly against ricer cars, in general i like japan/euro cars handling better - just the idiots that think they're modding them for performance when they fit a bigger tailpipe and add hella lights. like reading ricer mags won't make you an expert on tuning motors watching shit fly on the screen won't make you an expert on gentoo's inner workings.. things just don't work that way)
it's not about how horrible the community in TOTAL is.. it's just poking fun at the members of it who want to speak out just for the sake of speaking out without knowing what they're spewing out...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If KDE was installed (or kdelibs), I would guess you either have it in your USE flags or some poorly-written package chose to install it anyway (hey, it happens). Check out the man page for qpkg. It allows you to see which package installed which files on your system. If it turns out to be a package you don't want, emerge unmerge it.
You've got a great point. For production use, Gentoo is significantly more work than some of the alternatives (as a result, for a server that doesn't need to be terribly up-to-date, I'd likely choose Debian, and for a desktop, probably something like Fedora or SuSE).
But if you run a server farm (or even just one machine), you can avoid a lot of these issues. If you run a server farm, you already have a test machine for installing updates on prior to rolling them out to the critical infrastructure (or you should), so with Gentoo, you can use that machine in the same capacity, and distribute binary packages. This is admittedly more work than debs or rpms, but not a whole lot more.
Overlooked in this entire thread, though (as far as I saw), is Gentoo Hardened. The only other major distro to offer anything comparable is Debian, and since nobody provides binary packages with propolice, etc (as far as I know), you'll end up using debsrc or srpms anyway, if you want this on a Debian or RedHat system (in other words, the flexibility of Gentoo is the reason that these hardened features are so easily available).
Finally, while Gentoo may not guarantee stability in the way Debian does, Debian also takes a long time to backport fixes. I remember waiting for quite a few days over the summer for a patched Debian PHP (after there was a RCE vuln published for it). Gentoo, by not backporting fixes, was able to have a fixed version out as soon as the PHP team released it (with a small delay for it to be committed, marked stable, and sent out to the mirrors). A recent study (by Secunia, if I remember right) showed Gentoo releasing by far the most security advisories of any major distro. This wasn't because we issue needless advisories, but because we do our best to track every one of the thousands of packages in Portage.
So there are real advantages in areas that you probably care about more than a ``0.1% speed boost''. I don't use Gentoo because of any hyped performance gain. But I do still prefer it over much of the alternatives.
Welcome to last week. Honestly, it is such an old (yet funny) site, that i dont see why this made the front page. Might as well put an All-Your-Base article on the front page.
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Paluminum.net
Nyah nyah... I did a Stage1 install :-P
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