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Dvorak on the LinuxWorld Fracas
An anonymous reader writes "John C. Dvorak has entered the fray, offering his opinion on the O'Gara LinuxWorld flap. From the article: '...the Linux community is slowly evolving into a state of mob rule, with the cheerleaders being paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga.' "
If you ask me, Dvorak is the paranoid crackpot leftover from the waning days of the Amiga. Every community has its lunatics, just watch some Jerry Springer, your local city hall meetings or sit on the city sidewalk on a Friday night. For the Linux or Amiga community to have them is a sign of balance. Its the media that ends up giving them the light that stereotypes the whole community.
What the Linux community needs right now is a good leader. Someone to make everyone realize that the community is the one that is in charge of the direction of things and help them to focus their efforts.
Okay, yeah, I think I see your point here, John:
We should be more understanding towards useless "journalism" and media flamebaiting, because without those practices you might actually have to come up with something insightful or worthwhile every week to fill out your column and earn page hits. Hey, I can see where you're coming from -- that'd take legwork, insight and generally staying on top of the industry. I imagine that's hard work, and trust me: I'm right there with you on the "I don't like hard work" page.
BTW, congrats on getting your flamebait article on the front page of Slashdot. It's good to know that *some* "journalists" are still able to use (a) and (b) successfully to drum up (c). It's gotta be a good feeling to walk into your boss's office at review time and wave around yet another spike in ad impressions courtesy of the Slashdot crowd -- I hope you're appreciative enough to include Zonk on your Christmas card list!
Anyhow, hope preparing your standard self-righteous indignation column for when (d) inevitably rolls around is going well. Aw, who am I kidding, I know you're an old pro -- I'm sure you were already writing that one when you handed in this last article to your editor.
A little trolling, and two columns done and in the bank. Must be a nice life.
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...than a toadying suck-up to vendors.
DaGoodBoy
My God! It's full of Voids!
Here's the deal John:
1. There were many reasonable people offended by O'Gara and her attempts to intimidate Jones. And that's what you have to call it, because if you're trying to find out if someone's a stooge for IBM (Dvorak suggests this is all O'Gara was trying to do), you're not making your case by publishing the address of their mother.
2. Calling for a journalist to be disciplined, up and including being fired, for a clearly inaccurate and evil piece of journalism is not, in any way, "nutty" or indicative of "mob rule". To lump those who have done so with those on the fringes making death threats is to lump all christians with anti-abortionist murderers of doctors, or all muslims concerned about the US presence in the Middle East with Osama Bin Laden.
It's really that simple. Something did something clearly wrong to many of us, so many of us publicly expressed our disappointment. Some did so angrily, some didn't.
It's the height of paranoid fanaticism (and yes, I use the word paranoid quite justifiably):
to lump together a diverse group of people with differing opinions and charge them with some conspiracy to attack you.That's assuming you're not trolling for webpage hits. I assume the editors were by posting this article.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So Dvorak has seen another chance to jump in the lime light and play the under-dog
and stir up some controversy by calling all of us who called for O'gara to be fired "lunatics" (not just those who issued death threats , who are quite likely a bit mad)
Don't buy into this , he is just trying to kick up his readership .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Dvorak is on crack if he thinks that there are any businesses that are going to give a shit about the MoG/PJ flap. Businesses adopting Linux and other FOSS products are looking to reduce TCO and also trying to make sure that they don't end up being 0wnz0r3d by Microsoft into perpetuity by having their corporate data locked into proprietary file formats that change from release to release and by being locked into licensing schemes that become ever more onerous and increasingly expensive as time goes on. The antics of the various players in the MoG/PJ flap are going to have about as much impact on the adoption of Linux and FOSS as Steve Ballmer's video, the one where he jumped up and down like a chimp, had on the adoption of Windows XP.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Well, he lives by his own words doesn't he? He drums up an article or two on controversial subjects, gets them posted on Slashdot and his column gets more hits than the rest of the articles combined (stages scenario, I don't know the exact figures off course).
The problem is that the Slashdot editors also seem to love the controversy a Dvorak article is sure to bring in, having someone to bash is just good for business I guess.
that on the one hand he says that the linux community needs to grow up and denounce and eject extremists and fanatics, and on the other hand, criticises them for doing just that with OGara
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I also believe that O'Gara was merely being controversial.
Publishing someones phone number and address, and even their mother's address, goes way beyond being controversial. It's a privacy violation.
I think that that point was lost on Dvorak. Whether or not O'Gara is a paid shill or not is beside the point- what she did was not, and should not be considered by Sys-Con, to be appropriate.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
From the article:
Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership. But in today's world of the so easily offended, she's apparently let go instead, and things calm down as the hissy fit subsides.
This is the key, right here. It's actually slightly shocking that he let himself shine through so clearly in this paragraph. Dvorak is actually just upset because, y'know, that's his schtick. Generating readership by making inflammatory and offensive articles? That's pure Dvorak. It strikes fear into his black little heart to see someone get fired for doing exactly what he does, so he lashes out at it.
Who needs to be right when you can be controversial?
Random and weird software I've written.
And there's only one thing wrong with that logic.
It's complete bollocks.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
He got one thing right...
First let's get a few things straight. All of O'Gara's assertions are nutty.
Some of them go way beyond nutty. Dvorak acknowledges that O'Gara tracked down and photographed PJ's home and PJ's mother's home and posted pics in her column
But rather than point out the problem with this type of "journalism", he praises it.
Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership. But in today's world of the so easily offended, she's apparently let go instead, and things calm down as the hissy fit subsides.
Right, thank god we have PC Magazine to sustain the flame of responsible journalism. What an asshole.
In recent years, he has become a professional internet Troll. He knows that he can get a lot of page views by saying things to inflame passionate groups (Mac users, OpenSource advocated, etc.) and he does so at every opportunity.
My advice for you is the same as with any other Troll: Do Not Feed.
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Why do people confuse articles with editorials? He's not reporting news, he's voicing his opinion.
Windows over Linux == trolling.
Linux over Windows == advocacy.
Right?
We need a leader to tell everyone we don't need a leader?
No, we don't. Why bother putting the weight of a world-wide movement onto one individual, when the thing is doing fine on its own?
I'm reminded of a story from the Book of Judges (in the Bible). Israel had been more-or-less confined to the hill country by the Philistines because they kept failing to listen to their judges, who were sort of like Linus, ESR, RMS, et al. It was a meritocracy of sorts. Israel clamored for a king, though, so they could be like the other nations. Through Samuel, they were told the king would take away their freedoms and tax them for his own purposes, but they insisted. They ended up with King Saul, a megalomaniac of, er, biblical proportions.
sigs, as if you care.
That is the way these "journalists" handle it.
Since we cannot see the actual email, he is free to describe it in any way he desires.
Given that he has already characterized the Linux community as "criminally insane" and "lunatics", you can be sure that he will be portraying the emails as from such individuals.
BUT you will also NOT see a SINGLE case of any email being forwarded to the cops/FBI for legal action regarding communicating a threat.
Not
a
single
one
.
Meanwhile, if it were you or I who received an emailed death threat, we would have the appropriate message and headers carried to the local authorities for investigation and possible arrest.
No arrests will be made.
No criminal cases will be opened.
No email will be sent to the authorities.
But much will be said in his articles about the tone of the threats he received for his unbiased and fact-filled article about Linux extremists.
Today is the 16th of May, 2005 and it is 11:25am Pacific time.
That is my prediction.
I'm posting anonymously for reasons that'll become blindingly obvious in about three sentences.
My employer asked me to do this. We are involved with a particular industry that is rampant with Old Fogeyism. As I tend to rant anyhow, I posted a rant on a highly visible mailing list. My boss came to me and, to my horror, prodded me to keep flaming away. Flaming customers, mind you. Not usually a good business strategy...
I had my reservations, as an old-time Troll. I couldn't see the benefit. But my boss has an understanding of business that I lack, and I've learned to trust him. So I did it. I was my usual asshole self. I put fifteen years' experience in net.flaming into a post that was factually sound and very logical, but with my inner asshole coming out like Fran Drescher's voice in a granite cathedral. (Not that you have to dig deep to find the inner asshole where I'm concerned, mind you). It was so offensive, that only the people who already agreed with me already could agree with what I said, no matter how sound my logic was.
The next day, the boss told me: Now apologize to everyone.
Since then, I can actually see the repercussions. Many of them are just ripples from other things happening off in the distance, but the effect is clear: It was a kick in the ass to an industry that needed it, and suddenly people are wondering why that asshole on the mailing list was so damned mad. They're digging deeper.
You see this with SCO. Whenever SCO says something stupid and outlandish, the Free Software community will retaliate with venom, but others will also dig deeper to see: Do they have a point, and if so, how can we prevent this? Groklaw has become useful for this very reason -- for this purpose of getting the facts straight. Linus changed how he maintained the kernel. A lot of due diligence is being done on GNU/Linux that might never have been done anyway.
The whole O'Gara situation is causing people to look and think critically about the relationship between publishers, editors and content who haven't looked at such things before.
I was surprised to see the results of my little public flamewar. I wasn't surprised that people were pissed off; I was surprised that there was a genuine positive and creative response to it. My boss was fucking brilliant.
It shows that provocative writing does have a point from time to time. It is the little ego of the industry, goading people out of their complacency. Thank God this shit is not the only motivation we have, but it does have that use.
I thought the quote in the leader to this article was offensive, but it got me RTFA, and when I RTFA, I have to admit I laughed. I am laughing at myself, a true blue anti-MS zealot, when he says about the Linux community "Too nutty even for the Mac community? We welcome you!" It hits close to home, but he's right. I -am- too nutty for the Mac community.
So I think it's a bit more useful than just a scam to draw enough eyes that advertisers are happy; columnist journalism can occasionally benefit the industry.
Although most of the time, we're just trolling assholes.
I can't say much about Slashdot. However, newsgroups have been around much longer; and this same disease of bitching about how the newbies are clueless goes back to the very beginnings of the Internet.
The use of moderation only works when the moderators themselves are actually knowlegable and civil enough to understand who is ranting, who is BSing, and what the relevant issues really are.
That's why I still feel that only you can really moderate the stuff you read. Slashdot's moderation scheme is a nice try. But ultimately, it only works after the fact --if it works at all. Participation in a discussion is the only way to smoke out who is full of themselves, and who knows his/her stuff.
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