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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.' "
I'll say Dvorak has some good points.
I don't believe that either PJ or O'Gara are paid shills and Dvorak does a good job of explaining why.
I also believe that O'Gara was merely being controversial.
Interesting conspiracy theory that the rabid zealotry may be astroturfing on the part of MSFT, etc... I'll point out that said zealotry has existed for much longer than MSFT has been concerned about FOSS as a threat. Case in point: Stallman.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
1) In any sufficiently large collection of people, there will be some who are unstable.
2) Linux will not wither because of the nuts -- there's too much value in Linux to business and as long as the value proposition is there, so will Linux.
3) John, and almost any journalist, is probably feeling a little threatened by the MOG story.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
I fail to see how this is new. I mean, there is a reason why someone thought it was necessary to write a Linux Advocacy HOWTO.
Of course, most of the people aren't developers or testers or document writers. Most of them seem to be people who don't contribute anything but lots of noise (I guess since they are incapable of contributing anything,they think they belong by threaten to harm anyone they perceive as a threat to the community')
And this isn't actually a new phenomenon specifically within the Linux community. Any community creates these kinds of people, whether it's OS/2, Amiga, Macintosh, Windows.
Still I'm not sure the community did anything wrong with O'Grady (having her removed from writing an inflammatory article on a Linux site seems reasonable), unless someone actually did threaten physical harm to her (for that person, she should report it to the police. We don't need those in the community in the first place).
Je ne parle pas francais.
This whole article is flamebait and doesn't provide any new insight. Dvorak's taking a fringe minority of the Linux community and presenting them as the larger group. There's nothing new about death threats. Small groups of angry people make death threats all the time over everything. It's always happened in society and will continue to happen.
What is new these days, and I think Dvorak and other "journalists" are having trouble grasping, is that the media is now being held accountable. Since the late 90's there's been a larger number of reporters who have had to resign in disgrace over fabricated stories. Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, and just this week, Newsweek is being raked over the coals. News execs are certainly afraid with some comments lashing out at "bloggers." They should be afraid because in their history, they've never been under more scrutiny by their audience. Journalists are more afraid these days, and I don't think that's a bad thing. For once, there's a checks and balances system for them.
Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership.
To which olden days do you refer, Mr. Dvorak? Perhaps you mean those olden days of yellow journalism. Sorry, but I prefer a more ethical style of online writing. Dan Gillmor says it best: Be honorable.
FreeSpeech.org
What Dvorak doesn't understand is that no one is issuing membership cards to a "Linux Community." And there is no tollgate on Linux Island, so the barrier to entry is pretty low.
In any event I've met quite a few Microsoft Loonies on the net, and the only thing interesting about them is they are not just insane, they are usually on the mild end of retarded.
Crackpots and ignorant teens are going to be around, there's nothing we can do about it. Here let me try: "Crackpots, get out!" Hmm, nothing happened. Maybe if we all shout it at once "Crackpots begone!" Hmm.
I'm sure O'Gara and other people that put themselves out in the limelight end up taking the good with the bad as far as reader comments. It goes with the business. But O'Gara's stuff was way off the reservation, and if that sort of thing didn't garner an uptick in threats and hatemail, what would?
But threats/hatemail are wrong, period. Sorry there's nothing those of us that aren't doing it can do about it. Welcome to a free society.
No, he's just doing what he's always done -he alludes to it right in his article. "In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership."
He writes an article for the sole purpose of upsetting a large group of people, because he knows it will generate tons of hits (that's the name of the game). In the old days, there was a word for this, Troll.
Then in a week or two he'll write another article about how offended he was by all the lunatics in whatever community he attacked previously.
Bonus points if he can incite someone to threaten him. If he gets 10,000 reasonble posts and one threat, he'll make the next article about that one threat, completely ignoring the rest.
Its a scam. And nobody does it better than Dvorak. He's not where he is because of the quality of his "journalism", its his ability to incite "hits".
Actually, I am.
I'm rather... sheepish... about this now. In fact, I wish I could delete a few posts. Why on earth would anyone listen to this guy if he wasn't the Dvorak I was thinking about?
Now I can stop reading his columns with even the shred of respect I had. Are the two related? It seems that Dvorak might be a rather rare name in the computer industry.
My little site.
Nah, no relation - but don't feel too bad, you're not the first person to mix those two up.
I still have a lot of respect for the guy - I read his Inside Track back in the dark days before Slashdot. That was the first place I heard about DVDs, flash memory, touch pads, and a whole host of other really cool inventions back when they were still sitting in a science lab somewhere.
As an industry insider the guy's pretty good. As a self-styled all-knowing technology pundit he's not so good. It's unfortunate that lately his columns have been veering towards the latter rather than the former.
As a member of Dvorak's other "nutty" community (Macs), I've noticed that, far from becoming the "OS for the criminally insane," the Linux community has learned from the SCO lawsuit that it can handle legal challenges with skill. I've been particularly impressed with the expertise shown on PJ's website. It's certainly better than anything I recall from the pen of Dvorak.
Perhaps Slashdot should develop a "Yawn Rating" for stories that don't deserve the attention they get. I'd rate Dvorak's at Four Yawns. It'd get five but for the fact that the LinuxWorld story itself is rather interesting.
--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien, Seattle
So the question here is, which side are the lunatics and fanatics on? The community rises up against mudslinging journalism, Sys-con editors resign when it becomes clear that their CEO is a sociopath, and these are the signs of a community imploding? Standing up for your principles is fanatical? And of all of the incidents that he could have chose to support the idea that the Linux community is full of nutcases, he chooses this one?
Dvorak's really stooped low on this one. The reason is clear: If more communities responded to sleazy journalistic behavior the way the Linux community has in this case, he'd be out of a job.
I think I'll email him now:
http://www.xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/_fastfood_d ir/unixdead_j_dvorak.html
/bin/pr -p -t" or any other such nonsense. So they had to build a performance-sapping shell around the system, code name: SLOW. So much for the UNIX world takeover. I figured that would be the last I heard of it.
The following is from the August '86 issue of the DEC Professional, pilfered from http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/etc/unix-is -dead.html
Unix is Dead! Wanna Fight??
John C. Dvorak
Summer is over and a plague of UNIX programmers is upon us. College kids, wet behind the ears; greenhorns, rubes. They pour out of various campuses talking about ROFF and ED and pipes and paths, and they look for work. They're impressed with themselves. After all, they've learned the language of a secret society. If they're from Berkeley, they've learned the secret language of a secret society.
They all program in C, and wherever they go they change the prompts on whatever computer they get their hands on so it resembles a UNIX machine. They creative ones go into whatever operating system they have to use and find a symbol or token table; then they change the commands to look like UNIX. The *more* creative ones customize the commands further so they are even more cryptic and weird than UNIX. Whether these people ever do any real work is a mystery.
"Yes, weeell, to list my files I merely type P; MJOI."
"P; MJOI?? What they heck does that mean?"
"It just so happens that if I put my coffee cup on the keyboard and rock it a certain way, that's what it will type; so, I do that to list my files!"
While it's good to see these kids doing something other than wasting quarters on endless games of Pole Position, I'm not so sure UNIX dabbling is much better for society.
I feel this way, not so much because UNIX is an old-fashioned OS that has a special place reserved in hell, but because its time has passed. UNIX is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body. It lives like a zombie on college computers and serves as a gateway to all sorts of weird networks.
UNIX haunts marketing men, too. I remember when Fortune Systems was getting started. That's about the time that a bumper crop of college-bred UNIX drones was dumped like mulch into the marketplace. They all were singing the praises of UNIX to the low end of the market.
So, I went to this strategy demonstration given by one of the vice presidents of Fortune Systems. These guys surely were ahead of their time, and it was a perfect example of having too much bad information. The Fortune 16:32 (or was it 32:16? In either case it looked like a biblical reference...) said unto us: "Come to me for thine microprocessor and spend, spend, spend!" it was the first camel of microcomputers. Like a horse designed by committee (aka camel), the Fortune was preceded by too much market research. A lot of this was skewed by the hordes of UNIX maniacs running through the valley waving the UNIX flag.
First of all, I was shown a slide that clearly showed the Motorola 68000 as the world's greatest microprocessor.
The 68000 beat everything. Personally, I can't remember what it was pitted against -- probably the 8080, the 6502 and a 4004. Whatever, this was the chip to use.
Then the company did some market research and, because writers, pundits, researchers, secretaries, publishers, and programmers all said that UNIX was the next hot operating system, they chose it for their own little machine.
The UNIX community yelled, "Yea!" But, they continued to use free university-provided time, and none of the UNIX hackers bought the little UNIX boxes. Well, that was okay, it was intended to be a business machine, anyway.
Ooops! Gee, it seems that the businessmen couldn't cope with UNIX and "$ ls
No
The ONLY substantiated evidence is that the cops were called when MOG was harassing PJ's mom.Be careful, that could be taken as a "threat" by one of those "journalists".
And that is the biggest problem with these "journalists".
They don't know the tech or the industry, so they attempt to get by on National Enquirer style sensationalism and rumour.
Read John's column again and you'll see him reporting the allegations of "death threats" as if they were established fact.
Pure sensationalism and sensationalism can be had from any "journalist". It is harder to maintain readership for a sensationalist rag than for a real tech magazine.
Turns out that his benchmark of choice read the system clock - did something then subtracted 1 from 2 and reported the time to do an operation.
He apparently didn't notice that his computer was loosing 6 hours of time a day.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
"Over-enthusiastic Linux activists" did not DDOS Sys-Con-- "DDOS goons" did. The "Distributed" in in Distributed Denial-of-service implies a collection of zombie PC's or otherwise compromised machines. These are not the tools of a Linux activist, but rather a DDOS enthusiast. Sure, there is some overlap between the two sets, but describing the people who can launch a DDOS on short notice as "Linux activists" rather than "DDOS goons" is like summarizing Bill Gates as "a college drop-out" or Michael Jordan as "a pretty good golfer". Both may be true, but do not reflect their dominant characteristics.
And it is not hard to "find the high ground" at all. Just look for the folks condemning O'Gara's behavior without sending death threats or starting DDOS attacks. There are lot more of us here on the high ground than down in the swamp.
Not so much a sig as a lack of one.
Yeah, but can you type "typewriter" in Dvorak using only the top row? Huh?