Slashdot Mirror
Andover News, the sequel: A Well Braziered Bryar
About a week ago I posted a rebuttal to a column by Jack Bryar as published in Andover News to this forum." Click below for the full text from knarf-it's not pretty what happened - and check out the follow-up from Jack Bryar, as a cautionary mea culpa.
[From knarf]
Unfortunately, the original header I included with the message was edited out. In this header I stated that the author of the column had already received a copy of the message. A couple of minutes later someone suggested that people mail my rebuttal to Jack Bryar.
Well, they did, it now seems. And they did many more things. Like send insulting messages, flood his mailbox with repeating messages, and other kindergarten-tricks.
In his current column, Jack Bryar apologizes for the errors he made when writing that column. He also points out the difference between the readers of /. and Linux Today. I originally learned about Jack's first column from Linux Today, as did many others. Like me, some of them took up the issue with the author by correcting his errors and explaining the intricacies of the free software model(s).
Then my article arrived on /.
Hell broke loose. I quote Jack Bryar's current column:
After the "/." posting I got letters that began "hey sh**head go f*** yourself with the money you?re taking from Microsoft! What drugs are you on?" (Way too much coffee, actually). One writer, running out of invective finally sputtered that I was another Jesse Berst! (Somebody should be deeply insulted). After reading these things for a while I became convinced that I could make a fortune distributing a good Linux-compatible spell checker.
Folks, ranting and yelling is not taken as a proof of intelligence by most people. This is supposed to be a forum for "nerds", people with above-average intelligence. Let's make sure we do not spoil the reputation of the free software community by behaving like we just graduated from kindergarten then...
And if in doubt, just query your copy of the Jargon file. Look up the description of `Hacker Speech Style' and draw your own conclusions.
Frank de Lange
And what, pray tell, was actually gained by that tragic lack of discipline and style? Oh, yeah, you showed him! I'll bet he'll be appropriately meek and approving of Linux all the rest of his days. (Oh, sorry, GNU/Linux. Don't hit.)
Thugs.
What will actually happen when the children pull out their little code pop-guns and fire away at grownups is that everyone will see that they are children. The guy who made a mistake will act like a real person and own up to it, and the wee tykes launching smurf attacks will rant and attempt to defend their actions. And all the rest of the grownups will make a quick connection: Linux = freaks. Thanks awfully. I like Linux, and admire what the community is trying to do. But I truly hope this doesn't mean I have to be on your side. The enemy of my enemy may still be a childish prick.
If you're going to attack using computers over something like this, at least have the decency to do it well. Write your own tools. Check your spelling. The zealots here weren't just out of line, they were tacky and graceless. C'mon, forging only *part* of your email and personal info on a mailbomb attack? Pay attention! How tough would it have been to just plug in a random loop through the most popular firstnames over at babynames.com? If a group I'm a member of has to be labelled as a bunch of rude bastards, I'd prefer that we were at least rude bastards with style. You can't defend your OS with a display of poor computing skills.
I'm not complaining about the enthusiasm. The choice to break the law or act irresponsibly is between you and whatever God will have you. But at least show enough pride to make it worth it.
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
In every society or community, there are always those that seem to be unable to express themselves without the use of childish behaviour, invective, or just out and out disrespect for others.
There are also those who defend this behaviour under the auspices of free speech, and that it is wrong to arbitrarily silence them, and they're right.
The solution, as I see it, is not to restrict or remove those opinions, but to demonstrate (by our example) that these members of our society are immature (like children), and just like children everywhere, most will grow out of it with time.
We do this by presenting our own views in a mature, objective manner. We do this by demonstrating that these opinions are the minority opinions, regardless of how many times they are repeated. In cases like the one described here, we should make a point to contact the author / poster in question, letting them know by our example that there *are* adults in this community, whether or not we agree with the posted position.
The simple fact of the matter is that you get back what you give. If you flame, you will be flamed in return. By expressing ourselves in a vitriolic and immature manner, we are essentially saying to those we are trying to reach that we aren't worth listening to, and any position we have, however valid, will consequently be ignored.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
I've sent a lot of mail to journalists who have written bad articles, and this guy is the first one who has come back with a good response. Face it - he may not have his technical facts straight, but he handled the fallout with a lot more class than the slashdot community did.
Arrgh, I meant Linux - not Linux. Eeek.
-- Post No Gravy
> When the wingnuts start to show up at your party, it's tempting to call it a night.
I think this is a fallacy. Why should I feel at all associated with every single person thats tried linux for a while. Why should we consider stupid and obnoxious people part of our community? Why should a single act that any moron with a browser can perform (i.e. reading slashdot) define them as part of a community we like?
I dont consider people who act like stupid and clueless hangers on anything other than party crashers.
Oh, for Glub's sake!
... not ... type ... X!
I meant LINUS, not LINUX.
Must
-- Post No Gravy
As a professional Web journalist myself, I have reviewed the Bryar Incident with some interest. It's good to see that it has caused some reflection here.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Perhaps persons should be rated in various categories, [...]
I think the idea takes a nosedive here... Any time people start getting put into arbitrary categories ('geek', 'suit', 'PHB') no matter how accurate they may be, bad things happen. It's discrimination.
I do think it's very inturiging to think of having posters pre-screened by lots of others, but there would be some big assumptions:
One would be that the masses are correct (and based on windows usage, they're not).
Another would be that what other people consider good, i do. I'm happy to say i don't consider this true of myself now; I enjoy evolving my own taste in things. (perhaps a way around it would be to have adjectives like slashdot's and have them assigned rather than just numbers. A user could then say they wanted 'funny' rather than 'insightful' posts or whatever (obviously it would take lots more words and a complicated system that understood their interrelation).
It would definitely have to be optional.
The authors of the Open Source software you speak of would probably have to disagree with you. If they didn't care about the "reputation" of the software they were producing, why would we even have a need for Eric Raymond and others like him who spend their lives promoting open source. By your mentality we, the authors, would be the only ones using our software. But this is not the case. Why would anyone want to run our software if they thought by doing so they would be labeled as a rabid fundamentalist?
int69h
League for the Eradication of Rabid Linux Fundies
Open Source + Sensibility = Open Sense
How about a web site where one email can be formed and culled from the cream of all arguments and distilled down to what a majority would like to send?
Have a registration area where people of Open Sensibility can gather and suggest bullet items that can come to a vote with no anonymous ones. Have a core group that have to vote before any email can leave from the announcement area. That one email could serve as the voice of an entire group.
All someone needs to do is register this domain and start writing the backend process to form topic, references areas, bullet items collection, voting systems (like moderators here on /.) and you could have a very loose framework for a group voice that is unified.
It would seem that a reasoned and sense filled email would lend more cred and be easier to handle than 4000 emails bombs.
Also, an area where headers and example flame could be placed for public view could be used to regulate from within and deny access to membership within the opensense community.
Someone has probably thought of this before but I just wanted to throw it out and see who is interested in such a concept.
Feel free to poke at the flaws in this idea
Still... its just a thought... :)
"You cannot uncook Mushoo pork once is has been cooked" -- wiseman
http://fudge.org
I mean, its classic propaganda.
... so how do we know he's not just smearing the OSS community?
There's enough *truth* in what he's saying to warrant our belief, but how are we to know that it was nearly as bad as he's saying?
I mean, it's a pretty good argument against the Linux community, isn't it
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I love this idea. Who of all people has shown more restraint, more dispassion, more level-headedness [when it comes to Linux] than Linus himself? I remember reading his response to the whole KDE/Gnome issue, and was astounded by how reasonable and impartial he was. And then, I realized, I myself had picked up a few of the strong feelings aired out in /. discussions.
Needless to say, it was a very enlightening moment.
Linus is not a zealot, but a true engineer. I, for one, can only hope to someday become as down-to-earth dispassionate as he has shown all along.
iSKUNK!
Posted by d106ene5:
We live in a big bad society. If you can't deal with flamers, lamers, assholes, and mouthpieces, you better start sucking on a revolver. It only gets tougher from her on in.
Posted by d106ene5:
/dev/null before he ever sees it.
I love all of this talk about "what needs to be done" about free speech.
If you want to make yourself look like an ass and send this guy a nasty note over linux of all things, as long as you don't break the law go for it. It's a free country.
If you want to send him a reasoned response, thats great too. By time you're done writing it, he'll have a procmail filter set up and you'll be in
The open source movement is turning into a classic elitist/intellectual movement - popular at first, then a small group supresses the freedoms of most everyone else in order to serve their aims. See Russia, 1917, or, Germany, 1933.
1. The linux community is no longer a single, tightly knit group. It's made up of hackers, of kiddies, and increasingly, of corporate types. But that's what we wanted, right? Six years ago we dreamed of linux becoming mainstream. So now that we got what we wanted, what are you complaining about?
2. Since the linux community is no longer made up of only hackers, you can't expect it to behave in the way you would expect a hacker to behave. Is this a surprise? Are you surprised that the slashdot audience is not composed entirely of hackers?
3. The media has never accepted or rejected something based on the ramblings of the vocal minority. To think that we need to keep the flame kiddies quiet to win "mainstream media support" is nonsense. They'll come over to linux on linux's merits and nothing else. Have the ramblings of the os2 or mac crowd diminished the standing of ibm or apple as corporations? No. So what makes you thing that the media will dismiss linux because of some flamefest by immature kiddies?
I think you should have a little more faith in the movement, folks. It'll win, and it'll win regardless of what the kiddies say. It'll win because it's the next paradigm... nothing, not even the kiddies' flames, will be able to stop it. I'm not condoning the flames, I'm merely pointing out that they do no great damage, except maybe to the flamer's good standing.
Honestly, you should advocate it, but do so intelligently. I entered a workplace where the fellow geeks thought Linux was just a bunch of rabid k-rad speaking idiots, spouting filthy language like Mr. Bryar describes and how Bill Gates is Satan himself molesting then murdering goats during the night (maybe that's an exageration...).
Anyway, after talking intelligently, with mostly proper English describing what Linux does well (or doesn't do so well), many now have a healthy respect for it, even if they may never actually use it. Speaking well (and typing well, re-read and spell check what you write!) goes a long way to getting a point across. Inserting profanity all over the place only makes you look like an uneducated bafoon. People will most likely not even read anything else you have to say.
Years ago, as USENET was threatening to dissolve in chaos for the first time, an old ARPAnaut told me that what was happening was the "Four-Sigma Effect." It's a statistical fact, he said, that as a population grows, it becomes more and more likely to contain members more than four standard deviations (i.e. "sigma") from the mean. And it is these individuals (the technical term was "kooks") who yell the loudest, longest, and most frequently, leading to the mistaken impression that the whole population has taken a turn for the worse.
Of course, the net provides a wonderful way for kooky folks to find each other (to either join forces or do battle), so an amplification phenomenon occurs, enhancing the basic four-sigma effect.
My point is that this is just a normal aspect of Linux's and Slashdot's popularity. There are now millions and millions of folks on the Linux bandwagon, so it should be of no surprise that a few riders enjoy throwing rocks. The rest of us have to be careful not to let them speak for us, and maybe encourage them to ride elsewhere.
Three points (not entirely on-topic) in response:
1) I honestly don't mean to advocate people being abusive with each other. We should be respectful to each other -- period. But not because it'll make people like Linux.
2) If the abusive email came from Linus, ESR, and RHS then it perhaps would reflect on the OS community.
It didn't however and it won't.
3) Bill Gates doesn't have a stellar reputation but Microsoft is widely accepted by the mainstream.
When the wingnuts start to show up at your party, it's tempting to call it a night. It's getting so I don't really talk about Linux at all with most people, except in the most hedged tones ("oh, I run a few operating systems - NT, Linux, BSD - they all do some things well," blah blah) for fear of being associated with rabid fanatics.
Most of you probably agree with me, that the lunatics are just sadly life-deficient hangers-on who just stumbled across Linux as jihad-material. I have despaired of them ever calming down, however - they are here to stay, and for the sake of my reputation as someone who is NOT a wingnut, it forces me to disassociate.
The fact that almost no one likes Microsoft as enthusiastically as they like Linux is almost a blessing for Microsoft, because their advocates largely end up coming across as reasoned, equitable, and balanced.
Oy.
...that he said that could make a fortune by selling a Linux-compatible spell checker. Wait a sec? Sell a spell-checker in the land of free software? Naaaaa......
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
my god
/. think that it is a good thing to attack their enemies thru email.
that's the last time he'll write something bad about the open source community
a small minority of people who regularly read
not a good idea, especially if you're looking for acceptance by the mass media. if corporations get the impression that the linux crew is a bunch of little kids ready to email bomb, smurf, crack, and generally attack all that oppose, (some have already made this assumption) they're never going to seriously consider using it.
of course the people that are doing these things might not want the software to be publically accepted. they like being different and "more advanced" by running a minority o/s. running papasmurf doesnt make you more advanced -- it makes you a script kiddie.
if you're gonna flame someone, at least have the decency to include some arguement in your flame instead of "fuck"ing the hell out of them.
One of the major bogus sides of the expansion of Linux is that it's not really a community anymore. We've gone from a small town feeling to a large city, complete with all the nuts, gomers and unsupervised 10 year-olds that come with it.
Personally, I think something needs to be done to curb this sort of ridiculous behaviour before any sense of community is lost and we start to really alienate the people that we're trying to attract -- businesses, media and developers.
The problem is, what can be done? Well, I believe it's time to start shutting out the troublemakers. Everyone can still have free speech, but we're not obligated to listen to them or provide them with a forum or encouragement. As much as I'd hate to say it, /. is going to have to be the first place to change (it's the most popular Linux-related website, and therefore attracts the most goons; you don't see this sort of thing at Linux Today).
Does this mean more moderation? Probably; maybe even banning the IPs of some of the worse offenders, or some other form of punishment. We need to tell the trolls and the flamers that we don't want them because they're effectively ruining it for everyone.
In an ideal world, everyone would be mature, rational and adhere to the Advocacy FAQ. But its not going to happen. I guess my main concern is that in a year I will switch jobs and suggest Linux to my boss, who will answer back, "No, we don't want to get involved with those kind of people."
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It always disappoints me when i hear of unix users trading their rationality for religious fervor.
and i'm not saying that religious fervor will hurt the "linux movement" like many others; i don't really care much about the linux movement. i just think that as computer scientists, technicians, hobbyists, etc etc you have to remember that a particular piece of software or hardware is just a tool. once you lose your objectivity and become emotionally attached, you will become limited in your computing endeavors. i don't want to think of the hours and money that i have lost just because "i _had_ to do task X on operating system Y with Z software".
i also have a theory that the flamers and psychos on slashdot are experiencing serious deficiencies in terms of their social lives. if mail bombing unsuspecting journalists on your free time isn't a hint that you need to get out more, i don't know what is. god help us.
keep your cool and keep it impersonal - you will have everything to gain.
cheers,
mani
Flaming, email-bombing, and other tactics may not be civilized, but they are the actions of people who care about GNU/Linux and its future. It may not be "mature" to attack a *nix detractor. It was also not "mature" to dump tea into the Boston harbor. nothing has ever been accomplished by pseduo-civilized discussion over crumpets.
Script kiddies, Linux wingnuts, do your thing. Nothing you could do would be more "offensive" than a$$-cramming a browser into Windows 98 and force-feeding it to the general public...
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
I don't want my boss to think I like Linux because I'm just another "Anything But Microsoft" whiner. That's the increasing impression among the uninitiated, however, because of some of these flamers and wannabes.
PS: I just got a Linux box into our NT-only shop. Off topic, but I'm so happy that I won't be getting 3AM pages to restart IIS anymore that I just had to tell somebody....
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Wondered what would happen if 15 year old lamer gets shown that the veil of anonymity on the net is wafer thin?
http://www.planetcrap.com/929372550/
It's an interesting thread. And Open Source related to boot. Go nuts.
You know, there's a reason nobody's suggested a WWRMSD bracelet. The sooner he figures that out, the sooner he's likely to garner support for the Hurd.
Just a thought. Not that I don't hold his programming ability and ethics in the highest possible regard.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Why try to hide what the linux/OS community really is? So there are some angry puppies out there.
There are angry puppies everywhere. Who will we
kid pretending to be saints?
If industry/mainstream doesn't accept us on our technical merit, they will remain that far behind us.
moderation has driven off alotta smart people.
and it evidently hasnt gotten rid of alot of
emotionally disturbed folks.
whatever.
I don't understand why every time it is suggested
that perhaps the cause of Linux is better served
by a bit of restraint and maturity someone feels
the need to haul out "freedom of speech" as a
defense for acting like an eight-year old.
Yes, you have the right to say whatever you
like... and we have the right to ask you to
stop behaving like a jerk and embarrasing the
rest of us.
1) I honestly don't mean to advocate people being abusive with each other. We should be respectful to each other -- period. But not because it'll make people like Linux. Civility seems to be lacking from our society these days. We could do with a good deal more of it.
However, being civil doesn't have anything to do with "making" people like Linux. The way to do that is to present people with facts. There is a good chance those facts will bring them around. If not, then at least they've made an informed decission. But at the same time, it doesn't matter how many facts you have if you deliver your argument while beating the person over the head with a club. The finer points will be missed. All the person will think of is "Hey... this jerk is hitting me over the head". The facts will be lost on them. That is why one should refrain from base harrassment to "support" Linux.
2) If the abusive email came from Linus, ESR, and RHS then it perhaps would reflect on the OS community.
It didn't however and it won't.
You're sitting on a park bench when up walks a Lucranian tourist (fake nationality... I hope). The Lucranian begins to whizz on the bench you're currently occupying and when you voice protest, he spits at you. That wasn't the Lucranian President or any other kind of official. But you now have a rather negative view of Lucranians.
Linus, ESR, and RMS do not a community make. The OSS community consists of them... other coders... advocates... users... everyone who wants to identify themselves with OSS. When one of us behaves is a certain manner (especially negatively) it reflects on our community.
3) Bill Gates doesn't have a stellar reputation but Microsoft is widely accepted by the mainstream.
Bill Gates doesn't have a good reputation? You've been hanging out in the wrong circles. Bill has donated some rather large chunks of cash towards charrity. MS has also put a nice chunk of funding towards research progects that don't nessecarily fall under the MS umbrella. Bill Gates is seen amoung buisness circles as a pretty astounding success. Microsoft is a business role model.
Sure, techheads generally don't like Bill and MS. But then... Bill doesn't have to be liked to get business.
He's got a whole slew of folks who are used to being professionally pleasant. They're hand picked and trained to listen to business and provide them with solutions.... and even more importantly, a warm fuzzy feeling of security in a cold, alien world of technology. Enter... the Marketing department.
OSS has their community. We have just as many knowlegable people as they do. We have a pretty darned good base of code, technology, and future developments. But that's it. We depend on each other. If an unanointed walks amoung us and we dive on him with piranha-like frenzy... his buds aren't likely to follow. Nobody jumps into hostile waters without good reason.
And before we get too carried away, everyone has their pack of rabid jackels. It's just that, unlike us, the MS house has that team of Marketeers with their flashy comforting pamphlets and their soothing promises "...well, WE won't alienate you like those other guys will."
The author, upon being on the receiving end of pure harrassment suddenly went "Oh! I get it! I wrote an article full of errors!" Devine intervention via email. Suddenly the truth sprung from nothingness... he then went out to preach the Goodness that is OSS.
Not for a second did the author say to himself "man... I say something these jerks don't want to hear and they go ballistic. Their cause must be on shaky ground if they behave this desperately."
It's not a matter of hiding who we are. OSS is not just about "it's not Microsoft". But that seems to be the message getting out there. We should be avoiding that.
If it takes breaking ourselves of an apparently unhealthy obsession... so be it.
Posted by d106ene5:
What makes you think everyone who has an opinion to express is part of your "community"? Who the hell is "the community"? What a ridiculous crock.
There is no community. Speak for yourself.
Maybe *he'll* buy one!
Posted by d106ene5:
Yes, freedom of speech means a few rotten apples.
I prefer that to having some "community" tell me what I can or cannot write or say.
When you write a stupid flame mail, you represent yourself. No one else. No "community".
Maybe Slashdot should form a soviet, er, committee for approved opinions regarding linux.
OS/2 went through this idiocy years ago and we (all computer users) are still paying for it. Jerry Pournelle recently wrote (after being royally flamed):
"IBM's executives made it difficult, and Team OS/2 often made it unpleasant to write about OS/2; and eventually almost no one did."
Check out the discussion OS WARS at: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail52.html
If you see an article full of inaccuracies about Linux on linuxtoday or /., you know that the guy's going to get flamed, right?
So, send him an e-mail that starts by saying :
"I apologize on behalf of the Linux community for the idiots who are flaming you right now. Hopefully they will someday mature.
However, there *were* several errors, however unintentional, in your article. They were..."
At the very least, you'll show the writer not everybody in the Linux community thinks "pine" is for feeding flames.
But the problem is that the majority of Linux users seem to be rabidly anti-Microsoft. Even in the cases where a piece of Microsoft software is technically superior to a piece of Free Software, they refuse to accept it, blithely insisting that anything Microsoft must be utterly bad and full of bugs. That doesn't come across as sounding like a person who is very intelligent. Heck, lots of people I know refuse to by Microsoft's hardware, which is some of the best hardware on the market, because they refuse to believe that a company that made something as crappy as Visual BASIC could possibly make a decent joystick.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not to mention a distinct lack of support for a WWESRD bracelet...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I rather like the image of Bill Gates as a half-Worm God Emporer that constrains humanity in perpetual uniformity for 10,000 years forcing it to build up an unimaginable collective pressure that bursts forth in a Scattering upon his melting in a river ("Melting, I'm melting...")
With apologies to Herbet, my mostly inconsequential point is that if nothing else Gate's enterprise has given something for you lot (those of you who actually code) to push against...and there's definately something to be said for that, 'tho I'm sure many have said it better. Microsoft has provided the masses with the stochasticly reliable feature set that has at best been innovative and at worst been frustratingly limited in perspective and extent. But in doing so it has cast a swath of color on the landscape in which one can in comparison define a palatable pallette of hopefully more determanistic reliability and more fruitful functionality. Their business practices possess sufficient ominous qualities to add the spice of urgency to any competative developements not to mention the shiny happy feeling of slumming around in the moral highground. To grind my way through the last of the cliches of the wee morning, if nothing else they've offered us a catholic negative by which to define our own aspirations....
Well, I've done my singing to the ether....
that certainly was a nice steaming pile of words wasn't it?
On the other hand, this is all based on my subjective opinion of what consitutes intelligent discussion, and my (somewhat faded) memories of what Slashdot was like pre-moderation.
ESR can flame with the best of them, but I very much doubt that he'd employ childish tactics like that.
Humiliating - what's the meaning of that word? To make one
humble. Humility is a good quality for journalists to learn.
This guy did not handle the situation very gracefully. He's
supposed to be a professional journalist, and got his facts
very wrong about RedHat's margins. Not to mention the total
ignorance about unix having a solid history in business. Look
at Sun, for example.
He needed to be humiliated. Like it or not many, if not most,
slashdot readers are young and eager. I will be 50 years
old in two weeks, but feel the same way many "flamers" do
about such matters. Linux is a religion in that it it is a channel
for idealism and participants in open source (even those who
merely use it) seem to understand that it is very important
to our civilization for knowledge not to become owned by
anyone which is exactly what many software companies have
been trying with patents and licensing and copyrights to
ideas they did not create or discover.
So what is some suits and their mouthpieces get insulted
and humiliated. The goal of life is to become completely
humiliated - to be like dust. At least this journalist admitted
his mistakes. He should not then have published further
rationalizations for his own serious journalistic mistakes -
so serious they leave him open to lawsuit for libel for misrepresenting
easily established facts so blatantly. In attacking the style
in which some Linux enthusiasts responed to his article, he
really was putting up a smokescreen.
No, Slashdot, don't apologize for some of us not responding
in a matter which might win approval in corporate circles.
If a very few people engaged in network attacks on his email
or web site, that is another matter, but these attacks happen
all the time and it is unfair to assume that Slashdot readers
did that. These journalists and their corporate sponsors
use language that is not so pretty themselves behind closed
doors.
Don't be shamed. Be yourself and be proud of it. It does no
good to tell someone to think before acting. This is something
people learn with experience, but sometimes it is better to
act on one's feelings without so much thinking.
Since I didn't see any suggestions in the other threads that would make any practical differencereal change in behavior for the better, here are a couple of things "we" (Rob) could do to cut down the number of times Slashdot is made to look stupid by a bunch of immature children:
/. folk can send copies of the flame mail to for "our" action. (Copies of such flame mail could also be added to such a database by others "observing" the exchange...)
/. (the moderators would get more points/better gifts based on the number of mails they review yea/nay, not how many emails they vote as "guilty")
/. which are the source of this stuff with some sort of "banner" that no one would want to have associated with them ... Like any time that person posts on /., their posting is bracked with bold letters "A POSTING FROM AN IMMATURE JERK" or ? ... This would tend to reduce their participation in /. and hopefully make them think twice before they decide to "punish" someone else...
/. altogether, and post all known identifying information about them in a "hall of shame" some where...
/., that masking can often be penetrated, especially by people and software as powereful as we have here. Besides, forcing "bad" /. "members" to go through the extra work of becoming so annonymous we can't track them, may slow them down enough that they think better of "flaming".
1) Develop a "complaint" folder that people who've been flamed by
2) Encourage moderators to pick up extra moderator points (or free gifts ) by taking some time and going through the "flame mail folder" and basically voting on whether each piece of mail is so lacking in redeeming social value as to constitute an "offense" against
3) For people guilty of such "offenses" (as "voted" by their "peers"), an escalating set of punishments could include:
A) "flagging" those accounts people on
B) after a certain # of "offenses"... block the offender from
While there are ways to try to mask your identity when flaming someone to try to avoid punishment on
I'm sure that if he's read this, Rob has already got the code written in his head to implement all this ()!
When he implements this, we can continue to become one of the most successful experiments in self moderating, yet remarkably free information flows around. If we don't do something, the "slashdot effect" could become an expletive...
Steve
I think the time has come for the vast majority of us who believe in that quaint, old fashioned concept known as "good manners" to stand up to the jerks, in a non threatening way, of course. Maybe a quick email here and there (don't take criticism public) saying something like 'I know you probably didn't mean to, but your tone was a bit rude..." and pointing out the fact that good manners are simply a more effiecient way of changing behaviors and beliefs than vitriolic rants.
A good idea in theory. Unfortunately, however, at least a small minority of these people would just flame you back and go on as before. Yes, some of them would get the message and stop it, but my guess is that a lot of people that go in for that sort of stuff couldn't care less if you or I or every other person in the world thinks that what they did was wrong.
By way of analogy, look at the idiots that make and spread virii and worms - everybody (else) condems them, the authorities actually hunt them down and prosecute them, and still they do it. Why? Because that's how they get their kicks, and they're not about to let anyone spoil their fun. The same applies to the lame-brain mail-bombers; that's how they try to get their point across, and no-one is going to stop them from being heard.
At best, you'll probably just be ignored; at worst, you'll be flamed/mail-bombed yourself.
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
There has to be ways to defend OS's. Microsoft pay big dollars to people to spread FUD ( Mindcraft survey anyone ? ). If the Linux community doesn't make it unpleasant to write grossly incorrect disinformation uncomfortable occasionally then it will suffer.
Imagine also, a similar article about NT that said equally dismissive things and was equally independent of the facts. Microsoft would sue, not just send a few juvenile emails.
The one thing is, this guy actually deserves a great deal of credit for his admission of error. He admitted that he wrote something that was bad. I'll check his column once in a while from now.
...he did say distribute but when he mentioned fortune and spell checker in the same sentence and coupled with some of his earlier errors, I wrongly assumed that was what he was thinking. Besides, no one would think that giving away a spell checker and then providing service for it would generate a "fortune" , would they? heheheheh. How much service does a spell checker need?
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Frankly, most flames aren't worth the paper they're printed on. While personal assaults never
really win arguments, I'm constantly amazed by
professional writers who get teary-eyed over email. The internet is a public place. You can say anything you want in public, but don't be surprised when get a response.
I'm still of the mind that the internet is really just a cleverly constructed Eliza program.
internet> Why do you feel the internet is a cleverly constructed Eliza program?
C'mon people...this isn't right.
This isn't directed at Linux advocates or anyone else in particular. If this letter is for you, well, you know who you are.
They are everywhere, IIRC, Douglas Adams (a Mac advocate) once referred to some of his Mac-loving kin as "blithering zealots". Perfect. That is exactly the description of many Linux/MS/Mac/BeOS/OS/2 etc. ad nauseum "advocates". The funny thing is...most of the "blithering zealots" don't have a clue.
"Blah, blah, blah...use FooOS," they say.
"Why?" BarOS user says.
"Because anyone who doesn't use FooOS is lame," blithering zealot intellegently replies.
I've been around, in communication with other savvy, bleeding edge computer users, for quite a while now. It's always the same. There seems to be this "blithering zealot" gene. Without exception, there is always someone who will find something (anything!) and cling to it religiously without anything intellegent to back it up.
For those who fit the above description, this message is for you.
Stop it. If you find yourself:
1. NEVER installing a different OS because, "FooOS is better".
2. Flaming anyone who likes another OS better.
3. Flaming anyone.
4. Bashing MS (or any other software company) in response to an article about Linux....
You may have a problem. Step back and think, because you are just like the people you say you hate. "MS lemmings" is a rich term I've heard a lot. Well, ask yourself this: If FooOS started to suck...for whatever reason, are you past the point where you can objectively say, "Wow...FooOS has started to suck. Maybe I should start to look for something new." ?
Or, better yet, "Wow...FooOS has started to suck. Maybe I should work to fix it."
There is a pattern that I've noticed, and it involves most (almost all) zealots going down with their chosen sinking ship, just like they say their "opponents" are.
Wow...this turned from what I originally intended (an honest to god open letter) to more of a rant. I appologize for that. But IMHO, what I said needed to be said, so I'll leave it at that.
I appologize for the spelling errors that are probably scattered about in this.
Casey
I type as I would speak to you in person.
I don't, and I can see why most people don't either. On IRC (and in other forms of textual communications) I've had lengthy (sometimes heated) discussions about religion, programming languages, operating systems, computers, music, and a variety of other things. In real life, you don't have these sorts of conversations, because when they start getting heated, somebody will start cutting off other people in mid-sentence, people begin yelling, etc. On IRC, assuming you don't have ops and kick/ban the person, each of you has to let the other person finish his sentence, since you have no way of cutting him off or yelling over him.
Plus, there's the fact that I'd never have a heated discussion about religion with a random person I'd never met before in real life. On IRC, it's completely possible, because we're discussing the issues - who the other person is, and whether I've met them or not, is irrelevant.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's nice to see enthusiasm, BUT...
:)
These screamy platform advocates remind me of the comp.sys.mac[..].advocacy morons, or even the sad remnants still clinging to the corpse of the (once great) Amiga.
I don't particularly want to be associated with people whose arguments stretch about as far as "YOU SUXXX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!".
Admittedly, the mass media needs to get a major clue infusion too, but then that's nothing new. Telling one's arse from a hole in the ground never was the strong suit of the Jesse Bersts of this world..
Sadly, morons are ?(and have been) flowing onto linux as a platform for a while. Too many of them use it as a psychological crutch and something to worship. these people would be no loss if they vanished tommorow, since they don't contribute anything. Quite the reverse; they spend hours flaming poor saps in a functionally illiterate manner, and then go on to annoy the hell out of ordinary users by demanding "How can I get X driver for my FarEastTech GrandPants AGP of is??!!!!!?!?!" very loudly. They're a pain.
However, we're a victim of our own sucess in that respect. Everything that becomes popular does, due to the law of averages, attract a lot of noisy idiots. Because they're so vocal, it sounds like there's a whole lot of them, rather than the good old bell curve, which is closer to the truth..
End of ramble..
I'm not in high school, but I'm sure a lot of Linux advocates are. I don't care what someone's 'nick' is, or what they put in their documentation. I worship Linus Torvalds and Future Crew, because they can write good code, and I curse Microsoft because they screw everything up too much...
:) I see by your number that you're in the thirty-thousands or so, which shows how many accounts we must have now...
Oh, and I read the column, but I don't agree that the 'slashdot community' should admit to wrongdoing. *I* didn't do anything wrong. Here you are confusing the actions of individuals with that of a group. The 'slashdot community' isn't very organized, but we are, each of us, responsible for our own actions. And this could very well be the work of a "rotten few", but unfortunately users come in a sort of pyramid. At the top, there are the gods, the developers. Below that, you have the speakers, the well-known activists, the kernel hackers, the people who write major applications. Then you have the early adherents, the sysadmins, the people who write small applications... eventually you get to the newbies, and there are a *lot* more of them than there are of the rest of us.
I only really started learning about UNIX in 1994 or so, before then I was doomed to reimplement it on DOS (I wrote commands that worked like 'which' and 'df' and 'du', in Pascal, actually)... I found out about Linux in 1995, and only really started using it in 1996 or so... However, I'd consider myself to be a longtime veteran when I look at the people in the community now... this is that pyramid effect at work.
I read slashdot before we had user accounts, so my user # is 1020. I guess that makes me part of this community for a long time.
I'm sure there are a lot of newbies out there, but judging by their experience, I'm sure I'd consider most of them to be pretty low on the pyramid... The problem is trying to explain this to who they flame, because we can't train them all. Most of them will learn eventually, on their own, but by then there will be far more of them. This is the same thing that happened to the emulator scene, and it practically crumbled under the weight of the d00dZ who wanted their RoMz.
Also, the columnist didn't really fess up, all he said was that he had gotten *one* fact wrong, and exaggerated the rest, and he portrayed Linux/Open Source advocates as either raving lunatic crackers or flaky activists, which I think most of us aren't. Therefore, I'm not sorry he got flamed. Maybe I would be if he tried to revise his article to make it more accurate... Even if I didn't agree with his opinion, I could at least respect him if he got his facts right and tried to have an original thought or two.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
He makes a good point about spell checkers. It's not only the flaming idiots who need them either. I can think of a certain story poster who misspells more than his share of headlines on slashdot. If we're talking about "making the 'Linux community' look bad," repeated obvious errors in story headlines on slashdot are a lot more noticeable than some juvenile comments and flames.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Did I miss something, or did Jack forget to respond to the rebuttals?
Sure, we, the Slashdot front, can be rude at times in our postings. But THAT'S OUR RIGHT AS READERS, RIGHT ??
It's interesting to me that he chose to attack the user base of LinuxOS as opposed to attacking ONE individual (who, nevermind that he had legitimate criticisms).
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
not everything that Microsoft has done is bad. They've actually come up with some good things believe it or not
Like what?
Yes. There are lots of us who are trying to convince our companies to use and distribute open source software. These loudmouthed open source 'advocates' make all of us look like assholes, making it harder for us to convince management that open source is worthwhile.
So, not only are these idiots unlikely to have actually contributed anything (code, money, documentation, good karma, etc) to open source, they could actually be reducing the amount of software that will be released under open source.
I got one particularly amusing set of these missives from someone I'll call "Eric." Every five minutes Eric would post what was essentially the same email. He'd change his last name on each posting, but not his first name or his email address. Clever fella that Eric.
I wonder if that could be a certain Eric we know...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Personally, next time a link to an anti-[Linux|Open Source|Redhat] is posted on /., I'm going to be tempted to fire up my mailreader and write them a polite apology for the mails that are undoubtedly above and below mine in their mailbox.
"Don't mind the morons and the script kiddies - 14-year olds are a pain in the bum whether or not they can even spell Linux..."
A good idea in theory. Unfortunately, however, at least a small minority of these people would just flame you back and go on as before. Yes, some of them would get the message and stop it, but my guess is that a lot of people that go in for that sort of stuff couldn't care less if you or I or every other person in the world thinks that what they did was wrong.
Very true. In the "old" days I noticed the same trend on IRC. Some people would just run around on channels and stir up a stink just for the joy of it. If we tried to tell them the error of their ways they just got worse - their intent was to piss people off, and us trying to convice them not to was taken by them as a proof that they had accomplished their goal.
I'm not saying that all flamers are like that, but some are. I don't know of any way that we as a community can do anything effectively to stop them giving Linux a bad name.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Oh, this is priceless!
.signature file material for sure.
Bravo!
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
(Note: This article, like many of the others before it, was composed using an Open Source software product)
Which open source product? Microsoft Word 97, using Save to HTML? The text of his article badly needs the Demoroniser... it's full of lots of question marks in place of apostrophies.
Just because he didn't pay for it doesn't mean it's free software or open source software.
You can do other things while that's running...
Whether or not he deserved it is irrelevant. He gets several hours of inconvenience, reading through badly written and incoherent emails. We get a couple more years of obscurity, because people like you make the rest of us look incompentent. Try and focus on the larger scheme of things here. It is not about this childish concept of lashing out at any perceived threat, it is about supporting your community, and overcoming though competence rather than crass force.
Geek-grrl in training
"DEATH TO FANATICS!"
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
Yes, being rude is your right as a reader. Many stupid things are your right. That doesn't mean you have to excercise those rights. If he's made errors, you get your message across better by politely but clearly outlining what they were and why they were errors. You don't have to pussyfoot around it, but coming across as polite and articulate and rational is better than coming across as an idiot.
And if you absolutely must flame someone, at least be creative about it. I'm sorry but I would frankly be embarrassed to have to admit that "You ****head!" was the best I could come up with. In fact I wouldn't admit it, I'd either come up with something better or forget the whole matter.
...We even have them in the mainframe community! Certainly Apple, OS/2, and MS-Windows have their share... as well as others I fear to mention. :)
/. and LT. An article goes up on /. and, suddenly, we all know about it.
/. is merely the leading edge.
For a journalist to post a factually incorrect, borderline slanderous article about virtually any widely used OS is to invite something similar to what Mr. Bryar experienced -- the difference being more a matter of scale and timing than anything else.
I think much of the "problem" here has much to do with the concentration of enthusiasts around such sites as
Well, I'd like to advise all the careless journalists of the world, whatever they write about: get used to a networked and weblog-stratified world.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Look at the OSS movement more as a guerrilla war; we have to develop a superior product against the onslaught of an overwhelming foe who can change standards as fast as Bill changes his shorts. We need to win people over to our way of thinking, not run in and burn their villages and shoot their grandmothers.
This sort of sh*t alienates potential users, backers, business allies and developers. Call it a war if you insist, but this isn't the way to win. Instead, we should politely provide information, demonstrate that we can connect with people (a collective sense of humor would be a good place to start) and respect other peoples' opinions, even if they don't agree with us.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Hmm...my point...can't we just all get along?
The whole idea behind Linux is freedom, but
if we as a community squash anyone who doesn't agree with our opinions or is misinformed about the facts, we're making Linux that much more worthless.
So please, before you hit the send key next time,
think about what you're saying.
Deepak Saxena
Project Director, Linux Demo Day '99
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso
Or maybe they have grown up by then.
Don't hate the media, become the media.
>Heck, lots of people I know refuse to by Microsoft's hardware, which >is some of the best hardware on the market,
Bullshit. A lot of people refuse to buy Mircosoft hardware because it's cheaply made and overpriced. Are you seriously sugesting that that the Microsoft mice are better than the ones made by Logitech for instance? I've yet to see a Microsoft joystick that is better designed than my Nintedo 3d1 PC joystick. Yes, Nintendo designed a joystick for use with the PC.
As for the response to the article, well the person who wrote it got exactly what he devserved, just as NATO gave the Serbia what it deserved. What people like yourself are going to have to accept is the old days of "computer journalism" where a person could write the kind of article slamming something, submit it to a magazine and escape the results of their actions is over with. If a reporter wants to avoid the kind of fallout that people like yourself are bitching about, then he had better damn well be sure of his facts before posting the damn thing in the first place. There's a well-know term for the kind of article that Bryar submitted to Andover News. It's called yellow journalism.
The smart people aren't the ones that have .. not in my definition of smart.
... of course I can imagine that those people don't think about that either and just flame away anyway.
.. I've had my share of death threats by people from the other side of the ocean (which shows again that people don't think before they write ... it's very unlikely they will really take all that effort to come to here to kill me ..)
.. all this rambling .. Let's summarise: .. I've got my filter on 2, which gives me only the really interesting stuff.
to be afraid of the moderators.
At least
If you're smart, you think before you write,
therefor, you're comments are thought out and
well supported with arguments. In this way, smart people think about what they want to say, and
they know that what they write won't be moderated down, because it's reasonable and makes sense.
The NOT smart people, who press reply and start flaming away without any proper arguments. THOSE are the ones that need to worry about what happens to their comments
I'm an administrator on a chat-site and I know the way people can react on things they don't like.
Most people will indeed instantly get out the "big guns" (mailbomb, any kind of DoS attack, flame, whatever)
Hmm
The moderation system won't drive off smart people
it will maybe even attract more smart people and get them to post comments, because they know that their comments won't get lost in a sea of flames due to the filtering that's possible on the comments
--
Ignorance is no excuse
The smart people aren't the ones that have to be afraid of the moderators. .. not in my definition of smart. If you're smart, you think before you write, therefor, you're comments are thought out and well supported with arguments. In this way, smart people think about what they want to say, and they know that what they write won't be moderated down, because it's reasonable and makes sense.
... of course I can imagine that those people don't think about that either and just flame away anyway.
.. I've had my share of death threats by people from the other side of the ocean (which shows again that people don't think before they write ... it's very unlikely they will really take all that effort to come to here to kill me ..)
.. all this rambling .. Let's summarise: .. I've got my filter on 2, which gives me only the really interesting stuff.
At least
The NOT smart people, who press reply and start flaming away without any proper arguments. THOSE are the ones that need to worry about what happens to their comments
I'm an administrator on a chat-site and I know the way people can react on things they don't like.
Most people will indeed instantly get out the "big guns" (mailbomb, any kind of DoS attack, flame, whatever)
Hmm
The moderation system won't drive off smart people it will maybe even attract more smart people and get them to post comments, because they know that their comments won't get lost in a sea of flames due to the filtering that's possible on the comments
--
Ignorance is no excuse
This is the problem when the OS is a religion. Even though the majority of users are fairly level headed, there's a very small and annoyingly vocal minority that I like to term "The Lunatic Fringe." Despite their numbers, they somehow seem capable of ranting at everyone talking about the OS. Quite often they'd alienate fans of the OS in the press. They're one of the reasons IBM was hesitant to show much support to Team OS/2.
These people can not take a hint and shut up, so if you happen to know one In Real Life, do everyone a favor and club him like a baby seal.
I think I did something wrong somewhere... :)
Could someone moderate that first post down?
the second one is better in layout
(text is the same)
--
Ignorance is no excuse
Ummm, right. So you are saying if I don't mailbomb people that disagree with me, I'm not doing anything worthwhile?
There are more ways to fight against idiocy than a knee jerk reaction to respond with insults and mail bombs. The people who did this are clueless fanatics that need to be brought to task. They ruin any potential good will we can build on.
The proper response was to respond to him and point out where the mistakes were made in his article, in a civil manner that doesn't resort to ad hominen attacks or disrupt that person's life.
Are the people that gave a polite response any less devoted to Linux than the script kiddies? I think one such person does far more good than all of your bombers combined. The appropriate comparison is not to bring out the Boston Tea Party (trying to get rid of the establishment to rebuild a new one) but instead Dr. King (Trying to reform the establishment (ie user base)) Would he support fire bombs in someone's home because they made a racist remark?
You don't show very clear thought on this. The repercussions of what you are saying are more than you can possibly imagine.
"Tax preparation software eliminates errors your[SIC] may make...." From IRS home page.
Science fiction author Larry Niven, that is. Jerry Pournelle is fond of quoting it, and I've heard Niven himself say it a time or two:
"There is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuggheads."
Linux advocacy proves to be no exception.
-- Alastair
I love it. Not. After watching juvenile adults all these years, I now have to deal with real juveniles in my email.
People have been taught for years to "get out" what's bugging them, because "repressing your feelings is dangerous." And the hotter the feelings and expressions, the more authentic you are as a human being.
It's total bunk, of course, and this interchange demonstrates it. Now we've got a generation that not only engages in instant expression, but instant world wide dissemination. No wonder corporate types are embarrased to use Linux.
The sweaty college teenagers who did this had to take time out one evening from dating their hand to put both hands on the keyboard. It looks like the latter effort was about as productive as the former.
I don't think flaming is constructive. It is unlikely to convert anyone. Power driven arguments and foul mouthed ranting will drive people away. I watched the lunatic fringe of the libertarian party do this to themselves. I shy away from such people. They are a vexation on my spirit.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
This behaviour - including flaming the technical press - goes back to the beginning of the personal computer.
Let's see:
And my personal vote for most rabid partisans of all time...
Don't get me wrong - I dearly loved my Amiga and still believe it was far in advance of it's competitors, but the way those guys would flame the press made me want to white-out the logo on my machine.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
Any controversy will provoke replies from a certain number of immature people. There's nothing we can do about that--even if we act, on the average, nicer than anyone else, there will be a few idiots.
Bryar is deliberately choosing the idiots to respond to in order to paint Linux supporters as fanatics. That makes his own mistakes and his own mindless invective look less bad. It's a propaganda method--find the few inevitable idiots in the crowd and pick them out to respond to in order to tar your opponents in general with that brush.
There was no way to stop this--nobody can get rid of _all_ the idiots in their midst. Slashdot is not to blame. It's Bryan, for posting an "apology" which deliberately treats the most immature people in Slashdot as representative.
The Linux scene has changed a lot in the past year.
:-)
Heh. I've been saying that every year since 1994
I've seen Linux advocacy go from, "You should try Linux, It's free, it's fast and it's fun" to "You flaming piece of sh*t, how can you run a MS product?! Your mother eats kitty litter and your Bill Gates' secret butt-lover!" These people are not advocates, they are fools. The real advocates are still out there and they are still advocating. These are the people in the IS departments at companies and the people doing research in schools, and these are the people that are advancing Linux. You wont change anyone's mind by pissing them off.
-Rich
While this makes the most sense from the point of view of conveying the most relevant information and eliminating redundancy, in practice all this would accomplish in the short-term is to make the signal-to-noise ratio that much worse. Instead of 100 polite emails and 10,000 flames, the authour gets 1 polite email and 10,000 flames.
The loophole is that if the 1 email is from a well-respected entity whose opinions carry weight, it would be useful. Open Sense, if implemented, could eventually gain such weight. However, it won't have such weight when first implemented - this would be a medium-term effect at best, long-term at worst.
OTOH, those of us who write sensible letters could always post to both. That would give the best of both worlds.
As a side idea - it might be a good idea for someone who _does_ carry weight - for instance, Linus - to write a letter to the publisher that both states that the flamers do not represent his views (possibly apologizing), and then politely taking issue with the inaccurate points presented in the article. This might actually accomplish something.
Going to the publisher helps in that the article's authour is probably just ignoring all Linux-related emails. Coming from Linus or another noteworthy and level-headed developer/advocate would give it the credibility to get read.
In any event, if you do get Open Sense off the ground, please let me know. I'd be happy to contribute.
But when its posted on the website, it has that nonstandard character set from MS that makes the ' symbol into a ? symbol on NS in Linux.
This about it; can you see Linus flaming the hell out of someone for forgetting to mention that Linux runs on SPARC? No way! So, the next time you're tempted to mail out some giant foul-mouthed tirade against someone who has issues with the OSS movement, ask yourself: WWLD?
Man, I should have some wrist bands made up; I'd make a mint.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
If a journalist writes a clueless article that does merit a collective response, summarize what needs answering, (fair use limitations, of course) collect the worthy repsonses, and send them to him.
I hope I'm not tempting fate to say the fsck-you'ers are not going to seek out the article in Altavista just to give the journalist a piece of their minds. (No, fate, nothing to see here, please move along...)
As for articles in local papers, advocacy is important, but it should not involve more than the local LUG.
I'm sure the post on Linuxtoday (where I first read it) was more hits to this guy's online column than he had ever seen before. I'm sure he also got more feedback than he had ever gotten before. Then Slashdot was probably another order of magnitude more hits for his column. Combine this with the fact that this was probably the most error-ridden piece he's ever written before, and it's not surprising that he was treated this way. I'm not saying it's right. In fact, shame on you guys (you know who you are)! But if he had written something sexist and inaccurate that somehow got into the hands of several tens of thousands of feminists, what's he expect? Say something that's an opinion that people disagree with, you'll get some flack. Say something wrong and you'll get a lot. That * /. = bad news for him. He wrote an incorrect story and it was viewed by lots of people who disagree with him. Surely he realizes that a lot of us read it, dismissed it, and went on with our lives and that the people who flamed him are not in the majority (or I'm sure mail.andover.net or whatever would have died a quick death)
Hmmm, that feminist sentence makes no sense. s/[feminist setence]/[something really, really clever]/
By simply not focusing so much on Microsoft. I say don't post MS related stories on slashdot unless they really are newsworthy. And don't post them on LinuxToday unless they are related in some way to Linux.
This would take away forums that seem to be used mainly to stir anti-ms feelings and (sometimes subtely) encourage flaming.
If we all just back away from talking about MS all the time, several good things will result:
1. We will continue to grow for the same reasons we always did: not worring about marketshare, deadlines, acceptance, etc. These things will come in time if you produce good software. These have always been touted as the linux community's greatest strengths. Let's keep it that way.
2. We will attract people that are interested in free software instead of people that want to feel cool or 3L1te or just hate microsoft. Without a place to read and post anti-ms stuff those people will lose interest and leave. I say good riddance.
Bottom line - it's not out of the control of the leaders in this meritocracy. An example can be set, and would be followed.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The fleet admiral is clearly faking it.
For what motive, I have no idea.
Probably just to stir things up.
Maybe just to see how far beyond sarcasm he can go.
Maybe for the same reasons as the brainless flamers, if they have reasons.
Mouthing off is no way to gain respect for
your skills or your choice of O.S.'es. I may
be way off the mark here, but does anyone
else agree that you almost never see this kind
of behavior from folks who've received formal
education in Unix? I'm sure that many self taught
*nix freaks are well-mannered, but I feel
confident that the more profane in the crowd
probably have self-taught themselves ethics also.
...used to be a library...now it's just a mind-cemetary
Careful here--let's not back water so fast that we lose sight of the fact that much of the response was justified.
A lot of people pulled dumb stunts in complaining to Bryar. (The firewall thing, for example, better be a coincidence.) But when I tuned into the scene, most of the commentary was pretty on the ball.
Look--he screwed up big time. He made all kinds of false assertions and was smarmy about it to boot. When people do that, they need to be hit and hit hard. For your interests, you just can't leave that lying around ignored; for theirs, they don't need to get away with writing inferior pieces. Their reaction to your scathing reviews will show what they're made of. Apparently Jack Bryar is made of pretty stern stuff; not only did he admit what most suspected (he hadn't done his homework), he acknowledged that he deserved most of what he got.
He didn't deserve it all, though. I wonder if he would be interested in releasing the IDs of some of the more juvenile flamers? Some intense peer revulsion at this stage might do some good, as the best policing is internal policing.
The best way to go about this without stepping over the lines of free speech, it seems to me, is a little public dressing-down of the guilty parties. Let it be said that the Linux community takes care of its own--in both defending and administering justice.
Just go check the thread about Linux being obsolete, and Linus' first reply to Andy Tanenbaum, when he criticized Linux. Of course, he apologized later, and I guess he learned a lot with that, but, please! "What Would Linux Do?"
More like "what would someone with some sense do?"
In the me-too department: I share the feeling of shame at having the name of "Slashdot" associated with agressive flaming. I was so embarassed (because I really like Slashdot and visit several times a day -- I even post from time to time what I think I have something of value to contribute) that I posted onto the apologia at Andover very clearly in my own name, identifying myself as a Slashdot reader and expressing my personal shame.
In the "off topic" department, I sometime wonder if the growth of the electronic community will eventually increase or decrease civility. I rember reading David Brin's Earth in the late 80s. We had USENET by then, the Web wasn't in existence (except maybe at CERN) and the word Internet meant something to only a handful of us. In that novel, Brin imagined a global network that everyone had access to. (This stuff was very incidental to the story, BTW). Each person had a credibility rating. You would read messages filtering by credibility. I think the Slashdot moderation figure is a very primitive form of this.
What if access to the net was denied to no one, but every other participant on the net could adjust one persons credibility by one point once and only once? (What if this could be applied to sub nets and addresses at the IP level, but I get ahead of myself). What if we could put the real flamethrowers in Coventry (as we used to say)?
Everyone if free to be as abusive as they want, but they would be heard by fewer and fewer people as their credibility fell.
Perhaps persons should be rated in various categories, or a standard system eveloped to build this into a new kind of HTML compatible nntp? I'm not really suggesting anything seriously here, but the issue is real.
In some ways, despite all the evils of television, it has brought a certain increased sophistication to distant and disparate places (and also a certain lack of sophistication as well, but I don't want to go too far down that tangent right now).
The net can do the same, only more so.
Whatever. I'm a programmer by vocation and avocation, so I always seek a technological solution.
For now, I hope that each of us who feels proud to be a part of something Big and Important (open source, free software, the Internet, free speech, individuality) and who gives vent to that through fourums like Slashdot will take a little time to (gently) remind some of our more rambunctious fellow travellers what it means to be civilized.
Maybe in real life you aren't having these kinds of discussions because you're talking to the wrong people.
There's a guy I work with who has the tendency to get nasty and rude when someone disagrees with him over some minor issue. I've learned not to get involved with him in these sorts of discussions, because it's really pointless (he never sees points other than his own) and I just end up feeling irritated and offended.
There's another guy who I rarely see eye-to-eye with, only he has no trouble carrying on discussions and remaining polite and rational. Given, most of the talks up to now have centered around technology, but I haven't seen anything to make me believe it would be much different if the topic were politics or religion.
My point is: maybe the people you're talking with on IRC are just better people to be having debates with in the first place. Look hard enough and I promise you'll find plenty of people on IRC who would be more than happy to call you names and type in all caps to annoy and torment you.
When I read his initial column, I was surprised, and disappointed. He'd done much better in the past. Now I see that my original impression was correct. The guy has wits, knowledge, and a sense of humor.
Lo and behold he's also human and can make mistakes, ie be negligent in public.
Cheers Jack, that response was a much better column.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
You can't really stop people from sending flames, but the authors can stop posting their email addresses so they don't have to listen to it. It will be too bad if that happens because we won't be able to correct misinformed authors as easily.
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
My thinking then which I still think is accurate:
EvangeListas, remember when the guy from Wired wrote that net access with a PowerMac and a T1 is slower than with a 386 and a 9600 baud modem? And then proceeded to defend that as a factually correct statement? After all, he got tons of stupid mail; therefore he must have been correct...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Please don't chastise us for not behaving nicely. If we had a legal department we'd have sued. If we had a marketing department we'd have pulled a full page ad in the New York Times. But we don't.
So you got a mail bomb (a tiny one at that) and a few flaming emails. Which would Bryar have preferred?
A main goal of the entire OS movement was to work around the proprietary vendors that are beginning to embrace us now. I agree that, in general, people should be nice and thoughtful to each other. But does anyone care if the "reputation" of the open source movement is "spoiled" in the mainstream's eyes?
The Linux scene has changed a lot in the past year. That's not to say that there weren't crazed fanatics here before, but I do think the ratio has chnaged. Now that Linux is 'cool' and 'alternative' (a brief digression: did you ever notice that by the time anything is called alternative, it isn't, really?) More and more folks are using it because it makes them feel superior.
When someone attacks Linux, these people feel it as a personal insult. After all, if they are only cool because they use a cool OS, what does it mean when someone says the OS sucks? It means they suck.
All in all, though, I am proud of our community. Don't let the insecure, vocal minority of jerks blind you to the fact that a lot of smart, polite, reasonable, and downright nice people use Linux. I see it every day, here, in my user's group, in the newsgroups & mailing lists, and of course, on the ftp sites where the code lives: people helping each other out, sharing what they know with no thought of profit.
I think the time has come for the vast majority of us who believe in that quaint, old fashioned concept known as "good manners" to stand up to the jerks, in a non threatening way, of course. Maybe a quick email here and there (don't take criticism public) saying something like 'I know you probably didn't mean to, but your tone was a bit rude..." and pointing out the fact that good manners are simply a more effiecient way of changing behaviors and beliefs than vitriolic rants.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Good grief. Is it just me or does this sound more like an IRC war than a discussion? Hanging out on IRC changed drastically after the internet went mainstream. You always had your schmucks, but after tens of thousands of IRC clients started showing up, we ended up with a lot more schmucks. I have always had a hard time grasping the concept of saying things in text that you would never have the balls to say in real life in front of a person. I type as I would speak to you in person.
Rioting and mob mentality is understandable IMHO if tanks and soldiers are rolling down Main Street USA, but not when somebody says something dumb. Had he said he was going to rape the mothers of all RedHat investors, fine, attack. But he didnt.
If I went full force after every dumb comment made to me in person, there would be a lot less dumb comment makers in the world, and I'd be in prison *grin*.
One last thought: Ever notice that the religious nuts who run up to your car screaming about hell while holding a fistful of pamphlets hold a LOT less credibility than the preacher sitting quietly in a church doing his thing? Not that I'm a religious man, but heh, it's a thought.
I'll shaddup now, but damn people, relax.