Slashdot Mirror
Stopping the FUD
mackga wrote to us about the new LinuxToday Counter-FUD site. Good site to get information and destroy detractors -maybe we should link to it The Linux Myths and see who comes out next.Update: 12/04 11:52 by H :Also, thanks to Rik van Riel who pointed the The FUD Counter site.
Could we please stop with all the blaiming of the "Slashdot community" for everything. To a certain extent there is no slashdot community, just a bunch of individuals posting their state of mind. It seems that in almost any thread there is a comment along the lines of the "Slashdot community" being guilty of some horrible sin (we are zealots, flamers, mailbombers, fuddists, etc etc), yet for some reason these posts always get moderated up by the very "community" that is guilty.
There is a huge difference between a slightly exagerated personal statement about NT's percieved suckyness in a comment, and FUD as practiced by Microsoft and their equals. For them it is an adopted, controlled, and intentional process of discrediting the alternatives to their products. For them it is about making money, and countering any threats to their means for doing so: and, in the case of Microsoft, barred by absolutly no proffesional ethics (and that's not FUD, thats the conclusion of the US legal system).
No one is sitting in centrally located boardrooms in the middle of "Slashdot community" and making descisions about how we ought to discredit Microsoft (or, at least, no one has told me about it). I doubt very many of the posters here have financial incentives for wanting to discredit Microsoft. A lot of anti-MS sentiment comes through here because the people who post here are people who use and love computers, and they feel legitimately fucked over by them.
Maybe sometimes emotion gets the better of truth here: but that is far from FUD.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
On the other hand, if Roger Ebert showed up on Slashdot and started spouting about how much he disliked Dell computers, we wouldn't take HIM seriously for the same reason: within the Slashdot community, he has no reputation. People don't believe movie critics just because they're movie critics; they believe them because they've been reading their reviews for years and generally agree (or maybe disagree, but at least respect) them. (And, duh, obviously there are reviewers who you never agree with, think are idiots, etc., but that's the exception.)
I've been participating on Slashdot for almost six months now, and I don't post anywhere near as often or as intelligently as you do; I'm sure there are probably a couple thousand Slashdot readers who recognize your nick -- Signal11 -- on sight; I know I do. I doubt there are any who'd recognize mine. But the reason is that you have time and again given interesting viewpoints and opinions; I don't post very often and when I do it's usually not a discourse of any kind; most often it's a short response. (Well, not this time :)
Anyway, like I said, it's not a double standard; it's THE standard. If you don't have a reputation in an arena, even if you know what you're talking about, the people listening to you can't know that yet. It takes time to build up their respect.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Our FUD Factory is better than your FUD Factory because:
- Ours is Open Source FUD - anyone can add to it, yours is proprietary
- Our FUD is POSIX compliant
- Ours FUD Factory doesn't need to be restarted several times a day
- We don't have a FUD monopoly and the DOJ isn't about to close it down
- Ours is just plain cooler than yours
It seems to me that a lot of FUD comes from the Slashdot community itself. They scream bloody murder when someone states something wrong about Linux, but they themselves say blatent wrong things about the other non-Linux software. Especially against Microsoft and Apple. If you really want to stop the FUD then I would suggest starting with the Slashdot comments (and sometimes main story post).
Eric Anderson
Okay, in this community it's assumed you have enough technical prowness to differentiate between "marketing hype" and technical specs. This means that when you talk with somebody, it's gonna get pretty boring if you just quote the specs. That means you provide anecdotal evidence. For example, I have had nothing but problems with Fujitsu drives. I had one crash horribly, and the other one wouldn't work correctly when it was installed with a tape drive. Word of mouth, in effect. This is dismissed, but a movie critic's views are accepted as a reason to, or not to, go see a movie? I could be wrong, but that sounds like a double standard to me.
Sounds like the media doesn't take outsiders seriously. Strangely enough, technicians don't take non-techies seriously in their area of trade either. Arrogance, or common sense?