Well I clearly don't think of the Linux community as a homogenous unit; if I did, I wouldn't have posted what I did. However, much of the rest of the world, unfortunately does, which is the crux of my point.
As to your comments about Dvorak, yes, he is a pundit, paid for by an extensive readership and sensationalism sells.
However in this case I do not think he is alone in his sentiments. I suppose I'm less addressing him or this situation specifically as the situation overall with how the Linux community is perceived.
I have had both good and bad experiences with the community (mostly good). Unfortunately a small number of jerks can be enough to affect the perception of the Linux world by people not a part of it. I've read many posts over the years of newbies who, while probably not approaching support communities in an ideal way, have nevertheless been completely turned off by the attitude of those who respond to their queries.
And then there are those, and this is the category of people I'm mostly concerned with in this discussion, who won't even try Linux because of their experience with Linux "zealots."
Maybe it doesn't matter and my concern here is completely unwarranted. I'm not so sure though. In the end, it may well be that Linux will always be a fairly insular community and will never be mainstream. I don't know.
That was not my point. My point was that such a response, even if well-deserved, doesn't have any positive consequences. Taking a contrasting high ground, on the other hand, does. It demonstrates by its very nature that the Linux community is "above" this sort of thing, which further indicts O'Gara and people like her by making them look like a completely different species.
Posting personal information about an individual, along with photographs, does not require a protracted, retaliatory rant, as many engaged in all over the Web. The sleaze here is quite obvious to anyone who read the article (I did).
There was an opportunity here that was at least slightly diminished in significance by the emotionally charged retaliatory onslaught.
In your example, yes, I think responding a stupid verbal insult with physical force is indeed stepping across the line. Force should be met with force, and stupid insults should be met with silence, or, if you are particularly talented (I am not), a witty, rather than merely venemous, retort.
But despite that, your example is not similar to this situation. Indeed, there is no great audience who already considers you unbalanced and fanatical, watching for a physical outburst on your part (in your example) to confirm their prejudices. This is not the case with the Linux community.
Or maybe I'm just wrong and Linux users don't care how they are perceived and don't care about how such reactions hurt adoption and close minds. I do, and this is just my opinion and I speak only for me. I assume that there are others like myself who do care how we are perceived.
It certainly would be wrong, on the other hand, to let O'Gara's trash go unanswered. I simply believe there are better, more intelligent ways to respond to grotesqueness than freaking the hell out, as many people did.
Perhaps it is unfair to tar an entire group of people by the actions or words of the most obnoxious few, but unfortunately that's reality, especially if the moderates in a group are completely drowned out by the insane.
What would Dvorak have written if the response to the O'Gara article was a sober, "That is stepping across the line." rather than the mass freak-out that ensued all over the web?
Whatever percentage of the Linux population are complete basket cases, they tend to be extremely loud, and abusive. People associate them with the Linux community at large. That may be unfair, but it is reality. Measured, moderate, sober people tend not to yell and scream a lot, so people don't hear them.
I have to admit, as much as I love computers, it is amazing to me how much energy is spent on sarcasm, abuse, and anger over an operating system when the world is shot through with real injustice, genocide, corruption, and authoritarianism.
Part of the problem is that the internet has destroyed the need for civility. There are few negative conesequences to being a boorish jerk, not to mention an insane raving lunatic, so many people have dispensed with politeness altogether.
The Linux world is hardly the only community that has its share of abusive jerks, but the fact that these people show up in any community doesn't really excuse what does go on in the name of Linux advocacy.
The vast majority of criticism leveled against overly strident Linux advocates I hear is by people who use other operating systems (there are exceptions of course). It would do a great service to Linux in general if those who are not busy actually developing in Linux would make a concerted effort to be friendly and diplomatic, and to help influence those in our community who are not, and who refuse to be civil and measured. We need to be more critical of these "zealots" from within our own community, if indeed they do not represent us. It isn't enough to be general about it. We should respond to every unfair flame and every immoderate, inconsiderate insult to demonstrate that these folks do not represent us.
If indeed they do not; I don't think they do.
You can get as angry at Dvorak as you want, but his perception of the Linux community as a whole of having a screw loose is one that is widely held. We can all complain about this and how unfair it is or we can do something to rectify it.
I should not have to tell people, "Yes, I absolutely love Linux but I'm not one of, you know, *those* people" who think Windows users have some kind of irredeemable character flaw."
Rather than counter-accusations, a simple retort to distorted arguments against Linux outlining the facts, or "I respectfully disagree and this is why," would go much farther than yelling, "FUD!" every time someone has a misperception or...heaven forfend...a different opinion about Linux than we do.
The internet in general could use a good solid dose of civility. I hurled epithets and insults like anyone else until I got bored of this behavior destroying the signal to noise ratio. Also, I realized that I wanted to be treated with respect and deference when I said something unintentionally stupid, which I have, and which I will do in the future.
And which, probably, all of you have.
The perceived rancor, unreasonableness, abusiveness, and zealotry in the Linux community does hurt it. It especially turns off people who are new to Linux and are told, when they post an understandably frustrated query to a support group, "You must be too stupid to use Linux," which is one of the worst, unfair things someone can say to someone just starting out.
When unethical journalists like Maureen O'Gara post a smear job, the best thing we can do is soberly and succintly object to it in a polite way, since outrage doesn't do anything to help anyone's cause. Outrage, while understandable, can be easily perceived as fanaticism.
I for one do not doubt that there are DOS attacks, or de
Well, first of all I'd like to thank the music industry for making them even more satisfying to loathe. You couldn't create a better bad guy in a novel (Well, there's SCO, of course - again, a real life phenomenon, not some bad guy in a book)...
Seems to me like:
(1) There are those who are just opposed to piracy and consider it theft and leave pissed-off messages on forums such as this saying so from time to time. I think they're the minority, but they have an honest viewpoint, and if anyone is making a decent moral case for not ripping off music, it is them.
(2) The largest group of people are people who just really like music, and can easily get it for free. I don't think they spend a lot of time thinking about the music industry, intellectual property, copyrights, or what have you. They just like music. So they download it.
(3) There are people for whom pirating music, like smoking a joint, is a political act. I mean sure, guffaw all you want, but we live in a horriby insular, suburban, gated community world where this is as radical as it gets for most. I'm talking about people who enjoy the fact that pirating music is illegal, and enjoy screwing over very large companies, however much a drop in the bucket downloading a few mp3s is. It's not so much that they're really getting over on anyone, but it feels like it...just enough to make it a rush in and of itself.
(4) I just mention this group for completeness - these are people who are collectors, who like out of print or really obscure stuff that is difficult or impossible to find anyway, or simply is not commercially available.
And I have to wonder if the music industry is driving more of category 2 into category 3. I'm not sure about this though. I don't really buy the argument that "bad publicity" really affects the numbers. I think music piracy is largely an issue of convenience and R0CKING 4 FREE and not much more than that. Consumers are notoriously mushy when it comes to putting up any kind of united front against abusive companies, employers, or institutions, at least here in the States, and I suspect in much of the rest of the world as well. I doubt corporations would own and run as much as they do if consumers really had any moral conscience and really wanted to know what kind of atrocities their spending money was paying for.
Certainly, however, one thing the music industry is doing wonders for is assuaging whatever guilt the typical music trader still feels about piracy. I mean, if there is even the slightest hesitation, or opening for someone to make an argument about piracy, it's evaporating quickly due to the music and movie industry going out of their way to embarass themselves by pretending that they see this as a moral issue, as opposed to a dent in their ability to financially exploit people with actual talent. The moral "oh poor us" crap is pathetic in roughly the same way Jim Bakker's penitential sniveling was pathetic. It might mean something when an artist says so, but the industry just seems to be out to sabotage their own credibility at every turn. Like we don't really know the score. Like we don't all recoil in disgust from MTV, Clear Channel's radio stations, and the complete sewage of the pop music scene. It is this - the product they push the hardest, that lends incredible insight into the industry's supposed "moral" (LOL) conscience.
However one feels about piracy, the music and movie industries are deft black belts when it comes to outright DICKETRY. And one thing that makes the world go 'round is spite, and every time they do something as DELICIOUSLY EVIL as this, countless new "convenience traders" are introduced the sweet, sweet nectar of spite. Now, it's not just R0CKING 4 FREE - now it's R0CKING 4 FREE AGAINST THE MAN. Now there's an affirmative reason above and beyond just having, guiltily, THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MEATLOAF in 128 kbps MP3 format.
Idiots. This is ROCK AND ROLL they're poking with a stick. Of course its part of the same pa
I think if a campus network offers public access to its students which are paid for by student fees or otherwise by those who use it in some form, there ought to be a very precise outline of what you can and can not do with that connection.
When you then sign on the dotted line and agree to the terms, the question of what the university can ban and what it cannot would be pretty crystalline. If they want to ban you from going to cnn.com or pages with red backgrounds, and you agree to that, then fine, you should abide by it.
Those who have delighted in posting "tough crap" messages don't seem to take the fact that the network is being paid for by its users, for specific purposes, into account.
(What is it with this certain population of people who take such pleasure in siding with Authority, and who believe that there are never legitimate complaints or grievances; just whining?)
So the question is whether or not there is a specific AUP shown to the university community before they pony up for the fees, and whether it (ignorantly and stupidly) outright bans something like BT. I'm sure it's somewhere in writing or at bare minimum understood that illegal activity is prohibited, I'm curious whether there's a document somewhere that outright bans all Peer to Peer.
If on the other hand you paid for your network access with the understanding that basic internet services (and legitimate BT is one of these) were all allowed, and they just about-faced on this, I think at bare minimum you should have some traction to challenge it or else get some kind of refund.
The fact remains that these fees are being paid for by students (are they? If they're not, then this is a whole different argument), and as such students at bare minimum have a right to know up front what they're paying for. Or should have such a right.
Nice university administration, btw. Enlightened, discerning, technically knowledgeable and proficient. Fills me with confidence.
Idiots.
There's a whole population of people out there who'd take us back to quills and parchment if they could.
I used distcc w/ Gentoo for some time, but it kept crapping out on me with weird errors. It could have been a result of disparate gcc or library versions on the different machines. I probably should read some more about it because I do have some spare CPU juice lying around this room which could potentially relieve some of this tedium.
This is great to hear. I recently deployed Debian on some production servers out on the internet and they have gone several months without even the slightest quirk or hiccup, under moderately heavy load. I was semi-new to Debian, and I use it on one of my machines at home too; on my desktop I use Gentoo.
People have a variety of opinions on any distribution, but I can't think of anything easier to maintain, and it's well-documented too.
I've heard some rumors about the Debian support community being a little crusty and curmudgeonly, but I wouldn't know because I've so far never needed to ask anyone for support. And I'm not that bright, so that says a lot.:)
On the other hand, I've met Debian users in other non-Linux forums who all have been nice enough folks.
As I update regularly, it appears from the release announcement that there won't be any added value to downloading and burning it, which is just as well.
The conservatism here has been a positive things for the server-related things I use it for. I've never tried using testing or unstable as a desktop (where I imagine you generally want to be a little less conservative) so I can't speak to that. However, when I get a new system to replace this miserable 1 GHz Celeron, I'll probably turn this machine into a Debian machine, since running Gentoo on it, with the attendant compiling, is increasingly painful given its speed.
(Though I'll run Gentoo on the new system:)
Side by side, they seem to cover two extremes of the spectrum, and work well in that regard, side by side. I haven't even been very curious about anything else but these two. But that's just mey opinion.
Actually, I really like Quanta. I've been more productive with Quanta so far than any other HTML editor on any platform. Maybe it's less what Quanta does, than what it doesn't do - mangle code, for one. I was used to graphical/WYSIWYG editors for a long time, but now I really do prefer to write HTML code with the excellent tag properties menus. As much as one can write HTML in a text editor, I just can't always remember every attribute for every tag I use. So, it helps me be complete. I think most people can read HTML better than write it, just in the sense of forgetting an attribute here and there.
Most of the HTML I write isn't incredibly complicated, but I do mix PHP scripts in quite a bit, and for that, Quanta's been incredibly useful. It is, in fact, the only KDE application I use.
I had tried Bluefish and some others, but they all had annoying quirks or non-intuitive interface design.
There are a lot of features I'd like to see added to Quanta to bring it in line with something like Dreamweaver, but I'd definitely recommend it now, and it is maybe the most useful Linux application I use. If you write a lot of HTML in a text editor, Quanta is worth a try, because it basically has most or all of the benefits of a plain text editor with a lot of enhancements that you are free to use, or not use, such as Syntax Highlighting, end-tag insertion, and the very handy pop up attribute dialogs.
There seems to be this consistent need to preserve everything from film to film; plots get wrapped up too neatly at the end. At least at the end of Star Trek 2, it looked like Spock bought it.
Babylon 5 understood this. You never could be sure at the beginning of each episode and season whether the characters were going to pull through, as it seems they almost always do in the Star Trek films. You know they're going to win. That's why I'm sick of it.
They blew an incredible opportunity with Voyager. Wouldn't it have been interesting if Voyager returned home only to find the earth completely assimilated by The Borg and the entire Federation being decimated? Or maybe just have the Borg follow them home, to add a bitter note to their return?
What about a Star Trek film which details the birth/genesis of The Borg - how they came to be? Star Trek films also have got to start killing characters and *losing* sometimes.
And they really have to get a grip on their incessant need for cute humor. Humor once in a great while is fine, but they seem to really want to pack that into movies, and I'm just not interested in that. When I watch Star Trek, I want *epic* struggles. I want multilayered plots with twists and turns and powerful moral challenges (Picard trying to get his reign on his hatred of The Borg is the kind of thing I'm talking about.)
The characters are too perfect, and they are too at the center of the Star Trek universe. The emotion chip for Data was one of the stupidest ideas ever; they completely ruined his character.
I'm speaking generally of all of the Star Trek movies of course. Trek needs less action, and more cerebral plots. The shiny, bright Federation needs fascist factions and political problems within. More espionage, and most importantly - the *death* of some of the main characters. I want to
It's always disappointing watching Star Trek because I know going in everything's going to end up fine. It didn't at the end of Star Trek 2, and Kirk lost his shit and let the hatred boil, adding a rough, imperfect edge to his character. No wonder that movie is most peoples' favorites.
I'm just tired of the perfectly lit, wall-to-wall carpeted, Dudley Do-Right shit that makes up Star Trek films. I would hope the future would be partly that, but that should stand in contrast and struggle against darkness, greed, hatred, and fascism.
I want to see The Borg infilitrate the federation and eventually earth. I want to see a Star Trek movie end with a helpless crew watching as Earth or Vulcan is assimilated.
I want to see starships blowing up, and captains of them being pushed to the edge and sometimes losing it and acting immorrally.
I want to see guerilla rebels resisting the Federation like the Maquis. And I want to be on their side.
I want to see characters die. I want to see an end to all time travel plots, and want to see more plots that - as on Enterprise - require the characters to use cunning rather than tech to get out of scrapes.
I want to see no more hippie political crap like in Star Trek IV. I wouldn't mind them dealing with political issues we have not yet faced, but this whole Trek-as-metaphor-for-present-social problems stuff is played out; it was played out after the first series where they dealt with all of the 60s problems like race, space hippies, etc. Star Trek 4 was a travesty.
I want to see more darkness and less humor. All of this will make the victories of the main characters that much more interesting to watch, rather than just assuming that they'll triumph. Movies need to be treated as serials; plots need to continue from movie to movie and they have to leave us hanging. I don't want to see it all wrapped up at the end of the movie. That just ruins is and wrecks the tension. "Oh who cares that they're hanging off of a precipice, we know that can't be the end; there's still 17 minutes left to the movie."
Most or all of this applies to the television series as well.
Watching Star Trek in any form is an infuriating thing; if you're a hardcore fan, you grit your teeth and get through it for some reason; but my teeth have been ground down to powder. Berman needs to sit down and watch Babylon 5, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Space: Above and Beyond, and get some ideas.
One argument I hear a lot, not just in this massive discussion but in other places is that RMS is "arrogant" and "preachy" and is out to make sure that his name stays on "Linux."
From everything I've read about Stallman, it seems to have less to do with Richard Stallman himself, as much as Richard Stallman's ideas. I couldn't blame the guy, frankly, if all he wanted was to preserve some credit for something he's put so much time into. Especially for someone as unwavering and principled as he is; someone who makes a living "being the asshole." It must be mystifying for him why people are so hostile to him, when the roots of his ideas - and I do believe in the sincerity of them - was creating free software in a community context.
Everything I have personally read from Stallman and the FSF - and I have not read absolutely everything - has been steadfast in promoting these values, or ideology if you're a little cynical, or dogma if you're VERY cynical.
It does strike me as somewhat ironic that Stallman's largest critics benefit from this philosophy daily, however annoying they may find it. I've spent enough of my life being a user of other operating systems to know that without this ideology, much of this great software would still exist, but it would be beyond my price range. Much of it which I use for my own ends would not be available to me, and I would be much less empowered. Whether it's using astronomy software to find constellations, or free word processors and text files, or grepping through massive amounts of data, free software has made my life better. Equivalents exist, but they exact a hell of a price in return, and some of them are completely beyond what I can afford.
Free as in freedom has come to generally also mean free as in beer; they are separate concepts but you generally find one with the other. I've benefitted from both. For example, I have modified the source of an SNMP firewall monitoring tool to specifically give me the information and warnings I need. I never had these options in Windows. I've modified it so much, learning about how SNMP works from the source, that it's almost become a completely new piece of software. It would have taken me 10x as long if I had to figure all of the concepts from scratch.
This is nothing new to any of you.
But witness the voluminous tide of independently-produced crippleware which makes up the bulk of Windows software. There are some excellent freeware exceptions (WarFTP, Irfanview), but most Windows software is shareware. It is not free, and the source is not available.
What has made the "Linux" world so exciting - and I speak only for me - is the fact that freedom is the rule, rather than the exception. There is more "freedom" here than there is almost anywhere else. Even my grandmother refused to give out her best recipes. When your operating system is more community minded than your own grandmother, it's impossible not to consider the role of ideas and values beyond the ones and zeroes.
FSF and the GPL's "ideology" have created so much of the environment in which the "pragmatists" who just want "functional technology" thrive. Imagine, theoretically, having the Linux kernel, but then having to pay for all of the GNU utilities? See, I do think all of this would exist without the free software concept, but it would be very expensive. And we'd be a slave to the companies that produced them in terms of patching security holes and bugs.
It seems to me that the GNU aspect of the name represents the set of values that created the "Linux" community and keeps it free and dynamic, and the Linux part of the name is the practical, technical part (in terms of how and who you market them to). They seem pretty indivisible to me.
"Linux is a stable operating system based on UNIX." Great.
"Oh, and, it will cost us nothing."
Superb.
"And if we find some problem we can probably fix it ourself rather than spending a week getting the damn vendor to *admit* that a bug exists."
Wow.
"And we can even adopt the source to meet those small details we need, precisely fulfilling every bullet point on our needs document."
(Now as for this last one, anyone who has worked for a big company trying to purchase software to fill a need will understand how incredible and unique this is.)
I have on occasion winced a bit at some of Stallman's ideas or the way he states them, but I've made an allowance for a few things - first, the man's obvious frustration at the attempted separation of the values/"ideology" from the technology - and I share some of his frustration at this. (If the ideology is so overbearing, why not just go out and buy Solaris and be "free" of it? Because just as you can, in an atmosphere of free speech, advocate fascism, you can also use and benefit from free software while simultaneously slagging it, or at least its importance. I don't mean to make a direct comparison with people who are annoyed by Stallman and fascists, just the concept of being critical of something you're benefitting from.)
Secondly, Stallman *always* has to be the asshole. He always, as a point of principle, has to be the one everyone hates, because there's a lot less risk in saying, "Linux is a fun and powerful thing to use" rather than making an "ideological" point. I think it's a total virtue that he does this, which seems contrary to a lot of the complaints I hear about him. Yes, Stallman does scare some of the suits. I think in the long run, it is a small price to pay - freedom, for me, is far more important than certain individuals not using GNU/Linux in their corporation because of intellectual property concerns and because Stallman comes off as an angry hippie. I've never personally been worried about competition with Windows. GNU/Linux will survive because people want it to; precisely because people have an emotional and ideological attachment to it that, I believe, will withstand any test from the corporate world. I am sometimes dumbfounded by the amount of time people spend defending GNU/Linux compared with, say, human rights, but it is that spirit which will ensure that it survives.
After awhile, though, being the asshole has to get to be a drag. Personally I salute him for sticking with it and, in the face of all of this criticism, not giving up the fight for expediency. He fights for community values in the face of the same community often being hostile to him (It seems to me that for him the name is far more than semantics, though many of his critics seem to think it's precisely that. I think part of his fight is to make the point that *it isn't* just semantics, a point I agree with. It would be like trying to explain American civilization on the basis of a civics lesson (There are 100 senators, 2 from each state...) without the ideology (or mythology) (Individual rights, whatever).
Now, I agree that GNU/Linux is a mouthful. Maybe if we could do this all over again, we could find a more phonetically palatable thing to call this. But I personally think that the ideology and values of free software are so central and so paramount to this community, that it's worth tripping over my tongue a bit. If anything, when talking to someone who has never used GNU/Linux or hasn't thought about the ramifications of proprietary vs. free software, it raises the question "G...what?" In a sense it's a great way of starting a discussion.
As for Stallman being "bossy," which some people have argued, this is absurd. How can someone be bossy when they have no authority over you or your actions? By simply calling it all Linux all you wind up doing is guaranteeing Stallman won't grant you an interview. Big deal. I personally think you're doing a disservice to GNU/Linux when you leave the GNU part off, but you're free to do so, just as you're free to say "The West is great because it produces the best toys, but screw the people out there whining about the Constitution or freedom." There's nothing anyone can do - or should be able to do - about that.
I have a great operating system that I use every day to talk to people, exchange ideas, play games on, and run cool software. It didn't cost me anything, and I can modify and re-distribute it to other people. I am completely benefitting from the very wonderfully strange concept of free software. There is other cool software that can do many of the same things, but I'd have to pay probably thousands of dollars for it and then be stuck with its bugs and crufty source, especially if I've made such a considerable financial investment that it's not practical to abandon it. It seems a small thing to ask to call it GNU/Linux to preserve, conceptually, its roots as free software. I think that the freedom aspect of it (And as I run the Gentoo distribution, which downloads and compiles source for every package I want to install, it is obvious to me every time I update or install something) is so fundamental and crucial, that it's worth the small inconvenience and long-windedness of tacking on the GNU.
This is true for me, and I've got no problems with Stallman, and feel personally indebted to him. His efforts have not only provided me free software (And I do not think it's a contradiction in terms when you say, "You are free to use this, provided you don't make it un-free." any more than it is not a contradiction to say that "You can use your freedom in any way you want except to abridge another's freedom."), but his ideas have also made me think, and ultimately empowered millions of people.
Seems to me calling it all GNU/Linux is a small thing to ask - especially since contrary to his many critics, it's not really about reminding people of Stallman, but reminding people of Freedom. I really do believe that. With almost anyone else, I'd immediately assume it was mainly personal, but Stallman has been so consistent in this regard that I absolutely don't think it is, *fundamentally* personal (no doubt - and I blame him not at all - he would like a little personal credit for all of his work on this - and even at that rate, it's GNU, not Stallix or something).
As someone who has used GNU software far more than I've contributed, I just don't have the stones to complain about this small thing. I think were most people who use GNU/Linux to de-emphasize the values of the community, it would be extremely damaging to the operating system.
I understand fully that there are many people who understand all of this and just don't feel the need to pronounce the full name. But I would argue that this is important in terms of precisely defining what GNU/Linux is: an OS with - love it or hate it - an ideology attached. An ideology which has been as responsible for its present form as the practical code that has gone into it. And which we all - critics and advocates - benefit from every time we sit down at the keyboard.
I am just now getting used to calling it GNU/Linux, because I read and after thinking about it, was convinced by the document on the FSF site. This debate and irritation has been going on for awhile. I have not yet fixed all of my webpages to refer to it as GNU/Linux, but I will, for the reasons outlined above. People are obviously going to do what they are going to do but I would point out that originally, I was on the other side, because I initially considered it a silly semantic argument, especially given the weighty mouthful "Guh-new-Lin-ux."
But after thinking about it, I agree with Stallman's points. Putting the freedom up there in a paramount position in the name of the thing seems appropriate and even necessary. It's worth the price, to me.
The first problem is why say this at all? Why make it a semi-compulsory ritual to begin with?
Kids say this pledge literally thousands of times throughout their life to the point that it becomes a meaningless string of phonemes. The Pledge reminds me of listening to fellow Catholics recite the Profession of Faith on Sundays when I was a kid. So repetitious was it that no one even consciously knew what it was they were saying anymore. You could tell by the emotionless drone; it made the several parishes I was a part of sound like some religious cult under deep mind control. (In reality of course it was a bunch of people trying to stay awake).
Its not just the "under God" part I object to. It's the whole thing.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Well, what if immoral, sadistic acts are being committed under the name of that flag? The Klan flies that flag. The flag was on the uniforms of soldiers during the My Lai massacre. I don't think that the flag is evil, but it certainly is subjective and few can agree on what the flag means. Flags, like bumper stickers, are blunt objects that can mean a multiplicity of things to different people. If you're talking about the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so forth, well, yes, I have a personal allegiance to those moral and political principles. If you're talking about our corrupt Congress and increasingly spooky President and what he's doing supposedly in my name and yours as the figurehead of our Republic, then no. Americans in particular seem to have a weird fetish for these kinds of symbols, and it is something which seriously distracts from the very real principles we ought to be talking about.
And to the Republic for which it stands.
Someone pointed out that the the flag represents the Republic. Well, if so, then this is redundant. Strike the "pledge allegiance to the flag" part and just pledge allegiance to the Republic. But even this is problematic. What if you feel the Republic is corrupt? I often do (I often believe as a nation we do many good things, but it is certainly a mixed bag). I have no issue with the "as written" principles this country was founded on, nor even honest business and capitalism, but that this Republic honestly represents these principles consistently is more than questionable.
One Nation
Well, I believe that we are one nation, and that nations can and should be diverse and built around broad principles of civic morality. Tolerance, freedom, and standing up both for your own rights and those of your neighbor. Others may be into sedition. I don't know. I prefer to connect myself to the world and others in the contexts of honesty and mutually beneficial community, but I respect the rights of those who don't and want to live up a mountain in Montana somewhere.
Under God,
I don't think God has anything to do with it. For example, I seem to remember a passage in the Bible about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We are a capitalist country, and frankly, I have no problem with the honest, productive accumulation of wealth through honest trade and productivity. But depending on which part of the Bible you conveniently choose to follow today, it's questionable that God has anything to do with this. As an agnostic myself, I am not offended at all by other people saying this pledge (or praying silently to themselves in public places - even government buildings, or putting up Christmas trees in parks), but why must it be institutionalized in this instance? It's not a matter of having a problem with the Pledge of Allegiance, it is the problem of forcing others to say it as well. That strikes me as very, very, unAmerican. I've said the Pledge thousands of times, and saying Under God doesn't freak me out, but it is wholly unnecessary. Those who support the compulsory pledge, should they consider themselves quote-unquote Real Americans, ought to have no objection to this being purged in a nation supposedly founded on freedom of - and from - religion. I don't understand psychologically what makes it so important to compel others to swear allegiance to their particular God. It sounds rather...Taliban...to me. Or suggests a kind of self-doubt and paranoia allayed only by consensus, the assuredness of hearing many others pledge allegiance to a God you have some kind of doubt about. I don't understand the motivation here.
Indivisible
Well thank God this nation divides when our government is perpetrating one atrocity for another, whether it be slavery, institutionalized racism, immoral, meddling wars abroad, or blatant Nixonesque authoritarianism. Unity is only a value when it is attached to a kind of tolerance and moral consensus, not when compelled through the kind of propaganda we're dealing with right now where our own congress is afraid to do anything other than indulge any authoritarian whim our President has. Division, however much it lulls us out of our stupor and worries us enough that we can't be satisfied drooling at stupid sitcoms at night, is healthy. Division is cultural, moral, and political dissonance; it insists that we weigh our actions and values as a nation. What good is unity if it is under the auspices of jingoism, groupthink, and collectivism? Division ought not be a permanent state but I'm really thankful that people are willing to stand up and say, "I will not support this; not even in the context that we are both countrymen and this is being done in our collective name." How often did our founding fathers make statements about how a revolution every so often is a healthy thing? We ought to be able to sustain reasonable differences and remain united, but there must be a limit to this. Otherwise, there is nothing worthwhile about our freedom, or our Republic.
With liberty, and justice, for all
Well with tongue in cheek, it's kind of fun to say this line with a heavy dose of irony. As noble as this sentiment is - and it is perhaps, in its honest, untarnished form, the most noble part of the Pledge of Allegiance, it...well...doesn't apparently apply to many classes of people including foreigners, pot smokers, hackers on trumped-up charges, anyone serving a draconian mandatory minimum sentence for a petty crime, dozens of political criminals from the Nixon years still in jail and denied new hearings, trials, or parole. People in internment camps. And so on.
The justice part doesn't apply much to the wealthiest and most powerful who buy their way out of justice and wind up serving sentences at federal country clubs. Celebrities also don't seem to go to jail very often for the things the rest of us do. Victims of right-wing regimes we've propped up in the past are excluded here, obviously. And so on and so forth. The point is, if anyone should be forced to take this pledge, it is our *leaders* and people in the justice system. Justice applies not only to the poor and downtrodden who often get screwed by the System because they don't have the money to hire a decent lawyer, but also to the rich and powerful who rarely pay for their crimes.
I don't think anyone should be forced or compelled to take any pledge. It ought not be part of any compulsory institution like our public education system (itself arguably a huge waste of time and money). But if there must be a pledge, it should be something more along lines of:
I pledge to be honest, to criticize my government when commits crimes or supports those who do. I pledge to uphold and fight for the values enshrined in our Constitution. I pledge to protest and throw my own weight against the eternally grinding gears of authoritarianism wherever I may find them. I pledge to respect and protect the values, practices, and expression of those who are different from me, even though I may find them objectionable, provided that those practices do not infringe on the freedom of others. I pledge to question authority, recognizing its legitimacy only when it serves the rational values of of liberty and justice. I pledge honesty, honor, respect, and civility in ordinary discourse and human interaction (This of course would be problematic among most Usenet users, but that's a different rant.) I pledge loyalty only to principles, and not the symbols, individuals, and collectives by which those principles are corrupted. I stand in opposition to hypocrisy, dishonesty, and the use of violence except as a last resort in legitimate retaliation or self-defense to solve disputes.
The first problem is why say this at all? Why make it a semi-compulsory ritual to begin with?
First of all, kids say this pledge literally thousands of times throughout their life to the point that it becomes a meaningless string of phonemes. The Pledge reminds me of, when I was a kid, listening to fellow Catholics recite the Profession of Faith on Sundays - so repetitious was it that no one even consciously knew what it was they were saying. You could tell by the emotionless drone; it made the several parishes I was a part of sound like some religious cult under deep mind control. (In reality of course it was a bunch of people trying to stay awake).
Its not just the "under God" part I object to. It's the whole thing.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Well, what if immoral, sadistic acts are being committed under the name of that flag? The Klan flies that flag. The flag was on the uniforms of soldiers during the My Lai massacre. I don't think that the flag is evil, but it is subjective. Flags, like bumper stickers, are blunt objects that can mean a multiplicity of things to different people. If you're talking about the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so forth, well, yes, I have a personal allegiance to those moral and political principles. If you're talking about our corrupt Congress and increasingly spooky President and what he's doing supposedly in my name, then no.
And to the Republic for which it stands.
Someone pointed out that the the flag represents the Republic. Well, if so, then this is redundant. Strike the "pledge allegiance to the flag" part and just pledge allegiance to the Republic. But even this is problematic. What if you feel the Republic is corrupt? I do. Not the principles this country was founded on, not even honest business and capitalism, but that this Republic represents these noble principles less and less as the years go by.
One Nation
Well, I believe that we are one nation; and that nations can and should be diverse and built around broad principles of civic morality. Tolerance, freedom, and standing up both for your own rights and those of your neighbor. Others may be into sedition. I don't know.
Under God,
I don't think God has anything to do with it. I seem to remember a passage in the Bible about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We are a capitalist country, and frankly, I have no problem with the honest, productive accumulation of wealth through honest trade and productivity. But depending on which part of the Bible you conveniently choose to follow today, it's questionable that God has anything to do with this. As an agnostic myself, I am not offended at all by other people saying this pledge, but why must it be institutionalized? It's not a matter of having a problem with the Pledge of Allegiance, it is the problem of forcing others to say it as well. That strikes me as very, very, unAmerican. I've said the Pledge thousands of times, and saying Under God doesn't freak me out, but it is wholly unnecessary. Those who support the compulsory pledge, should they consider themselves Real Americans, ought to have no objection to this being purged in a nation supposedly founded on freedom of - and from - religion. I don't understand psychologically what makes it so important to compel others to swear allegiance to their particular God. It sounds rather...Taliban...to me.
Indivisible Well thank God this nation divides when our government is perpetrating one atrocity for another, whether it be slavery, institutionalized racism, immoral, meddling wars abroad, or blatant Nixonesque authoritarianism. Unity is only a value when it is attached to a kind of tolerance and moral consensus, not when compelled through the kind of propaganda we're dealing with right now where our own congress is afraid to do anything other than indulge any authoritarian whim our President has. Division, however much it lulls us out of our stupor and worries us enough that we can't be satisfied drooling at stupid sitcoms at night, is healthy. Division is cultural, moral, and political dissonance; it insists that we weigh our actions and values as a nation. What good is unity if it is under the auspices of jingoism, groupthink, and collectivism? Division ought not be a permanent state but I'm really thankful that people are willing to stand up and say, "I will not support this; not even in the context that we are both countrymen." How often did our founding fathers make statements about how a revolution every so often is a healthy thing? We ought to be able to sustain reasonable differences and remain united, but there must be a limit to this. Otherwise, there is nothing worthwhile about our freedom, or our Republic.
With liberty, and justice, for all
Well with tongue in cheek, it's kind of fun to say this line with a heavy dose of irony. As noble as this sentiment is - and it is perhaps, in its honest, untarnished form, the most noble part of the Pledge of Allegiance, it...well...doesn't apparently apply to many classes of people including foreigners, pot smokers, Kevin Mitnick, anyone serving a draconian mandatory minimum sentence for a petty crime, dozens of political criminals from the Nixon years still in jail and denied new hearings, trials, or parole. The justice part doesn't apply much to the wealthiest and most powerful who buy their way out of justice and wind up serving sentences at federal country clubs. Celebrities also don't seem to go to jail very often for the things the rest of us do. Victims of right-wing regimes we've propped up in the past are excluded here, obviously. And so on and so forth. The point is, if anyone should be forced to take this pledge, it is our *leaders*.
I don't think anyone should be forced or compelled to take any pledge. It ought not be part of any compulsory institution like our public education system (Itself a huge waste of time and money). But if there must be a pledge, it should be something more along lines of:
I pledge to be honest, to criticize my government when commits crimes or supports those who do. I pledge to uphold and fight for the values enshrined in our Constitution. I pledge to protest and throw my own weight against the eternal grinding gears of authoritarianism wherever I may find them. I pledge to respect and protect the values, practices, and expression of those who are different from me, even though I may find them objectionable, provided that those practices do not infringe on the freedom of others. I pledge to question authority, recognizing its legitimacy only when it serves the rational values of liberty, justice, and knowledge. I pledge honesty, honor, respect, and civility in ordinary discourse and human interaction. I pledge loyalty only to principles, and not the symbols, individuals, and collective by which those principles are corrupted. I stand in opposition to hypocrisy, dishonesty, and the use of violence except in legitimate retaliation or self-defense to solve disputes.
Well, I started out working in a computer store buying and selling used computer equipment and building new systems to spec. It seems like when you get 10 techs in a room, you get 11 opinions (With some exceptions - I don't know of anyone who loves, say, Packard Bell systems. That's a near consensus). I have three PCs here that I built on my own - two from brand new parts, and one from cannibalized used parts. I have another PC in the other office which was one of those TigerDirect barebones systems.
First, the absolute best thing you can do if money is not the #1 factor in your decision is build your own. It's simply the most rewarding, especially if you can buy the parts locally.
The first step is to use the web and sites like Anandtech to research what the best parts are, and then scale that against the price to find something you can live with. I have heard opinions from experienced techs that completely contradict each other. This may be a result of parts not working well in combination with some parts but quite well with others, or something as basic as the source of the parts being what I suppose you'd call "gray market" (usually from Asian countries - not to say that just because it comes from Asia, it's garbage, but if you find some questionable parts, they probably came over on a boat with glow in the dark Jesuses for your dashboard). The parts could be counterfeit altogether, or they could be remanufactured parts, or "rejected" surplus from a reputable manufacturer, as someone mentioned in regard to memory. Or, they could have "fallen off a truck", either figuratively or literally.
This is why I try to stick with name brand parts from reputable dealers.
There is no substitute for lab tests and benchmarks. When the results of these tests match the general opinion of experienced techs, or even empirical raves from users of a particular component, that's usually a good sign that the part is worth buying.
Subjective, short reviews in mass-market magazines and web sites are next to useless, and often completely contradictory. Find reviews of products which have been rigorously tested by professionals in a lab with reliable techniques. Some magazines and web sites will hire ANYONE to do product reviews, and some people are impressed by any BRIGHT SHINY OBJECT.
This takes time, but it is well worth it. Research each and every part, and then go to the newsgroup archives to see what people are saying empirically. Few products come unanimously recommended, but you can find a general "tilt" toward a product or brand being good or bad. I generally spend about 20 hours total researching all the parts for a new PC, since I only build one for myself on average every 30 months or so and have to research what's come on the market since. Spread it out over a week and you'll be fine. Make sure to look for interoperability issues as well as compatibility with whatever OS you want to use.
It is not always worthwhile to buy from the cheapest vendor. I figure for most things it is worth paying 10%-15% more locally for a product if I can easily return it if defective. Dealing with RMA processes is time consuming and can be expensive. That being said, I haven't found a decent local vendor here in Tucson yet, so I've been doing most of my ordering online.
As for barebones kits and "white box" machines, I think you can make the broad statement that, oftentimes you get one of these cheap systems that works flawlessly, and sometimes you don't. I think you take that risk with cheap parts, but sometimes you win on the gamble. I have a machine here running Mandrake 8.1 that hasn't hiccupped at all, and that's one of those Tiger Direct barebones kits. Then there is my homegrown Athlon system built with high quality parts which is rock-stable. But then my girlfriend has one of the TigerDirect barebones kits that has had a power supply die, and intermittent instability. So you roll the dice, but that's not saying you'll always lose. No vendor likes returns so if you can find someone locally that builds entire LANs for government agencies using the same combination of parts over and over, and they're reliable, go for it. When you order online, you really don't know what you're getting. Ear to the pavement helps, and Usenet is always your friend.
Brands. Everyone has brand loyalties. Some people have knowledge that is out of date. I used to service Compaqs and Dell Optiplexes in the mid to late 1990s, and from my standpoint, they were superb machines, well designed and easy to swap parts in and out of (Could swap a whole motherboard in one of the Compaq systems - this was when they were heavy and built like tanks - in under 2 minutes). We sold some used Compaqs which were ancient and still running like clockwork. I've heard that this has changed, but I have no direct experience with it. I've heard contradictory things about Compaqs, HPs, and Dells, from people saying they'd *only* use them in production and people who say they'd *never* use them in production.
Likewise I have had absolutely miserable experiences with Maxtor hard drives. Every single Maxtor I ever owned - about 3, have died within 3 years. Yet I have friends online who have run them for years without incident.
Conversely, Western Digital drives have served me well - I still have a (200?) MB Western Digital Hard drive that I rsn a BBS off of in 1992 and 1993 that still works like the day I bought it. I've encountered very opinionated people who consider Western Digital drives "overpriced crap" to quote a close friend.
I like Asus motherboards. I used to sell computers built with them and have 2 PCs here that I've built with Asus boards, and they have been perhaps the most reliable thing in each system. Some people swear by other brands - again, the best thing to do is read detailed reviews and lab tests. Asus boards are generally reviewed and regarded well but I'm sure there's someone reading this who hates them.
Do the research, take the risk (you always do), and build your own. It is a rewarding experience that you will keep on feeling good about every time you sit down at your PC. And what you learn may help you avoid costly labor fees for repair down the road; knowing how to build and service PCs is a valuable skill that pays off time and time again, and you may even have some private opportunities to make some cash or make someone's day by helping them out down the road, with what you've learned.
It's a beautiful thing, considering what you can do with a computer, and the art of building and maintaining PCs is not treated with the respect that it should be.
Having worked in retail selling PCs and then having worked for a large ISP doing tech support and writing technical support content, my opinion of the matter, whatever it is worth, is that no one has realized the basic fact that support works only when both sides meet at the middle.
First of all, companies spend too much on supporting the least profitable customers. There are, unfortunately, some people who are just too stupid to use certain technologies. That may not fit in with the idealism of the present age, but it is a fact. At the same time, savvy users are often denied the online resources / self help data which is cheap to provide. No one should ever have to dig, for example, for IP, DNS, etc. setttings for their ISP. The ISP I use doesn't have a single page written with the basic numbers that I need to configure a PC, but they'll spend countless hours writing "How to use e-mail" documents and supporting users who delete their WINNT directory "because they're using Windows 2000."
Learning to use technology requires the affirmative and volitional use of brainpower. The worst disservice you can do to support a person is to tell them what keys to press, and in what order, without telling them why. This may be a short term fix to get a customer off of the phones, but it results in countless followup calls which make hold times longer, support more expensive, and therefore services for expensive. A little user education goes a long way. Consumers should be expected to open up their minds and learn about the technologies they use. If a 3 year old can use a PC - and many, many do, there is no reason why a full-grown person cannot spend a little time in the evenings educating themselves in whatever way they are most comfortable with.
"I don't have the time." What this means is, the individual would rather watch Survivor than spend 30 minutes in their evenings learning a little bit about the technology they use. Well, that's *their* problem. In the end, the decreased productivity they experience, all of the time saving measures they cannot avail themselves of, etc. far exceeds the simple initial investment of RTFM. How often I've watched people in my own office lay out little bulletins and brochures using scotch tape and scissors when they could have done it in a fraction of the time using only the most basic functions of Word. It's not as if you have to be a computer geek, just a reasonably educated computer user. Anyone who has ever put the time in ought to know that the investment pays off, frees up time, money, and resources.
Paranoia about support boundaries. Several companies I've worked for have paranoia about supporting products beyond the most rudimentary tasks. An example of this is setting up a Linux system to work with an ISP. Write the damn documentation, put it online, and then put a disclaimer on it saying, "Use this information at your own risk. We don't support it and are not responsible for anything that happens to you including spontaneous combustion if it all goes awry." Whatever the company's legal department is happy with. Some companies do this now and it makes life easier and saves a phone call, which costs companies so much money.
So much time has been spent catering to the user's ignorance that consumers are not expected to take some effort to learn about the products they buy. Every time something is dumbed down to the point a monkey can use it, inevitably two things happen:
Power is or may be diminished in the product (Windows is one example).
An expectation is set, and now every company which comes later must spend the support resources necessary to support people who won't crack open a manual.
Ideally, ample online/self-help resources ought to be provided by every company that manufactures a product, because it is cheap; in fact it costs almost nothing. You spend the time hiring some technical writers or knowledge engineers to put together a knowledge base or support web, then just have a few maintainers on. Agents can then use this information for support, and so forth. This is infinitely cheaper than doing phone support.
Then, there ought to be tiered pricing for support, depending on the issue. Phone support ought not necessarily be free. People who expect companies to bend over backwards for them have no conception of revenue models. Support is *expensive*. There is no reason, for example, a company should be forced to support someone who will not crack open a manual. What this does is drive up wait times, resulting either in customer dissatisfaction, or the company has to hire more tech support people, which costs money, cuts into profits, resulting in the expense being passed onto the consumer.
But consumers want everything dirt cheap. That's Capitalism. What they don't want is the very basic reality that you get what you pay for. Take low-margin industries like PC retail. Sure you can buy a bargain basement clone with who-knows-what in it, but somehow when it works like crap, the indignant dissastisfied-customer attitude doesn't impress me. Support and quality ought to come at a premium. If customers didn't buy technology like they buy clothes pins, like "they're all the same," maybe they wouldn't be bitten so hard by poor support and low quality.
Inevitably every customer I've dealt with has some "10 year old whiz kid" in the family who *thinks* he knows everything about computers. Occasionally this is the case, but more often my experience has been that for some perverse reason it has become *fashionable* to be a computer nerd, and so a lot of people who know how to mouse around in Windows call themselves experts for the supposed status it brings (I went to school in the 1980s and the opposite could not have been more true). All technology is not build the same. All companies are not built the same. Sometimes, yeah, you get what you pay for. Deal with it.
Learn to read manuals and use the library and especially online resources. Or else get someone to teach you. Or pay for the support that you require that so few others, who have the ability to learn on their own, do.
I had no one to teach me about computers or technology, or how to work my VCR. I had to sit down and learn it, and it didn't take up all of my free time; I didn't have to dedicate my life to figure out how to stop the damn blinking 12:00 on my VCR. It took 5 minutes. 5 minutes people are not willing to spend. And in 90% of the cases not because they are working 24/7 and don't have a single second to figure it out, but because they are lazy and would rather indulge themselves in whatever banalities pass for entertainment in the world these days. I am not sympathetic. There are so many resources available to people, and the time required to learn the basics of anything so considerably small compared to the time-saving benefits and payoffs, that I don't see why I should care about this gap.
Somewhere in America there is an idiot whining about the fact that he has to learn to cursor around the menu system on his VCR, while an 8 year old is installing FreeBSD in his free time.
Welcome to the 2000s. This is life. I wonder if people whined about having to learn to read following the invention of the printing press and the onset of the Enlightenment, and eventually the industrial revolution.
Carry your own weight, or get out of the road, maggots.
M.U.L.E. It's always been M.U.L.E. First on the Commodore 64 when I was 12 or 13, then via emulators since. It worries me that a single game can keep me enthralled for the space of something like 17 years.
Others: Gyruss (MAME), Klax (MAME). When I was an adolescent, Dig Dug. But the first one; the first video game ever to addict me and in fact caused a chain reaction which has left me a computer geek to this day: Asteroids.
It's not that I'm being all retro. It's that I'm OLD.
Hey yeah, the 2000s...Hard times, heavy times.
on
Browsing Alone
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One question I'd ask is how many people here really have ever had an interest in interacting with the world at large? My whole life has been a search for my "tribe." My criteria, however, have changed over time. I used to be one of these people for whom having an opinion and stating it at people forcefully was important. Google's extensive Usenet archive is a painful reminder of this admittedly anti-social tendency.
But this has changed, a lot now, especially since I've become increasingly irritated with the personalities in my own ideological camp. There's something more essential than politics in a person which attracts me to them. As a libertarian, I've found myself strangely attracted to anarchists and even communists who have a moral (as opposed to intellectual ivory tower) attachment to their viewpoints; who live it more than preach it.
I've found common ground with a diverse range of people and the online communities I've been a part of or in fact have created would meet almost anyone's definition of diversity. This was even the case when I took great pleasure in being a so-called "pundit."
I don't know how or why it happened, but somewhere along the line I realized that when you can clear through all of the semantic and ideological bullshit, most people are more similar than different - that is, this is true of most thinking people. I've known socialists and classical liberals even at my own university who bitterly hated each other, yet lived their lives in almost precisely the same way - as academics, as civilized intellectuals.
This realization has caused my sense of community, or I should say more precisely, my need for it, to evolve dramatically. As I get older I feel that I know less and less and grow increasingly suspicious of people who think that they do or who dismiss opposing opinions with a wave of the hand and a mumbled "tripe!" under their breath. I seem less and less sure of things and yet in that uncertainty, somehow I feel more peaceful, more at ease, more...in a word, wise (I feel that way - whether or not I am becoming more wise remains to be seen). The arrogance and tension that categorizes so many online forums seems increasingly juvenile to me. The loud, bitter debates I witness and that I used to incite and participate in seem increasingly more juvenile and pointless, because in the end, it seems to me personally, the number of ways we are different is insignifiant to what we have in common. I used to think that this was a bunch of hippie crap, but frankly it seems more and more true as I watch, for example, conservatives and liberals argue for hours with each other in a newsgroup and then get up to go to the same jobs with the same motivation to support their familes. I am intrigued by this more and more every day, and all of the testosterone I used to produce in ranting and screaming on a newsgroup is just gone. What remains is this desire to make peace, find common ground, and find a way that people with differing opinions can work for things they both need and want.
But even at the height of my own ideological arrogance, I never stopped listening to the opposition and seriously reconsidering my own viewpoints. And this goes beyond politics. Maybe I've just never had the self-confidence to proudly affirm to myself and others that I have concluded my consideration of matters and events. As I look back, I cannot honestly claim that it was mere intellectual honesty, but more that I always felt that our own existence and knowledge of "How Things Are" has been precarious at best. Or at least, I've felt that *my* knowledge has been precarious. For every viewpoint, there is a dissenting opinion.
I think it is healthy to expose ourselves to a diverse range of opinions and ways of thinking but at the same time I remember being in high school (which was in the late 80s) and cafeterias were not unlike the closed communities we see online. Katz talks about this great social past we once had, but at least in my lifetime, I've never seen anything even approximating it, either before the 90s or after. It always amuses me to hear people talk about The Breakfast Club in negative terms, "bah! bunch of cardboard stereotypes."
Maybe my experience was unique but my school was filled with pretty much exactly those stereotypes, and they sat together in closed communities at the lunchtable. The "conflict and opposition" much touted in building a well-rounded worldview generally involved members of our Wrestling team indiscriminately beating the living shit out of anyone clutching a sci-fi paperback. I'm still not entirely sure what was to be gained by this.
In the suburbs where I grew up, a cul-de-sac is a cul-de-sac, is a cul-de-sac. I never interacted with kids from the cities, or different countries, or from domestic rural areas. But I do that now. I had maybe 3 friends in all of high school. I hadn't ever met a labor organizer or human rights activist, but I've met many of them online. I look at articles like Katz's (and there have been many like it), and I just don't see my own experience reflected in it.
It drives me nuts when people talk about the online world and use "We" to describe things. Because "We" has rarely ever included me in any sense. What I do know is that I have met many people from far and abroad who I never would have met otherwise. And I have never felt particularly connected to any mass of people in any locale in which I've lived. There have been individuals, sure, but the insinuation that somehow everyone went to town meetings and social events and knew each other and built communities this way, well... I know it is true of certain places, but none that I've ever lived in. In New Jersey where I grew up, the "walls" were massive tracts of landscaping and fences. Everywhere I've ever been, people have been building their own moat-surrounded castles metaphorically, and this is something I noticed long before the internet ever worked its way into modern consciousness.
As for the BBS scene, it too was filled with a bunch of exclusivity. Closed membership boards. Elite or not elite? Got the right political opinion? Are you too young or too old? What is your view on hacking and software piracy? Once in awhile, there was a great board with a great cross section but even that was based on a kind of closed commonality: All participants were people with general focus and broad interests who had the social skills to interact with people different than themselves. Any community by definition must exclude some portion of the general population. I don't see this as a bad thing; where the positives or negatives of this come into play is *on what basis* are you doing this?
I use an instant messenger client for one purpose: as a pager. Or roughly the same way I use a telephone. "Hey, X is on TV, you should watch it." "Hey, do you want me to pick up some beer on the way over tonight?" "Hey, do you know what bluescreen.dll is for?" But the vast majority of my communication is on Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC. I have chosen this because it maximizes my return. That others don't do the same is not a fault of the technology but of the use of it. I'm even engaged to someone I met online who lived hundreds of miles away from me. In time, most of my online communications do result in some kind of personal meeting.
So it may well be true that 95% of our lives are local, but rather than accept this as just a matter of fact (which it may be, but it is in my opinion an *unfortunate* matter of fact), the internet has been truly (here comes the e-word) empowering in the sense that I'm no longer limited by the "slim pickings" in my own backyard. For me, my time online has been an enhancer and companion to - not a replacement for - real community building and social interaction.
I find e-mail to be a highly superior form of communication than the telephone. It is more economical, more thought out, more prosaic and literate, more precise, and free of all of the annoying verbal diarrhea and pointless tangents (Something like 30% of every phone conversation I have ever had has been comprised of: ummm, what was I gonna say, umm, hmm...errr, ummm... as well as roundabout ways of explaining in 5 minutes of babbling what could be said more precisely in one line of a well-thought out e-mail. Beyond which, with e-mail a record of the conversation exists and can be referred back to.)
So while all of these social phenomena may be true if you measure it objectively, it hasn't been true for me. It just, simply, hasn't. As I said in the beginning of this musing, my needs in terms of online communities have changed, and one of the reasons is, through interacting with people of so many diverse opinions online (90% of which simply didn't exist in suburban New Jersey in the sea of mass produced housing developments and strip malls), I know now that I haven't even begun to expose myself enough to ideas to have a definitive opinion on almost anything. I used to think I knew it all. Now, largely because of the internet but more precisely because of the diversity you can find there *if you mine for it*, I realize that the older I get, and more opinions I encounter, the less sure I am of what I myself, think. And the more open I am the possibility that world isn't exclusively, as I assumed when I was an angst ridden teen, "full of stupid morons who need to be exposed to the enlightement that only I am privy to." It has made me feel better about the world. But I'd feel even better if more people found some humility and tried to be more constructive with their opinions than divisive. Online, with the safety of a screenname, so many people want to be Noam Chomsky or Rush Limbaugh or whatever. They want to talk *at* people rather than *to* them. I'm as guilty or even more so than others, of this. I believe the potential for all of this to change can happen once people get bored and worn out of having to be right just for the cheap thrill of it, all the time.
In sum, all of the problems Katz mentions are human problems. People *choose* to use the internet as they do. They can also *choose* to use the internet for good, or for evil. Kind of like *The Force*. People *choose* the easy, exclusive forms of online communications wherein they are never exposed to divergent viewpoints, philosophies, etc. Once one gets over the need to be *right* all the time, it is amazing how intellectually nutritious it can be to engage in *discourse* with different-thinking people as opposed to bickering, debate, and put-downs. Discourse is in my opinion far more stimulating than banding together with like-minded people and saying, "Screw those other guys." I just wish it hadn't taken me nearly 30 years to figure that out: That a person is not "full of shit" simply because they disagree with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I clearly don't think of the Linux community as a homogenous unit; if I did, I wouldn't have posted what I did. However, much of the rest of the world, unfortunately does, which is the crux of my point.
As to your comments about Dvorak, yes, he is a pundit, paid for by an extensive readership and sensationalism sells.
However in this case I do not think he is alone in his sentiments. I suppose I'm less addressing him or this situation specifically as the situation overall with how the Linux community is perceived.
I have had both good and bad experiences with the community (mostly good). Unfortunately a small number of jerks can be enough to affect the perception of the Linux world by people not a part of it. I've read many posts over the years of newbies who, while probably not approaching support communities in an ideal way, have nevertheless been completely turned off by the attitude of those who respond to their queries.
And then there are those, and this is the category of people I'm mostly concerned with in this discussion, who won't even try Linux because of their experience with Linux "zealots."
Maybe it doesn't matter and my concern here is completely unwarranted. I'm not so sure though. In the end, it may well be that Linux will always be a fairly insular community and will never be mainstream. I don't know.
That was not my point. My point was that such a response, even if well-deserved, doesn't have any positive consequences. Taking a contrasting high ground, on the other hand, does. It demonstrates by its very nature that the Linux community is "above" this sort of thing, which further indicts O'Gara and people like her by making them look like a completely different species.
Posting personal information about an individual, along with photographs, does not require a protracted, retaliatory rant, as many engaged in all over the Web. The sleaze here is quite obvious to anyone who read the article (I did).
There was an opportunity here that was at least slightly diminished in significance by the emotionally charged retaliatory onslaught.
In your example, yes, I think responding a stupid verbal insult with physical force is indeed stepping across the line. Force should be met with force, and stupid insults should be met with silence, or, if you are particularly talented (I am not), a witty, rather than merely venemous, retort.
But despite that, your example is not similar to this situation.
Indeed, there is no great audience who already considers you unbalanced and fanatical, watching for a physical outburst on your part (in your example) to confirm their prejudices. This is not the case with the Linux community.
Or maybe I'm just wrong and Linux users don't care how they are perceived and don't care about how such reactions hurt adoption and close minds. I do, and this is just my opinion and I speak only for me. I assume that there are others like myself who do care how we are perceived.
It certainly would be wrong, on the other hand, to let O'Gara's trash go unanswered. I simply believe there are better, more intelligent ways to respond to grotesqueness than freaking the hell out, as many people did.
Perhaps it is unfair to tar an entire group of people by the actions or words of the most obnoxious few, but unfortunately that's reality, especially if the moderates in a group are completely drowned out by the insane.
What would Dvorak have written if the response to the O'Gara article was a sober, "That is stepping across the line." rather than the mass freak-out that ensued all over the web?
Whatever percentage of the Linux population are complete basket cases, they tend to be extremely loud, and abusive. People associate them with the Linux community at large. That may be unfair, but it is reality. Measured, moderate, sober people tend not to yell and scream a lot, so people don't hear them.
I have to admit, as much as I love computers, it is amazing to me how much energy is spent on sarcasm, abuse, and anger over an operating system when the world is shot through with real injustice, genocide, corruption, and authoritarianism.
Part of the problem is that the internet has destroyed the need for civility. There are few negative conesequences to being a boorish jerk, not to mention an insane raving lunatic, so many people have dispensed with politeness altogether.
The Linux world is hardly the only community that has its share of abusive jerks, but the fact that these people show up in any community doesn't really excuse what does go on in the name of Linux advocacy.
The vast majority of criticism leveled against overly strident Linux advocates I hear is by people who use other operating systems (there are exceptions of course). It would do a great service to Linux in general if those who are not busy actually developing in Linux would make a concerted effort to be friendly and diplomatic, and to help influence those in our community who are not, and who refuse to be civil and measured. We need to be more critical of these "zealots" from within our own community, if indeed they do not represent us. It isn't enough to be general about it. We should respond to every unfair flame and every immoderate, inconsiderate insult to demonstrate that these folks do not represent us.
If indeed they do not; I don't think they do.
You can get as angry at Dvorak as you want, but his perception of the Linux community as a whole of having a screw loose is one that is widely held. We can all complain about this and how unfair it is or we can do something to rectify it.
I should not have to tell people, "Yes, I absolutely love Linux but I'm not one of, you know, *those* people" who think Windows users have some kind of irredeemable character flaw."
Rather than counter-accusations, a simple retort to distorted arguments against Linux outlining the facts, or "I respectfully disagree and this is why," would go much farther than yelling, "FUD!" every time someone has a misperception or...heaven forfend...a different opinion about Linux than we do.
The internet in general could use a good solid dose of civility. I hurled epithets and insults like anyone else until I got bored of this behavior destroying the signal to noise ratio. Also, I realized that I wanted to be treated with respect and deference when I said something unintentionally stupid, which I have, and which I will do in the future.
And which, probably, all of you have.
The perceived rancor, unreasonableness, abusiveness, and zealotry in the Linux community does hurt it. It especially turns off people who are new to Linux and are told, when they post an understandably frustrated query to a support group, "You must be too stupid to use Linux," which is one of the worst, unfair things someone can say to someone just starting out.
When unethical journalists like Maureen O'Gara post a smear job, the best thing we can do is soberly and succintly object to it in a polite way, since outrage doesn't do anything to help anyone's cause. Outrage, while understandable, can be easily perceived as fanaticism.
I for one do not doubt that there are DOS attacks, or de
Well, first of all I'd like to thank the music industry for making them even more satisfying to loathe. You couldn't create a better bad guy in a novel (Well, there's SCO, of course - again, a real life phenomenon, not some bad guy in a book)...
Seems to me like:
(1) There are those who are just opposed to piracy and consider it theft and leave pissed-off messages on forums such as this saying so from time to time. I think they're the minority, but they have an honest viewpoint, and if anyone is making a decent moral case for not ripping off music, it is them.
(2) The largest group of people are people who just really like music, and can easily get it for free. I don't think they spend a lot of time thinking about the music industry, intellectual property, copyrights, or what have you. They just like music. So they download it.
(3) There are people for whom pirating music, like smoking a joint, is a political act. I mean sure, guffaw all you want, but we live in a horriby insular, suburban, gated community world where this is as radical as it gets for most. I'm talking about people who enjoy the fact that pirating music is illegal, and enjoy screwing over very large companies, however much a drop in the bucket downloading a few mp3s is. It's not so much that they're really getting over on anyone, but it feels like it...just enough to make it a rush in and of itself.
(4) I just mention this group for completeness - these are people who are collectors, who like out of print or really obscure stuff that is difficult or impossible to find anyway, or simply is not commercially available.
And I have to wonder if the music industry is driving more of category 2 into category 3. I'm not sure about this though. I don't really buy the argument that "bad publicity" really affects the numbers. I think music piracy is largely an issue of convenience and R0CKING 4 FREE and not much more than that. Consumers are notoriously mushy when it comes to putting up any kind of united front against abusive companies, employers, or institutions, at least here in the States, and I suspect in much of the rest of the world as well. I doubt corporations would own and run as much as they do if consumers really had any moral conscience and really wanted to know what kind of atrocities their spending money was paying for.
Certainly, however, one thing the music industry is doing wonders for is assuaging whatever guilt the typical music trader still feels about piracy. I mean, if there is even the slightest hesitation, or opening for someone to make an argument about piracy, it's evaporating quickly due to the music and movie industry going out of their way to embarass themselves by pretending that they see this as a moral issue, as opposed to a dent in their ability to financially exploit people with actual talent. The moral "oh poor us" crap is pathetic in roughly the same way Jim Bakker's penitential sniveling was pathetic. It might mean something when an artist says so, but the industry just seems to be out to sabotage their own credibility at every turn. Like we don't really know the score. Like we don't all recoil in disgust from MTV, Clear Channel's radio stations, and the complete sewage of the pop music scene. It is this - the product they push the hardest, that lends incredible insight into the industry's supposed "moral" (LOL) conscience.
However one feels about piracy, the music and movie industries are deft black belts when it comes to outright DICKETRY. And one thing that makes the world go 'round is spite, and every time they do something as DELICIOUSLY EVIL as this, countless new "convenience traders" are introduced the sweet, sweet nectar of spite. Now, it's not just R0CKING 4 FREE - now it's R0CKING 4 FREE AGAINST THE MAN. Now there's an affirmative reason above and beyond just having, guiltily, THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MEATLOAF in 128 kbps MP3 format.
Idiots. This is ROCK AND ROLL they're poking with a stick. Of course its part of the same pa
I think if a campus network offers public access to its students which are paid for by student fees or otherwise by those who use it in some form, there ought to be a very precise outline of what you can and can not do with that connection.
When you then sign on the dotted line and agree to the terms, the question of what the university can ban and what it cannot would be pretty crystalline. If they want to ban you from going to cnn.com or pages with red backgrounds, and you agree to that, then fine, you should abide by it.
Those who have delighted in posting "tough crap" messages don't seem to take the fact that the network is being paid for by its users, for specific purposes, into account.
(What is it with this certain population of people who take such pleasure in siding with Authority, and who believe that there are never legitimate complaints or grievances; just whining?)
So the question is whether or not there is a specific AUP shown to the university community before they pony up for the fees, and whether it (ignorantly and stupidly) outright bans something like BT. I'm sure it's somewhere in writing or at bare minimum understood that illegal activity is prohibited, I'm curious whether there's a document somewhere that outright bans all Peer to Peer.
If on the other hand you paid for your network access with the understanding that basic internet services (and legitimate BT is one of these) were all allowed, and they just about-faced on this, I think at bare minimum you should have some traction to challenge it or else get some kind of refund.
The fact remains that these fees are being paid for by students (are they? If they're not, then this is a whole different argument), and as such students at bare minimum have a right to know up front what they're paying for. Or should have such a right.
Nice university administration, btw. Enlightened, discerning, technically knowledgeable and proficient. Fills me with confidence.
Idiots.
There's a whole population of people out there who'd take us back to quills and parchment if they could.
I used distcc w/ Gentoo for some time, but it kept crapping out on me with weird errors. It could have been a result of disparate gcc or library versions on the different machines. I probably should read some more about it because I do have some spare CPU juice lying around this room which could potentially relieve some of this tedium.
This is great to hear. I recently deployed Debian on some production servers out on the internet and they have gone several months without even the slightest quirk or hiccup, under moderately heavy load. I was semi-new to Debian, and I use it on one of my machines at home too; on my desktop I use Gentoo.
:)
:)
People have a variety of opinions on any distribution, but I can't think of anything easier to maintain, and it's well-documented too.
I've heard some rumors about the Debian support community being a little crusty and curmudgeonly, but I wouldn't know because I've so far never needed to ask anyone for support. And I'm not that bright, so that says a lot.
On the other hand, I've met Debian users in other non-Linux forums who all have been nice enough folks.
As I update regularly, it appears from the release announcement that there won't be any added value to downloading and burning it, which is just as well.
The conservatism here has been a positive things for the server-related things I use it for. I've never tried using testing or unstable as a desktop (where I imagine you generally want to be a little less conservative) so I can't speak to that. However, when I get a new system to replace this miserable 1 GHz Celeron, I'll probably turn this machine into a Debian machine, since running Gentoo on it, with the attendant compiling, is increasingly painful given its speed.
(Though I'll run Gentoo on the new system
Side by side, they seem to cover two extremes of the spectrum, and work well in that regard, side by side. I haven't even been very curious about anything else but these two. But that's just mey opinion.
That's it. This is the end. All hope is lost. We are doomed.
Only one thing can save us now. You all know what it is.
Gentoo Linux.
Actually, I really like Quanta. I've been more productive with Quanta so far than any other HTML editor on any platform. Maybe it's less what Quanta does, than what it doesn't do - mangle code, for one. I was used to graphical/WYSIWYG editors for a long time, but now I really do prefer to write HTML code with the excellent tag properties menus. As much as one can write HTML in a text editor, I just can't always remember every attribute for every tag I use. So, it helps me be complete. I think most people can read HTML better than write it, just in the sense of forgetting an attribute here and there.
Most of the HTML I write isn't incredibly complicated, but I do mix PHP scripts in quite a bit, and for that, Quanta's been incredibly useful. It is, in fact, the only KDE application I use.
I had tried Bluefish and some others, but they all had annoying quirks or non-intuitive interface design.
There are a lot of features I'd like to see added to Quanta to bring it in line with something like Dreamweaver, but I'd definitely recommend it now, and it is maybe the most useful Linux application I use. If you write a lot of HTML in a text editor, Quanta is worth a try, because it basically has most or all of the benefits of a plain text editor with a lot of enhancements that you are free to use, or not use, such as Syntax Highlighting, end-tag insertion, and the very handy pop up attribute dialogs.
I'm a big fan of it. I use it almost every day.
There seems to be this consistent need to preserve everything from film to film; plots get wrapped up too neatly at the end. At least at the end of Star Trek 2, it looked like Spock bought it.
Babylon 5 understood this. You never could be sure at the beginning of each episode and season whether the characters were going to pull through, as it seems they almost always do in the Star Trek films. You know they're going to win. That's why I'm sick of it.
They blew an incredible opportunity with Voyager. Wouldn't it have been interesting if Voyager returned home only to find the earth completely assimilated by The Borg and the entire Federation being decimated? Or maybe just have the Borg follow them home, to add a bitter note to their return?
What about a Star Trek film which details the birth/genesis of The Borg - how they came to be? Star Trek films also have got to start killing characters and *losing* sometimes.
And they really have to get a grip on their incessant need for cute humor. Humor once in a great while is fine, but they seem to really want to pack that into movies, and I'm just not interested in that. When I watch Star Trek, I want *epic* struggles. I want multilayered plots with twists and turns and powerful moral challenges (Picard trying to get his reign on his hatred of The Borg is the kind of thing I'm talking about.)
The characters are too perfect, and they are too at the center of the Star Trek universe. The emotion chip for Data was one of the stupidest ideas ever; they completely ruined his character.
I'm speaking generally of all of the Star Trek movies of course. Trek needs less action, and more cerebral plots. The shiny, bright Federation needs fascist factions and political problems within. More espionage, and most importantly - the *death* of some of the main characters. I want to
It's always disappointing watching Star Trek because I know going in everything's going to end up fine. It didn't at the end of Star Trek 2, and Kirk lost his shit and let the hatred boil, adding a rough, imperfect edge to his character. No wonder that movie is most peoples' favorites.
I'm just tired of the perfectly lit, wall-to-wall carpeted, Dudley Do-Right shit that makes up Star Trek films. I would hope the future would be partly that, but that should stand in contrast and struggle against darkness, greed, hatred, and fascism.
I want to see The Borg infilitrate the federation and eventually earth. I want to see a Star Trek movie end with a helpless crew watching as Earth or Vulcan is assimilated.
I want to see starships blowing up, and captains of them being pushed to the edge and sometimes losing it and acting immorrally.
I want to see guerilla rebels resisting the Federation like the Maquis. And I want to be on their side.
I want to see characters die. I want to see an end to all time travel plots, and want to see more plots that - as on Enterprise - require the characters to use cunning rather than tech to get out of scrapes.
I want to see no more hippie political crap like in Star Trek IV. I wouldn't mind them dealing with political issues we have not yet faced, but this whole Trek-as-metaphor-for-present-social problems stuff is played out; it was played out after the first series where they dealt with all of the 60s problems like race, space hippies, etc. Star Trek 4 was a travesty.
I want to see more darkness and less humor. All of this will make the victories of the main characters that much more interesting to watch, rather than just assuming that they'll triumph. Movies need to be treated as serials; plots need to continue from movie to movie and they have to leave us hanging. I don't want to see it all wrapped up at the end of the movie. That just ruins is and wrecks the tension. "Oh who cares that they're hanging off of a precipice, we know that can't be the end; there's still 17 minutes left to the movie."
Most or all of this applies to the television series as well.
Watching Star Trek in any form is an infuriating thing; if you're a hardcore fan, you grit your teeth and get through it for some reason; but my teeth have been ground down to powder. Berman needs to sit down and watch Babylon 5, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Space: Above and Beyond, and get some ideas.
One argument I hear a lot, not just in this massive discussion but in other places is that RMS is "arrogant" and "preachy" and is out to make sure that his name stays on "Linux."
From everything I've read about Stallman, it seems to have less to do with Richard Stallman himself, as much as Richard Stallman's ideas. I couldn't blame the guy, frankly, if all he wanted was to preserve some credit for something he's put so much time into. Especially for someone as unwavering and principled as he is; someone who makes a living "being the asshole." It must be mystifying for him why people are so hostile to him, when the roots of his ideas - and I do believe in the sincerity of them - was creating free software in a community context.
September, 1983, Stallman posts his intentions:
Stallman Proposes GNU
Everything I have personally read from Stallman and the FSF - and I have not read absolutely everything - has been steadfast in promoting these values, or ideology if you're a little cynical, or dogma if you're VERY cynical.
It does strike me as somewhat ironic that Stallman's largest critics benefit from this philosophy daily, however annoying they may find it. I've spent enough of my life being a user of other operating systems to know that without this ideology, much of this great software would still exist, but it would be beyond my price range. Much of it which I use for my own ends would not be available to me, and I would be much less empowered. Whether it's using astronomy software to find constellations, or free word processors and text files, or grepping through massive amounts of data, free software has made my life better. Equivalents exist, but they exact a hell of a price in return, and some of them are completely beyond what I can afford.
Free as in freedom has come to generally also mean free as in beer; they are separate concepts but you generally find one with the other. I've benefitted from both. For example, I have modified the source of an SNMP firewall monitoring tool to specifically give me the information and warnings I need. I never had these options in Windows. I've modified it so much, learning about how SNMP works from the source, that it's almost become a completely new piece of software. It would have taken me 10x as long if I had to figure all of the concepts from scratch.
This is nothing new to any of you.
But witness the voluminous tide of independently-produced crippleware which makes up the bulk of Windows software. There are some excellent freeware exceptions (WarFTP, Irfanview), but most Windows software is shareware. It is not free, and the source is not available.
What has made the "Linux" world so exciting - and I speak only for me - is the fact that freedom is the rule, rather than the exception. There is more "freedom" here than there is almost anywhere else. Even my grandmother refused to give out her best recipes. When your operating system is more community minded than your own grandmother, it's impossible not to consider the role of ideas and values beyond the ones and zeroes.
FSF and the GPL's "ideology" have created so much of the environment in which the "pragmatists" who just want "functional technology" thrive. Imagine, theoretically, having the Linux kernel, but then having to pay for all of the GNU utilities? See, I do think all of this would exist without the free software concept, but it would be very expensive. And we'd be a slave to the companies that produced them in terms of patching security holes and bugs.
It seems to me that the GNU aspect of the name represents the set of values that created the "Linux" community and keeps it free and dynamic, and the Linux part of the name is the practical, technical part (in terms of how and who you market them to). They seem pretty indivisible to me.
"Linux is a stable operating system based on UNIX." Great.
"Oh, and, it will cost us nothing."
Superb.
"And if we find some problem we can probably fix it ourself rather than spending a week getting the damn vendor to *admit* that a bug exists."
Wow.
"And we can even adopt the source to meet those small details we need, precisely fulfilling every bullet point on our needs document."
(Now as for this last one, anyone who has worked for a big company trying to purchase software to fill a need will understand how incredible and unique this is.)
I have on occasion winced a bit at some of Stallman's ideas or the way he states them, but I've made an allowance for a few things - first, the man's obvious frustration at the attempted separation of the values/"ideology" from the technology - and I share some of his frustration at this. (If the ideology is so overbearing, why not just go out and buy Solaris and be "free" of it? Because just as you can, in an atmosphere of free speech, advocate fascism, you can also use and benefit from free software while simultaneously slagging it, or at least its importance. I don't mean to make a direct comparison with people who are annoyed by Stallman and fascists, just the concept of being critical of something you're benefitting from.)
Secondly, Stallman *always* has to be the asshole. He always, as a point of principle, has to be the one everyone hates, because there's a lot less risk in saying, "Linux is a fun and powerful thing to use" rather than making an "ideological" point. I think it's a total virtue that he does this, which seems contrary to a lot of the complaints I hear about him. Yes, Stallman does scare some of the suits. I think in the long run, it is a small price to pay - freedom, for me, is far more important than certain individuals not using GNU/Linux in their corporation because of intellectual property concerns and because Stallman comes off as an angry hippie. I've never personally been worried about competition with Windows. GNU/Linux will survive because people want it to; precisely because people have an emotional and ideological attachment to it that, I believe, will withstand any test from the corporate world. I am sometimes dumbfounded by the amount of time people spend defending GNU/Linux compared with, say, human rights, but it is that spirit which will ensure that it survives.
After awhile, though, being the asshole has to get to be a drag. Personally I salute him for sticking with it and, in the face of all of this criticism, not giving up the fight for expediency. He fights for community values in the face of the same community often being hostile to him (It seems to me that for him the name is far more than semantics, though many of his critics seem to think it's precisely that. I think part of his fight is to make the point that *it isn't* just semantics, a point I agree with. It would be like trying to explain American civilization on the basis of a civics lesson (There are 100 senators, 2 from each state...) without the ideology (or mythology) (Individual rights, whatever).
Now, I agree that GNU/Linux is a mouthful. Maybe if we could do this all over again, we could find a more phonetically palatable thing to call this. But I personally think that the ideology and values of free software are so central and so paramount to this community, that it's worth tripping over my tongue a bit. If anything, when talking to someone who has never used GNU/Linux or hasn't thought about the ramifications of proprietary vs. free software, it raises the question "G...what?" In a sense it's a great way of starting a discussion.
As for Stallman being "bossy," which some people have argued, this is absurd. How can someone be bossy when they have no authority over you or your actions? By simply calling it all Linux all you wind up doing is guaranteeing Stallman won't grant you an interview. Big deal. I personally think you're doing a disservice to GNU/Linux when you leave the GNU part off, but you're free to do so, just as you're free to say "The West is great because it produces the best toys, but screw the people out there whining about the Constitution or freedom." There's nothing anyone can do - or should be able to do - about that.
I have a great operating system that I use every day to talk to people, exchange ideas, play games on, and run cool software. It didn't cost me anything, and I can modify and re-distribute it to other people. I am completely benefitting from the very wonderfully strange concept of free software. There is other cool software that can do many of the same things, but I'd have to pay probably thousands of dollars for it and then be stuck with its bugs and crufty source, especially if I've made such a considerable financial investment that it's not practical to abandon it. It seems a small thing to ask to call it GNU/Linux to preserve, conceptually, its roots as free software. I think that the freedom aspect of it (And as I run the Gentoo distribution, which downloads and compiles source for every package I want to install, it is obvious to me every time I update or install something) is so fundamental and crucial, that it's worth the small inconvenience and long-windedness of tacking on the GNU.
This is true for me, and I've got no problems with Stallman, and feel personally indebted to him. His efforts have not only provided me free software (And I do not think it's a contradiction in terms when you say, "You are free to use this, provided you don't make it un-free." any more than it is not a contradiction to say that "You can use your freedom in any way you want except to abridge another's freedom."), but his ideas have also made me think, and ultimately empowered millions of people.
Seems to me calling it all GNU/Linux is a small thing to ask - especially since contrary to his many critics, it's not really about reminding people of Stallman, but reminding people of Freedom. I really do believe that. With almost anyone else, I'd immediately assume it was mainly personal, but Stallman has been so consistent in this regard that I absolutely don't think it is, *fundamentally* personal (no doubt - and I blame him not at all - he would like a little personal credit for all of his work on this - and even at that rate, it's GNU, not Stallix or something).
As someone who has used GNU software far more than I've contributed, I just don't have the stones to complain about this small thing. I think were most people who use GNU/Linux to de-emphasize the values of the community, it would be extremely damaging to the operating system.
I understand fully that there are many people who understand all of this and just don't feel the need to pronounce the full name. But I would argue that this is important in terms of precisely defining what GNU/Linux is: an OS with - love it or hate it - an ideology attached. An ideology which has been as responsible for its present form as the practical code that has gone into it. And which we all - critics and advocates - benefit from every time we sit down at the keyboard.
I am just now getting used to calling it GNU/Linux, because I read and after thinking about it, was convinced by the document on the FSF site. This debate and irritation has been going on for awhile. I have not yet fixed all of my webpages to refer to it as GNU/Linux, but I will, for the reasons outlined above. People are obviously going to do what they are going to do but I would point out that originally, I was on the other side, because I initially considered it a silly semantic argument, especially given the weighty mouthful "Guh-new-Lin-ux."
But after thinking about it, I agree with Stallman's points. Putting the freedom up there in a paramount position in the name of the thing seems appropriate and even necessary. It's worth the price, to me.
The first problem is why say this at all? Why make it a semi-compulsory ritual to begin with?
Kids say this pledge literally thousands of times throughout their life to the point that it becomes a meaningless string of phonemes. The Pledge reminds me of listening to fellow Catholics recite the Profession of Faith on Sundays when I was a kid. So repetitious was it that no one even consciously knew what it was they were saying anymore. You could tell by the emotionless drone; it made the several parishes I was a part of sound like some religious cult under deep mind control. (In reality of course it was a bunch of people trying to stay awake).
Its not just the "under God" part I object to. It's the whole thing.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Well, what if immoral, sadistic acts are being committed under the name of that flag? The Klan flies that flag. The flag was on the uniforms of soldiers during the My Lai massacre. I don't think that the flag is evil, but it certainly is subjective and few can agree on what the flag means. Flags, like bumper stickers, are blunt objects that can mean a multiplicity of things to different people. If you're talking about the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so forth, well, yes, I have a personal allegiance to those moral and political principles. If you're talking about our corrupt Congress and increasingly spooky President and what he's doing supposedly in my name and yours as the figurehead of our Republic, then no. Americans in particular seem to have a weird fetish for these kinds of symbols, and it is something which seriously distracts from the very real principles we ought to be talking about.
And to the Republic for which it stands.
Someone pointed out that the the flag represents the Republic. Well, if so, then this is redundant. Strike the "pledge allegiance to the flag" part and just pledge allegiance to the Republic. But even this is problematic. What if you feel the Republic is corrupt? I often do (I often believe as a nation we do many good things, but it is certainly a mixed bag). I have no issue with the "as written" principles this country was founded on, nor even honest business and capitalism, but that this Republic honestly represents these principles consistently is more than questionable.
One Nation
Well, I believe that we are one nation, and that nations can and should be diverse and built around broad principles of civic morality. Tolerance, freedom, and standing up both for your own rights and those of your neighbor. Others may be into sedition. I don't know. I prefer to connect myself to the world and others in the contexts of honesty and mutually beneficial community, but I respect the rights of those who don't and want to live up a mountain in Montana somewhere.
Under God,
I don't think God has anything to do with it. For example, I seem to remember a passage in the Bible about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We are a capitalist country, and frankly, I have no problem with the honest, productive accumulation of wealth through honest trade and productivity. But depending on which part of the Bible you conveniently choose to follow today, it's questionable that God has anything to do with this. As an agnostic myself, I am not offended at all by other people saying this pledge (or praying silently to themselves in public places - even government buildings, or putting up Christmas trees in parks), but why must it be institutionalized in this instance? It's not a matter of having a problem with the Pledge of Allegiance, it is the problem of forcing others to say it as well. That strikes me as very, very, unAmerican. I've said the Pledge thousands of times, and saying Under God doesn't freak me out, but it is wholly unnecessary. Those who support the compulsory pledge, should they consider themselves quote-unquote Real Americans, ought to have no objection to this being purged in a nation supposedly founded on freedom of - and from - religion. I don't understand psychologically what makes it so important to compel others to swear allegiance to their particular God. It sounds rather...Taliban...to me. Or suggests a kind of self-doubt and paranoia allayed only by consensus, the assuredness of hearing many others pledge allegiance to a God you have some kind of doubt about. I don't understand the motivation here.
Indivisible Well thank God this nation divides when our government is perpetrating one atrocity for another, whether it be slavery, institutionalized racism, immoral, meddling wars abroad, or blatant Nixonesque authoritarianism. Unity is only a value when it is attached to a kind of tolerance and moral consensus, not when compelled through the kind of propaganda we're dealing with right now where our own congress is afraid to do anything other than indulge any authoritarian whim our President has. Division, however much it lulls us out of our stupor and worries us enough that we can't be satisfied drooling at stupid sitcoms at night, is healthy. Division is cultural, moral, and political dissonance; it insists that we weigh our actions and values as a nation. What good is unity if it is under the auspices of jingoism, groupthink, and collectivism? Division ought not be a permanent state but I'm really thankful that people are willing to stand up and say, "I will not support this; not even in the context that we are both countrymen and this is being done in our collective name." How often did our founding fathers make statements about how a revolution every so often is a healthy thing? We ought to be able to sustain reasonable differences and remain united, but there must be a limit to this. Otherwise, there is nothing worthwhile about our freedom, or our Republic.
With liberty, and justice, for all
Well with tongue in cheek, it's kind of fun to say this line with a heavy dose of irony. As noble as this sentiment is - and it is perhaps, in its honest, untarnished form, the most noble part of the Pledge of Allegiance, it...well...doesn't apparently apply to many classes of people including foreigners, pot smokers, hackers on trumped-up charges, anyone serving a draconian mandatory minimum sentence for a petty crime, dozens of political criminals from the Nixon years still in jail and denied new hearings, trials, or parole. People in internment camps. And so on.
The justice part doesn't apply much to the wealthiest and most powerful who buy their way out of justice and wind up serving sentences at federal country clubs. Celebrities also don't seem to go to jail very often for the things the rest of us do. Victims of right-wing regimes we've propped up in the past are excluded here, obviously. And so on and so forth. The point is, if anyone should be forced to take this pledge, it is our *leaders* and people in the justice system. Justice applies not only to the poor and downtrodden who often get screwed by the System because they don't have the money to hire a decent lawyer, but also to the rich and powerful who rarely pay for their crimes.
I don't think anyone should be forced or compelled to take any pledge. It ought not be part of any compulsory institution like our public education system (itself arguably a huge waste of time and money). But if there must be a pledge, it should be something more along lines of:
I pledge to be honest, to criticize my government when commits crimes or supports those who do. I pledge to uphold and fight for the values enshrined in our Constitution. I pledge to protest and throw my own weight against the eternally grinding gears of authoritarianism wherever I may find them. I pledge to respect and protect the values, practices, and expression of those who are different from me, even though I may find them objectionable, provided that those practices do not infringe on the freedom of others. I pledge to question authority, recognizing its legitimacy only when it serves the rational values of of liberty and justice. I pledge honesty, honor, respect, and civility in ordinary discourse and human interaction (This of course would be problematic among most Usenet users, but that's a different rant.) I pledge loyalty only to principles, and not the symbols, individuals, and collectives by which those principles are corrupted. I stand in opposition to hypocrisy, dishonesty, and the use of violence except as a last resort in legitimate retaliation or self-defense to solve disputes.
To me, this is a far more American pledge.
The first problem is why say this at all? Why make it a semi-compulsory ritual to begin with?
First of all, kids say this pledge literally thousands of times throughout their life to the point that it becomes a meaningless string of phonemes. The Pledge reminds me of, when I was a kid, listening to fellow Catholics recite the Profession of Faith on Sundays - so repetitious was it that no one even consciously knew what it was they were saying. You could tell by the emotionless drone; it made the several parishes I was a part of sound like some religious cult under deep mind control. (In reality of course it was a bunch of people trying to stay awake).
Its not just the "under God" part I object to. It's the whole thing.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Well, what if immoral, sadistic acts are being committed under the name of that flag? The Klan flies that flag. The flag was on the uniforms of soldiers during the My Lai massacre. I don't think that the flag is evil, but it is subjective. Flags, like bumper stickers, are blunt objects that can mean a multiplicity of things to different people. If you're talking about the principles of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so forth, well, yes, I have a personal allegiance to those moral and political principles. If you're talking about our corrupt Congress and increasingly spooky President and what he's doing supposedly in my name, then no.
And to the Republic for which it stands.
Someone pointed out that the the flag represents the Republic. Well, if so, then this is redundant. Strike the "pledge allegiance to the flag" part and just pledge allegiance to the Republic. But even this is problematic. What if you feel the Republic is corrupt? I do. Not the principles this country was founded on, not even honest business and capitalism, but that this Republic represents these noble principles less and less as the years go by.
One Nation
Well, I believe that we are one nation; and that nations can and should be diverse and built around broad principles of civic morality. Tolerance, freedom, and standing up both for your own rights and those of your neighbor. Others may be into sedition. I don't know.
Under God,
I don't think God has anything to do with it. I seem to remember a passage in the Bible about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. We are a capitalist country, and frankly, I have no problem with the honest, productive accumulation of wealth through honest trade and productivity. But depending on which part of the Bible you conveniently choose to follow today, it's questionable that God has anything to do with this. As an agnostic myself, I am not offended at all by other people saying this pledge, but why must it be institutionalized? It's not a matter of having a problem with the Pledge of Allegiance, it is the problem of forcing others to say it as well. That strikes me as very, very, unAmerican. I've said the Pledge thousands of times, and saying Under God doesn't freak me out, but it is wholly unnecessary. Those who support the compulsory pledge, should they consider themselves Real Americans, ought to have no objection to this being purged in a nation supposedly founded on freedom of - and from - religion. I don't understand psychologically what makes it so important to compel others to swear allegiance to their particular God. It sounds rather...Taliban...to me.
Indivisible
Well thank God this nation divides when our government is perpetrating one atrocity for another, whether it be slavery, institutionalized racism, immoral, meddling wars abroad, or blatant Nixonesque authoritarianism. Unity is only a value when it is attached to a kind of tolerance and moral consensus, not when compelled through the kind of propaganda we're dealing with right now where our own congress is afraid to do anything other than indulge any authoritarian whim our President has. Division, however much it lulls us out of our stupor and worries us enough that we can't be satisfied drooling at stupid sitcoms at night, is healthy. Division is cultural, moral, and political dissonance; it insists that we weigh our actions and values as a nation. What good is unity if it is under the auspices of jingoism, groupthink, and collectivism? Division ought not be a permanent state but I'm really thankful that people are willing to stand up and say, "I will not support this; not even in the context that we are both countrymen." How often did our founding fathers make statements about how a revolution every so often is a healthy thing? We ought to be able to sustain reasonable differences and remain united, but there must be a limit to this. Otherwise, there is nothing worthwhile about our freedom, or our Republic.
With liberty, and justice, for all
Well with tongue in cheek, it's kind of fun to say this line with a heavy dose of irony. As noble as this sentiment is - and it is perhaps, in its honest, untarnished form, the most noble part of the Pledge of Allegiance, it...well...doesn't apparently apply to many classes of people including foreigners, pot smokers, Kevin Mitnick, anyone serving a draconian mandatory minimum sentence for a petty crime, dozens of political criminals from the Nixon years still in jail and denied new hearings, trials, or parole. The justice part doesn't apply much to the wealthiest and most powerful who buy their way out of justice and wind up serving sentences at federal country clubs. Celebrities also don't seem to go to jail very often for the things the rest of us do. Victims of right-wing regimes we've propped up in the past are excluded here, obviously. And so on and so forth. The point is, if anyone should be forced to take this pledge, it is our *leaders*.
I don't think anyone should be forced or compelled to take any pledge. It ought not be part of any compulsory institution like our public education system (Itself a huge waste of time and money). But if there must be a pledge, it should be something more along lines of:
I pledge to be honest, to criticize my government when commits crimes or supports those who do. I pledge to uphold and fight for the values enshrined in our Constitution. I pledge to protest and throw my own weight against the eternal grinding gears of authoritarianism wherever I may find them. I pledge to respect and protect the values, practices, and expression of those who are different from me, even though I may find them objectionable, provided that those practices do not infringe on the freedom of others. I pledge to question authority, recognizing its legitimacy only when it serves the rational values of liberty, justice, and knowledge. I pledge honesty, honor, respect, and civility in ordinary discourse and human interaction. I pledge loyalty only to principles, and not the symbols, individuals, and collective by which those principles are corrupted. I stand in opposition to hypocrisy, dishonesty, and the use of violence except in legitimate retaliation or self-defense to solve disputes.
To me, this is a far more American pledge.
Well, I started out working in a computer store buying and selling used computer equipment and building new systems to spec. It seems like when you get 10 techs in a room, you get 11 opinions (With some exceptions - I don't know of anyone who loves, say, Packard Bell systems. That's a near consensus). I have three PCs here that I built on my own - two from brand new parts, and one from cannibalized used parts. I have another PC in the other office which was one of those TigerDirect barebones systems.
First, the absolute best thing you can do if money is not the #1 factor in your decision is build your own. It's simply the most rewarding, especially if you can buy the parts locally.
The first step is to use the web and sites like Anandtech to research what the best parts are, and then scale that against the price to find something you can live with. I have heard opinions from experienced techs that completely contradict each other. This may be a result of parts not working well in combination with some parts but quite well with others, or something as basic as the source of the parts being what I suppose you'd call "gray market" (usually from Asian countries - not to say that just because it comes from Asia, it's garbage, but if you find some questionable parts, they probably came over on a boat with glow in the dark Jesuses for your dashboard). The parts could be counterfeit altogether, or they could be remanufactured parts, or "rejected" surplus from a reputable manufacturer, as someone mentioned in regard to memory. Or, they could have "fallen off a truck", either figuratively or literally.
This is why I try to stick with name brand parts from reputable dealers.
There is no substitute for lab tests and benchmarks. When the results of these tests match the general opinion of experienced techs, or even empirical raves from users of a particular component, that's usually a good sign that the part is worth buying.
Subjective, short reviews in mass-market magazines and web sites are next to useless, and often completely contradictory. Find reviews of products which have been rigorously tested by professionals in a lab with reliable techniques. Some magazines and web sites will hire ANYONE to do product reviews, and some people are impressed by any BRIGHT SHINY OBJECT.
This takes time, but it is well worth it. Research each and every part, and then go to the newsgroup archives to see what people are saying empirically. Few products come unanimously recommended, but you can find a general "tilt" toward a product or brand being good or bad. I generally spend about 20 hours total researching all the parts for a new PC, since I only build one for myself on average every 30 months or so and have to research what's come on the market since. Spread it out over a week and you'll be fine. Make sure to look for interoperability issues as well as compatibility with whatever OS you want to use.
It is not always worthwhile to buy from the cheapest vendor. I figure for most things it is worth paying 10%-15% more locally for a product if I can easily return it if defective. Dealing with RMA processes is time consuming and can be expensive. That being said, I haven't found a decent local vendor here in Tucson yet, so I've been doing most of my ordering online.
As for barebones kits and "white box" machines, I think you can make the broad statement that, oftentimes you get one of these cheap systems that works flawlessly, and sometimes you don't. I think you take that risk with cheap parts, but sometimes you win on the gamble. I have a machine here running Mandrake 8.1 that hasn't hiccupped at all, and that's one of those Tiger Direct barebones kits. Then there is my homegrown Athlon system built with high quality parts which is rock-stable. But then my girlfriend has one of the TigerDirect barebones kits that has had a power supply die, and intermittent instability. So you roll the dice, but that's not saying you'll always lose. No vendor likes returns so if you can find someone locally that builds entire LANs for government agencies using the same combination of parts over and over, and they're reliable, go for it. When you order online, you really don't know what you're getting. Ear to the pavement helps, and Usenet is always your friend.
Brands. Everyone has brand loyalties. Some people have knowledge that is out of date. I used to service Compaqs and Dell Optiplexes in the mid to late 1990s, and from my standpoint, they were superb machines, well designed and easy to swap parts in and out of (Could swap a whole motherboard in one of the Compaq systems - this was when they were heavy and built like tanks - in under 2 minutes). We sold some used Compaqs which were ancient and still running like clockwork. I've heard that this has changed, but I have no direct experience with it. I've heard contradictory things about Compaqs, HPs, and Dells, from people saying they'd *only* use them in production and people who say they'd *never* use them in production.
Likewise I have had absolutely miserable experiences with Maxtor hard drives. Every single Maxtor I ever owned - about 3, have died within 3 years. Yet I have friends online who have run them for years without incident.
Conversely, Western Digital drives have served me well - I still have a (200?) MB Western Digital Hard drive that I rsn a BBS off of in 1992 and 1993 that still works like the day I bought it. I've encountered very opinionated people who consider Western Digital drives "overpriced crap" to quote a close friend.
I like Asus motherboards. I used to sell computers built with them and have 2 PCs here that I've built with Asus boards, and they have been perhaps the most reliable thing in each system. Some people swear by other brands - again, the best thing to do is read detailed reviews and lab tests. Asus boards are generally reviewed and regarded well but I'm sure there's someone reading this who hates them.
Do the research, take the risk (you always do), and build your own. It is a rewarding experience that you will keep on feeling good about every time you sit down at your PC. And what you learn may help you avoid costly labor fees for repair down the road; knowing how to build and service PCs is a valuable skill that pays off time and time again, and you may even have some private opportunities to make some cash or make someone's day by helping them out down the road, with what you've learned.
It's a beautiful thing, considering what you can do with a computer, and the art of building and maintaining PCs is not treated with the respect that it should be.
Having worked in retail selling PCs and then having worked for a large ISP doing tech support and writing technical support content, my opinion of the matter, whatever it is worth, is that no one has realized the basic fact that support works only when both sides meet at the middle.
First of all, companies spend too much on supporting the least profitable customers. There are, unfortunately, some people who are just too stupid to use certain technologies. That may not fit in with the idealism of the present age, but it is a fact. At the same time, savvy users are often denied the online resources / self help data which is cheap to provide. No one should ever have to dig, for example, for IP, DNS, etc. setttings for their ISP. The ISP I use doesn't have a single page written with the basic numbers that I need to configure a PC, but they'll spend countless hours writing "How to use e-mail" documents and supporting users who delete their WINNT directory "because they're using Windows 2000."
Learning to use technology requires the affirmative and volitional use of brainpower. The worst disservice you can do to support a person is to tell them what keys to press, and in what order, without telling them why. This may be a short term fix to get a customer off of the phones, but it results in countless followup calls which make hold times longer, support more expensive, and therefore services for expensive. A little user education goes a long way. Consumers should be expected to open up their minds and learn about the technologies they use. If a 3 year old can use a PC - and many, many do, there is no reason why a full-grown person cannot spend a little time in the evenings educating themselves in whatever way they are most comfortable with.
"I don't have the time." What this means is, the individual would rather watch Survivor than spend 30 minutes in their evenings learning a little bit about the technology they use. Well, that's *their* problem. In the end, the decreased productivity they experience, all of the time saving measures they cannot avail themselves of, etc. far exceeds the simple initial investment of RTFM. How often I've watched people in my own office lay out little bulletins and brochures using scotch tape and scissors when they could have done it in a fraction of the time using only the most basic functions of Word. It's not as if you have to be a computer geek, just a reasonably educated computer user. Anyone who has ever put the time in ought to know that the investment pays off, frees up time, money, and resources.
Paranoia about support boundaries. Several companies I've worked for have paranoia about supporting products beyond the most rudimentary tasks. An example of this is setting up a Linux system to work with an ISP. Write the damn documentation, put it online, and then put a disclaimer on it saying, "Use this information at your own risk. We don't support it and are not responsible for anything that happens to you including spontaneous combustion if it all goes awry." Whatever the company's legal department is happy with. Some companies do this now and it makes life easier and saves a phone call, which costs companies so much money.
So much time has been spent catering to the user's ignorance that consumers are not expected to take some effort to learn about the products they buy. Every time something is dumbed down to the point a monkey can use it, inevitably two things happen:
Ideally, ample online/self-help resources ought to be provided by every company that manufactures a product, because it is cheap; in fact it costs almost nothing. You spend the time hiring some technical writers or knowledge engineers to put together a knowledge base or support web, then just have a few maintainers on. Agents can then use this information for support, and so forth. This is infinitely cheaper than doing phone support.
Then, there ought to be tiered pricing for support, depending on the issue. Phone support ought not necessarily be free. People who expect companies to bend over backwards for them have no conception of revenue models. Support is *expensive*. There is no reason, for example, a company should be forced to support someone who will not crack open a manual. What this does is drive up wait times, resulting either in customer dissatisfaction, or the company has to hire more tech support people, which costs money, cuts into profits, resulting in the expense being passed onto the consumer.
But consumers want everything dirt cheap. That's Capitalism. What they don't want is the very basic reality that you get what you pay for. Take low-margin industries like PC retail. Sure you can buy a bargain basement clone with who-knows-what in it, but somehow when it works like crap, the indignant dissastisfied-customer attitude doesn't impress me. Support and quality ought to come at a premium. If customers didn't buy technology like they buy clothes pins, like "they're all the same," maybe they wouldn't be bitten so hard by poor support and low quality.
Inevitably every customer I've dealt with has some "10 year old whiz kid" in the family who *thinks* he knows everything about computers. Occasionally this is the case, but more often my experience has been that for some perverse reason it has become *fashionable* to be a computer nerd, and so a lot of people who know how to mouse around in Windows call themselves experts for the supposed status it brings (I went to school in the 1980s and the opposite could not have been more true). All technology is not build the same. All companies are not built the same. Sometimes, yeah, you get what you pay for. Deal with it.
Learn to read manuals and use the library and especially online resources. Or else get someone to teach you. Or pay for the support that you require that so few others, who have the ability to learn on their own, do.
I had no one to teach me about computers or technology, or how to work my VCR. I had to sit down and learn it, and it didn't take up all of my free time; I didn't have to dedicate my life to figure out how to stop the damn blinking 12:00 on my VCR. It took 5 minutes. 5 minutes people are not willing to spend. And in 90% of the cases not because they are working 24/7 and don't have a single second to figure it out, but because they are lazy and would rather indulge themselves in whatever banalities pass for entertainment in the world these days. I am not sympathetic. There are so many resources available to people, and the time required to learn the basics of anything so considerably small compared to the time-saving benefits and payoffs, that I don't see why I should care about this gap.
Somewhere in America there is an idiot whining about the fact that he has to learn to cursor around the menu system on his VCR, while an 8 year old is installing FreeBSD in his free time.
Welcome to the 2000s. This is life. I wonder if people whined about having to learn to read following the invention of the printing press and the onset of the Enlightenment, and eventually the industrial revolution.
Carry your own weight, or get out of the road, maggots.
M.U.L.E. It's always been M.U.L.E. First on the Commodore 64 when I was 12 or 13, then via emulators since. It worries me that a single game can keep me enthralled for the space of something like 17 years.
Others: Gyruss (MAME), Klax (MAME). When I was an adolescent, Dig Dug. But the first one; the first video game ever to addict me and in fact caused a chain reaction which has left me a computer geek to this day: Asteroids.
It's not that I'm being all retro. It's that I'm OLD.
One question I'd ask is how many people here really have ever had an interest in interacting with the world at large? My whole life has been a search for my "tribe." My criteria, however, have changed over time. I used to be one of these people for whom having an opinion and stating it at people forcefully was important. Google's extensive Usenet archive is a painful reminder of this admittedly anti-social tendency.
But this has changed, a lot now, especially since I've become increasingly irritated with the personalities in my own ideological camp. There's something more essential than politics in a person which attracts me to them. As a libertarian, I've found myself strangely attracted to anarchists and even communists who have a moral (as opposed to intellectual ivory tower) attachment to their viewpoints; who live it more than preach it.
I've found common ground with a diverse range of people and the online communities I've been a part of or in fact have created would meet almost anyone's definition of diversity. This was even the case when I took great pleasure in being a so-called "pundit."
I don't know how or why it happened, but somewhere along the line I realized that when you can clear through all of the semantic and ideological bullshit, most people are more similar than different - that is, this is true of most thinking people. I've known socialists and classical liberals even at my own university who bitterly hated each other, yet lived their lives in almost precisely the same way - as academics, as civilized intellectuals.
This realization has caused my sense of community, or I should say more precisely, my need for it, to evolve dramatically. As I get older I feel that I know less and less and grow increasingly suspicious of people who think that they do or who dismiss opposing opinions with a wave of the hand and a mumbled "tripe!" under their breath. I seem less and less sure of things and yet in that uncertainty, somehow I feel more peaceful, more at ease, more...in a word, wise (I feel that way - whether or not I am becoming more wise remains to be seen). The arrogance and tension that categorizes so many online forums seems increasingly juvenile to me. The loud, bitter debates I witness and that I used to incite and participate in seem increasingly more juvenile and pointless, because in the end, it seems to me personally, the number of ways we are different is insignifiant to what we have in common. I used to think that this was a bunch of hippie crap, but frankly it seems more and more true as I watch, for example, conservatives and liberals argue for hours with each other in a newsgroup and then get up to go to the same jobs with the same motivation to support their familes. I am intrigued by this more and more every day, and all of the testosterone I used to produce in ranting and screaming on a newsgroup is just gone. What remains is this desire to make peace, find common ground, and find a way that people with differing opinions can work for things they both need and want.
But even at the height of my own ideological arrogance, I never stopped listening to the opposition and seriously reconsidering my own viewpoints. And this goes beyond politics. Maybe I've just never had the self-confidence to proudly affirm to myself and others that I have concluded my consideration of matters and events. As I look back, I cannot honestly claim that it was mere intellectual honesty, but more that I always felt that our own existence and knowledge of "How Things Are" has been precarious at best. Or at least, I've felt that *my* knowledge has been precarious. For every viewpoint, there is a dissenting opinion.
I think it is healthy to expose ourselves to a diverse range of opinions and ways of thinking but at the same time I remember being in high school (which was in the late 80s) and cafeterias were not unlike the closed communities we see online. Katz talks about this great social past we once had, but at least in my lifetime, I've never seen anything even approximating it, either before the 90s or after. It always amuses me to hear people talk about The Breakfast Club in negative terms, "bah! bunch of cardboard stereotypes."
Maybe my experience was unique but my school was filled with pretty much exactly those stereotypes, and they sat together in closed communities at the lunchtable. The "conflict and opposition" much touted in building a well-rounded worldview generally involved members of our Wrestling team indiscriminately beating the living shit out of anyone clutching a sci-fi paperback. I'm still not entirely sure what was to be gained by this.
In the suburbs where I grew up, a cul-de-sac is a cul-de-sac, is a cul-de-sac. I never interacted with kids from the cities, or different countries, or from domestic rural areas. But I do that now. I had maybe 3 friends in all of high school. I hadn't ever met a labor organizer or human rights activist, but I've met many of them online. I look at articles like Katz's (and there have been many like it), and I just don't see my own experience reflected in it.
It drives me nuts when people talk about the online world and use "We" to describe things. Because "We" has rarely ever included me in any sense. What I do know is that I have met many people from far and abroad who I never would have met otherwise. And I have never felt particularly connected to any mass of people in any locale in which I've lived. There have been individuals, sure, but the insinuation that somehow everyone went to town meetings and social events and knew each other and built communities this way, well... I know it is true of certain places, but none that I've ever lived in. In New Jersey where I grew up, the "walls" were massive tracts of landscaping and fences. Everywhere I've ever been, people have been building their own moat-surrounded castles metaphorically, and this is something I noticed long before the internet ever worked its way into modern consciousness.
As for the BBS scene, it too was filled with a bunch of exclusivity. Closed membership boards. Elite or not elite? Got the right political opinion? Are you too young or too old? What is your view on hacking and software piracy? Once in awhile, there was a great board with a great cross section but even that was based on a kind of closed commonality: All participants were people with general focus and broad interests who had the social skills to interact with people different than themselves. Any community by definition must exclude some portion of the general population. I don't see this as a bad thing; where the positives or negatives of this come into play is *on what basis* are you doing this?
I use an instant messenger client for one purpose: as a pager. Or roughly the same way I use a telephone. "Hey, X is on TV, you should watch it." "Hey, do you want me to pick up some beer on the way over tonight?" "Hey, do you know what bluescreen.dll is for?" But the vast majority of my communication is on Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC. I have chosen this because it maximizes my return. That others don't do the same is not a fault of the technology but of the use of it. I'm even engaged to someone I met online who lived hundreds of miles away from me. In time, most of my online communications do result in some kind of personal meeting.
So it may well be true that 95% of our lives are local, but rather than accept this as just a matter of fact (which it may be, but it is in my opinion an *unfortunate* matter of fact), the internet has been truly (here comes the e-word) empowering in the sense that I'm no longer limited by the "slim pickings" in my own backyard. For me, my time online has been an enhancer and companion to - not a replacement for - real community building and social interaction.
I find e-mail to be a highly superior form of communication than the telephone. It is more economical, more thought out, more prosaic and literate, more precise, and free of all of the annoying verbal diarrhea and pointless tangents (Something like 30% of every phone conversation I have ever had has been comprised of: ummm, what was I gonna say, umm, hmm...errr, ummm... as well as roundabout ways of explaining in 5 minutes of babbling what could be said more precisely in one line of a well-thought out e-mail. Beyond which, with e-mail a record of the conversation exists and can be referred back to.)
So while all of these social phenomena may be true if you measure it objectively, it hasn't been true for me. It just, simply, hasn't. As I said in the beginning of this musing, my needs in terms of online communities have changed, and one of the reasons is, through interacting with people of so many diverse opinions online (90% of which simply didn't exist in suburban New Jersey in the sea of mass produced housing developments and strip malls), I know now that I haven't even begun to expose myself enough to ideas to have a definitive opinion on almost anything. I used to think I knew it all. Now, largely because of the internet but more precisely because of the diversity you can find there *if you mine for it*, I realize that the older I get, and more opinions I encounter, the less sure I am of what I myself, think. And the more open I am the possibility that world isn't exclusively, as I assumed when I was an angst ridden teen, "full of stupid morons who need to be exposed to the enlightement that only I am privy to." It has made me feel better about the world. But I'd feel even better if more people found some humility and tried to be more constructive with their opinions than divisive. Online, with the safety of a screenname, so many people want to be Noam Chomsky or Rush Limbaugh or whatever. They want to talk *at* people rather than *to* them. I'm as guilty or even more so than others, of this. I believe the potential for all of this to change can happen once people get bored and worn out of having to be right just for the cheap thrill of it, all the time.
In sum, all of the problems Katz mentions are human problems. People *choose* to use the internet as they do. They can also *choose* to use the internet for good, or for evil. Kind of like *The Force*. People *choose* the easy, exclusive forms of online communications wherein they are never exposed to divergent viewpoints, philosophies, etc. Once one gets over the need to be *right* all the time, it is amazing how intellectually nutritious it can be to engage in *discourse* with different-thinking people as opposed to bickering, debate, and put-downs. Discourse is in my opinion far more stimulating than banding together with like-minded people and saying, "Screw those other guys." I just wish it hadn't taken me nearly 30 years to figure that out: That a person is not "full of shit" simply because they disagree with you.