Our modern society likes to focus on quick fixes. Your kid acting "strangely?" Dope him up on Ritalin. A few kids snap and go on a shooting spree? Must be the movies. We're trying to raise our kids on a checklist of things that are "good" and "bad."
Parents have used checklists for a long time. My own parents handed down their own checklists to me. Don't swear. Don't fight, walk away from bullies. Don't steal. Do your homework. Do go outside and spend some time away from the computer. Checklists have a place. But they fall apart because they feel to the child exactly like what it is. Arbitrary rules. The child doesn't necessarily understand them, and as a result challenges them. I sure as heck swear when no adults were present. I avoided homework whenever possible. I picked a few fights.
More valuable were the lessons on how to think and reason. My parents helped me learn to reason out rules and ways of behaving. I could ramble on for pages with the lessons I learned, but it can all be summarized in the Golden Rule, "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." I may have decided that my parents religion wasn't for me, but that simple rule, understandable by any child, has served as a guidepost for me.
When exposed to that simple rule and a lot of things that are legal become morally wrong. Keeping software proprietary becomes harder to justify (I want others to share with me, so shouldn't I share with them. Isn't that what RMS wanted?). Insulting someone is nearly impossible.
Conversely, a lot of "rules" become irrelevant. A rousing chorus of Uncle Fucka isn't really hurting anyone. (I choose to reduce my own swearing because curses lose a level of impact when commoditized, but that's a different issue.) A little nudity doesn't hurt anyone. In some situations, a lie can better than the truth.
So, this mother, for one reason or another, chose to allow her children to see South Park. Maybe she's letting the twin gods of television and cinema raise her children, but maybe she has decided that the movie won't harm her children. Maybe she has instilled her children with a sense of right and wrong, and is comfortable that they will be able to enjoy the movie without mental damage. It's her right to make this decision for her kids.
But the theatre has decided for her. Apparently General Cinemas knows better than she does what is appropriate for her kids.[1].
So Jon generously stepped in. While his story was a bit far fetched (A priest? Clearly Jon needs more practice with lies.:-), he did a good thing. He didn't teach the kids that you should lie to get what you want. He taught them that their mother's decision was better than the theatres. He taught them a bit of sacrifice (he missed portions of Eyes Wide Shut to help a woman he didn't know). He taught them that a persons moral choices can be independant of society, business, and law.
Of course, the kids only learned these lessons if they have been taught to think about why people do things, and to judge actions on some system of belief, not on a checklist of rules. I can only hope their mother did this.
[1] Disclaimer: General Cinemas isn't really a bad guy. It's a company that wants to make money, and it thinks it will make more money following this path. Or perhaps the owner of the branch really believes this is for the betterment of society. Either way, GC should not be demonized. People should express their desires for how a business should act to their local businesses, and refuse to patronize businesses with which they have serious problems. I suspect that if enough people tell General Cinemas that they are using other theatres because of this treatment, GC will change its stance.
1. Too many people talking at once. It easily gets confusing.
2. Cut down on the sound effects. Little bits to seperate segments is just fine, but gratuitous sound effects suck.
Ideas:
1. Interviews with interesting people. Basically, if you'd like to talk to them, we're probably interetested in hearing them. Phone interviews aren't too hard to set up either, especially if they're really short. Geez, lots of people I'd love to hear interviews with post here.
2. Deeper research on things covered on Slashdot. This is just something I'd like to see more of in general, in "print" and audio. For example, track down someone who lives nearby with an Aibo and borrow it. Play with it some and tell us what you think of it.
I, like many geeks, and chronically disorganized. I forget things I promised to do, forget appoints, forget shopping lists, forget little notes.
I tried, dutifully, a little dayminder notebook for several years. It was an improvement. But I'd forget to look at it every day, it couldn't alert me that I had an appointment in 15 mintes, and when I took long notes in it that inevitably needed to be transcribed into a computer, I got irritated.
Then Palms walk into my life. The Palm III changed my life. It beeps to remind me of appointments. I put digital things I want to read on it, and put notes I want on my computer on it. It's small convient and has made me much more organized.
All in all, it's the right tool for me.
But.
To be far, I have yet to meet someone for whom their Palm was really useful in a business setting. I suspect there are people for whom it is useful, but amoung the roughly 15 Palm/Pilot owners I know, none really use it for anything work related. We use it to manage our personal lives.
My point: First, the article may be right, for businesses, in many situations, Palms probably aren't terribly useful. Second, for a disorganized geek, I swear by mine, and strongly recommend it to others.
This has occurred several times now. Someone (typically a journalist, but in this case Mindcraft) prints something less than glowing about Linux. Fine, it happens. A bunch of immature twits send hate mail. Not okay, and we should probably take efforts to let these people know that this sort of attitude hurts the cause more than it helps, but it happens. (There will always be childish people on the net.) But then the journalist quotes of the hate mail, or in Mindcraft's case, publishes it on their web site. Um, what?
What exactly is the point? To show that their are immature people who can send email? I think we're all well aware of that. To show that Linux people are all raving loons? That's a sad generalization, as bad as assuming that all teens are vandals because some are vandals. To show that Mindcraft feels hurt by this? Possibly, but is quoting the messages necessary?
The link to the page on Mindcraft's home page is "Ouch! Net rage (road rage on the Information Superhighway) defined." Are they trying to show what sort of stuff happens on the net? Mindcraft didn't seem like the sort to study the social atmosphere of the net, and the page is lacking any sort of analysis. Are they really trying to compare a bunch of stupid email to road rage?
Frankly, I think a few people were a little pissed at getting the mail (and understandable), and quickly through the page together. While this is understandable as an individual, I think it's in poor taste for a corporation.
[Context: the article "seeing Stallman and deconstructing Katz" by Lloyd Wood, it's the second link in the above article.]
I'm awfully tempted to just say "Lloyd Wood doesn't get it." But that's overgeneralizing it, and so I'm ramble on for a bit about why I don't think he gets it. Of course, first I'll need to explain my perspective, (and thus, explain the 'it' that Mr. Wood doesn't get).
I don't usually read newspapers. When I do read a newspaper, I find myself irritated that they bother to kill trees to print such mindless tripe. I'm not terribly fond of television or radio news either. The closest I come is CNN Headlines News in the morning, and I only stand for it because I'm still in my semi-awake haze.
I feel abandoned by modern media. (Media as news source, not media as entertainment. Not that there is much of a line anyway.) They have decided what is important for me to know. But I really don't care. Mr. Wood probably won't appreciate this, but I think this issue is better dealt with by Jon Katz in several of his previous articles, including this one.
Anyway, as I sat here thinking about why I like Katz, even though I disapprove of many of his articles (I'm terribly unhappy about the book related stuff), I came to a realization. I do read a newspaper. It just happens to be digital and run by a guy better known as CmdrTaco than his real name.
A while ago, I read an interesting article complaining that the media was becoming too neutral (or at least trying hard to look neutral). Perhaps, the article argued, we needed media with opinions. (I apologize for forgetting the source of the article.) Well, as I look around, I find that Slashdot has become my media of choice. It's got opinions and attitudes, and it has become interesting to me. It's got the "editorial balance" that Mr. Wood seems to feel is so important, it just happens to have chosen to balance it against certain issues and opinions. (In fact, every newspaper, online magazine, and news show has such a skewed view, Slashdot just doesn't hide it under a veneer of impartiality.)
Yes, it's filtered through a certain set of glasses. But at least I get some say in which pair of glasses.
So, Slashdot is my newspaper, my magazine. It serves me. And, based on its popularity, it serves a lot of other people. But it doesn't serve everyone. No media outlet with an opinion can. (And those they try to avoid having an editorial slant, and opinion, end up alienating some people anyway.)
And if Slashdot partially serves one's needs, skip the stuff you don't like. My favorite newspaper (when I was still regularly reading such things) was the Wall Street Journal. I only read the front page to get a quick view of world news. The rest of the paper had no interest to me. If Katz has no interest to someone, don't read him. I eventually decided I was unwilling to purchase the Wall Street Journal to just read the front page, it wasn't worth the money. Fortunately, Slashdot is free, so it costs me nothing to skip Katz's articles, or Star Wars stuff, or anything else. (With the advent of the customizable Slashdot, I can choose to never see posts by a particular author or on a particular topic.)
So, why is Mr. Wood complaining? In fact, why is Mr. Wood reading Slashdot? If you feel that the editor is "...someone who appears to be functionally illiterate...and it looks as if he would think that 'editorial balance' has something to do with spreading webserving load via SMP." why read on? It's nice that Mr. Wood is willing to forgive Rob for the above "given his youth and lack of a decent education....", but clearly Slashdot is not for him. Perhaps Mr. Wood would be happier with more traditional newspapers headed by older, wiser, and presumably better educated heads.
Cheap shots:
Mr. Wood took a few cheap shots, so I thought I'd fire a few back (in no particular order:
(All quotes are Mr. Woods. Of course, in many cases he is quoting Mr. Katz.)
If I posted this to Slashdot it would be quietly censored - as previous anti-Katz material has reportedly been. I don't believe Malda has either the courage or the understanding of editorial balance to post this in full in his Brave New Widely-Moderated World Where Anything Supposedly Goes, despite the traffic and attention it may attract.
If it was any more quietly censored, it probably would have been a feature article. Wow, the terrible pain of being censored by CmdrTaco, who stated "I agree with most of the stuff in these articles...." I'm sorry, I seemed to have missed any sort of solid information about the anti-Katz material that was "reportedly" censored. Having browsed the followup messages on several Katz articles, I can assure you that there is a lot of anti-Katz material there. Some of it is even good.
Mr. Wood proceeds to rip many of Jon Katz's quotes out of content. (No, I'm not refuting all of them. Yes, I think that some of the points Mr. Wood brings up are valid, but some verge on petty.)
Geeks bit the heads off of chickens and rats in carnivals...
Suggesting that Alice Cooper, faded mainstream media musician who gets television time as an indicator of American culture, is a geek, strikes me as rather, well, odd. Come again?
Interesting, a quick scan of the article the Katz quote is from quickly reveals that Katz is discussing the transition of the word geek from the former meaning to the later meaning. (In fact, to quote Webster's Seventh Dictionary (1965), a geek is "a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usu. includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake")
Movies (and TV) are, after all, one of a culture's most revealing, reliable mirrors
And what does this tell us about ancient Rome - or should I watch a rerun of 'Ben Hur'? If this is true of the United States, I'm glad I don't live there. I'd hate to think that the Jerry Springer show was real life, or that Katz appearing on the Today Show would indicate that many Americans using the Internet are just like Katz.
Clearly Katz means mirror in the most literal possible sense. Obvious Movies and TV directly reflect exactly what happens on a day to day basis. Feh. Perhaps mirror isn't the perfect word, but it's not a new analogy, and certainly not one created by Katz. A culture reflects its goals, desires, and fears into its entertainment. Jerry Springer does reflect our desire for voyeurism, a way to handle our fears that our lives are more messed up than anyone elses, a way to satisfy our desire to feel better than others. And while ancient Rome didn't have movies, they certainly had plays, poetry, and prose which did the same thing. What the Romans protrayed in their forms of entertainment reflected upon them.
If Katz's technical knowledge is still open to question, I'll point out:
... that the server where the Katz-alert mailing list is run...
will give you a 'welcome to the NT 4 options pack' page running on an IIS server. Remember, Katz is a man praising Linux to the skies...while dismissing Gates as a dwarf even as he relies on Gates' software.
Good God, no! The mailing list run by someone else on a machine not administrated by Katz is running IIS! I personally praise Linux and dispise Gates, but work under Windows every day. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean I'm not allowed to use it. I'm not above using something I dislike if it's the only option, and sometimes that's the case. I sincerly doubt Katz asked freedomforum, "Gee, could you set up a listserv for me, and make sure it's running on an NT box". He (or freedomforum) was probably offered the use of the machine and accepted. Maybe Linux would be better. Maybe not. Does it really affect his articles?
Between "skies" and "while" in the above quote, I pulled the following:
(All Hail Linux! To criticise Linux is to risk the wrath of thousands of high school students and other sociopaths who can't spell!),
I don't even know what to think of this. Is Mr. Wood saying that Katz is warning us that criticizing Linux will draw flames for high school students and sociopaths? I seem to have missed the article where Katz says that.
Online, everybody is a critic, each opinion as good as any other.
This is said by the man who goes on to talk about text written in 'ASCCI', thus disproving his own claim. I think the opinion that it's called ASCII is likely to be the rather better opinion.
Actually, I think that the fact that it is called ASCII is better yet. And I suspect that Katz doesn't hold any sort of opinion that it is spelled ASCCI. If you pick on his spelling and charge that Katz is incapable of editing, I'd believe it. But to claim that a typo is evidence that Katz's discussion of opinions is invalid is completely silly.
Wood points out that Katz doesn't have a college degree. So what? A college degree is a piece of paper. I know people who graduate from college with minds completely free of knowledge, and people who never graduated that I deeply respect for their knowledge and wisdom.
You've got a long way to go, guys.
It all depends upon where you are going. I'm not quite sure I see where you are pointing Mr. Wood, and given that I'm comfortable with Slashdot right here, I see no reason for it to start going anywhere.
Having recently registered a domain, your first bill doesn't show up for a few weeks, and it's due in a month. So roughly 1.5 months of free registration.
I'm told that in the past, they didn't send out bills for months, but I'm less certain of this.
So it is possible to register a bunch of domain names for "free" for a while. My understanding is that this is how squatters work.
Ignore the pointy haired boss behind the curtain
on
Free the Open Source
·
· Score: 1
Feh.
Just ignore the silly article. It's typical pointy haired boss claptrap. While the pointy haired bosses sits around worrying about the granola eaters who want free software (clearly without the faintest idea of what "free softare" means) and communism, their capitalist loving underlings will cheerfully use and support free software to get their jobs done. As other articles have pointed out, many people are "sneaking" linux boxes and other free software into their jobs to make their lives easier, their network stabler, and generally running the company. Free software will continue to grow, not because CTOs decide that's it's now the hip thing to do, but because it's so darn useful those in the trenches.
Ah, this article reminds me of my first Linux. Me, Slackware, a pile of floppies, long nights downloading, and not the slightest idea what I was doing. It was new (to me), Win3.1 gave me daily problems, and it was similar to the cool thing called SunOS running at the computer labs. Well, that and I wanted gcc so I could code at home. (I didn't learn until djgpp until later.) And I spent a lot of time installing, hosing the file system, reinstalling, monkeying with things at random, reinstalling, and generally being lost. But as Katz points out, you learn to not be afraid. You learn to dig through log files, error messages, and documentation. Everything you need to solve your problem is right in front of you, it just takes time to find.
Jon, you mention how cool it was to watch the pppd attempt to dial out. I can promise you, it just gets better. Eventually it will become old hat, and you'll move on to other things. At each point you'll think "Wow, I couldn't do this with such-and-such an operating system, I don't know how I ever did without it." You'll acquire a need to mess around with more and more things. Maybe you'll try a few other window managers, write a script to automate some daily task, or something similar. That's one of the neat things.
Part of the Unix way of thinking is that first you need some basic grounding. Things like how to edit a config file, how to kill a process, how to navigate the drive, how to read a log file, how to find the documentation. Once you've got that under your belt (and you're well on your way), nothing new is terribly hard. It's just a matter of finding the right configuration file, reading the right log file, finding the documentation.
The power to fix things is one of the reasons for the vilification of Windows and MacOS among Unix lovers. I've never had any Unix-esque operating system simply decide that it was going to die for no reason. I've never had to reinstall the operating system to fix a software problem. The Windows and MacOS way of thinking is "The user doesn't want to be bothered, so try to fix things yourself." The down side of this is that there is little support for fixing those problems that do sneak by. Most Unix tools on the other hand, cheerfully complain when they are unhappy, and many provide useful messages allowing you to track down the problem and squish it. People complain about the cryptic error messages from Unix, but once you've learned a basic bit of jargon, many of those error messages are quite helpful. This is as opposed to such stunning error messages as "Error -14", "The operation failed because 'The operation completed successfully'", or a blue screen of death.
Put simply, when something goes wrong on my Linux box, I can hunt the problem down and fix it so it doesn't happen again. It may not be easy, put it's possible. When my Windows box isn't happy, well, often all I can do is hope it doesn't happen again. Or I can reinstall the software, and occasionally the operating system.
For those that haven't seen it yet (it's been mentioned on slashdot before), a good article on the dangers of making computers easier to use (in particular, it's a discussion on "Wizards" in Visual C++, but it touches on the general topic) is The Dumbing Down of Programming.
Oh, and as a suggestion Jon, stop using the root account ASAP. I suspect you know this (most books on linux mention it explicitly), but it's one of the most important things to learn. While you're setting things up, you certainly need to use root, and you'll occasionally need to use root later to tweak things or install new software, but with great power comes great responsibility. It's easy to make a mistake that takes a few hours to fix, and it's possible to make a mistake that requires reinstalling the system. The nice thing about user accounts is that if your system is reasonably configured, it is very hard for you to muck things up, making it all the safer to boldly mess with things you don't understand.
Thanks, Jon, for an excellent article. The last two were a little fluffy (fun to read, but nothing that left a lasting impression). This article reminded me of my first installations, and the fun it was.
For those of you saying that "Jon isn't hacking", I'd like to remind you that hacking is a personal thing. Each person hacks in his own way, and grows as they go. Sure, what Jon is doing is no longer hacking to me, but once upon a time it was.
If you're the sort of person who thinks the Jargon File (The New Hacker's Dictionary) is a good reference, "hack" has 9 definitions, including:
"6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. 'Whatcha up to?' 'Oh, just hacking.'"
That said, I don't think Jon views himself as a hacker, nor do I think that he views himself as hacking in the other senses of the word. He's just some guy learning to monkey around with his computer, mostly for the sake of doing so. And in the process, he's learning why most of us do so. And if he keeps down this road, he may become a hacker. It's been known to happen.:-)
Yes, installing a Windows printer driver really is easy. But it wasn't for Jon. And it isn't for people across the world. No amount of pretty user interface will help people get over their fear of computers. If anything, insulating people in a layer of protection designed to make their computer "user friendly" increases their fear and panic when something goes wrong.
Jon's not here to laugh with us as how much Microsoft products suck (We do that well enough:-). He's here to talk about the experience of computers with people. His experience with the printer is typical of thousands of people every day. His writings are a strong argument that perhaps there is a down side of "user friendliness", and something to be said for learning about the internals of your system.
Slashdot Mirror
Parents have used checklists for a long time. My own parents handed down their own checklists to me. Don't swear. Don't fight, walk away from bullies. Don't steal. Do your homework. Do go outside and spend some time away from the computer. Checklists have a place. But they fall apart because they feel to the child exactly like what it is. Arbitrary rules. The child doesn't necessarily understand them, and as a result challenges them. I sure as heck swear when no adults were present. I avoided homework whenever possible. I picked a few fights.
More valuable were the lessons on how to think and reason. My parents helped me learn to reason out rules and ways of behaving. I could ramble on for pages with the lessons I learned, but it can all be summarized in the Golden Rule, "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." I may have decided that my parents religion wasn't for me, but that simple rule, understandable by any child, has served as a guidepost for me.
When exposed to that simple rule and a lot of things that are legal become morally wrong. Keeping software proprietary becomes harder to justify (I want others to share with me, so shouldn't I share with them. Isn't that what RMS wanted?). Insulting someone is nearly impossible.
Conversely, a lot of "rules" become irrelevant. A rousing chorus of Uncle Fucka isn't really hurting anyone. (I choose to reduce my own swearing because curses lose a level of impact when commoditized, but that's a different issue.) A little nudity doesn't hurt anyone. In some situations, a lie can better than the truth.
So, this mother, for one reason or another, chose to allow her children to see South Park. Maybe she's letting the twin gods of television and cinema raise her children, but maybe she has decided that the movie won't harm her children. Maybe she has instilled her children with a sense of right and wrong, and is comfortable that they will be able to enjoy the movie without mental damage. It's her right to make this decision for her kids.
But the theatre has decided for her. Apparently General Cinemas knows better than she does what is appropriate for her kids.[1].
So Jon generously stepped in. While his story was a bit far fetched (A priest? Clearly Jon needs more practice with lies. :-), he did a good thing. He didn't teach the kids that you should lie to get what you want. He taught them that their mother's decision was better than the theatres. He taught them a bit of sacrifice (he missed portions of Eyes Wide Shut to help a woman he didn't know). He taught them that a persons moral choices can be independant of society, business, and law.
Of course, the kids only learned these lessons if they have been taught to think about why people do things, and to judge actions on some system of belief, not on a checklist of rules. I can only hope their mother did this.
[1] Disclaimer: General Cinemas isn't really a bad guy. It's a company that wants to make money, and it thinks it will make more money following this path. Or perhaps the owner of the branch really believes this is for the betterment of society. Either way, GC should not be demonized. People should express their desires for how a business should act to their local businesses, and refuse to patronize businesses with which they have serious problems. I suspect that if enough people tell General Cinemas that they are using other theatres because of this treatment, GC will change its stance.
1. Too many people talking at once. It easily gets confusing.
2. Cut down on the sound effects. Little bits to seperate segments is just fine, but gratuitous sound effects suck.
Ideas:
1. Interviews with interesting people. Basically, if you'd like to talk to them, we're probably interetested in hearing them. Phone interviews aren't too hard to set up either, especially if they're really short. Geez, lots of people I'd love to hear interviews with post here.
2. Deeper research on things covered on Slashdot. This is just something I'd like to see more of in general, in "print" and audio. For example, track down someone who lives nearby with an Aibo and borrow it. Play with it some and tell us what you think of it.
I tried, dutifully, a little dayminder notebook for several years. It was an improvement. But I'd forget to look at it every day, it couldn't alert me that I had an appointment in 15 mintes, and when I took long notes in it that inevitably needed to be transcribed into a computer, I got irritated.
Then Palms walk into my life. The Palm III changed my life. It beeps to remind me of appointments. I put digital things I want to read on it, and put notes I want on my computer on it. It's small convient and has made me much more organized.
All in all, it's the right tool for me.
But.
To be far, I have yet to meet someone for whom their Palm was really useful in a business setting. I suspect there are people for whom it is useful, but amoung the roughly 15 Palm/Pilot owners I know, none really use it for anything work related. We use it to manage our personal lives.
My point: First, the article may be right, for businesses, in many situations, Palms probably aren't terribly useful. Second, for a disorganized geek, I swear by mine, and strongly recommend it to others.
What exactly is the point? To show that their are immature people who can send email? I think we're all well aware of that. To show that Linux people are all raving loons? That's a sad generalization, as bad as assuming that all teens are vandals because some are vandals. To show that Mindcraft feels hurt by this? Possibly, but is quoting the messages necessary?
The link to the page on Mindcraft's home page is "Ouch! Net rage (road rage on the Information Superhighway) defined." Are they trying to show what sort of stuff happens on the net? Mindcraft didn't seem like the sort to study the social atmosphere of the net, and the page is lacking any sort of analysis. Are they really trying to compare a bunch of stupid email to road rage?
Frankly, I think a few people were a little pissed at getting the mail (and understandable), and quickly through the page together. While this is understandable as an individual, I think it's in poor taste for a corporation.
I'm awfully tempted to just say "Lloyd Wood doesn't get it." But that's overgeneralizing it, and so I'm ramble on for a bit about why I don't think he gets it. Of course, first I'll need to explain my perspective, (and thus, explain the 'it' that Mr. Wood doesn't get).
I don't usually read newspapers. When I do read a newspaper, I find myself irritated that they bother to kill trees to print such mindless tripe. I'm not terribly fond of television or radio news either. The closest I come is CNN Headlines News in the morning, and I only stand for it because I'm still in my semi-awake haze.
I feel abandoned by modern media. (Media as news source, not media as entertainment. Not that there is much of a line anyway.) They have decided what is important for me to know. But I really don't care. Mr. Wood probably won't appreciate this, but I think this issue is better dealt with by Jon Katz in several of his previous articles, including this one.
Anyway, as I sat here thinking about why I like Katz, even though I disapprove of many of his articles (I'm terribly unhappy about the book related stuff), I came to a realization. I do read a newspaper. It just happens to be digital and run by a guy better known as CmdrTaco than his real name.
A while ago, I read an interesting article complaining that the media was becoming too neutral (or at least trying hard to look neutral). Perhaps, the article argued, we needed media with opinions. (I apologize for forgetting the source of the article.) Well, as I look around, I find that Slashdot has become my media of choice. It's got opinions and attitudes, and it has become interesting to me. It's got the "editorial balance" that Mr. Wood seems to feel is so important, it just happens to have chosen to balance it against certain issues and opinions. (In fact, every newspaper, online magazine, and news show has such a skewed view, Slashdot just doesn't hide it under a veneer of impartiality.)
Yes, it's filtered through a certain set of glasses. But at least I get some say in which pair of glasses.
So, Slashdot is my newspaper, my magazine. It serves me. And, based on its popularity, it serves a lot of other people. But it doesn't serve everyone. No media outlet with an opinion can. (And those they try to avoid having an editorial slant, and opinion, end up alienating some people anyway.)
And if Slashdot partially serves one's needs, skip the stuff you don't like. My favorite newspaper (when I was still regularly reading such things) was the Wall Street Journal. I only read the front page to get a quick view of world news. The rest of the paper had no interest to me. If Katz has no interest to someone, don't read him. I eventually decided I was unwilling to purchase the Wall Street Journal to just read the front page, it wasn't worth the money. Fortunately, Slashdot is free, so it costs me nothing to skip Katz's articles, or Star Wars stuff, or anything else. (With the advent of the customizable Slashdot, I can choose to never see posts by a particular author or on a particular topic.)
So, why is Mr. Wood complaining? In fact, why is Mr. Wood reading Slashdot? If you feel that the editor is "...someone who appears to be functionally illiterate...and it looks as if he would think that 'editorial balance' has something to do with spreading webserving load via SMP." why read on? It's nice that Mr. Wood is willing to forgive Rob for the above "given his youth and lack of a decent education....", but clearly Slashdot is not for him. Perhaps Mr. Wood would be happier with more traditional newspapers headed by older, wiser, and presumably better educated heads.
Cheap shots:
Mr. Wood took a few cheap shots, so I thought I'd fire a few back (in no particular order:
(All quotes are Mr. Woods. Of course, in many cases he is quoting Mr. Katz.)
If it was any more quietly censored, it probably would have been a feature article. Wow, the terrible pain of being censored by CmdrTaco, who stated "I agree with most of the stuff in these articles...." I'm sorry, I seemed to have missed any sort of solid information about the anti-Katz material that was "reportedly" censored. Having browsed the followup messages on several Katz articles, I can assure you that there is a lot of anti-Katz material there. Some of it is even good.Mr. Wood proceeds to rip many of Jon Katz's quotes out of content. (No, I'm not refuting all of them. Yes, I think that some of the points Mr. Wood brings up are valid, but some verge on petty.)
Interesting, a quick scan of the article the Katz quote is from quickly reveals that Katz is discussing the transition of the word geek from the former meaning to the later meaning. (In fact, to quote Webster's Seventh Dictionary (1965), a geek is "a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usu. includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake") Clearly Katz means mirror in the most literal possible sense. Obvious Movies and TV directly reflect exactly what happens on a day to day basis. Feh. Perhaps mirror isn't the perfect word, but it's not a new analogy, and certainly not one created by Katz. A culture reflects its goals, desires, and fears into its entertainment. Jerry Springer does reflect our desire for voyeurism, a way to handle our fears that our lives are more messed up than anyone elses, a way to satisfy our desire to feel better than others. And while ancient Rome didn't have movies, they certainly had plays, poetry, and prose which did the same thing. What the Romans protrayed in their forms of entertainment reflected upon them.Between "skies" and "while" in the above quote, I pulled the following:
I don't even know what to think of this. Is Mr. Wood saying that Katz is warning us that criticizing Linux will draw flames for high school students and sociopaths? I seem to have missed the article where Katz says that. Actually, I think that the fact that it is called ASCII is better yet. And I suspect that Katz doesn't hold any sort of opinion that it is spelled ASCCI. If you pick on his spelling and charge that Katz is incapable of editing, I'd believe it. But to claim that a typo is evidence that Katz's discussion of opinions is invalid is completely silly.Wood points out that Katz doesn't have a college degree. So what? A college degree is a piece of paper. I know people who graduate from college with minds completely free of knowledge, and people who never graduated that I deeply respect for their knowledge and wisdom.
It all depends upon where you are going. I'm not quite sure I see where you are pointing Mr. Wood, and given that I'm comfortable with Slashdot right here, I see no reason for it to start going anywhere.I'm told that in the past, they didn't send out bills for months, but I'm less certain of this.
So it is possible to register a bunch of domain names for "free" for a while. My understanding is that this is how squatters work.
Just ignore the silly article. It's typical pointy haired boss claptrap. While the pointy haired bosses sits around worrying about the granola eaters who want free software (clearly without the faintest idea of what "free softare" means) and communism, their capitalist loving underlings will cheerfully use and support free software to get their jobs done. As other articles have pointed out, many people are "sneaking" linux boxes and other free software into their jobs to make their lives easier, their network stabler, and generally running the company. Free software will continue to grow, not because CTOs decide that's it's now the hip thing to do, but because it's so darn useful those in the trenches.
Jon, you mention how cool it was to watch the pppd attempt to dial out. I can promise you, it just gets better. Eventually it will become old hat, and you'll move on to other things. At each point you'll think "Wow, I couldn't do this with such-and-such an operating system, I don't know how I ever did without it." You'll acquire a need to mess around with more and more things. Maybe you'll try a few other window managers, write a script to automate some daily task, or something similar. That's one of the neat things.
Part of the Unix way of thinking is that first you need some basic grounding. Things like how to edit a config file, how to kill a process, how to navigate the drive, how to read a log file, how to find the documentation. Once you've got that under your belt (and you're well on your way), nothing new is terribly hard. It's just a matter of finding the right configuration file, reading the right log file, finding the documentation.
The power to fix things is one of the reasons for the vilification of Windows and MacOS among Unix lovers. I've never had any Unix-esque operating system simply decide that it was going to die for no reason. I've never had to reinstall the operating system to fix a software problem. The Windows and MacOS way of thinking is "The user doesn't want to be bothered, so try to fix things yourself." The down side of this is that there is little support for fixing those problems that do sneak by. Most Unix tools on the other hand, cheerfully complain when they are unhappy, and many provide useful messages allowing you to track down the problem and squish it. People complain about the cryptic error messages from Unix, but once you've learned a basic bit of jargon, many of those error messages are quite helpful. This is as opposed to such stunning error messages as "Error -14", "The operation failed because 'The operation completed successfully'", or a blue screen of death.
Put simply, when something goes wrong on my Linux box, I can hunt the problem down and fix it so it doesn't happen again. It may not be easy, put it's possible. When my Windows box isn't happy, well, often all I can do is hope it doesn't happen again. Or I can reinstall the software, and occasionally the operating system.
For those that haven't seen it yet (it's been mentioned on slashdot before), a good article on the dangers of making computers easier to use (in particular, it's a discussion on "Wizards" in Visual C++, but it touches on the general topic) is The Dumbing Down of Programming.
Oh, and as a suggestion Jon, stop using the root account ASAP. I suspect you know this (most books on linux mention it explicitly), but it's one of the most important things to learn. While you're setting things up, you certainly need to use root, and you'll occasionally need to use root later to tweak things or install new software, but with great power comes great responsibility. It's easy to make a mistake that takes a few hours to fix, and it's possible to make a mistake that requires reinstalling the system. The nice thing about user accounts is that if your system is reasonably configured, it is very hard for you to muck things up, making it all the safer to boldly mess with things you don't understand.
Thanks, Jon, for an excellent article. The last two were a little fluffy (fun to read, but nothing that left a lasting impression). This article reminded me of my first installations, and the fun it was.
If you're the sort of person who thinks the Jargon File (The New Hacker's Dictionary) is a good reference, "hack" has 9 definitions, including:
That said, I don't think Jon views himself as a hacker, nor do I think that he views himself as hacking in the other senses of the word. He's just some guy learning to monkey around with his computer, mostly for the sake of doing so. And in the process, he's learning why most of us do so. And if he keeps down this road, he may become a hacker. It's been known to happen.Yes, installing a Windows printer driver really is easy. But it wasn't for Jon. And it isn't for people across the world. No amount of pretty user interface will help people get over their fear of computers. If anything, insulating people in a layer of protection designed to make their computer "user friendly" increases their fear and panic when something goes wrong.
Jon's not here to laugh with us as how much Microsoft products suck (We do that well enough :-). He's here to talk about the experience of computers with people. His experience with the printer is typical of thousands of people every day. His writings are a strong argument that perhaps there is a down side of "user friendliness", and something to be said for learning about the internals of your system.