Mindspring used to get extremely high ratings in customer-satisfaction polls, and as God is my witness I can't imagine why. I fled them twice.
My first round of bad experiences with Mindspring was when they purchased Pipeline and screwed over that user base. Whatever one thought of their PinkSLIP-based software (which I used a couple of times before realizing they were attempting to pass everything through gopher commands -- this is back just before Mosaic broke wide, you understand, so it wasn't causing the performance hit it did later on) the Pipeline guys ran a good local-to-NYC ISP, and they didn't kick about offering static IP addresses. When Gleick etc. sold out to Mindspring, suddenly tech support calls didn't get returned and my FTP access to my own Web site was blocked for weeks at a time.
So I left for Netcom, not universally known for great customer service (although I got good results from the business-account support staff) but blessed with *many* POPs around the world, which was a priority for me then. Service was quite acceptable until they were purchased by -- you got it -- Mindspring. Once again customer service crashed and burned, staffed as it apparently was by middle-aged women from Georgia whose lack of tech-support knowledge (I spent an entire call explaining to one of them that the Net and the Web were not identical entities) was equalled only by their rudeness. Fortunately some of the Netcom tech-support staff was still available and all too aware of the decline: as one of them said, "If we could buy back the service and run it ourselves we would." By the middle of last year, I was experiencing regular, unscheduled downtime on the Seattle POP, made worse when I'd call the tech-support number and be told that there was no downtime *scheduled* and thus the problem was with my computer. (This was especially intelligent "advice" when the POP when down in the middle of, say, a long download -- yeah, obviously my bad.)
And then came Earthlink. Adding Scientologists to the mix proved too much for my tiny mind, and I jumped ship immediately. I don't care if they're actually right and Hubbard *is* god -- god himself couldn't fix that pack o' grits.
Nice post, though I'd be willing to argue that Netscape wasn't *entirely* the innocent victim myth and Judge Jackson have made them out to be. (Just because they were up against a company doing *truly* evil $h1t doesn't mean they weren't perfectly capable of maneuvers ranging from bizarre to incapacitating. The programmers were brilliant; I'm talking about the business folks, you understand. And of course no one deserves to be eviscerated by Bill Gates, except maybe Steve Case.)
Dave Winer over at Userland has an interesting take on Bezos' comparison of A* to N* (among other things). There's a bit of cant about Amazon's "converstaion" with the Web community, a phrase that's getting beat into the ground with the success of The Cluetrain Manifesto etc., but on the whole it's a good rebuttal. (And he's right that Amazon's customer-service form letters truly suck.)
Talk about your weight gain. But indestructible, no question. And it'll be a godsend for any personal self-defense needs -- load that sucker into a slingshot and you could probably take out King Kong.
Let's think about this: You get to be a moderator by spending a lot of time at Slashdot. If you're spending a lot of time at Slashdot, you're obviously not out having a life, now are you? (Hear me, the voice of experience!)
Seriously, lot of crappy moderation happening on/. lately -- once upon a time my filters managed to knock out almost all the flames and almost none of the content, but the system seems to be failing. I worry that the threads are being taken over by the freaks that seem to infest most other online discussion areas sooner or later. Let's hope it's a temporary thing.
No heart? No head, more like. Leave social problems to fester behind your back and they *will* eventually bite you in the ass. "Out of sight, out of mind" works only for so long as social policy. The earlier poster's I've-got-mine-Jack is a kind of sociopathy -- one reserved for the middle class, where such this move from mental disorder into public policy.
As for your points, prizog, I think #2 is the most salient, or at least the most easily defensible. No child asks to be born into difficult circumstances (or, come to think of it, at all). This "sins of the father" attitude has overflowed our jails and appears, by all available social statistics, to be breeding a bumper crop of violence and garden-variety psychosis in America.
As to #3, this is America and we make people pay and pay and pay for their mistakes (and yes, there are those who just keep making the same damn mistakes, and those who don't care, and those who don't bother trying to do better -- and those people infuriate me, not least because they're used as an excuse to deny folks who have hit a rough patch or who simply can't get traction in this world).
My thought? If Original Poster and his ilk won't donate to charity for the sake of shared humanity, or for the sake of unselfish action on behalf of another, he'd better do it for his own self-interest -- because if he won't, he deserves the mugging, the knife in the ribs, or whatever else he gets from his not-my-problem attitude.
HK who expects this post to be karma'd down, since/. is fairly awash with racists, neocons, infinks, and other lunkheads of late. these days I only come here for the flamewars .
What, you can't worry about more than one thing at a time? Check your processor; something's wrong with your multitasking.
Seriously, I think and hope that most of us are already donating to one or more social / educational / religious causes on a regular basis; most of us past the starving-student stage are well-set to do so. A one-time donation to what we all hope is a one-time need shouldn't make a difference to that well-ingrained good habit. Right? Right?!
Besides, with any luck this money will help not only the cute widdle penguins but the other victims of this ecosystem violation. If the little fluffy guy is the poster child that can benefit some of the less photogenic fauna of Philip Island, so be it.
No, it's even more pernicious than that -- we want to make sure that everyone who can count is geared up for the *real* millennium party. Oh, it'll be grand -- not only will we not be sitting on our asses in our various server rooms etc., it'll be *MUCH* easier and cheaper to get good hotel and restaurant reservations.
But again, that only goes for the folks who understand that there was no 0 CE. In light of which, congratualtions to all: we have just jointly observed / administered the world's largest simultaneous, albeit short, IQ test.
No, SF, your ranting isn't a thought-crime. It would have to be thought to be a thought-crime, and I sure don't see any brain activity where you are. Crawl back under your stone and take your crayon-to-computer interface with you.
(Okay, moderators, I've got in my shots; moderate the thread down!)
Yeah, it was *definitely* short-sightedness that made storage space so ungodly expensive all those years ago. How rude of them not to take up valuable space on zillions of iterations of the same two digits, especially since most of those po'boys didn't think we'd still be using these legacy systems decades hence. Cheeky monkeys.
(Moderators, could you please slap the rating / comment on either AC or me here? I'm still so brain-dead from 1 Jan it's hard to tell which of us is being obnoxious, but I'm pretty sure it's one or the other.)
I just completed a review of the RocketBook that says basically the same thing. That's a spiff little unit (and incredibly cool once you get used to it), but I like it best as a PG delivery device. Who wants to pay $20 for an e-book that'll cost you $25 in hardcover form?
Reading a PG text on a RocketBook, however, is sweet -- much better than reading it on a regular screen (and far more portable). Read in bed! Read in the dark! Read on the stoker's seat of a tandem bicycle! Read the M$ findings-of-fact without wasting 207 pages worth of tree!
And PG has a secret quality weapon going for it too -- to get into the archive, someone has to like a text enough to go through the process of input (which is pretty tedious even if you're scanning). Keeps the riff-raff out, in a wholly unintentional way...
Well spoken. Here's another thought: This reporter is sitting indoors with his Net connection and would rather be out and about in familiar surroundings. In theory, he COULD be out and about in familiar surroundings, if he didn't have to do this story. The constraint of nothing-but-Net is doubly artificial in this case -- not only is it a false representation of how most folks interact with the Net, it's false to how this guy would naturally do things (and hence uncomfortable to him as you pointed out).
You can bet this would have been a much different story if this guy had been, say, in a strange part of the country, or (like me) shut in with a nasty case of the flu for the past week. I'm feeling pretty damn euphoric about HomeGrocer and ICQ and drugstore.com and whatnot right now, I assure you.
What s/he said -- I too did time at PC Mag, though possibly a bit earlier than AC. (When I was at Mag, it was the comm-SW issues that didn't sell.) Leaving aside the fact that a significant number of c|net employees ARE former PC Mag/Ziff babies, there's a lot more happening than your basic "not getting it."
I can't speak for what happens at the levels above, say, associate editor (the people in charge of developing, assigning, and editing the features when I was there), but I will confirm that as a writer and researcher I was never pressured by Ad Sales to do anything. In fact, ads people were actively chased away from the edit part of the office. (Probably a good thing for the ads people. We hated those @ssholes. They sound like a frat house in heat when they make a big sale, and they got paid several multiples of the salary of your average hard-working edit geek.)
What AC says about the staff's loathing of MS products (and Wag-Ed -- PTUI!) is true too. For instance, I was on the team that did the head-to-head review of Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 Warp back in the day. (Wish I'd saved the testing script from that matchup; it was a monster, and a really fine example of how to beat the hell out of an OS, or in Microsoft's case an OE.) Anyway, I think I can speak for every member of the team when I say that we desperately, desperately wanted IBM to kick the snot out of MS on that one. After all, you'd have to be a COMPLETE dumbass not to know which of those two products was better coded, sleeker, smarter. And indeed IBM did win on those points. It's just that they lost on the other things the world cares about, like availability of applications. (deScribe. Right. Give me a freakin' break.)
Anyway, the thing I remember most about that testing period was how utterly ubiquitous MS made itself to the process. In a good way, even -- making sure someone was available to answer reviewers' questions 24/7, answering research queries immediately and completely, sending documentation promptly, all the stuff that makes testing go more smoothly. IBM, on the other hand... argh. When time is limited and the testing is complex, the last thing any reviewer needs is inaccessible tech folk. It almost felt like IBM didn't *want* to do well. Which, if you read the Findings of Fact...
*sigh* Most importantly, though, what AC says about the Peter Principle (managers rising to their level of incompetence and sticking like leeches) is absolutely true. Mag was a great place to get good hands-on lab experience and even, once, a damn fine place to geek. However, even in my final months I sensed that true gearheads weren't welcome past a certain point; promotability depended on being respectable and presentable in certain ways that had very little to do with diving feet-first into technology and shaking up applecarts and whatnot.
Past a certain point in its lifecycle, PC Mag developed a distinct discomfort with kooks, visionaries, contrarians, and amateurs (in the for-love-of-the-game sense), and a distinct preference for the kind of people that buy software packages by the gross and mainly hope to avoid answering too many questions from their managers about their choices. I'm sure it seemed like a tidy, profitable business decision at the time, but it doesn't make for a great magazine -- and it was destined to turn out just as it has.
(So much for my do-not-feed-the-trolls resolution, but dang, I'm bored.) Spoken like someone who's never written parody. Or listened to much Weird Al. Or bothered to check whether Al is *actually* related to accordionist Frank Yankovic (though I understand that Mr. *Nick* Yankovic is, indeed, a a very nice man). Or purchased a dictionary. Who the hell wrote this, Coolio?
Offended? Heck no -- keeps me humble. Not as much as that photo did, though. The only resemblance I bear to that graven image is that I, too, have two eyes and a head .
AG, aka HK genuinely amazed by the/. discussion of her article, which beats the hell out of any discussion engendered in her unmourned magazine days .
Hi bliss. That list, which was derived from an analysis of 1984, was compiled and evaluted by David Ross (the scifi writer) and an Orwell scholar. The factoid (not the list) appeared online -- in The Progressive Review's newsletter among other places. The newsletter is dated 15 June 99, and I believe they have an index here...
Dig the AC code kiddies, whining 'cause CmdrTaco sold out to The Man... Didn't Rob realize that doing/. was a Holy Mission and required a vow of poverty? Shame, shame, shame.
Kee-rist.
Congratulations to all hands, and Andover.net seems like a good choice (and a decent group of folks). The end of the ISDN line at last! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go do something I should've done a long time ago: set my rating threshhold to 1. Sheesh.
H. Kitty who suggests that AC still sporting a problem with this send all their allowance and lunch money to Rob -- or better yet, to me.
I'm also a journalist. I've worked at about a dozen tech books over the years; at the moment I'm the tech columnist for a consumer weekly. I remember the bad old MacEvangelist days, and how the editors (the ones that weren't getting mailbombed, that is) sneered at what we perceived as Apple unleashing a pack of particularly rabid hounds.
The deluge o' flamery was rarely about unfair or inaccurate coverage; it usually concerned what the list perceived to be insufficient adulation. (It may, though, be inaccurate to say "the list perceived" -- it was all too clear from most of the messages that the writers hadn't read the article they were beefing about. We used to laugh at how many letters were obviously cut-and-paste jobbies from a single template.)
Fast forward. The MacEvangelist list is dead, and fortunately most journalists were able to laugh off the nutburgers and focus on the products. Seems to me, though, that certain members of the Linux crowd have stepped into the nutburger breach.
In the past week I've seen an alarming increase in weird Linux-related ranting -- not from people with specific issues about things I've written, but from folks who simply cannot tolerate less-than-reverent mentions of OS Most Holy. Unfortunately for them I use a somewhat flip, sardonic tone for my column persona, and nutburgers by definition have little to no sense of humor; much of my mail appears to be derived from the same unwillingness to READ THE FINE ARTICLE that we saw with my old buds on the MacEvangelist prayer tree.
In a sense, fine by me; columnists exist in part to keep the Letters To The Editor page well-stocked. And most of the non-crayon-using members of the readership surmise, correctly, that I am extremely open-source-friendly. (I swear it's not just an extreme anti-MS bias. Honest.) Still, I find that talking to members of the Linux community -- even reading/. -- is slightly less fun when there's hysteria and ranting afoot. It makes me want to spend less time following Linux developments and, say, more time bitching about Amazon or the Sci****logists or eBay or whatever else won't scare off the non-geeks in the audience.
An ally who wants to keep the users at arm's length?
Slashdot Mirror
Mindspring used to get extremely high ratings in customer-satisfaction polls, and as God is my witness I can't imagine why. I fled them twice.
My first round of bad experiences with Mindspring was when they purchased Pipeline and screwed over that user base. Whatever one thought of their PinkSLIP-based software (which I used a couple of times before realizing they were attempting to pass everything through gopher commands -- this is back just before Mosaic broke wide, you understand, so it wasn't causing the performance hit it did later on) the Pipeline guys ran a good local-to-NYC ISP, and they didn't kick about offering static IP addresses. When Gleick etc. sold out to Mindspring, suddenly tech support calls didn't get returned and my FTP access to my own Web site was blocked for weeks at a time.
So I left for Netcom, not universally known for great customer service (although I got good results from the business-account support staff) but blessed with *many* POPs around the world, which was a priority for me then. Service was quite acceptable until they were purchased by -- you got it -- Mindspring. Once again customer service crashed and burned, staffed as it apparently was by middle-aged women from Georgia whose lack of tech-support knowledge (I spent an entire call explaining to one of them that the Net and the Web were not identical entities) was equalled only by their rudeness. Fortunately some of the Netcom tech-support staff was still available and all too aware of the decline: as one of them said, "If we could buy back the service and run it ourselves we would." By the middle of last year, I was experiencing regular, unscheduled downtime on the Seattle POP, made worse when I'd call the tech-support number and be told that there was no downtime *scheduled* and thus the problem was with my computer. (This was especially intelligent "advice" when the POP when down in the middle of, say, a long download -- yeah, obviously my bad.)
And then came Earthlink. Adding Scientologists to the mix proved too much for my tiny mind, and I jumped ship immediately. I don't care if they're actually right and Hubbard *is* god -- god himself couldn't fix that pack o' grits.
Dave Winer over at Userland has an interesting take on Bezos' comparison of A* to N* (among other things). There's a bit of cant about Amazon's "converstaion" with the Web community, a phrase that's getting beat into the ground with the success of The Cluetrain Manifesto etc., but on the whole it's a good rebuttal. (And he's right that Amazon's customer-service form letters truly suck.)
Okay, you've had too much caffeine (though I'd spot you a point's worth of moderation if I had any). So what's the excuse for...
THIS?!
Not that I'm not getting one; it'll go great with my Hacker Barbie --
HK
putting her Vaio on a lazy-susan and calling it Cow In A Tornado.
This got moderated to Flamebait? Aw man it must be an election year...
Talk about your weight gain. But indestructible, no question. And it'll be a godsend for any personal self-defense needs -- load that sucker into a slingshot and you could probably take out King Kong.
Let's think about this: You get to be a moderator by spending a lot of time at Slashdot. If you're spending a lot of time at Slashdot, you're obviously not out having a life, now are you? (Hear me, the voice of experience!)
/. lately -- once upon a time my filters managed to knock out almost all the flames and almost none of the content, but the system seems to be failing. I worry that the threads are being taken over by the freaks that seem to infest most other online discussion areas sooner or later. Let's hope it's a temporary thing.
Seriously, lot of crappy moderation happening on
No heart? No head, more like. Leave social problems to fester behind your back and they *will* eventually bite you in the ass. "Out of sight, out of mind" works only for so long as social policy. The earlier poster's I've-got-mine-Jack is a kind of sociopathy -- one reserved for the middle class, where such this move from mental disorder into public policy.
/. is fairly awash with racists, neocons, infinks, and other lunkheads of late. these days I only come here for the flamewars .
As for your points, prizog, I think #2 is the most salient, or at least the most easily defensible. No child asks to be born into difficult circumstances (or, come to think of it, at all). This "sins of the father" attitude has overflowed our jails and appears, by all available social statistics, to be breeding a bumper crop of violence and garden-variety psychosis in America.
As to #3, this is America and we make people pay and pay and pay for their mistakes (and yes, there are those who just keep making the same damn mistakes, and those who don't care, and those who don't bother trying to do better -- and those people infuriate me, not least because they're used as an excuse to deny folks who have hit a rough patch or who simply can't get traction in this world).
My thought? If Original Poster and his ilk won't donate to charity for the sake of shared humanity, or for the sake of unselfish action on behalf of another, he'd better do it for his own self-interest -- because if he won't, he deserves the mugging, the knife in the ribs, or whatever else he gets from his not-my-problem attitude.
HK
who expects this post to be karma'd down, since
What, you can't worry about more than one thing at a time? Check your processor; something's wrong with your multitasking.
Seriously, I think and hope that most of us are already donating to one or more social / educational / religious causes on a regular basis; most of us past the starving-student stage are well-set to do so. A one-time donation to what we all hope is a one-time need shouldn't make a difference to that well-ingrained good habit. Right? Right?!
Besides, with any luck this money will help not only the cute widdle penguins but the other victims of this ecosystem violation. If the little fluffy guy is the poster child that can benefit some of the less photogenic fauna of Philip Island, so be it.
No, it's even more pernicious than that -- we want to make sure that everyone who can count is geared up for the *real* millennium party. Oh, it'll be grand -- not only will we not be sitting on our asses in our various server rooms etc., it'll be *MUCH* easier and cheaper to get good hotel and restaurant reservations.
But again, that only goes for the folks who understand that there was no 0 CE. In light of which, congratualtions to all: we have just jointly observed / administered the world's largest simultaneous, albeit short, IQ test.
No, SF, your ranting isn't a thought-crime. It would have to be thought to be a thought-crime, and I sure don't see any brain activity where you are. Crawl back under your stone and take your crayon-to-computer interface with you.
(Okay, moderators, I've got in my shots; moderate the thread down!)
Yeah, it was *definitely* short-sightedness that made storage space so ungodly expensive all those years ago. How rude of them not to take up valuable space on zillions of iterations of the same two digits, especially since most of those po'boys didn't think we'd still be using these legacy systems decades hence. Cheeky monkeys.
(Moderators, could you please slap the rating / comment on either AC or me here? I'm still so brain-dead from 1 Jan it's hard to tell which of us is being obnoxious, but I'm pretty sure it's one or the other.)
I just completed a review of the RocketBook that says basically the same thing. That's a spiff little unit (and incredibly cool once you get used to it), but I like it best as a PG delivery device. Who wants to pay $20 for an e-book that'll cost you $25 in hardcover form?
Reading a PG text on a RocketBook, however, is sweet -- much better than reading it on a regular screen (and far more portable). Read in bed! Read in the dark! Read on the stoker's seat of a tandem bicycle! Read the M$ findings-of-fact without wasting 207 pages worth of tree!
And PG has a secret quality weapon going for it too -- to get into the archive, someone has to like a text enough to go through the process of input (which is pretty tedious even if you're scanning). Keeps the riff-raff out, in a wholly unintentional way...
Well spoken. Here's another thought: This reporter is sitting indoors with his Net connection and would rather be out and about in familiar surroundings. In theory, he COULD be out and about in familiar surroundings, if he didn't have to do this story. The constraint of nothing-but-Net is doubly artificial in this case -- not only is it a false representation of how most folks interact with the Net, it's false to how this guy would naturally do things (and hence uncomfortable to him as you pointed out).
You can bet this would have been a much different story if this guy had been, say, in a strange part of the country, or (like me) shut in with a nasty case of the flu for the past week. I'm feeling pretty damn euphoric about HomeGrocer and ICQ and drugstore.com and whatnot right now, I assure you.
What s/he said -- I too did time at PC Mag, though possibly a bit earlier than AC. (When I was at Mag, it was the comm-SW issues that didn't sell.) Leaving aside the fact that a significant number of c|net employees ARE former PC Mag/Ziff babies, there's a lot more happening than your basic "not getting it."
I can't speak for what happens at the levels above, say, associate editor (the people in charge of developing, assigning, and editing the features when I was there), but I will confirm that as a writer and researcher I was never pressured by Ad Sales to do anything. In fact, ads people were actively chased away from the edit part of the office. (Probably a good thing for the ads people. We hated those @ssholes. They sound like a frat house in heat when they make a big sale, and they got paid several multiples of the salary of your average hard-working edit geek.)
What AC says about the staff's loathing of MS products (and Wag-Ed -- PTUI!) is true too. For instance, I was on the team that did the head-to-head review of Windows for Workgroups and OS/2 Warp back in the day. (Wish I'd saved the testing script from that matchup; it was a monster, and a really fine example of how to beat the hell out of an OS, or in Microsoft's case an OE.) Anyway, I think I can speak for every member of the team when I say that we desperately, desperately wanted IBM to kick the snot out of MS on that one. After all, you'd have to be a COMPLETE dumbass not to know which of those two products was better coded, sleeker, smarter. And indeed IBM did win on those points. It's just that they lost on the other things the world cares about, like availability of applications. (deScribe. Right. Give me a freakin' break.)
Anyway, the thing I remember most about that testing period was how utterly ubiquitous MS made itself to the process. In a good way, even -- making sure someone was available to answer reviewers' questions 24/7, answering research queries immediately and completely, sending documentation promptly, all the stuff that makes testing go more smoothly. IBM, on the other hand... argh. When time is limited and the testing is complex, the last thing any reviewer needs is inaccessible tech folk. It almost felt like IBM didn't *want* to do well. Which, if you read the Findings of Fact...
*sigh* Most importantly, though, what AC says about the Peter Principle (managers rising to their level of incompetence and sticking like leeches) is absolutely true. Mag was a great place to get good hands-on lab experience and even, once, a damn fine place to geek. However, even in my final months I sensed that true gearheads weren't welcome past a certain point; promotability depended on being respectable and presentable in certain ways that had very little to do with diving feet-first into technology and shaking up applecarts and whatnot.
Past a certain point in its lifecycle, PC Mag developed a distinct discomfort with kooks, visionaries, contrarians, and amateurs (in the for-love-of-the-game sense), and a distinct preference for the kind of people that buy software packages by the gross and mainly hope to avoid answering too many questions from their managers about their choices. I'm sure it seemed like a tidy, profitable business decision at the time, but it doesn't make for a great magazine -- and it was destined to turn out just as it has.
Feh.
(So much for my do-not-feed-the-trolls resolution, but dang, I'm bored.) Spoken like someone who's never written parody. Or listened to much Weird Al. Or bothered to check whether Al is *actually* related to accordionist Frank Yankovic (though I understand that Mr. *Nick* Yankovic is, indeed, a a very nice man). Or purchased a dictionary. Who the hell wrote this, Coolio?
Offended? Heck no -- keeps me humble. Not as much as that photo did, though. The only resemblance I bear to that graven image is that I, too, have two eyes and a head .
/. discussion of her article, which beats the hell out of any discussion engendered in her unmourned magazine days .
AG, aka HK
genuinely amazed by the
Hi bliss. That list, which was derived from an analysis of 1984, was compiled and evaluted by David Ross (the scifi writer) and an Orwell scholar. The factoid (not the list) appeared online -- in The Progressive Review's newsletter among other places. The newsletter is dated 15 June 99, and I believe they have an index here...
Dig the AC code kiddies, whining 'cause CmdrTaco sold out to The Man... Didn't Rob realize that doing /. was a Holy Mission and required a vow of poverty? Shame, shame, shame.
Kee-rist.
Congratulations to all hands, and Andover.net seems like a good choice (and a decent group of folks). The end of the ISDN line at last! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go do something I should've done a long time ago: set my rating threshhold to 1. Sheesh.
H. Kitty
who suggests that AC still sporting a problem with this send all their allowance and lunch money to Rob -- or better yet, to me.
Amen.
.) Still, I find that talking to members of the Linux community -- even reading /. -- is slightly less fun when there's hysteria and ranting afoot. It makes me want to spend less time following Linux developments and, say, more time bitching about Amazon or the Sci****logists or eBay or whatever else won't scare off the non-geeks in the audience.
I'm also a journalist. I've worked at about a dozen tech books over the years; at the moment I'm the tech columnist for a consumer weekly. I remember the bad old MacEvangelist days, and how the editors (the ones that weren't getting mailbombed, that is) sneered at what we perceived as Apple unleashing a pack of particularly rabid hounds.
The deluge o' flamery was rarely about unfair or inaccurate coverage; it usually concerned what the list perceived to be insufficient adulation. (It may, though, be inaccurate to say "the list perceived" -- it was all too clear from most of the messages that the writers hadn't read the article they were beefing about. We used to laugh at how many letters were obviously cut-and-paste jobbies from a single template.)
Fast forward. The MacEvangelist list is dead, and fortunately most journalists were able to laugh off the nutburgers and focus on the products. Seems to me, though, that certain members of the Linux crowd have stepped into the nutburger breach.
In the past week I've seen an alarming increase in weird Linux-related ranting -- not from people with specific issues about things I've written, but from folks who simply cannot tolerate less-than-reverent mentions of OS Most Holy. Unfortunately for them I use a somewhat flip, sardonic tone for my column persona, and nutburgers by definition have little to no sense of humor; much of my mail appears to be derived from the same unwillingness to READ THE FINE ARTICLE that we saw with my old buds on the MacEvangelist prayer tree.
In a sense, fine by me; columnists exist in part to keep the Letters To The Editor page well-stocked. And most of the non-crayon-using members of the readership surmise, correctly, that I am extremely open-source-friendly. (I swear it's not just an extreme anti-MS bias. Honest
An ally who wants to keep the users at arm's length?
Is that really what flamers want?
Does that really help fight the Good Fight?