but Corel is evidently thinking logically and rationally about how to make money without damaging the energy and vitality of the community.
Certainly not out of the goodness of their hearts, though. Not damaging the vitality of the community that produced Linux and its tools is in their long-term best interest.
...But as Linux becomes more and more popular, I think the open source community needs to make sure its interests are protected. That's why we require a guardian or parent to agree to the GPL license on behalf of someone under 18 before downloading Corel LINUX OS. The intent is just to ensure the GPL is enforceable.
A very important implication of this is that Corel sees the GPL not just as something they have to conform to, but as something they may themselves need to defend in court. That's probably a good thing...
I remember somewhere around Ultima V, VI or VII, you started being able to choose the sex and look of the Avatar. Then Origin seemed to have abandoned that tack and went to requiring you to play a blond, blue-eyed Avatar. About the time the Ultima series became sucky...
But anyway, if you had something to do with Ultima V, all I can say is thanks for keeping me from getting anything done for six months...
I know the guy's a troll, however, I think OS/2 is often forgotten, which is a shame. I use any opportunity to let people know exactly how good OS/2 was.
It was a damn fine OS, and I was sad to see it fall behind for nontechnical reasons. I also think the Linux community needs to look at the experiences of the last technically good OS that took on the Microsoft behemoth. There are many lessons to be learned there. Those who forget history, blah, blah, blah...
Of course OS/2 came out on 5.25" floppies. It would have been really stupid for IBM to release an operating system on media that most of the computers of the time could not read...
OS/2 was available on 3.5" floppies, of course, not surprising as IBM brought out its PS/2 line at the time. These were the only x86 machines with 3.5" floppies then available. For the most part, anyway. But since they wanted to sell for non-PS/2s, they had to make 5.25" floppies available.
Win 3.1, which was the most "advanced" Microsoft OS out (other than OS/2, of course), came on 5.25" floppies. Which I still have for some odd reason.
CDs were, of course, pretty much nonexistent then.
Now given that NT came out something like four years later, well after 3.5" floppies had caught on, it is not surprising that no 5.25" floppy version was released.
(working on the 64-bit version of NT... more proof that MS is still innovating!)
How long has the 64-bit version of Linux been out?
Actually, Win NT still doesn't have a true OO desktop the way OS/2 did.
Just to give a trivial example, you change settings on any folder. The desktop was just a folder object. So you could, for example, change the background image for a single folder. (There are much better examples, but it has been years since I've done OS/2.)
(And yes, OS/2 was 100% "truly" multitasking and 32-bit before there even was a Windows NT.)
I hope everyone realizes that that "640k" Bill Gates quote that is running around the internet is an urban legend...
(I also hope everyone realizes that in the timeframe in which that 640k design decision was made, there was a hardware addressing limit of 1 megabyte, the average PC had 64k RAM, and IBM's marketting department was projecting sales of around 500,000 and foresaw no major hardware upgrades.)
E.g. In the late 80's, IBM, a much larger company than Microsoft, tried to dominate the operating system's market. What did they use? OS/2. We all know how well OS/2 fared! Why? Because it was not even close to the quality of Microsoft's product: Windows 3.1.
You do realize that OS/2 was a Microsoft product up to OS/2 1.3, don't you? (Wish I'd kept those floppyies labelled "MS OS/2". They'd have been good for a laugh.)
Do you even realize that Windows NT was originally an offshoot of OS/2? (Both Microsoft and IBM had, per joint agreement, rights to the OS/2 1.0 to 1.3 code bases, as it had been developed by both companies jointly.)
To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory...
And then he goes on to list those features that OS/2 had and Win 3.1 lacked!!
Yes, it must be remembered that it took a very particular set of procedures to get the cloning to work, that it took decades for someone to figure out how to do it despite many incredibly intelligent people trying, and that many of the leading experts in the field thought it impossible in mammals.
If this doesn't deserve a patent, then nothing does.
Well that's exactly it. I (usually) don't want to see stuff like that. You do. I set my preferences not to see it. You set your preferences to see it. We're both happy.
Do they have deeper thoughts that they're afraid or unwilling to share, or is this really all there is?
To continue the anthropological discussion, this has to do with the difference between the journalistic attitude and the attitude of the rest of us. Most of us would only think to put pen to paper if we thought of something interesting, informative or whatnot. (We could be wrong, of course, but that's the breaks.) Journalists are trained to write about something even when they don't necessarily have an interesting opinion, or something new to say. They've got to have something out regardless.
If you took most of us, sat us down once a week, and said "write an interesting essay by tomorrow", most of us would have a hard time doing much better than Katz. We'd tend to make mountains out of molehills, or overstate the obvious just to get something out. Fortunately, we have the choice to not write, so we don't do that. Someone who wants to be a "journalist" or an "essayist" doesn't have that choice. They've got to produce. And very, very few have the talent to produce something truly interesting day in, day out.
The only trouble with killfiles is that people invariably start posting things like "I just killfiled you, nyah, nyah, nyah", which generally just adds fuel to the fire.
In response to this article, some AC posted, the following:
Shut the fuck up? (Score:-1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on 08:09 AM January 20th, 2000 PDT (#9)
who even bothers reading katz' crap anymore?
Now this is exactly the sort of behavior Katz is complaining about. But, as you can see, the moderation system quickly took care of things. Anyone reading at 1 (Which is the default, isn't it?) would have to go out of their way to even know of such a post's existence. I know that I certainly never saw it, reading this topic around five minutes after it was posted.
So what's to complain about? Well, I suspect that the real complaint is that the post exists at all. This is natural. No one wants something like the above posted about them, even if no one sees it. But what really upsets us, even if we don't realize it, is not that it is posted, but that someone feels that way about us. But keeping it freeing being posted doesn't stop the poster from feeling the way they do, so why bother?
It is not like anyone is going to read that post, and say "Well, I used to like Katz a lot, but know that I see that some AC thinks his stuff is not worth reading, I won't bother to read the next Hellmouth essay". Not likely. More likely is that someone will read that and think "Another moron AC post".
Moderation does a damn good job of keeping us readers from having to see this stuff. As long as we readers don't need to be bothered with crap like that, I really don't think it matters. Going beyond that is just counterproductive.
Most of the suggestions mentioned in Jon's article have been tried. Mostly the results have been, at best, mixed.
The worst kind of flamewar is the flamewar about who should be censored, ejected, etc. If you want to see exactly how bad that can be, check out the conferences (especially the meta conference) at utne.
If most hostile posts come from kids and their freedom to behave irresponsibly or cruelly online is guaranteed - (and it should be) it's the responsibility of the single biggest group of online users - the lurkers - to speak up.
This is the absolute worst thing you can do. When kids come trolling, yelling at them just encourages the behavior.
In any case, I really, honestly don't see what the problem is. I read at 1 and rarely see anything truly offensive. I hear people complain about offensive stuff, natalie portman posts and the like, but I rarely see them. (I've only seen the one petrified post that got +3 funny.)
More moderation scares me as there is already a problem of moderators voting their politics. I suspect that part of the solution is not more moderation, but readers learning not to take offense at things that posted and then moderated down.
There have been some extremely good AC posts that would not have gotten posted had ACs not been allowed. If you read with the filter set at 1, those are the only ones you'll ever see. Maybe only one AC post in a thousand, but if you don't see the thousand, than the one is worth it.
(Your last paragraph is an example of the very incivility that is being complained about, BTW.)
As a counter-example, I've frequented a conferencing system that included a retired woman from Colorado, a non-technical practicing physician, a high-school teacher, etc, etc, etc.
I think that part of the problem is that this is the only conferencing system that Jon frequents. While his comments superficially seem to fit here, they sure as hell don't fit for the WELL, Utne, Salon, Slate or even the Yahoo message boards.
Yes, you can be hurt by words, but only if you let yourself be hurt. Unfortunately, our politically correct world teaches people to let themselves be hurt.
Our society trains us to take offense. Instead, it should train us to understand that what some idiotic 14-year-old without the guts to name himself things just does not mean squat.
If someone says "fuck you, you idjit, use emacs", have the self-confidence to ignore it. If you take offense, you've just given them what they want. Stop giving them what they want, and they'll stop.
As a non-geek who usually (for a variety of work reasons) writes in Microsoft Word, some members of this community have been trying to drive me off the site ever since I arrived.
No one should attack anyone for the software they use. (Politely mention that better alternatives exist, yes, attack, no.) However, it is instructive to mull over the phrase...As a non-geek... and the subtitle of Slashdot (News for Nerds) when listening to the complaints in this essay about being treated as "an outsider". By definition, he is an outsider.
Of course, the way some people here treat outsiders here is near criminal, but that doesn't change the original point. Most people come here because they want to read stories about electrodes in cat-eyeballs, or the latest release of SCSI drivers, not because they want to read old-media stories that would be as in-place in Time, Newsweek or Salon.
It would be no different if this were a party full of Unix engineers and a lone journalist walked in. Would he feel the outsider? Well, yeah... Is it possible that some obnoxious drunk might start making fun of the guy who doesn't know his emacs from his vi? Yes again. There are always jerks.
Now make that party the size of slashdot's readership, and you'll get a lot of jerks. And as we all know, obnoxious jerks are usually very loud. But that doesn't mean that it is anything "new".
There is some merit to the article. It is likely true that all of these "Natalie Portman" posts make it a less comfortable place for women. However, I think that Katz is a little late in this observation because the problem was much worse a few years ago. Not so much in the volume of infantile posts, but in conferencing system efforts to fix the problem (Here:moderation) and in the realization among posters that these posts are no more worthy of notice than a bad word scrawled on the wall.
I participate in other conferencing systems that have a much more even sex ratio. The paucity of women here is likely not due to "natalie portman" posts here. It is "geeks" tend to be male. (And the reason for that has everything to do with how kids are raised and nothing to do with what gets said here.) And as we all know, when guys get together in large concentrations, infantile behavior tends to pop up. In other words, the paucity of women is not caused by "natalie portman" posts. "Natalie Portman" posts are caused by the paucity of women.
(And the reasons for that are far more worthy of concern than infantile behavior in public, IMHO.)
Even if a technological crisis hit storage, I think it'd be too late. The 40 gig IDE drives are already falling in price to the point where they're worth buying. That'll hold 60 uncompressed CDs and almost 800 compressed to an level that won't change the playback experience for most users.
I'd be interested to see someone try the streaming of new music. My first instinct were I to buy such a "streaming right" would be to try to find a way to save the stream to my local drive...
But really, you are right, this is just another instance of corporate types trying to get us to give up control of our local data. NC redux. In that, it has nothing really to do with technology and everything to do with control of data.
Twenty CDs and a backpack has a higher bandwidth then I have at work...
(Or maybe it is just this new 20 gig HD I got here at work. I've been copying CDs to it for a week now. I have almost a hundred here. Why would I want to download each time I listen when I can just save them to the HD? This seems better than wasting company bandwidth each time I get the urge for NIN.)
Why, oh why is everyone pushing all this connectivity stuff when the thing that is improving the least in most computer systems is the bandwidth? You can get a 27 gig drive for $200 now. That just cries out for new applications, but all these companies can come up with is new ways to send too much information through tiny little holes. I don't want my music to skip just because I'm downloading a new Quake patch.
New app: cheap motherboard+large hard drive+good sound card->awesome stereo.
As one who posts regularly and is on the receiving end of positive as well as snarky feedback, I'd go with preserving anonymity over advancing civility, if those were the only options.
This statement caught me off-guard, because I've never actually seen a Jan Katz post. I've seen stories submitted by him, but I've never seen any other sort of commentary. I suspect that this is the true source of most of the flames that he gets. He doesn't appear as a member of this community. He appears as someone submitting stories from on-high, thinking himself too good to come join the common fray. (I'm not saying that is true. That is just the appearance.) I suspect that he'd get a lot less flack from people here if he were to do that.
Jon, why not post here, is response to people's comments? Better yet, read other stories on/. and comment on them. You've obviously got the language skills to do so. Jump in. I think you'll find that it can be even more rewarding then coming up with the perfect story in your basement. (On other conferencing systems, I've seen real reporters post, and respond, and the results were very rewarding for both sides.)
Personally, I've found that it is possible, with practice, to avoid most flamewars. (Through painful experience, believe me.) It is mostly a matter of learning not to respond to trolls, learning how to use diplomacy in posting, and mostly, learning not to take it all too seriously.
And one thing always to remember: you will never "prove yourself right" to the point where everyone agrees. Don't bother trying. Once you've stated your case appropriately, it is counterproductive to say any more.
Just remembering that will avoid a lot of flaming.
I also think it interesting that this story is posted here as it seems to me that/.s structure avoids the worst flamewars. Not so much the moderations system as the short lifespan of the topics. It is hard to keep the grand-mal flame-fest going when everybody leaves the topic after two hours.
Hmmmm....I guess YMMV. I certainly remember flamewars when I lurked on Usenet in 1986. I even participated in some a few years earlier than that on old Apple ][+ BBSes. (Only on the side of "right", of course.)
Flaming is (unfortunately) a natural human activity. I suspect that the second message ever posted to an electronic bulliten board was "You jerk!".
Slashdot Mirror
but Corel is evidently thinking logically and rationally about how to make money without damaging the energy and vitality of the community.
Certainly not out of the goodness of their hearts, though. Not damaging the vitality of the community that produced Linux and its tools is in their long-term best interest.
...But as Linux becomes more and more popular, I think the open source community needs to make sure its interests are protected. That's why we require a guardian or parent to agree to the GPL license on behalf of someone under 18 before downloading Corel LINUX OS. The intent is just to ensure the GPL is enforceable.
A very important implication of this is that Corel sees the GPL not just as something they have to conform to, but as something they may themselves need to defend in court. That's probably a good thing...
Caveat: I own Corel stock.
I remember somewhere around Ultima V, VI or VII, you started being able to choose the sex and look of the Avatar. Then Origin seemed to have abandoned that tack and went to requiring you to play a blond, blue-eyed Avatar. About the time the Ultima series became sucky...
But anyway, if you had something to do with Ultima V, all I can say is thanks for keeping me from getting anything done for six months...
Actually, MS got the OS/2 source as well, and in fact NT will run 16-bit OS/2 processes to this day.
I know the guy's a troll, however, I think OS/2 is often forgotten, which is a shame. I use any opportunity to let people know exactly how good OS/2 was.
It was a damn fine OS, and I was sad to see it fall behind for nontechnical reasons. I also think the Linux community needs to look at the experiences of the last technically good OS that took on the Microsoft behemoth. There are many lessons to be learned there. Those who forget history, blah, blah, blah...
Here's hoping Linux doesn't recap OS/2's history.
Of course OS/2 came out on 5.25" floppies. It would have been really stupid for IBM to release an operating system on media that most of the computers of the time could not read...
OS/2 was available on 3.5" floppies, of course, not surprising as IBM brought out its PS/2 line at the time. These were the only x86 machines with 3.5" floppies then available. For the most part, anyway. But since they wanted to sell for non-PS/2s, they had to make 5.25" floppies available.
Win 3.1, which was the most "advanced" Microsoft OS out (other than OS/2, of course), came on 5.25" floppies. Which I still have for some odd reason.
CDs were, of course, pretty much nonexistent then.
Now given that NT came out something like four years later, well after 3.5" floppies had caught on, it is not surprising that no 5.25" floppy version was released.
(working on the 64-bit version of NT... more proof that MS is still innovating!)
How long has the 64-bit version of Linux been out?
Yes, it is called "coercive monopoly power".
Actually, Win NT still doesn't have a true OO desktop the way OS/2 did.
Just to give a trivial example, you change settings on any folder. The desktop was just a folder object. So you could, for example, change the background image for a single folder. (There are much better examples, but it has been years since I've done OS/2.)
(And yes, OS/2 was 100% "truly" multitasking and 32-bit before there even was a Windows NT.)
I hope everyone realizes that that "640k" Bill Gates quote that is running around the internet is an urban legend...
(I also hope everyone realizes that in the timeframe in which that 640k design decision was made, there was a hardware addressing limit of 1 megabyte, the average PC had 64k RAM, and IBM's marketting department was projecting sales of around 500,000 and foresaw no major hardware upgrades.)
E.g. In the late 80's, IBM, a much larger company than Microsoft, tried to dominate the operating system's market. What did they use? OS/2. We all know how well OS/2 fared! Why? Because it was not even close to the quality of Microsoft's product: Windows 3.1.
You do realize that OS/2 was a Microsoft product up to OS/2 1.3, don't you? (Wish I'd kept those floppyies labelled "MS OS/2". They'd have been good for a laugh.)
Do you even realize that Windows NT was originally an offshoot of OS/2? (Both Microsoft and IBM had, per joint agreement, rights to the OS/2 1.0 to 1.3 code bases, as it had been developed by both companies jointly.)
To see Microsoft's true innovation, though, look at Windows NT, that came out soon afterwards. With innovations like preemptive multitasking, virtual memory...
And then he goes on to list those features that OS/2 had and Win 3.1 lacked!!
Yes, it must be remembered that it took a very particular set of procedures to get the cloning to work, that it took decades for someone to figure out how to do it despite many incredibly intelligent people trying, and that many of the leading experts in the field thought it impossible in mammals.
If this doesn't deserve a patent, then nothing does.
Well that's exactly it. I (usually) don't want to see stuff like that. You do. I set my preferences not to see it. You set your preferences to see it. We're both happy.
Do they have deeper thoughts that they're afraid or unwilling to share, or is this really all there is?
To continue the anthropological discussion, this has to do with the difference between the journalistic attitude and the attitude of the rest of us. Most of us would only think to put pen to paper if we thought of something interesting, informative or whatnot. (We could be wrong, of course, but that's the breaks.) Journalists are trained to write about something even when they don't necessarily have an interesting opinion, or something new to say. They've got to have something out regardless.
If you took most of us, sat us down once a week, and said "write an interesting essay by tomorrow", most of us would have a hard time doing much better than Katz. We'd tend to make mountains out of molehills, or overstate the obvious just to get something out. Fortunately, we have the choice to not write, so we don't do that. Someone who wants to be a "journalist" or an "essayist" doesn't have that choice. They've got to produce. And very, very few have the talent to produce something truly interesting day in, day out.
The only trouble with killfiles is that people invariably start posting things like "I just killfiled you, nyah, nyah, nyah", which generally just adds fuel to the fire.
Now this is exactly the sort of behavior Katz is complaining about. But, as you can see, the moderation system quickly took care of things. Anyone reading at 1 (Which is the default, isn't it?) would have to go out of their way to even know of such a post's existence. I know that I certainly never saw it, reading this topic around five minutes after it was posted.
So what's to complain about? Well, I suspect that the real complaint is that the post exists at all. This is natural. No one wants something like the above posted about them, even if no one sees it. But what really upsets us, even if we don't realize it, is not that it is posted, but that someone feels that way about us. But keeping it freeing being posted doesn't stop the poster from feeling the way they do, so why bother?
It is not like anyone is going to read that post, and say "Well, I used to like Katz a lot, but know that I see that some AC thinks his stuff is not worth reading, I won't bother to read the next Hellmouth essay". Not likely. More likely is that someone will read that and think "Another moron AC post".
Moderation does a damn good job of keeping us readers from having to see this stuff. As long as we readers don't need to be bothered with crap like that, I really don't think it matters. Going beyond that is just counterproductive.
Most of the suggestions mentioned in Jon's article have been tried. Mostly the results have been, at best, mixed.
The worst kind of flamewar is the flamewar about who should be censored, ejected, etc. If you want to see exactly how bad that can be, check out the conferences (especially the meta conference) at utne.
If most hostile posts come from kids and their freedom to behave irresponsibly or cruelly online is guaranteed - (and it should be) it's the responsibility of the single biggest group of online users - the lurkers - to speak up.
This is the absolute worst thing you can do. When kids come trolling, yelling at them just encourages the behavior.
In any case, I really, honestly don't see what the problem is. I read at 1 and rarely see anything truly offensive. I hear people complain about offensive stuff, natalie portman posts and the like, but I rarely see them. (I've only seen the one petrified post that got +3 funny.)
More moderation scares me as there is already a problem of moderators voting their politics.
I suspect that part of the solution is not more moderation, but readers learning not to take offense at things that posted and then moderated down.
There have been some extremely good AC posts that would not have gotten posted had ACs not been allowed. If you read with the filter set at 1, those are the only ones you'll ever see. Maybe only one AC post in a thousand, but if you don't see the thousand, than the one is worth it.
(Your last paragraph is an example of the very incivility that is being complained about, BTW.)
What Jon needs to do is that he is almost certainly smarter and more together than the person who told him to "please die".
People who insult anonymously are petty little cowards. Why should anyone care what a petty little coward thinks?
(And we certainly shouldn't prevent those who need to post anonymously from doing so because of a bunch of petty little cowards.)
As a counter-example, I've frequented a conferencing system that included a retired woman from Colorado, a non-technical practicing physician, a high-school teacher, etc, etc, etc.
I think that part of the problem is that this is the only conferencing system that Jon frequents. While his comments superficially seem to fit here, they sure as hell don't fit for the WELL, Utne, Salon, Slate or even the Yahoo message boards.
It is interesting to note that one of the oldest, most respected conferencing systems ever was mostly populated by non-technical baby-boomers.
They don't hurt people.
...unless they let them.
Yes, you can be hurt by words, but only if you let yourself be hurt. Unfortunately, our politically correct world teaches people to let themselves be hurt.
Our society trains us to take offense. Instead, it should train us to understand that what some idiotic 14-year-old without the guts to name himself things just does not mean squat.
If someone says "fuck you, you idjit, use emacs", have the self-confidence to ignore it. If you take offense, you've just given them what they want. Stop giving them what they want, and they'll stop.
As a non-geek who usually (for a variety of work reasons) writes in Microsoft Word, some members of this community have been trying to drive me off the site ever since I arrived.
...As a non-geek... and the subtitle of Slashdot (News for Nerds) when listening to the complaints in this essay about being treated as "an outsider". By definition, he is an outsider.
No one should attack anyone for the software they use. (Politely mention that better alternatives exist, yes, attack, no.) However, it is instructive to mull over the phrase
Of course, the way some people here treat outsiders here is near criminal, but that doesn't change the original point. Most people come here because they want to read stories about electrodes in cat-eyeballs, or the latest release of SCSI drivers, not because they want to read old-media stories that would be as in-place in Time, Newsweek or Salon.
It would be no different if this were a party full of Unix engineers and a lone journalist walked in. Would he feel the outsider? Well, yeah... Is it possible that some obnoxious drunk might start making fun of the guy who doesn't know his emacs from his vi? Yes again. There are always jerks.
Now make that party the size of slashdot's readership, and you'll get a lot of jerks. And as we all know, obnoxious jerks are usually very loud. But that doesn't mean that it is anything "new".
There is some merit to the article. It is likely true that all of these "Natalie Portman" posts make it a less comfortable place for women. However, I think that Katz is a little late in this observation because the problem was much worse a few years ago. Not so much in the volume of infantile posts, but in conferencing system efforts to fix the problem (Here:moderation) and in the realization among posters that these posts are no more worthy of notice than a bad word scrawled on the wall.
I participate in other conferencing systems that have a much more even sex ratio. The paucity of women here is likely not due to "natalie portman" posts here. It is "geeks" tend to be male. (And the reason for that has everything to do with how kids are raised and nothing to do with what gets said here.) And as we all know, when guys get together in large concentrations, infantile behavior tends to pop up. In other words, the paucity of women is not caused by "natalie portman" posts. "Natalie Portman" posts are caused by the paucity of women.
(And the reasons for that are far more worthy of concern than infantile behavior in public, IMHO.)
Even if a technological crisis hit storage, I think it'd be too late. The 40 gig IDE drives are already falling in price to the point where they're worth buying. That'll hold 60 uncompressed CDs and almost 800 compressed to an level that won't change the playback experience for most users.
I'd be interested to see someone try the streaming of new music. My first instinct were I to buy such a "streaming right" would be to try to find a way to save the stream to my local drive...
But really, you are right, this is just another instance of corporate types trying to get us to give up control of our local data. NC redux. In that, it has nothing really to do with technology and everything to do with control of data.
Control your own data!
This seems like a huge waste of bandwidth to me.
Twenty CDs and a backpack has a higher bandwidth then I have at work...
(Or maybe it is just this new 20 gig HD I got here at work. I've been copying CDs to it for a week now. I have almost a hundred here. Why would I want to download each time I listen when I can just save them to the HD? This seems better than wasting company bandwidth each time I get the urge for NIN.)
Why, oh why is everyone pushing all this connectivity stuff when the thing that is improving the least in most computer systems is the bandwidth? You can get a 27 gig drive for $200 now. That just cries out for new applications, but all these companies can come up with is new ways to send too much information through tiny little holes. I don't want my music to skip just because I'm downloading a new Quake patch.
New app: cheap motherboard+large hard drive+good sound card->awesome stereo.
As one who posts regularly and is on the receiving end of positive as well as snarky feedback, I'd go with preserving anonymity over advancing civility, if those were the only options.
/. and comment on them. You've obviously got the language skills to do so. Jump in. I think you'll find that it can be even more rewarding then coming up with the perfect story in your basement. (On other conferencing systems, I've seen real reporters post, and respond, and the results were very rewarding for both sides.)
/.s structure avoids the worst flamewars. Not so much the moderations system as the short lifespan of the topics. It is hard to keep the grand-mal flame-fest going when everybody leaves the topic after two hours.
This statement caught me off-guard, because I've never actually seen a Jan Katz post. I've seen stories submitted by him, but I've never seen any other sort of commentary. I suspect that this is the true source of most of the flames that he gets. He doesn't appear as a member of this community. He appears as someone submitting stories from on-high, thinking himself too good to come join the common fray. (I'm not saying that is true. That is just the appearance.) I suspect that he'd get a lot less flack from people here if he were to do that.
Jon, why not post here, is response to people's comments? Better yet, read other stories on
Personally, I've found that it is possible, with practice, to avoid most flamewars. (Through painful experience, believe me.) It is mostly a matter of learning not to respond to trolls, learning how to use diplomacy in posting, and mostly, learning not to take it all too seriously.
And one thing always to remember: you will never "prove yourself right" to the point where everyone agrees. Don't bother trying. Once you've stated your case appropriately, it is counterproductive to say any more.
Just remembering that will avoid a lot of flaming.
I also think it interesting that this story is posted here as it seems to me that
Hmmmm....I guess YMMV. I certainly remember flamewars when I lurked on Usenet in 1986. I even participated in some a few years earlier than that on old Apple ][+ BBSes. (Only on the side of "right", of course.)
Flaming is (unfortunately) a natural human activity. I suspect that the second message ever posted to an electronic bulliten board was "You jerk!".