I have done two years of phone tech support for a hard drive manufacturer. I have done 3 years of e-mail tech support for a small linux distribution. I've done tech support.
I find User Friendly hillarious.
Now, I read his article, and I can see what he is trying to say. We should be nice to clueless people. And to some extent, we should. But there are people out there... it's amazing that they can even turn the damn things on! And what is worse, they are trying to do something that is way beyond their skill level (like installing a hard drive - not hard by any means, but for those that are scared to look in the recycle bin...) which is usually the direct result of a sales person at BigComputerStore (who is equally clueless, or he still works on commission...) telling them it's easier than baking a pie.
Now, should we laugh at people who really have no clue? Why not? Why is tech support any different from plumbers talking about stupid homeowners who tried to do something like replace a floater ball in their toilet and destroyed the entire mechanisim? You can't tell me that plumbers don't talk about that kind of thing. They just don't happen to have large numbers or comic strips. It still happens when they eat lunch together.
The reason we enjoy jokes reagarding tech support, is that as a whole, we techies & geeks are fairly computer literate, know about much of this stuff, and are good at getting around the web. Which means it's subject matter that we understand, and as many have noticed in various parts of the Internet, many of our `cliques` are at some times zealtous in their knoledge and beliefs. (Pick a flame war, any flame war...)
So what happens when we have a comic strip that we (Don't know anyone [even my wife!] who doesn't enjoy User Friendly) all find funny, timely, and uses it's comedic license very well with current events - someone is bound to hate it. Apparently there is now one person who hates User Friendly. First one I ever heard of. (And I don't pretend to know Scott.) Now, this person is also a techie, and has a web site. Bingo! That's what the net is all about.
Another thing about the Internet that goes with stating your opinion - others will have the same opinion as you. Multitudes more will not. And they are the ones to speak up. Welcome to the Internet Scott. I hope you don't have too much E-mail to read.
One other quick thing I would like to leave you with. Scott says he thinks comic strips more like Help Desk are funny because they don't poke fun at the customers calling. Well, he should read just a few more strips past his own example: http://www.ubersoft.net/helpdesk/015.html
To me, it seems that this strip is poking fun at the customer for being stupid. Didn't Scott say that was bad? Now, there is a word that comes to mind, but I'll just let it lie.
I support Katz profiling! Good. Go to your User Preferences, and disable JonKatz as an author. Personally, I feel that all this anti-Katz BS is childish, and it proves to me further, that the Linux Community (as it presents itself to me on Slashdot) seems incapable, and even unwilling to pull itself together without getting into petty flame wars - or zealotous "It's not GPL so it must suck!", "It's not Linux - it sucks!", "That distribution sucks!" or "You don't know about Linux, so you suck!" Of course, there are other kinds of zealouts out there as well, I'm just using Linux as an example. You could choose to precieve this message as a flame, and that is your option and you are entitled to your opinion. I like to think of it as a polite way to say "Grow up".
Since the Quake 1 code is coming out, it would be nice to see this using Quake. (I also thought about Duke Nukem, mainly for the inventory functions that are not present in Q1.)
Now, you can setup links as slip gates. Just add the RL teleport patch, and life gets very interesting.
If you wanted to jump back and forth from directory to directory, have a few temporary slip gates around. Just jump through, and your there, and turn around to go back.
Of course, we'd still need a nice console interface, but that can be done. Just imagine coming up behind some user logged in at a console, his back turned, completely unaware that the sysadmin is right behind him with the Lightning gun...
And yes, I would love to see netplay. It would have to be on a dedicated server, because one strategy would be to attack the network connections of other users to make them simply blink out of existence. (Of course, the ping of death did that before... now it's "legal" and part of the game...)
First attempt at loading the mirror got nasty errors, but it's coming up now. They have some neat toys. And yes, the keyboard would be pretty cool... but I wonder if it's a pain to type on?
A few select comments: This page design is HORRIBLE! How can you justify this defacing of such a fine OS? The comment page itself is a great example. This page looks like it was created by my 12 yr. old sister. My mother in law could make a better page in Microsoft Word for christ's sake. This site makes Linux look like an OS for 14 year old kids. Please get a clue. And stop running it on NT you fucker...
Slashdot Mirror
I have done two years of phone tech support for a hard drive manufacturer. I have done 3 years of e-mail tech support for a small linux distribution. I've done tech support.
I find User Friendly hillarious.
Now, I read his article, and I can see what he is trying to say. We should be nice to clueless people. And to some extent, we should. But there are people out there... it's amazing that they can even turn the damn things on! And what is worse, they are trying to do something that is way beyond their skill level (like installing a hard drive - not hard by any means, but for those that are scared to look in the recycle bin...) which is usually the direct result of a sales person at BigComputerStore (who is equally clueless, or he still works on commission...) telling them it's easier than baking a pie.
Now, should we laugh at people who really have no clue? Why not? Why is tech support any different from plumbers talking about stupid homeowners who tried to do something like replace a floater ball in their toilet and destroyed the entire mechanisim? You can't tell me that plumbers don't talk about that kind of thing. They just don't happen to have large numbers or comic strips. It still happens when they eat lunch together.
The reason we enjoy jokes reagarding tech support, is that as a whole, we techies & geeks are fairly computer literate, know about much of this stuff, and are good at getting around the web. Which means it's subject matter that we understand, and as many have noticed in various parts of the Internet, many of our `cliques` are at some times zealtous in their knoledge and beliefs. (Pick a flame war, any flame war...)
So what happens when we have a comic strip that we (Don't know anyone [even my wife!] who doesn't enjoy User Friendly) all find funny, timely, and uses it's comedic license very well with current events - someone is bound to hate it. Apparently there is now one person who hates User Friendly. First one I ever heard of. (And I don't pretend to know Scott.) Now, this person is also a techie, and has a web site. Bingo! That's what the net is all about.
Another thing about the Internet that goes with stating your opinion - others will have the same opinion as you. Multitudes more will not. And they are the ones to speak up. Welcome to the Internet Scott. I hope you don't have too much E-mail to read.
One other quick thing I would like to leave you with. Scott says he thinks comic strips more like Help Desk are funny because they don't poke fun at the customers calling. Well, he should read just a few more strips past his own example: http://www.ubersoft.net/helpdesk/015.html
To me, it seems that this strip is poking fun at the customer for being stupid. Didn't Scott say that was bad? Now, there is a word that comes to mind, but I'll just let it lie.
I support Katz profiling! Good. Go to your User Preferences, and disable JonKatz as an author. Personally, I feel that all this anti-Katz BS is childish, and it proves to me further, that the Linux Community (as it presents itself to me on Slashdot) seems incapable, and even unwilling to pull itself together without getting into petty flame wars - or zealotous "It's not GPL so it must suck!", "It's not Linux - it sucks!", "That distribution sucks!" or "You don't know about Linux, so you suck!" Of course, there are other kinds of zealouts out there as well, I'm just using Linux as an example. You could choose to precieve this message as a flame, and that is your option and you are entitled to your opinion. I like to think of it as a polite way to say "Grow up".
Since the Quake 1 code is coming out, it would be nice to see this using Quake. (I also thought about Duke Nukem, mainly for the inventory functions that are not present in Q1.)
Now, you can setup links as slip gates. Just add the RL teleport patch, and life gets very interesting.
If you wanted to jump back and forth from directory to directory, have a few temporary slip gates around. Just jump through, and your there, and turn around to go back.
Of course, we'd still need a nice console interface, but that can be done. Just imagine coming up behind some user logged in at a console, his back turned, completely unaware that the sysadmin is right behind him with the Lightning gun...
And yes, I would love to see netplay. It would have to be on a dedicated server, because one strategy would be to attack the network connections of other users to make them simply blink out of existence. (Of course, the ping of death did that before... now it's "legal" and part of the game...)
This is very thought provoking.
First attempt at loading the mirror got nasty errors, but it's coming up now. They have some neat toys. And yes, the keyboard would be pretty cool... but I wonder if it's a pain to type on?
-Obelisk
Makes it darn hard to read.
Sorry about that guys.
Pictures would NOT download for me.
(and man, 30 mins to download 3 pages of how many?? I must be insane...)
Of course, you could check out my project too... that's pretty insane as well.
Attempting to get the whole document.
. html
Should be avaliable at:
http://members.tripod.com/~crystalake/tie/paper
Which, if you prefer a clickable link, is here.
Hope I can get it all down...
But maybe that's just me. Went to /pub/dist/easylinux (or whatever it was) and the directory was empty.
Don't that have to make it avaliable for download?
Their 'eregistry' program is GPL, acoording to the readme in the tarball.
Sending quite the nasty E-Mail.
A few select comments:
This page design is HORRIBLE!
How can you justify this defacing of such a fine OS?
The comment page itself is a great example.
This page looks like it was created by my 12 yr. old sister.
My mother in law could make a better page in Microsoft Word for christ's sake.
This site makes Linux look like an OS for 14 year old kids.
Please get a clue.
And stop running it on NT you fucker...