Only thing worse than non-tech media...
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| cjcox Jul 29, 2004 9:24 AM EDT |
is Red Hat. Sheesh. For example: Pennington says, "If the Linux desktop were exactly the same as Windows, there would be no reason for users to incur the time, cost and effort required to switch over." Some things are more important than time, cost or effort. And of course, Linux could never be "the same as Windows"... it's always superior because of the development model, regardless of cursory "look and feel" subjections. |
| sbergman27 Jul 29, 2004 11:12 AM EDT |
The only thing worse than non-tech media... is RedHat-bashers. Sheesh. For example: cjcox says, "Some things are more important than time, cost or effort" Tell that to my boss. Tell that to my mother. Tell that to my users. They don't care. The only people who care about this sort of thing are the regulars at lxer.com. Now, please don't get me wrong. I'm definitely a regular here, too. And I most certainly grok the concepts. But I am becoming rather concerned with the tendency of this forum to be quite insular. (Even more so than LT, if you can believe that!) Most any article, no matter how well written or thought out, that criticizes Linux is voted against. We don't want to see it. We want to stick our collective head in the sand. The fact is that Havoc is right even though he (gasp!) works at RedHat. Do you even know who Havoc Pennington is? Or are you just spouting this as a reflex reaction to the term "RedHat"? The Linux desktop has a hell of a long way to go, and although things are progressing at an "OK" rate, one could have hoped for more. In case anyone hasn't noticed, ostriches are not the dominant species on this planet... This message was edited Jul 29, 2004 3:02 PM |
| Void_Main Jul 29, 2004 11:44 AM EDT |
I agree with both of you on some points. Although I don't recall an article being unfairly voted negatively. If you could point out an example I would love a chance to agree or disagree with you. Every one I have voted as "not worth reading" either: A) have nothing at all to do with Linux or B) have done no real research on the subject of their article and got many of their facts wrong I am also of the type who thinks "the Linux Desktop" (whatever that really is) is just fine, and has been for quite a long time. But I also realize that I am a rocket scientist and am happy with little more than a place to hang a few bash shells. Surely not everyone works and plays the same way I do. To be honest with you though, and you will surely think this is selfish, but I don't care if everyone on the planet uses Linux or not. I don't want Linux turned into something that I don't want or like just for the sake of being the most popular OS on the planet. Grandma can continue to use Windows if she wants but if she uses Linux I'll help her through whatever problem she may run in to (from real world experience Grandma has far less trouble using Linux than she does Windows because all Grandma cares about is browsing the web and reading email). The only possible reason I have for wanting Linux to have a bigger market share than it does is to encourage web masters and users to think twice when they create a proprietary web site or send a proprietary document. Other than that, I don't care if I am the only one on the planet that uses Linux. But that's just me, I'm selfish. BTW, I also hate Red Hat bashers who bash Red Hat just because they are Red Hat, but I don't believe that that is what cjcox was doing. |
| sbergman27 Jul 29, 2004 1:45 PM EDT |
Ok. How about this one: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17402 Sure, you can ridicule the guy for not knowing a workaround for the Mozilla profile bug, and IIRC, you did. (Just to be clear, the insistence of Mozilla for requiring any 2 simultaneous sessions to use a different profile *is* a bug.) But then, perhaps your distro (which I assume is debian, per your obligatory inclusion of an "apt-get" plug) includes the workaround as a script called "mozilla", probably in /usr/bin which gets you around the problem without your noticing it. For many, clicking on the mozilla icon a second time results in a screen which demands that you create another profile or "Exit Mozilla". The point is that the article makes some good points from the standpoint of the average user. But then you ridicule it (and I assume, vote against it to protect the rest of us from being subjected to reading it) and we can all stick our heads in the sand and deny the fact that Mozilla has shortcomings, and that it is not "hands down" a better browser than IE. I always have mixed feelings about "converting" people to Mozilla. I know that they are soon going to experience the "This site does not yet support Netscape. Please download Internet Explorer instead" bug. And blame the web developers all you want. It's a Mozilla bug. Why is that a bug? It's a bug because way back when, when Netscape released the initial code, the Mozilla developers grabbed it, wasted a year on it and then, without releasing a thing, dumped it and started over again from scratch. At the time, Netscape had a majority of browser share. By the time the Mozilla team deemed the new code (which they had wasted a year working on before their change of heart + another 3.5 years after) ready, IE had 90+% of the market and Netscape was, and still is, called an "alternative" browser. The reasoning at the time was that we were going to come out with such a killer browser that we could just take all that market share back when we were fininshed. Well, last month, after all the publicity about IE's egregious security problems, IE lost 1% market share to our "killer browser" and we all cheered. This month, IE held its own. Can you really blame developers for writing to the de facto standard, which 90+% of people use, and ignoring the less than 5% of users that use Mozilla? Especially when much of that less than 5% also has IE available if they really want it? The point? There is no place for complacency here. Open Source is not "hands down" better than the competition. Open source projects foul up just like everyone else. Thank God that people like Havoc see that, and don't naively believe that just because a program, platform, whatever, is OSS, it's automatically better than the competition. In summary, I enjoy the "warm fuzzies" that we get around here as much as anyone, but it is important that everyone be informed about the reality of the situation. The newbies need it to get a realistic perspective, and the old timers need it to keep from losing the same. |
| Void_Main Jul 29, 2004 3:08 PM EDT |
Actually, you have never seen me ridicule anyone. When I ridicule someone they usually end up crying like a little school girl. :) If you read what I wrote in the comment explaining my vote you will see that I did not give it a negative vote because the author didn't know how to make the browser work like he wanted. The reason I gave it a negative vote was because it was apparent that he made no attempt to see if there was a workaround. By the way, the behavior he was complaining about only happens on certain distributions. The one I use works the way he wants it to work, right out of the ISO. I also don't believe it is a bug. Now, if the author of the article would have made an attempt to do one single simple Google search and pressed the "I'm feeling lucky" button he would have found a workaround to his problem. He could have passed this information on to the reader. Without doing this it appears to me as an "uninformed whine" and not worthy of a read. I'm sorry, but that's the way I feel about it. He could have still bitched about the profile thing but if in addition to this bitch he had offered a solution to the problem I would likely have put a positive vote on the article. The default may be undesirable by some people, including me, but all he had to do was say something like: This is the Mozilla default behavior on most systems. There are some distributions where Mozilla behaves as I wish, and there are workarounds (with some effort) to make Mozilla behave as I wish for other distributions. I believe that this should be the default behavior and because of this I will bring it up on the Mozilla development list. Or since I don't have any programming background maybe one of you would be willing to provide a script for each distribution that I can try and get included with the default Mozilla and Firefox packages for every OS that they run on. At minimum I will make an attempt. I can just do without the whining. I mean C'mon, Linux (Mozilla in this case) *is* open source. It *is* community. You see in the Microsoft world (and any other closed source proprietary software) you can really do little more than whine about the problems. In the open source world you actually have the power to do something about it. That means there lies some responsibility to not only point out the shortcomings but to spend a little effort finding a solution to the shortcoming so maybe some day Grandma can have that ultra perfect OS with no flaws that everyone seems to be dreaming about. 90% of the reviews I have read are like this though so it's not like I am just picking on this on person. The community is out there, they are bright, use them. If he doesn't want to show people how the community works, or doesn't actually *know* how the community works, then he shouldn't be writing reviews. When I come across a problem with something I try and find a resolution and show people how to work around the problem until it can be fixed properly. And for the record, I voted a negative on this particular article *after* it had been posted. So far the only articles I have voted negative that have not yet been posted are ones that have nothing to do with Linux (there are a lot that the automated process picks up totally by accident). I also can do without seeing all the latest SCO FUD, whether it be pro-SCO OR anti-SCO. Frankly there are plenty of more appropriate sites out there to read about this (groklaw is an excellent choice). When SCO finally does go out of business you can post about it here. And before you start off on the censorship thing. You have access to the unposted articles just as everyone else does who has an account so you can read all of those articles anyway. Besides, all of these articles come from somewhere else. This site is nothing much more than an index. No one is preventing you from reading them on the sites they originally come from. I would like my web site to be at the top of the Google list. I can't believe Google is censoring me like this. Got any more articles that you believe were unfairly voted negative? This message was edited Jul 29, 2004 7:08 PM |
| warsaw Jul 30, 2004 3:10 AM EDT |
I personally vote in favor off just as many articles critical of Linux as I do those those that are obviously pro-Linux. But I must admit, I often think twice before voting on negatively on a an article that criticises Linux. It's easy to feel like maybe you're "voting out" an article just because it doesn't blow sunshine up OSS's butt, and I can understand why sbergman27 feels that LXer and other news sites unfairly "out" anti-Linux or anti-OSS articles. In reality, however, there is a *lot* of anti-Linux news that exists purely for the sake of sensationalism. There are a lot of poorly researched, written, and opined Linux articles that I vote negatively on because of their poor content. For a lot of mainstream tech journos, writing an article on Linux is proving their readers with a look on "how the other side lives". It's a bit of a novelty for a Windows-only user to see what the other 5% do with their computers/desktops -- and because a lot of these articles are pitched at mainstream users that have never seen anything but Windows, it's easy for journos to slip in a few mistruthes without the average reader noticing. Linux users tend to spot this, however, and usually are the one's to voice their opinions in feedback sections and on the website's forums, etc., thus creating the illusion that Linux users are likely to bash anyone who has a negative thing to say about Linux. However, IMO, those most critical of Linux are Linux users. Why? Because, as Void_Man put it, that's the nature of the community. You don't like something? Do something about it! Linux users are always deconstructing their OS -- both as programmers and end-users -- and constantly debating the merits and downsides of Linux. That's how it's gotten to be such a damned fine product. The Linux community knows what's bad with Linux, what needs fixing, and what needs improving. But there's nothing worse that someone coming along and raising a bunch of invalid points and pointing out imagined flaws. I personally *hate* seeing opinion peices authored by journos who have no idea at all, but try and talk like their *nix users from way back. *That's* the stuff I vote negatively on. But whenever an article comes along that validly critisises Linux, I'm only happy to recommend it. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!