Not a review
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| cmost Jan 22, 2012 10:13 AM EDT |
No offense, but I would hardly consider this article a review of anything other than someone's passing opinion on an OS he briefly installed. In a nutshell, this article only says that PC-BSD isn't Linux (and the author won't go into the details.) PC-BSD has a slower installation (again, no hard numbers for comparison.) It has four desktops to choose from (no details on any of them except KDE for which he provides only the version number.) It uses PBI packages (no explanation of what they are, how they work and why it's unique.) Finally, the author concludes that PC-BSD 9 is better than what it was several years ago, the last time this "expert" looked at PC-BSD. And that's it! I'm growing a little tired of these so called tech bloggers pretending to be authorities on software that they in fact know very little if anything about. I hope sites like Lxer.com start weeding these out these non-articles by people who are amateurs at best and dabblers in FOSS at worst. Readers don't like wasting their time looking at them. |
| Fettoosh Jan 22, 2012 11:42 AM EDT |
Quoting:I hope sites like Lxer.com start weeding these out these non-articles by people who are amateurs at best and dabblers in FOSS at worst. Readers don't like wasting their time looking at them. You were doing so well yourself until your last statement. It don't believe LXer's job is to screen what is published on the Internet, that would be a form of censorship. It is totally against the principles of FOSS and Freedom of the press. Who is to say that LXer's editors are infallible and represent the views and opinions of their diverse readership? By giving its readers the ability to present diverse views is what makes LXer the best Linux site on the Internet. It is also the best approach to rebut falsely made statements and present facts. I believe LXer's Editors are doing the right thing and making a pretty good effort in keeping comments in compliance with LXer's TOS. |
| cmost Jan 22, 2012 12:55 PM EDT |
@ Fettoosh You're right, I wasn't thinking of it from that angle and I wholeheartedly agree with you. If people wish to post and read these sorts of articles they should be able to without any sort of censorship! Thanks for setting the record straight and pointing out the error of my ways! |
| gus3 Jan 22, 2012 1:39 PM EDT |
Ummmmm... |
| Fettoosh Jan 22, 2012 2:28 PM EDT |
Quoting: I wasn't thinking of it from that angle and ... We all do that at times. The level of degradation in quality sometimes get us so angered we wish we could take severe drastic actions to remedy the situation. I am sure someone will remind me when I say similar things. :-) |
| Khamul Jan 22, 2012 3:27 PM EDT |
Totally disagree. The whole job of an editor is to pick what to publish, and what not to publish. In a traditional print medium (newspaper, magazine), there's very limited space, so you can't publish everything people want. On the web, storage space is indeed no longer a problem, but peoples' attention spans are and always will be. So, by your logic, if some people want to post pro-MS stories here, or stories championing MS products and technologies, or stories about Apple products, or stories about Obama and politics, or stories about the destruction of rainforests, or stories about religion, or stories about how cute someone's cat is, LXer should go ahead and approve and post ALL of theses stories here for us to read, or else they're "censoring", right? Wrong. It's called "exercising editorial judgment". I for one don't have time to scroll through hundreds of off-topic stories about politics or raising roosters or whatever just to find things that are relevant to Linux and FOSS. Similarly, I don't want to waste my time wading through dozens of cr@p articles with no real information, or with total misinformation like the garbage published by Rob Enderle and Ken Hess. The whole job of an editor is to pick things the readership wants to see, and to separate the wheat from the chaff, so that the readership is presented with only those articles that are up to the quality standard of the publication. If you don't have a quality standard, you end up having a cr@ppy publication. Finally, stop throwing around the red herring word of "censorship". Censorship is when the government restricts the dissemination of information, particularly information it doesn't want the people to know because of scandal, etc. From Wiktionary: "The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated." Every privately-owned news organization has every right to select the information it wants to publish, and to reject things it doesn't want to publish, in order to select information that is of high quality, and also truthful. If I started a blog and wrote an article about how Linux use causes dementia and pancreatic cancer and claimed I had "scientific" research proving this, because of a special form of radiation emitted by Linux computers, and that only I had the ability to detect this radiation because of a special seer stone I dug up in my yard, would you call if censorship for the LXer editors to reject my (obviously ridiculous) submission? Articles should absolutely be screened for quality, and that's one giant weakness on this site, IMO. There's simply too many cr@p articles, and the gems get lost amongst them. |
| jdixon Jan 22, 2012 4:11 PM EDT |
> There's simply too many cr@p articles, and the gems get lost amongst them. One man's trash is another man's treasure. That's what the comment section is for. |
| gus3 Jan 22, 2012 5:52 PM EDT |
@jdixon, sorry, but Ken Hess puts the lie to that. |
| jdixon Jan 22, 2012 7:34 PM EDT |
> @jdixon, sorry, but Ken Hess puts the lie to that. I can't say I disagree, gus3. But I;m sure some people do. |
| Khamul Jan 22, 2012 8:47 PM EDT |
Quoting:One man's trash is another man's treasure. Right, so where do you draw the line? Do you just post everything vaguely related to the topic at hand? What about things that aren't at all related to the topic at hand? If someone writes a post on his blog with a 1-line shell script to do something trivial, and does 10 posts of this every day, should that be posted too? Do you really want to wade through 500 articles posted every day looking for something interesting, amid all the articles showing a picture of someone's cat in front of a computer running Linux? Do you not see where this is going? It's absolutely appropriate for an editor to select the content s/he wants to post on his site. If you don't agree with his choices, then set up your own site, or go visit a competing site. It's no different from newspapers; don't like the way one paper is edited, then go buy a different competing paper. The nice thing about the internet is that the barrier to entry to creating a site like this is much, much, much lower than starting up a newspaper. Maybe I should start up my own Linux blog, take a ton of photos of my cat in front of my computer (showing the KDE desktop to be relevant), and have my blog automatically post a new "article" (consisting of the photo and a short comment, like "how cute! she likes KDE!") every hour, 24x7, with a new photo, and then automatically submit this new "article" to LXer to be posted here. And then, if the editors here don't accept my never-ending deluge of cat "articles", I can scream and cry about "censorship!!". |
| BernardSwiss Jan 23, 2012 12:16 AM EDT |
A voting/rating system? |
| tuxchick Jan 23, 2012 12:43 AM EDT |
Quoting: A voting/rating system? LOL, and then threads full of complaints about the voting scores....LXer visitors could help by submitting good stories, as several of you already do. I look for these first in the story queue. |
| linuxsavvy Jan 23, 2012 3:10 AM EDT |
BernardSwiss wrote:A voting/rating system? Do you recommend going the Digg/Reddit way? That'll be a sea change for LXer, and also positively challenging for amateur writers, in my opinion. |
| mbaehrlxer Jan 23, 2012 6:15 AM EDT |
there is room for both, sites with editorial control and sites where readers vote. the problem with the readers voting sites is that it takes longer for articles to be published. fsdaily for example frequently has posts that appeared on lxer a day earlier.
or you get involved in the voting process and end up reading more bad articles in order to help the quality of the site. for either kind of site you need to decide if the selection matches your preference. on lxer i trade the ability to influence the selection for a relatively close match to my preferences, achieved with less effort than getting involved with voting. what little mismatch there is, is easily weeded out by reading the comments like the one that started this thread... greetings, eMBee. |
| linuxsavvy Jan 23, 2012 6:58 AM EDT |
mbaehrlxer wrote:on lxer i trade the ability to influence the selection for a relatively close match to my preferences, achieved with less effort than getting involved with voting. what little mismatch there is, is easily weeded out by reading the comments like the one that started this thread... I think I have to agree with you. We have to leave it to the editors to choose who should be allowed to have his or her voice heard. One problem with voting is that it can be gamed. And, when editors allow a good measure of freedom here, I think lesser known writers get a great opportunity to grow and learn at the same time. |
| gus3 Jan 23, 2012 7:34 AM EDT |
No voting, please. Unix wasn't designed by committee. |
| jdixon Jan 23, 2012 9:41 AM EDT |
> A voting/rating system? That's what the comments are. Sure you have to read them, but... > ...what little mismatch there is, is easily weeded out by reading the comments like the one that started this thread... Exactly. |
| tuxchick Jan 23, 2012 4:28 PM EDT |
OK which one takes longer-- scanning an article to see if it interests you, or reading a batch of comments? And what value are the comments? One reader hates the article, another one likes it. What if there are no comments? Suck it up, buttercups, there is no way to please everyone all the time. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jan 23, 2012 5:01 PM EDT |
If an article has something to do with free software/hardware/culture, it's fair game for posting on LXer, in my view. Ever tried to get an article on Digg or Slashdot? After a couple of unsuccessful tries, I gave up. LXer doesn't require agreement of a cabal, or (much, much, much more likely) so-called friends in high places to get an article linked. It's different, it's put together by actual human beings (even YOU if you want to submit articles), and it really works. You can usually tell from the headline and description whether or not you want to read a given article. I'm a big proponent of on-the-job training, and the only way to get good/better at writing articles is to keep on doing it. Just remember that you may not like a certain type/level of article, but there are others who will. As long as it's about free (as in freedom) technology, it belongs here. |
| Khamul Jan 23, 2012 8:45 PM EDT |
Quoting:Ever tried to get an article on Digg or Slashdot? After a couple of unsuccessful tries, I gave up. LXer doesn't require agreement of a cabal Slashdot is a MUCH bigger site, with far, far, far more users, and also a much, much broader focus (anything tech-related, versus things Linux and sometimes FOSS-related) and from that we can surmise it has far, far, far more article submissions than this small site. If they accepted every article submitted, it'd be a total mess; it already has tons of new articles every day and it can be hard to find stuff. In addition, sometimes their editors screw up, and post an article that was already posted a day or two before (or an article about the exact same subject as the previous one), and they get hammered for it; it's called a "Slashdupe". Quoting:It's different, it's put together by actual human beings When you're dealing with orders of magnitude fewer users and less information, then it's a lot easier to keep more human control over things, instead of turning it over to automated tools. Quoting:You can usually tell from the headline and description whether or not you want to read a given article. That's fine up to a point. But what if there's 3000 new articles every single day (and most of them are articles about peoples' cats)? Exactly how many people do you think are going to bother to stick around for that? You seem to be making an argument in favor of spam email. After all, it's "censorship" to use automated tools to remove spam from your email inbox, right? Shouldn't you just look at the email subject and sender and be able to determine which of those 5,000 emails you got this morning are legitimate ones, and which ones you can just ignore? |
| tuxchick Jan 23, 2012 10:09 PM EDT |
Oh yes Khamul, and then what if we decide to start posting a MILLION cat stories and spams EVERY DAY. Hahahaa I am scripting an engine to do that RIGHT NOW. Then a whole bunch of weird people are coming to your house to read you MORE stuff you don't like. Oh yes we are. |
| Khamul Jan 23, 2012 10:23 PM EDT |
My point is that, if this site became full of thousands of truly useless stories, most people would probably stop wasting their time coming here, because the time needed to wade through the junk would be too much. It's the same reason Slashdot exercises editorial control; if they posted everything that people submitted, people would get tired of the overwhelming amount of information and not even bother, and just go to one of their competitors that exercises better editorial control. Just go to Slashdot's "firehose" to get a small idea of what this would look like; it's not pretty. Does anyone really think that people would continue to read abcnews.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, cnn.com, bbc.com, or aljazeera.com if those sites just posted all kinds of low-quality stories, in gigantic volumes, instead of exercising editorial control? Sure, some people complain about the "slant" of the editing, but then they end up going to the site whose slant is more to their liking, be it foxnews or bbc or aljazeera. It's not like there's no competition. While the the scale and relevance are different, the principle is the same as that of the existence of spam. When there's too much garbage content in a forum, that forum usually dies because its normal members all leave. Just look at what happened to USENET. When the internet became commercialized and spammers filled up all the usenet forums with millions of spam messages, people simply stopped using it, and went to alternative forums to hold their discussions, where spam was blocked or limited. |
| jdixon Jan 23, 2012 10:47 PM EDT |
> But what if there's 3000 new articles every single day (and most of them are articles about peoples' cats)? Exactly how many people do you think are going to bother to stick around for that? Then that particular poster's stories will no longer be accepted. Look, if you want a gatekeeper there are plenty of other options out there. That's not the role LXer has chosen. They deliberately cast a wide net and leave separating the wheat from the chaff to their readers. If that ever becomes a problem, they'll deal with it then. > if this site became full of thousands of truly useless stories, Yes. If. But it hasn't yet, has it? > if they posted everything that people submitted, They don't. It has to have some marginal FOSS or Linux tie in. > Does anyone really think that people would continue to read abcnews.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, cnn.com, bbc.com, or aljazeera.com if those sites just posted all kinds of low-quality stories, Yes, since most of what they post is low-quality stories. |
| Khamul Jan 23, 2012 11:02 PM EDT |
Quoting:Then that particular poster's stories will no longer be accepted. Look, if you want a gatekeeper there are plenty of other options out there. Now you're not making any sense at all. You say there's no gatekeeper, but then you say a particular poster's stories won't be accepted? Which is it? Is there editorial control or isn't there? If any stories are not accepted, then there is editorial control, and you must obviously agree with me. I'm not saying there's too little editorial control, I'm arguing in favor of the concept, because some other people here equating it to "censorship", and I'm trying to point out that editorial control is entirely appropriate in every news-aggregation website, though they may differ on their standards, i.e. how low their bar is. Quoting:They don't. It has to have some marginal FOSS or Linux tie in. So then they have exercised editorial control! Isn't that "censorship", according to Fettoosh above? After all, who decides what qualifies as a sufficient level of FOSS/Linux tie-in? Is an "article" about my cat walking on my keyboard, with the photo showing my KDE desktop (or worse, a Unity desktop with a comment about how much the cat hates it), relevant to Linux? Sure it is. If the computer in the story is running Linux, then it's Linux-related and it qualifies. If an editor decides that a picture of a cat and a computer and a dumb comment simply isn't worth posting here, then editorial control has been exercised, and those arguing against this "censorship" should be up in arms. Quoting:Yes, since most of what they post is low-quality stories. No, because the readership does not consider them low-quality, and furthermore, if you really think there's no difference between, say, a two-page article on foxnews.com (which you may totally disagree with), and a spam email advertising enlargement pills but trying to present itself as "journalism", with a link for purchasing these items from some shady website in Vanuatu, then you're really not being reasonable at all. If any serious news site filled their site with thousands of such "articles", they'd be out of business overnight. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jan 23, 2012 11:44 PM EDT |
I don't think there are so many free-software articles out there every day that LXer can't accommodate as many of them as readers want to post. |
| Khamul Jan 24, 2012 12:52 AM EDT |
@Steven: Did you miss the part about me writing some scripts to submit cat-related stories every hour, 24x7? I can do better, I can submit a cat-related story every minute. I can even write the script to change the text in every submission. Do you really think LXer can accommodate all these stories without people getting fed up with all my cat stories? How about if a bunch of people write scripts to submit "stories" about enlargement pills and online pharmacies, and throw some extra bit in there about Linux to make it "relevant", and deluge the site with thousands of submissions every day for this stuff? ("Our online pharmacy uses Linux!") Do you still believe all these stories should be allowed? |
| Steven_Rosenber Jan 24, 2012 1:25 AM EDT |
I prefer stories submitted by actual people. And I don't think off-topic stories submitted by scripts or even people should be allowed. I was very clear -- the topic is broad (free software/hardware/culture), but entries should fall within that very broad and meaningful category. Any entries that explore the free-software side of felines or other animals -- I'd love to see them. I'm sure there already are a fair share of automated, not-terribly germane submissions to LXer that don't make it. Since the site is moderated, I imagine that's a bit of a deterrent to spammers. |
| Khamul Jan 24, 2012 2:29 AM EDT |
Quoting:I prefer stories submitted by actual people. And I don't think off-topic stories submitted by scripts or even people should be allowed. So you ARE in favor of "censorship", and editorial control then. |
| BernardSwiss Jan 24, 2012 3:00 AM EDT |
I like to argue. But I like argument to be constructive, or at least instructive. This is more heat than light. |
| jdixon Jan 24, 2012 7:57 AM EDT |
> You say there's no gatekeeper, but then you say a particular poster's stories won't be accepted? Which is it? Is it my fault you don't understand how LXer works? Articles are submitted to the queue. They're approved by the editors or not. They seem to have a deliberate policy of approving most. > So then they have exercised editorial control! Isn't that "censorship", according to Fettoosh above? You'd have to ask Fettoosh that, not me. But since LXer is private property, which we're allowed to visit, no it's not. > No, because the readership does not consider them low-quality... Ah. So quality is a popularity contest for you. So why are you bothering with a Linux and FOSS related site anyway? Wouldn't a Windows site be of higher "quality"? After all, more people read it and consider it high quality. > f you really think there's no difference between, say, a two-page article on foxnews.com (which you may totally disagree with), and a spam email advertising enlargement pills... If you haven't noticed, spam usually isn't approved for posting, and spam comments are removed on a regular basis. You're arguing against a problem that doesn't exist. If it ever does become a problem, the ownership of the site will respond accordingly. > I can submit a cat-related story every minute. You can, yes. And the articles will be rejected after the first few. And they'll probably write a script to filter them out of the queue. And probably delete your account. > So you ARE in favor of "censorship", and editorial control then The two aren't the same thing. > This is more heat than light. Exactly. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jan 24, 2012 12:13 PM EDT |
Quoting:Articles are submitted to the queue. They're approved by the editors or not. They seem to have a deliberate policy of approving most. That's exactly right. |
| Khamul Jan 24, 2012 2:05 PM EDT |
@jdixon: Have you not been reading my prior messages? I never complained about the editorial control here, I'm arguing in favor of the concept of editorial control. Some others are saying there should be zero editorial control, and all stories submitted should by accepted, no matter what, and if they aren't, that's "censorship". >> So then they have exercised editorial control! Isn't that "censorship", according to Fettoosh above? >You'd have to ask Fettoosh that, not me. But since LXer is private property, which we're allowed to visit, no it's not. According to Fettoosh, it is. You and I disagree obviously. >So why are you bothering with a Linux and FOSS related site anyway? Please point to where I complained about anything, except the concept of approving anything and everything. >If you haven't noticed, spam usually isn't approved for posting, Which means I'm right: there IS editorial control being exercised. The bar isn't terribly high, but it is there, much to the chagrin of the "anti-censorship" people. >You can, yes. And the articles will be rejected after the first few. And they'll probably write a script to filter them out of the queue. And probably delete your account. More examples of that "censorship", which is really just editorial control. Let's go back and get it from the horses's mouth: Fettoosh wrote:It don't believe LXer's job is to screen what is published on the Internet, that would be a form of censorship. It is totally against the principles of FOSS and Freedom of the press. Who is to say that LXer's editors are infallible and represent the views and opinions of their diverse readership? THAT is what I've been arguing against this entire time. According to the above, those spam posts and scripted deluge of cat posts should all be accepted. You can't have it both ways; if you're screening posts at all (even if it's just for spam and other obvious non-related stuff), then you're by definition "screening what is published". If you want to say that you don't "screen", then you have to accept everything, including obvious spam. > So you ARE in favor of "censorship", and editorial control then >The two aren't the same thing. Fettoosh disagrees with you, as I pointed out above. So why are you all arguing with me, instead of with Fettoosh? |
| tuxchick Jan 24, 2012 2:16 PM EDT |
Dang, that is one of the biggest mountains constructed from a molehill ever. |
| jdixon Jan 24, 2012 2:21 PM EDT |
> Which means I'm right: there IS editorial control being exercised. I've never argued otherwise. > More examples of that "censorship", which is really just editorial control. The fact that some people are confused about what censorship is is not excuse for your deliberately misusing the term when you know better. > So why are you all arguing with me, instead of with Fettoosh? Because your the one making the statements, not Fettoosh. |
| Fettoosh Jan 24, 2012 4:04 PM EDT |
Quoting:Fettoosh disagrees with you, First off, preventing an article from being linked to just because one editor happens to think it is bad quality, even though it complies with TOS, is a form of censorship. That is in my opinion of course and you are free to differ. What you don't seem to understand is the fact that censorship and TOS are totally different things. LXer has its TOS, which you agreed to when you signed up on LXer. You can publish and link to whatever you want as long as it totally complies with LXer Terms Of Service. If you infringe upon any of the terms, I believe the process is you will be notified first, then warned, and eventually your account will be gone if you persist. That is totally different than preventing some one from linking to an article just because some editor happen to think that the article quality is not up to par. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jan 24, 2012 5:59 PM EDT |
Unlike Slashdot or Digg, LXer has a narrower scope, and within that scope there isn't an overwhelming flood of original articles on a daily basis. LXer seems to be able to handle the flow very well. The reason I come here is to see what's being written about free software and hardware. Not to see "the best," but to see what the members of the site think is important in the world this site covers. Once I figured out that I could post my own articles here, I was hooked. Lots of writers have LXer accounts through which they post their own stories. I'd say out of every 100 postings, probably 99 are my own articles. I think most of us can look at a couple dozen headlines per day and read what we want, ignore what we don't. The "light" curation at work here is "just right," if you ask me. |
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