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Distribution quote of the weekDistribution quote of the weekPosted Mar 19, 2013 21:51 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)In reply to: Distribution quote of the week by duffy Parent article: Distribution quote of the week
Maybe he was suggesting that YOU think that they are less astute than trained monkeys.
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Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 23:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
There are lots of users who are not really familiar with such as a boot loader menu before they look into Linux. Comparing them to trained monkeys or implying that other people are doing so just for stating that a boot loader is confusing to such users isn't really defensible in any way. There are repeated comments like these that say people are stupid just because they don't understand or not interested in learning all the minutia of how things work under the hood and I find them entirely inappropriate.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 12:39 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Allow me to disagree. There are few users so unfamiliar with anything as my 4 years old son. Yet our PC's boot menu has not represented a problem for him, or for my wife who is completely uninterested in technology. In fact, I have yet to find someone who is confused in the slightest by a boot menu.
But that's not the point. The point is that you cannot pretend to win an argument by playing the offended card. At most you will halt discussion and poison the relation with the community. That's too high price a price to pay for wining an on-line discussion.
People that are easily offended are as dangerous (if not more) to a healthy on-line community as people that are too prone to aggressive behavior. Note that I do not say "prone to offend", and that's for a reason: offensiveness is a relative personal interpretation. Anybody can choose to feel offended by anything, no matter how unreasonable may it seem.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 13:04 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Unfortunately, I mostly associate utterances along the lines of "Anybody can choose to feel offended by anything" with the likes of Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson, and Jeremy Clarkson.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 17:33 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Interesting. I associate it with people like Salman Rushdie or Galileo Galilei, instead.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 18:37 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Being provocative is fine at times but just being rude doesn't make you Salman Rushdie. It makes you a jerk.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:41 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Rude is a subjective quality, just like offensive or beautiful: Salman Rushdie is a jerk for quite a few people out there.
But that was not a good example, Rushdie was being *deliberately* provocative. That's not what I saw in the mail exchange. What I saw was someone choosing to ignore a valid point on the grounds that the messenger was offensive and elitist, a clear ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
And that leads us to the crux of the matter. Was Malone rude and elitist, as purported by Duffy? The mails are out there for all to see and consider.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:49 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Feel free to call it whatever you want but if you have a valid point, you are better off expressing it politely. Human nature being what it is, you are unlikely to convince someone else by comparing non technical users to monkeys.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 22, 2013 9:56 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] Absolutely.But that's not important here. Let me reuse your words and say that, Human nature being what it is, everybody can (and do) behave inappropriately eventually. We all have had a bad day. And if I have to deal with people because of my job, I have to understand that. Otherwise I'm behaving like a jerk too. Do two wrongs make a right? Curiously enough, I have just read about the "donglegate" thing that happened at PyCon. Those things should get us thinking about what's the correct behavior in those situations.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 22, 2013 14:10 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
For most people contributing to Fedora, it is *not* their job and this discussion has nothing to do with anyone having a bad day since such opinions have been expressed by the same people consistently. So your argument doesn't make much sense and I think you aren't aware of the history here.
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