Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 13:22:33 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "FreeBSD Advocacy" <freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD on the desktop (was: TheRegister article on Hotmail) Message-ID: <038501c293b4$2a6a6f90$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <3DDF7691.22726.4FCB4F2@localhost> <02dc01c29338$320168c0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3DDFF5A3.10708@mtbiker.net> <02ed01c2933c$e2b7c390$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3DE00F41.D5D828E9@mindspring.com> <031c01c29356$7f408300$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3DE071F3.F7D8CAAA@mindspring.com>
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Terry writes: > Blind, unreasoning support of it by morons > who have bought into the idea that "What's > good for Microsoft, is good for America"? Quite the opposite. As a mainstream operating system, Windows is used and endorsed by many people with no emotional investment in their choice of operating system. Most see it as a tool that matches requirements. When their relative calm and objectivity is compared to the frothing emotion of advocates of many other operating systems, the prudent choice (for those who are likewise uninvolved emotionally) is clear. It's important to understand the impact of this. The kind of language I'm seeing used here is nothing less than alarming to people who do not inhabit the tightly circumscribed, febrile universe of OS zealots, and these extremists who use it are immediately written off as angry young males with far more emotion than sense by the rational majority (the same rational majority that, in theory, should be the target of advocacy). Conspiracy theories, ad hominem, and baseless accusations of malfeasance are totally unpersuasive to corporate CIOs and Fortune 500 companies, and induce observers to mark their purveyors as bickering children who are best ignored. > You are a paid troll. Who is paying me? > You are paid to put opinions which are > dictated to you by your employers ... Who are my employers? See my observations on conspiracy theories and accusations of malfeasance above. One of the distinguishing characteristics of OS zealots is that they believe their OS to be so important and so special that it _must_ be giving birth to vast, secret conspiracies conceived exclusively for the purpose of keeping their pet OS from rising naturally to a position of dominance in the universe. In fact, often nothing impedes the acceptance of the OS more than the zealots themselves. Anyone considering Linux or the Mac, for example, may have second thoughts after encountering a few of the wild-eyed fanatics that seem to orbit endlessly around such minority operating systems. > ... instead of getting honest opinions by people > using FreeBSD as a desktop system, they see your > crap about how "FreeBSD is just a server OS, and > doesn't work well as a desktop" -- which is a > blatant lie on your part. Didn't you just say that you never use ad hominem? Anyway, someone reading the archives will definitely get an impression of some sort, I suppose, but I daresay that it will not be the one you suggest. > It is this, not an hinest mistake, which resulted > in your posting of private email to the mailing > list: because you start with a new message body > for your reponse, rather than using a reply > option, and then cut-and paste the message > you are replying to into the message body. I'm not sure why this would be a _dishonest_ mistake--what were you saying about ad hominem, again? Anyway, I don't start with a new message body, I use the reply button and then remove all but the relevant parts of the original message to which I am replying, in order to save bandwidth. > The tools you use to do this are also the reason > that you tend to truncate quoted message bodies > line lengths, reformatting messages into > near-unreadability. I do that because I must precede the quoted text with a special character so that it can be easily recognized. I keep the lines thus quoted short so that they are less likely to be automatically wrapped by other mail clients. > You are a moron ... Tell me again about your avoidance of ad hominem; in particular, explain to me the purpose of the comment above, if it is not intended as ad hominem. > ... if you believe that the people on this list do > not see through your little charade at "advocacy"(*). The people on this list are welcome to address their assessments to me themselves, should they feel so inclined (some already have, and they do not necessarily agree with yours). This being so, neither I nor they need your third-party opinion of what their assessments might be. > Luckily, there are people who will refuse to allow > them to be archived as stand-alone statements; when > people go searhing the mailing list archives for > threads, they will find followups, like this one, > which shows your post for what it is. Follow-ups like yours only underscore the calm rationality of my own posts, so feel free. It's much easier to support my points when others are doing it for me. > (*) Conditionalized -- therefore not ad hominim ... Ad hominem is any attack against the person, rather than the opinion. "You are a moron" is thus always ad hominem. I suggest you try to control your emotions rather than struggle to justify their expression after the fact, as the latter only undermines any support you may have for your position. > ... if you chose to trigger the condition, you're > the one calling yourself names And if a woman chooses to trigger rape by dressing provocatively, that's her problem ... right? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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