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Editor's Note: Joe Sixpack Must Die
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| A fair bit of so-called advocacy seems to be taking its cues from the poor
| quality of most Linux news reporting. I indulged in an enjoyable and
| cathartic rant against shoddy tech journalism, and one thing I left out,
| since I tend to ramble on excessively, was why do so many tech journalists
| pretend to be some mythical average dimwit user when they're writing about
| Linux? And not just the pros, but all kinds of bloggers and commenters in
| forums and mailing lists do this too. This mythical average user, this "Joe
| Sixpack", is too stupid to figure out which shoe goes on which foot, let
| alone run a computer. And yet this is the target user for whatever Linux
| version or device they are talking about:
|
| "Ubuntu and OpenSUSE...provide much if not all of what "Joe Sixpack"
| wants to do with their personal computer, but the reality is there are
| significant obstacles that must be overcome...."
|
| "...unwashed masses..."
|
| "...the best Linux distribution for the mythical Mr. Joe Sixpack I've
| seen yet."
|
| "Linux will never be ready for the desktop until Joe and Jane Sixpack can
| use it without ever having to go anywhere near the command line
| interface, or edit a configuration file"
|
| "Joe Sixpack probably couldn't find a need for those kind of applications
| anyway."
`----
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-01-24-001-35-OS-CY-OO
Recent:
Careers In Linux Journalism-- No Knowledge Required!
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| My current favorite horrid example is Dana Blankenhorn's famous "someone
| please send a Linux laptop" column, written in July 2008:
|
| "I have written about, and been written to about, Linux laptops for some
| time. Now is a good time to take the plunge. So I am asking for a review
| unit. "
|
| How can one craft any sort of response other than WTF??! But let us not be
| hasty. The Internet is already full of hasty, kneejerk flamers and uninformed
| pontificators, and we do not want to be like them. Perhaps there is more to
| this story, so let us make use of the very secret weapon that nobody in tech
| journalism knows about: Google. I've been reading Mr. Blankenhorn's column
| for some years, and between my cluttered old memory and Google I do not find
| any indication that he had ever actually touched a Linux PC until September
| 2008:
|
| "My first Linux laptop is the ASUS EeePC."
|
| Be still my heart.
|
| Preston Gralla, famous Windows author, wrote a good article about his first
| serious Linux experience Living free with Linux: 2 weeks without Windows. But
| again, WTF??! Another technology writer who has been writing about Linux for
| years without knowing anything about it:
|
| "Now, I recognize that a few hours of using desktop Linux isn’t a true
| test drive. But if you want someone to throw over their habits of a more
| than a dozen years, you’ve got to wow them right away. And Linux didn’t
| do that for me."
|
| Like, heavy, man. This doesn't even rise to piffle-- it's piffle lite.
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http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/01/careers-in-pund.html
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