Verily I say unto thee, that Erik Jan spake thusly:
> From my experience in this group I concluded not that a "troll" is a
> kind of post and the one who sent it a "troller" and the one who fell
> for it a "trollee", but that a troll is a kind of subhuman monster
> that disrupts normal discussions and excels in unreasonableness,
> impoliteness, and enjoys sexual innuendo and words like "fscking".
Troll is both a noun and a verb. The origin is:
n. A supernatural creature of Scandinavian folklore, variously
portrayed as a friendly or mischievous dwarf or as a giant, that
lives in caves, in the hills, or under bridges.
[Old Norse.]
But subsequently came to be used as a verb to describe the act of
behaving like a troll:
[Middle English trollen, to wander about, from Old French troller, of
Germanic origin.]
troll'er n.
So I personally have come to understand "a troll" to be a miscreant who
wanders around insidiously, looking for (and usually causing) trouble
(i.e. "trolls" v.).
Apparently (and somewhat appropriately) the word also means:
To fish for by trailing a baited line from behind a slowly moving
boat.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Troll
This may account for why Gary M. Stewart, one of Usenet's most notorious
trolls, assumed the pseudonym "flatfish".
AFAIAC the various anti-Linux posters in COLA fall into one of the
following categories:
1 ... Those who have no particular interest in either Linux; Mac OS;
Windows; nor anything else related to computing, but are here only
to cause trouble by being obtusely contradictory, in order to fill
a void in their otherwise shallow life. I'd characterise such
people as children, or at least as having the mentality of
juvenile delinquents. Such people may be any combination of
misguided; stupid; or inherently evil
2 ... Those who are paid (or otherwise compensated) "Technology
Evangelists" for Microsoft (i.e. shills singing from the
"Evangelism is WAR!" hymn-sheet). Given that they must be acutely
aware of the reprehensible nature of who and what they
"evangelise", such people can only be characterised as evil
3 ... Those with a typically right-wing extremist agenda, who despise
the principles of Freedom, and perceive Free Software as a threat
to their extremist ideologies. Such people are profoundly evil
4 ... Archetypal "fanboys", who (like 1. above) are either children, or
adults with a juvenile mentality, but generally bear no real
malice towards others - they have merely been indoctrinated.
Typical examples include Xbox owners and Ubuntu users. Hopefully
such people will eventually grow up to become mature adults, and
come to understand (and more importantly - /care/ about) the
politics behind the object of their obsessions
Anyone causing disruption in COLA, regardless of which one of the above
four groups they belong to, may be accurately described as a troll,
since they are defined by their actions (trolling), but personally I'd
reserve the word "troll" purely for category 1 types, since IMHO a real
troll lacks any ulterior motive, and is only driven by a compulsive
desire to cause trouble, for no particular reason other than his
demented personality compels him to do so. The rest are shills,
corporatists and fanboys, respectively.
In that vein, I think I'd probably label COLA's anti-Linux posters as
follows:
Fanboys: Any of various (mainly) Ubuntu users, who have passed through
COLA at one time or another. I classify them as "anti-Linux"
posters because, although they /use/ one flavour of GNU/Linux,
their doctrine is antithetical to the fundamental principles
upon which GNU/Linux is based. Many such posters can be quite
vicious in their attacks (e.g. one particularly nasty example
called "Ben <beno1990[AT]gmail.com>"). The appearance of actual
/Windows/ fanboys seems to be extremely rare indeed, since
AFAICT Windows doesn't really have any genuine "fans" at all,
only disgruntled users and paid "evangelists". A number of Mac
users could be described as fanboys, especially the notorious
"Oxford".
Corporatists: DFS, Ray Lopez, Alexander Terekhov, and John Bailo.
Terekhov in particular is as close to a pure fascist as
I've ever encountered.
Shills: Erik Funkenbusch, Bill "amicus_curious" Weisgerber, "cc", Otto
"OK" Kaiser, "Msg-ID" Larry Qualig, Jesper Lund Stocholm, Miguel
de Icaza, Jörg Schilling and Mike Cox (both Solaris). Some we
know for a fact are current or ex-employees of (or have
professional ties with) companies which are (or were) anti-Linux
(Microsoft, and previously Sun), such as Qualig; de Icaza; and
Stocholm. Other's are simply presumed to be shills because of
the diligent and comprehensive work they do to defend their
respective companies from any criticism (esp. Funkenbusch).
Trolls: Hadron, Michael "Snit" Glasser, Scott "Shitstick Nudds" Douglas,
Gary "flatfish" Stewart, Jean-Francois "Kadaitcha man" Mezei,
Jeff Relf, Clogwog, and Tim "Stalker" Smith. Most of these
posters are severely intellectually challenged, especially
Hadron, who is without exception the most stupid person I have
ever encountered. Relf seems to have some semblance of
intelligence, but this is rather let down by the fact that he is
demonstrably insane, and Smith only gives the /appearance/ of
cleverness because of his obsessive pedantism, but his obtuse
logic makes his pedant points rather non sequitur, and it's
obvious he only participates in COLA for mischief. Mostly he's
just an incredible bore. Of them all, Kadaitcha man is the only
one who seems gifted with any actual intelligence, but
unfortunately his mind is so full of filth that it's entirely
wasted.
There's some overlap, especially as those who shill for Microsoft are
(by definition) also corporatists (although the reverse is not
necessarily true), since (in the IT sector) Microsoft is the
poster-child for corporatism.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "At the time, I thought C was the most elegant language and Java
| the most practical one. That point of view lasted for maybe two
| weeks after initial exposure to Lisp." ~ Constantine Vetoshev
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Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
08:16:52 up 62 days, 15:59, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
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