So, I stumbled on this column by a Stan Beer, wherein the reviewer attempts to try out Linux, but successively burns a bunch of coasters that won’t boot. Here’s a hint, Mr. Beer — if you burn eight CDs of various images and they don’t boot — that’s probably not a Linux issue, but an issue with the way you’re burning CDs.
Today, Beer discovers that the Windows CD burner doesn’t handle ISO images. Does he place the blame on Microsoft, or himself, for not knowing this? No, he entreats Linux distros to make up for his lack of knowledge:
Meanwhile, Ubuntu and all other Linux distros who haven’t done so, please, for the benefit of Windows users who want to give you a try, document fundamental issues such as this on your site.
Mr. Beer, if you’re going to play software reviewer, you should at least have a fundamental understanding of whether or not your CD burning program can, in fact, burn ISO images. This is after Beer claims to be an expert at, well, something:
I don’t exactly know what my real worth is on the open market, but at my rapidly advancing age, I reckon $50-100 an hour is a very conservative estimate. I personally think my time with family, friends and clients is worth a lot more than that but let’s not split hairs.
While I’m reluctant to judge Beer’s worth to his family and friends, I wouldn’t spend $5 to $10 an hour on his services as a writer or IT expert, much less $50 to $100. A competent journalist would have done a bit of Googling to find out whether or not he was doing something wrong, rather than simply blasting Linux because he can’t figure out how to create a viable install CD. A competent IT expert should have known whether or not Windows could burn an ISO image, for goodness sakes. A quick note to the Ubuntu users list would, no doubt, have yielded some assistance. Instead, Beer chose to use this as an opportunity to take a misguided swipe at Linux (and the community).
Apparently, it’s not enough to produce a usable operating system for free — but the Linux community needs to provide educational services as well. And, yes, a lot of Linux users are happy to help educate new users, but it greatly annoys me to see new users who are unwilling to take even the slightest personal responsibility for learning anything and then blame others for not teaching them. This is the equivalent of giving someone a car, and then they complain because it’s a stick and they don’t know how to drive it.
Desktop Linux isn’t perfect, but it does annoy me to keep seeing this type of “review” where the reviewer flogs Linux in general for the failings of one single distro or (even more common) their own failings.
I admit, I’ve flubbed on reviews as well — but nowhere near this spectacularly, and I’m willing to fess up when I screw up rather than blaming the vendor/project for failing to spell out the obvious. (I realize that “obvious” is in the eye of the beholder, but there’s obvious, and then there’s obvious.)
I understand. And I disagree. Let’s assume for a moment that Beer’s not a loser (awesome family name if nothing else) but that he’s Windows or Mac-centric.
In Linux terms, you could say: lobotomized… it shows up if you just do a word count on guru through his articles posted in February. Anyone who uses the Indian word for teacher that much is showing such a catastrophic shrinkage of brainwatts that… wait up, I digress. I’m drinking wine as I write this…
So he’s a migrating type of bird. Or, better yet; he’s a bird leaving the nest. Or possibly, just going by the way he writes, a relatively well-respected though insecure kinda guy. I’m thinking Cliff from Cheers (which betrays my age group anyway).
Why should he know about ISOs? Isn’t that the point? Same diff if you copy over an mp3 from one machine to another… a disk, a card, a device, a tape… they might work effortlessly but never for me.
What I mean is, if a company wants people to dig their product to the extent that they put it online and say, “Download this, it rocks.” — In one way or another, they might (I didn’t say ‘should”) have taken the time to walk the Windoze users through the basic steps with a little more elegance, grace and, most importantly, forethought.
For example, “Windows Users [assuming idiot]: Please click the underlined blue sentence (you’re reading it now) to download this file.
From another angle, some of my favorite terms are: Out of the Box. Plug and Play. We’ve all gone into the early hours trying to work out why x won’t work with y only to find out about some niggling, obscure, counter-intuitive nano-datum some bright spark has known all along…
…more to the point: Beer (or Beers) is the target audience. He’s exactly the type of guy the opensource community needs. The type of guy who won’t switch to openofice coz he’s already paid his Microsoft Orifice license.
He’s your product tester, your Joe Shmo. And probably a whole quantum leap beyond average (sad, sad, sad but probably true). You called it with “Novice” in the title of your post… there’s nothing wrong with being a novice. There’s nothing wrong with being new.
Truthfully, Zonker, you knew it by the time you got to the last sentence. We all flub, dude. Flubbing is what we do. And maybe you weren’t spectacular before but I reckon this one… big flub from where I’m sitting.