Anthony

[Bart Silverstrim]

On Feb 15, 2005, at 7:56 AM, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:

> On 15 Feb Timothy Smith wrote:
>> Stijn Hoop wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 02:34:24AM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>>>
>>>> MSIE has traditionally followed HTML standards more closely than
>>>> almost any other browser.  Firefox does pretty well, tough; Opera
>>>> much less so.
>>>
>>> Thank you for giving me another reason to killfile you again, after
>>> you resurfaced without your vanity domain. You clearly don't know
>>> jack about the things you write. Maybe you could write some code
>>> instead of exploding the lists with drivel.
>>>
>>> *plonk*
>>>
>> hah well said sir
>
> I think most of the time Anthony *does* know what he writes about but
> does not care enough to be honoust about *all* the facts. In Holland we
> also had a person like him -silent for quite some time now- polluting
> a list with propaganda and twisted truths about windows/linux things.
>
> Discussion will *never* silence such a person, nor will polite 
> questions
> do the trick. They feed on response. The only way we got rid of this
> person was to *totally* ignore everything he wrote about. *Everything*!
> It took quite a while before everybody understood this to be the way to
> go. As long as people keep on responding, Anthony's will florish..

The problem with that is that the propaganda will be picked up by 
Google caches and the like; people that know enough to search for 
answers and and starting out trying to learn the ropes start finding 
the drivel and lies and if no one responds, by nature, people tend to 
believe the crap.  "No one offered a counter to it...."

:-/

These events also show the personality of the cult in which new people 
are starting to dip their toes into.  I can't count the number of 
people I've read accounts from saying that they were turned off to 
Linux a couple of times simply because the "help" was to go to IRC or 
newsgroups, and the people there were childish monsters.  Here is a 
list forum that has attracted people with FreeBSD questions (technical 
questions, general questions...I see it listed on the reply as just 
questions and not tech-questions) and some of these side discussions 
are now being met with listmoms demanding it be moved to -discussion 
(if it's supposed to be strict, wouldn't this forum be to ask questions 
and discussion be to get answers?).  If the list starts getting really 
negative, other people will be turned off to it.  (All this talk about 
logo/mascot contests...why would people WANT to get involved for 
"marketing" it if the people that usually help new people or people 
having trouble turn sour at others when they could opt just to ignore 
it?).  Sometimes the discussion DOES still help people.  One person 
commented that they thought the Ernie Ball story was interesting.  I 
had assumed people involved in using OSS or have to "market" it to 
their bosses would have found that information years ago already.

Eventually people probably will get so sick of it they just stop 
replying.  As I said early on to Anthony, he didn't hear what he wants 
to hear, so there's no point in answering him.  Sorry, no photoshop for 
FreeBSD, and if that's the only kind of criticism you have, there's 
nothing we can do about it.  Go away then.  But he continued to post 
about things that can mislead other people.  Yes, I'm guilty of feeding 
him too at the moment...I've worked hard at learning FreeBSD and Linux, 
and when people rip at it with information that is inaccurate, I don't 
want others to find that and think it's gospel truth.  It's just an OS 
but I've "wasted" a good portion of my life trying to learn the ropes 
of it and introducing it to my workplace, and I know what it's like to 
run into people with these kind of attitudes and I know that I've 
personally found ways that for me (and for what the majority of other 
people do) there *are* workarounds and alternatives available to them.  
Anthony comes off as the type of person that already has his mind set 
and what he's hoping to accomplish here I don't know...