Girl orders ubuntu laptop and...

The IT Profession is one of thinkers, and as such, they expect anyone wishing to join it to be at least able to think. Sadly, it is not always the case, as this woman demonstrates.

 

Read my post again, I never talked about a license. That's what we call a strawman argument.

This counts as "doing your homework", which is what I'm suggesting people should do. You inform yourself before buying the TV rather then buy whatever and then scream bloody murder when you find the TV does not work as it should. It is patent that the girl in the Ubuntu story did not do her homework.

Correction: Best Buy will sent a consultant to sell you things you don't need in addition to what you really need, hoping that you won't have the knowledge to sort it out.

This is patently false and yet you keep repeating it.

No, I don't. You are parodying my position.

You forget the part of your point contrasting the mocking going on in the IT industry against "every other industry", which presumably are not mocking their customers. I was pointing out that the contrast does not hold.

Please get off your moral high horse. The poor beast is limping badly. You are presuming what other people are doing. I'm not even in the IT industry (anymore) and yet feel quite comfortable with the amount of time I've spent helping people new to Linux.

 

Well, that pretty much again personified the selfish and immature attitude I believe is hurting the IT industry as a whole.

Two short words for ya. Hyper. Bowl.
Because one big word may be too much.

Edit: I'll even link it for ya. Hyperbole

It pained me to see that this user got hateful responses from the Linux community.

It touches on the general hostility that drives people away from learning new things in general. I imagine if my lifetime mentors treated me like an incessant bug that needs to do more research or take a class on Common Sense 101.

 

It's pronounced hye-per-buh-lee.

 

This, we call an ad hominem. Discussing the person instead of the argument. Any other logical fallacy you'd like to share?

 

If you cant get something to work, you dont call the TV stations, you ask a friend/company/online. Of course, all this requires that you have an IQ a little greater than that of an orangataun, and did CmnSns1101 at some stage of your life. I am worried about the world, does this girl actually get to vote?

 

Its a good thing it didn't come with Gentoo on it. Then she would have sued for sure. If she thinks Ubuntu is frustrated then stay away from compiling your own distro from scratch. Could you imagine calling india to get tech support for that distro?

 

I doubt she could have noticed a difference between gentoo and ubuntu if both are equally alien to her

 

I'm glad you didn't see the humor in that.

Sigh, Ad hominem is attacking the credibility, belief, etc etc of the speaker. Well, when the actions in the example ARE the substance of the arguement, then it IS logical to use said example as evidence. That's the short version. It's about $100 bucks to take a class on logic theory. Or about $1.50 library fines. Then come talk to be about logical fallacies.

On another note, her decision to drop her classes is an entirely unrelated situation. Her decision to quit relates to her character rather than what OS her laptop uses.

The substance of her story does show how unready Linux is for the mainstream.

 

^ The fact that she didn't even try to use Ubuntu says nothing about whether Linux offers user-friendly distros. On one hand, thousands of people of average (or less) technical knowledge have converted to Ubuntu and used it successfully in their daily tasks.

The testimony of one woman's experience (or rather, her lack of trying) does not prove anything at all in terms of OS usability. Rather, it does attest to the lack of flexibility on the program's part as well as the lack of research on the customer's part. She should have known what she was buying.

 

Haha i think that was me posting about a client saying that to me

 

lol yeah your probably right, it was a while ago. It cracked me up.

 

Somebody definetely didn't do her research on what she was buying but that's not the point. Has anyone actually tried to help her or were all the messages she received vitriol filled hatemail? Because that paints us Linux users as quite juvenile....

 

The argument as you originally stated it was not about me as a person no matter now you'd retroactively wish it were. You were characterizing the IT industry, which I am no longer part of. Even if I were still part of that industry, your characterization was a generalization. Statistically, generalizations allow for individual variations. It is a sad fact that some people do conflate the general and the particular but let's not make that mistake, alright?

There is one thing I omitted earlier because I was pressed for time but I'm going to address now. You admitted you used hyperbole. Hyperbole is fine in poetry, in fiction, in demagoguery, in jokes or in careless speech but not in reasoned argumentation. That becomes clear when we call it by its plainer appellation: exaggeration. That was one of my issues with your characterization of the IT industry. You were exaggerating, distorting reality. You pictured the IT industry as radically different than other industries. It is not.

When you said you were using hyperbole, you admitted that you were exaggerating. Thanks for the confession.

Another thing I let slip earlier. I wrote:

To which the reply was:

Granted the reply was to other things in addition to the quote above but still, I am baffled as to how being comfortable with the amount of time I've spent helping people "personifie " a "selfish and immature attitude". You must have read what I wrote as "I did not do squat and I have no remorse" but that's far from reality. (And here I would add that the question of whether or not someone did squat is again an ad hominem.) I general I don't like to get into those "what have you done lately for such and such cause" discussions because they amount to little more than pissing matches. The interlocutor is always free to set the bar to sainthood as high as he wants. (e.g. "Your contribution is worthless unless you are providing as much effort towards the betterment of Linux as Linus Torvalds does.") And typically at least one of the discussants in the pissing match fails to recognize the fact that people cannot be characterized unidimensionally and that the various dimensions which can characterize people do not reduce to one another. The discussion turns into "unless you perform such and such actions which for me are important, then you are [insert deprecatory characterization here]".

So to get into some specifics now, I fail to see how providing a support page/forum about how to install Ubuntu on the Compal IFL90 is selfish. I fail to see how providing a plugin for Chinese processing in Open Office is selfish. I fail to see how answering the emails of my friends who have recently moved to Ubuntu is selfish. I fail to see how answering the technical questions of people on this board is selfish. I fail to see how sponsoring (with real money) amazing open source software which I could be using for absolutely free is selfish. (You can add immature in all of the above and the questions remain.) Please explain.

Of course, you are free to assume I do all of the above while mocking everyone.

 

Girl orders ubuntu laptop and... all the guys here got excited :laugh:

 

Give it a rest already!
http://xkcd.com/386/

 

Here's a quick solution for her. Go to Best Buy and get a copy of Vista.

 

My guess is that it would end up in the same kind of disaster...

 

I totally agree. The computer she buys will have issues installing the Verizon Broadband card. She will then quit her classes, stay in bed for three months and never marry.

Edit:

A hyperbole is more like an exaggeration...... to emphasis a point. While distorted, it points to the direction of the substance and meat of the argument. The exaggeration, in and of itself, isn't accurate. Duh. It's a friggin exaggeration. It merely points to the point.

Hey, there you go!!! Now we are finally back on track. But the discussion has moved past this point. So maybe, some other time.

 

Ayle, I commend your attempts to interject humor into this situation. Your selflessness is an example to us all, not that it was necessary. Haha.

 

I like all the logical themes that have developed in this thread. Don't see that too often. :GEEK: