Achtung, I am now going to rant about idiots on the internet…
I can’t believe how full of stupid people the internet has been. Take for example Ubuntu help pages…
Type these commands into the terminal: [bla bla bla]…
No longer do the writers bother to explain what these commands do. I doubt the readers are interested in reading them either, they are the so-called “noobs” who thought installing “Linux” would be cool, so they try it out, not knowing what the fuck they are doing, and resorting to asking questions in forums and googling about how to accomplish things. Sure it will get you somewhere, but will you understand what’s happening on the way?
I remember the good old days of reading man pages, well written ones that begin with the background of what’s what, before giving you an explanation of what each command does, and example command lines. None of the “Copy & paste this. If it doesn’t work come back and ask for more hand-holding.”
Reminds me of a girl who wanted to know how to get the text-mode console from X.
“Press Ctrl-Alt-F1″, I said.
“And to get back to X?”
“Ctrl-Alt-F7. Well, not always F7, you see there are these virtual consoles…”
She’s pressed those buttons already, and wasn’t listening to my explanation anymore.
This rant was inspired by the Tabloid-like Slashdot headline Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop’s Hard Drive, which overblows an issue of a bad parameter in a script (which everybody can, and should, fix themselves) to a problem that sounds like something has gone horribly wrong with Ubuntu itself. This brings me nicely to the second class of Internet-idiots: The sensational-headline-writing dolts that are Digg submitters. Who are forced to write ready-for-tabloid bullshit headlines and summaries because that’s what grabs idiot user’s miniscule attention spans…
I got nothing… tabloids and reality shows are popular because they cater to the less intelligent, so I guess I can see why Digg is so popular…
Disclaimer: I do read Digg (although avoiding the site and lame commenters using the excellent Sitening’s Digg Feed), and am continuously disappointed at the level of bullshit in the content they link to.
