Why Dont You Blog?

spEak You’re bRanes has a Twat-o-Tron. (It generates random comments, plucked from Have Your Say section of the BBC’s website.) *

This site is so brilliant that you’ll want to wave your arms in circular stirring movements and punch an invisible ceiling and shout “You go, girl!” and other demonstrative American talk-show things. But it’s very British, so I will have to restrain myself to a “Jolly good job, that chap.”

All the comments quoted were found on the BBC “Have Your Say” site. Yes, people really have written them. On purpose as far as I can tell. (from spEak You’re bRanes)

The twat-o-tron will give you the distilled flavour before you dip into categories like “Armchair Warriors” on the whole site.

This blog is dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC “Have Your Say” discussions. Part of me thinks that the right-wing “blogosphere” of America is encouraging its slow readers to get over to the BBC and add their ill-informed opinions… but another part of me fears that the sample is actually more representative… perhaps the majority of people in the world really are this awful and stupid. (From the about page of spEak You’re bRanes )

I tend to assume that most of the BBC comments that cause apoplectic rage fits are spoofs. (It’s wishful thinking, I know, but leave me some illusions.) However, if even 1 in 10 of these comments are legit, it makes you wonder how people can be that stupid and still manage to operate an email account.

[hat tip: Alun Salt]

* (Don’t use Internet Explorer 6 though. It works but its hard to read.)

Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

(An aside on the posts about TW’s Linux problems and the really helpful comments people have posted.)

When they are working, new forms of Linux are great for the user and they make you feel all warm and fuzzy about the possibility of voluntary co-operation.

I love Linux when I can get on a machine that someone else has set up.

A few years ago, setting up Linux was a fantastic challenge. (It took two days to configure it to even see a screen display on a bog-standard monitor.)

Modern versions set themselves up on a stand-alone machine perfectly, while you are having a cup of coffee. But modern hardware and our expectations of having things like networked wireless broadband access can make the set up process just as intransigent. It’s great to use a pre-configured and working Linux system. It’s harrowing to set one up when something goes wrong.

Not least because you need net access to even start to find a solution. Hmm. How exactly do you manage this if you haven’t got another working machine with an Internet connection? Pretty unsurmountable problem there.

Surmount it and you find an infinite number of forums that offer access to other people’s expertise. Assume you are lucky enough to find one where you aren’t laughed out of the place for saying “what’s the root directory?” You find that the people who know what they are doing and are really trying to be helpful expect you to be able to adapt their instructions to edit the source code and recompile binaries for your PearlDropsElectric 4-USB-hub adapter on the basis of a slightly similar driver for the Dolcis 2-USBII adapter. (Yes, I made them up)

At this point, you already know you will reduce a potentially working PC to a new form of electronic landfill if you even open the file in a code editor.

At the same time, a fair number of Linux distros still seem to call for you to use a floppy disk, when it’s unlikely your case even has one, let alone that you have spare disks that haven’t degraded into the dust from which they sprang.

You slink off back to Windows, shamefaced, until you have taken a post-graduate course in computer science. In Swedish.

If only someone would bring out a version of Linux for morons… This blog has always whined about technology books that claim to be for “newbs” or “dummies” or “idiots” and turn out to mean “slightly below par rocket scientists who do brainsurgery in their spare time”.

It has to be for real Linux morons.

People who can’t even untar distros (or understand what that means.)

(The FireStats for this blog - which makes its fair share of LInux posts - show that about twice as many visitors use a Mac than use Linux. A Mac, ffs. )

Popularity: 26% [?]

Popularity: 26% [?]