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kevinryanmooney

Last seen: 5 weeks ago

Kevin is a 30 year old guy from El Granada, California, USA

I dig unusual people, linguistics, inappropriate humor, assertive women, activism, tattoos (got one so far, a Dr. Seuss), the macabre, and the smell of cluttered old bookstores. My vivid imagination is balanced with deep respect for science, critical thinking, and immense distaste for religious dogma.

These days I'm a nerd for hire, spend time with good people, fantasize about running away and living in the wilderness, read voraciously, and take an unhealthy interest in being generally sarcastic.

I stumble and comment as an outlet for my own derangements and neuroses. I'm direct and outspoken, which pisses off a fair number of people. Feel free to get your panties in a twist over it, if doing so would distract from your drab existence."You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Churchill

  • Even When Linux Fans Win, They Lose | PCMech

    Rated Oct 10 2008 • 38 reviews • linux, operating systems, douchebags • pcmech.com

    As I was reading this, I could already anticipate the responses on the comment page.

    For one thing - yes - it's a bit ironic that he's railing against elitism, and simultaneously using the *nix term (ostensibly because it's obscure, not because what he's talking about actually applies to the unix-like OS metaset. We can even forget the incorrect definition of "*nix" as "unix or linux", ignoring posix, irix, etc., many of which are not even free, and therefore don't make sense in the context of this article. It's about linux, so say "linux". But I ramble.)

    The issue is a little complex in that people who run mr. Torvald's kernel are in several factions. One camp is hardcore coders whose parents played "find the tetrahedron" with them when they were 2, who were compiling their own slackware kernels in 1996 and who write perl scripts that look like line noise. Ubuntu looks stupid to them. Another camp are crunchy OS evangelist hippies who think that FOSS is an instrument for social change, and who want to see MS lose as much market share as possible. Ubuntu looks great to them.

    There's a little bit of overlap in this Venn diagram, but not as much as one would like, because to be in the intersection, you have to actually get over your fucking self and show some emotional maturity exceeding jr. high levels.

    The crux of the issue is this: if you are ub3r L1nUxh4x0r, of course you're going to make fun of beginners, but it's not like a n00b distro is going to actually adversely affect your term-heavy highly-configured debian install. Because distros are code forks, and you can work on your own little piece. That's the whole fucking point. The beauty of the OS you love so dearly is its flexibility, which means that it can be good for what you need, and good for what others need too. So don't be a buttchin. Your snobbery isn't impressing any girls; trust me on that one.

    And what can the Stallman cheerleaders do about the gnu/linux naming issue? They can just shut up, please-and-thank-you. Is that level of semantics really what you want to argue about? Really? When you run your own highly successful distro, you can call it whatever you want, like "dOct0r el1t3's GNU/Linux/X-Windows/Apache/xfce s00perdistr0" which is TOTALLY WAY more fair.