Skip to main content

Flame Wars...

Last time I remembered being involved in a flame war was... Well... A couple of years ago on the PLUG Mailing List (archives here) When I asked the following questions:

- have you used Windows? did you like it? why? why not?
- (assuming that you do use linux) what linux distribution do you use?
- what are the things you see in linux that are not found in Windows? if
any, what are the things in Windows that you don't see in linux?
- what are the things in Windows that you would want to see in linux?
- why do you think Windows users aren't switching over to linux by now?

And the flame war starts there. If you follow the link, you might want to see what people had to say about the answers. Since then, I have vowed to debate online merely with technical matters, and in cases of opinion, I would try my best not to put emotion into the post and use politically correct posts as much as possible.

Obviously, I fail at times. And sometime before, I've had a discussion with a particular fellow in the Computer Science Mailing List on Object Oriented Programming. Not a flame war, but it was quite an informative discussion.

I seem to get into these "wars" quite often, and I usually try to step back, and look what the heck happened. Thanks to the archives, we can all relive the glory days of once Zealot users of Linux and Open Source.

I hope I don't get into one again soon... :)

CHill...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Appreciating Rizal...

Nope, this is not an academic post. More of a reflective and wrote-because-i-was-enlightened type post. Anyway, I just passed a paper on Rizal's notion of a nation according to Quibuyen (a local writer who devoted a book -- A Nation Aborted -- on his treatise on Rizal). Chapter 6 was an interesting read, and a definite eye opener. Rizal all of a sudden became interesting, especially to someone like me who could care less. It seems that most of what Rizal aims for and wrote about is still evident in today's Philippines as I see it. I wonder why I didn't get to appreciate Rizal and his work when I was still in high school -- might be the fault of the high school and the curriculum, or might be because I was still considerably immature then. I wasn't able to understand most of Rizal's writings though even if I got to reading them basically because they translated from Spanish to Filipino/Tagalog. I don't have problems with Tagalog, until you put it in writing. I

From FOMO to JOMO

Until very recently I believed that I needed to be on top of the latest news and happenings not only in my field (computer science and software engineering) but also in as many things as I can be on top of. This meant subscribing to all sorts of magazines, newsletters, YouTube channels, Twitch streamers, watching TV and live sport events, etc. — I was on top of a lot of the latest happenings, trends, news, interesting developments. I was having fun and I felt busy. What I did not feel was particularly effective nor productive. I felt like I was consuming so much information with the thought that it might be useful someday. When I was younger this wouldn’t have been an issue but I realised that ever since I’ve started taking stock of what I’ve been spending my time on, that a lot of it I’ve been spending just staying on top of things that I really didn’t need to be on top of. This article is about some of the realisations I’ve made in the course of exploring this issue of “FOMO” or

Keeping a work log

I have been keeping a journal for my personal life with some regularity for the good part of 4 years. The difference between my earlier attempts at journaling before four years ago is the regularity and the structure. I started with a very structured and regimented journal (doing it everyday with prompts and blanks to fill), to a ruled journal notebook, then a plain notebook (no rules nor grids in the pages), and then settling on a dot-grid notebook. This allows me to doodle and write free-form to help me commit thoughts and observations of my day but it was mostly for archival and looking back to "feel good" or reminisce (also to sum up a month, a year, etc.) The approach helps a lot with self-improvement in terms of my mental health and my reflection to see where I was a specific amount of time ago and whenever I was reading it again. In a previous post I wrote about keeping a work log, and I realised I only mentioned that in passing. In this post I detail the structure of