You Must Be This Tall to Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside The Story

Product Information

The technical barrier effects technical contributors a whole lot less than folks with writing and design skills. It truly, honestly does. I failed for 5 years to contribute to free software in any meaningful way, and was only able to break through the barrier by landing an internship at Red Hat where there were lots of people I could bug *in person* to help me when something stopped working or I couldn’t figure something out.

Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law: When Inch High Private Eye gets embiggened in an episode, the very first thing he does is rush to a nearby amusement park and get on a ride that has this sign. He makes the park attendant repeat himself when they allow him on the ride. Inverted in "House Ghosts", when Daisy tells Paul Bunyan that he's too tall to enter the club. However, he turns out to be the Seven Dwarfs in costume. We take care of our own. Sort of my, ah… specialty.” Will drained his coffee and signaled Irene. When she’d left, he said, “When Big Maude’s husband beat her up so bad he put her in the hospital, the rest of the crew decided enough was enough. So they sent me. Gators ate what was left of him. Last winter we all found out Nell Buttons was skimmin’ from the take, which meant less for everybody. Thousands.” He shrugged. “You don’t hurt your own, your family. Carny code. She knew that and she did what she did anyway.”Will climbed onto the desk and knelt before the pinned man. A nod, and Hannibal released the victim, letting Will wrap his hands around Ingram’s throat, staring at him the entire time as he choked the life out of him. Windows has a huge market share and he vast majority of people don’t contribute there, even with the little bit of Windows that you CAN have access to; so why would be it any different with Linux (even though it’s completely open)? We really have 2 distinct groups of users: The general public who just want to use it; and the other group us the tinkerers, the programmers, the developers, power users, network/sys admins, etc. These 2 groups aren’t mutually exclusive to computers/technology though; there are end-users vs geeks in all areas. car geeks vs those who want to know the very basics and just want to drive, for example. the person who just wants to drive, doesn’t care that it has a 455 Hemi and a Nitrous Tank, they just want it to get them from point A to point B, whereas the car geek would mull over the 455 hemi vs XYZ, etc. Your Nautilus example is quite a poor one since there is an easily-discovered GUI option for that preference. Tilt-a-whirl secured, Will prowled the darkened carnival. The stranger wasn’t there, but Will found him easily enough, sitting in the window of a late-night diner that gave him a perfect view of the vacant lot across the street where the carnival had parked their trailers and other vehicles. Will leaned against a lamp-post to finish his cigarette and dipped into his power, welcoming the golden slice across his vision. He saw what the man must be seeing from his vantage point, and branched out into his perspective. Did you miss the metaphor of the basic requirements to get on an amusement park ride? Allowing more users in doesn’t prevent experienced users from staying in.

Second point you have is also flawed. It is based on an assumption that “A big part of the reason a lot of us are here in the Linux community is to improve & spread software freedom and free culture”. This is an often made and often wrong assumption, for much of the development and hardcore user base the big part of the reason they are in the Linux community is becuase it works better for them. We like the Linux and F/OSS community becuase the current default culture base is made up of competent users. That is a very very different culture base from Windows or even Apple.How does that affect the community for you, the assumption that the base is made up of competent users? How does that affect you directly? How would that base changing affect you? Unless you’re married to a psychopath who is secretly plotting evil things, most fights and most pain felt in those fights are a result of simple misunderstandings The number of incumbent users is far larger than the number of new users at any given release of a piece of established software, such as Fedora. The Fedora 15 release is not going to see 100,000,000 new users. Let’s say Fedora has (as purely hypothetical figures) 10,000,000 users now, and may gain 100,000 new users with the next release. Redesigning the whole desktop so 100,000 new users have a _slightly_ easier time of things while 10,000,000 users get the annoyance of all their learned behaviors being invalidated is a really piss-poor optimization of your users’ time and energy. I have spent over a decade an half from front line help desk to help desk manager, the “Any Key” user is far more common than I would have ever guessed.”