sigh. I just went through a round up updating one of my websites, and a part of that was just dealing with link rot ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot ). Now I understand whole websites going away when the sponsor ceases to exist, but what is so frustrating are the sites that keep shuffling everything around every few years for no apparent reason, "to improve the user experience" is just too lame an excuse for most of the changes. Worst yet are the retirement of data just because it is 'old' (aka Age discrimination) as if nobody ever keeps products running past their design life, or that newer versions actually migrated the excellent 1st generation documentation in the the current sets. I have made use of 20 year old manuals as they were the most comprehensive for what I was doing even if they missed some of the recently added features. I make a point of trying to keep all my links consistent so that even when the root domain has been switched out from under me, they rest of the links can still be used at the new location.
I try to follow Tim Berners-Lee advice in http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI as much as possible on this front.
2012-06-29
2012-06-19
Assumptions: All computer operators are programmers
As a technical person that came through the DOS/OS2/NetWare/Windows path, it has been an interesting set of challenges learning to install and support Linux systems. One of the biggest has been that many in the open source world that Linux is a part of, is that everyone who isn't a total end-user, must be a full programmer. This is so clear in much of the documentation (man/info pages) as it is in many of the forums/chat groups.
An example is the documentation for the Linux 'free' command which tells you all the switches for the command, but without any indication of what the output of the command really means, because it is supposedly obvious. I think I have it mostly figured out at http://www.konecnyad.ca/andyk/freemem.htm, but that is only through lots of Googling and finding blogs that actually go into it to explain different points.
In too many of the forums, I've seen people trying to learn being told that it was simply obvious and beneath requiring an explanation, or that the answer was a tiny bit of programming and therefor 'simple'. This sounds like the arrogance you see in academia, like a physicist that showed that the physics of a fusion reactor was proven and it 'only' needed some engineering to finish (over 5 years ago and we still don't have that reactor design adding power to the grid that I can tell).
I would say this is one of the biggest obstacles to Linux getting anywhere near mainstream, because so many supporters keep treating mainstream as not worthy of the support they need. I can only think that many of them crying for mainstream acceptance are really just elitists who really don't want to share. But I will keep pushing to break those barriers as I believe that open source is still the most efficient way forward for the bulk of IT.
An example is the documentation for the Linux 'free' command which tells you all the switches for the command, but without any indication of what the output of the command really means, because it is supposedly obvious. I think I have it mostly figured out at http://www.konecnyad.ca/andyk/freemem.htm, but that is only through lots of Googling and finding blogs that actually go into it to explain different points.
In too many of the forums, I've seen people trying to learn being told that it was simply obvious and beneath requiring an explanation, or that the answer was a tiny bit of programming and therefor 'simple'. This sounds like the arrogance you see in academia, like a physicist that showed that the physics of a fusion reactor was proven and it 'only' needed some engineering to finish (over 5 years ago and we still don't have that reactor design adding power to the grid that I can tell).
I would say this is one of the biggest obstacles to Linux getting anywhere near mainstream, because so many supporters keep treating mainstream as not worthy of the support they need. I can only think that many of them crying for mainstream acceptance are really just elitists who really don't want to share. But I will keep pushing to break those barriers as I believe that open source is still the most efficient way forward for the bulk of IT.
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