Miss Israel visits the Balkans
BY FLORE DE PRENEUF
(04/15/99)

The snide tone of the recent article by Flore de Preneuf regarding Israel's efforts to aid Kosovar refugees was entirely inappropriate. Israel's motives for doing the simplest of things are always being impugned by people who assume that Israel always has ulterior motives for doing anything, aiding refugees in particular. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they sit on their hands, they're accused of ignoring the plight of the refugees because they're Muslims. If they actually help them, they're sniggered at by smug nihilists who think the whole thing is nothing but a dishonest publicity stunt, concocted to suck up to public opinion.

The situations of the Kosovars and the Palestinians are not in any way analogous. While it is unfortunate, and while an equitable solution is greatly to be hoped for, the plight of the Palestinian Arab refugees is most definitely not the fault of Israel, as much as the article tries to insinuate this. The Palestinians were displaced as a result of a series of wars against Israel instigated by the Arabs, the stated purpose of which was the destruction of Israel. Ever since the PLO was founded by the Arab League (prior to the 1967 war, I might add), the Palestinian Arabs have gone out of their way to let everyone know that they wholeheartedly supported the PLO program, which, until very recently, explicitly called for the destruction of Israel by violence and the forcible banishment of most of the Jews who live there. Indeed, if Arafat's continuing statements to Arab-language media are any indication, the PLO has not yet genuinely repudiated this aim, regardless of the agreements they into which they have entered. The Palestinian refugee camps were created and maintained by the Arabs for the specific purpose of preventing Palestinian integration into the surrounding Arab countries -- keeping the eyes of the world focused on a problem that they made no effort to solve, and insuring that there would be a steady supply of desperate and violent people to fill the ranks of the fedayeen. Unfortunately, this strategy has worked only too well, aided and abetted by irresponsible journalists like de Preneuf.

The Kosovars, on the other hand, are genuine civilian victims of a planned campaign of genocide, who have never threatened Israel with war and destruction. It is only right to help them.

-- Earl Hartman

Damned to diaper duty
BY JENNIFER BINGHAM HULL
(04/16/99)

This was undoubtedly the worst piece of writing I have seen in Salon. Hull finally admits the truth near the end of page 2: "I say I want help but I also want control, of all these little things I care about and he doesn't." Nowhere in the article does she mention talking to her husband about the things that bother her, and why would she? He doesn't care, and she is not shy about proclaiming her assumptions as fact.

I would not deny that the father-child bond is much different than the mother-child bond, but as a father who told his wife to finish dressing while I changed and dressed my baby daughter in the outfit that I had selected; as a father who checked diapers, ointments and baby food in the morning and brought the replenishments home at night; and as a father who inspired laughter more than once when the pacifier or a tiny toy fell from a pocket at work, I would like to suggest that Hull take her passive-aggressive arrogance and toss it in the diaper pail, before her husband goes from passive to aggressive and leaves her to experience single motherhood. Then she can really whine.

-- Andy House

I don't know about her husband, but Jennifer Hull certainly sounds like a shrew. Consider this possibility: You worry because you like it, not because it matters. He doesn't like it, and so worries only about things that matter. Women have a lot invested in saying that men don't do enough. I've seen plenty of women say that in cases where it clearly isn't true: where the woman is a whining layabout while the husband cooks, cleans and entertains the kids. And even where it's true, it's often true because the woman is worrying for the sake of worrying. So you stayed up all night worrying about wipe warmers? Maybe the father just thinks kids need to get used to the idea that sometimes in life, your ass is cold. Women often value worry for its own sake; men mostly value results. Perhaps that's the real difference.

-- Glenn H. Reynolds

Why Linux needs help
BY ANDREW LEONARD
(04/15/99)

While I found the article interesting, was it necessary to use the vulgar term "fucking" when describing what RTFM means? I am not opposed to the use of vulgarity when it clarifies meaning, but that is not the case here: RTFM is also said to mean, sarcastically, "Read The Fine Manual." Furthermore, among hackers, the use of a vulgar reference to fornication in print has been generally changed to "fscking": a word play on the fsck (File System ChecK) command.

-- Rene S. Hollan

Yes, the Linux help files are bad, and often impenetrable -- even for professionals in the industry, like me, let alone users like poor Andrew. About the only thing that can be said in their favor is that they are more likely to actually contain the information you are looking for, if only you can decipher them, than those of commercial vendors. Commercial software makers use nicer, context-sensitive help files that often just don't answer your question at all. Nice GUI, inadequate content.

And what about when you want to go beyond the help files? Chalk and cheese. There are thousands of people willing to give you good and mostly correct advice about your Linux problem. Just start with the news groups. Even better, search the news groups for answers before you ask your question -- chances are you're not the first person to have the problem. With commercial vendors you are much less likely to get this sort of help. Here is a quote from a commercial software vendor that I received in my e-mail just today:

"Thank you for your interest in [company name deleted] and for taking the time to contact us. Technical support is designed primarily for getting the program running without errors. When it comes to helping customers with actually using the program, we are of little help as we don't have access to usage information."

Say what?

So, go on complaining about bad help files. Even better, learn something and write some if you are so dissatisfied. But don't make out that Linux is worse than the others. When you take everything into account, it isn't. And ultimately you have a better chance of getting a correct answer with Linux than with most other pieces of software.

-- Andrew Dunstan
Atlanta

With his bad-pun focus on help and documentation, Andrew Leonard fails to mention the key features that make a system widely usable -- intuitiveness and consistency.

The example of GNOME-ppp is a case in point. The name "GNOME-ppp" itself exposes the fundamental flaw in the program's design -- it is just a GUI for ppp. Simply glomming a GUI on a command-line program and providing documentation does not make that program more usable. In fact, an incomplete GUI front end for a command-line utility might be less usable than the command-line utility itself -- less intuitive, less complete, and not as well documented.

Completely abstracting the details of underlying services and their configuration into high-level concepts like "connect to the Internet" makes a system usable. Making all such abstract interfaces work in exactly the same way makes a system usable.

Creating interfaces that require the user to read Help files reduces the usability of the system. That's why modern consumer user interfaces have wizards.

-- Bruce LeSourd

Passionate eating
BY DEBRA OLLIVIER
(04/16/99)

I can appreciate the love of good food, but the reason why the rest of the world can gorge on fat and stay healthy while Americans grow obese on bread and water is simple: The rest of the world walks, and we drive.

-- Keith Ammann

The crack-up
BY STEVEN SCOTT SMITH
(04/15/99)

I also recently went through a similar "depressive episode." Like Smith, I am an intelligent overachiever who has a great deal of self-knowledge and introspection. However, no amount of self-help reading or relaxing vacations would have kept me from falling into the depression that I experienced. It seemed to almost come out of nowhere. Just like Smith, I also "achieved" nearly every symptom on the psychiatric description of depression. What made it even worse was that as I slid further downward, I thought of myself as a big failure for "allowing" myself to become depressed despite my intelligence and emotional maturity.

But there is a bright side. Working through the pain and the bottoming out, I have learned so much about myself and my life. It was a wake-up call for me to treat myself well in the present instead of continually pushing it off until some point in the future, after I had achieved my career goals and pleased everyone else. Coming to the realization that I needed help from the outside -- my doctor, my therapist, medication, my friends -- was a humbling experience but a relief as well. Too often an overachiever tries to do it all alone; the realization that the only person that judges you for not doing it all alone is you provides a much-needed reality check.

-- Angela Richard

I was extremely disappointed with Steven Scott Smith's superficial, smug recollection of his bout with mental illness. While I feel for anyone who has had to endure a mental breakdown, Smith's piece eschewed honest self-examination in favor of phony Reader's Digest-style folksiness ("Remember, climbing out is done in baby steps") and rank condescension aimed at his father, his therapists and just about everyone else. The piece taught me nothing about living with mental illness and is markedly below Salon's usual high standards.

-- Dan Wiencek