Thu, 09 Jun 2005

I’ve previously blogged about Eugenia here and here. I’ve never previously been directly misrepresented by her, though, until now! Oh, the excitement. Let us see what is wrong with this story. (Well, with the original version; some of the problems listed below have been corrected. Yay for doing research after publishing.)

• I’m described as a Novell engineer, which is wrong, in as much as I haven’t worked for Novell for… jeez, five months now, and as Dave pointed out, I was never an engineer there either :) By making me sound like an expert, she’s making the situation sound different than it really is.
• Oh, wait! The email I sent explicitly says ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, an expert should verify these.’ Good to know that Eugenia read the whole thing, and mentioned the disclaimer in her ‘news’ article.
• Cairo is described as an engine that ‘makes things look good and scalable throughout different resolutions.’ While not inaccurate, it’s a pretty shortsighted view of what Cairo does, and doesn’t in any way provide a balanced picture of what we expect Cairo to provide that might explain the performance tradeoff we might make.
• She describes Cairo as ‘supposedly “accelerated”‘, which is certainly planned, but certainly not implemented in any way that a mere mortal like me can test. A simple email to anyone involved would have given her that information. Again, she is either misunderstanding or deliberately misrepresenting to make the situation look worse than it is.

So, that’s four misrepresentations, misunderstandings, or outright errors in two sentences, all of which could have been corrected with a single email to me. If anyone wants to give me a few bucks, I’ll happily buy osunsubstiatedunresearchedrumors.org as a small gift for our friends over there. ostrollmasqueradingasnews.org is also available, I’m guessing.

Sigh… this is coming across as very vehement. Which it is. It is a shame, because gnomefiles.org is one of the most useful sites we have right now. An actual gnome news site which did research and reporting, instead of repeatedly sloppily mischaracterizing d-d-l emails, would be immensely useful. I do wish that osnews could be that site; it seems very odd to me that people who clearly mean well for gnome (by providing the very useful gnomefiles.org site) can at the same time provide a site that is at best terribly sloppy and at worst deliberately sensationalistic.