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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">I've been puzzling over why Gibson and others achieve celebrity status anyway.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Old saying, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."<br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Too many people don't apply critical thinking. They assume that because Gibson uses a lot of jargon, Gibson must be smart. Smarter than the audience member who can't understand the BS. And the audience tunes into the next session with the belief that they might understand it.<br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">The proper response should be to find someone actually knows the subject and present it clearly.</div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div></div><div id="ydp8682a2ayahoo_quoted_2504455918" class="ydp8682a2ayahoo_quoted">
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On Sunday, February 16, 2020, 8:51:37 PM PST, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
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<div>Quoting Paul Zander (<a shape="rect" href="mailto:paulz@ieee.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paulz@ieee.org</a>):<br clear="none"><br clear="none">> I decided to give a listen to the show. I don't pretend to be<br clear="none">> anything like a security expert and was hoping I might learn<br clear="none">> something.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">If you want to learn more about security, there are _excellent_ places<br clear="none">to do so, but sadly Leo Laporte's show on the subject, despite him being<br clear="none">an urbane radio host, is almost certainly not among them. It's, as you<br clear="none">suggest, a news digest show, and the biggest problem is that neither<br clear="none">Laporte nor Mr. Gibson his (apparently frequent) guest commenter<br clear="none">actually understands the subject.<br clear="none"><br clear="none"> (snip)<br clear="none"><br clear="none">> Anyway, you can list me as another person who is extremely<br clear="none">> underwhelmed by Mr. Gibson. I would have preferred a random video of<br clear="none">> cats.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">Gibson popped up as a sudden software celebrity and frequent speaker in<br clear="none">the 1980s, back when I was one of the newsletter staff at Diablo PC User<br clear="none">Group in Walnut Creek. Gibson's firm Gibson Research Corporation<br clear="none">(grc.com) suddenly showed up in 1985. His big first moneymaker was a<br clear="none">hard disk utility called Spinrite (1988), which claimed to do all sorts<br clear="none">of magic things to make hard disks more reliable and improve their<br clear="none">durability and performance, and in reality Spinrite in its heyday was<br clear="none">practically a one-trick pony: It tested MFM-type hard drives to find<br clear="none">the best-performing interleave setting, and then (destructively; i.e.,<br clear="none">you'll need to restore from backup) rewrote the low-level formatting<br clear="none">information with the new interleave factor. <br clear="none"><br></div>
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