Joe said:
Twisted, stop flattering yourself.
[snip various things, including an insult]
And why, pray tell, should I believe a word you say, in light of the
fact that you have long since assumed an adversarial stance?
Are you still so pissed about everyone's disagreement about [insults deleted]
The only thing I'm "pissed about" is a certain fairly prevalent, very
judgmental attitude I've noticed. The sort that responds to someone's
honest work and problem-solving efforts with scorn and derision,
forcing them to speak up in their own defense, only to respond to
*that* in the same manner.
The sort that indicates that the people doing it have very insecure
egos and can only feel good about themselves when they're kicking some
other guy around or finding some reason to feel superior or something.
[Snip various rhetorical questions and assorted nonsense]
And by the way, don't bother using smiley emoticons when it's perfectly
clear that your posts are inflammatory and not in a joking tone.
My posts are nothing of the sort. It is your posts, liberally sprinkled
with insults and belittling language, that are inflammatory here, yours
and those of the others like you. Mine have been calm and rational
almost to a fault, where perhaps screaming and frothing at the mouth
would have been both understandable and, perhaps, more effective, since
then I'd be communicating in a language I know for certain you
understand instead of one I merely hope you do.
I've never seen anybody in such denial about a flawed approach...
As long as you continue to accuse me of "flawed" anything, you aren't
going to convince me of anything, because I will reject everything you
say and consider it a lie. The minute you tell the other person in a
debate what's wrong with them, you've lost any chance to convince them
of anything; it's stopped being a debate and become an argument, and
they cannot now give any ground, or even be perceived as giving any
ground, because now there isn't a common search for the truth, but a
contest; now there isn't discovery, but winners and losers, and nobody
likes to lose.
Once you attack someone, you force them to entrench their position and
in a place like this, you will never make them give any ground; not
with arguments, pleading, namecalling, or even dirty tricks.
If you had wanted to make some constructive suggestions to me, then you
should have done so and done nothing else. Now it is too late. Since it
is clear that you dislike me and wish to cause me problems and pain, I
cannot trust a word you say, since doing something you suggest may well
simply help you accomplish that particular goal and help me accomplish
nothing. You would have been smarter to conceal your goals, given what
they appear to be, and tried to trick me then, rather than blatantly
insult me; you would have been wiser to have had different goals from
the outset.
and never seen anybody reject so much advice from so many experienced
posters who initially responded to your message with the intention to
help.
I didn't reject any advice from people whose intention was to help. I
did not accept it unconditionally and unquestioningly either, which
some people appear to have misinterpreted, but I did not reject it. I
do reject anything said by someone whose attitude even remotely
resembles yours, though. Perhaps there is a lesson in that for you.
You see it as an attack on your methodology, but it is more
experienced developers (by your own admission, calling yourself a
newbie) trying to steer you in the right direction.
"You're an idiot; give me the wheel" isn't "trying to steer me in the
right direction", it's "pissing me off and convincing me not to trust a
word you say". And that "you're an idiot" attitude oozed out of every
pore of some of the earliest responses I got. I don't respond well to
patronizing posts or condescending or derisive ones either, as you have
probably figured out by now. Why you persist in making them after
they've proven ineffective is a mystery to me.
Instead you decided to take it as a "challenge" from the "alpha male" [insult deleted]
What I took as a challenge was the hostile tone I received. It wasn't
exactly hard to interpret it correctly. When someone says "You don't do
it that way, dummy" it's fairly clear that they are trying to assert a
dominant position. When someone's response to your questioning them
instead of jumping when they say "frog" is to call you names, it's
become damned obvious.
* Software only does what its name implies
I never said that; you did, just now. I did say that if someone has
only the name on which to base a guess, and that guess doesn't suggest
it would be of use to them, then it is unlikely that they will use it;
but that is a completely different statement than the ludicrous one you
falsely attribute to me.
* Google is flawed because it doesn't return results that you think it
should
I didn't say that, either. I said Google is flawed if there exists a
query term for which it doesn't return the most common usages as the
bulk of the first page of hits. People googling for hoofbeats want
horses more often than they want zebras, so I don't think there can be
any disagreement with that statement, but that makes it useless for
framing me for the high crime of idiocy, so again you're forced to
invent something vaguely similar but wrong and then attribute it
falsely to me. But I don't believe for one second that I'm some sort of
supremely qualified person to decide what google should do; just that I
know what its purpose is and what those who built it intended it to do.
* You are a mighty hacker and will disable the computer and internet
connection of anyone who dares censor you in a public unmoderated forum
I do reserve the right to respond in kind to anyone who uses
underhanded tactics. In particular, if someone is going to take my
posts to this unmoderated newsgroup and moderate them, I have no qualms
about doing it right back to their posts.
* Standardized build tools like Ant are unreasonably complicated to
learn and have no use in small projects.
I never claimed that, either. I did claim that if someone unfamiliar
with a tool is working on a quite small project that has not needed
such a tool, then taking time out to download, configure, and learn the
new tool is not necessarily justified. I *would* go so far as to say
that doing so *purely* to conform to the expectations of some bunch of
usenetters is in fact *not* justified.
One remark though on the Google issue - Google is a search engine and
they catalog what is out on the Web. When somebody runs a search, i.e.
"ant", it's going to return more relevant results first.
That is the theory; the practise is apparently quite different,
although why some people think that's somehow *my* fault, I don't know.
You mentioned before that you don't have the desire to be a
professional software developer. Thank God for that; I'd be miserable
if I had someone as stubborn and unreasonable as you on a project team.
I am only "stubborn and unreasonable" to people like you. Perhaps you
should ponder why. (I suggest this, because I know you won't have
bothered to actually read and understand the part of this post, near
the top, where I actually *told* you why.)
