Joe said:
Will you shut up about the Google Groups posting problems?
[Attack post detected. Response mandated.]
It's called "topic drift". It happens. If you don't care for it, feel
free to ignore that branch of this thread now.
I have run into this limit at times
too when involved in heated discussions involving lots of posts.
And it never once occurred to you that one of your opponents might have
discovered a way to engineer such an occurrence in order to stifle
dissenting opinions?
Anyway, I have absolute proof now -- a post by foobarbazqux (apparently
a PofN sockpuppet by the way) quite definitely contained code designed
to trick GG into thinking I wanted to crosspost my response. It only
showed me the name of one bogus extra destination group, but it
evidently spammed an unknown but large number of others, since the
limit in question was hit again almost immediately thereafter.
The issue is probably moot now, since I'll manually edit the newsgroup
list when responding to anything from either sockpuppet from now on,
and be a bit more alert for anyone else trying a similar tactic (who
will, of course, start to be suspected of being another of this loser's
sockpuppets upon being detected...)
Way to over-simplify. You are becoming quite the conspiracy theorist.
I don't see any "over-simplification" here. They are still getting the
money in question, and they are not providing usenet service with it
anymore. Nor, to my knowledge, are they now using it to provide some
different service. There was no new feature added at the time they
removed usenet access; in fact, they also dropped web hosting(!) at
about the same time and told everyone to go use Yahoo. I let my small,
poorly-maintained and semi-abandoned site lapse rather than do anything
of the sort or pay for it to be hosted somewhere less bogus, of course.
Face it; they were simply being greedy.
No one cares about your housing situation.
Rather arrogant of you to presume to speak for everyone who reads here,
especially given that that's potentially the entire population of the
planet. Who died and appointed you Secretary-General of the United
Nations, or whatever it is that you think that you are that would mean
that you had a jurisdiction that bloody huge?
Anyway, nobody's sticking a gun to your head and forcing you to read
anything I write (or reply, for that matter -- hint, hint).
Your "review" was simply a distortion of [continuation of untruths
snipped]
**** you. Now you've crossed a new line and more or less called me a
liar, and I have no other response to something like that; I won't
dignify it with a proper point-by-point rebuttal.
[I spent more time than you did]
Whoopee. I don't have as much time to waste here (and you're already
wasting way too damn much of it, and not even giving me a choice in the
matter) as you evidently seem to think I do, and especially not to open
eighty thousand browser tabs and fish around and google up references
to liberally sprinkle in my posts. I assume that everyone else here
besides you is smart enough to know how to browse their way up the
thread if they forgot anything -- easy with GG, and also with a proper
newsreader if they don't chuck all the old posts' headers.
So that means after that point, advice is no longer accepted? After
this point, advice to the contrary becomes bashing and hostility,
apparently.
I never said that. I'm just pointing out that I didn't read that
particular message until later. That is to rebut the claim many have
implied and some have stated outright that I ignored that advice and
did something different out of pure bloody-mindedness. Of course,
making claims like that about my motivations and state of mind without
evidence *is* bashing and hostility...
Jumping on? He was just trying to help, for God's sake! There was
nothing negative about his post, he was trying to be helpful!
Are you blind? The post in question snapped "URLs can be to local files
too" rather bluntly as if this was some fact some backwards student
needed reminding of for the nth time, without bothering to read ahead.
How would *you* describe such a response?
The response was of a genuinely helpful intent, it would seem. One part
of it was somewhat undiplomatic though, and in hindsight assumes
additional significance as such.
No; that only started once I posted what I'd discovered using google to
the thread.
[insult deleted] It started when you started acting that way.
"Acting that way"? Meaning "posting to comp.lang.java.programmer" I
suppose?
It's not a misunderstanding. You're oversimplifying again. It is your
approach as in, the approach you chose to use.
Stop accusing me of error. It is a misunderstanding, given that I (and
others) will read it as implying "your half-assed homebrew approach"
when they see "your approach". In any event, there's the niggling
little matter that calling it "my" approach attaches to me some sort of
responsibility for it, which doesn't actually exist since I knew of no
alternatives at the time in question. That perceived responsibility is
then used as a hook to hang attacks on; accusations of doing things
stupidly that obviously would fall flat otherwise. In light of the
purpose of framing the debate in that particular "you-oriented"
language the very use of such language, especially after being told not
to, carries significance on its own.
In fact, perhaps a big problem all along has been the use of
"you-language" which inextricably mixes up a software project and its
author, and makes an attack on either an attack on both. Using "you" at
the same time as criticizing an aspect of a project implicitly
criticizes the person too, and puts them on the defensive. When that
happens, it becomes darn hard to convince them of anything, not when
accepting what you're saying would mean accepting the implicit
criticism of their person too. So the use of "you" language is
monumentally stupid if you assume that a person's motive is to help,
but on the other hand it is quite logical if you suppose instead that
their motive is to attack someone. And that means, of course, that the
use or disuse of "you" language can itself be used to make educated
guesses about someone's motives ... yours, for instance.
Not really. I once wrote a Sun developer article about web services,
using the low level JAXM API to manually construct SOAP messages. It
was mostly academic; in practice, nobody would use such an archaic and
overcomplicated method. Sun developer articles are not always best
practices. So no, no trouble brewing here.
I expect them to at least work, and (barring a single bug which their
test cases never triggered anyway) the one at issue here did.
I don't expect that the following should result in criticism, however:
* Having a problem
* Investigating with Google
* Eventually encountering a hit on sun.com describing a possible
solution
* Implementing this
* Having no more problem
I was damn surprised when criticism was the result. And, of course,
annoyed, particularly when the criticisms called it "my" approach and
thereby implicitly criticized *me* and not just the approach itself.
(That alone implicitly criticizes sun.com, which I also find startling
here.)
That's your ego kicking in. He said nothing to make it sound that way,
unless you were overly defensive to begin with.
You are not the judge of what is "overly" defensive. See above re: your
jurisdiction, which as far as I can tell so far extends precisely as
far as the four exterior walls of your home and to the tip of your
nose, the same as mine.
How dare he deviate from your original question!! Oh yeah, you had
mentioned the user's directory and he mentioned that in response to
that.
You didn't mention this in your post, and I'm hard-pressed to remember
every detail of this excessively long thread that you insist on
perpetuating, so I only had what was in your posting to go on there.
Don't blame me for this. It is you who didn't give additional
information in that post, and it is you, to a significant extent, who
is making this thread so bloody long to begin with. (Count your
postings to this thread and then double that to include every reply
that I was forced to make if I was to counteract some insult or
another, less the first couple that were non-insulting thus
response-optional. The result's gotta be in the neighborhood of 40 by
now. And counting.)
I don't think you are a liar.
You more-or-less came right out and called me one about two pages up in
the interminable post this is a reply to. Either your memory is shorter
than a single posting (and you just implicitly attacked me for not
remembering *the whole thread word for word*) or you're a hypocrite.
I think you were overly defensive from the beginning and as such, took everything as an
attack against you
No. I only took as an attack anything that implied that the poster
questioned my competence, intelligence, honesty, or whatever.
To recap: after my detailing of the solution I found online, there
were, almost immediately, responses insisting that I explain my choice
of approach, and detail its advantages. This is the kind of response
I'd expect to get in a class at school after doing something dumb or,
at best, questionable; not in a newsgroup where the post in question
was of a "nothing more needs to be done here, move along" nature
indicating that no further assistance was required. (And when it's my
project, of course, it is I, not you, who decides if further assistance
is required.)
I would, at that point, have welcomed anything neutral (or better) and
constructive. Unfortunately, not even "neutral" was in the offing;
every response, *every last damn one of them* suggested, in front of an
audience, that I was doing something dumb; several of them challenged
me explicitly to provide evidence against such a claim.
If that isn't rude I don't know what is; basically what we had was "if
you don't quickly prove otherwise I will conclude that you're stupid
and everyone reading this is then advised to draw the same conclusion".
This is rather as if I'd done something innocuous and someone suddenly
unsheathed a sword and said "Engarde!", with a lunge sure to follow
shortly if I didn't take defensive actions.
The mystifying thing is ... why? I found some fix on the Internet for
my problem. So? If I'd waited for advice here and used it instead, I'd
still have found some fix on the Internet for my problem. In fact,
instead of it being from sun.com it would have been from a usenet
newsgroup; I know which is likely to be considered more credible by
most people.
I posted the details. Civilly and mainly to let people know the
original question wasn't in need of answering by anyone here after all.
That's courteous; I could have just been quiet and potentially left
someone busily researching away on my behalf, unaware that it was a
waste of time for them to continue.
Next thing I know: schoolteacher-type responses testing me, like "What
are the advantages of your approach?" I didn't come here to be lectured
at or, worse, asked patronizing questions! I'm six years out of
university, not some grade-school kid taking remedial math classes!
Grrrr!
*sigh* I doubt the exact, complex causes of this ... event will ever be
understood. Short of being able to read the minds of the initial
respondents, anyway. If I ever get one of them alone while I happen to
have access to sodium pentothal, maybe I'll find out >;-) but otherwise
it seems unlikely, unless someone remembers and chooses to divulge
their exact mindset at the time. Likely one of them actually instructs
a course in Java programming and went into "teacher and slow student"
mode without even thinking about it, and that set the tone of the whole
debate and created a handy template for subsequent responses, but that
is only ever likely to be an educated (so to speak) guess.
We were discussing the approach to your problem, so of course we were
asking about the advantages of your approach...
Why were "we" discussing it at all, once I made the post indicating I
had a working solution? Certainly not with the intention of solving the
problem, given that it no longer needed solving. I definitely did
nothing specifically to invite continued discussion. That doesn't mean
I wouldn't have welcomed a constructive response, but what I got was a
questioning/doubtful one, followed closely by an outright incredulous
one.
And Oh No! People continued to question you??!!
By continuing to do so, they implied I'd done something wrong, or is
this somehow lost on you? (A post *suggesting* something else would
have been another matter, as long as it was civil.)
It was an ongoing discussion, so what? Nobody forced you to come back
and write the hostile replies that you did.
You seem to misunderstand the next sequence of events. Because my
competence had been publicly called into question it was my
responsibility to respond and set the record straight. To the poster
who'd asked what the advantages of "my" approach were, I responded with
not one but five that applied at least to the specific case in
question. (Later, it emerged that the other approach is superior in a
broad class of cases *not* including that one.) At no time did I
personally attack anyone; my responses were either statements or
questions of a largely factual nature.
The fact that everyone in this thread is pretty much unanimously in
agreement about your piss-poor attitude might tell you something about
your tone, were you not so self-important to keep this going as is.
My tone is that of someone besieged unexpectedly and, yes, increasingly
annoyed by it.
And it is you who is "so self-important to keep this going as is". You
have not had your honor, competence, or anything of the sort
questioned; you could walk away from this right now without losing
anything. On the other hand, that choice is denied me every time
someone posts something that claims that I did anything wrong. I must
then respond and explain why that isn't true, or else continue to be
perceived as wrong by whoever sees the posting in question. (I think I
can safely assume that the worst of the people posting such things will
never be convinced, unfortunately.)
Every time I respond in my own defense, though, some jerk posts
something that undoes all of my hard work and suggests unkind things
about me again! It is clear that there is a deliberate pattern here,
that certain people simply will not quit doing so until I let one of
their attack posts stand unchallenged. Obviously though I *can* not
satisfy them without negative consequences (while they could easily
quit without negative consequences). Why do they -- why do *you* want
this? Why do you seem bound and determined to have some disparaging
claim about me be the last word in this thread? Especially when you
must realize by now that it is futile; I will not allow it to happen
and it is easily within my power to prevent your victory condition. The
game is a draw -- please just admit it and walk away, without stigma.
)