Joe Attacki wrote:
[snip drivel]
And if I were to label you as anything, "liar" is the furthest from my mind.
For the love of God, whatever label you are thinking of instead, keep
it to yourself!
I'm not giving you a choice? You could always not respond.
Technically true, but I can't simply walk away from this without
consequences, while you can. If I quietly slink off now, everyone will
immediately draw the conclusion that I've capitulated, that yes I'm
whatever kind of moron you lot claim I am, that my software is stupidly
designed, and whatever else I've been arguing against. How else would
they interpret my withdrawal, than as a forfeiture?
No, the moment the discussion became about me rather than about
software, it was no longer a viable option for me to just withdraw. Not
once people put my intelligence, honor, and whatever else into question
with their words.
You are truly the master of hyperbole.
Why, thank you.
[Snip assorted meaningless drivel not germane to "giving an application
an icon"]
As has been said many times before, "It just works" is a dangerous
practice in software development.
You make an error I already alerted others to avoid. (And you, except
that you obviously don't read much of what I write, or we wouldn't even
be having this argument.)
There's two ways people could interpret "it just works". One is as
advocating not caring if you actually understand something so long as
it works, and there I'd agree with you.
The other is as advocating choosing the more reliable of two options.
For example, a built-in string constant simply works without any mess
or fuss or any chance of failure. A string constant stored in an
external file and loaded using I/O operations involves more mess and
fuss and introduces the possibility of an I/O failure of some kind,
such as "file not found" if the file got moved and isn't in the
expected place. This doesn't of course mean one should never
externalize strings; it just means one shouldn't do so just for the
heck of it. Localization is an example of a good reason to externalize.
Now can we drop the "just works" debate already? Consider my earlier
usage to have meant "it's foolproof" or "it's more robust".
I've already explained this but you chose to ignore it. It's easier to
type "your approach" than to type "the approach you found on sun.com
while googling and had to hack a third party class to get working".
So ease of typing effort is more important than avoiding ad-hominem
argumentation.
If that's what you believe, then we can never have a meaningful
discussion here. And since the attack/defense cycle here is obviously a
stalemate, we should both concede that the game is a draw and walk
away. (Which means that you should not post a followup to this, at
least if it does more than just nod and agree to these terms.)
As I've also said many times, it was a discussion. Yes, it was critical,
because the approach you found on sun.com while googling and had to
hack a third party class to get working (happy now?) is less than
optimal.
There are three problems there:
1. I did everything by the book, and therefore should be
judgment-proof. Why wasn't I? Apparently to avoid criticism here
requires actual omniscience and perfection, rather than just doing the
best you can?? How unjust! For the high crime of doing the best I can,
rather than some higher standard set by you (and what authority do you
have to set standards here anyway?!), I am now to be mercilessly abused
verbally, no matter how I plead my case that you should desist? How
unjust!
2. Besides the fact that I don't see how any of you could have done
better if you'd been in the same situation, with exactly the same
information (and no more!) than I had, I also don't see why you had to
make it about me and my purported incompetence and not just about the
software. Care to explain that part? Why drag my reputation into the
table-stakes and force me to defend it, simply because I *merely* did
the best I could, and not better?
3. On top of all this, as far as I can tell in *this specific instance*
(other circumstances not being relevant here) the approach I wound up
using isn't actually inferior anyway! So it may not have been possible
to do "better" anyway (only different).
You must successfully refute all three of the points above calmly and
logically, or else admit that your whole argument against me doesn't
have a leg to stand on and should be considered null and void,
including every last criticism of either me *or* my software that you
previously made in this thread. (If you do some third thing instead,
I'll consider it tantamount to an admission as per the second item
above.)
That includes justifying dragging me-the-person into the issue as a
target of criticism rather than limiting your scope solely to the
software originally at issue, and it includes justifying holding the
expectation that someone do better than the best they can, an
expectation I consider unreasonable and very much doubt you *can* find
a valid argument to justify.
OK, so you're not overly defensive?
"This is the approach I found and implemented"
"Hm, did you consider doing it this other way? It's typically the way
to solve this problem. Does your approach have any advantage?"
"What!? How dare you criticize me, who do you think you are!? Why are
you challenging my competence??!"
This caricature is nonsense. Closer would be
"This is the approach I found and implemented"
(Teacher-to-backwards-student-mode) "What are the advantages of your
approach?"
(Voice #2) "Why did you do it THAT way??"
(Me) "Here are several advantages of the approach I used ... What other
way did you think I would do it, given that this was the first google
hit I got googling the subject and that was thus-and-such and etc..."
(That should be the end of it, but nope...) "Ignoring all of the above,
I now say something to more strongly suggest that your approach is
broken and stupid, and that by extension so are you, since you
obviously didn't get the subtle hint the first time and quietly go away
like I wanted you to!"
(Gloves now begin to come off...)
I'm sorry, is there a limit to how many replies I should post in a
given thread?
No, only to how many attack posts you should write. That limit,
incidentally, being zero.
(It is only attack posts that both waste bandwidth and force your
target to follow up in his own defense. At least other off-topic posts
merely waste bandwidth! Attack posts basically count for double, and
that's ignoring the ugliness, rudeness, unjustness, etc. and the nasty
effect it has on your victim.)
OK, here we go again. Stop exaggerating. You KNOW I didn't attack you
for not remembering the whole thread word for word. I simply expected
you to at least remember the tone and content of the posts that put you
into this rage.
In other words, the whole thread. Well, actually, strictly speaking
nothing, since nothing has put me into any rage. Aside from the "****
you" when someone called me a liar earlier, I've been pretty much calm
and logical -- perhaps to a fault. Maybe the only language you lot
understand is the one you're using, and that therefore to get your
attention or to convince you to leave me alone requires that I start
insulting you and shouting at you.
I've hoped against hope all this time that you'd realize that you're
stalemated and accept a drawn game, but it is now becoming apparent
that I might have to stoop to your level and counterattack or never see
the end of this, with day after day losing as much as an hour a day
simply to undoing the last 24 hours' damage to my name by you lot in
this one thread. If that's what it will take to end it, the gloves will
really come off and I will have at you with every weapon in my arsenal;
and if you will never let me come out of this smelling like roses (or
even neutral), then I'll ensure that we'll ALL come out of this
stinking like an open sewer! It's called "mutually assured destruction"
by the way; I've been told that it's an excellent deterrent. Perhaps
now this will be allowed to quietly die the death it deserves? But if
not ... I guess we'll see how long it takes to nuke one another into
submission. I must admit a part of me actually would like to start
slinging serious verbal firepower at the whole lot of you until
everyone's reputation (and, as likely as not, this newsgroup) is a
smouldering wreck. But actually I'd much rather we all just walked away
from this (you first of course, so that the score is zero-zip after I
post a final round of replies). It would be the mature, adult thing to
do.
(So why do I now suspect that there's at least one kid, or worse
teenager, among you? ...)
If you didn't want any more assistance, advice, discussion, or
whatever, why did you keep coming back to the thread? Oh, right,
because everyone was attacking you.
Exactly -- to rebut the insinuations (and later outright lies).
For example, the post asking "What are the advantages..." required a
response. Failure to reply would have suggested an admission that "my"
approach was crap, after all, as the poster obviously thought. So I had
to answer the question. Unfortunately, instead of it being left at
that, a reply disregarded most of what I'd written and tried to
undermine the rest, and it was obviously necessary to reiterate ...
You are being completely absurd. Nobody challenged you.
You don't honestly think that a shocked-sounding "What are the
advantages of your approach???" in a situation where the very question
is out-of-scope isn't effectively a challenge of "You say you're not an
idiot? Prove it!" do you?
It's what a teacher says to a student who's done something a) different
from all of the other students and b) wrong, or at least questionable.
It's *not* something you ask without intending to make an implicit,
rather pointed *point* of some sort or another. And that's leaving
aside that it was the *mildest* of the responses. You can make a fairly
good case that it's innocuous, and at worst a Java course instructor
coming home after a bad day at work with incompetent and difficult
students, checking netnews, and slipping into "teacher to student
suspected of having made a mistake" mode out of sheer habit.
Unfortunately, some of the other early responses to the disclosure of
"my" approach were not open to any such charitable interpretations at
all...
Tell me something -- if you asked how to do X, found Y before seeing
any replies, Y worked, and then you checked news again later and saw a
bunch of belated suggestions to do Z, posted that it was OK, you'd
found Y which worked well enough in your situation, and then suddenly
everyone was either continuing to suggest Z (implying they think Y is
stupid) or asking you why the heck you did Y, tell me what would *you*
think these people were implying by doing so?! In fact more generally
if people keep asking why you're doing something or suggesting you do
something else, instead of sticking to the implicit boundaries you
originally set on the discussion, wouldn't you take that as
criticism???
Do I even have to make it explicit that if I ask how to do X, then the
scope of the discussion is "ways to do X" and any unsolicited advice or
questioning outside that scope is clearly a suggestion of incompetence,
or at least a sign of dubiousness, that would have been better kept
private rather than made public? You're welcome to your negative
opinions about me or the way I choose to develop my software -- just do
SHUT UP and keep them to yourself! When I want your opinion on such
things I will explicitly ask the questions.
(P.S. I don't recommend
holding your breath waiting for those questions, either.)
Asking what an advantage is is not a challenge. It's a DISCUSSION.
It's prying outside the original bounds of the question, and as such
it's an implicit questioning of the validity of the choice I made, and
by extension, of my validity. (Not that I even had much of a choice,
given that at the time I had yet to be made aware of any other
approach.)
Tell me what *you* think the motives behind such responses are?
I can only think of two. One is to simply attack me for the heck of it.
The other is genuine helpfulness, gone wrong due to a misguided
approach chosen. In that theory, the person genuinely wants my project
to succeed, and genuinely thinks a different approach would be better,
but unfortunately chooses to word their "help" as an attack on the
approach used rather than an endorsement of the approach they consider
superior. And that, of course, challenges the original poster to defend
the approach used, and likely closes their mind to your suggestion.
You've doubly shot yourself in the foot if you do that: not only won't
your suggestion, which you believe genuinely constructive (and perhaps
correctly), be used, but you've also brought the original poster's own
competence publicly into question, if implicitly by making the
suggestion that their choice of approach might not be all it's cracked
up to be. And now they are put upon to defend not only their actions
but their intelligence and competence too, since this happened in front
of a goddam audience.
"Are you sure Z wouldn't be better?" is likewise problematic. It uses
the word "you", you'll note, and makes the person's decisions at issue
and not just the needs of the software being developed.
That's what this newsgroup is for, DISCUSSION. Plenty of posts were neutral. As for the
ones that suggested you were doing something dumb, well, it is because [insult deleted]
See? I'm right! Posts did suggest unflattering things about me, and now
you're at least admitting that they did (while insulting me further at
the same bloody time mind you).
There's the wrongdoing. Nobody should have ever suggested anything of
the sort. Either they should leave me-the-person out of the discussion
entirely, or they should sing my praises. But they should never, under
any circumstances, have said or implied any negative thing about me,
especially in front of an audience where it not only is rude but forces
me to speak up in self defense to negate the effect their remark has on
that audience.
No, that's the generalization you made.
No, that's the truth, and you just admitted it yourself in the last
paragraph. You're not very consistent today are you?
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!
[insult deleted]
Aren't you going to explain how either a) the person patronizing me
somehow wasn't or b) their patronizing me is justified somehow even
though I did not ask for their opinion in that area? Or are you just
going to sit there and call me names like a pouting child who just lost
an argument?
[insult deleted] The initial responses were plenty constructive.
They were not wholly constructive, and they contained a taint that
wasn't merely offtopic but actually damaging. *That's* the problem,
rather than a complete lack of constructiveness.
They suggested alternatives and offered reasons why the approach you
found on sun.com while googling and had to hack a third party class to
get working was problematic.
Perhaps it didn't occur to them that I didn't want to *hear* reasons
why they thought I was dumb, certainly not in public? I certainly
hadn't asked for such. Certainly not worded so as to suggest gross
incompetence on my part in front of an audience.
Instead of taking these into account, you took them as some kind of challenge to your
intelligence.
"You should have done better than this!" (whether stated or implied) IS
such a challenge, dimwit, or had that somehow escaped your
woefully-inadequate excuse for an inference engine?
[Calls me a liar again]
That's it. We're done here. I'm going to respond to the several other
posts full of (no doubt) drivel you've graced this newsfroup with today
with detailed rebuttals, but any future ones I will respond to only
with boilerplate denials of any wrongdoing. Obviously you are incapable
of reasoned debate, and I'm wasting my time responding in any way other
than with a blanket "I'm not an idiot, asshole".
A responsibility to your ego, maybe.
A responsibility to my reputation, and to myself. Unlike you, who
certainly had no responsibility to go attacking random usenetters for
no good reason.
Anyways, if you're looking for overdeveloped egos I suggest you start
with the nearest mirror and work your way outwards from there to
examine some of the *other* recurring posters in this thread. It seems
they have some kind of inability to feel good about themselves in any
way besides putting down other people, either with the subtle put-downs
I endured right after posting "my" approach, or with the far less
subtle ones that quickly followed. Many of these people seemed to feel
slighted if I didn't instantly jump up whenever they said "frog"; talk
about egos! And every last one of you is obviously deeply insecure or
you'd have been much friendlier from the outset (and not in the "smile
sweetly while you twist the knife" sense of some early "friendly" posts
either, but sincerely and without any sly implications!) and would
never have descended into blatant mudslinging.
Your responses didn't attack anyone, no. But they had a very sarcastic
tone
With good reason, since the same was true of the posts being responded
to. "What are the advantages of your approach" and so forth.
While you say you have a responsibility to respond and explain why the
people "challenging" you are wrong, you still haven't said why the
disagreements are untrue.
Disagreements aren't true or false, statements are. If you mean why the
damaging allegations being falsely made against me are false, I've
provided tons of evidence, which you conveniently continue to ignore,
but no longer; it's evidently a waste of my time.
The only reason you've given for not trying the getResource approach is that you're
[insult deleted]
Actually I've given lots.
* At this time, there's no real advantage so it isn't worth the time
and effort, which isn't necessarily a perpetual state of affairs;
* I don't tend to try approaches people want me to try when many of
those people express their desire with rudeness, hostility, insults,
and veiled threats, as it may mean they have some ulterior motive and
even when they don't my doing so would still reward their nasty
behavior;
* The code works as it currently is, and "if it ain't broke don't fix
it";
* Why is it any of your concern anyway?!
And frankly, although I have taken some of your
overstatements of how long it takes to learn such things as
exaggeration, perhaps it calls your competence into question.
No, it just emphasizes that people familiar with something
underestimate the complexity and intimidation that result from early
exposures to someone unfamiliar with it. When you're completely new to
something you do NOT just type in some command to install it and start
using it like it's second nature, as a general rule. (Eclipse was,
remarkably, an exception; but it's still idiotic to bet on that kind of
experience rather than on spending a lot of time with man pages, more
still tinkering, and more still shopping for Rogaine after yanking out
all your hair...)
To top it off, there was an enormous pressure being brought to bear
that I should drop every damn thing I was doing and learn whatever
RIGHT NOW, and on the double, move it move it move it!
If there's one thing that is absolutely guaranteed to turn a pleasant
learning experience into a week-long nightmare of configuration hassles
and crashes of various sorts, it's trying to do it on the clock while
people are yelling at you to hurry the hell up already.
Especially if it's a crowd of half a dozen or more all chanting in
unison.
Now perhaps you have some understanding of why I quickly began to feel
put upon, and called you lot on making me feel that way??
I can only imagine the can of worms I've opened with that one, but oh
well.
You just gave a weak reiteration of the usual insults; nothing new
there. It was weak enough I didn't even feel the need to snip it and
replace it with something in square brackets. Maybe you're losing your
touch?
Haha, wow, way to be over-dramatic. A victory condition? It's a
discussion group, not a battle royale. *rolls eyes*
Correction: it was the former, until *you* turned it into the latter.
If you actually think I am still setting the terms or the rules of the
game, forget it -- you turned it into a war and made it plain that you
consider an unchallenged insult of me to be your victory condition. I
will now deny you that, with one of the reasons being quite simply
because to do otherwise would be to reward your execrable behavior over
the last week or so. And that is something that I will not do, not only
for my sake but for the sake of the next poor unsuspecting n00b to
wander into this shitty little corner of the 'net and get pounced on.
Perhaps he won't be if you realize that you won't get what you want out
of pouncing on that n00b, or nitpicking everything he says or does to
death like some nagging aunt, or whatever the hell.
If this were an isolated incident, Twisted, I could see. But any other
discussion thread I've read from you in other groups has had a common
theme; someone disagreed with you and you got completely hostile.
Leaving aside the dubious morality of net.stalking *and* the
irrelevancy of any other thread anywhere to this one, there's the
simply fact that if someone openly and bluntly disagrees with me in a
public space then they have put my accuracy, competency, intelligence,
honor, and what-have-you into public question, and that requires a
rebuttal. On the other hand a rebuttal does not constitute "going
hostile". I get more hostile, mainly out of sheer frustration, when for
some moronic reason the idiot that rudely contradicted me doesn't
simply agree to disagree, or say "I'm sorry, in your particular
circumstances your method is perfectly acceptable", or do nothing, but
instead stubbornly persists in some sort of stupid quest to prove me
wrong, presumably to boost their own ego. (Egos again! And again not
mine!) I also dislike the fact that someone can make me run their
stupid little treadmill like that or else face ridicule. It isn't
right; it means that anyone can at any time pop up and cause me to
either lose time or lose face with *no* way to avoid having at least
one of those things happen. And anyone actually doing so is therefore
as much a jerk as if they walked up to me and shot me without
provocation, or stole my wallet, or something. It's a fucking crime, as
far as I'm concerned. Nobody should do that, and put me on the
defensive; if someone thinks I'm an idiot they should think it real
quiet like, especially if there's an audience around. If someone
disbelieves something I said, they can diplomatically say "I disagree"
or "This works too" or "This is an alternative"; nobody but their own
inflated ego compels them to argue against the man and use "you"
language and say things like "You're wrong".
But I don't think you'll read any of that paragraph, will you, and if
you do you'll just rationalize some reason why it doesn't matter and
why you have a God given right to insult whoever you damn please and
why they should just take it and shut up and not explain to you (and
your audience) why what you said isn't true. You don't intend to ever
stop attacking me, do you, and nothing will convince you that I'm right
or even that it's a stalemate. And so we'll go on like this, posting a
few new posts in this stupid little war of yours, even though you can
never land a blow while I won't fight back, for the next week, the next
month, or even the next year or more.
Unless, of course, I decide that I have had enough and I *will* fight
back. But that will not lead to anything any of us desire, will it?
