Alexander Noe' wrote:
Geoffrey
> Actually Jörg, I tend to agree with Steve, but it could well be
> a cultural issue. You do come across rather blunt.
Although this is true, let me tell you some things:
* the difficulties to express such notions in a foreign language are
unknown to some (actually, too many) english native speakers who have
never tried to learn a foreign language seriously (scholar french/german
isn't exactly what I mean when saying 'seriously') and thus prefer to
feel insulted rather than just assuming a badly chosen expression.
Understood. I've taken my share of languages, including Spanish, French
and Latin. I do understand the issues of "it's lost in the
translation." Latin is quite an expressive language, with so many more
tenses then, say English.
It
was really funny how long the Bush administration needed to find out
what the sentences "Nous sommes désolés que notre président soit un
idiot. Nous n'avons pas voté pour lui." on some shirts made in Canada
meant :)
:)
* some people whose native language is not english *think* to be able to
express or understand such differences but aren't.
* some people refuse to change an opinion. I don't mean NEC who reliably
copies firmware bugs from one drive to the next (the speed selection
firmware bug is the same in 3500, 3520, 3540, 3550 and 4550 models), but
forum trolls like fugitive/inertia/bob11879 (cdfreaks), fraisouille
(hardware.fr), or Odin of Fire (brennmeister) who rather claim that
pdflatex developers have special contracts with Adobe than admitting
that their boss was too greedy to send a negative reply to a c&d-letter,
who claim that a fiat is a knock-off of a BMW (because a fiat also has 4
tyres) rather than admitting that their beloved plextor is behaving
extremely weirdly and so on.
I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there simply there to stir things
up. Or worse. I catch my share of trolls on many lists, far too many
on the local LUG list. I know how they are and how frustrating it is to
deal with them.
* Eduard Bloch, who has been mentioned somewhere in a message above is,
IIRC, that guy who stated that
void* p = malloc(whatever);
unsigned char i = p[17];
was correct C code and that Sun should fix their compiler to accept this
Bloch-C...
When you have enough contact with people whose main activity is
trolling, you kinda react badly to people using weird arguments, even if
it doesn't qualify for trolling. You must admit that the idea to add a
workaround for a new linux kernel bug to software that is supposed to
work on more platforms than just linux is funny as long as it is not
guaranteed that this workaround won't cause new problems...
I do agree that changing any software to accomodate an existing flaw in
another software package (particularily a kernel) is on the verge of
stupidity. I'm a firm believer in fixing problems, not patching them.
Especially patching something that does not have a defect so it will
work around something broken in another application.
--
Until later, Geoffrey
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