> I’m sad to say that I rarely respond at all. I can’t help them
Well you could say "please contact your local dealership".
“I have toyota corola”
201–210 of 365 posts
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're confusing being a jerk with communication styles and cultural differences. I disagree. We always can simply claim 'it's a cultural difference' as an excuse, but that doesn't make it true and it doesn't make the behavior acceptable. Mature people in every culture look to show respect to others. If someone insulted me and said that, I'd think they were irresponsible and a bit slippery. I've lived in some of th…
I think it's disingenuous to try to appeal to what you see as the norms of "professional IT culture" when Linus founded the Linux community, and with it, its culture. I think invoking the "Ugly American" concept when discussing this is interesting because saying that Linus and the Linux community should conform to "professional IT culture" at large seems emblematic of that mentality. Linus started a community and get…
That comment seems to assume that if enough people do it, it therefore is a good idea. Not all behavior is relatively the same; good and bad don't depend on what the majority likes to do. Lots of people in the business world are condescending toward women; that doesn't make it good or acceptable. In a different context, civil rights exist to protect the minority from the majority.
My point in the GP was that the claim of 'cultural differences' isn't valid; we all learn and adjust to new cultural norms easily, and very few cultures, if any, have the norm of disrespect.
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had a Program manager once who was the English Gentleman stereotype. No matter how ridiculously behind schedule someone was he could not confront anyone about it. He would just ask the same questions every week. For six months I knew that we had a hardware driver problem on the target hardware that was causing the drive to be accessed at PATA speeds (3 MB/s max throughput stuck out from my time spent configuring Linu…
My idea of the stereotypical English Gentleman as a program manager is someone who uses nice language and still makes it perfectly clear, after you have thought about it a little, that he's telling you to fuck off idiot. Not someone who's not able to communicate.
We Americans are dense and don't always pick up on undertones of disappointment. Half of the program answered his questions as if they weren't loaded. It was painful to listen to after a year.
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get something similar. I was an early adopter of a popular email service, so I managed to get @ .com. Pretty neat, pretty simple, right? Except I have a really common name, and people seem think that if the email address has their name in it, it must be their email address. I get sign-ups for Facebook all the time. I get emails about credit scores that make me panic until I realize I didn't sign up for that service…
I'm amazed how many people get their email address wrong. I have . @gmail.com, which is fine, and hardly gets any mail meant for someone else. @gmail.com however, is basically unusable. Funny thing is, the latter was the one I created first, but I forgot the password so had to create the other. I managed to recover it later and I'm glad I have the former.
I have a @gmail.com and I get everything from online shopping receipts to legal notices. You'd be amazed at just how uninterested a law firm is in knowing they just sent a bunch of legal correspondence to someone who isn't their client.
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knuth is such a class act. I don't think I've ever heard a negative story about him. Contrast him to, say, the harsh laguage Linus Torvalds routinely engages in or the many stories pointing out Steve Jobs' unfriendly side. I'm not 100% sure if you have to be a jerk to get ahead in life and lean towards 'yes' on this but when I see guys like Knuth, I wonder if nice guys do win sometimes. >TXT2COM As an 80s BBS kid, I…
You're confusing being a jerk with communication styles and cultural differences. You'd never hire anyone from the American inner city, from parts of Scotland and Ireland, parts of New York, and similar. Some very nice people talk loudly, swear, and use politically incorrect language. This is part of the reason some URMs can't get ahead in US corporate culture. Yes, Linus does swear a lot, and uses aggressive languag…
Your argument is shit. (Another Linus quote) And here's why.
"I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do.
People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it just results in what I consider to be a better system.
And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight face, and really mean it."
-- Linus Torvalds, 09/06/2000, LKML
"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended."
-- Linus, 2012.
Linus Torvalds on why he isn't nice: "I don't care about you."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/linus-torvalds-on-wh...
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knuth is a one man shop. Torvalds is leading the biggest open source project in the world, and Jobs was leading one of America's largest corporations by market cap. Leading is different than writing.
Being a leader does not justify being an asshole.
It can certainly justify being short with people though.
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds extremely funny. I would pay good money to get to be on the receiving end of "I want to talk to your manager!" when you can act however you want.
It gets old very quickly. I used to have a phone number that was one easily mistaken digit away from the largest pizzeria in town, and people angrily complaining about wrong or delayed orders was not funny. One of my siblings sometimes took orders he had no intention of fulfilling :P Edit: see also legal (or other) threats, from the same author (mentioned elsewhere in the comments) https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01…
It can't help matters that the domain is "haxx" ;)
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#208I have a similar story. I made an Android app which was getting like 2K installs a day. The app was meant for non-english speakers in India.
I started getting hundreds of emails on by developer email with empty body and empty subject text. I wrote back asking why they did it and never got a reply.
The friction to find and email a developer is pretty high in playstore. Then when I actually travelled to India and started low bandwidth networks I realized what was happening. There was some scrolling issue on playstore where people actually attempted to click on a related app but ended up touching developer email. Not knowing how to close the gmail's compose screen they instead pressed on send. (Many of these users dont know how to use email).
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knuth is such a class act. I don't think I've ever heard a negative story about him. Contrast him to, say, the harsh laguage Linus Torvalds routinely engages in or the many stories pointing out Steve Jobs' unfriendly side. I'm not 100% sure if you have to be a jerk to get ahead in life and lean towards 'yes' on this but when I see guys like Knuth, I wonder if nice guys do win sometimes. >TXT2COM As an 80s BBS kid, I…
You're confusing being a jerk with communication styles and cultural differences. You'd never hire anyone from the American inner city, from parts of Scotland and Ireland, parts of New York, and similar. Some very nice people talk loudly, swear, and use politically incorrect language. This is part of the reason some URMs can't get ahead in US corporate culture. Yes, Linus does swear a lot, and uses aggressive languag…
Linus doesn't swear because it's "his culture." He swears to put people down. There's a difference between using harsh language casually to talk about something, and using that kind of language to talk down a person or their work. Linus does the latter. Not only that, but he openly admits it.
I don't understand why there's confusion on that score. He knows what he's doing, he knows it's dickish, he does it anyway because people let him, and legions leap to his defense for it. It flabbergasts me, to be honest.
That's why he's a jerk, and that's why it's unacceptable.
Re: “I have toyota corola”
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get something similar. I was an early adopter of a popular email service, so I managed to get @ .com. Pretty neat, pretty simple, right? Except I have a really common name, and people seem think that if the email address has their name in it, it must be their email address. I get sign-ups for Facebook all the time. I get emails about credit scores that make me panic until I realize I didn't sign up for that service…
I'm amazed how many people get their email address wrong. I have . @gmail.com, which is fine, and hardly gets any mail meant for someone else. @gmail.com however, is basically unusable. Funny thing is, the latter was the one I created first, but I forgot the password so had to create the other. I managed to recover it later and I'm glad I have the former.
I have @gmail.com because I'm an early adopter (TM). My mailbox is almost unusable.