161–170 of 365 posts
Earlier 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.
Earlier 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.
Edit: typical -> popular
As somebody who has written to companies about bugs in their products (and almost always ignored), I would really appreciate a response even if it was some form letter thing to the effect of "I just make a small component that happens to be used in your car, kind of like the people who make the screws in your car. Please contact your car manufacturer directly." I personally just like knowing somebody read my letter i…
For a very long time I ran publicly accessible NTP servers. Usually this required little to no maintenance, sometimes we'd get hammered (like when a large ISP rebooted all of their customers boxes at the same time). But usually it wasn't a big deal.
Now, when you have hundreds of thousands of people using your services, it doesn't take many people who have decided you are going to fix their problem, as a percentage to get overwhelmed. Mostly users were great, but there were a few...
My company provided Linux support, and our support number included an option users could select that was prefaced with "If you are an existing customer and are having a service impacting emergency, press 1 to receive a call back from a technician within 15 minutes."
This system would allow them to leave a voicemail and then would log a bug in our tracking system and would start calling our senior on-call tech and their backup, 24 hours a day. It was either the second or third time in a week this happened, and I replied with a "You are not a customer, this is not a service impacting outage, and you are reporting our servers replying to your computer's requests for time service."
The level of vitriol I received in return convinced me it was time to stop offering NTP as a public service.
Most people will spend some time understanding what is going on before reaching out to someone they've never heard of before, expecting them to fix the problem. But if you have enough people using something you provide, you will run across people who have huge expectations of you and get pissed off if you don't fix their problem.
Back in the days of shareware, around 1985, I wrote a program called TXT2COM. It was a simple way of turning a text file into an executable. All a user had to do was run the converted com file and the text file appeared on the screen with full scrolling, search and save. I had my name and phone number embedded in the program. My first problem was when someone converted the Constitution of the United States into a COM…
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…
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 language. That's part of his style, his culture, and how he communicates.
No, he is not a jerk. The reason Linux beat the BSDs is because Linus is a very nice guy. He created a community which, despite the harsh language, was very welcoming, and willing to mentor new people. The BSDs created elitist, closed-off communities, which were unwelcoming to newcomers.
If you made a mistake, the BSD communities would write you off. The Linux community would tell you what you did wrong, and how to fix it, even if they used harsh language to do so.
The Linux culture is also quite meritocratic. It doesn't matter how you communicate, or how incompetent you were a year ago. If you're doing good technical work today, you're welcome. More than other cultures, arguments are taken at technical face value, not by who makes them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a leader does not justify being an asshole.
Nowhere did willhslade say that it does. He said that comparing Knuth's style to Torvalds's isn't very enlightening because they are fundamentally engaged in different activities. Comparing Knuth to Torvalds and saying "look, you don't have to be an asshole to be a great leader" is like comparing Usain Bolt to Dean Karnazes and saying "look, you don't have to be really muscular to be a great sprinter." The comparison…
That makes sense, except that OP said "You don't have to be a jerk to get ahead in life", he didn't mentioned being a leader. The followed commenters brought the leadership point into attention and then subtly implied that there is more correlation between being a jerk and a leader.
Earlier 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…
I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk.
Also keep in mind that BSD have legal challenges that GNU/Linux didn't so community is not the only reason why Linux won the popularity contest
Earlier quoted context omitted.
32k? Loooxury! We had to bang magnetic rocks together fast enough in order to induce a current on the phone line and we only got 1200 baud and WE LIKED IT. Seriously, 32k in the days of shareware? I think the fastest modem I ever saw (in that era, anyway) was 19.2k, and almost nobody had those. Pretty sure I went from 19.2 straight to ADSL.
My mistake 32k was the first I'd used and I downloaded a great deal of shareware at that time. I didn't realise it was dead by then.
(I'm 33, maybe that fact will shed some light)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's the point in putting your e-mail address at the end of the license/about/readme ? If you don't want to receive e-mails, don't put your e-mail. If you just want to receive some kind of e-mails (like just congrats but not bugs), add that information in the end. Of course some people won't comply, but that's just human behavoir. Now, just putting your e-mail and letting the black hole eat them without an answe…
>One way to fix would be ... Trust me, that wouldn't fix it. As someone who works for a company whose name resembles a popular Microsoft product, putting in disclaimers (in our case on our support contact form) doesn't help one bit. They don't care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a surprisingly hard task to educate developers and testers to use the designated test domains (example.com and example.org) in automated or manual tests.
I thought the TLD test was meant for this, like mydomain.test.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there are, presumably, tens if not hundreds of millions of cars with curl in them now. While I'm sure you would appreciate a response, imagine the time it would take to reply to these questions? I mean it's not like it's a bug in curl... As for "if the customer gets angry at the response, it's fine...", well, what if you're taking the time to reply and then getting angry responses? What a waste of emotional energ…
The Poindexter in me thinks he needs a mail relay with a whitelist. Everything in the whitelist gets through (plus some keyword), everything else gets a reply with "If you saw my email in $DEVICE, please contact the manufacturer, if you really want to talk to me, place $VERB in the subject of your email.
Never underestimate desperate people's selective deafness; when you want to solve a problem, you will filter out everything between you and it, and will see only "place $VERB in the subject of your email". The false positives from this method will be the most desperate, and probably the least congenial.