191–200 of 365 posts
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>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.
Well, his e-mail wouldn't show up inside a multimedia central in a car.
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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…
> 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…
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>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. I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk. Also keep in mind that…
> I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk. It's 100% a cultural difference. While you see it as personally aggressive and grating, a lot of people see "overly polite" language as a sign that you don't care about the topic being discussed and/or are trying to address an issue politically rather than by merits of a strong argument. Neither of these perc…
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 Linux).
Finally, finally I convinced him to let me sit in on a call to the vendor (VxWorks) and in fifteen minutes we identified the problem and a feasible workaround. Old VxWorks, new bridge controller(?) backward compatible with one they DID support.
All because he couldn't say what needed to be said.
We got a nice 35% jump in the app after the next firmware upgrade.
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Being a leader does not justify being an asshole.
Jobs wasn't an asshole. People confuse directness with being an asshole. If your results suck, saying they suck isn't being an asshole. If you feel that something is horrible, sugar-coating it to make sure you don't hurt someone's feelings is unauthentic. Here's the difference... When someone says "your product sucks, throw it away" .. with the INTENT of causing that person to feel bad, thats being an ashhole. If you…
so the stories about him firing people on a whim weren't true ?
I have had a similar problem for about two decades now in regards to eCards (virtual greeting cards). I own youknowwhat.com and one of my email addresses is youknowwho@youknowwhat... Turns out that thousands of people every year think they are being super clever by putting my email address in the "From" field. So of course I get zillions of "receipts" for these eCards. "Sister, I hope you feel better soon" ...is the…
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If there's a limited amount of car companies, why not just compile one email with a big list of contact numbers, and use that reply template whenever you get such an email. I suppose you could even send it out automatically based on filter conditions?
And then those numbers change, and how are you gonna know? Do you periodically call them all? Do you wait for people to get mad at you because the number has changed, before you spend more time figuring out what the number is supposed to be today? And what if you don't even know all manufacturers from Asia or Brazil? And what if people complain that they want the number for their own language or country? That list ge…
Who cares? If they get mad, they get mad.
I used to run a tech job board in the UK called Hacker Jobs. I used to get two or three emails a week from folk (almost always outside of the UK) asking me to hack into Facebook and gmail accounts. The best thing was that the job board was very obviously a normal tech job board yet these people had to dig pretty deep into the site to find my contact email.
The development IRC channel for the Wine project is #winehackers, and we pretty regularly get morons asking what kind of hacking tools we develop, or if we can help them crack some software's DRM.
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> I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk. It's 100% a cultural difference. While you see it as personally aggressive and grating, a lot of people see "overly polite" language as a sign that you don't care about the topic being discussed and/or are trying to address an issue politically rather than by merits of a strong argument. Neither of these perc…
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…
Not someone who's not able to communicate.
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I believe SMTP attempts delivery to the A record if there is no MX record.
Indeed, if no MX record is known, but an A record is, mail will be sent to that host. However, example.(com,org) are designated testing domains by RFC and any self-respecting mail server should know not to forward mails there. And on top of that, since the domains are designated testing domains, they do not accept mails.
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> I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk. It's 100% a cultural difference. While you see it as personally aggressive and grating, a lot of people see "overly polite" language as a sign that you don't care about the topic being discussed and/or are trying to address an issue politically rather than by merits of a strong argument. Neither of these perc…
When you say "trying to address an issue politically", that sort of implies a context in which you're pushing back against someone else who's already employed a more "Linus-like" approach. That's not what the parent comment was suggesting. Someone like Knuth isn't accused of valuing politics over technical merit because he simply addresses technical merit in a polite way. I'm not one of the people who cares all that…
He's a perfectionist and he seems to get distracted easily.
Like me, he seems to overly inured to the siren song of Force Multipliers (making other people more productive) and really should have spent more time practicing the craft.
If I had it to do over again I probably would have spent a little more time coding and a little less of it thinking in my late 20's to early 30's. It would make a broader group of people understand what I'm about. Especially bosses who don't understand that it would take three people to replace me, even though the majority of the team close more bugs than I do.