Subject: Re: A few questions, Alan Turing and LISP? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/02/12 Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3127773903580669@naggum.no> * "Gary H. Merrill" <ghm48805@glaxowellcome.com> | Wow! What a huge organization!! just what _is_ your problem, Gary? I'm trying to answer your hostile and stupid questions, and all you do is prove you're an asshole. | I concede it must have been difficult dealing with the complex management | and organizational structure of such a company. 55 million dollars of | revenue in 1997. Offices in 10 (!) nations. Very impressive. why do you talk in terms of "impressive"? whoever wanted to impress? and in particular, why the hell would anyone want to impress _you_? you asked a simple question, you got a simple answer. look at your reaction. if you believe that bureaucratic management problems are linear in the size of the corporation, you must _really_ be lacking in intellectual capacity. my experience is that some of the worst run small companies that don't grow large because of their management style. (yes, these are also companies most in need of consultants, and they are also the most likely to give consultants hell and not pay them. it's vital to a small consulting shop to know such people. based on the available evidence, I retract my offer to help any company Gary H. Merrill might work for.) | > | I sense the wounded response of the true Linux fanatic. | > | > I sense a moron who needs to see fanatics when he knows he's in the wrong. | | I bow to your intellect. While knowing nothing about my company, its | organization, or my role or position in it, you have deduced that: | | 1. I am stupid (well, now in fact a moron). that you're a moron has nothing to do with your company. I concluded that you're a moron because you invoked "Linux fanatic" just because I showed you how a Linux system was very, very inexpensive compared to the stuff you said could not be beaten in price/performance. I beat your price/performance by a large factor. after you had published your false statement of unbeatability, you kept adding requirements that you never told anyone about. you turned around and threw _new_ arguments against the suggestion in order to invalidate it. I'm sure this is necessary on a personal level for you to avoid looking like an idiot to said possessed boss, but it really has nothing to do with the fact that Linux runs on dirt cheap hardware. you got an answer to what you _said_, not what you _thought_ at the time. keeping vital information secret so you can beat up anyone who corrects you is simply not intelligent behavior. it's what morons do. that you now have to pretend that you're a moron for some _other_ reason where _you_ obviously couldn't be a moron, just goes to show that I'm pretty accurate. incidentally, the choice of Linux was not at all made out of fanaticism, but out of a desire to waste as little money as possible because we had to reimplement a system that some incompetent fools in a large consulting company had charged a lot of money for, and we needed a lot of resources to get it right. instead of wasting 60-70 grand on computers, and _then_ 100 grand on software, we figured it would be better to re-use old iron and get the software at a much lower price. and that we did. getting Linux past the sometimes very conservative, yet sometimes very liberal, management took quite some time and effort, precisely because of the nature of Linux _support_, which you appeared to bring up as an argument, but then it turned out to be the _hardware_ vendor who had to sell it. well, I'm just shaking my head at your insecure and stupid responses. incidentally, reusing old iron made it possible to use Common Lisp, and we've done _much_ more with the money saved on the hardware than merely fixing a broken system. because the money could all be spent on new software, we now have a system that enables the company to advance into new markets. we could not have done this with the old system, provided we had been able to survive at all with its dangerous instability. I'm sure you'll scoff at this to, and find some more stupid things to attack. I don't know what you need to prove or to whom, Gary H. Merrill, but I do know that your need to prove _something_ completely overshadows whatever technical merit there could have been to this discussion. | Well, I am having quite an emotional reaction to this. as has been quite obvious for some time. all I did was show you a much cheaper system, and you went postal. I think I'm fully entitled to judge you as a moron, Gary H. Merrill. | As someone who claims to work as a consultant, this is an interesting | approach to making one's abilities, skills, and attitudes known to a | wide audience of potential employers. well, you're the kind of client I could not afford to take on -- with such a moron as you in there who would do nothing but sabotage anything that threatens your personal space, and Lord knows that's _anything_, the chances of success are miniscule. I'm sure you have done a great job in promoting yourself, as well, but I actually thought it was more than just bad netiquette to attack people's livelihood. you really are quite a remarkable asshole. good luck with your Alpha. I sympathize with Compaq who actually has to support you. #:Erik -- Y2K conversion simplified: Januark, Februark, March, April, Mak, June, Julk, August, September, October, November, December.