Subject: Re: builtin lists and Intel SSE support?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 24 Jan 2004 08:58:52 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.ai.games,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3283923532054583KL2065E@naggum.no>

* Brandon J. Van Every
| "It'll take 10 minutes" is bullshit.  By the time you actually get
| through understanding, designing, coding, testing, redesigning, and
| real world shaking out of bugs, it'll take weeks or months.  And if
| you don't understand that, then you don't code commercially.

  Then why do you ask people to help you for free?

| Or else you are completely insulated from any financial impacts,
| i.e. you're someone's employee, and you sit around wasting a lot of
| your employer's time and money implementing stupid stuff like that.
| Those of us bearing our own development costs, want things
| off-the-shelf that save us labor.

  If any of this pontification was honest, you would already have been
  able to recognize that you ask people to help you as favor.  What kind
  of person is so much in tune with the «financial impacts» and still
  goes out in the world and /demands/ that people help him and complain
  when the help is not to his liking, without offering compensation to
  those who are willing to help?

  Your concept of the value of the information you seek is faulty, and
  the most likely cause is that your concept of the value of the labor
  you want to be saved from doing is /missing/.

  If you valued both your own time and that of others, you would step
  down from the soapbox and find ways to entice people to help you, but
  now you have angered many of those who could have helped you.  You
  come off not as someone who is financially responsible, but as someone
  who is strapped for financial resources and therefore turns to other
  with demands to ease your unfair suffering instead of with offers of
  remuneration for what you value properly.  Trust me, USENET is full of
  people who are poor and demanding, but fora like this exists because
  people are willing to share of their tremendous surplus.  Those who
  approach such fora with demands, bring an imbalance to the table that
  annoys people, because instead of two people sharing of their surplus,
  the one who has something to share feels taken advantage of when the
  person he shares with only offers arguments from poverty.

  If my predictions about you hold true, you will now attack me because
  you believe you were attacked and will focus your energy on exacting
  revenge on me for having exposed something uncomfortable about you,
  and you will focus your energy into feeling insulted and mistreated,
  instead of understanding that you have been asked politely not to be
  so demanding of those you ask for help.  If my predictions about you
  are false, you will surprise everybody with an apology for your
  aggressive and insulting behavior and offer us a better understanding
  of your actual problem in such a way that people who can think of
  better ways to solve them than you can, will feel free to either help
  you or offer you their solutions in exchange for real, hard cash.

  Which path do you want to follow?  Both are equally open to you now.

-- 
Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.