Re: Giving an application a window icon in a sensible way


"Twisted" <twisted0n3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1164712797.568535.229060@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I've hoped against hope all this time that you'd realize that you're
stalemated and accept a drawn game, but it is now becoming apparent
that I might have to stoop to your level and counterattack or never see
the end of this, with day after day losing as much as an hour a day
simply to undoing the last 24 hours' damage to my name by you lot in
this one thread. If that's what it will take to end it, the gloves will
really come off and I will have at you with every weapon in my arsenal;
and if you will never let me come out of this smelling like roses (or
even neutral), then I'll ensure that we'll ALL come out of this
stinking like an open sewer! It's called "mutually assured destruction"
by the way; I've been told that it's an excellent deterrent. Perhaps
now this will be allowed to quietly die the death it deserves? But if
not ... I guess we'll see how long it takes to nuke one another into
submission.

I feel the need to warn you that I think this will be a losing strategy
for you. MAD only works if the mutual destruction is actually assured. I
think you'll be taking a big risk getting into a flame war here. In fact, I
think your destruction will be assured (in the form of mass plonking), while
others will not (they will not plonk each other, and thus be able to
continue their participation in this newsgroup unfettered).

[...]

Do I even have to make it explicit that if I ask how to do X, then the
scope of the discussion is "ways to do X" and any unsolicited advice or
questioning outside that scope is clearly a suggestion of incompetence,
or at least a sign of dubiousness, that would have been better kept
private rather than made public?

Probably yes. I would assume it's okay to provide unsolicited advice or
questioning outside the original question, unless the OP specifically states
they don't want this to occur.


[...]
Tell me what *you* think the motives behind such responses are?

I can only think of two. One is to simply attack me for the heck of it.

The other is genuine helpfulness, gone wrong due to a misguided
approach chosen. In that theory, the person genuinely wants my project
to succeed, and genuinely thinks a different approach would be better,
but unfortunately chooses to word their "help" as an attack on the
approach used rather than an endorsement of the approach they consider
superior.

Yeah, this is probably what happened. Though people (myself included)
would disagree about the "misguided" and "attack" labels.

And that, of course, challenges the original poster to defend
the approach used, and likely closes their mind to your suggestion.
You've doubly shot yourself in the foot if you do that: not only won't
your suggestion, which you believe genuinely constructive (and perhaps
correctly), be used, but you've also brought the original poster's own
competence publicly into question, if implicitly by making the
suggestion that their choice of approach might not be all it's cracked
up to be. And now they are put upon to defend not only their actions
but their intelligence and competence too, since this happened in front
of a goddam audience.

"Are you sure Z wouldn't be better?" is likewise problematic. It uses
the word "you", you'll note, and makes the person's decisions at issue
and not just the needs of the software being developed.

So how would you phrase it?

[...]
I get more hostile, mainly out of sheer frustration, when for
some moronic reason the idiot that rudely contradicted me doesn't
simply agree to disagree, or say "I'm sorry, in your particular
circumstances your method is perfectly acceptable", or do nothing, but
instead stubbornly persists in some sort of stupid quest to prove me
wrong, presumably to boost their own ego.

Pretend the above paragraph was written by someone else and read it
again in that context.

I also dislike the fact that someone can make me run their
stupid little treadmill like that or else face ridicule. It isn't
right; it means that anyone can at any time pop up and cause me to
either lose time or lose face with *no* way to avoid having at least
one of those things happen.

Right. It's a losing game. Time to change the rules of the game.

And anyone actually doing so is therefore
as much a jerk as if they walked up to me and shot me without
provocation, or stole my wallet, or something. It's a fucking crime, as
far as I'm concerned. Nobody should do that, and put me on the
defensive; if someone thinks I'm an idiot they should think it real
quiet like, especially if there's an audience around. If someone
disbelieves something I said, they can diplomatically say "I disagree"
or "This works too" or "This is an alternative"; nobody but their own
inflated ego compels them to argue against the man and use "you"
language and say things like "You're wrong".

Right. But people do stuff that they shouldn't do. And one needs to
learn to deal with it. That's life.

- Oliver


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