Re: Java 7 features

In article <1189481208.078505.262230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<nebulous99@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 10, 5:56 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have no idea. But it's a usenet acronym, and you associated it with
Seinfeld; the intersection of the two yields "a Seinfeld newsgroup" as
the source.

Seems like a stretch to me, for the reason given below. But --
whatever.

It's "a stretch" to compute the intersection in a very simple two-
circle Venn diagram? :P

In context? Yes, because in doing so you leave out a significant
point, that I also said I was not a fan of the show.

Not that it matters, or that you care, but -- not really, except
in the sense that thread drift is more common than it is in some
more technical groups. I searched again for my silly initialism in
Google's archives of aue, sorting by date rather than relevance,
and found that some of the most recent uses were by newsgroup
regulars whose language is generally very good, and the uses
went unremarked. Maybe that's what contributed to my impression
that this thing was in wide use. <shrug>

Even seemingly expert users of English may have some flaws or bad
habits, including excessive use of cryptic acronyms or other needless
obfuscation.

Very true. In alt.usage.english, however, lapses generally earn
the lapser an "Oy!"

But I've already taken this discussion further than I meant to
in the direction of "if I made a mistake, it wasn't my fault!"
I've had ample occasion in this newsgroup to observe how
unattractive that is ....

Indeed, gratuitous and often unconscious obfuscation
seems to be the vice of choice on usenet -- well, second after
excessive pedantry with implied put-downs of peoples' intelligence,
that is.

For me it might depend on how the error was pointed out. I don't
think I automatically take "you're wrong" as an insult.

Even when stated that tactlessly?

Hard to say without context, but I don't think so.

Not all of us can afford to be so forgiving. Look how many people seem
to believe nasty things of me, even with the amount of work I've put
into defending against many of the nasty claims -- and consider how
much worse it would be without that mitigating factor. As for what
makes me such a target, I've no idea -- likely it's just bad luck,
since it's certainly not that I'm doing anything wrong, and I'm not
wearing my race, sexual orientation, religion, or anything of that
sort on my sleeve that might provoke attacks from bigots, either. I
chalk it up to the snowball effect: one attacker gets believed by some
people, a few of whom are affected enough to become additional
attackers, and as the volume of attack posts grows, so does the rate
of growth of the set of attackers, unfortunately. Another reason to do
as much as possible to make an opposing viewpoint heard as well --
slow or stop the snowball effect. Even now the snowball is growing,
though the rate has been reduced greatly -- Arne has officially joined
the club with a fairly nasty and off-topic post to another thread in
the last day or two, after a previous borderline-hostile posting that
had me warn him that he was treading close to a line. He crossed it,
unfortunately, within 48 hours; in this case I was evidently too late.

As I just said in another post, I agree with those who say that the
person doing the most damage to your reputation is you yourself.

I also have observed, in Usenet groups, a pile-on effect, in which
a put-down from one person attracts put-downs from others as well.
It's unattractive behavior, true. There may be some effective
defense that can be mounted, but IMO what you're doing here isn't
it [ an effective defense ]. <shrug>

Could be. I guess I could try harder to not make mistakes in
the first place, but once a mistake is made, it seems to me
that the sensible thing to do is to acknowledge it and move on.

There's also the matter of explaining why it could not have been
avoided, though, isn't there? To avoid being blamed for its
consequences. Obviously it wouldn't happen unless it was unavoidable
for some reason, or you would have avoided it. Maybe it was a
statistically inevitable result of insufficient information, or
something. But if you just meekly acknowledge it without explaining
why you were unable to avoid it you may develop a reputation for
incompetence and lazy workmanship, or whatever.

Could be. Maybe this would be a good point at which to comment
that a lot of my thinking about reputation in the workplace was
formed in situations in which people generally pretty much knew
who was competent and who wasn't, based on direct knowledge of
their work, and their opinions weren't much swayed by admissions of
mistakes or self-deprecating humor. The head technical person at
a previous job used to comment, on finding a bug in his own code,
"who wrote this code?!", with a clear implication that he was the
culprit. No one thought worse of him for it; we all knew he was
a lot more than competent. To me this is how things should be.
Sometimes it's not possible -- in my current workplace, people's
work is different enough that sometimes all we have to go on
is what each person says about his/her work. But in technical
newsgroups, it seems to me that one can form opinions based on
people's work rather than on what they or others say about it.

I realize that you may very well conclude from the paragraph
above that you're right and I'm wrong, and I'm admitting it, and
so you win. Go ahead. I'd still rather be known as someone who
admits to mistakes when she makes them than as someone who wlll
never, ever admit to being wrong.

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.

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