Re: Synching with two computers

["David A. Desrosiers" <hacker gnu-designs com>]

> But beyond that David, your reply sucks.

	Yes, I tend to be very unhelpful to the many thousands of 
users I support every single day. You're right. If you go back and 
read the list archives here and on other lists, you'll see that too. 
</sarcasm>

> I am not looking for the answer to the problem. I did not say 
> "Please help me with this", or anything close to it. I offered 
> information to an information forum, if anyone is interested.

	No, actually you didn't do either. 

	You never said in your original message that you solved the 
problem and had a solution to present. Your original message sounded 
like a request for help, because Windows screwed up your data as 
represented in Evolution. Go re-read it and see what it says. I'm not 
the only one who interpreted it that way.

	In the future, consider formulating your email in a way that 
people can understand what you're saying. It might help a bit more 
towards providing a solution, or soliciting the kind of people who can 
best help you.

> I was polite David. I offered to extend my time and effort to help 
> anybody that is working on, or is curious about, this bug. I hurled 
> no insults.

	Interesting, but no you didn't. And I quote: 

	"If this leaves you scratching your head thinkingd "why the
	 heck would anybody want to do that" I will not waste
	 the bandwidth."

	This sounds like a "I'm doing something weird, and if you ask 
me why, you're wasting my time."

> If nobody cares about this issue, I see no need to waste people's 
> time with the details.

	You won't know who cares, until you provide enough information 
to be useful. You're "Nyah-nyah" post didn't do much to encourage 
anyone to ask further... so how can they know the information would be 
useful to them? 

	Provide the details, and let the rest of the list decide if 
they think it merits further inspection or review. Perhaps parts of it 
are useful to some, and not to others. You won't know until you post 
it.

> A simple, polite, offer to any developer that is curious about this 
> should have received a, "Yes, I would like to see what you found", 
> or a "No, we are not interested", or simply been ignored.

	How can we not be interested, when there is no information? 

	That's like saying 

	"I've got something to sell you, but I can't tell you what it 
	 is, and if you ask me what it is, you're wasting my time. Do 
	 you want to buy it or not?"

	That being said, I did ask for greater detail, which you 
ignored, confirming my original assumption about the nature of your 
message.

> Go back under your rock David. When you're squatting down there, ask 
> yourself, "Why is it so hard to recruit quality programmers to 
> projects like this? Why would somebody with 20 years C/C++ 
> experience not feel welcome here?"

	I don't ask myself that at all, actually. Everybody is treated 
equally, with the same level of respect, until they prove otherwise 
(in most cases). I don't make assumptions about the skills of someone 
posting a message to a public mailing list, and certainly not after 
only a 2-sentence message. 

	You could have 20 years of experience programming in LISP, but 
you still might not understand how the GNOME classes and objects work. 
Everyone, including you, has areas of skill that they can learn more 
on.

	If you wanted to help, you would have provided some useful 
information that could help the other developers here (many with much 
more experience than you) to solve the problem. 

	A patch, details, versions of components, all of the things I 
asked for in my reply... if you truly were a programmer with 20 years 
of C/C++ experience, you wouldn't be so ignorant to the kind of things 
that help _other programmers_ solve these kinds of problems.

	I'm done, now you're wasting _my_ time.

	Good luck with your solution. Perhaps Palm and Microsoft would 
be interested in hearing all about it.


David A. Desrosiers
desrod gnu-designs com
http://gnu-designs.com