Re: To Bob Badour, sorry

From: Tony D <tonyisyourpal_at_netscape.net>
Date: 19 Jun 2006 19:16:41 -0700
Message-ID: <1150769801.591023.296850_at_b68g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>


I didn't get round to answering this before; apologies.

x wrote:

> Huh !?!? A reaction or a retraction ?
>

A reaction to Cimode's "interpretation" of why people might disagree with him and/or agree with Bob, based on a small amount of skewed evidence. I didn't think he was being particularly fair.

> > Sometimes, you just have to call a spade a spade.
>
> And often not.
>

Indeed, often not. Most of the time, you can discuss things pleasantly, and bring the discussion to a close with everyone understanding the others point of view, and if necessary changing their opinion on something.

> Who's pushing you to do that ? :-)
>

Sometimes, no amount of discussion will resolve a debate, especially if one of those taking part insists on refusing to accept overwhelming evidence or simple facts that contradict their position. In those instances, you simply have to resort to plain language ("calling a spade a spade").

> Where I have heard that before ? ...
>

Many times and many places, although in slightly different ways, probably.

> >Sometimes admittedly
> > Bob will call it a bloody spade, and get rather exasperated that
> > someone still hasn't grasped the concept of "spadeness" and wants to
> > talk lots and lots about how they want to rename shovels as spades and
> > can't see what the problem with that is and hey I've been successful
> > with projects by using shovels and calling them spades and I've been
> > earning decent money since nineteen-canteen using shovels as spades and
> > the difference between a shovel and a spade is only of interest to
> > those theory guys and ... and .. and ...
>
> Maybe they were just talking about different things ...
>

Often not; if you replace "spade" with "relational DBMS" and "shovel" with "SQL DBMS" in what I wrote above, hopefully you'll see what I was talking about.

> > Maybe he understood them better than you think ?
>
> Or maybe not, 'cause he has not shown that.
>

Sometimes, you just recognise the same argument or debate coming up worded in a slightly different way. Or sometimes, someone believes they have a major insight that others have already tried and discounted. And sometimes, the major insight is simply irrelevant to the discussion at hand. (For example, I really don't care about RAM controllers; and when I get to see a process space on a Unix machine, I see a huge long flat chunk of memory, with no additional structure to it. So how an MMU deals with physical memory to present that big flat contiguous space is simply irrelevant and uninteresting to me.)

> 0x2B | 0x2B that's the question.
>

Shouldn't there be a ! in there somewhere ? ;)

> If someone turns up it will be turned down.
>

I used "turns up" in the sense of "arrives", if that changes how you understand what I wrote. Too colloquial of me.

> http://romania.ido.ro/tornero-lyrics-6/
>
> Garcon! Another turn!
>

You didn't watch Eurononsense this year, did you ? I lost interest when the Poles didn't get into the final ... the big guy rapping was a star in the making :)

> >If someone turns up asking leading questions
>
> What's a leading question ? A heavy one ?
>

A question that is asked in such a way that the person asking it gets the answer they want. In law, a leading question guides a witness towards a particular answer, and is therefore expressly forbidden.

> >or pushing an
> > opinion or pursuing an agenda whilst simultaneously repeating over and
> > over that they're just asking questions and would like to understand,
> > well they can expect to get called on that. Reasonably enough. And if
> > it goes on over an extended period, anyone's patience wears out.
>
> Who's agenda ?

A private agenda that is different to the public one. For example, publicly "I want to understand the relational model", but privately (or not-so-publicly) "I think we should really ditch the relational model". Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 04:16:41 CEST

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