Argh, Stray interrupts 2006

[Matthew Dillon]

   Er.  Danial, you are just being an idiot now.  Programmers are
   lazy?  Why don't YOU try to reverse engineer an ethernet card
   with half a dozen HARDWARE bugs in it without vendor documentation!

   Vendors not only do not provide documentation, they also tend to 
   hide hardware bugs and deny their existance.  In fact, *MOST* general
   purpose PC chipsets these days are chock full of hardware bugs, nearly
   ALL undocumented by the vendor.  Vendors come out with chip revs every
   other month, each with their own set of quirks.  There are over *200*
   ATA chipsets out there, probably even more, and just as many ethernet
   chipsets.  Hundreds of chipsets containing tens of hundreds of
   undocumented hardware bugs.  Buggy BIOSes.  Buggy firmware.  Even buggy
   CPUs (but at least Intel and AMD document those bugs)!

   You seem to believe that this stuff is somehow easy to figure out. 
   And, worse, you seem to believe that we somehow have an obligation to
   drop everything at your whim and spend all our time solving your
   problems.  Well, I got news for you... it is NOT easy to figure out,
   and we have no such obligation.

   Open source works because the people involved are willing to spend
   their own time and money solving problems, and because both programmers
   and users alike enjoy a sense of community.  EVERYONE works hard to 
   achieve their goals.  But you don't seem to think that you have any
   obligation at all as an end-user.  You seem to believe that you can 
   denigrate people and make accusations, call people lazy, etc etc etc,
   and you STILL expect people to solve your problems?  That's pretty stupid,
   dude!

   I will tell you straight out that I have no desire whatsoever to help 
   you.   In fact, I am very close to banning you from the mailing lists
   alltogether because you are becoming seriously harmful to our community.

   You seem to believe that you are somehow owed help and that you
   don't have to give anything back in return (not even a friendly
   conversation, apparently).  You seem to believe that a programmer can
   sit down and in a few hour solve your worst nightmare of a problem, and
   you seem to believe that you can put down people and then still expect
   them to drop everything to help you.  You seem to believe that hardware
   is somehow simple and obvious and easy to decipher.

   Well, I got news for you, Danial.  That isn't reality.  The reality is
   that sometimes the simplest bug.. a one line error in code for example,
   is the hardest to find.  The reality is that the 60 seconds you spend in
   your armchair writing out yet another stupid email is nothing compared
   to the MAN-WEEKS it can sometimes take a real programmer to track down
   a bug.  The reality is that third party vendors in the general purpose
   PC arena don't give a flying crap about open source or open operating
   systems and tend to be more interested in covering their own asses then
   in actually producing reliable hardware.  The reality is that hardware
   is COMPLEX.  Do you think an ethernet chipset just pushes packets and
   pulls packets in?  That's just the tip of the iceberg.  That isn't
   reality.

   If you want your problems solved, then you have to get down and dirty and
   help track them down on your own time.  And I'm not talking about spending
   60 seconds writing yet another armchair email.  I'm talking about
   dedicating real time to solving your problems, just like *WE* do.

   And that is my last word on the subject.

						-Matt