RE: Mysterious gdb behavior

["Paul Derbyshire" <derbyshire at globalserve dot net>]

On 3 Aug 2002 at 4:50, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:

> Oh man, I know *way* better than to get involved here

Then don't.

> (especially after reading the *HILARIOUS* FAQ

I for one don't find it amusing. Please stop referring to it. 
Moderator, please remove all references to it and all other 
completely-off-topic content from the archives. There's no viable 
purpose to having such material in the archives anyway, and it wastes 
disk space.

[Snip some crackpot suggestions involving protection from boojums]

And people here have been claiming that *I'm* a nut?!

> I'd guess what's happening is that you're in your early forties and still live
> with your parent(s)

Wrong. 26, backelor pad.
Please don't waste time and bandwidth speculating in areas where 
you're obviously ignorant.

> you bear a striking physical resemblance to the comic book
> guy on "The Simpsons"

Nope. If I did I'd have seen the doctor long since. Skin that color 
indicates advanced liver failure that can be fatal if untreated.

> have never held meaningful employment

BZZZT! Sorry, that's three strikes. You're out. Perhaps our next 
contestant will do better! *ding ding ding* Oh wait, that sound means 
we're out of time. And this was the last episode in our production 
run this season, and NBC has canceled the show. I guess that means an 
end to this guessing game called Facts about P.D.'s Private Life That 
Are Off-Topic For The Cygwin List. If you want the show to go on, 
petition NBC at mailto:/dev/null but I don't think it likely anyone 
will even read the mail.

> and you're a Perpetual Student who has switched majors no less than
> six times and will die of old age in a lecture for the Psych 101
> class that you're auditing for the sixtieth time on the folks'
> dime.

Nope. I graduated this spring, in fact, with a bachelor's degree.

> But I am completely unsure of all that, so I
> know you won't take offense.  I certainly meant none.  Just guessing.

AKA wasting bandwidth.

> Can we call you "Glitch"?  I still like Kim's "Tard" the best though.
> Heehehheheheee!  Classic.

You can call me by my name. You cannot call me anything else without 
my permission. It's a violation of trademark law. Calling me any kind 
of insulting name in a public forum that is archived has the 
potential to damage my brand in the labor market, should I ever 
decide to change jobs. Therefore I think a case can be made that it 
damages a (common-law rather than registered) trademark, and can 
carry a civil penalty.

Perhaps the next game show will be named Who Wants to Be Sued for A 
Million Bucks? Ten contestants come up with insults, Regis picks the 
best, and the the legal documents are delivered the next morning!

[Snip assortment of insults]

To hell with the game show. Expect to hear from a lawyer within the 
next 7 days if you don't retract that remark and then shut the hell 
up.

[snip some remark about killfiling me]
The people posting this garbage should all go ahead and do so and 
quit just talking about it. It's not like any of them tend to have 
anything *constructive* to say to me anyway. It would do the whole 
list a favor.

> In any other time and place, you'd probably be running from a mob armed with
> torches and pitchforks by now.

So you admit that your slanderous remarks are designed to incite 
hatred and perhaps even violence? I think there's a law against that.

Now at least everyone can see this flamer's true colors, and his real 
purpose for attacking me. I suggest *he* be killfiled en masse.

[Additional insults deleted.]

> get the hell away from me

Hit control-K, Gary, just hit control-K and you'll never see a word I 
write again.

> (And before you ask, yes, you can use the
> "Micro$oft" thing, just be sure to give me credit for coming up with that
> doozie!)

I hate to tell you this but you didn't invent that. I've seen it 
before lots of places.

> I notice that you've FINALLY found the mysterious cygcheck "program"...

Once someone deigned to tell me more about it than merely implying 
that it existed somewhere out there on the net, yes.

> You know, for a sad sack that seems to have no problem typing for hours on end...

Actually I do have a problem with it. My back and butt get sore, and 
I develop excruciating headaches from staring at the monitor. Yet you 
keep posting garbage about me in public places, which requires me to 
reply in my own defense lest my silence indicate assent, and you post 
the garbage in such huge bandwidth-clogging volume that doing so 
takes hours. I think I'll have a doctor check me out for repetitive 
strain and postural injuries and then make that lawsuit include 
medical damages as well. What say we make it eight figures in 
American dollars, eh?

> you'd think you'd know how to run a program from a command prompt.

I do know how to. When I have reason to believe I already have the 
program in question, I have no trouble doing so.

> 1. "nobody here likes being asked questions".  I like being asked questions.

Your behavior suggests otherwise.

> You just insulted me.

Yes, several times as a matter of fact. I distinctly recall referring 
to you as a "flamer" for one. It's because you've insulted me. If you 
would kindly shut up you wouldn't see any more insults from me.

[Snip more insults.]

I thought I told you to shut up, you asshole. :P

> > What is the boundary of what "everyone using Cygwin should know"?
> 
> If I told you that, I'd have to insult you.

It was a rhetorical question. The answer, of course, is the FAQ, the 
whole FAQ, and nothing but the FAQ.

[Snip more insults]

> And then you got a number of suggestions of stuff to try and you tried nothing.

Actually, if you'd care to check the archives I got one single 
response with any kind of content: someone saying it was a Winblows 
bad EXE format error. I responded saying that it looked like the 
error message was itself in error, as the executable in question ran 
fine outside the debugger and running it there presumably involves 
the same Winblows API calls.

[Snip nonsensical drivel, much of it in all caps]

Who's the kook here, the guy who posts honest questions about gdb and 
gets flamed for doing so, or the flamer with nothing better to do 
than post 30 kilobyte messages to the list in all caps that are 
wholly and blatantly off-topic?

> Right, that was admittedly a bit confusing.  The bugs page is in the FAQ now,
> which we've incidentally renamed the "Bugs Page".  And it's now in an
> undisclosed location, to protect it from further imaginary insults.

Great. This Gary kook is messing with the Cygwin documentation on the 
web site now. He claims to be *hiding* some of the documentation. 
Someone fire him, or whatever it is you do to let go of complete 
lunatics.

[Snip more lunacy]


> > Reasons:
> > 1. The questioner doesn't have the familiarity with the source code
> >    that the maintainer/some other expert does. The maintainer can
> >    zero in on the relevant section in seconds; the questioner
> >    probably would need hours just to isolate the correct source
> >    *file* to investigate more closely. Thus, the questioner is being
> >    asked to do a large amount of work to save someone else a small
> >    amount of work. Hardly what I'd call efficient use of man/hours.
> 
> But this is.  Wow.

No, this is not. But it's your fault for blowing things out of all 
sense of proportion. All I did was ask a few straightforward 
questions; pretty much everything since then has been a forced move.

> > 2. In connection with #1, a quick result might be crucial. The
> >    problem, whatever it is, may be causing a work stoppage that is
> >    costing someone money.
> 
> You're paying how much for support?  Oh, nothing?  Then it seems to me that your
> sobbing about "work stoppage" and $1 still won't get you a cup of coffee at
> Starbucks.

I'm not personally experiencing a work stoppage that's costing money. 
I'm pointing out that someone else might have a problem that does 
need to be solved urgently for whatever reason, and that beating 
around the bush when they ask a question would be doing them a 
particularly great disservice.

[Snip more garbage and insulting garbage]

> > Undoubtedly I could add many more plausible reasons to the above;
> 
> I challenge you to produce a single one.

Someone has 26 hours of stuff they need doing that day and giving 
them the runaround when they ask a question on the Cygwin list will 
only make it worse?

I've never seen this kind of lunacy outside of a commercial support 
contract before. Volunteers usually actually do a good job because 
they don't have an incentive not to, unlike paid-for support techs 
who get more money the longer they keep the customer on the line 
thinking the problem is about to be solved (so they don't give up and 
hang up) but not solving it (so they don't say "thanks!" and hang up) 
and 1-800 support techs whos real job is to convince the customer 
that the problem is with their own settings and not with the server 
whose un-backed-up disk just crashed leaving the company worried 
about how to keep 30,000 customers paying for the service they 
suddenly are not able to provide anymore.

I've gotten this kind of run-around and bullshit and insults when 
trying to find out why my ISP's mail/news/whatever server isn't 
responding and when they plan to fix it, but I never expected that 
kind of nonsense here...

> Nobody cares.

Correction: YOU don't care. You don't speak for everybody.

[Snip latest insult questioning my mental health]

Anyone ever notice how when people stoop to ad hominem attacks 
because their position is otherwise indefensible, they always seem to 
question the victim's intelligence, sanity, ancestry, and/or sexual 
habits? Why those particular things? :P

> Pfhht, bandwidth's cheap.  Especially when it's on the folk's dime, huh Paul?

I guess it must be. You are obviously not concerned about the cost of 
staying online to write 30k worth of crap. I wonder when your folks 
will decide the bills are getting too high and take your wittle 
keyboard away? I can only hope that it's already happened...

> Paul: "Abandon... wha?  Naw, to do that I'd have to get out of bed, put on
> something to cover my shame, put one foot in front of the oth-"

What shame? Not everyone's been psychologically brutalized into 
finding their own bodies shameful you know. Of course, if you were so 
mistreated, it could explain your evident obsessions and compulsions 
involving insults and extremely long off-topic postings to mailing 
lists. Then again, it could just be Tourette's Syndrome. I'm not a 
qualified psychiatrist; you'll need to seek professional help to get 
a proper diagnosis.

> > The only thing I've *complained* about has been uncivil treatment and
> 
> Which you have yet to receive.

Your 30 K of drivel is uncivil. It speculates openly about my state 
of mental health in an unflattering manner. It calls me a wide 
assortment of names. It even contains an admission that the intent, 
far from "tough love", is to incite hate and violence! You, sir, are 
a hypocrite on top of everything else that you've demonstrated 
yourself to be with this 30 kilobyte monument that you've erected in 
the name of Satan and that physically embodies pain and chaos and the 
terror of your own damnation that you undoubtedly feel. And seems 
designed to bring more pain and chaos and terror to this mailing 
list, incidentally. See what a repressive religious upbringing does 
to a man?

> And hence they deserve uncivil treatment.

Who said that?

> > Uncivil
> > treatment lacks any excuse I can conceive.
> >
> 
> You're able to rationalize it away when you're the one doing it easily enough.

We're talking initiatory use of force here. As in, insulting someone 
without provocation, as opposed to insulting someone *back*.

> > Such as? The sequence is this.
> > 1. Problem with gdb.
> > 2. Search documentation. Fixed or:
> > 3. Solve problem on list.
>      ^^^^^
>      Cause

Oh, yes, your behavior does demonstrate that you believe that you 
should post to cause rather than solve problems. After all, you just 
posted 30 kilotons of violently insulting poisonous radioactive spew 
that you commissioned a team of 400 crack scientists to design using 
Cray-1 supercomputers to maximize its nuclear explosive yield when 
dropped from the Enola Gay onto an unsuspecting mailing list. Without 
the excuse of a Pearl Harbor to point to as provocation, I might add.

[Further snippage]

Damn, my dosimeter badge is now beeping a warning at me.

If I die of radiation poisoning, the lawsuit grows to nine figures 
and sets my next of kin up for life, I hope you realize.

> > I report problem A, someone says it's caused by problem B, and I
> > guess now you expect me to research problem B.
> 
> If you don't, who will?

Nobody? Someone already knows about problem B. Why should I duplicate 
all the work of researching it when they could just plain TELL ME!

> I sure ain't - rest assured I know it's unsolvable even
> though I don't know what the problem is.

You're such a quitter.

> What, and miss out on all your great posts?!?  No WAY!  I'm keeping the
> *solution* all to my self until I've had my fill of your inspired writing!

I thought you didn't like me?
Please, just save the whole damn mailing list the bother and killfile 
me.

> Yeah, I suppose after over thirty years of school one would get weary of all
> that book learnin'.

I'm not even thirty years old. It's closer to 19 years of school -- 
from preschool to university graduation, ignoring the couple of years 
off I've taken.

> What happened, your email go down momentarily?

???
Probably. My ISP is about as competently run as the Titanic and I'm 
frankly amazed its stock hasn't hit an iceberg and sunk long since.

[snip]

Oh look, he's added paranoia to the list of accused mental illnesses. 
How charming. Asshole.

> All the moreso when you stated that you also had djgpp installed.  HUH?!?!?

Why, shouldn't I?

> > It would probably fail on startup with a genuinely malformed
> > exectable.
> 
> 'Course it would.  "Imagining" is all we need to solve these sorts of problems.
> No need to actually "investigate" or "experiment"...

Oh, come on. I don't know about you, but I don't happen to have a 
handy source of genuinely malformed executables lying around, nor do 
I believe I need one.

> > No! But if you think something is the cause, say so instead of being
> > vague! Why is it that people keep misunderstanding what I'm saying?
> 
> Because you misunderstand what you're saying.

Of course I don't. I guess you're adding some kind of aphasia or 
dyslexia to your unprofessional diagnosis?

> > The meaning of the English sentences I've used are not in the least
> > ambiguous. I keep saying that I am irritated by insults
> 
> ...where there are no insults...

Calling me an idiot doesn't qualify, hm? Or questioning my mental 
health? Okay, then, my calling you an asshole a few times isn't an 
insult either. I expect there not to be a comeback then, since 
there's no insult for you to reply to. In fact I want you to killfile 
me before it's too late and your lunacy gets us both unsubscribed 
from the list.

> ...which you should be ashamed of being "irritated" by even if you'd gotten any,
> which you haven't...

Only a religious nut would believe you should feel ashamed of your 
own feelings, whether feelings of irritation or of whatever. 
Religious nuts aren't the most self-accepting of people. Perhaps 
that's why they are so intolerant toward others. Calling them idiots 
and so forth. On a public mailing list.

[Snip more of Gary's less lucid ravings, for which there can be no 
coherent reply]

> > Would that this were true. Apparently they were just spending a day
> > planning a new onslaught with truly despicable slander tactics.

Worse. Apparently commissioning hundreds of scientists to devise the 
verbal equivalent of the nuclear bomb. I expect the fallout to still 
be settling for weeks after you actually went and detonated it, you 
dumbass, instead of 
deleting it unsent, overwriting your hard drive with random bytes 
three times 
over, smashing it with a hammer, setting it on fire, burying it 
behind six-foot-
thick walls of lead in an old mineshaft 3 miles beneath the stable 
geology of 
the Canadian Shield, filling the entire mineshaft with concrete, and 
fencing 
the site in with barbed wire and signs saying DANGER -- RADIATION -- 
NO 
TRESPASSING.

> Slander schmander, go pretend to slip on that unsalted sidewalk or something if
> you need more dough for your Perpetual Tuition.

What tuition? I've graduated, and I have money practically falling 
out of my 
asshole now. The only reason for suing you if this nonsense keeps up 
is to 
take your money and your toys away from you and make you go away and 
play elsewhere. Chechnya or Afghanistan, or maybe North Korea. Yeah, 
North Korea... Your insults would be harmless coming from behind what 
remains of the Iron Curtain!



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