Subject: Saying things straight...
From: [email-masked] (Kai Ruottu)

21 Dec 1998 10:31:45 -0800
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About the Alan's case:

I read the Alan's original "DON'T LAUGH" message, where he polite enough
(although was misappointed and pissed of about the unstandard packing
method of the full.exe) hoped another package as a .ZIP-format or
something with the same things inside...). Or needed help about how to
unpack those InstallShield self-extracting files under DOS. He was even
ready to receive it as a big, big email message (although having only a modem 
connection).

If then reading about the "I want to try something myself too...", and
reading what that was, the first fact which comes into my mind was that
there probably isn't much or anything in the 'full.exe' into that purpose.
The GNU binutils sources with the BFD stuff etc. could have been much
better... If he asked earlier about these things for his 'project' (I remember 
that he perhaps did), and got misinformation about needing the 'full.exe', that 
was really sad...

 If he downloaded it without asking anything before, and then after unpacking 
it found nothing interesting there, he surely had keeped his frustrations
inside. But if it isn't mentioned anywhere that this packed '.exe' file 
cannot be unpacked even under DOS/Win32s, it is weird... Knowing all those
self-extracting pkzip-files, with which nobody has any troubles in unpacking
them under DOS, Win3.1x, Win32, Linux, Solaris2,... they are just '.zip' files,
it really needs a MS-attitude to see that "Of course anything that worked 
earlier and was easy shouldn't work now"...and "Of course everybody has at 
least Win95 always available"....

 "Hi, I wan't to buy a good brand name PC at home"
   "Ok, we have Compaqs, HPs and Microns here..."
  .......
   "Here we have a Pentium-II 300 MHz with 64M memory and a 6.4G disk, Win98
   installed and some MS Office applications too..."
 "Excuse me, but I don't need Win98 and that Office stuff..."
   "Excuse me, but must have understood something wrong, of course YOU DO 
   NEED Win98 and those applications"
 "As I said, I don't need them and don't want to pay anything for 
 them, take their price away from the PC price".
   "When you say that, it comes into my mind that you are going to copy 
   illegally the stuff... Ok, we cannot take their price from the PC price,
   you need it and you pay for it"...
 "Sigh, you ACCUSE ME A CRIMINAL and try to say WHAT I NEED OR WHAT I 
WANT... Oh shit YOU STUPID BASTARD..." (The customer leaves...)

Please choose your attitude:

1. That was really a stupid idiot for a customer, really... Perhaps a criminal
   too, knows nothing about PCs... It was really a good that he/she left. 
   Nobody needs customers who buy a PC, and when asked about if they need a 
   opsys to it, say that they don't need it and come the second day blaming
   that their PCs don't work, that beautiful GUI didn't appear to the screen...

2. The seller was a stupid idiot, who had never heard about the "The customer
   is always right". He shouldn't have asked why the customer wants the PC
   without Win98, or should have politely asked how the customer is going to
   solve the missing opsys problem (If he/she had purchased NT3.51 years ago,   
   RedHat5.3 or something), and apologized that they cannot take the Win98 and  
   the Office stuff from the price, tried to sell a a good no-name PC with   
   first-class parts, with only what was needed...)

 If you have the MS-attitude, your opinion is the first. You don't understand
people why try to buy a PC without Win9x, build their own PCs from parts and
try to do anything as stupid.

 You can see in a newsgroup somebody ask help with words like "Hi, I want up-to 
date GCC to my machine (or even more precisely, "my PC"), Then you answer to 
this question saying "You will find GCC for Win32 at 'www.cygnus.com/win32'". 
The asker CAN be very happy! But you show you narrow-mindness in every 
imaginable way... But if the asker had GCC in his/hers PC now, and wants to 
update it, and he/she has Linux in his machine and cannot think (just another
kind of narrow-mindness again) another system with GCC as the native compiler,
being a novice, he/she can become very ANGRY after getting tens of messages
about "How beautiful Win32 is and how well Unix programs port to cygwin32"...
Ok, he flames the 'kind helpers' (always so helpful), others get angry, 
defending the 'helpers', and nobody cares to look what he had asked, what 
mistake he/she did and try to answer his/hers original question...

 Ok, I admire those wise guys who promptly answer asking the asker give more
info. A PC, 'computer' or 'machine' doesn't mean much...

 If a guy ask how to unpack a new-format package in an 'installer format', 
there should be no reason to expect him wanting to install it, run the binaries 
in it or do anything 'to be expected from an ordinary user'... Ok, I cannot 
imagine what the extra info could be in this case (of course what was the stuff
he imagine he will find in it...), but the answers were just pure flames, not
caring about anything what the asker had asked, or trying to show some kind 
of sympathy to his 'PS'...
  
 If you can take your thoughts from "BG words are the words of our God, 
he is the only one we follow" (or Germans from the words of AH in the 40's,
the Russians from JS, the Iraqs today from SH...), and be more open-minded
there could be some hope...

 I have always thought that the idea of the Cygwin32 project is to help port
apps from Unix to Win32, not to do mission work to convert Unix people to the
beautiful MS world. Programs are those to be converted, not people...

 My thought is that this work can be done much better in a real Unix 
environment, using the Win32 as the target. So I have never understood the
need to make the Win32 environment behave 'like Unix'. If is is hard to
get 'fork()' behave ok, why then try it all... If the free WWW-servers
work ok under Linux, what joy is there if the same program finally runs under
NT ten times slower... I'm fully content with the 'spawn()'...

 Getting GCC to work under Win32 was a great achievement, and getting the run-
time environment such, that also cross-compilers work ok, so that we can make
cross-compilers from Win32 to almost any target, was really fine...

 Ok, all those 'real flamers' sending later flames through this maillist should 
be removed from this list... I will ask myself to be removed, as a matter of
fact all these 'how to get select() work', or 'why doesn't configure work' 
discussions don't interest me very much, select() works and configure works ok
in my Linux, I haven't had any kind of problems to build cygwin32-targeted
stuff under Linux, cannot help the askers in any way (but just sending 'flames'
to them suggesting that they should switch to Linux...) and don't remember any
problems to ask here...

 Ok, I confess to be a bastard when daring to blaim guys like Geoffrey, Tim,
Colin having some kind of 'MS-attitude', seeing only the Win32-environment as
the 'only way' to do anything... Or, Mumit... Perhaps it was just a joke from 
him suggesting a guy with a modem connection to the net to download 24M of
sources. The cygwin32 sources have been fully impossible for me too, since
downloading the b18 ones... And really vain when I always have the up-to-date
FSF and egcs-sources...
 
 Ok, I remove my homepage with all the links to the win32-hosted crosstools,
quit updating the tools and helping people to use them or build anything to
the cygwin32 environment... And ask Michael Hirmke to remove my stuff from 
'ftp.franken.de'. Let this be the first 'good decision' for the coming year 
from me... I'm just sick of all this 'MS-attitude' involved... Ok, I do this
after the Christmas, so all needing e.g. WinHelp-docs about the GNU-tools,
GNU libc1 and libc2 (Win32-to-Linux cross-compiler owners -- WinHelp from
the libc6...), can still visit 'www.nettilinja.fi/~ankosken') and download
the stuff...

 Merry Christmas to all, (MS-attitude bastards too...) Kai
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