Build Date: Tue Apr 14 11:10:12 2026 UTC
Bad people of the Future don't go to bed, they pass out.
-- Johnny Royale
Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument
2001-01-05 16:42:57
Mr. Bad and Crackmonkey collaborate on a fine Mr. Bad's List. We put together ALL the TECHNOLOGY you ever need to know in order to STUMP your OPPONENT in a technical argument. Use these only when your back is against the wall -- they're definitely desperation tactics.
- That won't scale.
- That's been proven to be O(N^2) and we need a solution that's O(NlogN).
- There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
- The syntax is idiosyncratic.
- Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.
- That can't be generalized to a cross-platform build.
- Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.
- If we go with that idea, we're going to have Don Marti camped out in the front lobby with 300 angry software jihad supporters.
- Our support infrastructure simply can't handle the volume that change would involve.
- I had one of the interns try that approach for another project, and it scrambled the CEO's hard drive. So I think it's going to be a hard sell.
- Yes, well, that's just not the way things work in the real world.
- I like your idea. Why don't you write up a white paper and we'll review it at the next staff meeting?
- Unfortunately, we're an all-FORTH shop. Otherwise, it's a nice idea.
- I think you need to stop taking this so personally. We need to think about what's best for the project, not about our own little pet theories.
- Oh, I played with that approach back as an undergrad. Got a D, too.
- I was reading about that on BugTraq yesterday.
- Yes, I believe that's the approach Windows NT is taking.
- That's totally inefficient on modern hardware.
- Well, yes, but it really reduces to the knapsack problem in that case. Do you have some kind of heuristic, or are we dealing with an NP-complete case?
- Have you LOOKED at the number of I/O requests that will create?
- We can't afford the transaction overhead.
- Yeah, or we could all just plink away on Amigas or something.
- What? I don't speak your crazy moon-language.
- Hmm. Didn't they just go bankrupt? It's OK, I guess -- there's some German company who's picked up the existing service contracts.
- No, no, no. We're really working on an N-TIER architecture, here.
- No, no, no. It's fairly important that the database be in THIRD NORMAL FORM.
- No, that would break object encapsulation.
- I don't think that's altogether clear. Please write it up in UML for me.
- I think there's a problem with your drive geometry.
- Can you generate some USE CASES that would justify the change?
- How is that going to impact the schedule?
- RAM is cheap and all, but...
- It would probably be best if we deferred that until version 2.0.
- I like it, but it is too point-oh for my tastes.
- If you make this change, I will fork the code.
- Yes, well, unfortunately the economy is going away from anything remotely like that. Our investors would kill us.
- Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting hit piece on that.
- Yes, yes, we've all read DJB's RFCs on the subject.
- This is all covered in Knuth, and we don't have time to go over it again.
- This one is in the FAQ: http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#your_dumb_technology
- I don't have time for this extropian nonsense.
- Well, I guess we could start the QA cycles again from square one. That would require a press release, though.
- You used to program in Pascal, didn't you?
- Why don't we make a generalized solution including both options, and let the administrator decide with a config-file setting?
- You've obviously ignored the various namespace issues.
- I don't think you're considering the performance trade-offs.
- What kind of benchmarks have you been running?
- Let's table this for now, and we'll talk about it one-on-one off-line.
- This really doesn't jibe with our core competency.
- This sort of thing should really be outsourced.
- I remember that IBM had a project to do that back in the 70s.
- Um, hello? We're using VON NEUMANN MACHINES HERE.
- We need this to fit on a single floppy.
- Yes, but can this be embedded in a toaster, for example?
- We need something that my mom can use.
- Users won't want to click through that many layers of hierarchy.
- The packaging costs will be prohibitive.
- OK, but what about internationalization?
- Look, would you just get off your Be obsession for FIVE MINUTES and talk serious design with us?
- That's a good idea -- you should do that on your home page.
- Yeah, Linuxcare tried that with the Sourceror project.
- Ho, man! Are they still AROUND? That's so cool. I thought that whole idea was discredited years ago.
- What you're not seeing is the difference between an 'is-a' and a 'has-a' relationship.
- There is no hope for the widow's son, Boaz.
- Yes, but we're standardizing on XML.
- That doesn't fit into the MVC model.
- Well, that's great if you have an AI running the thing.
- Well, they're going to do that with the next version of Perl, so we should probably wait.
- Well, they're going to do that with the next version of OS X, so we should probably wait.
- I heard that the only real application for that technology was child pornography. How did you hear about it?
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