On Tuesday 17 May 2005 17:21, Vickram Crishna wrote:

At 1:09 PM +0530 5/17/05, sherlock@vsnl.com wrote:

...

If it was anything else (low cost, innovation, efficiency) the chinese would have beaten us.

But not, perhaps, for their sense of civility, as we have seen after smarting from many sharp replies on this list.

Ah the chinese are subtle - at first. Very often silence follows after u have taken a stab at them. But the next round is a missile. U will notice this in their dealings with the Americans. Remember the Chinese-killing-India rhetoric last year. Initially there were a couple of press releases stating the figures on rice and shrimp import from India. As usual the AH's who run this country did not understand. The next round was proposed chinese sanctions on Indian exports to china, which dwarf Indian imports by an order of magnitude. The indian ministers quietly shut their mouths. End of great Indo-Chinese trade war.

Actually, the Chinese (Confucius, as he is called in English) invented the civil servant, but it took Indians to raise that personage to the heights of misrule and uncivility. Even ;-) Sherlock can't begin to compete. Of course, s/he may be one, and if so, I rest my case.

No such luck. You can either be civil or a servant. I am not a servant so I might just make to the ranks of civility. And i am not employed by the government - a very good qualification imo.

Unlikely, of course, as s/he does not lack for knowledge or willingness to help,

(Big self glorification para) My knowledge (restricted to hardware only) has steadily deteriorated after the 486 era. I did have detailed knowledge of many of the chipset schematics and registers and designed a couple of 286/386 mobos including the external glue logic and a large number of addon cards for the isa bus. The glue logic was quite substantial inspite of the chipsets.

if not actually suffer fools or children.

Actually the irritation is that most posters do not make the slightest attempt to exercise their fingers on google, let alone their brains before posting. Which is so much against the libre software philosophy of making you independent and productive permanently. We should have an initiation ceremony for new members. At every meet they will sit around a burning windows cd and the list admin will deliver a homily on list ettiquitte and FSF philosophy. They will then intone the homily thrice. The smoke from the cd should drive away all but the most determined.

rgds jtd