My personal rule of thumb is that life in tech means putting up with a bit of hyperbole every now and then. :-) But that's really not unique to tech - just look at question time in Parliament!
When someone says or writes something to me like "your proposal is idiotic because ... " or "you're an idiot to propose that because ... ", I just ignore the first part of the sentence and try to parse out the actual technical point being made.
Cheers,
Andy
On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 4:58 PM Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Jacob,
On 17-Jul-19 07:39, Jacob Hoffman-Andrews wrote:
.....
> However, the first post
> was one WG regular telling the author "You are insane to propose
> <technical thing>."
Clearly that was out of order and IMHO the WG chairs should have said so.
But (having started professional life among physicists) I don't think
it can be called unusual. As a matter of curiosity, I just ran a search
on my personal email archives and found 174 occurences of the word "insane"
going back to 1995.
The first one of all reads:
> It could be that the
> 4 bits may be better devoted to making the flow id be a full
> 32 bits.
>
> I think Brian's words of
> SHOULD and MAY are important and a good idea too.
>
> Frankly, this is positively insane. Either IPv6 is a variation
> of IPv4, and shares the same ethernet type, with demux early
> in the IP processing, or its new, and is demuxed at the ethernet
> (and other) layers. Having it both ways is just idiocy.
So X is telling Y that Brian's idea is insane and idiotic, as far as
I can see. But IPv6 ended up with both its own Ethertype and an IP version
number field.
The point is that this wasn't offensive, because it was directed at
the technical proposal, not at the proposer. I think that's what people
should bear in mind.
Brian
