[e2e] (no subject)

[Detlef Bosau]

David Andersen wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2005, at 4:30 PM, Alessandro Vivas wrote:
> 
>> Jon,
>>
>> I dont agree with your message. About yahoo mail  and hotmail  address 
>> isnt true. I live in Brazil and many universities dont have  have mail 
>> accounts for all students. Im a phd student and I use  gmail account 
>> because my university dont provide e-mail account for  me.. only this. 
>> So, please dont use examples with countries like  when you talk about 
>> China.
> 
> 
> 
> I shouldn't jump in on this thread, but to try to inject a little bit  
> of CS:


Me neither. And we all would better stop this endless discussion.
I´m not a judge to say who said something wrong here or who didn´t.
Jon´s posting was misunderstood, Fan Ye felt insulted here.

As stated countless times here, the reactions were overexaggerated.

I myself often say things in a harsh way and a way which can be 
misunderstood. And when I think of some off list communications during 
the last days, I wonder that I - and my peers as well - are still alive.

Basically, to the best of my knowlege, even the english speaking world 
has adopted an appropriate german word for it:

                             Kindergarten.

Did someone die because of these posts? Have these posts caused a war?
Did some company declare bankruptcy? Are any people suffering from an 
illness as a consequence of these posts?

If not: Here in Germany we would say, Jon and Fan Ye should have a Bier 
(sp!) together and make peace. Even if there is no real war.

If we had simply ignored these two posts, this would have caused less 
harm than this endless discussion. We should get a live and drop our 
onversensitivity. Next time, we sue people in the bus for an unfriendly 
look...
> 
> This is a problem of reputation management between un-introduced  
> parties on the Internet.  And it's a serious one.  As a well known  


Reputation management.

Surely, you have some slides from a well known Reputation Management 
Consulting Agency here.

Which one should we choose? The Boston Consulting Group? McKinsey? 
Anderson Consulting? Ernst & Young?

I suffered years of my life from the double standards behaviour in some 
department wherer reputation was all, the private person was nothing.
Every word, every behaviour was weighted against the "reputation". Even 
the papers had to improve the "reputation". No comment on the scientific 
quality. Does this matter? No. If only the "reputation" is perfect.

I hate it. Admittedly, I hate it. Jon is right: We shall conduct 
ourselves. But for me: I´m Detlef. And who talks to me, talks to Detlef.
And although I´m in general a friendly guy, I sometimes can be somewhat 
"difficult". And if you talk to me for more than half an hour, you know 
that.

So, I will conduct myself, and you must take me as I am, there is no 
other Detlef Bosau. And surely, the same holds true for Jon and Fan Ye 
and all the outhers.

> networking researcher, Jon is probably subjected to a constant stream  
> of "random" emails.  \footnote{When I was at MIT, we were subject to  a 

All of us are. As I said in another post, I´m unemployed. So I´m not 
suffering from too much mail here.

One nasty person at our employment exchange boasted: "Do you know, how 
much e-mail I receive?" So what. That´s not my problem. One must be in a 
need to say it to talk about this. This person cried hysterically: "I 
get 80 emails a day!". O.k, some people receive 80 emails an hour. We 
should base a social ranking upon this. The more email we receive, the 
better is our reputation ;-)



> constant stream of in-person visits from crackpots who believed  they'd 
> broken RSA and wanted to talk to crypto experts, people who'd  figured 
> out the grand unified theory, ... }  As a well known  networking 


I deeply feel with you.


> resource, end-to-end is subject to a fairly constant  stream of emails 
> that -- from a high level read of the email -- sound  for all the world 
> like they're asking for the solution to a homework  problem.

Is that the way you think of me? No? You ask, why I think this? I can 
tell you:



> I hit delete on an enormous number of threads on e2e, particularly  
> lately.  How do I decide which threads to actually read?
> 
>   a)  The subject line
>   b)  Who initiated it and is participating in it
> 
> (No, I'm not going to say what features influence deletion or reading).
> 
> When an email comes in from random_student at cs.well_known.edu, I have  a 
> few bits of information about them.  They're more likely to be  active 
> in my research area.  They're more likely to have some  background to 
> ensure that their question isn't going to be yet- another tarpit 
> discussion.


<Flame>
Fine! So, if i were the great Detlef.Bosau at cs.cmu.edu, I would be a 
member or student of the great Carneghie Mellon University, perhaps of 
higher rank than you and you have to bow before me and so you would read 
my post. Otherwise you drop me :-(
</Flame>

My apologies to the list, if someone found this not acceptable.

It took me years even to have a homepage. And when I read this post, I´m 
about to cancel it. I like people who talk _to_ me. I don´t like people 
who talk _about_ me. And I don´t want to suffer from prejudice.

So, on my homepage you will not find neither my CV nor a photograph.
(In fact, you find a mess, there is a lot to be added.)

However, much persons here even talk to a nobody "detlef.bosau at web.de".
And I´m thankful about that, because I´m allowed to learn and people 
even talk to a nobody. And I´m _deeply_ impressed when I see _who_ talks 
to me.

However, I try to treat everyone the same whay. And whem someone prefers 
to have the address Bull.Shit.2005 at yahoo.com, I certainly find this 
somewhat strange, but this is _my_ problem. And when one offers me a 
GUT, even then I can stay polite. Perhaps, there is one mail among 
thousand with a hidden nugget in it.


> 
> On the other hand, when email comes from  terminator_sex_god at yahoo.com, 
> the bits of information are a little  different. john_q_public at gmail.com 
 

which is simlar to mine...

> gets binned in the intermediate  category:  gmail users are frequently 

Merciful! Really merciful!

> more technically savvy, no  offense intended to Yahoo mail users, but 
> it's still a relatively  anonymous address.  I do know quite a few 
> researchers who use  gmail.com for their primary email, though -- not 
> including the vast  numbers at Google labs. :)
> 
> If you want the situation to be better, give me a nice distributed  
> email reputation system that I can use to rate the "bozo-factor" of  

It´s even more merciful, that you don´t call ith teh "bosau-factor".

BTW: I don´t believe in "reputation systems". It´s a buzzword. Not more.
And a bad one too.

I´m angry about your attidute, frankly spoken. What you say here is 
nothing else that what Jon was accuesed for. However, you say it in a 
more elaborated way.

I worked for years at a customer´s help desk. (Do you still talk to me?
A "hotline guy"? Do you have the same word in English?)

> incoming email.  That way I can stop using my often incorrect domain- 
> based heuristics, and instead look at the mail and see "ahh,  Crowcroft 
> vouches for Foo who vouches for Bar who vouches for  dude at yahoo.com.  
> Guess I'll read the mail."
> 

And when I´m not that lucky that a "name" vouches for me, I´m worthless.
Thank you.

This not only sounds arrogant, it _is_ arrogant.

Seems, as if you believe in vouchers, name dropping and other kinds of 
prejudice. What do you think about judging a person for his contribution?


> I'll let people return to drilling tunnels through the earth,
> 
>   -Dave
>    (I'm sure I just lost several points on the email credibility  scale 
> for contributing to this thread...)


Surely. Perhaps it destroys your reputation ;-)

Frankly spoken: At least, I know some of your prejudices now. So, if you 
don´t receive an email from me, it´s not because your lack of 
reputation, an insufficient number of doctoral degrees or because you 
were "only" assistant professor and no tenure. (I don´t know, I did not 
look at  your homepage, intendedly not. I want to write totally unbiased 
here.)

It´s, frankly spoken, because from this post you appear to me as a quite 
arrogant person.

And that you are a victim of the "world wide reputation system".

2+2 = 4. And not 5. And this does not change even if the guy who said 
that were the biggest a**h*le of all times

In science, we look at the results. And wie should not look at the 
person. (Admittedly, I _have_ difficulties here myself. And when I try 
to get a job in Germany at the age of 42 and the copmpanies don´t hire 
german inhabitants, particularly no half dead perons, but younger, 
mostly asian competitors which currently overwhelm our country, this is 
anything but a comfortable situation. With respect to Jon´s post, I 
therefore did not see the potential insult therein but thought by 
myself: "Wonderful! Finally someone to tell the truth!". Perhaps you 
will hate me for that. But I only want to be understood. Perhaps this is 
wrong. But that´s the attitude of a 42 years old computer scientist who 
hunts a job for about two years now and sees well situated asian IT 
guyes the whole day each time he leaves his appartment. And you don´t 
read my posts, not because I don´t have a chinese name, I have none, but 
because I´m not from a Gig.Name.University at Edu.Land. It´s exaclty what 
Fan Ye complained about.)


Finally: I tried to express this as politely as I could. If, however, I 
offended someone, perhaps due to my bad english, I apologize.
Originally, I did not want to contribute to this thread because I think 
it would cause unnecessary harm. Nothing happend - and we should not 
make this "nothing" _happen_ without any need to do so.

However, I felt offended by your post.

And BTW: Perhaps, next time, when I should ever contribute to a 
conference which is not double blind, I consider to apply for a 
yahoo-Account :-) detlef.bosau at yahoo.com :-)
> 
> 
>>
>>
>> Bye,
>>
>> Alessandro Vivas Andrade
>>
>>
>> On 9/14/05, Fan Ye <fanye at us.ibm.com> wrote: Jon,
>>
>> This is the first time I ever post on e2e list, although I've  subscribed
>> to it several years.
>>
>> I'm really astonished to see your technical discussion on ns  
>> drifting, or
>> "accidentally dropping",  onto some language attacking an ethnic group
>> (see below quoted text). You may not have the intention, but what you
>> wrote seems to imply that all these guys are clueless chinese  
>> students who
>>
>> dont know a better way to plagiarize.
>>
>> > (I have no idea where they are really from - are they using such
>> > addresses because they are afraid their university will catch them
>> > plagiarising,
>> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> > or are they blocked in china?) and they do more harm than good.
>>                                                ^^^^^^
>>
>> I'm very, very upset to see this kind of language, not to mention at a
>> least expected place, a technical discussion list.
>>
>> I have little clue about why these people use hotmail or yahoo address
>> either. My guess (from my own, limited experience 6+ years ago), is  that
>> many schools in china simply do not provide an email address to every
>> student, or the habit of Internet users in china differs from here  a 
>> lot,
>> people (including graduate students) simply use one email address for
>> everything, they consider this a convenience. I've got emails from  such
>> students as well, and they asked valid, technical questions. I  didnt 
>> have
>> the chance to check out their publication, but I would have a hard  
>> time to
>>
>> believe they are just poor plagiarizers without a better means to  
>> conceal
>> identity.
>>



-- 
Detlef Bosau
Galileistrasse 30
70565 Stuttgart
Mail: detlef.bosau at web.de
Web: http://www.detlef-bosau.de
Mobile: +49 172 681 9937