Bravo ! Well said !
On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, you wrote:
> I'd like to take this moment, and point this letter as the poster child for
> what NOT to do when someone asks a question. Sure in my previous email I had
> said that I have a life and that I get a lot messages, and sometimes I don't
> respond to messages on mailing lists. But I followed up with some answers.
> I'm not saying that I am the Martha Stewart(or moderator) of this mailing
> list, but since this list is for newbies, and since I joined this list, not
> because I'm a newbie, but because I was once a newbie, and I want to help
> the newbies. Obviously if everyone here was a newbie, then not a lot of help
> would be offered here. (imagine, 3 illiterate people, trying to teach each
> other how to read and write.. sure they would probably come up with their
> own alphabet, but it won't be anything to what everyone else uses).
>
> > I for one don't even bother answering questions to which the answers are
> > trivial, or easy to look up. I have enough work looking up the solutions
> to my
> > own problems.
>
>
> Rial, if you're IQ really was higher than that of a carrot, you wouldn't
> have wasted your so called valuable time, which you spend trying to solve
> your own problems, by writing this letter.
>
> > What pisses me off the most is people who don't even know how to upgrade
> their
> > graphics card, insist on running linux because they heard some hype about
> it,
> > and then get all frustrated when it's not as easy as baking an egg.
>
> I have no clue how to bake an egg. What comes easy to you, may not come easy
> to others, I can install slackware 7.0 in less than 15 minutes on a machine,
> yet installing debian, or freebsd, or even mandrake would take me 30-40
> minutes. Just because someone else can't install slack in 15 minutes,
> doesn't mean they shouldn't try.
> Why did you pick up Linux ? I'm sure you heard about it from someone else,
> who told you how great it was.. guess what.. just because that person wasn't
> part of a big News agency, doesn't mean you didn't buy into the hype. He
> hyped it, you bought it and you installed it.
>
> > Also, nobody cares to read manuals anymore. Everybody on this list claims
> to
> > have read all the apropriate manuals/docs, but found nothing, so they ask
> here.
> > And then they expect us "guru's" to solve their problems. Meanwhile the
> thing
> > they're asking is usually explained in detail somewhere between the second
> and
> > seventh paragraph in the man-page of the program that's causing them
> trouble.
> > But that means they have to type in "man rpm" or something, and that's too
> > hard. I wonder what the heck makes people decide to run linux anyway, if
> reading
> > some documentation is too hard, or too much to ask?
>
> Just because you are armed with a ton of books, doesn't mean you know which
> book is appropriate for your current problem.
> Say you're a 16year old kid bent on getting a drivers license, and want to
> be trained by a school. How do you know which school to pick ?
> no one can force you to pick a school, but you decide to pick one, after
> doing some research.. this research usually involves talking to other people
> who in turn will give you their opinions on school's they've been to. The
> more people you talk to , the more schools you'll hear about. How do you
> know which one is the right one ?
> say you do decide to go with one school that a friend recommend, but that
> school wasn't as great as you thought ? the instructor didn't speak english.
> ? My point here is that,
>
> .1. Just because there's so much documentation about Linux, doesn't mean
> iit's all good. I'll take the phrase from Perl, "theres more than one way to
> do it", my answers to do things differed from
> the answers of others, everyone said go into /etc/inittab and change the
> initrd to 3 instead of 5, Guess what, I learn't something new there. I would
> always have gone into /etc/rc.d to turn it off.
> Now Art may find my way of doing it easier than editing the innittab. maybe
> he's new to Linux, and isn't familiar with vi, now he stands a chance of
> really screwing up his boot scripts, maybe he found my answer too hard, and
> liked the innittab answer. In the end he knows more than he did before he
> asked the question.
>
> With your response, the only thing he knows now is that Linux users don't
> want to help him, and want to be part of some exclusive club. He gets a bad
> impression of the Linux community, and goes and tells all his friends. Who
> in turn think that the entire Linux community is made up of immature people
> like you.
>
> > Kit: "noone wants to help..." Now let's say you sell your car. Someone
> comes
> > over and buys it. Then a week later he's at your door again. "How do I
> shift up
> > or down?" --> "Manual page 15 and where the heck did you get your driver's
> > license?" Then 3 days later he comes back "And how about reverse, does my
> car
> > (and so on.......).
>
> Art seems to have asked 3 questions, to which he hadn't recieved an answer
> earlier. Comparing him to your
> car customer is unfair and stupid. Just because you answered the same
> question 200 times to 200 different people, doesn't mean that they went and
> shared it with the rest of the world
> the 201st person you blew up at, doesn't need to be screamed at. The answers
> are obvious to you because you've heard the question 200 times.
>
> Just because I don't need to look at the keyboard to type, doesn't mean that
> someone who just got a new computer, and does need to look at the keyboard
> is an idiot.
> He may very well be smarter than me when it comes to carpentry or astro
> physics, how would you like it if you had a question in Physics, and the
> only person who could answer your question called you a
> dumb moron, and compared your IQ to a carrot ? when all you were trying to
> do was to get an answer to a problem you had come across for the first time.
> Yet he had come across it 5 years ago and solved it. ?
>
> My point is that you too were once a newbie, and just because you aren't,
> doesn't give you the right to degrade people on a mailing list, just to make
> yourself sound technically proficient in your own eyes.
> >From your reply to the email, you didn't give an ounce of advice, and the
> only "technical expertise" you displayed was that you know how to type, and
> can move your mouse around.
> If you do consider yourself a "guru", and feel your valuable time is being
> wasted by sifting through the messages on this list, then maybe it's time
> you unsubscribed from the mailing list. I'm sure a linux guru like you
> knows how to do that.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rial Juan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Monday, March 13, 2000 4:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [newbie] Where is the so called help???????
>
>
> >
> > Kiddo,
> >
> > before you even start THINKING about running linux, you must be well aware
> that
> > it's a pretty hard OS to master for those with absolutely no technical
> > background. Linux is an operating system that tries to hide nothing for
> the
> > user, unlike MS Windows. If you have no basic understanding of how a
> computer
> > works, and I don't mean knowing your way around in WordPerfect or
> something like
> > that, I mean: how a computer works internally, well, if you don't have a
> basic
> > understanding about that, then linux is not for you. Also, what's that
> stupid
> > remark about "too much technical jargon" anyway? This is a hacker's OS,
> what did
> > you expect? If it's too technical for you, well... Nobody forces you to
> run it.
> >
> > What pisses me off the most is people who don't even know how to upgrade
> their
> > graphics card, insist on running linux because they heard some hype about
> it,
> > and then get all frustrated when it's not as easy as baking an egg.
> >
> > Also, nobody cares to read manuals anymore. Everybody on this list claims
> to
> > have read all the apropriate manuals/docs, but found nothing, so they ask
> here.
> > And then they expect us "guru's" to solve their problems. Meanwhile the
> thing
> > they're asking is usually explained in detail somewhere between the second
> and
> > seventh paragraph in the man-page of the program that's causing them
> trouble.
> > But that means they have to type in "man rpm" or something, and that's too
> > hard. I wonder what the heck makes people decide to run linux anyway, if
> reading
> > some documentation is too hard, or too much to ask?
> >
> > I for one don't even bother answering questions to which the answers are
> > trivial, or easy to look up. I have enough work looking up the solutions
> to my
> > own problems.
> >
> > Kit: "noone wants to help..." Now let's say you sell your car. Someone
> comes
> > over and buys it. Then a week later he's at your door again. "How do I
> shift up
> > or down?" --> "Manual page 15 and where the heck did you get your driver's
> > license?" Then 3 days later he comes back "And how about reverse, does my
> car
> > have one?" --> "Still manual page 15, and of course it has one, you
> moron!" Then
> > 4 days later he comes back "How do I turn on the radio?" --> "Explained on
> page
> > 4 in the radio manual. Never seen an on/off swicth before?" Then a few
> days
> > later "I heard rumours that you can slide the seat to the front or back so
> you
> > can reach the pedals better. Is that true? Is it worth the effort? Won't
> it
> > degrade the lateral tire-pressure? My feet won't get stuck in the engine,
> will
> > they?"
> >
> > I think you'd grabbed a big gun by the third time the dude comes over,
> shot the
> > bastard trough the head, hid the body, and sold the car again. This time
> to
> > someone with an IQ higher than that of a carrot.
> >
> > On Mar 13 Kit wrote:
> >
> > > BOY, I agree...with you BIGTIME...noone wants to help...they just
> > > want to
> > > tell you to go somewhere and read...well, thats what I've been
> > > doing...and doing
> > > and doing...but it still does no good...most all tutorials are
> > > very poorly written.
> > > they use too much technical jargon...they don't remember that
> > > HELP means you must
> > > help them on the persons level of understanding...if they had
> > > technical knowlegdge,
> > > they wouldn't be asking questions...they would of fix their own
> > > problem...man, what
> > > a bunch of dum people...for knowing so much as they do...
> > >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Rial Juan <http://nighty.ulyssis.org>
> > e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Belgium tel: (++32) 89/856533
> > ulyssis system admininstrator <http://www.ulyssis.org>
> >
> > The little critters in nature; they don't know they're ugly.
> > That's very funny... A fly marying a bumble-bee...
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Sign the petition at http://www.libranet.com/petition.html
> > Help bring us more Linux Drivers
> >
> >
> >
--
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