Re: Rant (was Re: X Window : Newbie)
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On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 01:55:12PM +0100, Joerg Johannes wrote:
> Did we have a bad night? I'm not used to hear such ranting from you...
Kind of. Part of it is d-u inspired, I'm seeing a lot more persistent
ignorance than normal tonight. It didn't help that the stupidity
level in real life was way up tonight, too.[1]
> >1) You just asked the *SAME* question (or at least the same subject)
> > 30 minutes ago. Do you honestly expect an answer at 4AM on a
> > weeknight?
> 4am your time. This list works globally, and someone in another country
> could read this list in his coffe-break just by now. But ok, 30mins is a
> bit impatient...
This is true. However, by the patterns of list traffic, I'm willing
to guess that the vast majority of the people posting are in the
United States, and the majority of those are in the Pacific time zone.
This isn't an unreasonable assumption, the US has more Internet
connected people than any other country, and technically oriented
mailing lists tend to draw more folks from the tech-heavy west coast
rather than the old-money east coast, so call it an educated guess.
> You're right. But still it is non-intuitive that a regular user has not
> the rights to "startx" by default. man "XF86Config" and "man startx"
> won't tell you how to allow it to a normal user.
Never mind debconf asks you how you want to set permissions to start X.
> Some of those "please help" mails are very interesting, and occasionally
> those guys really need help. Please think again if you really want to
> use such a filter rule.
If the writer can't be bothered to set an intelligent subject, I have
no reason to believe that the rest of their post is any more
intelligently posed. If I see more than a few eyecatchingly bad posts
by the same person inside a short time span, especially the same
question posed in said bad form twice in half an hour when the vast
majority of the readership is either asleep, having breakfast or stuck
in traffic on their way to work, that's enough motivation to get me to
point out some manners. I'm not alone in this, last fall another
newbie pulled the same thing and was promptly shouted down by a couple
scores of posters.
> > net.ghod with 30 years Unix experiance; if you act like a retard,
> > we'll treat you like one. Likewise, if you post in an intellegent
> > manner, we'll respond in a (hopefully) helpful manner. If you want
> > to act like a retard and get smart answers, go hire a consultant.
> That won't help. If you are a retard, a consultant won't ever give you
> smart answers ;)
Yes, but I believe extreme stupidity should have consequences. I'm
fairly cut out for my work.
> >To prevent such tonguelashing in the future, please ask smart
> >questions. Eric S. Raymond tells you just what the world expects out
> >of a call for help:
> >
> >http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> This is a good idea to read, indeed. But how should a newbie know this link?
Given the circumstances that only the newbie knows how they arrived at
that spot, and considering how rarely people get a magic fix from a
"Help me too!" post, leads me to believe that nobody on the list is
psychic. Keeping this in mind, it seems like anybody with an IQ
greater than that of a brick would realize that they need to give
clear, concise, and complete detail of what they're trying to
accomplish and what they've tried to get there on their own. Most
people learn this by the time they hit third grade and they get tired
of re-explaining everything to their teacher when asking for help.
Am I wrong in presuming that it's safe to assume people on this list
have at least a third grade education, or is that way too much to ask?
[1] "You gave me two different names, and no last name either time.
You can't provide the name of the person you want to visit (only a
room number). You don't have ID. You smell like a downtown bus stop
after the bars close. It's three in the morning. The country's at
orange alert and this is a major research hospital. You can leave
now, or I can take you in for public intoxication and tresspassing.
Up to you." This was roughly par for the night. I'm seeing roughly
the same on the list tonight.
- --
.''`. Baloo Ursidae <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org>
: :' : proud Debian admin and user
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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