Re: Debain on the rise ! - However ....
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CCing this just in case WB has left the building...
On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 11:32:48AM -0700, W. B. Maguire II wrote:
> And what about discretization in other areas? I asked a question about the
> Debian install (3.0 r1) not recognizing my HDDs connected to a Rocket-133
> PCI-IDE card (a few days ago---titled "New Debian install + Rocket133 = no
> HDDs! (Please help...").
Adding pleas for help ("Please help" "HELP!!" or similar) on *any*
high traffic mailing list usually causes everybody else's brain to
automatically s/$PLEA/I'm a noob without a clue and entitlement
issues, delete me and move on/ .
You might have greater success after giving ESR's howto a readthrough.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> The end result? The end result is unfortunate for Debian. I really *did*
> want to try Debian, but with the only response I got to my
> hour-long-researching-post being "compile your own kernel", that pretty
> much shut this new-comer down!
If I had seen it, I would have asked if you had read the Installation
Manual (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/install), or
suggest you try Knoppix.
> In the few days that I have been on this list, I can
> say that I have seen many, many requests for help go unanswered.
It's not our fault that people still haven't gotten the hang of
effectively communicating in written form almost 40 years after the
creation of email, and several millennia after the advent of written
language. We exist because we don't want to cater to the Great Unwashed.
> Maybe I'll be able to give Debian a try at some point in the future, but at
> this point, it feels almost unsupported to me. I'm not saying that there's
> no help here, I'm just saying that the volume is *crushing*, and that it
> seems that many of the requests for help are being lost in the volume!
Is your mail reader threaded? You'd notice that the vast majority of
messages are parts of existing threads. Most threads get response.
If you don't get a response, you're doing something that's causing
people to avoid that thread (bad subject, not enough info, looks even
remotely like another AOL idiot thinking we care about their "printer
icon", etc).
> It sounds to me that you imply that anyone who doesn't have a good mail
> client just shouldn't bother with this list.
Well, you're on the right track. Anybody who doesn't have a good mail
client shouldn't bitch that they get burned by volume. Especially on
this list. Just popping open tin real quick and searching my news
server, I see these newsgroups *all* mirror this list (post by sending
directly to the list):
apana.lists.os.linux.debian.user
jlug.ml.debian.users
linux.debian.user
I also know of (but don't seem to carry)...gmane.debian.user
There's also a digest version.
Anybody who has a bad mail client has no business using email. 8:o)
> I, myself, haven't had the time to migrate to Mutt on my RH9 Linux
> box, so I'm temporarily putting-up with Eudora on Win98 (even though
> I *hate* it and Windows!).
Fastest, easiest way to solve that problem: Delete windows now and
don't go back. You don't learn to swim by standing in the wading
pool, after all. Most guys I know, myself included, learned to swim
by being pushed off the pier at a Scout camp in my early teen years.
I'm a pretty strong swimmer now.
It worked again for me in 1997 when I switched to Debian. You think
Debian's a bit off-setting to newbies now, you should go back five
years. Before apt!
> Fine, maybe you and your *good* e-mail client can handle the volume
> on this list, but what about me and my *Windoze-average/crappy*
> e-mail client?
You make it sound like we should be spending our time catering to the
weakest link (bad software) instead of working towards the goal of
getting the people who are ready for it over to a better alternative.
> _________ Maguire@AnalyticInvestments.com ________ |**===
> / |**===
> ( W. B. Maguire II, Ph.D. Tel: 303.772.1615 |=====
> | Chief Executive Manager FAX: 303.651.6389 9||
> | Analytic Investments LLC _ |
> | 700 Ken Pratt Blvd STE204 PMB166 ( ) The ASCII ribbon |
> ( Longmont CO 80501-6455 X campaign against )
> \__________________________________ / \ _ HTML e-mail __/
As bad as HTML email is, arguably, warlording is worse. There's a
chance HTML email has content, massive sigblocks are content-free.
http://ursine.ca/jargon/html/W/warlording.html
- --
.''`. Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca>
: :' :
`. `'` proud Debian admin and user
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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