Re: Old Computer Parts
On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 22:02 +0100, Joe Hart wrote:
> I think a lot of the questions that are asked in this mailing list could
> be self answered, but it seems that there are a lot of people who never
> bother looking for an answer when then think a guru will take time from
> their precious day to reply.
Well, some people are lazy. But if I think back to when I started out
with linux, I had no idea what I was doing, many man pages were fairly
cryptic, available documentation assumed you know what you're doing. To
make matters worse, I had no internet access, and only limited e-mail
access - which means mailing lists was my primary source of information.
In first world countries, people take thier superfast internet
connections for granted and don't realise that in much of the rest of
the world having an internet connection at home can be a luxury even for
IT professionals.
No matter how easy or difficult the question you ask, there will always
be some smartass who tell to you go RTFM (which is often a longer
sentence to type than the answer to your question). Don't let it bother
you. Eric S. Raymond's advice is good advice, but I know people can be
intimidated and/or confused by some documentation out there. Heck,
after more than 10 years of using linux some projects' documentation
still overwhelm me. If you know absolutely nothing about a certain
program or the technologies involved, it can be difficult to figure out
where to start.
These days I have hardly any time at all to read these lists (when I do
there are always a couple of thousand mails from debian-user) let alone
reply, but when I do get time, I really try to reply to every question I
can answer, no matter how basic. If some guru hadn't taken some of his
precious time to answer my basic questions 10 years ago, I would
probably not be in IT anymore.
Hans
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