Re: minoru hodo koube wo tareru inahokana

["roylo" <roylo@example.com>]

I can understand your point; and I do agree to it.
However, I view it a bit differently from you.
I started out playing linux back when the symbol was elf/dwarf instead of
that cute little penguin. ^_^;
At that time linux wasn't that popular and online resource was little. So I
learn it by reading the HOWTOs and try&error method.
Later on when linux got popular I was the kind of guy that will tell people
to "RTFM"; why? because I think all the answers are in the HOWTOs and if the
questions are big and nasty enough I should send an e-mail and ask the
authors instead.
Sometimes, if people caught me in a good mood I will help them out; elsewise
I will tell them go "RTFM"
And then one day I got stocked on some problems and didn't quiet understand
the README file that was suppose to explain to solution for it;  so I went
on irc and ask people for help. And someone reply back with "RTFM" to me; As
much as it hurt my pride I realize that what I did was wrong. And that
really made me changed myself.

There is nothing wrong with point out mistakes to people; however, one can
choose to do it in a professional and friendly manner or otherwise. That is
what I'm trying to get across to this mailing list. I agree with what you
are saying and I hold pretty much as the same value as you do. But I think
it will be better to say, "Here, please go to linuxdoc.org and you can find
the howto for {etc, etc...}" instead of just saying something like "RTFM"

That is just my 3cent value










----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Q" <jq@example.com>
To: <tlug@example.com>
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2001 9:52 PM
Subject: Re: minoru hodo koube wo tareru inahokana


> roylo (roylo@example.com) wrote:
>
> > When people see someone make a careless [dumb] comment, they can choice
to
> > make a friendly suggestion,  ignore it, make fun of it, or criticize it.
>
> You'll find there is a lot more tolerance here for dumb questions
> (as opposed to inexperienced beginner questions, which are totally
> OK) than there is for dumb answers.  The philosophy on a lot
> of tech lists (not just this one) that values not saying something
> that doesn't do anything to solve the problem, and especially
> not saying something that's 100% unhelpful. The only thing worse
> is giving somebody an actual wrong answer/bad information about
> their problem.
>
> TLUG is perhaps more straightforward about saying that than
> many lists are.  If I came up with something really stupid, I
> would fully expect someone to say it was.  The atmosphere may
> sometimes seem a bit harsh to newcomers, but most of this have been
> on this list for a long time (almost four years for me, and others
> have been around even longer), but it seems to work.  Maybe it's
> a bit harsher than it once was, but we've had some really severe
> signal:noise ratio problems in the past, and this has probably
> led some of us who've been around here for a while to be rather
> short-fused about things like that.  Plus, it's just the way we
> are :-)
>
> > Of course there are people who will tell everyone to "RTFM" on
everything;
> > and there are people who are willing help out others.
>
> Believe me, telling someone "RTFM" is helping them out.  A lot.
> Particularly because at the times RTFM is used, either that way or
> in some politer form, it's usually because it's pretty obvious the
> poster has not read the manual or they wouldn't be asking that
> question in the first place.  People on TLUG and throughout the
> wider Linux community place a lot of value on the idea of helping
> yourself first.  That means you read the documentation, try to make
> it work, if you have a problem or don't understand something, then
> get on your favorite list, explain the goal, the problems you are
> having achieving it, and what you have done so far to solve those
problems.
> You'll find the repsonses are both larger in number and more helpful and
> detailed.  The more information you give, the more people can help you.
>
> If a person is totally lost and doesn't even *know* what the proper
> documentation or tool for what they want to do is (which happens to
> lots of people when they are starting out, including me) they can
> post a message and say "I need to do X, but don't know how to do it/
> what to use.  Can anybody tell me where to find some tools and/or
> documentation to do this?" if someone knows what you need and where to
> find it, you can be pretty sure of getting an answer and possibly even
> a quick rundown of what it does/how it works.
>
> > I believe most people on this mail list are the ones that wants to help
>
> Everyone on this list wants to help others, not just most people.
> Sometimes telling someone not to say dumb things that are totally
> useless to the recipient (heck, the guy already knew the dsl problem
> was with Linux, he said so in his initial post) is helping them.
> Simon is one of the most helpful and knowledgeable people on this
> list, and has helped many people with many things on many occasions.
> He has helped me on a number of occasions, and if he told me that my
> answer was the stupidest thing he'd ever heard, I would go back and
> take a good look at what I'd written, because the odds are pretty good
> he would be right.
>
>
> Jonathan
>
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