has everyone been eating their happy pills?

Andrew G. Hammond drew-vnkfHpbZfesgsBAKwltoeQ at public.gmane.org
Sun Feb 29 19:47:42 UTC 2004


Lloyd Budd wrote:

>
> I know about "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way?"
> <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>


Anyone else think that ESR comes across as arrogant in that FAQ? 
Especially the older versions.

> but where is the "How to Answer Questions..."


No kidding. Always makes me want to smack the smug jerks who just say 
RTFM without providing a pointer to relevant documentation. If you can't 
say something useful don't waste other people's time. You know, the ones 
who googled into the thread archive in search of an answer to the same 
question? The ones who are trying to RTFM? Especially makes me want to 
smack them when I just spent a good chunk of my time helping them solve 
their problem, and they can't be bothered to help out some newbie.

I think that's the thing that really bothers me about ESR's FAQ. It 
propounds this very polarized view of the world: godly hackers and lowly 
suplicant lusers. I don't hardly know squat about Java stuff, so when 
I've got a tough Java problem, I call one of my buddies who does. He 
isn't much for networking, so when he needs a firewall script written, 
he calls me.

> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns


Neolithic. Almost as dumb as munging reply-to.

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