On Wednesday 21 May 2003 19:00, Paul M Foster wrote:
> You get this kind of answer from people who 1) want to be helpful, 2)
> can't answer the question directly, and 3) don't have the problem the
> requester has. Unfortunately, weird problems like this will appear and
> disappear from kernel to kernel and distro to distro. It's one of the
> things we live with in the Linux community. The upside is that if this
> was Windows and you had the problem, you'd have to wait for the next
> service pack or OS version, and _hope_ they fixed it.
My mantra is that I will immediately answer a question with which I've had
personal experience, or if the question is well asked (and a "corner case"
not well addressed by a FAQ/HOWTO somewhere) I may spend some time
researching the question before attempting an answer. I generally *never*
refer to a FAQ or HOWTO unless it is a question about an esoteric question or
one that appeals to the geek basics (ie, is it new, is it alpha, and does
anyone else truely understand it yet? ;) - anything outside of the mainstream
userbase.
This does mean sometimes I won't answer a question because:
1) I'll appear to be an arrogant prick for pointing a newbie to a truely basic
FAQ/HOWTO. If an answer would not be helpful, I simply refuse to send it.
2) It will take too long to google around to put together an appropriate
answer (a busy day job will do that to you).
3) The question was too hard - it would take me an evening or two to play
around with whatever someone is asking about, which may or may not happen
depending on what other geek projects I have running on the side.
My favorite questions are the ones where people ask about something I *don't*
know. If there is some new software suite that I *should* be aware of but
have no experience with, SLUG is a great way to take a twack upside the head
to open my eyes about something I've been sadly ignorant of.
-- - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>(This message bound by the following: http://www.nks.net/email_disclaimer.html)
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