On Friday, 8 October 2004 18.17, Danny Sauer wrote:
Powell, wrote regarding '[SLE] Juvenile antics on the list' on Thu, Oct 07 at 17:35:
I have included Patrick's reply below merely as an example. Telling people to RTFM or search on Google is not terribly helpful. For either of these methods to be useful, you have to know what it is you're looking for in the first place. This kind of treatment only serves to deter people from asking questions.
[...]
I'm all for the "Teach a man to fish" philosophy, but sometimes, you just need a quick fix for something so you can move on and get past it. Don't forget, today's 'noob' is tomorrow's guru.
That "guru of tomorrow" will never attain guru status if he never learns to 1) brush off responses that appear hasty and 2) search for himself before asking for the quick fix. When people ask questions to which the answers could be found in the first couple entries google returns, or by simply reading the man page, then it seems totally appropriate to direct them to google or the man page.
One of my teachers once asked us what we thought the most important thing we had learned (or would learn) at university was. The answer (very correct) wasn't some obscure piece of information, or even some very useful piece of information, it was *how to search* for information. If you don't know how to look for information, google can be your worst nightmare If you can't tell a good answer from a bad one (and there are some very bad ones out there), google can be your worst enemy
--Danny, who wishes there was a unisex replacement for he/she that wasn't as cumbersome as "one"...
it? What's wrong with "one"? It's not as bad as Swedish, our equivalent to "one" actually is "man", so we get crap even if we use the supposedly gender neutral alternative :)