On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 09:27:57PM +0100, Felix von Leitner wrote:
> Thus spake Dave Sill ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> > I'm not a big fan of newbie smackdowns, though a repeat offendor might
> > warrant one. I think newbies generally respond better to reward than
> > punishment. E.g., instead of:
>
> This is a question that I have asked numerous times and I never got a
> good response for it:
>
> Why would you want to help rude newbies?
You wouldn't. But, unfortunately, someone ends up doing so, leading to a
continuous wrong-doing trend.
>
> Don't get me wrong: helping newbies is essential for the survival of the
> knowledge. But if I have the choice, I will not help people who are so
> dumb that they will probably get killed the next day because they
> thought pissing on overland power lines is a bright idea.
>
Ease down, Felix. Don't look at it as a matter of dumbness. It's more of an
inadequacy issue. Keep reading;
> And that includes people who
>
> a. are too dumb to state their question properly
> (this includes bad grammar, bad spelling, bad quoting and obnoxious
> signatures)
Please... The internet wasn't built for english speakers, nor by english
speakers. But, as we all know, english (or english-ish approaches) is a
common language for all of us. My own english is far from perfect, and I
very often find myself twisting my brain trying to figure out what a
supplier or business partner is trying to tell me in a meeting.
As long as we're not talking about l33t dud3z, nor native speakers, that
shouldn't be a problem. (at least not a major one)
> b. are too dumb to state their question in the proper forum
That's not dumbness. That's rudeness or inadequacy. By inadequate, I'm
talking about those guys who've never seen a unix shell until two days ago,
have no clue whatsoever of what C is, expect the docs to _talk_ them step
by step into procedures, or, the most common case, expect someone to give
them an out-of-the-box solution for free.
What frightens me is that more and more of these seem to be in charge of
someone's mail, webspace, databases, whatever. They sould never, ever, be
allowed to touch a damn root prompt, unless the machine is nowhere near a
network. THAT's how people should learn. Unfortunately, a large group of
new "sysadmins" are teaching themselves through experience in production
environments and, what's worse, they're using either pre-built packages, or
scripts someone else gave them (either because they were polite, or because
they whined for a week and someone got tired and gave them a solution).
This usually leads to a situation where things do work, but the "ladmin"
has no clue on "why", "how", and "what to do if it fails".
Also, more and more of these ladmins seem to be unaware of the fact that
Linux isn't the only non-Windows OS. They don't know what Unix is. They
have no idea of how to configure things without the nifty GTK or curses
interface; and ultimately, editing source or slightly changing a script is
a nightmarish idea.
But what truly pisses me off is the fact that they expect a qmail (example)
list to solve their problems with bash scripting, kernel options, DNS. And
they don't seem to realize this is NOT the proper place to do so, and
refuse to read the docs where answers to most issues are clear. But then
again, if they have no Unix backgound or knowledge at all, how will a simple
answer like "Change the uid of that directory to that of the user running
the daemon" help?
> c. are not friendly (i.e. demand answer instead of being polite)
Oh, well... Why doesn't everyone just ignore those?
> d. whine when someone points their mistakes out to them
Hey, Felix... They're the Unix Gurus in there. They convinced everyone else
NT was no good, and should be replaced. How dare WE tell them they're
wrong?
>
> If he doesn't want to change his ways, then he is welcome to examine the
> inside of my spacious killfile. Noone is obligated to help idiots. In
> particular, I am not.
Noone is. But the base fact is: They should never come this far without
basic IT and Unix skills.
RC
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