On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Nadeem M. Khan nadeem.m.khan@gmail.com wrote:
- Please let's not discourage a newbie asking 'silly' questions. The
best approach would be to show him the right direction politely. I'm guilty of doing this in the past on other lists.
The problem is that everyone has a different idea of 'silly' questions. Being a majorly tech friendly list (there are few active 'userland' members, i.e. people who are sensitive to the non-tech nature of doing things), I have seen many basic questions on programming/sysadmin/techie-newbie related issues being answered with gusto out here. In my experience these questions are easily answered by googling for them since pretty much everything is documented in some way or the other (official docs, mailing lists, forums). But when someone asks a basic desktop/internet/non-techie-newbie related question they're likely to be flamed. This has reduced somewhat with many giving useful replies to them as well, but every so often there will be someone who decides to take out his/her frustration on the poor newb.
<kidding> I'd say flame the techie-newbs as well ;) </kidding>
- Let's also not discriminate posters by their language. I've noticed
this many times - If a poster is not proficient in English, he is flamed. Not all of us come from an English-medium school and IMHO, one does not need to be gramatically correct to be an effective sysadmin/coder. Using SMS-style lingo is a different matter though.
+1. This is pretty much what happened on the Linux Kernel book thread IMO.