On Friday 20 Feb 2009, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 04:40:13PM +0530, Suhit Kelkar wrote: [snip]
re the thread discussion about silly questions: lots of people, esp. from our cultural/educational atmosphere *cannot* absorb knowledge except through a conversation. they simply cannot parse the written
Then perhaps they need to find alternate fora for learning? Email is definitely text based, as is IRC.
I have to agree with Suhit here to some extent: it takes quite some experience to be able to sift through all the links that a search engine gives you to find out the one relevant to /your/ specific problem, and many people just give up. Whereas if you ask on a mailing list then people can interact with you to figure out the precise problem, and offer you a precise solution.
Note, not advocating that everyone throw in every stupid question they can think of here. OTOH, I do agree that for some people a web search isn't really an alternative (their search skills not being up to the mark), and at the very least one can to a point search and throw the result URL back to the OP. I'd do some mild ribbing too, but then a combination of mild ridicule and a hint on how to find the real solution is more likely to make the searcher a good searcher than ridicule by itself :)
Regards,
-- Raju