Another funny....

[Mark]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Pastor JW
<pastor_jw at the-inner-circle.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday, November 17, 2010 11:47:57 pm Basil Chupin wrote:
>>
>> Which is why I do NOT propagate the urban legend that "google is your
>> friend".
>>
>> It makes a lot more sense to ask for help about a problem, and get it,
>> from either this forum or launchpad or the Ubuntu documentation.
>
> Exactly correct!  I'd much prefer to hear and receive help from someone I
> "know and trust" rather than rely on a proved less than stellar 60,000 set of
> answers from Google.
>

I'm torn on this one - see below.

> I tend to also lose respect for those who jump in and refer a person to
> google.  Not only is it not at all helpful to the new user but just makes him
> feel lost and alone.
>

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of us who have been
doing this for a long time, those whom others (possibly you, Pastor)
"know and trust" got to be this way from using our own resources
before pestering the know-it-alls that be.  This may be partly
because, rightly or not, the larger set of experts who know, love and
use Linux instead of that other rip-off X-windows former licensee that
was created by one of the best salesmen of underpowered crap software
in history tend to have gotten here by doing our own research first if
not only.

I think we have two responses to requests for help, especially the
newest, most helpless ones who ask basic questions whose answers
generally *can* be found in TFM:

1) Be it ever so not humble, TFM is the first, foremost and best place
to start with questions about anything on a UNIX/Linux system.  That's
whay TFM is there in the first place.  It's not always the
best-written reference, nor is it necessarily easy to understand, but
in strictly technical terms, it tells you what each and every entry in
it does and means - from that entry's point of view.  This is what
makes it both enlightening and frustrating.

(E.g., I am currently doing some research on extended file attributes
in Solaris, and the man page for fsattr contains many explanations of
what each relaed function call does and how it behaves.  Most of them
use the same first two parameters in exactly the same way, but instead
of making an ote of this up front and then explaining what each one
does, every GD one of them starts off with exactly the same GD two or
three sentences before the relevant information, which makes my eyes
water and my brain want to explode.  We are, after all, human beings
who can intuitively understand certain commonalities between otherwise
unrelated entities, and in cases like this where the entities are
related, we don't <censored> *need* to be told for *every* *single*
*one* what the same parameters mean and how they are related when they
are all identical.)

2) While GIYF came from STFW which came from RTFM, they are not the
same thing.  For general questions where one does not even have a clue
where to start, Google can very much be your friend, more so than an
old crust who is likely to take your Google-ready request and point
you at Google to find it.  At least we all (right?) know that TFM has
something relevant in it, even if we don't know what it is.  OTOH, a
well-constructed Google query can often get you exactly the right
answer, sometimes even from TFM because, after all, TFM is also on the
the web, in many, many places.

What usually gets me, especially in my own quests for "the answer" is
that I often find it if I just look hard enough in the right and wrong
places, and quite frequently, whittling the question down with enough
specifics leads me to my own answer without help.  Granted I have more
experience with this sort of thing that some others, but if I can do
it by trial and error, why can't you?  And if I narrow down the
description of the problem enough by specifiying enough information to
make it crystal clear, more often than not I did that alogn with
checking each aspect of it out along the way until I find the answer
myself or I find that i can't find the answer myself and have to ask.
A perfect example of this was my question regarding browser vs. folder
views in Nautilus - we had quite a go around on that one until someone
pointed out an article (on TFW) that described exactly what happened
(i.e., the default behavior had been changed but there were options to
control which way to go *now*).

In short, given how long this has grown, I prefer not to have to
engage in this detailed an explanation of anything, particularly not
simple (to me) questions that can easily be answered if the asker just
takes a few minutes to RTFM, STFW, use Google and *then* come to me
and say, okay, I did all this and didn't find it - what do you know?
Then I can give the correct brilliant answer, be a hero, and gain fame
(but unfortunately not a fortune) while informing this poor sot what
s/he didn't know, or not.

As I said up front, I'm torn on this one, but I'll go with RTFM any
time it seems appropriate.  More often than not, it is, still.