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My opinion



Hello there.


Not many of you know me. Actually, except Ira and Gilad Ben-Yossef none of
you heard my name before. I would like to express my feelings about the kind
of behaviour Marc uses when he encounter newbie questions in the mailing-list.

First of all, I tend to agree with most of you. I think it's really rude and
impolite to bother 150 people with  "reference questions" that are answered
and reachable everywhere, weather it's a FAQ, HOWTO, Program documentation
or manuals. 
I am a pre-newbie. Picasso will be installed and used under my system as
soon as 1.7G hard-disk I ordered about a week ago, arrives by delivery. But
I'm for once, not wasting any time. In the past month I've been reading
_hundreds_  (I'm not exaggerating) of FAQ's, relevent HOWTO's, and other
information pages, I even read the 2600 hackers guide to understand more
about UNIX security systems, also got myself the necessary basic programs
(Like partition applications, dual-boot loaders and more). And eventhough
I'm not a native English speaker, I managed to understand everything quite
well, I believe.
I got myself many UNIX account via Telnet, just to practice working with it,
I visited friends who run Linux, ruined their computers and bugged them with
questions. ;-)

But, there is another aspect to all of this:

Someone who's a newbie now, could become an experienced Linux guru a year
from now. If you use a patronizing attitude on people like me, the only
thing you'd achive is making me disconnect from this list. Instead of
helping me "grow" into Linux-il, and be a useful member of it in a year or
so. I think newbies could be a very smart long-time investment.

Therefore, I believe something in this attitude should be changed:
When someone new here asks a rather silly questions, I suggest doing one of
the following:

1. Simply answering his message to his e-mail only (No need to bug 150 for
information that's obvious for them), and asking him to try learning stuff
by himself, using the Doc's next time.

2. Sending him a message that goes like this: "Dear Linux user! We are proud
to have you as a part of our mailing list. Now, this list is mostly
containing Linux professionals, whice do not like be bugged with questions
that are answered in hundreds of documents spread all over the Internet. And
except, the purpose of this organization is mostly to solve problems
concering Hebrew with Linux. If you need help, or you have difficulties
running certain programs, the newsgroups alt.os.linux.* are always at your
service. Please refer to Linux-il's FAQ (www.linux.org.il) before further
usage of this list. Thank you."

The form is a bit silly, and my English isn't good enough to be used for
formal posts, but I think you get my point by now.

Thanks alot for listening (Reading, actually).


 



    Gilad Egozi,
    egozi@netvision.net.il