On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 09:51:13AM -0500, Dale A. Raby wrote: > On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 08:35:25AM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote: > > I really don't need to be told RTFM. I am 80 yrs old. > > I forget things.
[I think people should take note: this comment clearly suggests that Paul, like many people, has had negative experiences asking relatively simple questions on mailing lists like this one, if not this very one.] > I am 56 and also forget things... that's maybe what manuals are for? ;) > I normally just start Googling and usually find an answer somewhere. > List requests work though. The problem with the RTFM answer is that TFM is (in many cases, and certainly in the mutt or emacs cases) rather long, and if you don't already know exactly what you're looking for, finding that one thing you need can take hours. Searching (your manual or google) is only as good as your ability to guess the right keywords, and if you didn't find it that means actually reading large sections of manual. When what you have is basically a 2-second question, reading the manual is a waste of time. Asking on a mailing list, where someone (or many someones) almost certainly knows the answer without looking it up, AND will reply to you usually in less than 5 minutes, while you go make yourself a nice cup of tea, is a much more productive and less frustrating way to solve the problem, and should be encouraged, not discouraged. Otherwise why are we here? For answers that take some effort, replying with RTFM is fine, if you're going to suggest where in TFM to look. If you can't be bothered to do at least that, then you should probably find some other way to spend your time--your answer isn't worth the time it took you to send it. If the answer can definitively be given by a couple of lines of text or less, then replying with RTFM is just making noise on the list that benefits ABSOLUTELY NO ONE. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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