On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 11:08 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote: > On 03/12/2012 09:57 AM, stan wrote: > > As the underlying system becomes more and more complex, and my use > > case further and further out of the mainstream, I find myself able to > > give less and less help. That said, I'll add the following to your > > excellent point above. > > I have a little list. > They will never be missed! > > And I'll add two of my own. First, people who think there's One True > Way to do everything and assume that everybody knows and loves their > favorite tools. Not everybody knows (or wants to know) vi, so if you're > going to tell a beginner to use it, include complete instructions, > including how to save and exit. Not everybody (except on Ubuntu) uses > sudo for root access. Some of us prefer su, and don't particularly like > the assumption that everybody in the world uses sudo; just tell us to do > something *as root* and let us decide what tool to use. > > Second, people who expect you to know their hardware, their update > status, what DE they're using and so on and never give out such > elementary info without being asked, often several times. Included in > this, btw, are people who report that a program failed with an error > message that they didn't bother to write down, so that nobody has the > slightest idea what actually happened. I agree with some of this, but the second point that people expect you to know their hardware etc. just likely don't realize how much information you need to help them. I worked in support of complex systems for about four decades, and everyone I helped just did not seem to realize that the hardware, software, programming language etc. is all a system, and to understand a systemic problem you need the information about the system, not just the problem or error message. And by the way, the people I was helping were all engineers of one stripe or another. If engineers cannot realize this, how can a normal consumer who is say a financial person be expected to know it, or act in an anticipated way? Regards, Les H -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
