Why questions don't get answered, or "No, I've already RTFM, tell me the answer!"

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2005-12-30 at 06:37 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 12:44 -0600, Birt, Jeffrey wrote:
> 
> > i.e.: "...after all I have gone through a severe amount of pain and
> > mastered *nix; therefore I am far superior to the Windoze drones."
> 
> That reminds me of something that occured to me a while ago:  There
> seems to be an attitude of:  "I suffered long and hard to figure out how
> to use it, you should have to as well."
> 
> I don't mind giving people a fair bit of help, but I do get annoyed that
> if you tell someone to modify something in the "security level" control
> panel (for instance), that they want you to explictly tell them where to
> find it in the menu, as well.  How hard is it to look through your menus
> and see what options you have?
> 

Exactly!  They seem to have no concept of learning but want to be
guided.  That is part of the current attitude in many areas of "it's not
my fault! he made me do it!" that we see a lot of in all areas of life.

> Though, to be fair, that's far more of a Windows than Linux issue.
> 

I see that as an attitude fostered by Windows, not just a Windows issue.
In Windows you are discouraged from using a command line and are led to
believe that the gui will do it all for you.  Thus the code bloat and
the user having no clue that there actually is a command line that can
be useful and that there often is the capability to do more than the gui
makes available.

A friend of mine recently told me that the biggest problem with Linux
getting on the home desktop is it expects the user to think instead of
just blindly clicking on things in the gui.  My response was that is a
reflection of our society and attitudes in general where people do not
like to be responsible for themselves.  They would rather someone else
was responsible (and at fault when they fail).

> -- 
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>