Re: Attitude (was: keyboard failure)

You know, I've made some of those points myself at one time or another, but
I finally just got over it and decided, "it's their project, let them behave
as they see fit, and let them reap the positive or negative results of their
attitude."  However, I would like to point out what a piss-poor forum to
introduce this subject.  And in this instance, I don't find his post which
basically says "I can't fix the problem if all you tell me is you have a
'mac68k system' and a 'keyboard'", to be a very RTFM-like statement.  Seems
perfectly reasonable to me.

As I said, some of your points make sense (to me anyway), however posting
something like this can have two possible purposes: (1) to try to get people
to change their ways, (2) to troll.  Since your audience is awful small on
the mac68k list, I'd have to assume it is the latter.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Roy Hinkley" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 9:47 PM
Subject: Attitude (was: keyboard failure)


> At 9:45 PM -0500 1/25/03, Nick Holland wrote:
> >timo ochmann wrote:
> ...
> >
> >Yes.
> >It isn't working correctly.
> >
> >"a mac68k system"?
> >"the keyboard"?
> >
> >Provide system model, keyboard manufacturer and model, complete dmesg,
> >and maybe we can provide assistance.  At this point, all I can say is
> >"works fine for me", which is about as useful to you as your
> >description was to us so far...
>
> I continued to be unimpressed by the attitude of experienced OpenBSDers
> toward newbies.  Make that "...toward anyone who needs help".
>
> I'm this >< close to giving up on OpenBSD because of:
>
> 1) it's emphasis on "correctness" doesn't include usability.  IMHO, poor
> usability makes it easy to make mistakes and as such means that OpenBSD
> isn't all that correct.
>
> 2) the attitude of its wizards, from the very top all the way down, seems
> to be one of "oh boy oh boy, someone I can jump all over and insult!
> today is a great day to be me!"
>
> This is not a personal comment on Nick, this is a general comment that
> includes Nick, Theo, and most (not quite all) of those who (could) help
> others.
>
> I grew up on the Internet and have been on it since before Al Gore heard
> of it. And I know the RTFM attitude.  But never have I seen such a group
> of self-rightous dicks who go beyond the old RTFM attitude as I have with
> OpenBSD.
>
> Oh yeah, and:
>
> 3) Getting it to run on a Mac68k machine is something I haven't been able
> to do (with an external drive for swap).  I've successfully installed
> Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.  But OpenBSD?  Nope.  I've read lots of docs
> (some of them wrong) and I've got it to install, sort of.  It doesn't
> work for long, networking won't work, swap doesn't work right if at all.
> I'd ask for help, but no one is paying me to deal with rudeness and
> increasingly, I'm wondering if the payoff is worth it.
>
> I do like the songs, though.
> <http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html>
>
>
> Brian
> --
> The god of computing wants a sacrifice, and volunteers are being called
for.
>                                                 -- Simon Travaglia