Mail Archives: djgpp/2001/06/30/06:00:23.1
On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 09:58:37 +0300, "Eli Zaretskii"
<eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il> sat on a tribble, which squeaked:
>> Okay, I'll grant that. It looked suspiciously like a command, rather
>> than a suggestion, the way it was worded.
>
>``A command''? All it says is "please read them". And I though _I_
>was having problems with understanding written English.
"There are Intel reference manuals on this, please read them." comes
off sounding at best like a request to read something along with a
vague implication that I should *already* have read them. And the
terseness betrays some kind of impatience that also carries the
suggestion that "yet another newbie just asked a stupid question" or
something. I can't see that kind of attitude, or wording that suggests
that attitude, being justified except when the reference involved is
the newsgroup FAQ, and even then "Your question is answered in the
FAQ. Please read it. If your news server doesn't currently have a copy
in the group, there's one at http://rtfm.mit.edu/foo/bar.html." is far
preferable to "There's a FAQ for this newsgroup. Read it."
>> "Not sure anyone here can sum it up in just a few words, but all of
>> the gory details are in the reference manuals at http://foo, though
>> I'm not sure you'll want to slog through all of those."
>
>That's what I said.
Not quite -- the tone was different and the URL was absent. (Absent a
URL, if someone says "manual" they're liable to think "book", followed
shortly by "how expensive -- and can I find it?"...)
>This is considered common knowlege these days, like the need to look
>up the FAQ.
The FAQ alone should be the "common knowledge". Some language or
another, some programming knowledge, and the FAQ's contents are what
can reasonably be assumed of a reader of the newsgroup.
--
Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980
"There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980
"This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998
Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.
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