ASNN

Yeah... um.. you're a jerk.

I'm going to rise to Joel's, and indirectly Peter's, defense.

Joel gets bugged far too often by stupid questions from people who really should know better. Rather than coddle this slow drain on his time and energy by spoonfeeding responses, he googles a quick link to demonstrate how easy it is to find the answer. Check out the timestamps above: Peter had his link in 41 seconds, including the time it took him to read Adam's orig message and think about it.

Adam's question was NOT stupid despite the speedy url, nor does Adam make a habit of asking any but the hardest questions. (Peter's link provided a far more detailed explanation than is feasible through IM.) It's just that the stupid questions of Other People have trained a response algorithm which gets applied to us all, myself included. Or maybe I ask stupid questions.

Ron: whatevah. A few years ago (2? 3?) I asked a very similar question via email at work, and I received a similar response from pcg. I had never heard of the "useless use of cat" award, but I ended up reading about it. As a result, I learned a bit more about how the bash interpreter works, and more specifically, about xargs, which I have found quite handy ever since.

So yeah, pointing someone in the correct direction isn't being a jerk -- it's giving them an opportunity to learn more. Granted, sometimes the way people do pointing can come of as being a little "please don't waste my time", but seriously -- this is 2003. We should be used to IM and one-line email responses by now. Deal with it.

I 'aksed' Peter if that was correct simply because he said something to the extent of 'pipe that to vaddusers'. Knowing how pipes work, I figured 'Hmm, I could probably just put the file in there with a < dealie, but I'll ask (because I always do. I'll ask rather than assume.) Googling isn't always the quickest response (Depending on the topic). However, google came to my assistance today, despite it's very disturbing way of bringing me new information.

I'd like to propose a "Useless Use of My Limited Time On This Earth" award, to be awarded collectively to everyone who ever wrote a unix shell or shell command, that eventually resulted in people having to worry about all this kind of crap. I'm gonna go learn me some scsh ( http://www.scsh.net/ ) and forget all about standard shell syntax.

Unrelatedly but amusingly, the scsh manual contains the following immortal "Acknowledgements" section:

-------------------------------------------

"Acknowledgements

Who should I thank? My so-called `colleagues,' who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on *my* work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit `fooling around with computers,' go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?

My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.

If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.

Oh, yes, the *acknowledgements*. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.

Olin Shivers
Cambridge
September 4, 1994 "