Simple question responses on comp.unix.questions.

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

Mr. Moore,

  I must once again disagree with you, and in fact dispute your facts,
on several points.

  When you enter a new "society", you are expected to abide by the
rules of that society.  Usenet is such a society, and each newsgroup
is a smaller society within it.  Your entrance into
comp.unix.questions violated rules of Usenet society and
comp.unix.questions society; the fact that you do not realize that is
part of the problem.  These violations are probably at least part of
the reason why some people reacted to you with hostility.

  Your first message in c.s.u asked:

>I know that you can use "which" and "whereis" to find the locations
>of commands, but is there a command to allow you to find files.
>
>For example I want to find out where file XXXYYYZZZ.yahoo is located.
>Is there a command like "find XXXYYYZZZ.yahoo"?

This is one of the official "commonly asked questions" in c.s.u.  As
such, it is answered in the "commonly asked questions" posting made
regularly to this newsgroup.  Therefore, violation number one is that
you did not read that posting, which all c.s.u readers are "expected"
to read before asking questions.

  Now you say (or you might say), "How am I supposed to know I was
supposed to read that posting?"  A Usenet-wide rule is that you are
generally supposed to read any newsgroup for a couple of weeks before
you start posting to it.  This is mentioned in the introductory
postings made to news.announce.newusers, which you are *also* supposed
to have read before using Usenet.

  I should add that many people ask the 'find' question in c.s.u.
Most of them are told, "See the man page for find, here's an example
of how to use it," and that's the end of it, since it's easier to just
tell them the answer than to complain about their failure to read the
introductory documents they should have read.  In fact, I saw several
responses of this sort to your question.  By itself, your question
about find was harmless.  With the postings you made after that one,
it was just one more point against you in the eyes of many people in
this newsgroup.

  Your first message ended:

>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Ken @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
>@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

This, too, is a direct contradiction of the rules documented in
news.announce.newusers.  That is what people were complaining about.

  Someone responding to a posting of yours said:

>In article <20486 at unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo at unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L
>Moore) writes:
>>
>>==>A symbolic link is a POINTER to a file,
>>==> a hard link is the file system's GOTO.
>>
>>What does this mean? I don't get it.
>RTFM.  Try reading _something_ relating to UNIX before posting.  Also, do you
>have any idea how much bandwidth your signature uses?

I agree with you that this is probably excessively rude.  However, if
you are truly a PhD student in EE, then surely you have done SOME C
programming, in which case you probably know what pointers and goto's
are.  The assumption being made here, I think, is that with a little
research into what symbolic links and hard links are ("man -k link",
followed by reading the man page for link(2), symlink(2), and ln(1),
perhaps), you would understand what was being said.  Certainly, the
question, "What does this mean?  I don't get it," leaves a lot to be
desired.  What *is* it that you don't get?

  So, if we were keeping score, there would now be 4 points against
you (not reading commonly asked questions, not reading
news.announce.newusers, bad signature, and asking a vague question
about something whose answer you could have found out yourself), and
one points against the "rude people in this newsgroup", namely the
rudeness of whoever posted this.

  Next, you said in response to this message:

>What does RTFM mean?

That's in the news.announce.newusers postings too.  Now it's 5 to 1.

  Then, in a separate message, you said:

>    I forgot to ask. What do you mean by bandwidth and how does that
>relate to my signature?

As I've already pointed out, that's in the newusers postings, so I
won't count it against you again.  As an aside, if you're an EE PhD
student, I don't understand how you can't understand the word
"bandwidth", especially since it is so widely used in network analysis
both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

  Next posting to you:

>He means that the 240 or so characters in your "signature" (the one with all
>the @ characters) serve no useful function and use up network communication
>capacity that could be better used for transmitting potentially useful
>information.  Also, many sites have to PAY to receive or transmit that
>useless garbage.  Please show consideration and omit such decorations.

  I think this is a fairly succinct description of the problem.  It is
not rude, IMHO.

  In response, you say:

>I can't believe that four lines causes any significant problems.  Does
>anyone know how much is paid to recieve my .sig? .000000001 cents?

  Why can't you believe it?  Why do you find it necessary to dispute,
without any evidence, the claim of someone who has obviously spent
more time on the net, and who therefore probably has more experience
on the net, than you do?  This is, I suspect, what ticked off a lot of
people (including myself, and at least one other person with whom I
exchanged E-mail correspondence).  Six to one, now.

>Sounds like a mountain out of a mole hill to me.

  It doesn't matter, really, what it sounds like to you.  If you'd
done the necessary "homework" before starting to post to the net,
you'd understand why it's a problem.

>Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily
>identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well.

  Once again, irrelevant.

>I still don't know how .sig relates to bandwidth.

  Do you have any concept of what bandwidth *is*?  If not, did you try
to look it up?  Just curious....

  (Note that thus far I have been generous in not counting against you
mistakes you made twice; unfortunately, this isn't how people's minds
works.  As people see the same mistakes made over and over, they will
count them against you over and over when building an impression of
you, even if it's all based on one mistake.  That's life.)

  Your next mistake:

>Nope. You just aren't allowed to rm. So then you unalias rm and
>really remove the file. Then source .tshrc and start over. Or use
>"rm" to defeat the aliasing.

Shows an obvious lack of understanding of how the shell works, as I
pointed out in a future posting.  "\rm" or "/bin/rm" are both a lot
easier than unalias'ing, rm'ing and sourcing the .tshrc file.  This is
now seven to one -- answering a question which you do not really have
the knowledge necessary to answer.

  Then, you say:

>I am assuming that you use a mask of 700 like I do so that people
>can't overwrite your files.

Two mistakes.  Furst of all, the "mask" is a mask of permissions which
get "masked", i.e. removed from files that are created.  Therefore,
the correct "mask" is 077, not 700.  You *cannot* use "mask" to refer
both to the umask and its complement; it is either one or the other,
and the convention is that it is the same as "umask", *not* it's
complement.  Hell, even the man page for the umask function uses
"umask" and "mask" interchangeably.  Now it's eight to one.

  The second mistake is the assumption that everybody use a 077 umask.
That's completely bogus, and solutions you post to c.s.u should not
rely on baseless assumptions like that, as someone pointed out.  Nine
to one.

  The next posting I think is relevant is:

>The bandwidth he is referring to is the transmission (across lines,
>usually rented through the phone company for various purposes, one of
>them news) of your message through those rented lines, across different
>nets to other machines across the country.  The bandwidth is a specific
>allocation of this line to your message.  Your signature on the end of
>your message takes up additional room on the bandwidth signal, thereby
>keeping other messages from going through as quickly (thereby costing more
>to other machines.)

I don't think this correction is overly rude either.

  And here's another correction:

>  Noone meant your .sig in itself.  A .sig is useful.  However, using 3 lines
>of said .sig to say that your name is Ken is slightly wasteful.  Try piping
>your .sig through tr -d '@', or sed -e '2,4d'; it'll be much more acceptable.
>Also, you'd be surprised how much 240 bytes cost, passing through thousands of
>systems...

This one isn't that rude either.  I have yet to see the overwhelming
rudeness you complained about in your last message; granted, I haven't
seen your E-mail.

  Your next mistake is to give a WRONG explanation about umask vs.
mask, including mentioning logical AND where bitwise AND is the
correct term, confusing mask and umask (again), and being quite
patronizing in general.  Ten to one.

  In yet ANOTHER message about bandwidth (despite at least four
requests to shorten your .signature, only one of them rude, you still
leave it long and continue to object to requests to shorten it.  This
doesn't jive with your claim that you shortened it when "reasonable"
requests to do so were made.  I've seen at least two, possibly three,
reasonable requests before this posting of yours):

>Could you clarify this point? I think that I have heard the term
>bandwidth before and this seems to be a misuse of the word.
>
>Or is this another one of those terms that is bantied about by the
>partially informed in hopes of impressing the totally naive?

  "Bandwidth" is, as used here, the traffic level that a network or
similar system can handle.  A "waste of network bandwidth," on the
net, means something that doesn't need to be posted, but which is
anyway.  Your quip about the "partially informed" using the term to
impress the "totally naive" is a veiled insult if I've ever seen one.
Eleven to one.

  Here's ANOTHER message about your .signature.  This one isn't rude
either:

>Bandwidth means nothing more complicated than "how much of the net's
>time and money is spent sending the stuff".  For instance, using your
>signature in an email message isn't so bad, because then only a few
>interim sites have to handle the useless 240 bytes (although they won't
>be too thrilled about the idea if you send a lot of mail).  But when
>you post a news article with a wasteful signature, *every* site on the
>net has to pay for receiving those 240 bytes, plus sending them to
>every site they feed news to.  For instance, the site that feeds me
>news does the same for seven or eight other sites.  Considering that
>you seem to be posting perhaps twice a day in this group at the moment,
>that's 4K or more of useless '@' characters which that one site has had
>to send for you on a daily basis recently.  Now, multiply that by the
>thousands of sites which handle news, including a lot of long distance
>connections, and I hope you can see why the bandwidth taken up by the
>non-informational part of your signature is bad netiquette.

  The next message about your .signature, to which you took particular
offense, is certainly meant to be offensive.  You were perfectly
within your rights to take offense at it.  However, at the same time,
I think that the poster was perfectly within his rights to be quite
peeved at all the traffic you had wasted posting about something about
which several different people told you you were wrong.  However,
since he was quite abrasive, I'll give you the point.  Eleven to two.

  Then, in a posting by me, I flamed at about most of the stuff I'm
mentioning here, but not in as much detail.  It was a flame, *and* I
got my facts mixed up, so once again I'll give you the point, even
though I think that my protests in general were well-founded.  Eleven
to three.

  Oh, and twelve to three is the "My mother likes me." in the
References: field of your posting.  Header fields in Usenet messages
are not meant to be made into jokes.  The References: field helps
people to follow discussions.  Putting garbage in it is generally
considered obnoxious and juvenile.

  Now, I haven't seen any of the E-mail you have received from people
in c.s.u, although I will take your word for it if you say that some
of it was quite offensive.  I merely wish to point out that, in
several ways, you brought it upon yourself.

  It's much easier on the net to get bad impressions of people than it
is to get good impressions.  My first impression of you was bad,
because you broke so many of the rules that are meant to make it
easier for new users to make the transition onto the net (and to make
their transition easier on the veterans), and because you posted
several messages that just *weren't* good Unix know-how, which is a
pretty bad thing to do when posting an answer to a newsgroup like
c.s.u.  You made that impression worse when you started posting
criticisms to corrections about your .signature or about "RTFM" or
about bandwidth, instead of trying to find the answers for yourself.
I don't know if my impression of you is what you're really like, I'm
just telling you the impression you made.

  Summary: The blame for any offensive messages you received is not
exclusively upon the people who sent the messages.  You did *not* make
a good first Usenet impression, and you should think about that before
you start posting again....

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
MIT Project Athena				11 Ashford Terrace
jik at Athena.MIT.EDU				Allston, MA  02134
Office: 617-253-8495			      Home: 617-782-0710