jbb @
flare .
Cs .
umb .
edu writes:
> This space should be devoted to enlightenment, not
>encouraging fear of the unknown. The problem is a technical one,
>not attitudinal. Technical answers are what I welcome, not the
>waving of dead chickens.
Excuse me?
I have a technical question: "I would like to jump off this building,
will my knees be driven through the top of my head when I
land, or not?"
This can be answered simply in terms of a yes/no answer, but in real
life, it's sometimes worth discussing the *question* rather than just replying
with a "technical answer" in a vacuum. In the example above, someone might
raise the issue of the existance of stairs or elevators in the context of
my question abovE, and save me a lot of trouble and pain.
I'm sorry if my response wasn't valuable. Certainly, even if my
response was "waving dead chickens" it took more thought and effort to
generate than the message I am replying to here. Perhaps if John Brown
(jbb) has strong feelings about what kind of responses and discussion
is "welcome" in this mailing list, we should re-open the question of
whether commercial product blurbs should be blocked, as I originally
suggested, and should discuss what constitutes an appropriate or
contributory mail message. Certainly a mail message that says, in
effect, "I don't like your answer and it is unwelcome" isn't a huge
contribution, either.
Sometimes just giving a flat answer to a question serves to
obscure the problem. The only "correct" answer I know of to "which
ports are 'safe'" is "none." That's a useless answer, so let's try to
deal with the roots of the problem. At the very least, it is vendor
dependent, and even (arguably) machine dependent.
mjr.
|
|
