On Thu, 24 Jan 2013, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
Whilst I did learn a thing or two with this thread, thank you very much, I am astounded that you can seem to have no trouble reading Wikipedia articles to attack people, but you can't seem to read a man page?
Andrew, your problem is that you seem to believe that there are no facts and that anyone who disagrees with you is attacking you personally and rejecting your opinion. However in the real world there are facts and we should all try to discover them not just make things up. Wikipedia is really easy to read, that's one advantage of having lots of people read and edit it. A common difficulty with Unix man pages is that the terms which are used by the program differ from the plain English terms that some users use, this makes a search of the man page unlikely to find the desired answer. A man page which is more than 3000 lines long is difficult to read at the best of times, the rsync man page is about the length of a 9 page magazine article! Also you don't get to criticise people for having "trouble reading" after you cited a conspiracy theory site and said "I'm not going to verify it's correctness or otherwise, please don't ask me to". If you aren't going to try to verify that your references are correct (or even sane) then you have no right to criticise anyone else.
It's not the first time something so basic about a Linux tool or operation has escaped your vast experience and that really surprises me.
Linux and the software which runs on it is actually very complex. No-one can know everything about how it works. For example when I was at university I spent dozens of 8 hour days reading man pages to learn about Unix (mostly Solaris and HP-UX) and still only learned a fraction of it (I did have professors and post-grad students start asking me for advice on Unix issues though).
The other most significant oversight from you was the checkarray processing of software RAID. Just the same, interesting, I'm sure you are a very knowledgeable Linux user, but sometimes I just wonder in total amazement.
If you want to demonstrate your skill then you could try answering questions on the main LUV list. You could offer to give lectures on topics that you know well. You could write blog posts which teach people about things related to Linux and have them syndicated on Planet Linux Australia. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/