{"id":1610,"date":"2010-06-07T16:28:15","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T16:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1610"},"modified":"2010-06-07T16:28:15","modified_gmt":"2010-06-07T16:28:15","slug":"if-you-dont-know-the-answer-shut-the-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1610","title":{"rendered":"If you don&#8217;t know the answer, shut the &#8230; up!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To all the smartalecs on support forums out there: what the hell is wrong with you? If I ask someone with a map about the route from town A to B, I expect them to tell me directions, not question my sanity for wanting to drive to town B in the first place. Similarly, if someone posts a question in the form of, say, &#8220;I have device A giving error message B under operating system C, how do I solve this problem?&#8221;, the one thing they are absolutely, positively NOT interested in is lectures such as &#8220;Why would you be using device A?&#8221; or &#8220;What kind of a moron still uses operating system C?&#8221; and the like. If you don&#8217;t know the answer, can&#8217;t you just shut up and not pollute Google searches with your asinine remarks?<\/p>\n<p>For instance, today I was trying to use a floppy disk. (Yes, people still need floppy disks sometimes. Not because they live in the stone age, but because they may be using a floppy to update a motherboard BIOS, for instance.) I ran into a problem. I searched Google, and found a support forum where a similar problem was discussed. There were a few helpful answers. But then, look at this little exchange:<\/p>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&gt;&gt;&gt; The other thing is - why do you need it?<\/pre>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&lt;&lt;&lt; I need the floppy to run the Western Digital program to test\r\n&lt;&lt;&lt; the drive [...]<\/pre>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&gt;&gt;&gt; If you're getting lots of bad sectors, then the drive has\r\n&gt;&gt;&gt; problems and you should be getting it replaced under warranty\r\n&gt;&gt;&gt; warranty, not attempting to 'fix' it. [...]<\/pre>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&lt;&lt;&lt; yes, but the thing with western digital is before you can send\r\n&lt;&lt;&lt; the drive back you need an error code [...]<\/pre>\n<pre style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&gt;&gt;&gt; But what error code could possibly be worse than a bad sector?\r\n&gt;&gt;&gt; Tell them the \"error code\" is\u00a0 xxxxxxxxxxxx bad sectors!<\/pre>\n<p>How bloody helpful. This really told the guy how to fix the floppy disk problem that he was seeking help for.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1610' send='false' layout='button_count' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To all the smartalecs on support forums out there: what the hell is wrong with you? If I ask someone with a map about the route from town A to B, I expect them to tell me directions, not question my sanity for wanting to drive to town B in the first place. Similarly, if <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=1610' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-internet","category-11-id","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1610"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1612,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions\/1612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}