Re: Whois command and Japanese

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Craig" == C Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    >> But I think your best bet would be to see if there's a whois in
    >> the JE distribution.

    Craig> I don't think it's in there.  I even posted to the

too bad.

    Craig> fj.os.linux group in Japanese and didn't receive a
    Craig> response.  Actually, I'm finding that I'm getting less and
    Craig> less responses from USENET in general.  I remember when I
    Craig> used to get 20 e-mail responses from a FAQ about e-macs
    Craig> configuration.  Perhaps the frontier is turning into a
    Craig> city?

That's one way to put it.  I know that I'm getting a lot less patient
with the usual run of newbie on most of my newsgroups.  I just keep my
finger on the "d" key.  The thing that ticks me off is that most of
the technical newsgroups have *really* good FAQs, and the newbies
don't read them; they go directly to the newsgroups.  Bad Netscape!
Bad, Bad Netscape!  AOL of course is worse, since they trained a lot
of people in bad habits before their browser became available.  (The
best newgroup is comp.os.msdos.djgpp, because they have a regular FAQ
police-=-the guy who compiles the FAQ answers questions with "As you
guessed, this is a FAQ.  See section ____ of the FAQ, available from
http://www.delorie.com/, as well as in all the usual SimTel mirrors.")

Of course, this is natural.  I don't blame people for asking without
searching when they don't even know how to search or where to find the 
FAQs (or in many cases what a FAQ is).  I do however expect that in
return they don't blame me when I ignore them.  In fact, I now
generally ignore all questions on mass distribution lists and
newsgroups because I figure I won't answer them first.  Only on small
mailing lists like TLUG do I bother to answer questions.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com
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