OSNews

Having myself been a newb to many things, I think there is enough blame on both sides. Yes, experienced users can get annoyed at newbie questions. Yes, newbies can even be a source of amusement and the target of sarcasm. At the same time, its all too common to see new users acting like pricks and being generally annoying. New users tend to get frustrated when things don't work, and take out their frustration by being rude and disrespectful. They often have an attitude that they are owed help, and get angry if they are not tended to immediately. They'll often take shots at whatever thing they're trying to learn, without really having an understanding of what they're talking about. You'll see this a lot with people who know X and are trying to learn Y, both of which are subsets of Z*. They think they have a general knowledge of Z, when they really just have knowledge of X. They try Y, find that their knowledge isn't working, and instead of realizing that its just a matter of Y not working like X, they blame Y for being a bad example of a Z.

*) If this is confusing, replace X with "Windows" and Y with "Linux" and Z with "operating systems", or X with "Java" and Y with "Lisp" and Z with "programming", and you'll get the idea!