[Locke1689]

I find this true not on the Internet more often. For example, one of my friends asked me to describe what I was working on and how it worked. I was perfectly willing to get him up to speed -- until I realized what I was stepping into. My current project was designing and implementing a hardware virtualization support layer. One of the reasons why I was so reluctant to help him was I realized exactly what kind of "background information" (as the article says) I was using in the project.

First, I would have to teach him how virtualization and virtual machine monitors work. But before that, I would have to teach him how modern operating systems work. Well, before that I would have to teach how modern hardware works. Even if we get through all that I'd still have to teach him IA32e assembler and POSIX standard C (he only knew C++). After realizing that, I told him I'd help if he took a couple more courses and later decided he still wanted to know. In this case I would have to say that I did intentionally withhold information, but only because I didn't want to give an incomplete picture.

P.S. You stole my username ;)