<blockquote>
  <p>Are we going to pander to people who are asking general questions and
  are not knowledgeable about technology
  or the industry?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>One thing to remember about these types of questions is some cases simple questions are easier to find in Google search results.  If we want to grow the community we need as much Google juice as we can getting new users onto the serverfault site.</p>

<p>If you remember back from the stackoverflow podcasts this was discussed during the episode that spawned the question <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo">How do I move the turtle in LOGO</a>?  The vast majority of develoeprs could figure out how to move the turtle, and the language is considered more of a toy then professional language, but it is also a pretty popular question.</p>

<p>In another podcast Joel encouraged (<a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/23456/questions-to-help-build-up-the-sf-repo/23459#23459">ref</a>) users to add lots of basic programming questions because they may bring in more users.</p>

<p>Having basic questions is not a bad thing in my opinion.  At least as long as they are related to field of system/network administration.</p>

<p><a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36906/no-question-too-newbie-are-you-sure">http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36906/no-question-too-newbie-are-you-sure</a></p>