[ale] Insolence of those asking for FREE help on public lists

[Jeff Hubbs]

I feel that the "FM," in the form of HOWTOs, FAQs, and man pages, has the
overarching defect of not being arranged in a way that corresponds to how
people encounter problems.  The way I envision it, a Linux problem can be
represented by some point in N-dimensional space, yet the body of FMs lives
on a flat plane within that space, and it's left up to you to chart a course
from your point in N-space to the nearest point on that plane.  In other
words, you have to "reduce" your dimensions (in much the same way that
casting the shadow of a 3-D wireframe cube onto a wall reduces the spatial
dimensions of the figure from 3 to 2) to find the pertinent information and
then "expand" that information back to your N-space situation.  The fly in
that ointment is that, well, there are plenty of wire structures you can
make other than a cube that can make a cube's shadow - my point being that
you can easily "expand" incorrectly.  

For instance, my new system is based on an Asus K7V mobo, which has its own
audio built in (Via AC97).  Mandrake 7.1 detects it but can't make it work.
I found info to the effect that I need the ALSA drivers (that's my point on
the plane) but nothing that specifically outlines what I need to do to set
up the ALSA drivers for my mobo.  In order to do it, I have to interpret
highly generic instructions in a way specific to my situation.  

In lieu of a FAQ, I wish there were some kind of way to represent the
different "areas" of a Linux system that gave you a way to drill into each
one in different directions, kind of in layers.  For instance, for my AC97
problem I might follow a path in this help system that looked like
audio/Asus/K7V/Mandrake-7.1 and I'd get instructions for how to get the
onboard audio on an Asus K7V mobo under Mandrake 7.1 - this help system
would somehow already know that the K7V's audio was AC97 and that the ALSA
drivers were required.  This would take some kind of deep linking but I
don't think off the charts techno-wise.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Knapka [mailto:jknapka at earthlink.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 4:35 PM
> To: Fletch
> Cc: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Insolence of those asking for FREE help on public
> lists
> 
> 
> Granted that the answer to any given question is (nearly always)
> in the FM, that still presents a problem. The sheer volume of
> documentation that one must sometimes wade through in order to
> answer a simple question can itself be quite daunting, even
> for experienced users (I say this having run Linux nearly
> continuously since early 1992, kernel 0.90). A question that
> might take a guru 5 minutes of research to answer could involve
> a marathon 3-day docfest for a newbie, and you can be a near-guru
> "over here" (i.e. C/C++. Tcl, glibc, IPmasq) but a rank amateur
> "over there" (i.e. Apache, Perl, NFS). Almost always,
> the most efficient way to answer a question is to find
> someone who's answered it before. That doesn't excuse impolite
> behavior, but IMO it does somewhat excuse the actual
> act of posting such questions.
> 
> Of course, it certainly pays to search the list archives (I
> admit this is a lesson I have only recently taken to heart).
> Possibly it would be a good idea to include a link to the
> ALE archive at the end of each ALE message, if majordomo can
> do that.
> 
> Wasn't there a thread a few months ago about an "ALE FAQ"?
> I recall that someone offered to host such a page, but I
> never saw what happened after that.
> 
> -- Joe
> 
> Fletch wrote:
> > 
> > >>>>> "John" == John Mills <jmills at tga.com> writes:
> > 
> >     John> [whine about newbieQ's elided]
> > 
> >     John> Thanks for sharing that. Feel better now?
> > 
> >     John> Answering those questions is always _voluntary_, 
> or are you
> >     John> upset that folks _do_ answer so beginners can become
> >     John> experienced users. Go back to your paying customers.
> > 
> >         I don't think newbie questions per se are the problem.  I
> > don't think questions from rude newbies are the problem.  
> The problem
> > as I see it is that there seem to be an increasing amount 
> of questions
> > from newbies that would be solved by one simple thing:
> > 
> >         RTFM.
> > 
> > <purl> Teach a man to fish and he may feed himself.  Give a 
> man a fish
> >        and he'll ask you if you could please cook it for him while
> >        you're at it.
> > 
> > --
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> ale" in message body.
> 
> -- 
> *** Joseph Knapka ***
> In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
> are to be treated as variables.
> --
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> 
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