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

[Joe Knapka]

I agree with most of what you say below. The technical
problems with providing an easily-usable interface to that much
data are truly daunting, well into the "Expert system" zone,
and most likely poking a good way into "Natural language
understanding." It may not be "off the charts", but it's
a LOT of work, and the biggest problem is that until you
bootstrap enough intelligence to handle the cross-referencing
tasks *in an intelligent way*, some human being actually has
to do the work.

I have this problem with all existing WWW search engines: they
don't really understand what I'm looking for. Me and a guy on
another list were contemplating building some software that
would provide an NLP plugin for search and indexing engines
to do natural-language parsing and semantic representation,
in an effort to get better data back from web searches. I think
something like this would be necessary in order to automate the
construction of a truly useful documentation knowledge base. And
until we have that, human beings are the best question-answerers.

-- Joe


Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> 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.
> > >
> > > --
> > > To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe
> > ale" in message body.
> >
> > --
> > *** Joseph Knapka ***
> > In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
> > are to be treated as variables.
> > --
> > To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale"
> > in message body.
> >
> --
> To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe 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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