Uwe Thiem wrote:
While I agree with you in general, I still think that most noise on most
mailing lists is due to bad answers, not questions. Answers tend to get
triggered by keywords without the answering folks reading the whole question.
So I put up with the occasional bad question. ;-)
I've noticed in myself that I'll avoid answering questions that have
been framed poorly because I know that it'll require four or five
exchanges if we're lucky to get to the real problem. Additionally you
might have to fix another three things along the way just to figure out
what the original question is. Unfortunately I don't have the time to
get in the guts of a problem, but I'm pretty good at diagnosing your
issue if you have presented all the relevant facts. I imagine most of us
professional admins are in the same boat.
In summary if you want busy admins (well at least this one) who may
have the experience to give better answers to look at your problem and
respond do your research, run a few tests, do some searching, write a
nice email, and frame a specific question.
and because I'm avoiding a meeting, I point out how complciated the
above really is.
Contrary to Eric Raymond's "How to Ask Intelligent Questions" it is
actually very hard to ask good questions or even search about a subject
you do not fully understand. Try this little exercise:
Your motorcycle has choppy acceleration at speeds under 45 mph. Think
of twenty things that could cause that. Now rank them the in order of
most likely to least likely. Now rank them in easiest to fix to hardest.
Now rank them in easiest to test for to hardest.
It is unlikely that you can think up more than five root causes unless
you've owned a motorcycle for a year or so. Even with a few years of
experience you will be hard pressed to rank them correctly in the most
likely to least likely. If you're anywhere close on the last two, you
are a motorcycle mechanic and I'll be over shortly to personally fix
your computer while you look at my bike.
So there we have it. Experienced users don't want to play twenty
questions and inexperienced users don't know what information is
relevant to the problem. Sort of a Catch22, though this is one of the
better lists in all respects. However to new users more info is almost
always better than less, but do try to present it with some organization.
BTW after replacing the plugs, the plug wires, the coil, cleaning the
points, replacing the points with solid state, greasing the throttle
wires and mechanisms, new air filter, putting in a fuel filter, new fuel
lines, rebuilding the petcock from the fuel tank, carb cleaning, carb
adjusting, carb rebuilding with new float needles to match the changes
in specific gravity of todays fuel vs fuel in the 70s (I was getting a
bit desperate around this point), changing the oil (wet transmission),
and countless drills in the parking lot to increase smoothness on the
throttle it was pointed out that the chain had a bit too much slack and
probably needed to be replaced. $28 and one half hour later the problem
was fixed.
kashani
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