Gentle persons: In a recent response to a disgruntled user trying to get a new-model Mesa Electronics board working with EMC2 and servo drives, Peter Wallace made a profound remark that characterizes many of the email storms I seen over the past several years.
Peter said "The newness of the driver also means that you have the disadvantage that there are few people with 7I43s using Hostmot2 to compare notes with." Substitute appropriate nouns for "7I43" and "Hostmot2" and this sentence expresses the problem I've seen on many boards and email lists. Although EMC2 and gnu/Linux make us all birds of a feather on this list, we have each of us created a variation on a theme. When problems occur, they may or may not be obvious to others, even to a guru. The problem getting a particular cellular technology modem working with Ubuntu is another example. I find the principal value of this particular list is not just that (1) its participants are ready willing and able to come forward with suggestions, pointers, personal experiences, as well as do extracurricular work; and not just that (2) its participants span a tremendous range of hardware and software experiences so that their responses are often homeruns on the first swing (apologies to the non-baseball fans); but also that (3) its participants are very frank about what they know, what they're pretty sure they know, and what they're sure they don't know. Swings-and-misses are often converted into homeruns because the participants fill in the missing bits in each other's responses. There are lots of lists and boards out there when every newbie question gets a dozen independent responses from presumptive experts who are condescending, cryptic, and wrong. They declaim rather than debate. I can't understand what motivates them to respond at all. They remind me of the old Saturday Night Live news sketches where Dan Aykroyd always prefaced his response to his co-anchor Jane Curtin with "Jane, you ignorant slut." If I were just starting out with a nontrivial computer application instead of building on 47 years of computing experience on everything from mainframes (including analog!) to supers to minis to micros, their responses would make me totally despair of ever being able to get something to work. So, to all you regular participants in EMC-USERS, I tip my hat. To all you who feel you just can't get the hang of it, keep at it. We've all been there and we want to see you succeed too (besides, there's a good chance we'll learn something from you too). Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
