At 01:14 PM 10/7/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Let me just put in my two cents as another newbie. It's a pain in the
>a** to have to RTFM all the time. Has anyone counted up all the
>thousands of pages of documents there are out there? Speaking as
>someone who has been R'ing TFM instead of asking, I have to say that
>while it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to have figured it out on
>my own, there has been more than one occasion when I've been up all
>night long searching for an answer in the docs that one of you gurus
>could have answered without thinking. I recently got married, I work
>full time, I'm in graduate school, and I'm one of those people who
>requires 8 hours of sleep a night in order to function. My time is at a
>premium, and if I post a question to the group it's not because I'm too
>lazy to find it myself, it's because I just plain don't have the time to
>do it myself and I'm hoping someone out there will be a little
>understanding and give me a helping hand. I'm not asking you to come to
>my house and do it for me, after all.
Well, I also value my time and I'm a professional consultant. Speaking
strictly for myself, I believe people have two options; 1) take their own
time to read the documentation and ask questions if they still don't
understand, 2) pay an expert for the answers that they have invested the
time to acquire. IMHO, those are you only choices. I understand time is
valuable but no one owes anyone answers they aren't willing to work for or
pay for.
What John is responding to (and rightly so, as far as I am concerned) is
the frustration that comes from answering the same questions over and over
when he and others like him have taken the time to record the answers to
the most commonly asked questions in the documentation that is shipped with
the, need I mention FREE, product.
Ask if you like, but, if you aren't paying for the answer, then accept what
you get. Over time, I'm sure the documentation will get better. As far as
I know, the contributers aren't getting paid so the consumers should be
grateful for what there is.
Douglas J. Toltzman
President/CEO
Oak Street Software, Inc.
(910) 326-6210
http://www.oakstrsft.com/
