Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
There is no sense in wasting the time of one informed developer to help one uninformed developer; this is a bad tradeoff unless the uninformed developer is showing signs of promise. The only way to assess this is to look at the questions they ask and the context they're asking them from. Nobody wants to answer one obvious question if there's any chance at all that the questioner will latch onto them and demand answers for dozens more - this isn't "helping someone", it's "doing their work for free". [ Drifting away ] Yes, there are utterly clueless newbie hordes, many of whom should be ignored or maybe even shunned. Unfortunately, due to the nature of email/news, it's often difficult or impossible to distinguish clueless newbie peons from a novice uninitiated potential contributor. The problem with email/news is that postings are often short/terse, and the nature of email/news is such that one doesn't have access to unconcious communication cues such as voice tone or body language. Don't underestimate the importance of tone or body language. It's a very important part of person-to-person communication, and it's often difficult to properly communicate without it. In the case of someone we know, we use our knowledge about that person to put email/postings into perspective. However, in case of people we don't know, we only have only the (often terse) message by which to judge them. In the case of the FreeBSD groups, many postings appear to be judged "ignorable newbie crud"; while most of them are, some aren't, and it's just too easy to classify a perfectly honest question as "ignorable newbie crud" or "flamebait tinder". I'm saying all this because I've recently seen some disturbing trends in the various FreeBSD lists: [ Side note: I've been following various FreeBSD lists since June 1995, and so I'm not some idiot newcomer spewing at the mouth. ] 1. Instant escalation. Example: supplicant A asks question in FreeBSD group. Some FreeBSD contributor says, "RTFM", and does not give any useful information whatsoever like which "FM" or even a vague area. Supplicant A asks for more information, said FreeBSD contributor insults supplicant A for being clueless newbie crud and flamefest results. Lesson: if you can't say anything nice, don't say it at all. Look at it this way: you won't have wasted your time, your blood pressure will be lower, and you won't look stupid for having stooped to insults, which also doesn't reflect well upon the FreeBSD contributors. Lesson 2: if you are going to answer a question, at least give some minimally-useful information. Don't say "RTFM" unless the FM in question is bloody obvious. Lesson 3: not everyone thinks like you do. In the FreeBSD- contributor's defense, I can see how the contributor could maybe have interpreted the question as coming from clueless newbie crud. However, it could easily be interpreted as an honest, intelligent question, also. Try not to make assumptions. Keep in mind that email/news lacks communication cues like voice tone and body language. 2. Whatever happened to "three strikes and you're out"? (This is a useful alternative to "instant escalation".) If you're going to answer a question, give the person the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're "ignorable newbie crud", or maybe they're a novice uninitiated potential contributor. If you're going to answer a question, at least give them three chances to prove that they're ignorable newbie crud; please don't instantly escalate it. If you can't be bothered with this, then don't answer. 3. Short tempers and thin skins. Recently, it seems that the number of flamefests involving FreeBSD contributors have increased. Yes, clueless newbie crud exist. They seemingly appear to breed like maggots. They exist. Deal with it. Grow up. If you're tired and irritable -- take a break, or maybe a vacation. Have fun. Blow off steam. If you get insulted, at least try to act like a mature, rational human being. If you're still having problems, may I suggest that email filters like deliver(8) or procmail(8) might help? Please note that I'm not trying to point fingers or anything. What has happened, has happened. Nothing's going to change that, and pointing fingers is counterproductive. Personally, I don't care who's at fault, but I do care about possibly driving away novice uninitiated potential contributors. Several months back, I attended a conference at which a Major Linux Personage gave a speech to Linux users and *potential* Linux users (I won't say who gave the speech, aside that it wasn't Linus). One of the things mentioned about how Linux was better than FreeBSD, was, um, the "development process" (and my words are much more charitable than his). Looking at the current flamefests, and thinking about what was said by the Major Linux
Re: Speeding up time...
Brian Somers wrote: I would like to play around with some y2k testing. While setting dates and such works, I'd really like to be able to disable xntpd, and have time move faster. So I could set the date to 12/28/99 or somesuch, and have time run at 4:1 or 10:1, or something that lets me run through a few days of operation in a few hours... Is there an obviously trivial way to do this? I think you can get away with simply tweaking machdep.i8254_freq (if you're using that counter that is). Couldn't he just have xntpd sync to y2k-test.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov, instead of modifying the software itself? Or is this not appropriate for the Y2k test in question? -- "Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Truth and faithfulness are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind." -- Cicero To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: PPPoE offer.
David Gilbert wrote: I've got some real $$$ available to encourage someone to make PPPoE work efficiently enough on the FreeBSD platform to handle a substantial number of users. Is anyone interested? Brian? ;^) There may be something real in the pipeline now. Julian E (cc'd) reckons he can implement a netgraph node pretty quickly, and if I'm interpreting the way netgraph works correctly, I could implement a talk-to-netgraph ppp(8) device in a matter of minutes (``cp udp.[ch] netgraph.[ch]'', tweak netgraph_Create()). The use of netgraph removes the requirement for the bpf device which would be a little bit too hackish. It also provides the ability to implement a PPPoE server - something that eluded me in the bpf case. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ -- Brian [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.Awfulhak.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour ! [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: A bug in the sppp driver?
At 05:54 AM 9/30/99 -0400, W Gerald Hicks wrote: doing state machines with switch statements is a big mess. Still, you'll find a lot of them around. Do you have a favored technique for coding complex state machines? (I'm a collector :) yes, state tables. Clean and easy to modify. IMHO state tables are fine in theory. The problem is that the ``do this'' bit sometimes needs to be split into two - one before the state change and one after, and that same bit is frequently ``almost the same'' as the ``do this'' bit for another transition. Once you start coding it, you start to bring the common bits of code into common routines, and eventually end up actually passing the from/to states into those functions. I found that redesigning the ppp(8) state machine eventually ended up with lots of switch statements and a result that was nothing like I had in mind when I started writing it ! It registers state transition handlers to a certain extent, but there are too few handlers and lots of ``if I'm in this state'' code. -- Brian [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.Awfulhak.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour ! [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: PPPoE offer.
On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Brian Somers wrote: David Gilbert wrote: I've got some real $$$ available to encourage someone to make PPPoE work efficiently enough on the FreeBSD platform to handle a substantial number of users. Is anyone interested? Brian? ;^) There may be something real in the pipeline now. Julian E (cc'd) reckons he can implement a netgraph node pretty quickly, and if I'm interpreting the way netgraph works correctly, I could implement a talk-to-netgraph ppp(8) device in a matter of minutes (``cp udp.[ch] netgraph.[ch]'', tweak netgraph_Create()). The use of netgraph removes the requirement for the bpf device which would be a little bit too hackish. It also provides the ability to implement a PPPoE server - something that eluded me in the bpf case. I'm working on it as we speak.. actually I'm reading through the several Linux implementations and looking at docs, (after a quick hackish prototype test). I just want to see how other people are aproaching the problem before I leap. One really interesting idea was a daemon that openned a pty (master) and supplied the other end to ppp. it then reads and writes using linux's raw sockets. (basically no mods to ppp, and worked with kernel ppp too) Another introduces a type AF_PPPOE, and alters kernel-ppp to specifically know about PPPoE, and connect to it. I'll be doing something different but I probably won't have it ready for a day or so. (still lotso stuff to read). Brian, for more on netgraph, in case you haven't seen them there are man pages available through ftp://ftp.whistle.com/pub/archie/netgraph/index.html and I THINK the latest mpd code has commented out netgraph interface code. if not, I'm sure Archie would send you the files. julian -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ -- Brian [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.Awfulhak.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour ! [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
[ snip good advice ] Now this is very good advice. I am certainly going to keep Darryl's comments somewhere for easy reference in order to make sure I at least never forget where I came from and how to treat others. I think everybody should heed this advice. -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai asmodai(at)wxs.nl The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai Network/Security SpecialistBSD: Technical excellence at its best Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: I was accepted to LokiHack '99 at Atlanta Linux Showcase
On [19991004 11:42], Stephen Hocking ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I would like to point out that they use the SDL library for many of their products. We have this in our ports section, but it does have a bug in that we get a threads crash when doing sound video simultaneously. The aliens demo displays this fault rather well. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't, there's something timing related. I suspect something needs to be protected by a mutex somewhere. Do you mean pthreads? If so, we still do not have a pthread_cancel in our libc_r which could greatly make things harder to implement. I think OpenBSD has one and we might do well to look at that one. Now if we mean another threads implementation alltogether, than you can just ignore the above =) -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai asmodai(at)wxs.nl The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai Network/Security SpecialistBSD: Technical excellence at its best Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: PPPoE offer.
On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Eugene M. Kim wrote: I personally used this approach for some kernel PPP over TCP tunnels, and strongly recommend it because now there are many protocols that make use of PPP (PPTP, PPPoE, PPP over TCP to name a few). If we modified the kernel PPP to create a new protocol family, we basically would have to do the same kind of `porting' every time a new protocol (based on PPP) comes out. Look at the netgraph stuff at ftp://ftp.whistle.com/pub/archie/netgraph/index.html for how we handle this situation at whistle. julian To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Fetch/wget/ftp: How to do a recursive ftp-get?
But which tool can do a command-line, recursive ftp-get? NcFTP versions 2 3 can. There are also purely command-line versions, called ncftpget ncftpput in the `ncftp3' port. -- -- David([EMAIL PROTECTED]) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
Let me give you some advice on FreeBSD list etiquette. You quoted *_114_* lines just to add FIVE?? Are you so busy you can't figure out how to delete lines in your editor? It is replies like this that have run many of the knowledgeable people from this list. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
qcam/cqcam driver
Just a question: has the Quickcam and ColorQuickcam (if there was any) been removed from the kernel? And, if yes, for what reason? -- Chris Christoph P. U. Kukulies [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: I was accepted to LokiHack '99 at Atlanta Linux Showcase
Do you mean pthreads? If so, we still do not have a pthread_cancel in our libc_r which could greatly make things harder to implement. I think OpenBSD has one and we might do well to look at that one. We could implement pthread_cancel rather easily (I have some crufty patches lying around somewhere to do it), but it wouldn't be nearly POSIX compliant. Some non-cancellable routines would be cancellable, and vice-versa I think too. We need to take a different approach to our threads library in the form of scheduler activations. I _can_ hack in the pthread_cancel routines into our current libc_r, but I'd much rather spend my time looking into scheduler activations which will better solve the problem. Dan Eischen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
On a slight tangent, I've just gone back and reread Greg Lehey's 'How to get best results from FreeBSD-questions'. It's a great document, covering a lot of the etiquette for the freebsd-questions mailing list. It can be found at: http://www.lemis.com/questions.html However, the document doesn't really cover how 'newbies' (I hate that term :-) can find information for themselves. There is a huge amount of information on the internet -- too much, really -- and having a list of selected references could help people help themselves. This 'how-to-help-yourself' document wouldn't have to be long. But it could contain references to the FreeBSD handbook, the FAQ, and other stuff that people put together (eg. Gregs pages on vinum, Brian Somers pages on ppp, + many others), in addition to some general internet resources (eg. www.faqs.org), and general unix introductions. Ideally, this 'meta-FAQ' would only be a few pages in length. It's role would be as a quick signpost to material that people have found useful before. I just did a quick check on www.faqs.org, and there were *no* faqs posted for FreeBSD on that site (at least that I could find). I think it would certainly be worthwhile to have a FAQ listed on that site. I'd appreciate feedback on this. I'm willing to collate material and host such a FAQ (with the advance warning that I have *lousy* HTML skills:-). Please suggest any information or worthy sites that you think of. Looking forward to your comments, Mike 'forever-a-newbie-willing-to-learn' Kennett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Jeroen wrote: [ snip good advice ] Now this is very good advice. I am certainly going to keep Darryl's comments somewhere for easy reference in order to make sure I at least never forget where I came from and how to treat others. I think everybody should heed this advice. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
On [19991004 13:42], Michael Kennett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: This 'how-to-help-yourself' document wouldn't have to be long. But it could contain references to the FreeBSD handbook, the FAQ, and other stuff that people put together (eg. Gregs pages on vinum, Brian Somers pages on ppp, + many others), in addition to some general internet resources (eg. www.faqs.org), and general unix introductions. Ideally, this 'meta-FAQ' would only be a few pages in length. It's role would be as a quick signpost to material that people have found useful before. Allow me to cast the first stone then. I am already going to do this kind of stuff for the Dutch (Free)BSD User Group, so I imagine I could as well start work on this one as well. I even have a list of interesting FAQs on my homepage which I really need to expand. Joy! More work ;) Feel free to e-mail me interesting topics/faqs/information which is deemed hackers/new-hackers worthy. -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai asmodai(at)wxs.nl The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai Network/Security SpecialistBSD: Technical excellence at its best The descent to hell is easy. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
[This is only informative for others willing to participate, after this it should probably no longer hit -hackers since it's getting off topic] On [19991004 14:02], Michael Kennett ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Hi Jeoren, Almost ;) s/eor/ero I am already going to do this kind of stuff for the Dutch (Free)BSD User Group, so I imagine I could as well start work on this one as well. I even have a list of interesting FAQs on my homepage which I really need to expand. Feel free to e-mail me interesting topics/faqs/information which is deemed hackers/new-hackers worthy. I certainly will. But, please, don't think you're alone on this project. Next weekend I'll try to knock something up. I'll send it along to you when I'm done. OK Cool. If you look at http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai/bsd.html and http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai/programlinks.html you know what you don't have to send since I already have it ;) I will cast it into a DocBook form and will generate the HTML from there. -- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven/Asmodai asmodai(at)wxs.nl The BSD Programmer's Documentation Project http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai Network/Security SpecialistBSD: Technical excellence at its best Might makes right. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: PPPoE offer.
[on PPPoE] Well... a few toronto people and I got together (I'm trying to find email addresses) to discuss the problem. One particular thought that we had was that it would be cool if a single ppp process could handle a large number of connections. We also discussed the fact that you may very well want some low-level routing of the PPPoE packets. The cost model with our telco (at least) is that each ethernet connection costs $1500/mo. So... we need to be able to run somewhere around 5K to 10K connections (users) down each pipe. This means that a box on the front end to "route" the packets to multiple boxes is an asset. Dave. -- |David Gilbert, Velocet Communications. | Two things can only be | |Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | equal if and only if they | |http://www.velocet.net/~dgilbert | are precisely opposite. | =GLO To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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Re: On pthreads [Was: Re: I was accepted to LokiHack '99 at Atlanta Linux Showcase]
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai wrote: We could implement pthread_cancel rather easily (I have some crufty patches lying around somewhere to do it), but it wouldn't be nearly POSIX compliant. Some non-cancellable routines would be cancellable, and vice-versa I think too. We need to make a start somewhere, since no pthread_cancel makes us even less compliant =P I know. I brought this up with John Birrell and it was thought my time would be better spent working on user over kernel thread implementations. If there are ports/applications that really could use a non-POSIX compliant pthread_cancel support, then I can implement it. I just don't want to open a can of worms when it gets added and doesn't work as POSIX specifies it should. I neither have the docs, experience nor time to be of any help save that I can try patches/compilations for you. I found these people in reference to libc_r whom could prove helpful or insightful for your endeavours: John Birrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peter Dufault [EMAIL PROTECTED] All my changes get reviewed and approved by JB (the MAINTAINER) :-) Dan Eischen [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: qcam/cqcam driver
On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Christoph Kukulies wrote: Just a question: has the Quickcam and ColorQuickcam (if there was any) been removed from the kernel? And, if yes, for what reason? The qcam driver disappeared from the kernel years ago since it easily caused kernel panics and wasn't maintained. I was a victim of said panics. It wasn't very nice. Doug White| FreeBSD: The Power to Serve [EMAIL PROTECTED] | www.FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: qcam/cqcam driver
Christoph Kukulies wrote: Just a question: has the Quickcam and ColorQuickcam (if there was any) been removed from the kernel? And, if yes, for what reason? Well, people tried to once. I do not recall what happened in the end. The reason was that the driver did not support the newest devices, and there was a port which worked just fine. -- Daniel C. Sobral(8-DCS) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rule 69: Do unto other's code as you'd have it done unto yours To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
Wayne Cuddy and Mike Smith crossed swords thusly: Wayne: Mike: Wayne: Mike: So, regardless of whether you've asked a question or not, you need to understand that the onus rests solely on yourself to pursue the answer. They're all there in the code, where everyone else that you're asking has already found them. This is absolutely correct and in many cases the most inefficient way to go. Crap. It's the most _efficient_ way in terms of return on effort invested. Wayne, you seem to be forgetting that you're working with volunteers. It may very well be that there are 6 or 7 people out there who know the answer to your question right off the top of their heads, can point you to the exact line of code in question, and describe how to do what you want. If they're too busy with their days jobs, families, other FreeBSD work, or just lying on their backs counting stars, it is still not your place to DEMAND answers from them. You can ask politely, or you can just go away. If you don't get an answer, it might be because everyone was busy, nobody is really familiar with that part of the code, or because nobody is interested in helping at this time. The efficieny doesn't matter, you are ASKING A FAVOR. Phrase your questions appropriately. Do you approach doctor when sick and demand that he make you better NOW or you're going to tell the entire world what a moron he is? I certainly don't. What irritates me the most is that you and others in your position won't accept the fact that things are complicated. Oh no, it has to be these evil nasty people that don't want you to learn. Yeah. That's it. You sure know a lot about me! Are you making these assumptions about me and "others like me" based on what I am posting now or previous postings? I am really sorry you are irritated. And you think you are 100% unique. Oddly enough, so did each and every one of your hundreds of predecessors. ;^) -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: qcam/cqcam driver
Christoph Kukulies [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Just a question: has the Quickcam and ColorQuickcam (if there was any) been removed from the kernel? And, if yes, for what reason? Yeah, they were nuked ages ago. OTOH, I always wanted one of those babies, and ISTR that Connectix has a free developer program where you can sign up to get tech specs and stuff. If somebody donates the eq I might hack up a KLD module :) DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Wes Peters wrote: This is absolutely correct and in many cases the most inefficient way to go. Crap. It's the most _efficient_ way in terms of return on effort invested. Wayne, you seem to be forgetting that you're working with volunteers. Come on, you guys, you're both right. Sometimes, the guy with the info is too busy to help. Sometimes, the guy doing the asking wants everyone else to do his work for him. The real rule is, don't reply if you don't have something constructive to say, and be polite, even if it seems the guy you're answering has a few loose bolts. Outside of that, we are all on our own, and you can't enforce stuff on a volunteer organization. Chuck Robey| Interests include C programming, Electronics, 213 Lakeside Dr. Apt. T-1 | communications, and signal processing. Greenbelt, MD 20770| I run picnic.mat.net: FreeBSD-current(i386) and (301) 220-2114 | jaunt.mat.net : FreeBSD-current(Alpha) To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
"Daniel C. Sobral" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's very simple: if I (emphasis on "I") think answering your message is worth the time in which I could read ten, twenty other messages, I'll do so. The same applies to each other person on the list, developer or not. Very true. There are things one can do to improve their chances of seeing the message answered. For example: ... excellent advice, which everyone should follow. ... however, how the H*LL are the clueless newbie hordes supposed to know or learn this? As much as we'd like them to be, they're not exactly born with this knowledge, and I somehow doubt there's an "XXX for Dummies" book that covers this. In many respects, venturing into a newgroup or mailing list is much like visiting a foreign country, where the customs and social mores are different than yours. For example, let's say that you've never been to the United Kingdom. Since people there speak "English", you won't have any problem communicating, right? Well, not quite. You might get some amused looks if you ask for the "public bathroom", and you might be very puzzled if someone says to you, "I'll knock you up around half-ten." If you ask for "chips", you may not get what you expected. In the same way, there are "different mores and customs" in newsgroups and mailing lists. To us, things like "make the messages easy to read", "use quoting", etc. are obvious, but how the H*LL are newbies supposed to know this? I see very few people trying to politely correct newbies, but many people "going postal" after one-too-many newbie questions. Example of people wanting someone else to do their homework: "I noticed FreeBSD's malloc() does not return an error when it allocates more memory than available. Can't you do [options]?" While I'm sure you believe that all people who post questions like this, want others to do their homework for them, I don't see that. From that one "message", I can't tell the poster's motives or thought processes. I just see someone asking a question. Possible, correct response(s) to such a question include: * Ignore it. If you can't say anything nice, don't say it at all. * Answer: "No, doing so is non-trivial. The reasons for this have been mentioned in numerous other postings, and so, for more information, please read the XXX mailing list archives on YYY. Try searchiing for `ZZZ'." If you do answer, do *NOT* use emotionally-loaded words, like "lazy" or "clueless". Flamefests lie that way. [ I'm using the word, "clueless", because I'm trying to hammer a point across. ] This is a recurring thread, you can look up on the archives to read how it goes. And how is the newbie supposed to know this, if no one tells them? Also, telling them via insults and the like is, well, rude. Basically, the person doesn't like the present behavior, and would like to have an alternative (or have it changed completely). This is, believe it or not, a reasonable question/belief/expectation. If it's really asked that commonly, why not turn it into a FAQ? -- Darryl Okahata [EMAIL PROTECTED] DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the little green men that have been following him all day. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: qcam/cqcam driver
On 4 Oct 1999, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: Christoph Kukulies [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Just a question: has the Quickcam and ColorQuickcam (if there was any) been removed from the kernel? And, if yes, for what reason? Yeah, they were nuked ages ago. OTOH, I always wanted one of those babies, and ISTR that Connectix has a free developer program where you can sign up to get tech specs and stuff. If somebody donates the eq I might hack up a KLD module :) As far as I remeber it was under some pretty strict NDA because of the compression scheme used by the cameras. Quickcam is now owned by Logitech and there aren't even any notes about a Linux driver. If you do want something that sort of works, there's some utilities in the ports system that will talk to a quickcam bw/I/II as far as the newer models (VC/pro) i'm not so sure they are supported. How good is logitech at providing specifications for third party drivers? Anyhow, the bt848 stuff kicks butt, why would you want to waste so much CPU on a non-versitile parralell port thingy, than a bus mastering PCI capture card that sells for about the same price? :) -Alfred To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: PPPoE offer.
[on PPPoE] Well... a few toronto people and I got together (I'm trying to find email addresses) to discuss the problem. One particular thought that we had was that it would be cool if a single ppp process could handle a large number of connections. We also discussed the fact that you may very well want some low-level routing of the PPPoE packets. The cost model with our telco (at least) is that each ethernet connection costs $1500/mo. So... we need to be able to run somewhere around 5K to 10K connections (users) down each pipe. This means that a box on the front end to "route" the packets to multiple boxes is an asset. So just use an Ethernet bridge. You could play some games with the discovery protocol (which uses broadcast MAC frames) with multiple servers are the remote end. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
Darryl Okahata wrote: ... however, how the H*LL are the clueless newbie hordes supposed to know or learn this? As much as we'd like them to be, they're not exactly born with this knowledge, and I somehow doubt there's an "XXX for Dummies" book that covers this. The old-fashioned way: look before you leap. It is common courtesy to read any newsgroup or mail list long enough to get a feel for it before jumping in and making an ass of yourself. We shouldn't have to rename a list called freebsd-hackers into freebsd-hackers-clueless-newbies-stay-away just because a couple of children have trouble accepting that nobody had the time to answer their questions. This is and has been common courtesy on Usenet newsgroups and Usenet, later Internet mailing lists, since I've had Usenet access - about 1985. If you don't know that, you don't even belong on the net, let alone this newsgroup. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: qcam/cqcam driver
Just a question: has the Quickcam and ColorQuickcam (if there was any) been removed from the kernel? And, if yes, for what reason? In the time it took you to ask this question, you could have searched the CVS commit logs in $CVSROOT/CVSROOT/commitlogs and found the answers to your question. This would have saved countless megabytes of network traffic and many hundreds of man-hours reading time. This message is not a flame. It is meant to be a helpful suggestion that you and hopefully many others will bear in mind such that similar questions to this one are answered before they're asked. There are enormous self-help resources available to you that will give much faster gratification than demanding someone else do your work for you. If you can't work out how to use those resources, this is certainly a good place to ask about it. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Re: Developer assessment (was Re: A bike shed ...)
On Mon, Oct 04, 1999 at 09:44:00PM -0600, Wes Peters wrote: [common courtesy] This is and has been common courtesy on Usenet newsgroups and Usenet, later Internet mailing lists, since I've had Usenet access - about 1985. If you don't know that, you don't even belong on the net, let alone this newsgroup. I think you may have identified a wider problem than just freebsd-hackers :) Joe To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
