Slashdot Mirror
Where to Ask if not Ask Slashdot?
Rick the Red asks: "It seems that 3/4 of the Ask Slashdot articles are met with "Ask Google" answers. So, where do you go for answers (besides Google)? Advice (besides Dear Abby)? Opinions (besides ePinions)? If you want to know how to network one of those 4-in-1 printers, how do you find someone who's tried it? If you need help with some discontinued merchandise, who do you ask? If your pet project hits a snag, what do you do? Come on, all you "Ask Google" critics, fess up -- where do you think people should turn instead of Ask Slashdot?"
It's getting worse! I don't usually join the folks bitching about Ask /. questions, but this is getting old.
/. is the forum for how to network your 4-in-fucking-1 printer, that's what 4-in-1 printer newsgroups and customer support are for.
The post said exactly what you do, ASK GOOGLE. As more people are getting into this stuff, fewer are learning the way most of us did years and years back -- We Looked It Up.
I don't think
Yeah yeah go ahead mod me down before you read the full reply, for having an unpopular opinion...
but here it is anyway....
The reason for asking a question at ask slashdot is to get the help of people how have done it before. This is a plain stright forward simple truth. Yes in many cases you can go "ask google" however...you might get a page or two with in formation on the howto's...you will not get the life expirence information on how everyone did do it(as opposed to the one or two ways that google might give you)...the information that ask slashdot response will give you are the gotcha's the alternative approches, and so forth...
Its a community folks, personally I would rather ask the people who have done it and have the expirence that I can ask questions of during my implimentation...than trust it to some googled web page that may or my not even be currently maintained. Asking slashdot can also cut through alot of the bullshit that you might otherwise run into because the slashdoters who have bene there before will more often than not point you to the resources that did work for them...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
To try a somewhat different tack -- here are two things questioners can do to avoid stirring up us critics:
1) Mention where you've already looked (Google, Usenet, whatever), what you've found and what additional information you want. Half the time, the karma whores who do a quick search haven't found a useful answer. Telling what you've already done boosts your credibility and makes it easier for readers to complement other sources.
2) Maybe this is just me and a few others but -- enough with the "What is the best ____ for geeks?" questions! If you're trying to purchase an identity, why not go to Abercrombie and Fitch and buy a good one?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You can find a plethora of valuable information on the WWW, including archived mailing lists and other discussion forums (Yes, they do exist outside of /.!). Were a person crafty enough, they might even dig a little deeper into these forums and perhaps, upon finding a relatively fresh topic, post some of their own input and experience to the thread in order that they may help the NEXT person to come along asking the same question.
If same person has a webpage, perhaps they could post a detailed explanation of their experiences, as have so many other people done in the past, in order that "Ask Google!" will only become more valid as time goes on, rather than less so.
You mean to tell me that you could submit an Ask Slashdot article, have it posted to the front page, and have people responding with valid tips/tricks in time for you to implement a solution to your problem, and still have time to iron out the kinks before the article scrolls off the page and everybody loses interest?What are you doing, setting up a Samba server for a LAN? Installing a 4-in-1 printer device for a network? It's these very mundane tasks that "Ask Google" excells at, because so many others have come before and done the exact same thing (not to mention support from the copman[y/ies] in whatever form is available).
Slashdot is supposed to be (and if not, pardon my ignorance, I'm just going by the title of the page here) a NEWS site - is it not? Why is it news to me to find out where to get/how to make a portable hub (something that Google, BTW, excelled at determining the answer to)? What about finding graphics editing software? Don't we have Freshmeat for finding *NIX software? What about balancing Career and College? Haven't people been doing that for DECADES now? Don't most schols have guidance counsellors for that? What about career counselling services? Hell, one's own employer and/or co-workers? Safely cleaning LCD displays? My laptop came with instructions that were quite clear on this procedure, as have most devices I've ever purchased with LCD / TFT displays. Is Ask Slashdot really quicker than flipping to the Index in a manual? Online marketing for an indie band? People have been doing this for years - ask other bands, not nerds. If you're having trouble finding bands, look in the (sorry to alarm you) "Yellow Pages". You know, sources of information pointing to local businesses (read: people who make their living in each of these technical areas). Musty Music is a great source for people in the Durham / GTA and surrounding area. ("Not By Choice" rehearsed there, and was played first on the online radio station in which they are a partner!).
Whoa.. This one just took the cake - "Learning x86 for Non-x86 Assembler Programmers?"?!? I'm fairly certain that I could fill my shiny new 80GB hard drive with information in this area from, you guessed it, search engines!
Ask Slashdot was interesting a few years ago, but now it's just become a source of answers for people too lazy to do any legwork of their own. I agree with a previous post - one to two weeks of legwork required before an A.S. article makes it to the site. Perhaps documented proof of research should be a requirement to have an article posted to the front page.
</RANT>
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
My take on it is this the real geeks in here have been put upon and forced to do the dirty work of others for years with little to no recognition of our true talents. Then we come to our community as others have put it to relax and find reasons to be excited again. Then when we get here some lamer (for lack of a better word) has come up with the question of what geek options are our there for x. It's like someone asking me to do his or her dirty work in my time of leisure. This is especially irritating when I search up the exact question on google and it is in the top ten results with discussion groups tied directly to it already.
Now I'm all for being an open community but people really need to think before they ask what nerds might consider stupid questions. Especially when they don't check the resources that are out there before posting to ask slashdot. It is even worse when someone is looking for complicated answers to problems were it is obvious they don't even understand their own question.
The next one is the obvious company posting to ask slashdot for competitive analysis information. Their are people out there who study sociology for a reason. So they can perform the work of gathering information for group studies. Not so you can post a question asking us to tell you who all your competitors are and how we feel they rank to your product.
Now as for what resources obviously they are specific to the application so there is no single solution to this question. The rule of thumb is to start off small. Local user groups, specific interest groups, then as you encounter more and more "I don't knows", it might be an appropriate question for a larger community like slashdot.
The point being here is that if the only resource you know is ask slashdot then you really need to spend a bit more time with your favorite search engine and find others before you even think about posting to ask slashdot.
If this ever becomes the minority view then I will have to see if I can find myself a new news site. And slashdot can their tagline to "The Newbies Site for News and Information From Around the Web" instead of "News For Nerds Stuff That Matters".
It's people like *this*, ladies and gentlemen, who give the Linux/BSD/etc. crowd the ellitist snob look. Why can't people ask questions? What is wrong with asking even an 'obvious' question? Questions are how people learn. Sometimes people don't like crawling through tons of obscure pages written by people like this who assume you will look up *every* word you don't understand.
If you don't like a question, just don't answer it! Why must we berate and insult it?
"This is not an 'ask slashdot' question" Well, then I challenge you to tell me *what is* a "Slashdot question?"
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Last I looked, Usenet had mainly devolved into a vast collection of spamers, people utterly dedicated to a topic, and frothing nutters. That's a shame; circa 1991 it was actually pretty swell.
The thing I like about Ask Slashdot is that it gets a broad audience. The point isn't so much to extract particular information; it's to have a bunch of smart people talk something over. And the moderation mechanism means that I can easily see the relatively useful bits without having to wade through a lotta garbage.
So Google Groups, like Google, is often a good way to get answers to particular questions, but I hardly see it as a replacement for Ask Slashdot.
Is it so much to ask that people do even a cursory search of the available resources before asking simple questions? If someone wants help recompiling their kernel, should Slashdot readers give them a step by step walkthrough even though there are literally hundreds of pages of information about the topic available from various resources? Nobody would mind people asking Slashdot if the answer to the asker's question wasn't the first response in a Google search, as is frequently the case.
I don't have any problem with someone asking slashdot, even if it's a dumb question; but if the answer to their question is 2 seconds away, why waste everyone's time with it?
rooooar
Come on, all you "Ask Google" critics, fess up -- where do you think people should turn instead of Ask Slashdot?"
Am I the only one who took this as an attack on slashdot readership? It's like he's goading us into a fight. Besides, the question is rediculous. What do you think an "Ask Google" critic is going to suggest? Sheesh.
IMHO, the Ask Slashdot forum should be primarily for questions that do not have a straightfoward, logical, correct answer. This kind of information, such as how to network your 4-in-1 printer, can be obtained through numerous outlets (and, no, I'm not going to list those here -- read the other posts). The Ask Slashdot questions ought to be to stimulate discussion on issues that are not clear-cut and have no "right" answer. Slashdot has an intelligent readership that has a very diverse set of opinions. Asking a question here is likely to get you a wide range of interesting answers. That, my friends is one of the things that differentiates slashdot from a google search. Again, just MHO.
GMD
watch this
So, where do you go for answers (besides Google)?
Duh, the library. Google has news as old as what, 1985 for the most part? The library has newspapers, magazines, and books from the 1800s. You cannot come anywhere near the breadth of information contained in a good library by doing a search on google.