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?"
This should be in the 'Meta Ask Slashdot' catagory ;)
I personally ask stuff like that on mailing lists, usenet, and IRC (not in that order!). You can also try hooking up with a geeks / sysadmin group in your local area (I'm sure there's one most everywhere), and ask friends / associates there.
I'd suggest Ars technica...it's a great place to ask questions and the search gives you access to a bunch of older questions.
Google is another good one of course.
IP Therefore I am.
The forums at Tom's Hardware or anandtech are some of the best places to get answers to tech questions. Especially if its a question about which hardware to buy.
Another good way to go is to find a slashdot user who will probably have your answer, and check their journal/e-mail.
And of course usenet is great. And you can use google for that too!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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
Jesus. Stop posting these obvious questions! Just type them into Google:
where do I ask my questions other than slashdot
That results in this link:
ask.slashdot.org
Sheesh.
Come on, do some research. Ask Slashdot is by far the quickest way to get a legion of smart people with nothing to do but read slashdot to find your answers. Got a problem you don't want to waste an hour or two looking for the answer. Just ask slashdot.
Ask slashdot is just a smarter search engine.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Not if you check the answers to questions already asked and find what you're looking for there.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Usenet has for the last twenty or so years been a place to ask questions and get advice. Google Groups has a wonderful search feature where you can query past Usenet discussions, which includes almost all of the questions that others have already asked. Let's face it, it's very likely that someone else has already asked your question.
I use this for all sorts of topics (computers, home remodeling, appliance repair, cars, etc.). I almost always find some useful information.
And if all else fails, I can submit my question to an appropriate newsgroup (again using Google Groups).
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...
I rely heavily on IRC. particularly irc.openprojects.net...
sometimes my questions are OT, but the people in #debian are very nice. #wireless helps me with my wireless problems. #gnu helps me with my political questions. etc.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Effective troubleshooting is largely a process of elimination, and as such it works best if you are extremely orderly about it. For example, let's say a lamp "just stopped working," "for no reason." Well, first eliminate the bulb as the possible culprit: put in a new one, or test the old one in a lamp that's known to work. At the end, you should be able to say with certainty that the bulb works fine.
So now look at the lamp. Is the bulb socket corroded? Is the bulb making contact where it needs to? Is the lamp actually plugged in? Is the switch working? Again, at the end of the process, you should be able to say with certainty that the lmap is not the problem.
The you'd look at the wiring and whatever else might be involved. 99.9% of the time, you will find the problem well before you run out of places to look. It's exactly the same with computers. NIC isn't working? First swap in a NIC that's known to work. Then test cables that are known to work. Then you would probably do the same from the other end of the connection. Monitor isn't working? Try it on a different computer, or try a different monitor on your computer. Try a different video card. Different cable. And so on.
The other useful part here is that narrowing your questions like that greatly improves your chances of success with a search engine. Putting "my NIC doesn't work" into Google isn't going to help; but putting "my NIC transmits, but won't receive" probably is. Putting "permission denied" into Google is going to get you thousands of pages back, but putting "linux ifconfig permission denied" is probably going to put your answer at the very top. And so on. And, if you still are stumped and have to ask someone for help, at least you can provide a detailed explanation of what you have tried, which improves your odds of getting a qualified (and correct) answer back.
Because of this, I very seldom have to ask any questions. When I do, I usually ask either knowledgeable people I already know, or I post my question on USENET. This is primarily a question of competence, unfortunately; most web boards, IRC groups, and so on are full primarily of ignorant people who think they are really smart, and misleading or inaccurate replies can waste hours of my time if I don't correctly identify them as such. (Plus, they cause the knowledgeable people to get lost in the noise.)
Also, this was really long.
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".
I follow about 30 Usenet groups daily, and see some great help (with a client capable of doing some filtering, the signal to noise ratio is better than almost anywhere else on the net).
As a result, anytime I have a question, the first place I will hit is Google Groups.
With the right search terms and narrowing it down to the correct groups, the help can be fantastic. Chances are that if you are having a problem or question, someone else has had the same problem.
When I seach for Mac problem, for example, hitting comp.sys.mac.* with a search will give me quality results about 99 out of 100 times.
The other nice thing is that there are questions and answers for almost any subject you can imagine, from networking a four-in-one device to turning left on red.
[Yes, so maybe it is part of Google. But I am guessing that a lot of people submitting "Ask Slashdot" questions are not hitting that before they submit.]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
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.
I prefer to respond to the immature "ask google" answers with details about how they completely failed to answer the question, since that is generally the case. It always brightens my day to knock some uppity bitch down a peg or two. My only regret is that I don't have time to get them all!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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
half-empty.org might not have as much technical depth as /. but we do asnwer questions to the best of our ability.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
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.
A *great* place to start (even better than Ask Slashdot, IMHO) is Deja^H^H^H^H, er I mean, Google's Group, which is basically a search on Usenet.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio