Another Pulseaudio Adventure

[les]

On Mon, 2012-03-12 at 11:08 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 03/12/2012 09:57 AM, stan wrote:
> > As the underlying system becomes more and more complex, and my use
> > case further and further out of the mainstream, I find myself able to
> > give less and less help.  That said, I'll add the following to your
> > excellent point above.
> 
> I have a little list.
> They will never be missed!
> 
> And I'll add two of my own.  First, people who think there's One True 
> Way to do everything and assume that everybody knows and loves their 
> favorite tools.  Not everybody knows (or wants to know) vi, so if you're 
> going to tell a beginner to use it, include complete instructions, 
> including how to save and exit.  Not everybody (except on Ubuntu) uses 
> sudo for root access.  Some of us prefer su, and don't particularly like 
> the assumption that everybody in the world uses sudo; just tell us to do 
> something *as root* and let us decide what tool to use.
> 
> Second, people who expect you to know their hardware, their update 
> status, what DE they're using and so on and never give out such 
> elementary info without being asked, often several times.  Included in 
> this, btw, are people who report that a program failed with an error 
> message that they didn't bother to write down, so that nobody has the 
> slightest idea what actually happened.

I agree with some of this, but the second point that people expect you
to know their hardware etc. just likely don't realize how much
information you need to help them.  I worked in support of complex
systems for  about four decades, and everyone I helped just did not seem
to realize that the hardware, software, programming language etc. is all
a system, and to understand a systemic problem you need the information
about the system, not just the problem or error message.  And by the
way, the people I was helping were all engineers of one stripe or
another.  If engineers cannot realize this, how can a normal consumer
who is say a financial person be expected to know it, or act in an
anticipated way?

Regards,
Les H