Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Help me help myself

[Richard Bell]

MLeech I really understand where you're coming from. But I think that's the point of a community. If you are personally tired of answering low level questions, then you should not feel like you have to. Others in the community might be happy to do it, and you can stick to the advanced questions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how other communities seem to work that I've been involved with.

MMuller, thank you. I do my best to help myself before I ask a question here. Often, I feel like I'm asking a legit question, until the responses make me feel like i just asked the equivalent of "what does 2+2 equal?" Its always hard until you ask. Shrug.

Rich

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Marcus D. Leech <address@hidden> wrote:

On 12/22/2014 06:59 PM, Richard Bell wrote:

Actually, your replies helped. I was not aware or in the mindset that branchless_clip was a generally used method for clamping fixed or floating point values. Because of that, I was limiting my searches to gnuradio related stuff (googling "gnuradio branchless_clip"). Now I know it is a general method of doing something.

Helping people who are getting comfortable is a good thing to do. It will ensure they use the tools. There is a limit to this of course. No one wants to see basic level questions being asked all day.

I've been on this mailing list for, gosh, a decade?

In that time, what I've noticed is that in the last couple of years, there's a significant fraction of folks who are encountering not only Gnu Radio and
  SDR/DSP for the first time, but *software development in general*.   I'm not sure why that is, but I'm pretty sure that the list isn't, in
  general, well-equipped to deal with that kind of thing.

My own patience for that type of thing varies considerably, and I try to avoid giving any answers at all when my patience is perhaps not as
  generous as it should be, and try to give cheerful answers when possible.

I certainly don't want people to leave with the impression that we're unhelpful here, but on the other hand, I don't think it would be good for
 the list (and the community) if we became a "free CS101 course" for the huddled masses.  Just my opinion....

...funny anecdote time.

I once helped run an internal help-desk doing Unix technical support within the Nortel empire.  We'd assembled a team of
  pretty-darned-competent people to do front-line support.  *Vastly* better than your typical help-desk.  Like, could debug shell scripts
  for customers while waiting on the phone. So, we got a bit of a reputation of being pretty-much the best at what we did.  To the extent
  that our phone number leaked out into the greater world, and we started getting support calls from random not-Nortel places, which
  we obviously couldn't support, since it wasn't our mandate.

Sometimes, I think we do that here...

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Marcus D. Leech <address@hidden> wrote:

On 12/22/2014 06:45 PM, Philip Balister wrote:

On 12/22/2014 06:42 PM, Marcus D. Leech wrote:

I'm not as smart as Marcus, so I googled "branchless clip",

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/427477/fastest-way-to-clamp-a-real-fixed-floating-point-value

Philip

I think that at the end of the day, questions like this boil down to "how do I get comfortable with the tools of the trade in software development".

That's not something that the Gnu Radio community can economically address.




--
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org

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-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org