Re: E-mail notification from AS400

Gary wrote:
>Hi Hans,
>
>I think I might be slightly surprised by your comments.
>
>The magazines are a business. They won't be for long if they don't do
>anything to recover costs. I wonder if the obliteration of the trade
>magazines would be more helpful for the AS/400 community.

Hi Gary!  I'm surprised over your surprise.  The first thing I
wrote in my note was that I have no problem whatsoever in anyones
desire to be fairly compensated for their work.  That's a given
in a capitalist economy.  (Another given in a capitalist economy
is that no one owes you anything either.  Forgive me for being
blunt, but if your son doesn't go to MIT, well that's not my
fault, is it?)

What I was pointing out was that in other areas of the computer
field, there are working business models in which information is
offered with no strings attached.  I brought up Linux as a
general area where this seems to work quite well.  I also
pointed out the fact that the process of registration keeps the
search bots out of the AS400Network and MidrangeComputing web
sites, which makes the information in them more difficult to
find (even though much of that information IS available for
free).

Both you and Brad mentioned that you both answer upwards of 50
questions a day from people.  Doesn't that strike you as somewhat
excessive?  How many of these questions are the same?  In other
domains, there are excellent FAQ files listing answers to
commonly asked questions, and people are very often referred
to these FAQs.  If you and other experts would spend just ten
minutes a day contributing to an RPG FAQ (placed in a prominent
publically accessible place), perhaps you'd have more time for
other more important matters, like your regular consulting jobs.
(Or other even more important matters like spending time with
your family, or even your model trains.)

(If someone else would get the ball rolling on a FAQ, I would be
quite happy to contribute a couple of thousand words gratis!
One person has already offered to start that ball rolling in a
private e-mail.)

To summarize:  There is certainly quite a bit of information
already out there (available for free), but it's scattered over
multiple web sites, and is poorly indexed by the search sites. A
FAQ, with definitive answers contributed by the experts and
easily located, would go a long way to help AS/400 programmers.
And ease the burden on the overworked experts.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound critical of the good things you and
Brad and others do.  But I DO see how things are done elsewhere
and the contrasts are striking.  There are, in my opinion,
things to be learned from the experience of others.

Cheers!  Hans

Hans Boldt, ILE RPG Development, IBM Toronto Lab, boldt@ca.ibm.com

+---
| This is the RPG/400 Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to RPG400-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to RPG400-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to RPG400-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---