There was once a fellow on a list I belong to whose postings
were one tale of woe after another which is not that unusual for
those of us who tinker and work in technology. The trouble with
him was that it was all one big conspiracy against him and he
was just going to get out of the hobby of amateur radio all
together as nothing ever worked for him.
He never read about the how and why of things. His idea
of life was you borrow yourself in to the poor house, buy all
this neat stuff, demand accessible manuals, hook it all together
the way you think it goes and then complain when it blows up and
or just doesn't work.
Never once did I hear him ask why an antenna must be
built a certain way or how do the rest of you solve this or that problem.
It was all along the lines of "I spent X Dollars for this or
that and it quit on me in a puff of smoke, bla bla bla.
List members told him about articles he could read,
suggested he contact somebody locally who could help show him
the ropes as to how to do these things right, etc.
Finally, I think everybody just gave up. He left the
list and I have no idea what happened but this present
discussion reminds me much of that very similar discussion. We
were all jerks and just out for ourselves.
In the 35 years I have been involved with modern
computing, my experience has been that if you show you are
making a good effort to help yourself, people will at least
point you at a good reading list and many times, they do a lot
more than the call of duty says they should do.
I know I certainly have not contributed anywhere near
what I have gotten from the community but the experience has
made me a life-long fan of open-source and all the flavors of
free Unix that have emerged in the last couple of decades. I
advocate Linux, FreeBSD and all the other variants because they
aren't owned by anyone person or company and can help everybody.
How many other things in this world work that way? How many are
familiar with the "One Laptop per Child" organization? There
goal is to design and build laptop computers for 100 US Dollars
or less and set them up in under-developed countries with zero
infrastructure. The initial computers were powered by, you
guessed it, Linux because nobody had to pay money to do that.
The little computers are built stout and given to school
children to take home each night. The screen is the brightest
light source in the house and the word is that the kids take
excellent care of their computers. Very few have been lost due
to mishandling.
Martin
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