response 26 of 256:

Nov 3 18:20 UTC 1994

Re Roz's comment about adding more detail: That's a good point.  When I
entered a lot of that stuff, I assumed that folks would also read the
information about how to create a file, as well as how to have mail
forwarded to another system.  I mean, there are a lot of ways to create a
file and a lot of conditions where you'd need to do it.  Instead of
repeating the same instructions all over the place, I figured it would
make sense to have them entered once.  On the other hand, the cookbook
_Joy of Cooking_ has instructions like that, where every recipe refers you
to three other ones, which send you to three more, and so on, and I find
it very frustrating.  My solution of choice would be to include in the
"forwarding your mail" item a quick parenthetical instruction about one
easy way to create a file.

response 28 of 256:

Nov 4 08:28 UTC 1994

Yes and the lightbulb is labeled "lynx", which runs on Grex already.

response 30 of 256:

Nov 4 13:10 UTC 1994

<grin>

response 32 of 256:

Nov 4 23:04 UTC 1994

   What are you proposing Chris?  Perhaps you've already stated it (sorry
if thats the case), but please say it once more, how you would structure
things.
   Your input is *very* valuable.  We staff, founders, or long time users
of Grex have lost most (all?) of the perspective of the new user.  How
would you build things?

response 34 of 256:

Nov 5 13:48 UTC 1994

Trying to make things easy to find was one of the reasons I suggested a
hypertext format, so that "see also" cross-references could be put in,
such as the case in which the instructions say "create a file" and you
want be able to jump quickly to the instructions on how to do that,
then jump back to wherever you were.  That could all be done using
lynx, which we have on grex and which provides a simple, easy-to-learn
interface to the user.

If Christopher felt that my suggestion about books was "talking down",
well, I didn't mean it that way.  I was just pointing out that there is
a lot of info out there that's at a beginner's level, that's relevant
to using Grex and other similar systems, and that's more easily and
widely available than you might think -- you can find it in bookstore
chains such as B. Dalton's and others.  The observation is quite
correct that the internet is opening up computer access to a lot of new
people; publishers know this too, and I see a lot of new books
appearing about accessing online services, written at a beginning
level.

On the other hand, I agree that it's desirable to have good,
easy-to-find documentation online here, to save time and for other
reasons.  People interested in writing it might want to think about
putting it in hypertext format.

response 36 of 256:

Nov 5 14:33 UTC 1994

Or drag when the load is heavy.

response 38 of 256:

Nov 5 19:58 UTC 1994

perhaps of more importance would be that those of us whose B-daltons are too
@#$! ignorant to carry unix books (like mine) would have the same (virtual)
referance work there for us! Another problem that you guys may not be aware of
is that many of us are logging in via telnet from whereever we happen to be;
i'm certain that even if i did have a unix manual, that it would manage to
not be with me that one time i really needed it, like say, when telnetting in
from a friend's terminal. And, no matter how many books are put out on the
subject, I know for a fact that the bookstores in rural america are fortunate
to have something on DOS 2.x! I was in Marion, OH this past summer, and, while
i Found a few people who internetted around, there was nothing on the subject,
anywhere in town! One of them said that they relied heavily on online help as
their primary source of info regarding unix, as they couldn't find anything
else! Those of us who know what they are doing on unix are typically college-
educated, and learned most of what we know then. I'm not one of these people.
I'm high-school/trade-school educated, and I'm trying to learn the utter basics
now, and I find it ironic that I should be met by ant kind of resistance to
this effort.

response 40 of 256:

Nov 6 00:59 UTC 1994

sidhe:  Ever hear of mail order?  Book clubs?  Using the telephone to
call a better-stocked bookstore elsewhere?  Having a relative from a
bigger city pick up what you need?
 
Like it or not, you will not gain complete Unix knowledge from a single
source.  Ask questions here on Grex, read the Unix-related Usenet
groups, talk to other Unix users, and get yourself a couple good Unix
beginner's books and read them!

response 42 of 256:

Nov 6 11:55 UTC 1994

I am not looking for complete unix knowledge. I am, however, looking for better
(simpler) unix info than is currently provided. tsty, i will look up the man
pages; thank you. As for challenge vs. spoon fed- the entire reason that this 
would bee on it's own conf is so that those of you who want the frontier feel
don't have to be bothered with it. This is hardly frontier work, anymore. i
know. Along that analogy, the scouts and furriers and traders have been out
here for centuries now, and I'm just a new settler coming in, looking to make a
comfortable homestead. Hell, this is even post-train; Gophers have been up now
for years, allowing us non-unix knowledgable people to get virtually  anywhere
we want. So, like it or not, my predecessors on the internet, we're here, and
this is just the really brave ones. Wait a year, or two at the most, and you'll
wish that you'd set this conf up, if only for the amount of  helper calls
you'll be fielding.

response 44 of 256:

Nov 6 14:14 UTC 1994

OK some of you may remember this: A while ago, I proposed a new rpg .cf in
responce to all darksun items on rpg. Rush limbaugh took the words right out of
my mouth (although I hate the man) in his new book:See I told you so. rpg has
now become darksun, and hasn't changed one bit since this summer! So now, I am
re-requesting a new rpg .cf!  But even in the face of my Zeal, I will admit
that I know absolutely nix about setting up a .cf, or FWing for that matter. 
For this reason, I'm requesting some sort of FWing info, whether or not my
original request is granted, just for conviniece sake.

response 46 of 256:

Nov 7 11:29 UTC 1994

Maybe I'm dense or something, but Christopher, I don't see why you're
getting so upset.  You say that people are resisting the idea of having
lots of online help for beginners, but in looking through the previous
responses, I can't find any such resistance.  Valerie said that the
idea of a "FAQ" conference is what she has in mind for newinfo anyway,
in my remarks about hypertext I was thinking out loud about something
different from the conference format that would make it even easier to
look things up than they'd be in a conference, etc.  I'm not sure why
you interpret this as unfriendly.

Rane has a point in #45 -- because of the fact that Grex strives to
make lots of different things available, writing up documentation to
all of it in a standard format is not a small task.  The philosophy
here has always been that if there's a package that's in fairly wide
use in the Unix world, then we make it available on Grex.  As a result
we have a number of different user shells (sh, csh, tcsh, zsh, bash,
lynx, menu shell), a lot of different editors (ed, es, vi, emacs, jove,
joe, pico), several different mail programs (mail, elm, pine), several
different chat programs (write, ntalk, ytalk), plus a gopher client, a
couple of differnet ftp clients, etc. etc.  If there *is* resistance to
writing a "complete online user guide to Grex", it may come from the
realization that it would be a huge job to do it.

response 48 of 256:

Nov 7 13:47 UTC 1994

Argh!  It's not politically correct for me to say this, but I feel very
frustrated by this discussion.  I've put a lot of effort into being
sure there's a lot of stuff in the info conference *now* that is very
accessible and written for the level of new people.  Yes, it's embedded
in lots of other, less relevant, items.  But there is, for example, an
introduction to basic Unix commands, with a request for questions about
anything that needs any clarification, but I think nobody ever looks at
it.  Certainly nobody ever comes to me and says "the part with the
example of the 'ls' command doesn't make any sense".  To me, this
either means I've written something so perfect that nobody ever has any
questions about it (yeah, right), or that nobody ever reads it.  Either
nobody reads it because the pointer to it is buried where it's hard for
new people to find it, or they don't read it because people just don't
read things.  In the 1990's, everybody wants sound bites; our attention
span is 15 seconds long.  I *want* a FAQ or newinfo or whatever type of
conference to be accessible, but I have very little hope that people
would take the trouble to actually look stuff up there.

set flame=off


Re 44: moo -- join the info conference (at the "Ok:" prompt, type
"j info") and then type "read 26" for a list of fair witness commands.
The main commands you need to know are "set login" and "set logout" (to
change the screens people see when they enter and leave the conference)
and "enter" to add a new item.  The fair witness needs to enter the first
item before anybody else can enter items and responses in the conference.
Shall I go ahead and set up a rpg conference with you as fair witness?
Do you want any co-fair witnesses, or would you like to go it alone?
(Either option is fine.)