> chill out. people write books for money. and their motivation is very
> similar to what propels people to write FAQs at the root: interest in a
> subject, with a potential monetary reward on the side. look, I'm
> proposing extremely tiny transaction charges associated with retrieval.
> This *is* going to happen in a few months or a few years. And people
> like you will look kind of silly ranting against it.
> Keep in mind that FAQs are going to be called on to do new things: be
> hypertextable, be mini-databases, be indexed, be uniform, etc. In the
> current light, this all seems like toil and trouble. But tomorrow, it
> will look like a good investment. When we say FAQ today, that just has
> no relation to where the concept is going to go. And a UFF is one step
> in the direction of FAQ promotion.
> All you whiny FAQ maintainers are going to have a
> whole new attitude when you face the competition! <g>
> chill out, dear sir. NONE OF THESE STANDARDS ARE MANDATORY. if you can
> get into it, fine. if you can't no problem. but don't be SUCH A GROUCH
> about people who are trying to kickstart the future!
I find this condescending, I'm-a-visionary-but-you're-all-blind attitude
highly offensive, especially given the mountain of work that various people
on this mailing list have done in an attempt to promote information sharing.
Where the *hell* where you, L. Detweiler, when we were busy plugging
together Usenet with 1200 baud modems, buggy UUCP and news implementations,
and buried phone bills ;-) over 10 years ago? Where were you when we first
began to play with the idea of a "periodic posting", before we even
came up with "FAQ"? And which FAQ's do you author? What site are
you the mail/news/ftp admin for? What piece of mail/news/ftp/gopher/etc.
software did you write as your contribution? In short, what the heck
have you done to "kickstart the future" other than to attempt to tell
us what *we* should do?
Everybody on this list has done one or more of the above; some have done
many over a period of years with no reward except the acknowledgment of
their peers (and everybody on this list probably has a story or ten about
the flamage they've caught for their efforts from time to time). Almost
none of us have gotten a nickel for our efforts, or expect to, or want to.
But I suspect that few of us are prepared to listen to someone who does
the electronic equivalent of walking into an ongoing discussion and making an
opening statement telling us how backward and wrong we are.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some overdue massive revisions to do
on the MST3K faq's. Durn show changed casts again, you know. :-)
---Rsk
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