Perhaps you're mixing up the term request with demand. A simple and polite request, of the form, "What have you done, so far?" should be met with a prompt reply, in detail, from the O/P. In the early stages of this discussion,


I'd submit that the suggestions Per, and others, made would have been quite helpful and understandable, had the O/P invested so much as a few minutes to attempt to comprehend what was being said.


This O/P was just not willing to attempt to understand his assignment. He simply wanted someone else to provide the completed work for him. He hadn't made the effort to determine what the correct current through his LED's would be, and therefore couldn't even compute the correct cathode resistor value. What he failed to understand was, not the language, but the concept of doing the work.



The fault lies as much with us, here, at 8052.COM as with the O/P, and it's not limited to this particular query. All-too-often, someone comes along with a question like "how should I do this?" and many replies of the form, "Here's how you should do it ..." immediately appear. It would be prudent to ask a few questions first, including the, "What have you done, so far?" or "What problems have you encountered?" or, more basically, "What hardware are you using?" These requests for detail are not oppressive, insulting, or, in any other sense, condescending, yet would quickly separate the ones trying to do proper homework or solve a technical problem from those wishing to get someone to do their work for them. If we displayed a bit more discipline, we could save on bandwidth needlessly wasted on doing someone's homework for him/her. Unfortunately, even "snippets" of code and hardware design are often accepted as a significant attempt at performing "homework" by instructors in educational institutions, probably because so many students fail even to do that much. The stuff we all do is not terribly difficult, but it does require diligent effort. It's learning that that is important about doing these homework assignments.

That is why we have to be disciplined in our responses to random queries.

I would suggest the following, not as absolutes, but as a general guide:

(a) non-descriptive titles like "help-me" or "coding problem" be automatically rejected with a message telling the requester to be specific.

(b) thread discussion should be interrupted/terminated if a reply to a reasonable question about the specifics of the query is not forthcoming within, say, 3 days. This can't be automated, so it relies on the discipline of the 8052.COM community.

Providing directly applicable "snippets" doesn't teach a person as much as providing an example of the principle applied in a different setting. This is because the latter stimulates creative thinking, while the former simply encourages copying.

Aamir, in this case as in the others he presented, simply wanted something he could copy and hand in as his own work.

I don't think we should ever support such a thing.

RE