| ??? 10/16/09 19:49 Read: times |
#169811 - maybe something should take its place Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
No, I did not discuss the 'Answer is wrong' vote from our previous debate, Richard. That is your view. My view is that such a design is broken. You can run a car on two wheels, but that is still the wrong way. All part of a totally separate debate. While I have some recollection of a few of our previous "debates", I'm not at all sure what you mean here. If a fellow, for example, can get an IC, which, in this case, shall remain nameless, and it can be made to perform the task at hand, I believe it's wrong to refuse to answer his questions about it when he specifically ask for help in doing a specific thing, and to admonish him for using such an old IC or advocate for some newer part that may or may not (a) be available to him or (b) may present more trouble. If the design is complete, many years in service, and fully functional, then it's not broken. If it were, then everything on Earth would fall in the same category, as it's seldom long after a device is fielded before someone comes up with a "better way." Just because YOU don't like it, doesn't make it wrong. If your "broken" design remark was targeted at the multi-MCU serial port driver board I designed in 1986, that's certainly the case. It did what it was expected to do, satisfied the customer, satisfied my employer, and met all the system requirements, and did so within schedule and budget. It also helped prevent the expenditure of many tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds on an old and useless mess of hardware ... a purchase too often made before its nature is discovered. I have on at least two occasions seen two people debate on this forum. Both persons having good arguments for their view. One of them having an 'answer is wrong' or similar. Then I have returned to the thread the day after and finds the same thing. The same person have now received yet one more 'answer is wrong' or 'message not useful'. I prefer to not try to locate the debates, since I don't want to imply names. I find it more important to note that it is hard for people to defend themselves from anonymous critique. Yes, often the "scores" are unhelpful and capricious, no better thought-out than the typical query. But look at this specific thread. The original post contains two questions:
1: So firstly, they mostly operate on 5V right? 2: can you recommend a suitable and reliable supervisor chip for this family? Do you see a reason for flagging the thread as 'Looks like school work'? Do you see a reason why we should ignore the thread? I don't feel that's justified. The O/P declared his status and the nature of his project at the outset. His description was clear and concise, and he seemed to have done quite a bit of preparatory study. For #1, it is not so easy to search for an answer. Locating 100 variants and compute the statistics? But would that statistics be relevant, since the industry is moving toward lower voltages, and how do you count processors that can run use a wide span of voltages. Google is bad at showing what processors that are currently used for new designs, allowing you to deduce what it looks like "today".
#2 is has a different problem. Datasheets will tell how great they all are. But we all know that not all suppliers are 100% truthful when describing their products. Think about your love for Atmel. So there are good reasons for asking the question, and receiving answers to it would not be different from a student trying to call a distributor to get some feedback. If one reads beyond the first page of a datasheet, knowing that the first page is mostly marketing-friendly information, one can get the appropriate information from it. So the question is then: What reason is it to cast a negative vote "Looks like homework" when the first sentence of the post describes the situation? And remember that it is a negative vote. Explicitly shown with a '-' when casting, and with a '-' when browsing. It really takes some form of an agenda to cast that vote. The times when I marked a post as "looks like homework" have been when I recognized the nature and in some cases the wording of a query as reminiscent of one that appeared at the same time last term, and the term before, and the term before ... Richard said:
I've suggested some things that would significantly reduce the number of off-topic, looks-like-homework, didn't-search-first, and other common votes, which, I guess, can be seen as comments. If they are intended to be seen as comments, then they should not be given a weight of -1, and show up as a negative weight when viewing the recent history for a poster. They represent something completely different from the +/- votes some sites have to the question "was this answer helpful?" A great answer need not be helpful - if you have a bug possibly located in one of 10 places, then 10 people can suggest one place each, but only one catches the correct place. Even if the 9 other suggestions didn't lead to the bug being found, they do not represent bad answers. But the - votes here very much imply a "bad post". I've said I doubt the "scoring" system is really helpful. I thing something could be used that suggested relative interest in a given subject, but so long as threads aren't really sorted by subject, the subject often being something on the order of, "HELP!" I have to stay with my earlier (not only in this thread) remarks. RE |
