Exit Stephen's FAQ

[W. Boeke]

Hi,

Stephen van Egmond's BeOS FAQ will not be posted to this newsgroup
any more. I emailed to him about the irritation that his automatic
posting generated, and it appears that he did not even know about
that, because nobody complained to him. The remarks in the newsgroup
did not reach him, because he never visits this group.

Okay, that's it. By the way, is it known that a first-rate and
up-to-date BeOS FAQ is available at http://www.be-faq.de ?

Wouter Boeke

[m***@xs4a11.nl]

Post by W. Boeke
Okay, that's it. By the way, is it known that a first-rate and
up-to-date BeOS FAQ is available at http://www.be-faq.de ?

It was last updated 7 months ago (which is pretty up to date in the
BeOS world, I guess...), and it's in German.

[Dirk Steins]

Post by m***@xs4a11.nl

Post by W. Boeke
Okay, that's it. By the way, is it known that a first-rate and
up-to-date BeOS FAQ is available at http://www.be-faq.de ?

It was last updated 7 months ago (which is pretty up to date in the
BeOS world, I guess...), and it's in German.

Well, everybody speaks german - or not? :-)

Dirk

[Michael Koenig]

***@xs4a11.nl wrote:
<http://www.be-faq.de>

Post by m***@xs4a11.nl
It was last updated 7 months ago (which is pretty up to date in the
BeOS world, I guess...),

Unfortunately is isn't as up-to-date as I want it to be...

Post by m***@xs4a11.nl
and it's in German.

That's just a minor flaw ;-)

[Michael Koenig]

Post by W. Boeke
Okay, that's it. By the way, is it known that a first-rate and
up-to-date BeOS FAQ is available at http://www.be-faq.de ?

Although Marco covers the main issues I think I should say a few things
since I'm the author of that FAQ.

First of all, that FAQ doesn't focus on programming but general use of
BeOS and thus is a bad replacement for Stephen's FAQ.

Secondly, the FAQ is written in German, and I still didn't have the
motivation to do an English translation. Some people tried to do one for
me, but the only complete translation I got was from a helpful chap from
Finland, and obviously neither German nor English was his first
language.
Also translating the FAQ doesn't only involve simply translating the
text I wrote, but in many cases links have to be exchanged as well. For
example, in 1.1 I mention the nice little site <http://www.maybe.de/>,
which is only available in German as well; so shall I drop that
completely, shall I try to find a similar English site, or shall I add
at least some of the information provided there to the FAQ? Since MayBe
is only a short introduction to BeOS it could be dropped, although it
would be a loss in the translation, but there are other examples where
it's really not so easy.
Why did I write it in German anyway? Well, in the beginning it was a
very simple page covering the most frequent problems with the Personal
Edition when it was released. There were at least two or three English
FAQs for BeOS at that time, so I thought I could make one specifically
for the German users instead of yet another English one. But it seems
that my FAQ outlasted those FAQs a while ago...

Last but not least, the FAQ certainly isn't up-to-date anymore, and
needs far more than a few simple adjustments. All the links have to be
checked, which can take a while (You wouldn't believe how many hours it
took me to correct all the links to BeTips when Scot Hacker changed it
to PHP!), new applications, solutions, or even problems have to be
added, etc.
Maybe I could do some of the stuff when I get DSL next month, because it
sucks to do that sort of research via dial-up. But I'm also getting my
PowerMac G5 then, so I'll most likely have something else to play
with...

I personally hate it to see the FAQ in this state, but I'll have to see
when I have the motivation to do all the needed changes and probably
even an English translation at the same time...

[Dan Pidcock]

Michael Koenig <***@web.de> wrote in message news:<***@wintermute.unknown.dom>...
...

Post by Michael Koenig
Secondly, the FAQ is written in German, and I still didn't have the
motivation to do an English translation. Some people tried to do one for
me, but the only complete translation I got was from a helpful chap from
Finland, and obviously neither German nor English was his first
language.
Also translating the FAQ doesn't only involve simply translating the
text I wrote, but in many cases links have to be exchanged as well.

I had a look at translating your FAQ once and did the first section
but got no reply from you. However what this revealed to me was that
IMO many of the questions in there are not frequently asked questions
on the newsgroups. Also much of the answers in there are best
answered by pointing to web resources such as bebits wiki, betips.
I think the way to go about this would be to write an FAQ from scratch
looking through the newsgroups to see qhat are the actual FAQs. There
is so little activity now that it hardly seems worth it though.

Dan

[Michael Koenig]

Post by Dan Pidcock
I had a look at translating your FAQ once and did the first section
but got no reply from you.

I'm *very* sure that I wrote a reply. If you've never received one then
I'm sorry and I have no idea what happend.

Post by Dan Pidcock
However what this revealed to me was that IMO many of the questions in
there are not frequently asked questions on the newsgroups.

For example?
The FAQ mainly contains questions I found in newsgroups (alt.os.beos,
comp.sys.be.*, de.comp.os.be), several web forums (eg.
thegreenboard.com, or beosonline.de), some stuff I found in the other
FAQ, and a few problems I came across (eg. that MediaPlayer refuses to
play files with a '@' in the name) or I thought that might be
interesting.
In some cases it's hard for a newbie to ask the correct question because
he/she doesn't know what options there are. I tried to give them some of
the options from the start.

Post by Dan Pidcock
Also much of the answers in there are best answered by pointing to web
resources such as bebits wiki, betips.

Basically yes, but first of all there is the problem that those
resources often only exist in one language (I know that there are German
translations of the BeTips because I did some of those myself), and it
would be easier if both language versions of a FAQ aren't too different
from each other.
Also who can guarantee that those resources are there to stay? (OK, if
BeBits were gone then BeOS would be probably dead anyway...)
It took me really several hours to find all the articles on BeTips
again, after Scot Hacker changed it from TrackerDB to PHP (I think the
internal integrity of BeTips is still broken, because links from one
article to another simply don't work anymore). When Scot handed BeTips
over to someone else the suddenly my deep links to certain articles
didn't work anymore and you ended up at the title page. I think that is
fixed now, but those things often made me think: Wouldn't it be better
if I at least had the most important stuff on my FAQ so I'm not that
dependend on other sites working correctly?

Post by Dan Pidcock
I think the way to go about this would be to write an FAQ from scratch
looking through the newsgroups to see what are the actual FAQs.

If you think it's the best way to do it then go ahead and do it.
I know that I have to do a complete rewrite of the FAQ to get it
up-to-date again, but I certainly wouldn't write it from scratch! I
don't think it's that bad, apart from the Network section which is so
bad due to the lack of practical experience on my part (One of my more
or less rigid rules: Only include what you can confirm yourself or what
enough people confirmed that you are sure it works.).
Some stuff is hard to fit in there because of the stucture I chose, but
I want to keep that structure because I think it's necessary (take a
look at the other FAQs and tell me where you find things faster).

I already did a rewrite of the intro to get the current status of BeOS
right. I still cannot decide if I want to mention stuff like BONE, Dano,
or the Developer and MAX Editions. If I mentioned them I had to state
why I don't want to support them and that might be quite a long
paragraph, not to mention probably a rude one...

Post by Dan Pidcock
There is so little activity now that it hardly seems worth it though.

Sometimes I'm glad that I don't have any web statistics for the BeOS
FAQ, because I think then I'd notice that I did all the work for
nothing...