"Reading lengthy documents (and I dare say these days that means anything longer than a text message or a terse email) is less popular than it once was"

i think your post is a prime example :)

(sorry, couldn't resist(!) and thanks for your help with my patch BTW)

I applaud you Christopher.

You have successfully articulated some of my feelings in this post.

Disagreement and discussion are both great, and often lead to great leaps forward and/or good compromises, but the level of arrogance and plain bad manners in some recent posts makes one a little disappointed with humanity.

So, thank you for reinstating the incy wincy little bit of lost faith in humanity that I was feeling!!

Maybe your post should become the default forum entrance page....

Kind regards, Leigh

A timely reminder Christopher

Being on the receiving end of some of your help, I'm quite grateful for it.

When possible, I try to chime in with help on the forum when someone noober than me asks a question that I can help with.

I think the hardest part about running into Max walls (although it applies to nearly everything in life) is that there's always something that's not in the manual, help, or reference. You just kind of have to 'know' it. There's always an object or two that don't seem to make sense in terms of what the higher level objects 'need' to function, but make all the difference in terms of actual functionality.

Also searching the forum is generally not as useful as it would seem as most people (I always try to avoid doing this myself) never post the finished/fixed version of what they were getting help for. Whatever the last post/comment is that sends them on their way with their working patch.....sends them away with their working patch. It would be great if every "how do I do xxxx" post ending with a patch that did just that (ideally posted by the person who asked for the help, and implemented the help they got, and posted the working patch).

quote Rodrigo - "It would be great if every "how do I do xxxx" post ending with a patch that did just that (ideally posted by the person who asked for the help, and implemented the help they got, and posted the working patch)."

That's a great suggestion Rodrigo - it would also serve as a kind of "thanks for helping me out guys, and for anyone else stuck with this, let me now help you"

(action - quickly checking over my posts to see if I have ever done that! lol - there's room for improvement in all of us!)

Regards, Leigh

Hehe, I've made it a point to stick a working version, or at least a 'question answered' version of every post I've made and/or gotten help in for the same reason.

The worst (most disappointing) ones are where people post a question, then get little to no replies, then they follow it up saying "never mind, I figured it out", and that's the extent of the thread.... nothing posted!

i want a beer now.

Thank you Christopher for this post!

Regarding the 'question answered' forum feature, might it be possible for the maintainer of this forum to implement something like the system at StackOverflow? (http://stackoverflow.com -- the OP can accept answers and users can vote for the best answer for the question.)

The idea of Rodrigo about "how do i do xxx" is pretty good. It could be a "sticky" at the top of the forum.

But please no vote !

Yeah a 'question answered' designation would be great, though it would require tagging some posts as 'questions' as there's a lot of non question/help related topics.

"Usenet"

Huh? was that like telnet but... more useful? :D

"'Smart-*ss' is another mode I try to eschew, although those who know me know that I usually can't resist the temptation to indulge."

Ya, you can't really eschew that here, everyone's a goddamned smart-ass. :)

In one thread, I tried to tell people they can just hold down shift while mousing over close objects to avoid the wheel(which i'm perfectly fine with). In another thread, I was certainly a smart-ass about the color choice and look of it all. Neither one is a serious comment on my part(i know people won't be fine like me with holding down shift, and i know the color choice, while reminding me of the gay-pride rainbow, isn't that... and even if it was... would actually be kinda nice and soothing to see: the look is innocent and happy overall). Someone told me once: you should preface everything online by saying, "Raja just doesn't care about his online public forum interactions". Some people, like myself, don't put much significance to any etiquette because it would seem absolutely ridiculous to knit pick your own expressions in an environment of caricatures anyways: It's not too much of an effort to put away the worries of public image or, on the other hand, put away quick reactions to what other people say. Let people run the full gamut of their personality if they feel like it. Speak your mind if you need to in response. There's no need to take anything here personally overall, though. It's obvious to see that everyone here is different in real life than the 'character they play' online. And I don't think it's wise to kid yourself: online, you're always playing a character(it's impossible to represent your true and complete personality here). It's not just about learning. Some parts of communication are simply about expressing oneself, or even parts of oneself, particularly in an artistic community full of eccentricities such as this one. It might be different in a forum where engineering or medicine or interior design in general draws a more technical and general-usage crowd. but this is definitely an artistically-focused community, not just a technical one. idiosyncrasy is an indivisible part of the beauty everyone finds in art. you will find alot of it here, best to get used to it, in my humble, ignorant, and incomplete opinion ;)

"'kids today' simply have a different way of learning than people of previous generations"

this is not the full answer, though. 'old folks' of yesteryear also had a different set of resources, and out of need for more resources, created a newer way to access resources in general available to kids today. so they aren't just dealing with kids that belong to today, they are dealing with kids that belong to their very own legacy. if you are an older person, they are YOUR kids. even if not biologically. :) deal with them as though you, yourself, lead them to this point by your own hand. there and then everyone realizes: a game of blame only passes fault into the future, whereas a responsibility of love passes understanding into the now.

(cheers to a well-thought-out thread... when i hold my online-interaction mirror up to others' thoughts in this thread, it reflects infinite wisdom, your infinite wisdom. rather than just infinite knee-jerk reactions, yours and mine. hope that makes sense. :)

"...a game of blame only passes fault into the future, whereas a responsibility of love passes understanding into the now."

^ now THAT is a wonderful sentiment.

Thanks to the OP for such a thoughtful post, I truly enjoyed that.

Sometimes it's hard to tell how much of an answer to give vs. giving hints so that the receiver can discover it on their own...I parallel that with the learning center I work at, we want students to figure things out on their own. If they do, they remember better and have had that "grappling" which is so essential for one's mind to figure things out via making "mistakes". Yes, they get frustrated by not getting the answer right away, but giving an answer quickly robs them of the most important part of learning. It's a fine line...sometimes it's beneficial to model the right answer or approach, but in general, I think we do this too much in education.

I for one have a huge interest in getting people over the hurdles I went through while learning Max, but at the same time, so many of those hurdles seem "necessary" for where I'm at now. It's hard to say, especially as different people understand things differently, and some folks will pick things up so much more easily than I did, or maybe they get enough of a concept and don't feel the need to delve into the details as much as I wanted to. That seems like an eternal issue in programming...how far do you need/want to strip things down? How many layers on top of the "basics" do you want to go? If you use tools which hide the basics, what are you gaining and what are you losing? It's tough!!!

Anyway, just some thoughts...I do love how this thread (and learning Max) parallels so well with education in general, and am very interested to see where it goes!

C

"I do love how this thread (and learning Max) parallels so well with education in general, and am very interested to see where it goes!"

To the resident spambot, of course! Even he/she/it feels compelled to join in; I wonder if it has some kind of 'fluffiness' detection algorithm...? Cheers Roger

I am sad about people who do not want to try 6. I am biased, of course, because 5 was never stable on my system, but it's a free demo. Yes, I know early adoption = evil, but this definitely a case of the exception that proves the rule.

RE noobs, I have no time for people who choose not to read. That's the way I was trained, and that's the way I choose to train others. All learning paradigms aside, if you do not want to work why should some strangers in teh interwebz want to work for you?

Best

Joe

"how do i moog when not know why cycle~is turned on" type of questions might be dumb - but answering them with "it is in the manual" is far worse.

i somehow think that i wrote the same about 5 years ago.

hestitated to write more or less the same

Roman: I do not say this is unworthy of an answer, merely that my answer would be a manual reference :)

i could answer to you post now, but i have learned to just ignore things which i dont understand or dislike. this isnt 4chan, isnt it.

but i must admit that it also needs a good portion of ignorance to overlook the sticky post. it is true that you get answers about basic max stuff faster when using the search function. i think the same about asking to do ones homework.

To be clear; by reference I would mean chapter, maybe section, maybe page number.

I do not see how it is offensive/rude/insensitive to want to increase someone's level of understanding instead of providing a boxed solution.

The question can be boiled down to "do you give the guy a fish, or teach him to angle?"

Except some people just want a burger with fries, hold the onions.

Buy a man a fish, he eats for a day;

teach him to fish and - he's gotta buy a license, report to the local council how he'll dispose of old bait and fish-heads, register with the IRS so he can sell his fish, get a permit to cook on an open flame.......yada yada yada.

(Doug Stanhope)

some day i asked here "how do i implement phase distortion for my cycle~" and david zicarelly answered my shortly: ""kink~"

5 seconds later i had it going and could continue my work.

there are enough people which would have answered my question by "you should read the manual".

but i dont read manuals. i dont like fish.

and how would i have found "kink~" by searching for "phase distortion" anyway?

Page 193 of the MSP46ReferenceManual.pdf mentions:

The output of kink~ should be fed to the right inlet of cycle~ (at zero frequency) to produce a distorted sine wave (a technique known as phase distortion synthesis).

A pdf reader and a search would have saved you at least 2 seconds.

Who is this David?...