[Techtalk] Sound card gone missing - OSS/ALSA woes

[agoats at compuserve.com]

There's a thing not talked about in engineering and scientific circles 
and that is not to talk about your failures.

I found in business that I can do anything i want with scrap, no one 
cares. But when I find something that works with the scrap and show it 
to the powers that be, I get chided for using scrap and to go do it 
again with good material. IF I had used good material and failed.... bad 
things all around!

Consequently, I never talk about the failures, only the successes, same 
as Thomas Edison. How many failures did he have before he found the 
magic for the electric bulb?

So, the best thing is a separate computer for hubby to crash and learn 
with. With Linux, it doesn't have to be the latest and best computer, 
I've been running 500MHz to 1GHz machines at home quite satisfactorily, 
just max out the RAM as much as the  machine will take. Keep a recovery 
disk or installation disk handy and show the user how to find software 
and install from the internet.

As for learning from failures...
1)  Look at the failure and what it did, it gives clues what not to do 
and which direction to go

2)  Try the direction the failure suggests and see what happens. If it 
succeeds, great, but if it fails too, look a the clues as it narrows 
where to go next.

3)  Keep track of where you went and how it failed; many engineers and 
scientists tend to go in circles, eventually repeating what didn't work 
the first time and all too often, stubbornly going in the same circle 
over and over and over....

4)  If you get this far and can't go further, then ask the sages and 
give them the details of what you have, both good and bad. I had a 
couple of problems that escalated from the Applications Engineers and 
ramped up to a VP that originally worked on the issues in the deep, dark 
past. I got my answers, but because of the first 3 steps, i "proved" I 
wasn't a newbie who should read the manual, I had something that 
required true wizardry above and beyond the  simple chants shared by the 
Application Engineers.

Alvin


On 03/17/2012 06:17 PM, Rudy Zijlstra wrote:
> On 03/17/2012 11:28 PM, James Sutherland wrote:
>> On 17 Mar 2012, at 19:54, Anne Wainwright wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 05:11:00PM +1000, Miriam English wrote:
>>>> Little Girl wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> When I got my first computer a relative of mine said that I shouldn't
>>>>> be fearful of it, but just go ahead and mess around with it. He told
>>>>> me that everybody messes up their computers eventually, that he fully
>>>>> expected to be called to repair the damage from time to time, and
>>>>> that messing things up is actually a good thing because it's a
>>>>> learning process. He was right. I've learned a lot through my
>>>>> screw-ups over the years. (:
>>>>>
>>>> I couldn't agree more. Today we have a growing cultural prejudice
>>>> against making mistakes, but in truth is one of our most important 
>>>> ways
>>>> of learning. I often tell friends who are impressed with the amount I
>>>> know on various computery things that it is largely the result of 
>>>> having
>>>> made more mistakes than most people. Heaven knows how many times I've
>>>> totally screwed up my computers.
>>>> See also the quote in my sig below.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>>     - Miriam
>>> I have done my best learning by breaking things and then having to fix
>>> them. You are supposed to fix things in Linux, this is not Windows 
>>> where
>>> a quick reboot can heal all wounds. Keep at it
> one of the things i once discussed with a professor, is that the 
> incentives on university study are least partially wrong. All research 
> you see published is about the good results found. My feeling is that 
> all the research that "went nowhere" is just as important. I wish 
> someone would have the guts to write about that, and all the things 
> they tried and saw which did  not lead to what they were looking for.
>
> As it is, i think a lot of dead ends are researched many times over, 
> as they never get public attention. Oh well, at least it leads to 
> learning on the part of the researchers... And perchance, because they 
> are researched again with better technology, sometimes it does lead to 
> new discoveries ;)
>
> cheers
>
>
> Rudy
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