It's in the archives multiple times. About once a year this same question is asked, followed by a flurry of technical replies, and finally a small flurry of "it can't be done in the general case" replies.
Not everything is in the archives. And a lot is in the archives that doesn't need to be there, because of topic drift and periodic asking of the same question. I once had a colleague who asked me at least once a day what time it was. I told him the time of day every time he asked me for about two weeks. Then one day I grew tired of the process and asked him politely, but not smugly, why he didn't have his own watch. My answer of looking in the archives was too brief, and thus it appeared smug. I should have added that this was a difficult topic, there are a lot of details to consider, the problem is insoluble in the general case, and it is asked of IBM-MAIN about once a year. Reviewing the archives will also reveal the details that have been brought out in the past but that might not have been brought out in the current round of replies to this annual topic. Many of us do have answers right on the top of our head. But it takes a fair amount of time to compose a technically correct and hopefully helpful reply. It has to be EXTREMELY correct because there are some posters who seem to thrive on finding fault with others' posts. And I do not mean Charles Mills. I would hope that in an ideal world a would-be question-poser might contrast how much time it takes the five or six people who give thorough and correct answers with how much time he should research the subject himself before asking the whole world. When I was a child eating dinner with my parents, I would often ask them what such-and-such a word meant after first hearing it in dinner conversation. My dad, who had the answer on the top of his head, would usually say "you know how to spell now and how to find words that you don't know how to spell by breaking them down phonetically; look it up in the dictionary and/or encyclopedia (we had two different sets, one of which was Britannica) after dinner." I would look it up and learn far more than just the meaning of that word. My dad was not trying to be smug, but rather to instill in me more intellectual curiosity and individual resourcefulness. OTOH, my advice to search the archives was, IMHO, much nicer than this answer: "No." Bill Fairchild Programmer Rocket Software 408 Chamberlain Park Lane * Franklin, TN 37069-2526 * USA t: +1.617.614.4503 * e: bfairch...@rocketsoftware.com * w: www.rocketsoftware.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 10:13 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Who loaded me? Thanks, John. It is so easy and facile to say "RTFM." Yeah, sure, it's in the archives. So is everything else. When I lived in NYC in the sixties, I had a friend who had this idea of selling the police "a list of everyone in Manhattan who smoked dope." It was the Manhattan phone book. I have a program that will tell you anyone's RACF password. It's a random password generator. If you click it enough times it will generate the password you are looking for. RTFM is an appropriate response in many cases, but it is vastly overused as a smug put-down. If a friend asked you what time it was, would you tell him there was a clock in a room down the hall, or would you look at your wrist and tell him the damned time? I suspected someone would know the answer to my fairly simple question of the top of their heads, and I was right, Peter Relson did. If you don't have an easy answer off the top of your head, or you're too busy to respond, you are free to ignore a question. Put-downs are not necessary. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 7:56 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Who loaded me? Bill Fairchild is guilty of meiosis, the antonym of hyperbole. There is very much too much discussion of this topic in the archives. It is of course possible to get answers to carefully circumscribed special cases of this question of the sort Charles Mills is seeking. There are no general/generic answers to it, and the prospects for one are bleak. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
