I’m new to the UNIX & Linux site and I would like to ask a question. There is some guidance in the Help Center, but what are other actions I can take to make my question well-received and improve my chances of getting answers?
@JeffSchaller That's really elaborate, but I was thinking more like a short list of bullet points.
Given that mostly people don't like to read.
Anyway, I've upvoted both the question and the answer.
@JeffSchaller You wrote:
> If they do ask for clarification, respond by editing your question using the “edit” link towards the bottom of your question -- assuming you registered your account -- DO NOT respond in comments!
Actually, responding in a comment may be perfectly appropriate. And editing an answer may be appropriate. Or both. It just depends.
Just because comments may be deleted doesn't mean you can't respond with a comment. And lots of comments stick around forever, anyway. Unless deleted by a mod.
And if you want to have a dialog with someone, it's either comments or a chat room.
Which functionally is really the same thing - the chat room just has more sugar, so to speak.
And creating a chat room at request to discuss a question isn't trivial, last I checked. In fact, I still don't know how to do it. Newcomers will have no idea that's even possible.
@FaheemMitha As a general policy, and also in Jeff's answer. So I should have pinged him instead of you if my brain had been willing to brain a bit more :-) Ping @JeffSchaller !
@FaheemMitha It's been a very intense month but finally the election is over and the stress is going down. It's been the most stressful time I can remember since the time the storage systems for the entire customer email storage broke when I was working at an ISP.
It's really hard to plan everything technical for a thing that only happens every 4th year
@FaheemMitha Yes, the national, regional and local election for all of Sweden. And I'm sysadminning at the election authority.
But most things worked well, and the things that did fail are things that don't affect the actual election.
On the actual night of the election, I worked from 5pm until 2 am, then went to a nearby hotel to grab a few hours of sleep. I was back at work at 9 am and stayed until 5pm that night. I am too old for that kind of hours...
Three sysadmins. One of the others went home at 10pm so he could be in early. There were also four developers present, watching over the application where the election staff enter the vote numbers for computing who gets into the parliament.
We've taken turns to have a few days off after election days to recuperate. It was really rough, but we've all had a lot of support from the rest of the organization, which makes a huge difference.
@FaheemMitha The election isn't digitalised - people still vote with paper ballots that are counted by humans. So we don't really have that many systems to watch over. We did have a few more people on standby though.
@FaheemMitha yes, we get paid double for working weekends and nights, and of course we also get some pay for being on call. The voting percentage was 87.18% this time.
@Kusalananda Thanks! It was very unfortunate that the web servers went down, though the actual election systems were still running, and we were still feeding the results in real time to media. (And I can't talk about the reasons for the web servers going down until the analysis of what happened is finished and the agency has made a statement)
@Kusalananda There were a lot of mailed-in ballots that came in late, so they weren't included in the preliminary result
I don't think all of those have been entered yet - the regional governments have two months to report all the names written on ballots that were for non-registered parties
And their staff have been working around the clock to get the vote counts done, so I think they can be allowed to not hurry with the stuff that's only relevant for fun and statistics and not for actual result
@MichaelHomer Stephen commented similarly; are you OK with drawing a distinction between clarifying comments and conversational ones?
@JennyD first, congratulations on surviving the election! and second, I'm already taking grief for pushing clarifying-edits into the Question vs a comment, so I'm in violent agreement with you and feel like I'm missing your point :(
I'm guessing it's: "code looks horrible in a comment" ?
@FaheemMitha sure; like I wrote back to Stephen, it's probably wise of the asker to ping the person back, since it's highly likely that person would answer. But I didn't want to get too much into etiquette
comments are probably worth their own Q/A -- what they're for, and how they get deleted and flagged and moved to chat and ...
although the Meta FAQ probably covers them pretty well already
@JeffSchaller Thanks! And yes, that's my point - I am tired of trying to parse code/log lines from output in order to help someone. Sorry if I'm being part of a pile-on!
I do think that your response was a very good one and have upvoted it. There will always be people having strong opinions on details.
I have been looking at the following free -h output for a while now and trying to find out what is currently being stored in -/+ buffers/cache.
Here is the free output :
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 31G 31G 271M 68...
Request for learning material, from what I gather, is a request for links or pointers to offsite learning materials, or books, courses, etc. In fact, How do we feel about requests for learning materials? is defines it quite clearly.
That doesn't cover a request to be taught something, but there ...
I'm trying to figure out what to do with the files linked to from this article irq5.io/2016/12/22/raspberry-pi-zero-as-multiple-usb-gadgets, and I'm trying to understand the first one. I'm not sure if the first line is part of the script, or an instruction for the user, or a comment: #!/bin/bash -e
On the git page, that line is grey. Is the "#!" a shell command, a bash thing, or something else?
@YetAnotherRandomUser Ideally, you first try to understand what the script is doing before copy-and-pasting it into a terminal. The script is to be put into its own text file. The file is then supposed to be made executable with chmod +x scriptfile. The script can then be run with ./scriptfile on the command line.
But, as I said, don't run random scripts off from the Internet without knowing what they actually do.
@kusalanada I do think I have a good idea (good enough?) of what it does based on the article, at a conceptual level. If I was more familiar with Linux, I'd have been able to recognize what I was supposed to do with it.
BTW, I read that that giant jackass Jatley implied that he was going to try to get around the restrictions the Supreme Court had placed on private usage.
@PrabhjotSingh Hmm. But lots of people object to Aadhaar. Though I suppose they object even more to the linking and general proliferation.
General message boards are useful, as opposed to news articles, because you get a direct, uncensored, from the horses mouth view of what people are saying.
@PrabhjotSingh By the Govt, you mean? Not sure what you are replying to.
@FaheemMitha She used to write in Outlook and The Statesman. reading her since 2014. She says some people want to make our coutry data rich. Jean too has said that.
That's not exactly news. I think everyone understands that is what is happening. Even though the Govt and their corporate allies won't admit it, of course.
I have been looking at the following free -h output for a while now and trying to find out what is currently being stored in -/+ buffers/cache.
Here is the free output :
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 31G 31G 271M 68...
