----- Original Message ----- From: David VanHorn To: Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 3:25 PM Subject: [OT]: Idiots, and the PicList > At 07:43 PM 2/15/2004 -0800, James Newton, Host wrote: > > >Olin has been deleted from the PICList. > >No amount of excellent advice is worth being called an idiot. > > I somehow missed this till today, and while Olin was a bit abrasive, I'd have to agree, this was pretty much an Idiotic query. > > "Here's my raw machine code, can you find out what's wrong?" > > > Put me down as "on strike" till Olin returns. When I read the original posting I thought "god, not another one". Unlike Russell I did not see it as a post from an "expert in other field" I saw it as a post from a very enthusiastic newbee maybe a kid. I have delt with people who cannot get on with some software tools, who laughingly say they will write their own. It is difficult to impart the same meening in an email. I actually get some private emails from people who fall into the enthusiastic kid catagory. Sometimes they have missed a really small but important fact or installed a tool incorrectly. They are new to embedded work and they don't know what is missing or how the tool should behave. When I first looked at the PIC I did not notice FSR and INDF. What I did notice was the lack of an indexed addressing mode. When I get a request for help from someone and I see spagetti code which could easilly be replaced by a simple array, no reference to FSR or INDF anywhere, I show that person how to use FSR and they seem to shift into warp drive. I normally regard Olin as a great "stupid question filter" and have supported his views in the past but when I read Olin's response to the "insuccesses" post I was outraged. If I'd had the time I would have responded very negatively to his post. The OP was using machine code instead of assembly code and Olin was berating him for it. It would be like me berating Olin for using assembler instead of C (is there anyone on this list that doesn't know that Olin keeps on about using assemblers instead of compilers). Yes the original posting seems really stupid but we know so little about the OP or the real reason for his use of machine code that we should have found out more before branding him an "idiot". We ALL find it hard to understand a data sheet or software tool's docs at times. Imagin how much harder it must be for someone who uses English as a second language. The OP may not even have know that he could read the hex out of a PIC and disassemble it. We don't even know if he was transfering the hex into the programmer by hand from and assembly listing or from the back of an envelope. How many of us would have continued with PICs if after asking what may have been a very simple question we were ridiculed in front of thousands of others. Your "strike" is only hurting James, someone who doesn't deserve it. Regardless of what you might think it's not just the list that benefits from Olin, Olin actually gains a lot from being a member of the PICLIST. Above all else he gets valuable exposure. I wonder how much work he's had as a direct consequence of being on the list. If Olin wants "back in" I'm sure James would be only to happy to let him provided he promised to show a bit more self control. Think about this: if I had been ridiculed to the same extent when I first joined the PICLIST would I have bothered to produce ANY tools for the PIC or would I have looked for a friendlier MCU. Regards Sergio Masci http://www.xcprod.com/titan/XCSB - optimising structured PIC BASIC compiler. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads