asking smart(er) questions. was: Re: [Pw_forum] k point selection

[Luke Thulin]

Axel,

I appreciate very much the time people take to respond to questions, and 
I'm very sorry if it appears as if I'm not trying hard enough.  The 
issue is simply that I have asked questions in the past and have been 
told that they have been asked and answered in the archives.  My comment 
was just to try and let people know that I do take time to search the 
archives and somehow overlooked those relevant discussions.

Sorry for the trouble,
Luke

akohlmey at vitae.cmm.upenn.edu wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, Luke Thulin wrote:
>
>hi luke and everybody else on the list,
>
>i hope you're all having a nice day.
>i'd like to comment a little on the following sentence
>in a more general way, so please people who are not
>exactly interested in the detail of this discussion,
>please read on anyways.
>
>LT> different k paths?  Sorry if this question has been asked, but I seem to 
>LT> be incompentent when it comes to searching the archives.
>
>well, it is not _that_ difficult. if having to find and figure out
>the integrated search engine is too much of a hassle to you, you
>might try the following trick by (ab)using a more familiar search
>enging like google. as the mailing list archives are hosted on
>the democritos.it web server, you can search google, but restrict
>the search to only this domain. e.g. in your case i would try:
>
>"k points" selection  site:democritos.it
>
>one more thing. as you may have noticed, the people here in this
>forum are very open to newcomers and trivial questions (something
>i personally respect a lot, since it is not always easy to answer
>in a calm and unoffensive way to some of these questions). 
>however, you will see after a while the responsiveness will slow
>down if you do not demonstrate some significant effort on your
>side. which is understandable, since nobody here gets paid to
>respond to questions so the currency to 'pay' people here is
>mostly respect for their effort, and one way to pay respect to
>people is to try asking smarter questions. as stefano already
>pointed out, you are not expected to become an expert, but you
>have to demonstrate that you at least made an effort. claiming
>that you are too stupid, inept or incapable to even try, usually
>reduces people's attention span even more.
>
>for a more detailed discussion i recommend looking at:
>http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
>which demonstrates the IMHO essential point that the 
>'quality' of the response you get depends on the 'quality' 
>of your question.  
>
>thanks to everybody that made it this far.
>
>best regards,
>      axel.
>
>LT> 
>LT> Thanks,
>LT> Luke
>LT> 
>
>  
>