Why is it in tech help things always seem to work better for other people?

[1veedo]

I had this conversation with a friend of mine a while back. When something doesn't work on your computer it seems like for other people it always does. You can follow the exact same procedure that someone else reports worked for them yet it doesn't work for you.

 

Just an example I'm trying to run Civilization 4 under wine*. According to the wine appdb I did everything correctly yet it seg faults. There's even a guy with the same distro and same version of wine whom says it's "running perfectly." Why it works for him and not me, I don't know.

 

This is a recurrent thing, and it seems like it's not just me. I'm not complaining about it -- it's kind of amusing, actually, but I have two explanations that we can put through scientific vigor.

 

1) The person who fixed something has more specific knowledge relevant to the challenge at hand so over the course of debugging the problem he has done some steps and forgot about them, maybe not even knowing that they're relevant to the solution. The person looking for help, presumably taking advice from the first person, has less-adequate knowledge of the subject and cant look that step further to see what's wrong.

 

2) Computers are different, especially across Linux, but if you're under the same distro and architecture this should largely be resolved. On some subjects though I think this explanation is rather inadequate, especially for Windows, Mac, BSD, and of course specific distros. There are still going to be differences but in any specific problem I just can't see how they'd be relevant (eg make sure you're using the same version of wine and the same version of the app).

 

 

* Just FYI when Civ4 first came out I probably had it working better than anyone else. This was back before wine had native xml support -- I got xml and everything else civ4 needed in wine, around 6 dll overrides I stole from a Windows install, and it would load until setting the screen in directx9, which at the time wine didn't support. I saw today that people got civ4 running in wine so I decided to try again and this time I cant even get as far as I did last time!

[the tree]

That guy has more memory than you?

 

And Windows computers are different, consider that they have a gazilion things running on them at any given point, it really isn't going to be the same combination for everyone.

[blike]

You have to hold your tongue the right way.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Time for a new corollary to Murphy's Law.

[1veedo]

Nobody else has noticed this

 

Btw I got Civ4 running perfectly. One of the dlls got corrupted on the harddrive.

[JohnB]

Sorry, I still play Civ 2. I was so disappointed with Civ 3 I haven't even bothered with 4.