roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (08/31/86)
> In article <251@desint.UUCP> geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning) says that he is writing a chapter in the upcoming Waite book and needs information about paging and VM in BSD and Sys5. This evoked the following response: In article <429@rtech.UUCP> daveb@rtech.UUCP (Dave Brower) writes: > At the risk of being flippant, how can you then be qulified to write > about these subjects? It sure makes me question the credibility of > the finished work. I don't know Geoff so I can't comment on his qualifications. I would like to point out, however, that I don't see anything improper about his request for information. In the field that I am most familiar with (biology), people are often asked to write review papers on subjects of which they are leaders in the field. Typically, the first thing such an author will do is hit the library to find out everything about the subject that he doesn't already know. Often he will write to everybody he can think of in the field and ask for copies of any recent papers, or preprints of manuscripts in preparation so he can get caught-up on recent advances. I would be more disturbed if Geoff took that attitude that he already knew everything there was to know and wrote the chapter off the top of his head. From what I can tell, VM is not the main subject of his chapter, but a peripheral issue. His willingness to do research into those aspects of the field in which he isn't an expert should be viewed as a Good Thing. -- Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016