What's a FAQ?
FAQs are “frequently asked questions.” Something that often solicits contempt from other people on mailing lists and news groups, because the information is (typically) available with the manual that came with their application, detailed in the FAQ file for the list, is easily found out by them in some other way, generates dozens of replies saying (essentially) the same thing, or even generates dozens of incorrect replies, etc.
You'll often see people get told to “RTFM,” for asking a FAQ. So do read the (insert your own personal choice of “f” word here) manual first—that's what RTFM refers to. And check the manual's index, or do a word search, if you don't immediately find what you want.
Why should you bother to read this or your manual? Well, if you're going to ask questions about something you're going to have to read the replies anyway, so why not start where some answers are already available, instantly. You're likely to get similar answers anyway (as well as some completely wrong ones too), and I see no reason to keep typing the same things instead of directing someone to read what I've written before.
This small set of documents addresses a few FAQs that I commonly encounter on the mailing lists and newsgroups that I frequent, questions I keep on answering for friends, as well as some business queries:
Internet related
- Acronyms
- Clients, servers, and user agents
- Cookies
- Many different issues about e-mail
- Privacy policies on websites
- Secure messaging using PGP
- Sending documents to people
- Technical terminology (it's the glossary page in my webpage authoring guide)
- Wierd things on webpages
Video related
- Adelaide digital TV stations tuning
- Colour video signal generation and connections
- Interlaced video
- Movie film transfers
- Persistance of vision
- VHS versus Beta (the myth that either is better than the other)
- S-VHS isn't VHS
- Video tapes
- Video editing
- DVD formats
- Macrovision