What does this instruction mean: ANDDC #239 ?

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Folks might take your suggestions about how to post more seriously if you didn't post in HTML.

Here are some references if you are interested in improving the quality of your posts:

Netiquette: "When thou enter a city, abide by its customs."

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Usenet 101: How to properly format a Usenet post

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How do I quote correctly in usenet?

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Bottom vs. top posting and quotation style on Usenet

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Zen and the art of the internet (usenet section)

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Why you shouldn't ask for E-mail responses on Usenet

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The seven don'ts of Usenet

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Why bottom-posting is better than top-posting

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+What do you mean "my reply is upside-down"?
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The advantages of usenet's quoting conventions

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Rules for posting to Usenet

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Why should I place my response below the quoted text?

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How To Followup A Post On Netnews Properly

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Quoting Style in Newsgroup Postings

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Put an end to Outlook Express's messy quotes with this automated fix!

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How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

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For the Engineer/Programmer: News related RFCs and Drafts

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Reply to
Guy Macon
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The problem with top-posting is that nothing hangs together properly, and that it encourages failure to snip. Just the desire to be understood should argue against it.

The attributions are the "Joe Blow wrote:" headers, which, when synchronized to the count of leading '>' chars identify the authors of quoted material. I consider it simple courtesy to give credit (or blame) where it is due.

People fail to realize that articles need to stand by themselves. They may be read later, after the local system has purged anything else in the thread.

At any rate, those things were secondary to my outrage at your Indian rant. Earlier today you posted a very lucid and fair article about failings of at least one Indian firm, and what I would consider Asian dislike for direct controversy. I have generally found people from the sub-continent to be intelligent and able, but with hard to understand accents :-).

They do listen to those that vote. The American public is responsible for the existance of the present regime, even if only by inaction.

I don't think we really disagree (apart from topposting), but we do not agree about the basic causes. Software people, myself included, have been grossly overpaid for crappy work in the past. The pay scales for programmers have been within a narrow band, which should have been widened at both ends, according to ability and quality. Unfortunately it is hard for a layman to judge those. Instead they count whizbangs, and the result is foul web pages and Microsoft. But this is not the cause of outsourcing, rather we should look into the tax laws that encourage it and the increasing impoverization of the poor for the aggrandizement of the rich.

A typical case is Stanley Tools, almost local to me, who closed all their manufacturing a few years ago and shipped it elsewhere. I have not bought a Stanley tool (or anything else) since. I would rather buy something that honestly admits its origin than from a firm that does its best to hide its actions. Then there is the other extreme, illustrated by a toaster I bought a few years ago. I had to pay an extra dollar for one that claimed to be made in the US. It was simply not functional, and got junked in months.

No, I said "There is an old saying that people get the government they deserve." There is certainly a degree of truth in it. I did not write 'derserve', although without looking I could have accepted that I did.

My sig line is intended to propagate a clue to the newbies that are flooding usenet with useless replies via the shamefully inept google interface.

--
"If you want to post a followup via groups.google.com, don't use
 the broken "Reply" link at the bottom of the article.  Click on 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
CBFalconer

We'll just have to disagree on that one and live with it - I'm perfectly able to follow most threads using Outlook Express if it's something current and active (or groups.google if it's something I've found via a search). The posts (for me) that make things awkward are the ones that are bottom-posted (inline is fine for the reasons you state) because one does have to scroll down to see the reply after just reading the original.

I've read most of the links that someone else gave about top-posting, etc. but it just doesn't work for me. I cannot recall ever reading a top post and saying to myself, "I don't understand what's going on - I'll need to scroll down to look at the original context to understand that". I just scan thru, either looking for a particular point that I'm searching for, seeing if anyone's adding anything new to an ongoing conversation, making a mental note of replies that are not immediately important to me - yet I forsee as possibly useful in the future, etc. If I see a top-posted response in isolation, there's either enough info in the response (but devoid of context) for me to know if I should scroll down to see what caused that response to be made or to know that it's not worth scrolling down to get the original context.

I don't generally get confused if posts are not are not in a chronological order (and programmers that I've worked with would say that I'm easily confused :-/ ).

IIRC, Chomsky points out that when one listens to a sentence, the brain is basically plugging each word into a tree which as each minor tree is populated can be decoded. Remember that word order may be reversed for some languages - "Le Lotus Bleu" for example seems so strange until you start to speak a language like this - then it is just normal. So, as far as I can see, the brain is constructed to make sense out of things that might not appear to be 'reasonably' ordered - and mine one, at least, has no problem doing the same thing with top-posted paragraphs going into the tree nodes.

Have you seen the film Memento

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I wonder what your opinion is of that film.

Most people would understand that something's been quoted - and I don't think anyone reasonable is going to get upset if their name is missed out when someone else quotes in a reply. I'm sorry if Outlook Express doesn't follow the RFC you'd like it to - I like OE.

Then go to groups.google if the incomplete content on the new server is so important that you must know what the full discussion was.

Why so outraged? I'm only expressing a point of view. I have no dislike of Indians or Asians at all (I too have always found them good-natured) - that may sound patronising, but it is not intended to be so.

Not sure what you mean by 'inaction'. According to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, it appears that your current government is in office now because it cheated.

I don't think the wage for a software engineer (permanent, not contract) is paticularly high - I think it's taking the biscuit when a VB programmer can get more than a C++ programmer. This happens here in the UK - the City of London banks will pay a lot for VB programmers - and you never know, if they employed C++ programmers they might end up with better software.

Agreed, I don't use companies the offshore their telephone support (e.g. some banks in the UK are closing down access to branch managers and putting you thru to offshore call centres instead).

Typo.

I see - I suppose that was not obvious to me, since I don't use google to post (only to search).

>
Reply to
Joe Butler

Thanks for the bottom posting, here.... I actually read the comments.

The point isn't (and shouldn't be) so much as to what you can handle well, when reading. If you are using Outlook (I won't touch it), and it works well for you... then fine. Frankly, the problem for me isn't so much that I can or cannot use a page-up and page-dn key (I can), but more that I have to often dig around through the trailer to try and see what part of it the comments applied to. By putting responses into context, attached nicely to the parts of writing to which they apply, it's less work on most readers. And for those with perhaps a few thousand messages a day to scan in short order, it helps.

Understood. You don't mind. But that seems a very self-centered position to take. You might consider how others feel about it.

This changes nothing about what experience reading lots of messages a day has taught me -- and many others, as well. The fact is, that it is usually easier (not always, but most often) to handle newsgroup posts that are interspersed, as opposed to top posted.

Now, this is NOT so true for direct 1-on-1 email. It's perfectly fine when I email employees or friends and we've been having a personal conversation and we just write our responses above, leaving the bottom for details should we need it. In these cases, it's a given that we are each following a conversation. In the case of newsgroups, however, there may be a 'keyword' that we 'click on' and then suddenly wonder if we have something useful to say about it. But without some sense of context present within immediate view nearby, we have to page around or look back through older mail to see what may be the fuller context and that takes time. But with comments immediately following the points they refer to, it's much easier to see within short order.

I have.

Are you suggesting that this is a good way to write and communicate with others?

I hate OE. Used it for years because it "came with Windows." But I won't even look back, now. It'll be some years before I even consider the idea, again.

For me, using Agent, I keep a running context in a data base that lasts 60 days. Usually, that's more than enough time, so I rarely need to go to google.

But the point really is that it is important to know WHAT is being responded to, in a poster's response. If that is completely missing, then that is REALLY BAD. If it is all dumped to the end of the post, then it's not so bad, but it still may make figuring out what the writer was specifically talking to, difficult to fathom at times. Even 20 seconds delay having to ferret this out is too much, usually. It's not too much, if I decide to write a response, of course. But I don't respond to most messages -- in fact, a very, very few of them. So the seconds really add up for all those other messages.

And thanks for the consideration in your post, Joe. Appreciated.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Nor I, but we all see the silly quotefree newbie messages with the subject changed every two minutes. The neighborhood is going to pot.

--
"If you want to post a followup via groups.google.com, don't use
 the broken "Reply" link at the bottom of the article.  Click on 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
CBFalconer

...posted in reply to something that was posted a year ago.

I think we need a new phrase; The neighborhood is going to googlegroups.

...until they break their software in some new way.

Reply to
Guy Macon

If you're so confident that you need no context, then why do you duplicate other messages within your own?

Reply to
Simon

If you're the last competent person in the whole world to lose their job, there won't be much that you can spend the money on that hasn't been made by incompetent fools.

But I think we're there already. Yay capitalism.

Reply to
Simon

Or the fate of capitalism...

Not that the other alternatives were much nicer though!

Reply to
Lanarcam

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