[OS X TeX] huge digests full of dreck
Oliver Hardt
hardt at u.arizona.edu
Sun Sep 15 16:20:09 CEST 2002
I, too, have the feeling that this email has been send before -- the
"rocket science" phrase was very familiar to me ...
in any case, i agree with the sender in only one point:
quoting discipline. and here i only agree for the reason of
readability -- sometimes people quote an entire message in a RE that
only contains 1 or 2 lines of new text. that is pretty lazy and
makes not much sense to me: this level of redundancy is
counter-productive in regards of the communicative goal.
on the other hand, to me it makes also more sense to create a
mailbox "MaxOSXTex" in which all the msgs of this list are filtered.
then just go by the subject line and don't even open what you don't
want to read. a digest is probably not the most effective way to
read this list -- especially if you want to respond to one mail and
want to quote.
and at least for the american list members the equation
cost=MsgSize*RatePerMin doesn't compute in most, if not all, cases:
you pay 20 bucks or so per month and can be online as much as you
like to.
so, although i think that sometimes these inefficient quoting
techniques are actually a way to prevent communication, i do think
that the dreck that has been produced by this thread (to which i
contributed as well ... sorry) is much more of a nuisance than those
messages that actually addressed a tex-related topic. we have a
listowner to take care for the discipline.
olli.
9/15/02, Adrian Heathcote wrote:
>I have a sense of deja vu here. I am pretty sure that this very same
>message---word for word---was sent out about six months ago. I can
>recall the same listing of 'most useful contributors being the worst
>offenders', and the same un-likening of postings to rocket science.
>
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