HONORS@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (10/06/89)
Attention all Newsgroup users! My name is Travis Butler, and in addition to being a very interested newsgroup relatively novice user, I am a reporter for the university newspaper at the University of Kansas. I would like to write an article on the NEWS system and try to explain to the "general public" just what people do here. It would be a great help if any interested parties could answer the following questions for me: 1. Your full name 2. Your organization 3. Your position at the organization (i.e. junior, senior, grad student, professor, researcher, dean, etc.) 4. What do you use the news system for? 5. How has it helped your work? 6. Is there anyone you regularly talk to? 7. What have you been able to do on the nets that you couldn't do before you used the news system? 8. How do you like the news system? 9. What would you change? 10. Any other comments you would like to make on the news system. I apologize if I am breaking one of the net "unwritten rules," but I haven't been using the system long enough to have picked up everything. Please mail all responses to honors@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu. Thank you.
jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin) (10/13/89)
[ yet another student asking for information about how people use the net, multiply posting three times that I've seen so far ] One thing you should learn is the difference between multiple postings and cross-postings. The latter means that only one copy of your message gets transmitted; this saves on filestore (gigabytes, spread over the world) and communication costs (probably hours of line time); with most newsreader programs, it also saves human time (thousands of hours, spread over all readers) because people only need to see the article once. I see no earthly reason why we should help you when you aren't willing to make the preliminary investigation of the Usenet's technology that would have stopped you making such a grossly wasteful mistake. It hardly says much for your ability as a research scholar. A reporter for the National Enquirer would probably have done better. You could, for example, have asked an experienced local user, or your system manager, or posted to news.newusers.questions to ask how to go about it. This probably needs to go into the Frequently Asked Questions file. The answer should be along the lines of "piss off, unless your investigation poses a really interesting question". [ followups directed to news.newusers.questions ] -- Jack Campin * Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND. 041 339 8855 x6045 wk 041 556 1878 ho INTERNET: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk USENET: jack@glasgow.uucp JANET: jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs PLINGnet: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack