gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (11/09/89)
In article <20519@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes: > I forgot to ask. What do you mean by bandwidth and how does that >relate to my signature? He means that the 240 or so characters in your "signature" (the one with all the @ characters) serve no useful function and use up network communication capacity that could be better used for transmitting potentially useful information. Also, many sites have to PAY to receive or transmit that useless garbage. Please show consideration and omit such decorations.
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (11/10/89)
> I forgot to ask. What do you mean by bandwidth and how does that > relate to my signature? > @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ > @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Ken @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ > @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ In older tty-type terminals the ribbon is called a "print band". If you have a lot of characters with a high visual density this can cause excessive wear on the band. Your signature has @-signs, one of the highest density characters in the ASCII character set, all the way across the width of the display. This you use up a lot of "band-width". PS: :-> -- `-_-' Peter da Silva <peter@ficc.uu.net> <peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>. 'U` -------------- +1 713 274 5180. "*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues" -- Quentin Johnson quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu
yakker@ucrmath.UCR.EDU (matt robinson) (11/10/89)
In article <20540@unix.cis.pitt.edu> (Kenneth L Moore) writes: >In article <11576@smoke.BRL.MIL> (Doug Gwyn) writes: >>In article <20519@unix.cis.pitt.edu> (Kenneth L Moore) writes: >==>==> I forgot to ask. What do you mean by bandwidth and how does that >==>==>relate to my signature? >==> >==>He means that the 240 or so characters in your "signature" (the one with all >==>the @ characters) serve no useful function and use up network communication >==>capacity that could be better used for transmitting potentially useful >==>information. Also, many sites have to PAY to receive or transmit that >==>useless garbage. Please show consideration and omit such decorations. >I can't believe that four lines causes any significant problems. Does >anyone know how much is paid to recieve my .sig? .000000001 cents? >Sounds like a mountain out of a mole hill to me. >Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily >identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well. >I still don't know how .sig relates to bandwidth. yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) >@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ >@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Ken @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ >@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ The bandwidth he is referring to is the transmission (across lines, usually rented through the phone company for various purposes, one of them news) of your message through those rented lines, across different nets to other machines across the country. The bandwidth is a specific allocation of this line to your message. Your signature on the end of your message takes up additional room on the bandwidth signal, thereby keeping other messages from going through as quickly (thereby costing more to other machines.) ---------------------------------------*-------------------------------------- "Behold, God, is my salvation, I | Internet: yakker@ucrmath.ucr.edu will trust, and not be afraid.." |+| UUCP: ...ucsd!ucrmath!yakker |+|+| "What lies behind you and what lies |+|+| The University of California before you pales insignificant when |+| at Riverside compared to what lies within you.." | Department of Computer Science ---------------------------------------*--------------------------------------
wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) (11/11/89)
In article <20540@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes: |In article <11576@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: |>In article <20519@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes: | |==>==> I forgot to ask. What do you mean by bandwidth and how does that |==>==>relate to my signature? |==> |==>He means that the 240 or so characters in your "signature" (the one with all |==>the @ characters) serve no useful function and use up network communication |==>capacity that could be better used for transmitting potentially useful |==>information. Also, many sites have to PAY to receive or transmit that |==>useless garbage. Please show consideration and omit such decorations. | |I can't believe that four lines causes any significant problems. Does |anyone know how much is paid to recieve my .sig? .000000001 cents? Noone meant your .sig in itself. A .sig is useful. However, using 3 lines of said .sig to say that your name is Ken is slightly wasteful. Try piping your .sig through tr -d '@', or sed -e '2,4d'; it'll be much more acceptable. Also, you'd be surprised how much 240 bytes cost, passing through thousands of systems... (ack. never do fill-paragraph in jove when you forgot to seperate your text from the included text.) |Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily |identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well. Sure. The first line serves that purpose. The next 3 serve absolutely none. -- Bill Fenner wcf@hcx.psu.edu ..!psuvax1!psuhcx!wcf sysop@hogbbs.fidonet.org (1:129/87 - 814/238-9633) ..!lll-winken!/
bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton) (11/12/89)
In article <20540@unix.cis.pitt.edu> you write: >In article <11576@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: >>In article <20519@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes: >I can't believe that four lines causes any significant problems. Does >anyone know how much is paid to recieve my .sig? .000000001 cents? Hardly. The current cost of transmission alone is approximately 0.25 cents per kilobyte _per_site_. Your .sig is about 0.3 kB. Multiply that by 70,000 sites. Comes out to $52.50. Add in the cpu time and cost of storage, and it's considerably more. Feel important? >Sounds like a mountain out of a mole hill to me. That's 52.5 dollars every time you post it. 85% of it is useless repetition. It's you who made the ersatz mountain out of your lightweight molehill. Feel creative? >Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily >identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well. Identify you as a self-serving computer services thief. Keep it up. Further, it is an insult to the intelligence of tens of thousands of computer-using professionals that you assume we are not capable of remembering your name so that you find that you must resort to banal advertising gimmicks in order to produce your petty brand-loyalty. If you were _worth_ remembering, it would be for the quality and value of your postings, not for your fashion design. Feel successful? >I still don't know how .sig relates to bandwidth. This machine (buengc) has more than once been the victim of unnecessary news blackouts due to an overfull news partition. Considering that almost all computer systems allocate space in blocks, your signature is often the straw that pokes a single byte into the next block. Your 300 bytes are responsible for a 2k disk block, and without any informational content whatsoever having been stored. Feel intelligent? > yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) [79 @'s deleted] >[35 @'s deleted] Ken [35 @'s deleted] [79 @'s deleted] Or do you just feel like an idiot? --Blair "It's not even very attractive."
lee@sq.sq.com (Liam R. E. Quin) (11/14/89)
Kenneth L Moore writes (about his voluminous .signature): > Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily > identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well. No; its purpose is to help people to reply to you with electronic mail. That is why people are only counting the 240 characters of @-signs, not the first line. If your .signature had contained your Postal Address (for example), I expect that no-one would have thought anything about it. Isn't there something in one of the comp.newusers.renamed.today postings about this? (it used to be in mod.announce.newuser, I think, but I have not received that sort of group since then, sorry). Lee -- Liam R. Quin, Unixsys (UK) Ltd [note: not an employee of "sq" - a visitor!] lee@sq.com (Whilst visiting Canada from England) lee@anduk.co.uk (Upon my return to England at Christmas)
lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) (11/16/89)
In article <20540@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes: >I can't believe that four lines causes any significant problems. Does >anyone know how much is paid to recieve my .sig? .000000001 cents? Let's work it out. Assuming a connection between us and Edmonton (our nearest feed) that costs 18 cents per minutes, and a 2400 baud link , in the perfect case we move 240 characters per second. The cost for one second of LD is .18 * (1/60) = .3 cents to move those three lines (yes, I'm ignoring newlines, call setup overhead, etc.). If there are 5000 sites in the same situation, the sum total cost of moving those three lines around is 5000 * .3 = 1500 cents = $15.00 for every article you post. Most sites pay less to get news, but some sites pay more -- *substantially* more. See Brian Reid's postings for a (slightly) more accurate guess as to the actual number of usenet sites. >Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily >identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well. Except that it contains no information that's already in the header. The '@' characters serve no useful purpose, other than to make the signature more visible. In my case, they just give me a headache. I think this is what everyone else is really complaining about. There is NOTHING visually appealing about a bunch of BRIGHT '@' characters on a dark background (and vice versa). I tend to judge people by the contents of what they write. If I want to identify you (say, for a reply message) I'll do it by the headers. Besides, I don't know if I would want to be identified as a yahoo@ *anything* :-) Change the '@' to ' ' or something that doesn't mangle everyones optic nerve and the bitch rate will drop substantially. Or replace them with an utterly useless saying (see below for example :-) -- Lyndon Nerenberg VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University {alberta,decwrl,lsuc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA The Connector is the Notwork.
jwd@sas.UUCP (John W. DeBoskey) (11/22/89)
In article <1894@psuhcx.psu.edu> wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) writes: >In article <20540@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) >writes: |In article <11576@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: >|>In article <20519@unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L >Moore) writes: I sometimes am forced to wonder. Yes: His .sig definately let's someone know who sent the mail. You don't even have to read the name.. No: It's not like everyone else's. However: The last 10 articles I've perused had .sigs varing from 4 to 11 lines. His is the smallest so far. Now think: News is compressed. How much bandwith is required to send a continuous stream of '@' chars, a few bytes of text, and then more '@' chars. Please include the 3 cr's also. I leave this as a problem to the reader. It costs less then sending the average 5 line sig with no repeating characters. Personally I think the guy has a bad attitude for MAYBE 1 of the postings he has made. So what is my opinion. But flaming him for a .sig is just plain silly in my viewpoint. It shows some people aren't thinking when they let their fingers do the typing(aka: disconnect brain, start typing). John W. De Boskey jwd%sas@rti.rti.org (w) jwd%baggins@mcnc.mcnc.org (h)
jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) (11/22/89)
In article <1338@sas.UUCP> jwd@sas.UUCP (John W. DeBoskey) writes: > However: The last 10 articles I've perused had .sigs varing > from 4 to 11 lines. His is the smallest so far. According to "netiquette", anything above four lines is probably inappropriate except in extreme situations. That's why many news posting interfaces reject everything after the fourth line of a .signature file. Also, signatures are supposed to contain useful information. Three lines of @'s is not useful information. Therefore, if all he really needs to put into his signature is his username and address, he should have a one-line signature, with about twenty characters in it. THAT would be an acceptable signature. My point is that the question isn't whether his signature is wasteful or not compared to other signatures, but rather whether his signature is wasteful *in and of itself*. However, quite frankly, I'd rather see 11 lines of useful information than 4 lines of @'s. > Now think: News is compressed. How much bandwith is required to send > a continuous stream of '@' chars, a few bytes of text, > and then more '@' chars. Please include the 3 cr's > also. I leave this as a problem to the reader. It costs > less then sending the average 5 line sig with no repeating > characters. Not ALL news is compressed. As much as we don't like to admit (and as much as we are trying to change it), there are still sites out there that get their news unbatched and/or uncompressed. Furthermore, one place where news is *not* compressed is when the reader is viewing it. Ideally, an 11-line signature with lots of blank space in it (in the best case, represented as tab characters) will sometimes be transmitted across a tty line faster than a 4-line @ signature. A 4-line normal signature containing useful information will definitely be transferred faster than the @ signature. I'm not sure where the line can be drawn, but I'd say you can get away with a lot longer signature (in terms of lines) for the same transportation costs (in terms of the time it takes it to be sent to the user's terminal) if the signature has lots of blank space, which is usually the case when it represents useful information. And finally, I just don't like seeing three solid lines of @ in a posting. It hurts my eyes. It is abrasive. It is annoying. Just my opinion, of course, but apparently an opinion shared by many people on the net. > Personally I think the guy has a bad attitude for MAYBE 1 of the > postings he has made. So what is my opinion. But flaming him > for a .sig is just plain silly in my viewpoint. It shows some > people aren't thinking when they let their fingers do the > typing(aka: disconnect brain, start typing). Or that "some people" have read and understood the rules of netiquette and understand that signatures are supposed to contain useful information and useful information only. This is not a hard and fast rule that can never even possibly be broken (e.g. Peter da Silva's (sp?) signature with the little drawing in it is probably OK), but a signature containing three lines of @ almost definitely crosses the line. Jonathan Kamens USnail: MIT Project Athena 11 Ashford Terrace jik@Athena.MIT.EDU Allston, MA 02134 Office: 617-253-8495 Home: 617-782-0710