flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (09/01/89)
Lines: may be nice information but it's useless for transport. Newsreaders could easily count lines for you; characters if you think linecounting is too expensive. Characters is more interesting anyway. (n.b., characters are more expensive to count with record-oriented files, e.g., IBM mainframes.) Organization: is also pretty useless, misleading to novices, and often duplicated in the signature. Anyone interested in zapping it too? -- Felix Lee flee@shire.cs.psu.edu, *!psuvax1!flee
nagel@ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel) (09/01/89)
flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes: >Lines: may be nice information but it's useless for transport. >Newsreaders could easily count lines for you; characters if you think >linecounting is too expensive. Characters is more interesting anyway. >(n.b., characters are more expensive to count with record-oriented >files, e.g., IBM mainframes.) Hmm. So you think it is preferable to have newsreaders around the world recreate the same information hundreds if not thousands of times [:-)] than to have the transport system ensure its presence and creating it if necessary once? And are you volunteering to patch all of the newsreaders out there to now generate this information independently? I think some people are forgetting that we are striving toward a better system of sifting through news. Deleting "sift" information such as Lines or Organization is taking a step backwards. -- Mark Nagel UC Irvine, Department of Information and Computer Science ARPA: nagel@ics.uci.edu UUCP: ucbvax!ucivax!nagel
flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) (09/01/89)
In <1989Aug31.204014.24061@paris.ics.uci.edu>, Mark Nagel <nagel@ics.uci.edu> writes: > I think some people are forgetting that we are striving toward a > better system of sifting through news. Deleting "sift" information > such as Lines or Organization is taking a step backwards. Do you really care about lines in an article or would you be happy with any indication of size? Character counts are cheap on Unix systems; it would be easy to add articlesize to "rn". NNTP readers would need changes to NNTP, hmm. Is Organization: really useful in sifting news? What can you sift with Organization that you can't sift otherwise? But if you're interested in news sifting, why not a Word-Index: header that lists all the words in the article by frequency? Does this sort of thing really belong in the header? -- Felix Lee flee@shire.cs.psu.edu, *!psuvax1!flee
msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) (09/02/89)
I've refrained from posting until now, but I too am strongly in favor of "Lines:", for the reasons stated by others -- useful for screening, de facto standard, and all that. The fact that some other people do not prefer to use it that way doesn't alter the fact the some people *do*. I am also strongly in favor of widespread use of C News, and anyway there would be widespread use of C News whether I was in favor or not. Since the "Lines:" header, if present, should be put on at the originating site, I too am asking that C News be changed to do so -- and not optionally. If the only gain by its elimination is the 10 bytes or so of the article header, I suggest that many more bytes could be saved by reverting to the old style serial numbering in the Message-Id field, as this would shorten the "References:" lines also. -- Mark Brader "Bad news disturbs his game; so does good; SoftQuad Inc., Toronto so also does the absence of news." utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com -- Stephen Leacock This article is in the public domain.
coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge) (09/03/89)
msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) writes: >I am also strongly in favor of widespread use of C News, and anyway there >would be widespread use of C News whether I was in favor or not. Since the >"Lines:" header, if present, should be put on at the originating site, >I too am asking that C News be changed to do so -- and not optionally. I think the Lines: feature in C News should still be optional, as long as Lines: is not a required header in the RFC. I also think the RFC needs a rewrite, and at that time it should be decided if Lines: is worth making required. That said, I think the C News _should_ make Lines: a default setting, and include instructions on how to turn it off if desired. If Geoff and Henry aren't willing to do that, than they really should put in explicit notice in the installation script saying "default is to not generate Lines:, but most of the net thinks it's a good idea; do you want to generate Lines: [n]?". >If the only gain by its elimination is the 10 bytes or so of the article >header, I suggest that many more bytes could be saved by reverting to the >old style serial numbering in the Message-Id field, as this would shorten >the "References:" lines also. I agree. Saving bytes isn't an overriding reason to delete a feature. --John -------------------------------------------------------------------------- John L. Coolidge Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself) Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
leonard@qiclab.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) (09/05/89)
Lines is rather useful. I may be willing to read 30 lines of ranting on a subject that I'm not about to read 300 lines on. "Size" doesn't convey quite the same info. Lines maps fairly well to "screens", whereas "size" doesn't give me any idea how many screens of junk I have to wade thru. As for Organization, it has often been the only way I could figure out where a poster was (short of grepping the maps files). This can be very important when reading "for sale" or other location dependant articles. -- Leonard Erickson ...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard CIS: [70465,203] "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short
denny@mcmi.uucp (Denny Page) (09/05/89)
nagel@ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel) writes: >Hmm. So you think it is preferable to have newsreaders around the >world recreate the same information hundreds if not thousands of >times [:-)] than to have the transport system ensure its presence and >creating it if necessary once? Is this not what computers were invented for? :-) Several people have argued that a Bytes header is far more useful than Lines (I myself tend to agree with this... this is the _real_ size of the article, and it could be used for minor verification of munged articles as well), should we add a Bytes header as well as a Lines header? What about a Words header? All are useful for junking articles. If you really want a header that would be useful for rejecting articles, how about a Caps: header containing the percentage of upper case characters? Anything over 15 percent is a flame fest to be avoided at all costs (after all, how much can an extra 8 bytes in every article really cost? :-). Since several people want Lines, several people want Bytes, one person (:-) wants Caps, and hordes of people don't care, why not leave it to the reader? -- Someday has arrived
gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (09/06/89)
It's trivial for each site to recompute the Lines: value if it wants
it. NNTP servers can compute it for their clients, either when they
store the message, or when the client asks for it. If a news reading
program doesn't want to read way out to the end of a 60K message before
displaying the first screenful, fine -- it can read a few hundred lines
and report the message as "long" rather than give an exact count.
I mean, jeez!
There is no point in transmitting it around the countryside. My uucp
summary for August shows that hoptoad received more than 170 megabytes
and sent almost 300 megs, spending almost thirteen full days (319
hours) on the phone. Thank you Telebit! but I wouldn't object to
cutting out 1% of that by dumping Lines: headers! I fully agree with
Geoff and Henry that "Lines:" is one of the bogus headers that is
polluting the Precious Bodily Fluids of our network. (One way that we
disagree is that I think wasting bytes on uselessly long message-ID's
is also a problem; they don't.)
On the other hand, a good cryptographically secure hash function to
provide a checksum of messages would be quite useful. Usenet has been
dropping and mangling messages for too many years now; we can do better
with minimal effort. I envison the checksum being in the message-ID so
that if you see a reference to a message-ID and later obtain the
message, you are guaranteed that you actually got a true copy of the
message in question.
(A cryptographically secure hash function is one where it is quite hard
to change the message and predict what result that will have on the
hash value. For example, changing the meaning of the message while
leaving the hash the same is hard in a cryptographically secure hash
function. It's not hard at all with things like CRC's.)
--
John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com
"Watch me change my world..." -- Liquid Theatreweemba@beaver.ics.uci.edu (Matthew P Wiener) (09/09/89)
In article <8452@hoptoad.uucp>, gnu@hoptoad (John Gilmore) writes: >It's trivial for each site to recompute the Lines: value if it wants >it. NNTP servers can compute it for their clients, either when they >store the message, or when the client asks for it. Hey, I'm glad to hear it. I would like *somebody* to do it. C news is the easiest target, since Henry and Geoff stuck their necks out and made the change. You and Coolidge have convinced me that it's not 100% fair to pick on C News here. > If a news reading >program doesn't want to read way out to the end of a 60K message before >displaying the first screenful, fine -- it can read a few hundred lines >and report the message as "long" rather than give an exact count. >I mean, jeez! Perhaps you merely think or conjecture "jeez" here. I wouldn't bother anthropomorphizing my program here--it's the programmer who doesn't want to do it, after wrestling with buffering in the ideal case. My program can also say "too bad, unbuffered: your time is being wasted to preserve USENET's Precious Bodily Fluids". Everyone's trying to pass the buck, is all. > I fully agree with >Geoff and Henry that "Lines:" is one of the bogus headers that is >polluting the Precious Bodily Fluids of our network. (Are you aware that by referring to PBF you sound like sarcastic support for "Lines:"? Please, see DR STRANGELOVE again and the allusion *supra*.) You think the phone cost is the most important expense to minimize; I believe--as Brad Templeton has argued--that user dead time is, that, plus my own time spent programming. Just as they've been convinced that "Supersedes:" has a use, perhaps now they can be convinced that "Lines:" has a use--with the understanding that it will vanish from C News when an agreement about where to put it is achieved. -- -Matthew P Wiener (weemba@beaver.ics.uci.edu, weemba@math.berkeley.edu)