DHASKIN@CLARKU.BITNET (Denis W. Haskin, Manager, Technical Services) (07/25/87)
At the risk of propagating yet another meta-discussion... The recent exchange between Zar@Xhmeia.CalTech.Edu and Bob%Howard%Center- @UtahCCA, which I felt sort of rounded out a week full of too much SYS$ANNOUNCE and hacker philosophy, brought home a couple of points about Info-VAX, its use, and its misuse. o They are both right in saying "read the manual and don't read my mind." Info-VAX is most useful when the topics are those not available or not complete in other sources (such as DEC or other manuals, or other people at your site). While this is a blob of gray matter (what's incomprehensible to one may be daily routine to another, so...), a good rule of thumb - which I think most people follow already - is that one shouldn't turn to Info-VAX until about the third or fourth manual. And then, be explicit! Once zar@xhmeia explained his *real* reason for posting the query (which wasn't clear originally) it turned out it was a very appropriate message. If the original posting had been more explicit, 95% of the respondents would *not* have responded, because it was beyond merely looking it up in section 2.3.11.1 of Manual X. o Bob was way out of line with his flame at Zar, which was directed at him personally and *unnecessarily* rude (if you haven't yet apologized, you should). Flames are fine, when they're appropriate and directed at software, hardware, organizations (to some extent), and the like, but leave 'personality' (for want of a better word) out of it. If you really have to flame at someone personally, send mail to that person and let them know how you feel; don't send it all over the world just to make yourself feel good. o I unfortunately have to strongly disagree with Zar's suggestion of responses to an individual rather than to the net. The whole point of this effort is the exchange of information. Granted, 80% of the traffic may not be interesting or pertinent to my situation, but I would hate to miss the 20% that is, and I'm willing to slog thru the 100+ daily messages for it. If all the traffic is going on between individuals I think the quality of information could suffer. Again, explicit, concise messages with good Subject: lines (even though some Mailers chuck them) or a clear indication of the contents within the 1st paragraph really help. o Zar suggests replying to an individual and waiting a week for the summary posting. I don't know what throughput is like thru Info-VAX on the whole, but my gut sense is that we here on the Bitnet side are anywhere from 1 to 3 days 'behind' (sometimes longer), and I imagine parts of the Internet are even further behind. It is unfortunately unavoidable that discussions will go on for several days. One of the fundamental problems may be that the realm of Info-VAX is too big; is it possibly now time to split it into subgroups? Hardware / Layered Software / System Software / Tuning / Etc. Then members could subscribe only to those groups to which they are directly interested. I hope that common sense and etiquette will prevail. And by the way, flames to me, please. % Denis W. Haskin Manager, Technical Services % % ----------------------------------------------------------------------- % % DHASKIN@CLARKU.BITNET Office of Information Systems (617)793-7193 % % Clark University 950 Main Street Worcester MA 01610 %