yosi@ucbesvax.UUCP (09/22/84)
> This message is in regards to the question I inadvertently sent out to > net.general a while back, asking about the symbol :-)... > > I thank those of you who were nice enough to answer, in spite of the > fact that I posted the article to an inappropriate newsgroup. > > As for the large number of you who flamed viciously about it, I urge > you to think back to the days when even you were new to this system, > and considered that type of question to be a *general* question... > > > :-( > > Bill Heiser > decvax!cca!heiser *** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE ***
rch@brunix.UUCP (Rich Yampell) (09/23/84)
I send my hearty thanx to Bill Heiser about the :-) question. As a new
net person, I myself was quite confused about that symbol and was thinking
of putting up a questioning posting myself, so I was glad to see his.
But it really pisses me off to hear that people flamed about it. Boy,
some people are really pompous. I've seen that damn symbol on just
about every board I've read, so I don't see how it could be any more
*general*!!! So I ask the sophisticated, hot-shot net-gurus, who I
bow down to and recognize as my personal saviours: JUST WHERE THE HELL
SHOULD SUCH A QUESTION GO IF NOT NET.GENERAL?!? I defy you to come up
with any issue which is of more *general* interest to people on the
net.
>:-(
Rich Yampell\chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuqles) (09/24/84)
> So I ask the sophisticated, hot-shot net-gurus, who I > bow down to and recognize as my personal saviours: JUST WHERE THE HELL > SHOULD SUCH A QUESTION GO IF NOT NET.GENERAL?!? I defy you to come up > with any issue which is of more *general* interest to people on the > net. Where? Well, lets see. These questions are answered by re-occuring postings in net.announce.newusers. These questions are answered by an article called Emily Post (written by some ho-shot net-guru named chuqui) that is distributed with the news sources (as well as being posted on a regular basis to net.announce.newusers). What, you say that you've never SEEN any of these wonderful things???? Gasp, what a pity. I would heartily suggest that you talk to your local system administrator then, or to one of the other local users on your site, or if you ARE the system administrator AND the only user AND a brand new site then I'd suggest talking to the administrator of the site you hooked up to. What's the point of all of this? Just that there are times when it ISN'T appropriate to use the net. When you send a message to net.general it goes to more than 2000 sites on four continents. 8-10 thousand people will see that message. It costs money to transmit, takes disk space to store, and uses people's time to read. (As an aside- if we assume 7000 people read an article and it takes them 15 seconds to read a message you have just used up 29 man hours of time... At $60/hour that's about $1700 dollars of lost human productivity. Of course the incremental cost is low since this is spread out over 7000 people but that is just helps hide the total cost). You could have gotten the same answer for the same question a lot faster by thinking a bit about who you could ask locally and you wouldn't have had to waste a lot of the networks time. Whether or not the flames were appropriate is another point. Chances are people over-reacted. Of course, since you are new to the net you probably haven't figured out that there is a good reason for people to over-react. The signal to noise ratio in some groups is unconfortably high, and most of the noise is caused by people who don't think before they type. Flaming is usually more noise-- it makes flamers feel better but it rarely addresses the problem. Education seems to be the solution, but education is in the hands of the administrators and seems to be pretty slack most of the time. chuq -- From the Department of Bistromatics: Chuq Von Rospach {amd,decwrl,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
gino@voder.UUCP (Gino Bloch) (09/25/84)
[flame here] And, Chuq, you forgot to add: the ensuing generation of traffic from gurus, explaining why one shouldn't ask about ``:-)''. -- Gene E. Bloch (...!nsc!voder!gino)
haeckel@stolaf.UUCP (Paul C. Haeckel) (09/26/84)
WHERE THE HELL SHOULD IT GO??
How about in net.newusers, where it belongs - which is also
one of the, if not THE, first groups you should read if you are
just starting to read news, much less *post* it.
Paul Haeckel
ihnp4!stolaf!haeckel
OR
decvax!stolaf!haeckel