slamont@network.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont) (12/31/90)
In article <1990Dec30.151724.20808@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: >Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on >/dev/gd4f 231133 99129 108890 48% /usr/spool/news > >231Mbyte spool file; replicate that 20 or so times with other source >group postings, and you're talking a day saved for expires. I'd like that. It seems that what the discussion *should* center around is more efficient file transport and/or storage methods, not whether the postings themselves should be compressed/encoded/whatevered. All of this compression/ decompression and so forth should be invisible to the ultimate reader/user. Making the individual reader go through this process is very user unfriendly. spl (the p stands for pardon me, can I compress a word in edgewise?) -- Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- 1882p@cc.nps.navy.mil -- a guest on network.ucsd.edu NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93943 What is truth and what is fable, where is Ruth and where is Mabel? - Director/producer John Amiel, heard on NPR
kianusch@unigold.UUCP (Kianusch Sayah Karadji) (01/01/91)
In article <4418@network.ucsd.edu> slamont@network.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont) writes: > >It seems that what the discussion *should* center around is more efficient >file transport and/or storage methods, not whether the postings themselves >should be compressed/encoded/whatevered. All of this compression/ >decompression and so forth should be invisible to the ultimate >reader/user. Making the individual reader go through this process is very >user unfriendly. > Yup... I compleatly agree with that ... ... but also if somebody really has problems typing 'man uucico', or 'man uncompress' ... well they shouldn't be trying to compile any of the source codes posted here, because they woulnd't know what they were doing anyway, and that could be dangerouse for them... :-) Kianusch
slamont@network.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont) (01/02/91)
In article <49@unigold.UUCP> kianusch@unigold.UUCP (Kianusch Sayah Karadji) writes: >... but also if somebody really has problems typing 'man uucico', or >'man uncompress' ... well they shouldn't be trying to compile any >of the source codes posted here, because they woulnd't know what >they were doing anyway, and that could be dangerouse for them... :-) In the words of Rocky Rococo, "Maybe yes, maybe no." :-) Please remember that there are all sorts of different folks reading and posting to the net these days. I don't see that it should be mandatory for a net.reader to be a genuine UN*X guru simply to use sources posted. Of course, some base level of knowledge should be assumed, but why place any more obstacles before the reader than necessary. Using myself as an example, I'm not precisely what you would call a UN*X guru, but I am a fairly competent and, if I do say so myself, intelligent programmer. I know enough to get around in UN*X, how to write Makefiles, compile, edit, and so forth, but I don't involve myself with things like networking and operating systems innards more often than absolutely necessary. Why should I? I'm a scientific visualization programmer -- that's what I'm paid to do. Until the poster mentioned it, I'd never heard of uucico (though I did look up and scan the man page for it, so I guess I don't have any problems with man (-:). I've never had to deal with uucp. What does all this blather mean? Well, I guess what I'm saying is that source postings should be just that -- source postings. Nice, friendly, readable source code (even if mucked up a bit with sharisms) that a person of moderate intelligence and skill can look at to see whether they're worth bothering with. I like to see the source in a posting so that I can skim a little bit of it and determine whether it is worth saving (in my case, since I'm a guest on this system, saving means that I have to mail the postings to another account on my local machine in Monterey). While, as Kent suggests, I don't read each and every line of a source posting, I do read at least two or three screensful before I make that decision, just to get an idea of what I'm dealing with, to see if the code is well written or is garbage, and so forth. Some issue has been made of EBCDIC and ASCII in transmission. I don't know what others' experiences are compared to mine, but I've never had any trouble with garbled characters, even though my local machine is an Amdahl, speaking VM/CMS and EBCDIC. Since this point was raised recently, I did a little experiment, sending mail messages containing all of the ASCII printable characters back and forth. Everything seemed to make it back and forth intact. Things looked a little strange on a 3278 terminal, but all of the bits were there. Unless someone can present documentary evidence to the contrary, I'd suggest that the ASCII/EBCDIC issue is somewhat specious. The summary? Cleartext, please. spl (the p stands for please don't use the cent sign in any of your source code...) -- Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (408) 646-2572 -- a guest at network.ucsd.edu -- NPS Confuser Center / Code 51 / Naval Postgraduate School / Monterey, CA 93943 "... most programmers don't even bother going to the metal on machines where the metal is painful and there's no light to see by..." -J. Eric Townsend