samm (08/09/82)
It does make sense to give your address because the net routes are usually much more roundabout than necessary. For example, I can be reached by '...harpo!houxb!samm', but this article probably has a header involving npois, npoiv, houxi and sundry other nodes redundant for mail. In fact, it helps to have a reasonably up-to-date map of the network. Anybody have one for distribution/posting? Chanchal Samanta BTL-NP
ARPAVAX:arnold (08/10/82)
This is really just a minor tidbit of curiosity, but why do people give their uucp addresses as "...wonderland!alice"? I mean, why have the "..."? Novices will just follow it literally and it will never work, and knowledgeable people will find the path to wonderland. The "..." is implicit in uucp addresses, and is therefore redundant. I really don't care about all the money companies spend sending extraneous "..."s (since they've already probably spent as muchs sending REAL tripe (like this letter)), but I'm just curious as to what motivates this. Ken ucbvax!arnold, arnold@BERKELEY
laura (08/11/82)
I find 'his/her' annoying. I find the incorrect use of 'they' even more annoying, probably because I often catch myself using that abomination. However, the single commonly used english error which bothers me the most, is 'hopefully', which is an ADVERB and does not mean 'I hope'. I catch myself using it, though... I vote we go back to the third person general pronoun, 'he' and its related forms 'his' and 'him' (Middle English scholars involved in the debate over whether there is any relationship between the words 'he', 'him' and 'his', please excuse me), and tell those people who find in such usage the 'proof' of sexist attitudes that they are guilty of an akin sin -- judging people without sufficient information. Further discussion should move to net.nlang, where there was some discussion on 'chairperson' recently. Laura Creighton decvax!utzoo!laura
ld@sri-unix (08/11/82)
The following dribble is the raving of a pit-nicker. Do not bother reading
it unless you are a "hacker" (i.e. you like to nose through others mail,
etc.)
In English texts, it is common practice to indicate that a
quoted sentence is incomplete by pre/post pending "..."
(this might even be a rule rather than practice, I am not an English
major). Since an author of a uucp message is quoting only part of her/his
return address The "..." is inserted in front of an address to indicate that it
may take an unknown path to lead up to "wonderland". If the novice user saw
"...ucbvax!arnold" and tried to mail to "...ucbvax!arnold"
from "WEB40", [s]he would be rudely informed that there was no
such machine ("...ucbvax"). Would this novice user be any more informed by the
return address "ucbvax!arnold"? What would stop this naive user
from mailing to "ucbvax!arnold" and getting the same obnoxious
message that there was no such machine ("ucbvax"). I am sure that
Ken's query was rhetorical (come on, isn't it obvious).
Wouldn't it be nice if mail or uucp knew that "...<important.machine>" meant
that it was supposed to look in a file, maintained by local system
management, which contained the path to "<important.machine>", and
it was supposed substitute a pre-canned path to said machine?
Better still, wouldn't it be wonderful if mail could alias machines as
well as users?
I do not understand the statement that Ken made:
The "..." is implicit in uucp addresses, and is therefore redundant.
There is no implication to my version of uucp that "..." means anything, so it
is not redundant (does this sentence make any more sense than Ken's?).
Remember, all paths lead to ucbvax, but not all of us live there.
Larry Dwyer
...!ucbvax!hpda!ld (take that!)