NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/os/msdos/programm/8981

Text File | 1992-09-02 | 3.0 KB | 58 lines

Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Path: sparky!uunet!sun-barr!ames!agate!usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu!ncoast!brown
From: [e-mail] (Stan Brown)
Subject: Re: Novice question: how to boot from a bat file?
Organization: Oak Road Systems, Cleveland Ohio USA
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 01:38:29 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Lines: 47

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Timo Salmi) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Tony Porczyk) writes:
>>[e-mail] (Timo Salmi) writes:
>>>In article <adgn1#[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Tony Porczyk) writes:
>>>>begin 666 reset.com
>>Well, not to get picky, but the uuencoded post was 1 line long, your
>>preaching was 5 pages long.  Talk about a waste of bandwith.
>
>I am very sorry to see that there always are users who either miss
>or pretend to miss the point when they have such a nifty term as
>"waste of bandwidth" in their vocabulary.

Sorry Timo, but I'm with Tony on this one.  _Posting_ any sort of
message to the effect that another article should not have been posted
is almost always making the problem worse.  _Emailing_ may be
beneficial.

The assumption behind your post is that people read it before they post,
and then decide not to.  I don't think that assumption is accurate.
From the way they're phrased, it seems that most of the off-charter posts
in newsgroups are the result of people posting _without_ thinking, often
without even reading anything in the newsgroup.

So the people who commit those offenses are not going to be reached by
your posted article because they won't read it--most likely they don't
even subscribe to the newsgroup before posting their first article.
Posting an article won't prevent first-time offenses.  And to
discourage repeat offenders, private email is almost
always better than a public article, because email takes (as you know)
a far smaller share of resources; the rest of us, who already know better,
don't have to read it; and a polite and private request may succeed
where a public rebuke, however politely phrased, falls on deaf ears (as
this one will, I fear).  When once a discussion on netiquette is
started publicly, it risks degenerating into a flame war, or at least
triggering other tedious articles (like this one, perhaps).

In this case, however, both you and Tony missed what IMHO is the most
important point: the original article omitted quite important facts
which are in the FAQ.  Disregarding those facts, as the article did, can
lead to a loss of data on one's hard disk.  The question of whether
binary should have been posted is nugatory, since the subject was more
fully covered by the FAQ list.
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems                      [e-mail]
"Self-esteem, n.  An erroneous appraisement."
"Self-evident, adj.  Evident to one's self and to nobody else."
                                               --Ambrose Bierce