Re: [HACKERS] Off-topic: Communication. (was: Connect string again)

[First for those who didn't see the begining of this thread, I'm one of
those who when emailing from work, has to use Outlook. I'm hoping that I'm
going to be able to get procmail or sendmail to divert stuff from these
lists to one of the Linux boxes I have there.

PS: If anyone knows how to configure sendmail.cf to forward mail to any
other host other than localhost or the relayhost I'd be interested in
hearing from them.]

On 27 May 1998, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote:

> > It's horrible, isn't it? There is a way to tell M$ Exchange to not
> > put the answered mail at the end. But Exchange isn't able to use
> > international standars, like Re: for reply.- It insist on AW: for
> > the german Antwort.
>
> It is, indeed, horrible. One would think that as time passed, the
> software available to us for communication would get better, and this
> was the case until personal computing started complicating things.
> Those who write software for the mass market know that quality is not
> worth a large investment of time and money. Instead, products must
> come out in ever new versions, each with more colors, longer feature
> lists and more marketing hype than the last.

It's horrible here - middle and upper management seem to love M$ because
its either the presumed standard, or simply because its M$

Worse still, is when a user gets a brand new PC, and moans at us because
it doesn't to the same job as their old Dumb Terminal did (the DT proving
to be more reliable).

> Microsoft is much worse than most (although Lotus and Netscape are not
> that far behind, to name but two). A reasonable explanation for this
> has two parts: first, the teenagers who write software for Microsoft
> have little or no experience with the network community and the way
> things have been done here since the beginning, and second, they have
> the secure knowledge that this does not matter. Thus, what they don't
> know about standards and conventions on the net, they certainly aren't
> going to bother to find out. What they do will be the new "standard",
> effective immediately, because of the label on the box.

What anoys me more with their versions of the "standards" is that they
don't even keep to them within their own product range, or even with
different versions of the same product.

> > So I have to stick with Outlook.
>
> I feel sorry for you if you have an employer so lacking in common
> sense that you're forced to use a Microsoft application for email. It
> is one thing to demand that employees use Microsoft's poor excuse for
> an operating system, but you should at least be allowed to use what
> you want for tasks where it cannot make a difference to anyone but you
> which tool you choose.

Sadly were going down the M$ Exchange route for email also. Even though
it's a log better than what it's replacing (a mail can be 10 lines of 80
chars only), it's a real pig to keep up. Sometimes users call saying that
the server's gone down, when it's their PC deciding to forget the servers
name, or the server deciding that it would be fun to resent the last
months email to every single user (this little gem happens about once
every two months).

> > > I'm considering telling Procmail to dump anything written with Outlook
> > > (that's its name, right?) directly into /dev/null. It takes too much
> > > time trying to figure out what the context of the message is.
> >
> > Good move.
>
> I suspect sarcasm. :-) Actually, I'd like to defend this as being,
> indeed, a good move. I always have so many interesting things to do,
> and very much want to use my time as effeciently as I can. With the
> sheer volume of traffic on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, this means
> that I have to make an effort to get as much out of reading the lists
> as I possibly can.

I agree with you. If I can sort out getting mail from the lists to arrive
at the linux box under my desk, I'd switch over immediately.

> This, unfortunately, includes _not_ reading much of the material posted
> to the lists. But what not to read?
>
> Of course, I try to skip lightly over discussions on topics that I
> don't find very interesting. That's not the hardest part. The real
> problem is in the threads of discussion that I really want to follow.

> In the "good old days", technical mailing lists and newsgroups were
> generally easy to read, because most people followed the same set of
> conventions: text was properly formatted for 80 column terminals,
> common quoting rules made it easy to see what was old and new in a
> message, and selective quoting of relevant bits of what was being
> commented on made it easy to follow a thread of discussion smoothly.

This is the reason I prefer Pine. It's text only, but it handles all of
the standards correctly, formats for 80 column screens (unlike Outlook
which formats it on screen, but a paragraph is still a single line), and
it automatically quotes the message correctly (if you want to place a > at
the begining of the line in Outlook, you have to add it manually, and
format each line manually).

> You could very quickly determine whether a message held interesting
> material or not.

> If some newcomer didn't follow conventions, they were pointed out to him
> or her, and everything was fine.

I remember when I first started on the "Net" 5 years ago, netiquete was
one of the first things you picked up.

> These days, it's not always so easy. In many of the fora I follow,
> things are still the way they were. The NetBSD mailing lists, for
> instance, are easy to read -- almost everybody follows conventions.

That's most probably because they are reading them on NetBSD machines.

> Here on the PostgreSQL mailing lists, however, the picture is very
> much different: every new message that I read is fundamentally
> different from the last, so I have to _start_ by figuring out what the
> syntax and semantics of this particular message happens to be.

This is partly due to the number of different platforms that either
Postgres runs on, or the clients run on.

--
Peter T Mount peter(at)retep(dot)org(dot)uk or petermount(at)earthling(dot)net
Main Homepage: http://www.retep.org.uk
************ Someday I may rebuild this signature completely ;-) ************
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