Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!bionet!uwm.edu!rutgers!netnews.upenn.edu!jes From: jes@mbio.med.upenn.edu (Joe Smith) Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts Subject: Re: Direct Mail Responses Message-ID: Date: 3 Aug 90 01:55:01 GMT References: <9008021713.AA04687@genbank.bio.net> <1513@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu Organization: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Lines: 94 In-reply-to: steffen@hawk.bcm.tmc.edu's message of 2 Aug 90 18:42:00 GMT Having flamed in public to my own embarrassment more times than I care to admit, and having been burned by 'stupid' fences built into the software, I preface this message by saying 'I understand where you're coming from'. That said, it seems you have some (all too common) misconceptions on several points. > The filthy UN*X software wouldn't take my article BECAUSE I DIDN'T > WRITE ENOUGH!!! I believe this is a (perhaps misbegotten) attempt to enforce a point of net-etiquette: namely, it is considered bad form to post a followup article which contains only the quoted article plus a few lines of added comments - which is exactly what you were about to do. If you think about it, this is a reasonable policy. Whether or not the news software should enforce it in this way, apparently without explaining the reason behind the limitation is another story. Include enough of the message, quoted appropriately, to make it clear what your comments are referring to, but *no more*. In some cases, you may need to paraphrase the gist of the previous article. Remember, readers of your article can usually go back and retrieve the entire article if necessary. If you get the standard USENET groups, subscribe to the 'news.announce.newusers' group. There is a wealth of information there for novice netters. > ...BUT NO, because the amount of new > material I added did not exceed the amount of material I quoted, IT > REFUSED TO ALLOW ME TO POST! > ... > really, if I am to be allowed to post this at all, I have to use lots > and lots of words. If the included text is longer than your comments, you need to ask yourself 'is my comment really worth posting to the world?'. If it is, then maybe you need to reduce the quoted part. The intent is to *reduce* the amount of 'noise' on the newsgroups, not increase it! > The filthy UN*X software... Rn, that 'filthy' software which finally did post your message, after trying vainly to keep you from embarrassing yourself :-), is not 'Unix software'. It was written (primarily) by Larry Wall at the JPL who, out of a spirit of community, developed it and gave it to your site for the asking. If you had any idea of how complex a beast it is, and the work that went into it; or how much Baylor would have had to pay if AT&T had written it, I'm sure you wouldn't think so little of it. You must understand that a lot of the 'Unix software' owes a great deal to such unpaid efforts. There hasn't been enough of a market for any company to sink a great deal of money into. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsoft has spent more developing MS-WORD or OS/2 than AT&T has spent on Unix in all of it's 20+ years. Most of these people have 'real' work to do (unlike us :-)) and the last thing on the list is to 'idiot-proof' it. This is changing rapidly, fortunately for all of us. > Semi-seriously, those of you who wonder why biologists stay away from > computers, consider this: If my scintillation counter, or > spectrophotometer, or whatever ever did something like this to me, I > would send it right back to Beckman. And I _like_ computers. Have you ever returned an instrument because *you* didn't know how to use it? Unix really ought to better, but consider this - it takes a significant amount of effort to learn to use those instruments effectively (I mean other than just rote button-pushing). Yet I've seen so many 'biologists' sit down and expect to carry out a complex task on the computer *without so much as cracking a book*. Yes, it shouldn't be any harder than it needs to be, but most people have very unrealistic expectations about using a computer. > If I ever catch the SOB's from Bell Labs who invented UN*X, I will dry > their hair with my microwave. ... That's odd, I believe the computer science community awarded Ken Thompson their highest honor for just that accomplishment. In spite of it's geeky, unfriendly appearance, Unix has contributed tremendously toward making computers really useful, and will continue to do so. Unix has plenty of room to grow. Think about it - if we were all using Macs, there wouldn't be a newsgroup to soak up all this excess time we have on our hands! Maybe that wouldn't be so bad... :-)