Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:15666 comp.sys.misc:1442
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!umd5!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!iuvax!bobmon
From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Proposed comp.sys.ibm.pc.tech
Message-ID: <8837@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 17 May 88 23:39:56 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (RAMontante)
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Indiana University
Lines: 41

Well, I am strongly OPPOSED to it!  There are many interesting postings, which
spin off other postings that are themselves interesting but tangential.  I
want to to see those postings.  I DON'T want to have to chase all over the
freakin' net trying to find the article that followed up.  I was quite
interested in this RLL business.  Great -- now I have to subscribe to
comp.periphs, and wade through  an enormous mass of postings about
laser printers for Macintoshes and Vaxen.

Okay, that's more-or-less reasonable, but if I can kill all those to read
the RLL postings in comp.periphs, I can do it in comp.sys.ibm.pc too.
Consider sci.space, sci.astro, sci.space.shuttle.  A lot of stuff gets
cross-posted because it is as pertinent to one ill-defined subdivision as
to another.  What's the point???

Yet Another Newsgroup will not cut down on net traffic.  It will not increase
net traffic, possibly excepting a slight ballooning of control messages.  It
will not make it easier for me to read the things I'm interested in.  It will
not let me avoid the garbage postings, which are not category-specific so much
as person-specific or particular-topic-specific.  It WILL clutter things up
just that much further.

Consider an analogy:  We all like tree-structured directories, right?  We all
like to break our files up into different groups.  Well, the ultimate is to
break a directory up to the point where EACH and EVERY file is the sole leaf
of its own particular subdirectory.  So why don't we all do this?  Because too
much of a good thing is a bad thing, that's why.

I want technical articles.  The articles I don't want to see, I can 'next'
past or 'kill'.  I really don't want to waste my time and energy deciding
which subdivision of the topic-universe my latest thought should be pigeon-
holed into.  It's the thought that counts, not the bureaucratic assumption
that all thoughts must fit into exactly one of a set of pre-approved
categories.

You wanna flame me for this?  Fine.  Flames to alt.flame.  You already have a
pigeonhole for that.  In fact, this whole discussion should be in
comp.newsgroups (or whatever the correct name is) -- by posting here, you
tacitly admit that finding the proper pigeonhole isn't the important part of a
posting.

Sick of this penchant for stereotyping everything ahead of time,
	-Bob Montante