wtf is the deal?

[David K. Wall]

Tom <tom@nosleep.net> wrote:

> I didn't top post anything after ANYONE asked me to stop.
> If anyone said anything, I never saw it.
> As far as reading backwards in time, that is exactly the preferred
> way for Engineering, unless comments are inlined with quetsions,
> etc.
>
> I don't want to have to constantly scroll past what I already read
> a dozen times to get to what was responded to last.
> This is the 'proper' way to converse technical info, at least in
> the engineering world.

Where I work most people's experience with email is solely MS-Outlook
(they don't know from usenet), so the convention at my workplace is
"sedimentary" or top-posting order. I don't like it, but rather than
confuse everyone else when there's a long email discussion, I follow
the convention.

The convention here is NOT top-posting. You might not like it and
you might think it's stupid, but if you ignore the conventions of the
community the community will ignore you.

If you travelled to Britain, would you insist on driving on the
right-hand side of the road? After all, it's just a convention, and
those silly Brits will surely see the light after you show them how
to drive properly. What would actually happen, though, is that
everyone would honk at you and you would cause a wreck.

Stop driving on the wrong side of the road.

--
David Wall

[Tom]

> Having worked in fields ranging from embedded systems to software QA,

> I can definitively state that you're wrong. That is not the 'proper'
> way to do anything but confuse and irritate your audience.
>

Well, so far the hundreds and thousands of engineers I communicate with
communicate the way I described.
However, as you can all clearly see, I am obliging your requests.
I was just trying to understand why you all do it differently.
I'm not speaking to you in particular, but apparently many on usenet have
serious issues and should have been cops, since they seem to like being the
usenet police.

> -=Eric
> --
> Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
> typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
> -- Blair Houghton.

[Tom]

..

>
> Can we get back to Perl now?
>
> --keith
>

OK, but one final word. In my work, the entire threads must be kept intact
so everyone involved can follow the flow and know all the details.

Tom

[Eric Bohlman]

"David H. Adler" <dha@panix.com> wrote in
news:slrnbml91g.j3k.dha@panix2.panix.com:

> That's the point. Context *is* important. The idea is that you trim
> out the stuff that isn't relevant to your reply. That way there isn't
> anything irrelevant to "scroll to the bottom" of.

And that's one of the big differences between Usenet and email,
particularly corporate-internal email. When replying to the email
equivalent of a memo, in some corporate cultures snipping anything one's
superior wrote may be seen as disrespectful. But here on Usenet, we aren't
divided into bosses and subordinates. We have archives and references that
make it possible to get the full text of what was being replied to. And
we're writing not to be read by one person, but by thousands of them.

[Eric Bohlman]

"Tom" <tom@nosleep.net> wrote in news:3f6b4a8f$1@nntp0.pdx.net:

> OK, but one final word. In my work, the entire threads must be kept
> intact so everyone involved can follow the flow and know all the
> details.

In Usenet, unlike arbitrary email exchanges, we have threading, message-
IDs, and archives to achieve those goals. Therefore it's not necessary for
each new article in a thread to embody the entire history of the thread.
I strongly suspect that many of the email conventions in your work are
based more on CYA considerations than anything else, considerations that
don't apply here.

[David K. Wall]

Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net> wrote:

> And we're writing not to be read by
> one person, but by thousands of them.

/me looks around wildly, suddenly gets stage fright, and shuffles
away.....

[Tintin]

"Tom" <tom@nosleep.net> wrote in message news:3f6b465b@nntp0.pdx.net...

> > Having worked in fields ranging from embedded systems to software QA,
> > I can definitively state that you're wrong. That is not the 'proper'
> > way to do anything but confuse and irritate your audience.
> >

>
> Well, so far the hundreds and thousands of engineers I communicate with
> communicate the way I described.

Yes, but that has been via email. There is a big difference in
communication methods between email and Usenet. I'll let you read all the
various Usenet tutorials to see why.