From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Meta-Flame (was Re: RightBrain Software to Ship Source Code)
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 92 13:34:09 GMT


In article <724@rtbrain.woodside.ca.us> glenn@rightbrain.com
(Glenn Reid) writes:

>Considering that 80% of
>this newsgroup is devoted to one of the following (totally
>useless, inappropriate, or inflammatory) discussions,

>	1.  Ross Perot for president
>	2.  SIMM questions (almost always answered in the FAQ)
>	3.  College Student Ideas for NeXT's Marketing Plan
>	4.  Flames
>	5.  Rumors about NeXT hardware
>	6.  Flames
>	7.  Rumors about Atari, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, etc.
>	8.  Neuron technical support
>	9.  Rumors about Lotus
>	10. News about lousy Campus NeXT dealers

Had to laugh.  Pretty good list.  

>I'd like to point out that the recent (modest) discussion
>about how to set your shell prompt to display the current
>directory (including disclaimers about how this was the
>inappropriate newsgroup, but by the way, here's how I do
>it),

Mea culpa.

>was 13006 bytes.  My posting, including both the RTF garbage
>and the plain-text version of it, was 13961 bytes.

What you missed, possibly, is the old maxim that there's no
scorn like the scorn of the righteous (actually, I just made
that up).  Rightly or wrongly, I think people perceive you
as a successful developer-business-type, so naturally, human
nature being what it is, you have to be Purer than Pure.  

I had no quarrel at all with your announcement about making
sources available, but it probably should have been obvious
that somebody would and it (good old hindsight again) likely
would have been possible to head that off by posting a short
announcement in misc pointing to the full one in announce.
Water over the damn [ha] now, of course.

>I'd also like to point out that Chris MacAskill's sound
>file, for which nobody flamed him (as being both RTF and
>inappropriate) was just short of 100000 bytes.

I missed it completely.  If that's all it was, I would
have yowled too.

>So I ask you, which is more useful and appropriate: a
>question about UNIX prompts that has been answered a
>thousand times in unix-wizards over the last fifteen years,

You have to remember, Glenn, that the vast majority of the
people have not been around 15 years.  Some allowance for
newbies has to be made, especially in a relatively new arena
like the NeXT one.  Some fraction of the people here have
little or no idea about all the rest of the 2000+ groups.

Some of them, I suspect, are insecure or nervous and would
rather not make complete fools of themselves, whereas you or
I have done it so many times now that we're impervious to
the flak that inevitably results if you're not au courrant
of the Very Best or the Very Latest.  If you asked an awk
script question here, someone would be *sure* to point out
that perl is available for the NeXT and you must be a nut
case if you're not using it.  Same thing with the shell
priests.

>I've been doing Usenet for almost fourteen years, and the
>only rules that I still have left are these:

>[good rules]

>I work very hard and I take this all very seriously, and
>every know and then I get torqued out of shape by people
>flaming me.  Rarely, but it does happen.  Please, if you're
>going to flame, at least have some semblance of a reasonable
>argument, and at least do a good job of flaming me.  Boring
>flames are the most heinous waste of bandwidth there is.

After all, it's an art form, and there aren't that many
artists of it.  And, truth to tell, you've been flamed
*very* few times, in my impression.

>Almost everybody I know that finds out that I (still)
>actively read the net asks me "why?!" Indeed, I ask myself
>that.  The real reason is that occasionally Andrew Stone
>posts, and he is one of the greatest humans ever invented,
>and I don't want to miss anything that he posts.

Sorry to have been leading everyone on so long, but the
*real* reason I posted this was so I could say "me too" wrt
Andrew.  "Me too" posts are even dumber than flames, so I had
to disguise this a while.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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