bITs and blogs

I'm stunned by the number of people who feel it incumbent upon them to defend top-posting in emails because they don't want to scroll down through the whole discussion thread. Did you miss the point about cropping?

I'm stunned by the (slightly smaller) number of people who feel it incumbent upon them to defend the practice of not cropping because they might want an audit trail. Are you unaware that you don't have to delete every email you recieve immediately after opening it? What kind of audit trail are you going to have if the guy sending you a reply can just edit the quoted text anyway?

anyway.
something like this,
read emails that are ordered
anyone would want to
I find it hard to believe

Obviously, one of your primary uses of email is to participate in mailing lists, hence your adversion to "top-posting." (A term that I had never heard before, probably because I don't do mailing lists.) I contend that mailing lists are not really email. They are, well...mailing lists. All they are doing is using email as a transport mechanism.

"Normal" email traffic consists people conducting a continuious stream of active communication. In "normal" emails, top-posting is the expected norm and, IMHO, bottom-posting (if that's the proper term) would be a huge irritant and should get the sender flamed by anyone and everyone. Besides, if you are in a normal email environment where top-posting is the norm, bottom-posting would be extremely confusing to the receivers and since communication is the reason for sending an email, bottom-posting should be avoided.

So there we have it. If you're participating in a mailing list, especially any draconian groups as were described in the originial post, then by all means bottom-post. Otherwise when working in the normal email world, top-post.

Sorry, but you are wrong about top posting. I've been doing e-mail in
one form or another since the late '70's and have always top posted. It
was the way I was taught to do it on the lists I subscribed to and by
the email I recieved wheter or not from lists. If one is reading a
thread, you already know, or should know, what has gone on before. It
is acceptable to post quotes from the message(s) you are replying to
within the body of your message and do away with the continuum which
follows, so long as the quote is not out of context.

The idea of top posting being bad is a relatively new one, and I have
unsubscribed from lists who insist on replies being placed at the
bottom of a message. There is a reason why most e-mail editors place
the cursor at the top of a reply.

There is nothing more annoying than to have to scroll through six
messages to reach the new text (which may or may not be properly
segregated), which may only be a few lines. Takes more time to scroll
than to read the text.

 Also, yo should have mentione to use plain text. Use of HTML, or,
in the case of MS products, RTF for messages is overkill and not
necesary for the most part. There are sometimes, such as representing a
scientific formula, whe the use of HTML may be indicated. If you must
use eye-candy, even the graphic emoticons, within your text, you
probably don't have anything worth saying. Also, even though the cost
of storage has gone way down, such messages, even if text only, take
more space to store.

\\Steve//

I have to agree with most of the other posters here.  Top-posting is only good when the readers are typically seeing a message and replies for the first time where the text will be read in "logical" order as you put it.  In more common corporate exchanges, top-posting is preferred because we know what the previous messages were about and we only want to see the most recent reply.  The rest is included only for reference and so we only have to archive the last exchange and all replies are then included.  Top-posting may be a good rule for some things but it isn't a solid rule for every situation.  Someone who rants about top-posters in all situations isn't paying attention.

This used to be a matter of preference/style until Outlook/Outlook
Express became the dominant mail client.  Now users are nearly
forced to top post.  The way it does quoting and indenting makes
it difficult for people unused to the proper ways to even see how bad
their reply is going to look.  Also, with the cost of sending an
email being virtually $0.00 per byte, it is not a concern (or even a
thought) how large the email is.  Send 600 lines of quoted text, including quoted sigs, with a 12 meg WMV file attachment. No problem at all.

john alley said:
Don't post in-line unless you are in a situation where you are
pretty sure no-one else is going to reply. Following an interleaved
thread is almost impossible.

$DEITY preserve us!  Impossible for a raccoon, maybe.  No,
even they have the brain capacity to read an email conversation the
proper and most coherent way it can be posted.

I can't understand it.  First people claim that top posting makes
it easier to follow a conversation, an idea whose idiocy has only
become even more pronounced over time, now a statement like this. 
Our schools much have stopped teaching common sense and basic
intellectual understanding.  No wonder the US sucks at anything
requiring more than two braincells.

If this is the current quality of TR membership then it's questionable whether there's any viable reason to remain a member.

Who the hell are you and how much longer will this link be on every TR page?

esabatm

Apotheon wrote: "Odd, nobody seems to have such problems in any of the discussion threads I've ever run across and, in fact, I have never heard of anyone complaining about such a thing before, ever, while holy wars between Outlook Express indoctrinated top posters and 'everyone else' bottom posters seem to crop up semi-regularly."

Roughly 80% of the responses here seem to disagree with you on top-posting (plus this post, as well). Most people in a corporate setting have been in on the thread, so they don't want to scroll down to see the latest reply, but the rest of the conversation is there if you need to go back for reference or save it for documentation. So, apparently only about 20% makes up the "everyone else" you were referring to. I think I'll stick with top posting.  In fact, if everyone would top post, I think that might actually take care of your 2nd point as well. The other 8 are pretty good, though.

So for the first person who added the post, perhaps you don't want to change yet.

And for the person a couple of posts above who suggests that all of us TechRepublic members are idiots and maybe he shouldn't continue to be a member, I wish him well in his future endeavors. Perhaps he could start a new IT community where only those with superior intellect and e-mailing capabilities can join.

1. This has been effectively refuted in other posts. It's not that bottom posting isn't a good thing, it's your monomaniacal insistence upon it in all circumstances.
2. Agreed
3. Nope. Not anymore at least. I've been using email for a couple of decades, and until 5-10 years ago I'd have agreed with you. But today, it's up to the text-based client to parse a message and remove the html. No one cares whether someone using Mutt gets spaghetti html. For portable devices the point is more valid, but they also should have enough horsepower to lose the html on their own. No one argues that word processors shouldn't have styled text, even if its use is often abused. Why should email be different? The argument is academic, in any case. The war is over. You lost.
4,5. OK.
6. Hmm. Following this in the previous item "So: be humble.", we get this here: "I'm a spelling and grammar guru with the
English language". Good spelling is good. But worse than bad spelling are the gurus who delight in pointing out some trivial typo in an otherwise brilliant post.
7,8. OK
9. OK, sort of. Though your yammering on about line width violates your own "Don't be a completely gratuitous
windbag" dictum.
10. See 3 (PO?). Hard line wraps are only necessary if you insist upon plain text email and crummy email clients. I don't care if someone's mailreader doesn't handle line wraps gracefully. That's so last millennium. Another battle lost in a futile war.

Bonus: Yup. Though, in this era of broadband, many ISP's continued use of a 20yr old message size limit stricture of 5MB is silly. Kind of like 20yr old plaintext message format strictures.

In this world of mostly top-posters, I am really pleased when somebody
replies to me with a bottom-posted message.  It is Sturgeon's 10
percent and I feel blessed when it happens.

Just because you've done something for 30 years doesn't mean that it's
the best thing to do, today, even though there were quite likely good
reasons for it, once upon a time.  There is a good chance that the
original reasons have disappeared and all that's left is a habit.

Just because Microsoft tricks you into top-posting is no reason to keep it up.

You might have become so mouse-centric that scrolling has become a
chore.  I feel your pain.  In such a case, you probably don't
realize that a simple Ctrl-End key combination will take you to the
bottom of the message in most modern email clients.  Or a couple
of whacks on the PageDown key.  None of that bothersome scrolling.

A secretary taking the minutes of a meeting does not stack the
sentences in reverse order to which they were uttered.  The email
conversation is more followable (if I may?), if it is recorded in the
same manner as the minutes.  This, also, has become habit, but, a
more efficient habit...it flows.

If the message is only threaded by virtue of continuing subject
matter,  specifially, multiple subjects (like when you're catching
up with a long lost friend) bottom-posting and interleaved posting, in
the same message, works quite well.  This works best for me if I
can color code it, so as to be able to tell, at a glance, who said what
and in which reply they said it.  And cropping is an important
component of such a situation.

I can thinks of times when it doesn't really matter, but, I prefer bottom-posting...less chaotic!

My wife wouldn't appreciate it -- because I'm more like Windows!

Ya got me wound up, so, I think that
I'll say a little more.
I started out top-posting, as best as I
can remember, but, somewhere along the line I found myself writing
messages that were either very complex or had many replies and in either event they
required much re-reading in order to follow the thread as the replies
bounced back and forth. This re-reading was too complicated to do in
a top-posted message. I first started bottom-posting manually, just
to maintain the English language left-to-right top-to-bottom flow,
not realizing that it could be made automatic. Somewhere along the
line, I read similar material to what apotheon has posted, here. I then felt vindicated. Then, to
maintain consistency (the bugaboo of small minds?) with my
conversational cohorts, I went back to top-posting. Sometimes,
however, top-posting is just plain deficient. If you disagree then
you probably haven't had to deal with the levels of complexity that I
have in email, or, you're an extreme organizational genius.

There's a good chance that your message
exchanges don't normally evolve in a manner whereby it matters how
they are laid out. Do you primarily use email for forwarding
jokes, pictures, etc. and frequently say little or nothing? If so,
then, for you, it doesn't matter very much how it's posted. Are they
a series of short one or two line replies? This happens in personal
email, a lot, and in corporate email to such an extent that it
frequently resembles chat in it's brevity. Sometimes this actually
works better with top-posting.

Top-posting might be appropriate, if
your intent is to be creative (in the artistic sense).
Or playful.

I'd say that there are some good
reasons to change to bottom-posting, but, not to the exclusion of
other possibilities. If the message is programmatically
threaded, by all means, enhance the flow...bottom-post!  If it is a
complex and evolving conversation...bottompost!  If it is hard to
hold the parts together and still see the whole...bottompost!

As I've said before, I prefer
bottom-posting...less chaotic.

Now, on to issue 2.  I have personally put cropping to good
use.

Issue 3. Ditto the creative and
playful mentions above.
It depends on what you are doing. Or
to use an analogy: which is better, a Kawasaki or a Cessna?

Issues 4,5,6,7,8. I agree
wholeheartedly.

Issue 9: The rule isn't well known to
me. Makes sense, though. I recall (dimly) reading somewhere, years
ago, that the ideal width for readability is something like 30 or 35
characters. Newspaper columns, maybe?

Issue 10: (see 9.) I sometimes hard
wrap to a fairly narrow width if it appears that the person with whom
I am exchanging messages is having trouble making it fit.

Bonus Issue: Here's another hint. If
you don't want to waste your time dealing with such junk, tell the
sender. Try to find a tactful way to do it, because, many people
will be hurt to hear that their fun is your bane. I try to do the
same, but, it usually takes months for a situation to present itself
in such a way that I can brooch the subject tenderly. And even then,
I suspect that I might come off as arrogant or unfeeling. This only
applies if the sender is someone you care about.

I'm one for top-posting.  In all my years of emailing, I've only ever come across one person who didn't top-post and found reading his emails extremely difficult.  It's certainly not quick, one has to peruse the whole conversation to see if a comment has been added.  It's ridiculous.  Top-posting is most efficient, though I must admit, it can be difficult following a conversation at times if the reply is a one worded message referring to point 3 of my email.

Usually, I don't think too heavily on the OS I'm using. I'm used to
Linux. I'm used to the ways it makes my life easier, the ways it makes
me more productive, the flexibility of the system at my fingertips. I'd
really only notice most of this stuff consciously these days if I
suddenly found myself using an OS that did not grant me these things.
My, how things have changed from the days when Windows was basically
all I knew.

Once in a while, though, something happens that causes me to just
marvel at the wonderful state of affairs on one or more of my
computers. Tonight, I ran an apt-get upgrade (the Debian GNU/Linux
equivalent of Windows Update, basically, but a lot more as it involves
basically every piece of software on my system -- imagine if Windows
Update handled third-party software as well, and did it faster and with
a less obnoxious interface) and was greeted by a beautiful sight. Let
me show you what it said:

After unpacking 1794kB disk space will be freed.Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

See anything interesting? Yes, that's right, after doing a major
software update on this laptop, nearly two megabytes of space were
freed up. When was the last time updating anything on a Windows system
actually freed up any space at all? I'm impressed. One thousand, seven
hundred and ninety-four kilobytes freed up. Hot damn.

This is absurd. For generations medical charts and legal files and case-worker files have been organized with the oldest stuff on the BOTTOM. It is a short-sited person who can't see any value in this. Who wants to rifle through all that stuff to see where the most recent entry begins. Maybe you should sort your inbox with the most recent stuff on the bottom.

First off, I posted a short follow-up to some of this discussion in a separate blog entry. Basically, I'm responding there to all these ridiculous small-picture complaints about cropping as it relates to top-posting. What a waste of bandwidth it is to resend megabytes upon kilobytes of text that has already been sent back and forth a dozen times, all to justify top-posting. If you have to "peruse the entire discussion" or "scroll past the entire discussion" to find the reply, you're doing it wrong.

Secondly, kmatthia suggests I have my email client list most recent emails last rather than first. Um, I do. That is, in fact, the default with the mail user agent I'm using (mutt). It works beautifully. Thanks for the suggestion, though. Of course, I'm not sure you suggested it. Are you trying to make a point about it being hard to find the most recent? See, it's not difficult at all, because I'm using a computer, not a stack of papers. Your points about hardcopy-based record keeping don't apply here. A computer can default to showing you any part of the stack you like first, rather than always starting only at the top. Mine defaults to showing me the "bottom" of the list, where the new stuff has been placed as it arrived. Thus, I get an intuitive top-down progression, and I get to see the most recent stuff when I open my MUA. In fact, it's even better than that: if I have new stuff that fills up more than one screen, it starts by showing me the oldest of the new stuff first so that I will be able to get caught up on context for lengthy exchanges without having to scroll through the list (or flip pages, if this were hardcopy) to find a starting-point after the last thing I'd seen. See how great the digital age can be? Don't limit my efficiency and productivity with inapplicable meatspace data management models that actually slow things down in a cyberspace context. If that's not what you meant, though, I'd like you to tell me what you did mean.

There are rare instances where a top-posted comment is actually a good idea, even discarding for the moment the hell of rearranging a discussion where others have top-posted: a couple of you have made the point that bottom-posting may be the best in almost all cases, but top-posting actually makes sense once in a while. You're right. I chose to avoid mentioning it to keep things a touch simpler and less confusing, and to cut down on the number of people who would take that as carte blanche to top-post without cropping in every instance. Really, top-posting is something one should consider doing when one is steeped enough in bottom-posting wisdom to know the difference between an efficient top-post and mere bending to the weight of peer pressure and the like.

LaFong made the point that hard linewraps are "only necessary if you insist upon plain text email and crummy email clients." Actually, it's necessary if you A) want to keep things more readable (wider paragraphs are harder to read, experimentally validated in psych studies around the same time that it was determined green-on-black was easier to read than white-on-black or black-on-white for monochrome monitors) and B) don't want to be an inconsiderate prick to other people who have crummy email clients. I have an excellent email client that does dynamic line-wraps when needed, and I still prefer hard line-breaks for better readability. In fact, my client will leave other people's stuff unwrapped so that their (often asinine) lack of structure in email is undisturbed in case it might actually be desirable in this case to have longer lines, even while it imposes hard linewraps on my own text for me -- but I can extend it beyond 80 characters any time I want to when composing my own emails if I really want to. I prefer flexibility with a default to something sane and courteous over rigid adherence to an inconsiderate and unstructured "norm".

LaFong also seems to be unaware that even in the US, not only are there many people not using broadband, but the majority of Internet users are still on dialup. There's that self-centered "I got mine" attitude toward email again. Oh, and since the ISP is paying per unit of bandwidth and a bunch of 30MB emails would increase that bandwidth significantly when measured across its entire customer base, 5MB limits on email/attachment sizes makes perfect sense to me. Let me know if you start an ISP, LaFong, so I can avoid it: I don't want to get suckered into using an ISP run by someone with such a short-sighted, business-crippled view of technology as yours, and have it disappear from under me.

LaFong again: I don't tend to go around correcting others' spelling in emails with my little red pen. I just wince at the bad spelling, ignore the email if it's too bad to be able to read (or send a brief note to please rewrite it so it's readable, in rare cases where it's important enough to bother), and move on. The fact I mentioned it here doesn't mean I'm going around correcting people's spelling.

This is getting old. I'm going to stop this reply before it gets too long and go do something useful rather than try to force horses to drink water once they've been led to it.

kmatthia said,

?For generations medical charts
and legal files and case-worker files have been organized with the
oldest stuff on the BOTTOM.?

With something that carries that much
potential for being out of date, I agree with the filo
arrangement. I don't want to rifle through all that stuff, either.
However, it is not a box of files we are talking about. We're
talking about logs of conversations, like the minutes of a meeting.
Said minutes are invariably fifo. Most
message threads run dry in a few days and the clutter of historical
irrelevance is irrelevant.

?Maybe you should sort your inbox
with the most recent stuff on the bottom.?

As a matter of
fact, I do. It works fine for me, but, I also rearrange it when the
need arises.

Bottom posting might be cultured, but in most all cases top posting wins in speed and clarity in communicating what is the most important thing that you want the other person (or people) to know.

TV newscasters don't tell you everything about the war in Iraq before revealing the important new piece of information for that particular day (wouldn't that be an exciting newscast to watch?) so, why would anyone place history in front of the important new information you need to communicate?

I guess it's a choice of creating a message that is one of two things:   A verbose journal of record (which might be needed in rare cases like when a delicate legal issue is involved), or an efficient piece of clear communication.  I'll go with the one that will help the reco[oemt finish faster and with more confidence because they've avoided those moments (or minutes) needed to find the new info in a bottom poster's message.

I would make one suggestion to those who need to communicate a lot of detail in a message:  Consider using bullet points.  Important details can get lost in paragraphs like those I've typed so far.

• But, if you put one idea here
• And the followup idea here
• And, your most important idea here

... whoever has to turn those ideas into reality will have likely have better followthrough.  In fact, I bet I would have better retention of the "10 e-mail Commandments" if you had first provided them as bullet points and then followed up with the details.

In today's short-attention-span world those bullet points would be a visual cue to slow down, focus and read.  A sea of letters, words and paragraphs might be complete in content, but can end up being completely worthless if no one reads it.

Here's a clear example of why context is important: rickk didn't check context, so he doesn't know that I (and others) have, in many ways and several times, already addressed the matters he brings up. I'll repeat, with emphasis and in summary form, some of the high points:

1. Clarity suffers when you're reading stuff in reversed order. If you have to check context, and it's in reversed order, things can get very difficult to understand, and there ends up being a lot of scrolling back-and-forth, as you scroll downward while reading something, then scroll upward to find the beginning of the next item in chronological order.
2. You need to crop stuff not immediately necessary. Crop out the materials that don't provide necessary context. If people don't need to read three hundred lines of discussion history to understand what you're saying, don't send it. If there are a handful of lines, say perhaps six of them, of discussion history that is necessary to understanding your message, then they should be reading it anyway, and posting below it is a good idea.
3. If you want a journal of record, save your emails. Expecting the other guy to always send back unedited discussion history in its entirety is a crappy way to maintain a record of the discussion, and prone to failures.

I am a top poster, will always be a top poster and that is that. I don't want to wade through all the previous conversation just to get to what I'm after to begin with...the reply to my e-mail. After all, I have already read the previous conversation and already know what the main topic is. The only way I will do it another way is if whomever I am working for prefers it done another way. Then I will do it THEIR way. THEY pay my  bills so it is THEIR perogative to dictate how things are done within their own organization.

Like it or not, top posting is the way it has been done for decades and what 'reason' is there to change something THAT DOES WORK and has worked for all those decades. In all those decades, if there was something found to be REALLY wrong with it changes would have been made THEN! Why is it that only now someone wants to upset the status quo simply over a "preference"?

Another "like it or not" is that Microsoft has been able through "their means" to keep practically a steel trap monopoly going with their software. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2496&tag=nl.e539 How many "package computers" come with anything but Windoze installed on them? Yes, you can install your own preferential programs on them but that doesn't change the fact that M$ Windoze is the majority and it's code is written to TOP POST. K.I.S.S!!! THAT is why the MAJORITY of other e-mail programs default to top posting. No rocket science there.

That being said, this blog TOTALLY left out MY personal biggest e-mail peaves: Forwards that have lists and lists (and lists...) of e-mail addresses of people I don't know. Even a BIGGER peave I have is having someone send a composition and/or forward SENDING MY e-mail address to all kinds of people I do not know = INVASION of my privacy...just a little? Think about that one for at least 10 seconds.

Yes, SOME changes CAN be good. This one seems only to create more confusion. So why just roll over and attempt to change something simply for the sake of change based on personal preferences and NOT for RATIONAL REASONS that actually improve the way things work???

PLEASE refer to the PARAGRAPHS referenced by the response below as you read that response. You should then get the TRUE context of the points I was attempting to make ...without the twisted 'editing'. :|

BTW: I DID in deed READ the entire BLOG. I simply agree with the MAJORITY of responders on this board.

The commentary by btljooz begs for a response, so here it is.

"I don't want to wade through all the previous conversation"
How many times do I have to say it? Learn to crop! Criminy. Learn to read, too, folks.

"Why is it that only now someone wants to upset the status quo simply over a 'preference'?"
I'm going to make a wild guess here: you started using email and similar communication methods in the mid-'90s or later on Windows, didn't you? It wasn't until about then that top-posting started matching and exceeding bottom-posting in prevalence, as I recall, and it basically started happening because of Windows email clients that automatically insert a blank line above the text and place the cursor there.

"MY personal biggest e-mail peaves: Forwards that have lists and lists (and lists...) of e-mail addresses of people I don't know."
Two things: First, this isn't your blog, so you shouldn't expect me to start posting your personal peeves. Second, this was about replying, not forwarding. I've got to agree, though, with your dislike for that, and even stronger dislike for having your email address forwarded without permission to people you don't know. I'd find that particularly odious, too.

"why just roll over and attempt to change something simply for the sake of change based on personal preferences and NOT for RATIONAL REASONS"
I guess you didn't read the original blog post very carefully.

LEGO Difference Engine: Andrew Carol built a difference engine capable of second or third order polynomials to three or four digits out of LEGOs. Gotta love the geeks.

Mind Hacks: The psyche is hackable. This link provides an interesting example of how (well) it works.

Hedgehog, a "small tactical Lisp interpreter": Hedgehog is a Lisp dialect designed for consciseness, to be used on embedded devices. It's about time.

Take a look at this MS FrontPage ad. Notice anything odd? No, I don't mean the fact that there's a Microsoft ad in ITLOG. Yeah, there's some self-deprecating humor relating to how monumentally awful FrontPage is, and it's about time, but that's not the point of including it here. Look for line 28 in the source code on the "cleaned up" code example that makes the advertising pitch. I'll be more explicit for you, with this quote of the content: </p>That's right.We said FrontPage.</p> In case you don't know HTML or English very well, there are two problems. One is a missing space (English problem). The other, and for more ironically hysterical, is the broken paragraph tag (HTML problem). I know that code wasn't produced by FrontPage (and not only because it's far clearer than it should be for FrontPage), but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the ability of FrontPage to produce clean code anyway.

I think that about does it for now. Enjoy.

TMI, sterling. TMI.

There's a legendary thread called The Evolution Lie that has to date garnered no less than 2646 posts. It was rather a controversial subject, and prompted everything from psychotic rants to well-considered, deep philosophical musings, with a fair bit of humor peppering the thread as usual from the tangent-prone crowd of longtime regulars here at TechRepublic. Within a week of its creation, about two hundred posts had been collected in this thread. It got off to a fiery start and, through a series of obscenely virulent outbreaks of often unreasonable debate, it kept growing.

It has a competitor to fear, now. With the advent of the Unionize IT Now! thread, there's a frightening lot of controversy stirred up. It has, as of this writing, only been about four days since the thread was started. In that time more than three hundred posts have been made to the thread. This is about half the time it took the legendary Evolution Lie thread to get to two hundred!

It probably wouldn't have gained speed so quickly if it weren't for three things:

1. Paycheck-oriented Information Systems workers tend to be really bad at understanding economics, but really good at counting pennies.
2. Good programmers and their ilk tend to be really good at understanding economics.
3. Everybody is already worried about their jobs in the industry.

Unionizing the IT industry would result in an increase in the median and mean reported pay rate for domestic IT industry skilled labor. It would also result in a substantial decrease in unreported entry-level IT industry skilled labor, and a significant drop in employment numbers. Because the reported pay rates would climb, though, things would look rosy on paper. Finally, of course, it would result in much of the IT industry voting with its feet, moving overseas to do business, damaging the US domestic economy rather significantly.

I, for one, am against it. The majority of people in that thread seem to agree with me. Maybe you have your own opinion.

Regardless, it's certainly a controversial enough topic that it seems set to blow past the Evolution Lie thread's record high of 2646 posts as though it were standing still. I wonder if the trend in posting will continue unabated long enough for that to happen. After all, there's always something else to say about philosophical subjects, but almost everything being said in the Unionize IT Now! thread is a repeat of something that has already been said there, already.

If we want to put the Evolution Lie thread in its place, we need some interesting tangents about the time posting starts to slow down. I don't doubt it will happen, with this crowd. I wonder if the tangents will be interesting enough to capture my attention. The unionization debate has already lost my attention, pretty much.

Who needs a core architecture?

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I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

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I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

Well, that was kind of surprising — and annoying. For some reason, the RSS aggregation in this blog represents things like smart quotes as question marks, and any time I edit the post at the source this RSS aggregation reposts the abbreviated text. As such, I had four instances of the same thing posted, each with question marks in strange places in the title.

Obviously, I've gotten rid of three of them. Still, it is a bit annoying.

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

I'm a mediocre programmer using Perl. It's the programming language I know best, and I certainly have talent, but I just don't have enough serious software engineering and development experience to have cultivated some of the skills necessary to be really good at it. I'm working at that, though.

I keep running across things [...]

This post originally appeared on an external website

This was originally an excerpt from the off-site weblog post linked here:
I'm cheating on her, I'm afraid.

Since the RSS aggregator here at TR is going berserk and reposting
the same thing over and over again rather than just behaving itself,
I've turned off the aggregation. I don't want to deal with it any
longer.

This was originally a repost of something that is already posted two
entries back. I've deleted about a dozen of these things entirely. I am
unpleased.

If you want to see my more-thoughtful posts related to IT from now on, check out SOB. I'll just post the occasional frivolous bit here.

I'm just covering my tracks, wiping out duplicate posts from a gone-berserk RSS aggregation without deleting the comment someone made to the entry before I got to it.

Hopefully turning off the RSS aggregation actually worked.

Does anyone happen to know whether TR has managed to fix the broken incoming RSS feed support?

I made some edits to the settings for this TR blog earlier today, and they were undone in the next couple hours! What's going on here? Is the database going haywire, or is there someone at TR editing my blog settings because I linked to SOB, or what?

Argh. Highly friggin' aggravating.

I've run across some boneheaded errors in TR discussions in my time
here. Many of them are to some extent merely the fault of a lack of
experience, perhaps coupled with a lack of prudent caution when
entering a new social dynamic. I've decided to chronicle some of the
more common mistakes of that sort here.

Top 10 Indicators You're A TR Newbie:

1. You drag out the tired, inaccurate, and oft-debunked old security through obscurity
   argument to "prove" that Windows or Internet Explorer isn't less secure
   by design than a competitor. This ridiculous fallacy is often
   accompanied by dismissal of dissenting views as "Windows bashing", as
   if that is a compelling argument.
2. You post questions that should be in Tech Q&A in Discussions
   instead, and/or you post all your discussions (regardless of topic) in
   the Network Administration area because it's the default.
3. You complain about a discussion's topic being "off-topic" for TR
   when it's in the Miscellaneous discussion area, then for an encore
   start new subthreads within a discussion (because the subthread to
   which you're replying has reached its max depth, of course) without providing any
   context to your response ? rather than just backtracking one level to
   reply at the same depth.
4. You post a quibble for a Trivia Geek column that was already
   addressed by seven different people in three different subthreads in
   the same discussion. Extra points for correcting an aerospace engineer
   on the technical details of how spaceflight works when your job title
   is "IT department manager".
5. You actually think you can claim that there are great scads of
   software types that just don't run on Linux (and "everyone" must know you can't play games on Linux) without ending up looking silly.
6. You suggest I'm using a thesaurus to construct my responses to your
   so-called "arguments", and you think Jaqui is a girl. Bonus points for
   suggesting either of us doesn't know anything about Windows because we
   use Linux.
7. You accuse someone like jdclyde or Tech Locksmith of being a "Linux
   zealot" just because one of them happened to say something less than
   complimentary about Microsoft, or that jdclyde is a bigot (WTF, over?).
8. You don't know about Friday Yuk, or that it's okay that it's not
   always on Friday. You don't have to like it, but you definitely have to
   know what it is.
9. You aren't aware of the multi-post ghost, the evil spirits of RSS,
   or the annoyance of so-called "people" creating TQ&A queries where
   answers never get rated ? or that there's no way to "spend" your points.
10. You think it's a good idea to create a discussion thread that
    starts out saying something like "All these debates about [insert pet
    concept] are getting out of hand. I will provide the One True Way to
    deal with the issue. Oh, and I'm completely unbiased. No, that's not my nose growing."

. . . and for the love of Gob and all that's Wholly, fill out your
profile, folks. This isn't really a newbie issue: it's a shiftless
layabout issue. Give us some hint of what we're talking to.

This list is subject to change as more comments appear below.

Special thinks to Jaqui for suggesting a couple of points for the original version of this list, and to Jay just for being Jay.