[OS X TeX] huge digests full of dreck

[Oliver Hardt]

I, too, have the feeling that this email has been send before -- the 
"rocket science" phrase was very familiar to me ...
	in any case, i agree with the sender in only one point: 
quoting discipline.  and here i only agree for the reason of 
readability -- sometimes people quote an entire message in a RE that 
only contains 1 or 2 lines of new text.  that is pretty lazy and 
makes not much sense to me: this level of redundancy is 
counter-productive in regards of the communicative goal.
	on the other hand, to me it makes also more sense to create a 
mailbox "MaxOSXTex" in which all the msgs of this list are filtered. 
then just go by the subject line and don't even open what you don't 
want to read.  a digest is probably not the most effective way to 
read this list -- especially if you want to respond to one mail and 
want to quote.
	and at least for the american list members the equation 
cost=MsgSize*RatePerMin doesn't compute in most, if not all, cases: 
you pay 20 bucks or so per month and can be online as much as you 
like to.
	so, although i think that sometimes these inefficient quoting 
techniques are actually a way to prevent communication, i do think 
that the dreck that has been produced by this thread (to which i 
contributed as well ... sorry) is much more of a nuisance than those 
messages that actually addressed a tex-related topic.  we have a 
listowner to take care for the discipline.
	olli.

9/15/02, Adrian Heathcote wrote:

>I have a sense of deja vu here. I am pretty sure that this very same 
>message---word for word---was sent out about six months ago. I can 
>recall the same listing of 'most useful contributors being the worst 
>offenders', and the same un-likening of postings to rocket science.
>

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