> On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, Michael Lorrey wrote:
>
> > X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; U)
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Ha, knave! Thou art revealed as a Follower of the Foul Mozilla!
And happily so. BTW: This info can be found out about anybody's mail, no matter what mail reader is
used, unless of course, that someone is using, say, vi.
>
>
> > > [...]
> >
> > Is lobjan spoken by the 80 million people on the web today? Since most of those people use a mail
> > reader which is HTML capable, it is silly to hold out for the few iconoclasts.
>
> Forgive an old iconoclast, but would you please format your text in the
> ancient, honourable <80 chars tradition?
Sorry, I tend to widen it out so that multiple message quotes don't cause so much word wrapping. It
would be nice if they developed a one character standard (say, an underlined numeral) that communicated
the number of quotes, etc.
> > Tell me, a skilled user of a slide rule can frequently calculate faster
> > than a person using a hand calculator. If this is true, then why are
> > slide rules now museum peices? WHat do you think the Air Force would
>
> A slide rule might be faster to gauge the values, vor precision work one
> would want to use a calculator. It takes much more effort to learn to
> handle a slide rule, and the skills are much more difficult to maintain.
I dunno, my dad designed a prototype for the fast flux nuke reactor at Hanford with a slide rule....
> > have said to a contractor that insisted on doing all its engineering
> > work with slide rules? When I visit Seattle and go down to the
> > International district, I can often see elderly asian merchants still
> > using abacuses, and whipping along pretty fiercely. However, I don't see
> > them getting much business from anyone but first generation immigrants,
> > who still revere the aged.
>
> I don't think the abacuses are the root of their troubles.
No, but the attitude that causes them to continue to use them is.
> > > [...]
> > Sure it works pretty well. Englascii is a fine standard for may
> > discussion type exchanges. However, in order to deliver more complex
> > content, we will eventually have to move to a type of markup standard,
>
> Uh, wouldn't just an url be enough?
Sure, unless that person reading their mail was using a palmtop device that could read mail, but
couldn't browse the web...
> > to allow better organisation and presentation of information. As the
> > [...] This was just a small fraction of data on near earth asteroid
> > encounters predicted over the next 30 years.
> >
> > However, If I had used HTML, I could have presented the same information
> > is a graphical format, with links to other graphic formats, that would
> > all have been much easier to use than 30 pages of an ascii text table
> > that doesn't even align properly.
>
> I would be highly irritated, if someone insisted on clogging up my mailbox
> with 30 pages of content which is of little relevance to me (above
> material was not). The netiquette would seem to supply a two-line summary,
> followed by an invitation/url to access the material on a web site.
>
Current netiquette was developed to work around 2400 baud modem speeds. As the standard is now moving
beyond ten times that speed, its time to expand our horizons.
Mike