From: Eugene Leitl (eugene@liposome.genebee.msu.su)
Date: Fri Mar 13 1998 - 04:41:37 MST
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!
> > [...]
>
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
> > [...]
> 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?
> 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.
ciao,
'gene
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