Re: The problems in comp.lang.c

Jeff P. Bailey said:

On 23/3/2008 23:57, Richard Heathfield wrote:
jacob navia said:


Richard Heathfield wrote:

[snip]


Likewise, I assure you. But I think we differ over who we think the
morons are. If you don't like my articles, why not killfile me?


I would say the same. Good advice. You could use it yourself and
stop answering my posts.


Since it is in your commercial interest to have as few people as
possible pointing out your misunderstandings, blunders, and product
plugs, your response does not surprise me at all. It may surprise *you*,
however, to discover that I actually reply to relatively few of your
articles. (It may surprise others, too.)

This is the sort of thing I was talking about - a pointlessly negative
post.

It is, I agree, mostly negative in tone. I do not agree that it is
pointlessly so.

Every article of jacob's I've read has been well-informed and
useful

Then you have not read very many of them.

<snip>

A reasonable person would say that threads (which will certainly be part
of the next C++ standard, and I believe are also being considered for
the next C standard) are a topic of interest to C programmers, whereas
the breeding habits of gazelle aren't.

That is very unlikely to be true. There will be at least one or two C
programmers, somewhere in the world, who are very interested in the
breeding habits of gazelles. They might even be modelling breeding
patterns in a C program, for conservation purposes. So *obviously* the
breeding habits of gazelles should be topical here. And that way madness
lies.

And if something's borderline,
why not "be liberal in what you accept"?

The whole point of Usenet topics is that you find a group that discusses a
topic that you find interesting, not that the topic of the group changes
to match your interests. It's like shops. You go into a shop selling fine
wines, the kind that's several hundred LCUs a bottle, and you ask for a
steak. But they look at you as if you'd asked them for a stoat. You are
confused. After all, wine goes with steak, right? So you tell them they
*should* sell steak, and they look at you as if you'd asked them for a
lightly grilled stoat with fries. They're not about to start selling steak
just because you like steak. The fact that wine goes well with steak is
not going to persuade them to change their mind.

The reason it seems crazy to me is that it costs you (in Thunder Bird at
least) a single key-press to *ignore* a thread that you're not
interested in

And several thousand keypresses a day to ignore the several thousand
threads we're not interested in, and that can take an hour or more of
time. By the time clc descends to that level, it will have lost all the
people that make it worth reading.

- you don't need to reply to it, or even take any time
seeing any more posts in the thread once you've ignored it. Making a
series of "that's off topic" posts takes /much/ more time than just
pressing the ignore key!

Nevertheless, it seems to keep the off-topic posts to a manageable level.

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
.

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