Re: cobol data format!!! urgent!!!

From: Robert Wagner (robert_at_wagner.net.yourmammaharvests)
Date: 08/28/04 

Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 19:52:49 GMT

On 28 Aug 2004 03:33:24 -0700, riplin@Azonic.co.nz (Richard) wrote:

>"Russell Styles" <rws0203@comcast.net> wrote
>
>> They are credited with inventing the phrase "SPAM", when referring
>> to
>> unwanted email that drowns out all other conversation.
>
>No. Monty Python did a song: Spam, Spam, Spam. But it was about the
>tinned 'Spiced Ham' that was not everyone's favourite meat.
>
>The connection to EMail was made elsewhere referring to that song
>because it was so repetitive. No one credited Monty Python with
>inventing the phrase referring to EMail.

"Use of the term "spam" was adopted as a result of the Monty Python
skit in which our SPAM meat product was featured. In this skit, a
group of Vikings sang a chorus of "spam, spam, spam . . . " in an
increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the
analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the
Internet."

http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm

 

"Take Jakob Nielsen, Internet Usability Guru. The smartest person on
the web, or one of the Web's 10 most influential people, according to
the quotes included on his web page. Back before your mother had
email, Jakob Nielsen was a research scientist at Bellcore, a research
lab jointly funded by a consortium of the Baby Bells, where he studied
usability and user interfaces. But not the Internet.

Jakob Sends Some Email

In 1994, Jakob moved jobs; he left Bellcore to join Sun Microsystems.
Being an important chap, he didn't want anyone to lose touch with him,
so he decided to send out some email to tell people his new contact
details. This is probably something that any of us would do, but few
of us would think as big as Jakob did.

First, he trawled through all his archived email, and extracted the
recipient address of every single message. He eliminated the obvious
duplicates, and ended up with a list of some 5500 addresses. So he
made a big mailing list with all 5500 addresses on it, and sent a
notice of his change of address to it. Many of those addresses were
individuals. Maybe even most of them. But lots of them were mailing
lists, some of which pointed at thousands of people. The British HCI
mailing list. The announcements list for the ACM's CHI Special
Interest Group. Lists used to announce talks, or software releases.
Anything. And every one of them got a notice of Jakob's new address.

Of course, mailing lists have people on them in the end, and most of
us are on more than one list. So people started getting lots of copies
of the message. Three, four, ten, twenty times, the identical message
would appear in your mailbox. I got fifteen, I think, but then they
stopped. I think Jakob had been restrained, because it was noticable
that I only got messages with recipient email addresses in the
alphabetical range A-H. Perhaps after H, Jakob realised that people
were beginning to get the message.

It was a new phenomenon for most of us. The idea that the same message
would be sent out indiscriminately to thousands upon thousands of
email addresses. It was new then; but these days we have a name for
it.

Yep. Jakob Nielsen invented spam.

A Response
Anyway, all this happened in early to mid March. I was sitting around
in the pub with some friends one day, and we were discussing this. We
had proposed that your Nielsen Number was a measure of your
connectedness or importance in the HCI community; how many times did
you recieve Jakob's message? We wondered what was the right response.
And of course, April 1 was coming up...

I logged into a machine in Edinburgh for which I had administrator
privileges, and created a new account. The name I chose was "Craig
Shergold". Craig's name was well known to anyone who clued in on the
Net. Craig had once been dying of cancer and wanted to get into the
Guiness Book of Records by receiving the largest number of Get-Well
cards ever. The rumour had spread like wildfire on the net, and even
though, many years later, Craig was completely recovered, the hospital
was still innundated, every day, with sackloads of cards. The rumour
proved impossible to kill, especially on the Internet, where it had
morphed into various related forms (and is still sometimes seen).

On April 1, a message was sent from "Craig's" account to the ACM's HCI
announcement list. It said:

I head that Jakob Neilsen has recently moved jobs. Does anyone have
his new contact details?
-- Craig Shergold

Sure enough, I started getting all sorts of responses from folk who
didn't realise they were being had. The list of respondents who
forwarded me Jakob's message again read like the Who's Who of HCI.
And, of course, Jakob was one of them."

http://www.dourish.com/nielsen.html