Re: looking for hardware source

Ray Haddad wrote:
On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:10:33 +0100, I said, "Pick a card, any card"
and David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> instead
replied:


<snip>


Necessary to you, perhaps. Your goal is to win and force everyone to
post at the bottom of a post. You might believe that's noble but
it's really quite despicable. What if someone were to come along and
force you to top post or suggest strongly that unless you did you'd
be considered an outcast?


My goal is not nearly as forceful as that. I simply believe that a discussion forum of any kind is better for its users if they follow a similar communication style. The standard style for this newsgroup is text-only, with replies inline and/or bottom posted. Like most (I know that's subjective, but it's based on reading this group for many years) here who bother to express an opinion, I think that style is best for this group - for a variety of good reasons.

I am not trying to "win" anything, nor to force anyone. I believe that when a person joins any established group of people, they should adapt to the customs and conventions of that group. That's just common courtesy and respect. It is particularly irritating when people (not you, but another poster in this thread) join the group and not only ignore the established conventions, but claim loudly that their way of doing it is better, and we should all change.

I note that you are posting appropriately (no html, replying in-line and bottom posting, etc.), and it's perfectly clear from this thread that this style makes the conversation easy to read. So why exactly are we arguing? If it's about freedom, and people's right to say what they want and how they say it, then in general I'm all for it - but a certain level of convention and standardisation makes life much easier.

In spite of that, the issue of whether or not this is a voluntary
compliance is still the subject under discussion. You seem to insist
that it's the law. I insist that it's voluntary. We both know the
truth. If I wanted to, I could top post, attach a binary file and
use HTML to embed a link. The fact is that all binaries are
converted to text in the process of posting and your server can't
even tell the difference. The lack of binaries on this newsgroup is
simply luck in that the idiots who try to deny NNTP service by
flooding with binaries have not found this group to be worthy of
their interest. Knock on wood.

Yes, we both know that posting style is voluntary, and not law - and we agree that this is the way it should be. I simply believe that people should voluntarily follow the conventions of the group - it's best for us in the group from before, it is best for the new people joining the group, and it is best for future readers of the archives.

The lack of binaries on this group is due to filtering on servers to block binaries. This is done on most text-only newsgroups, and is important to the working of newsservers and news archivers, many of which only carry text-only newsgroups. Similarly, most newsservers will provide a certain amount of spam filtering of posts (at least for the most obvious spams) - this greatly improves their usability. You can certainly argue this amounts to censorship, but it is a very long way from any sort of freedom-curtailing censorship. In fact, the filters on most newsservers (including the one I use) are not strong enough to block the flooding with text junk that has hit this group several times in the last couple of months.
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