[nylug-talk] The linux infestation starts in Russian youth!

[Ron Guerin]

Chris Knadle wrote:

> But while email doens't need to be a masterpiece, I admit that I still get
> satisfaction from reading  one.  So it does matter.  That, and the emails
> that are more clearly written I believe tend to get fewer flame type responses.

When I see this many posts on any thread it's never a good thing.  Well,
I'm going to focus for the moment *again* on what I think the big thing
is people forget on mailing lists.  Form does matter, and you're trying
to appeal to other people's good nature unless you're trolling.  So on
mailing lists, you should always be focusing not on what *you* want, but
what your *recipients* want.  That's why people who prefer top-posting
don't do it where it's frowned upon, that's why people use spell-check
on their mail and read through it, often several times before posting
it, and that's why people often don't send mail at the same time they
write it.  This lack of immediacy often gives better judgment time to
intercede.

And I'm going to bang on this drum again also...  What you write here is
archived by us, and indexed by Google for the ages.  It's not like IMs
that no one's ever going to see, and I'd guess that even publicly logged
IRC channels tend to have those web-accessible logs disappear over
shorter periods of time.

I am aware that the younger generations consider e-mail to be your
grandfather's form of communication.  Supposedly they're as likely to
send an e-mail as I am to write a letter in longhand.  It would be a
shame if e-mail dies out, but I don't think turning it into another form
of ill-considered braindump communications is going to save it, if it
needs saving.

But what do *I* know?  I'm not on FaceSpace or FriendsTwitter.

- Ron