Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Roedy Green]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 05:55:01 -0400, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote
or quoted :

>Actually, you present a design that forces a solution that makes them
>do what you want down their throats, never mind what they want, or
>what they've been doing. It shows an amazing ignorance about the
>internet and how people behave on it. Like most antispam proposals, it
>won't actually stop spam, just force spammers to concentrate on
>different channels. You seem to have randomly broken quoting for
>people who download mail and read it offline, and for any medium
>that's unreliable or doesn't reliably deliver messages "in order" -
>which includes mail and news.  Virus writers will love the ability to
>change peoples address books remotely. The problem of differing
>character sets is technically solved. Practically, the solution
>doesn't work because people implementing the software ignore the
>standards. What's your server going to do when it gets messages with
>characters in them that aren't valid in the charset that it's declared
>as being? Better yet, what's it going to do when the characters are
>valid, but the declared charset isn't the one the author actually
>used? You implementation sketch only covers the client talking to the
>first server (in that it requires the client to encrypt a challange
>phrase with the private key belonging the email id, which is
>presumably what 2822 uses for the envelope sender). Most mail on the
>internet goes through at least two servers, and news is much
>worse. For instance, your messages apparently passed through 10
>servers getting to me. You really have to deal with store and forward,
>or convince a large number of corporations that potentially hostile
>users should be allowed to talk directly to their mail servers, which
>isn't very likely. Kudos for recognizing that spam needs to be dealt
>with by people with guns, but you lose half of them for making ISPS
>liable for it.
>
>I also read the comment about wanting an automated "Ask them to run my
>browser in my favorite configuration", which is equally naive. A lot
>of sites have such cruft on them already. I find them funny - I surf
>the web on three different platforms, none of them Windows. Any
>pointer to download a new browser or plugin for Windows just impresses
>me with the authors lack of skills. The only browser I know of that
>runs on all three platforms is Opera, and it's something radically
>different on one of the three. Even should you get the platform right,
>almost nobody is going to bother upgrading following the download
>links. The very small percentage of users who are real geeks will
>silently thank you for the notice, and update their software. Most
>users will ignore it so long as the page isn't obviously broken. For
>those for whom it's broken, all but small percentage will simply find
>some other site to visit. I'd suggest that anyone thinking about writing

Your post brings up a meta-issue.  How long should posts be?
I note several schools of thought.

There is the initial post, sort of a mini lecture on something
covering perhaps 7 major points.

Then you can have the theatre-critic style response where each person
in turn goes through the 7 points saying when they think.

Then they repeat the 7 points each commenting on what each of the
others had to say on the seven points. etc.

Then there is the conversational style where you discuss one major
point at a time, perhaps with several threads, one for each point.
These threads meander or split off themselves.

My preference is to think of a post, other than perhaps the initial
essay post, as like a paragraph.  It should stick to one main idea. 

Seems to me google will have an easier time classifying posts if they
don't cover too much ground.
-- 
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.