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@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999