Text 1749, 97 rader
Skriven 2007-04-13 13:45:39 av Alexander Koryagin
     Kommentar till en text av Ardith Hinton (1:153/716)
Ärende: Re: Mechanics...  2.
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From: "Alexander Koryagin" <koryagin@erec.ru>

F2EP
Hi, Ardith Hinton! How are you?
on Wednesday, 11 of April, you wrote to Alexander Koryagin about
"Mechanics...  2."

AH>>  Sometimes a message which is too long for a particular
AH>>  system to handle may be lost or truncated.
AK>>  May be it was at the dawn of Fidonet?

AH>           It happened to me twice during the 1990's... once in netmail,
AH> once in echomail.  That's how I learned where the limits were.  But the
AH> situation isn't as different nowadays as one might imagine.  We have
AH> computers which can handle longer messages.  At the same time, we're
AH> also gating stuff from other networks which typically arrives with an
AH> amazing number of kludge lines.  Before I could start reading a recent
AH> example I had to use the "Page Down" key twice....  :-))

But it seems to that a client pointer program has to automatically hide the
technical information from the letter's headers. Most of kludges contain
service information. If, for a expample, some kludges have the information
useful for the pointer it must optionally be shown (for example kludge
X-Face :)).

AK>>  Now imho all the Fidonet traffic is being tranfered via Internet.
AH>           Much of it, but not all!  Dallas still has some BBS users who
AH> call on a POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) line & occasionally type
AH> replies online.  I also know a few folks who still use the same DOS
AH> machine to handle Fidonet mail that they've been using for umpteen
AH> years, because it's stable & it works.  I'm not a techie myself... but
AH> I think I understand where they're coming from.  :-)

It also may be because of the more strict copyright culture in your country.
You are buying software programs at full price, so of course, if they work
well, you will not spend money to buy new software. I must confess that in
Russia we do not think about it too long. A Russian philosopher (me for
example) prefer to say that Bill Gates owes him a million dollars as a moral
compensation for his shattered nerves and health because of glitched,
poor-working, fucking software Bill Gates developed. Then he says that he
would not go to the American court to suit Bill Gates, because he also owes
him little money for the unpaid soft. ;=)

[skipped]
AH>>  As a conversation develops, the replies tend to get
AH>>  longer & longer.
AK>>  Both participants have to fight so that the length of
AK>>  a letter will be less than 10 kb.


AH>           Maybe, if both participants find long messages difficult to
AH> read.  As far as the computer is concerned, though, you can probably
AH> double that....  :-)

If we compare the live in an small echo with a campfire, we can say that
every letter is as a small twig for it. But it is too difficult to feed a
small fire with a log. ;)

AK>>  The letters longer than that are too tiresome in
AK>>  reading and answering; nobody reads them.
AH>           I do... that's how I know messages are still truncated
AH> nowadays.  The vast majority are articles somebody has copied from a
AH> newspaper or whatever.  I haven't seen any personal messages truncated
AH> recently, I suppose because people are more aware of the overall length
AH> when they've done more of the typing.  ;-)

It depends on the size of the echo traffic. If it is a small one, and in
general you have nothing else to read, then, of course, you have time to
dive into the reading of long messages.

[skipped]
AK>>  most important quotations, you learn how to say shorter,
AK>>  how repeat the essence in few words.  Eventually a pruning
AK>>  makes the tread readable for others.

AH>           Uh-huh.  Originally we pruned quotes as a courtesy to SysOps
AH> who were relaying our mail from one place to another at their own
AH> expense.  I think it's a tradition worth keeping, though, if it results
AH> in better readability....  :-)

The shorter the more comprehensible. It is like a source text of a
program. The compiler surely can compile the text of any size, but....

I heard that it is admitable (or rather optional) to put the suspension mark
without putting the full stop after it. From one side it is quite logical -
the suspention mark tells us that a sentence is not finished. So if it is
not finished why we put the full stop after the suspention mark?

[...De gustibus non est disputandum]
Bye Ardith!
Alexander
fido7.english-tutor 2007


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