Re: [OT] ettiquite - was gprof with gnat

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Mark Johnson <mark_h_johnson@raytheon.com> wrote in message news:<3CD14A98.6CF0B177@raytheon.com>...
> [flame on]
> Please calm down - I think there's an intolerance virus going around
> that causes people to get nasty about proper net etiquette. I see this
> kind of response on several newsgroups and believe it is unnecessary. I
> suggest a personal note to the OP instead of a public one if you feel a
> rebuke is necessary. That I find is an UN common courtesy that should be
> present. This rebuke is public to make the point to others (I'll never
> change you Robert :-).
> [flame off]

"please turn it off" hardly seems to be violent intolerance, and besides,
I note that the above note is a nice example of not following your own
advice :-) The reason that I think it is important to complain about excessive
quoting is that it is one of the things that greatly increases noise to
signal ratio in a newsgroup. Comp.lang.ada used to be far more useful than
it is, and it is a pity to see how many people have abandoned it. In this
case we had someone who claimed that if they turned off the quoting option,
they assumed that this meant that the message would be included without 
quotes. That's plain misinformation that is worth correcting, since otherwise
someone else might make the same mistake.

The reply to this message has it right. If you people to read your messages,
be more careful quoting junk. particularly annoying, and increasingly more
common is two people talking to one another quoting entire messages, and 
amazingly these programs have no guard against recursive quoting of messages
so you get quadratic accumulation of junk. I have seem messages quoted four
levels deep :-(

I find that I bother to look at fewer and fewer CLA threads these days, because
so many of them have excessive noise to signal ratio.