[H-GEN] software runs the world

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Sat Mar 19 04:19:35 EST 2005


On 2005-03-19, Russell Stuart wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 16:05, Greg Black wrote:
>> One of the problems with mailing lists is shown by this very
>> thread which has now appeared on three different Humbug lists.
>> That shows that (1) we have too many lists; or (2) that nobody
>> knows what the lists are intended for.  Since there's no
>> consensus about where this belongs, I'm going to leave it on the
>> list where the previous item in the thread appeared.
> 
> Uhmmm - That was my doing.  It wasn't deliberate.  I set 
> the reply to wrongly - or rather left it at the default
> which in my case is general.

I disagree.  It was deliberate.  There is no default, except one
that you set.  And the default that you set was wrong.  That's
nobody's fault except the person who did it.

> Secretly of course, I don't really think it is my fault. I
> blame the "reply munging to considered harmful" meme, which
> has infected the clan who runs this list.  Because the list
> no longer does reply to munging I have to do manually.

No, you don't have to do it manually.  Although it's so trivial
to do it manually that I in fact do it by hand for every message
I send to the Humbug lists.  If it was worth automating, I would
be one of those most likely to do it, since I am a programmer
and doing stuff like that is second nature for me.  And you
don't have to do it at all -- you can leave it to list members
to do the right thing.  But, if you think it's worth automating,
then I submit that it's worth the tiny amount of effort involved
in automating it correctly.  Certainly, there can be no excuse
for some stupid piece of software putting a wrong reply-to on a
message ...

> Since I really shouldn't have to do it manually (there are
> after all lots of lists out there where I don't have to), 
> it ain't my fault if I stuff it up.

I think I've covered that.

>> When I post to a list, people get to reply to me, to argue the
>> point with me, to show me the error of my ways, etc.  On my
>> blog, nobody gets to comment directly.  I like it that way and
>> have no plans to allow comments.  When people wish to comment,
>> they either email me (if they don't know me and care about me
>> seeing their comment) or they comment in their own blog (which I
>> may or may not read, and probably will never hear about if I
>> don't already know them).
> 
> Yes, and possibly therein lies the rub.  Blogs have given
> people a new option - instead of posting to a list, they
> can sound off on a blog.  If this is an alternative to
> posting on a list, then it is going to negatively impact
> lists such as this one.

But it's not an alternative to this list.  I'm here, writing
about this.  It's not being done in my blog.  Anthony has also
written to the list, although he too could have chosen to just
comment in his blog.  Lists like this are good for discussion
and this list carries those discussions well.  It has quiet
periods, which is good.  But it's far from dead.

> In fact, I am pretty sure I have seen posts here where 
> someone has said they posted something to their blog 
> rather than posting it here.  QED.

I recall one such post (on an extremely long and somewhat
doubtful thread), and I recall saying that I disapproved and I
seem to recall the person posting the essentials to the list
after that.  And there was one other blogged response that was
mentioned on the list.  That does not prove that the list has
had its day.

> No matter how much thought I put into something, I often get
> it wrong.  It seems when I post something that is wrong to
> a list, a lot of people will take the time to tell me so.  I
> may not like it at the time, but I can tell you that when I
> look back on the discussions I have had here for example, the
> ones I learned most from were those I was challenged on and
> proven wrong.  Perversely, looking back on it, it is those
> very discussions that I now think were the best.  Ones that
> spring to mind are when Andrae forced me to reconsider the
> performance of garbage collection in java, Chris made me
> re-think PKI, and aj prompted me to look at what makes
> computer payment schemes successful.

All these examples do indeed show the value of discussions on a
list.  I completely agree.

> Right now I think this feedback will be missing when I write
> something and  put something up on a blog.  I guess I will
> find out soon enough.

You will probably find that people you've never heard of (and
probably would never have heard of if you'd restricted yourself
to the Humbug lists) will write to you out of the blue about
stuff you write about in your blog.  I've had emails from all
sorts of people (some nutters, some well-known software people,
some just interested bystanders) about a wide range of things
that I've written about in my blog.  That has been a major
source of surprise to me and is one of the reasons why I'll keep
it going.

Of course, that used to happen to me when I did Usenet too, but
that was less surprising since you knew the stuff you wrote was
going out to a huge audience.  When I write my blog, I know that
a few friends and family will read it -- but I keep discovering
that other people are reading it too.  I don't read logs, so I
only find out about this when those people are motivated to
write to me directly.  It's been interesting.

But, good as blogs are for what they are good at, they aren't in
any way a replacement for mailing lists and that's good.

Cheers, Greg




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