[H-GEN] Solaris/Linux Systems Admin position in QUT - IHBI

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, listpuppy wrote:

> 2008/7/24 Greg Black <gjb at yaxom.com>:
>> I would certainly find it hard to pay $60k to an applicant for a sys admin job
>> who thought top-posting was OK or who was unable to operate their editor
>> sufficiently well to trim the irrelevant matter from the quoted text in
>> their message.
>
> My experience, over the last 6-8 years, strongly suggests that NOT 
> top-posting only causes confusion and mis-understanding on the part of 
> most recipients.

I always "inline post".  I have almost never had any problems with the 
recipient understanding what I said.  Technical people expect it. 
Non-technical people don't expect it but usually pick up the idea on the 
first email.  I have even had a few non-techical people adopt the practice 
despite their MUA being totally unsuited to the job.

Inline posting means I can reply specifically to each part of a post that 
is relevant.

In my experience many top-posters forget to respond to all of the relevant 
areas in an email.  If I ask several questions in an email, for example, I 
find most top-posters will forget to respond to some of them.  I expect 
this is because they must either remember all of the questions when 
responding to me, or continually refer back and forth to make sure they 
got everything.  Most don't do either of these things and so questions go 
unanswered.  Thus in my experience top-posting has a significant 
detrimental effect on the usefulness of email.  When dealing with 
top-posters I will typically reduce the size of each email and send more 
emails to them, allowing them to digest each one in turn.  When both 
parties are using inline posting a much more sophisticated conversation is 
possible.

[Discussion of revealing identity online snipped]

> I am no longer prepared to use my real identity unless I know exactly to 
> whom, and under what circumstances, I am revealing it.

My position is that I stand by every word I say online and I demonstrate 
this by being prepared to put my name to it.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine..."
 	-- RFC 1925 "The Twelve Networking Truths"