Problem with NRPE

[Paul L. Allen]

Joe Rhett writes: 

> Besides, I have a threaded mail viewer.

Gosh, that's handy. If somebody responds to a post that's a couple
of days old without quoting anything at all you can spend extra time
threading back to read the original question so you know what he's
talking about.  If you haven't already trashed the original.  In those
cases where some idiot doesn't quote, it's useful - but I'd prefer not
to have to resort to threading back and forth to decipher a post. 

British Standards on engineering drawings fell for a variant of this
fallacy a couple of decades ago.  They reasoned that if they substituted
meaningful constructs that took time to draw with meaningless constructs
that took time to comprehend, they could save a few minutes of a
draughtman's time.  What they ignored is that most engineering drawings
are drawn once and read many, many times (in a large shop, work would
be assigned to whoever was free so you might never see one particular
drawing often enough to memorize it).  Overall, productivity went down
because of it.  Is that faint line the outline of a screw thread or is
the drawing warn?  Is that anonymous box a capacitor or a resistor or
a transistor or a logic gate or an inductor or a diode? 

I mention this merely because others try to justify top-posting because
it's quicker for them to do it that way, even if it's harder for others
to follow.  Of course, if everyone saves time by top-posting, because
everyone reads more posts than they make, then everyone will end up
spending far more time trying to make sense of what they read than the
time they save by top-posting.  To those who say they don't have the
time to do anything other than top-post, I respond that I don't have the
time to give them answers to their questions (except I say it in my head
and simply delete their post). 

[...]
> Top-posting is the only sensible way to conduct one-sentence responses.

Nonsense.  Intelligent snipping is the only sensible way to make a
response of ANY length.  If you top-post an answer that looks like it
might be of interest to me then I MIGHT just scroll down to find out what
the question was and if your answer really is of interest to me.  If
you top-post a question asking for clarification to somebody else's
answer I WILL ignore it.  As will many other people. 

[Vast quantity of text from a much earlier post in the thread before
it digressed into a discussion of top-posting SNIPPED WITH EXTREME
PREJUDICE] 

You, sir, are an idiot.  Unfortunately, you are too much of an idiot
to even realize that you are an idiot.  Not only does top-posting
waste brainwidth, all that needlessly-quoted material wastes bandwidth. 

Allow me to insert a clue suppository.  Top-posting is arrogant because
it assumes that people are so enamoured of your pearls of wisdom that
they will put in extra effort to comprehend your post by scrolling up
and down repeatedly to tie up your points with bits in the original
post.  Top-posting without trimming unnecessary material is arrogant
because it assumes that everyone reading the list always reads it at work
over a high-bandwidth connection and never, ever reads it in a hotel room
over a 56K dial-up over a phone line constructed from damp string held
together with chewing gum.  Top-posting without trimming unecessary
material is arrogant because it says your time is far too important to
spend doing something that would benefit others. 

Top-posting essentially says "my time is more important than yours, all 10
(or 100, or 1,000, or 10,000) of you put together."  You are certainly
entitled to hold that opinion, but please do not be surprised if the rest
of us disagree. And do not be surprised if few people show any inclination
to give you help or advice.  You might get away with top-posting if you're
one of the implementors, because then your time really is more important
than that of most others on the list, but if you're looking for advice
then you're asking people to spend time they don't have to helping you
out for free, so you should make it as easy for them as possible. 

I mention all this not because I think it will do you the slightest bit
of good but that there may be a few people slightly less clueless than
yourself who were slightly distracted when they read your post and were
persuaded by your arguments. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 



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