On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 14:11 -0700, Norm wrote: > The IT world seems to attract types that can not accept > someone else may have different way of doing things. And the intolerance > and abuse that is often displayed when someone has a different way of > accomplishing the same objective astounds me. It's funny that you should mention it. The intolerant people you speak of in the IT industry (or at least, the IT industry in my part of the world) are normally the first to scream "fascist" (or worse) when someone tries to tell them to lose weight, dress properly,be more diplomatic, improve their personal hygiene, etc. But they go ahead and do the same thing to others on mailing lists. Another funny thing about fanatics of all creeds, religious, cultural or technological, is that they do not explain the logic behind certain practices (if there is a logic at all) very well. The reasoning I have seen so far on this thread (which I hope will stop soon) is worthy of the Da Vinci code, and displays a lack of real-world experience. There is a time and place for bottom-posting, when it is absolutely ESSENTIAL to a proper understanding of a situation, and it goes like this: Say that you are involved in contract negotiations for a project that is going to cost a lot of money. Most projects have critical nuances such as service levels, methods for determining success or failure, legal details, etc. It is standard practice to append replies to the FULL TEXT of the email you are replying to, not only for accountability reasons, but also when you suddenly need to get another individual involved in the middle of a discussion. If bottom-posting is followed, then the individual can literally read from top to bottom and understand the entire thread of the discussions. Imagine trying to skip around, which is what would happen if everybody top-posted. This can be a problem if there is a history of, say, 10 emails. I have been in that kind of situation before, and it can be very frustrating. The ironic thing is that business and legal people almost ALWAYS top-post (because they use Outlook), and you cannot tell them to stop. What is worse, the matters they discuss are normally a lot more critical and have more impact (in a monetary sense) than, say, discussing why there is an IRQ conflict on one of the servers causing a daemon to fail to start. If the Taliban of top-posting on this list had given this scenario as the reason, then I may have felt a little sympathy for them. But I'm pretty sure that most, if not all, of the intolerant emails have come from people who have never sat in a meeting with top-level business people *and* legal counsel, nor had to "accommodate" the less tech-savvy for the sake of the continued survival of their business. -- Pascal Chong email: chongym@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx web: http://cymulacrum.net pgp: http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc "La science ne connaît pas de frontière parce que la connaissance appartient à l’humanité. et que c’est la flamme qui illumine le monde." -- Louis Pasteur
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