Re: [OT] TOP-POSTING

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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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