Looks to me like newbie has nothing to do with how long you have been here.


"Lloyd" wrote in message
...
You think I'm a newbie?

Oh, let's see: I've been posting to what became Usenet since around
1981. Google (dejanews back then) first started archiving during that
same year. I used to dial up Carnegie-Mellon University's front end
machines in Pittsburgh, switch to a PDP-20 or a PDP-10 and begin
reading and posting with a Lear-Siegler ADM-42 terminal while in
not-logged-in mode.

Yep, I'm a newbie all right.

CMU was one of the main hubs of the original ARPA net, as administered
by BBN under contract to DARPA. The TCP/IP protocol was still under
development, and it didn't get deployed until around '82 or '83 as I
recall.

Yep, I'm a newbie all right. I was on the net before TCP/IP was deployed.

As Usenet developed, a pecking order developed along with it. Folks
at the top of the pecking order would decree "ex cathedra" how to
properly do certain things. The procedures were enshrined in FAQs and
soon became Usenet and Internet dogma.

You questioned an accepted FAQ at the risk of being known as a "lamer"
or a "luser," and a self-appointed set of gurus would often attempt to
instruct you in the ways of the current religion without ever pausing
to realize that the group-think had become dogma over time.

You can even see it in operation today.

For example, the old Usenet dogma ignores the massive, cheap disk
storage which is available to everyone and attempts to prevent people
from posting either image files or html. In spite of high speed
internet access and large disk capacities, the old guard still behaves
as if they're protecting the disk storage of a VAX-11/785 with a 400
megabyte disk pack as accessed by users using 300 bps modems.

Pathetic.

Similarly, certain styles of ASCII posting are politically correct
with the old timers, such as bottom posting. Have you ever looked at
the mess that results after three or four people have attempted to
quote previous posters?

The posts are usually illegible, because most of the bottom posters
don't bother to trim their quotes, and the posts become massively
convoluted and difficult to read. Line wrap errors, coupled with
repeated use of the "" quoting character, turn them into a mess. Run
on up to alt.flame if you want to see how unreadable bottom posting
can become.

And that's the norm for the great majority of bottom posts. I skip
them regularly, rather than trying to decipher them.

If you can't make your points in a top post, you probably haven't
developed the language skills necessary to make your points anyway.
Bottom posting is way overrated and is really a crutch. It should be
avoided.

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 00:07:57 GMT, Honus wrote a 104 line post
which eventually got around to saying:

You're correct that the netizens decide what's acceptable and what's not,
and naturally some things will change. I don't believe that top posting
will
be one of those things. You're still very much in the minority. I also
sense
that you're a newbie. Welcome to Usenet.

Try to get along.