Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site masscomp.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!grkermit!masscomp!trb From: trb@masscomp.UUCP (Andy Tannenbaum) Newsgroups: net.misc Subject: Re: Personal Translations? Message-ID: <193@masscomp.UUCP> Date: Sat, 25-Feb-84 16:40:35 EST Article-I.D.: masscomp.193 Posted: Sat Feb 25 16:40:35 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 26-Feb-84 04:54:49 EST References: <3348@utcsrgv.UUCP> Organization: MASSCOMP, Littleton, MA Lines: 36 S.P. of Toronto, Ontario asks: ... what happened to the good old days when 1/2 the articles came from trb? Bring back the days of the AI projects! Yes, friends, I'm still up and running, though in a different venue. I've left BTL to hack in northeastern Massachusetts. I haven't had much time to play the mail and netnews game recently, I've a hundred messages in my mbox and until recently I was a month behind on netnews. Of course, in the old days I could post a reasonable number of articles and it would be half of the ones on netnews. Those days are gone. These days, the volume is such that I usually just skip the really long articles, unless they are written by someone who I know is worth reading. In the olden days, when I saw something in netnews that upset or moved me, I would follow it up with an article. These days, there seem to be so many articles where the impressions are so fucking moronic, or worse yet, where there seems to be no insight invested at all, that I feel better just ignoring them rather than trying to right what I see is wrong. The volume has gotten out of hand, and not because of the number of contributors. I think that netnews will once again be managable when we make use of the reference fields in the headers to be able to skip entire senseless conversations. To let the truth (well, my opinion) be known, I'd also like to put an options line in my .newsrc which said let me always see netnews by author X, and never see netnews by author Y. I still enjoy netnews, but sometimes I get overwhelmed with the volume because the tools I have for dealing with it are inadequate (though I notice that they're improving). I still believe that netnews is worthwhile, especially considering its benefits when weighed opposite our individual investments (which are negligible). There you have it, S.P. of Toronto, because You Asked for It! Andy Tannenbaum Masscomp Inc Westford MA (617) 692-6200 x274