On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 2:19 AM, PackRat <[email protected]> wrote: > Furthermore, although Internet speeds (I started at 300 baud) > have increased radically in the past 20 years and PC memories > and CPU speeds have likewise increased, Internet resources > are still finite: more bits that travel down the same > communications channel eventually slow down the traffic for > everybody. Researchers have suggested that spam emails, for > example, currently account for 60% of all Internet email > messages. Can you imagine the difference if that wastage of > resources were eliminated?
Yes... that would yield perhaps a 0.1% drop in overall network traffic, and a massive increase in the usefulness of email. (Email traffic is a much smaller percentage of total bandwidth than http traffic, and the bulk of the traffic currently seems to be video streaming.) > I feel that a requirement (or expectation) of top or bottom > reply styles to carry full threads (or at least the full > message being replied to) in every message is completely > unnecessary in an environment that encourages free and open > discussion. To me, the interleaved reply style, which has > been in use in open discussions on the Internet for at least > 20 years (probably closer to 30-35 years), serves admirably > as a vehicle for discussion groups. (Quotations aren't even > necessary in some replies if the reply itself, or even the > subject line, gives enough context.) I struggle with this also. I am used to clipping out the points I am responding to and then providing my response following. When I top post, I feel it's often not clear issues I am addressing. I could perhaps address this better, by including verbiage in my top posts which draws the reader's attention to the points in question before providing my own responses, but usually the original words do a better job of that than I ever could. That said, we do have a lot of "modern devices" which are extremely limited in their ability to present text to the user, and I am not sure how to deal with that issue, either. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
