At 14:04 16/01/02 +0000, Alison Macfarlane wrote:
>Following earlier queries, I have received a number of response
>from people who live in or travel to places where telephone lines are
>slow, even in 2002. They have expressed a preference for people
>keeping their messages short, as far as possible.
Am I alone in having to say that I still regard this as a pathetic argument
in this day and age. Whilst there are undoubtedly some people having to
live with 'stone age technology', (a) they are very few and far between and
(b) they are being unrealistic in subscribing to an e-mail list if they
have such problems. Any internet connection so bad/slow that it takes any
significant time to download even largest message this group sees cannot
really be regarded as very viable; we should not be talking more than a
fraction of a second for even 'long' messages to this group.
I would hazard to guess that the accumulated total size of all RADSTATS
messages I have EVER downloaded probably amounts to less than the amount I
download onto my PC on many/most single days.
Do the people who make these comments ever access websites, I wonder? The
average website's 'home page' is probably orders of magnitude larger than
any message (excluding 'non-permitted' attachments!) which this list has
ever seen.
I obviously agree that _unnecessary_ length is to be avoided in any
communication (i.e., as Alison says, avoidance of unnecessarily lengthy
quoting of previous messages etc.), but that is a different matter. Of all
the e-mail lists/groups to which I subscribe, RADSTATS is one of the
'quietest', in terms of volume of traffic, yet I do not see similar
arguments being presented in any of the other groups. I hate to think what
the 'complainants' would say if this list saw the 50-100 messages per day
which is common on many of the other groups I belong to!
Kind Regards,
John
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Dr John Whittington, Voice: +44 (0) 1296 730225
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