At 07:22 AM 12/8/03 -0800, Eric Murray wrote:
Other people have made the point that mailing lists are "old tech" and I agree. I don't like the new replacements (blogs, web boards) as much as lists, but perhaps that's because of what I used first.
Its not just "the First is the Only Way" phenom. What's going on is that folks are online all the time now, so things interactive (web boards, IM) have become more popular than they could have been in the dial-up past. The big advantage of email, which was the original "killer app", was store and forward. Ie, asych; offline. IM strikes me as perverse. If I wanted to be interrupted I'd answer my telephone. Email clients of olde allowed aliasing to lists, which predated (and motivated) mailing list exploders/auto-managers. They are still widely used for group-of-friends 'private' lists. Even my parents understand Bcc: nowadays. Yahoo boards have options to use email, and modern clients manage multiple email addresses. But for online folks a board is perhaps more convenient, since the board is accessable everywhere. For home/office/school mobility this is a feature, even if its regressing to the "PC as dumb terminal" mechanism. The advantage of eg Yahoo groups (and presumably blogs) is their moderation; the lack thereof enabled spammers to bulldoze the commons of usenet. Inevitable. Also the reason why lne.com is the best node.
Kids these days don't know how to use shell shortcuts either.
Not sure what you mean by that. "Shortcut" is a M$ term for lame-ass sym link. ---- "Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a decent sniper rifle." Michael Hohensee