Lars (writing only for himself) writes:

> Yet another example that the "OT:" tags don't work very well:
>
>  When I checked my subscription options on the raven web pages,
>  I was curious to see how much my unchecked "OT" subject area
>  might have saved me recently...
>
>  I must admit that it saved me quite a number of threads in
>  the area of international politics. So it does help a bit.
>
>  However, I also noticed that threads like "No longer reading
>  HP3000-L" or "Volume sets on MPE" or "WRQ, XP, File Transfer,
>  & Firewall" had either morphed into the "OT:" category or at
>  least developed a branch into it. So better beware... if you
>  don't get answers to technical questions, this might be one
>  of the contributing reasons.

Life is just one large disappointment after another. If you let it be.

The complaints of a few chronic complainers don't really bother me. There are
about 800 people who subscribe to HP3000-L. If I said that I was going buy
everyone lunch today, I would expect that 25 or so people would complain
bitterly that the lunch was going to be Chinese. You just can't please
everyone all of the time, or even some of the time. You just do the best that
you can.

Nonetheless, if HP3000-L turned into a purely technical newslist, where it's
a repeat of the information that could be gotten out of the manuals with a
little bit of work, it would hold no interest to me. As I have mentioned
before, I read every posting, on this and about a dozen other listservers,
and I learn a little something from every one of them -- and sometimes I
learn a lot.

Nowadays, I have to futz with Linux, just like everyone else, but I don't
read any Linux newsgroups. To me, that seems boring beyond belief --
especially for an operating system that's already as ugly as hell. But even
more importantly, getting information from a newsgroup is not a particularly
quick (or perhaps even reliable) source of information. For specific
questions, Google and the O'Reilly books are enormously faster. The
piecemeal, hodge-podge, lack-of-a-central-philosophy nature of Linux/UNIX
makes Google an even more appropriate tool anyway.

The OT posts on HP3000-L have always been the posts that hold the most
interest to me. They're intrinsically the most informative, even if
occasionally not much thought is given to them by the poster, but they work
to build a sense a community that would never exist if this were purely a
technical newsgroup, and they make HP3000-L a very unique newsgroup and I
certainly would not want to do anything to discourage them too much.

While the number of off-topic posts has dropped dramatically in the last day,
I don't think that has anything to do with Gavin's idle threats (Gavin is
just bamboozling everyone; he isn't going anywhere. Heck, he hasn't anywhere
else to go :-). Rather, I think that now that the war has started, there
isn't all that much more to say. As GW Bush said just yesterday, "Our long
national nightmare of eight years of peace and prosperity is finally over."
However, I thought the discussion -- and its level of intensity -- prior to
the run-up to the war was not only interesting but important. It allowed us
all to hear opinions from groups of people that we probably never would have
heard otherwise.

While much of this material has hardly anything all that much to do with
HP3000s or even computation in general, if you blinker yourself into a
brightly lit, air-conditioned cubicle, and keep your mind tightly focused
only to the bits and bytes of MPE, you're automatically making yourself
obsolete and invaluable. Before long, someone's going to come along an pull
the rug out from underneath that kind of world.

Wirt Atmar

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