Alternatives to Kubuntu, was Re: KDE 4.0.0!

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Sunday 20 January 2008, ronw at paradise.net.nz wrote:

> Actually I quite like the way it handles mail. It is fortunate that it
> showed me there is merit in top posting and will save me from being so one
> eyed on a subject that I start calling habits conventions and suggesting
> something is logical when it patently is not.

The real problem is with people who don't trim their reply text.  It doesn't 
matter where you leave it, if you have a gigantic gob of reply text in your 
message, it's obnoxious.

I happened to quote all of yours, but four lines looks about right to my eye.  
If that had been a big paragraph, I would have cut out most of it, and if 
that had been a reply to something else, I would have cut out all but the 
most critically important bits (if any) in the text to which you were 
replying.

People never used to have these discussions. They just did more or less what I 
described above automatically.  That's how email used to be done, and usenet 
posts too.  It all changed in the mid '90s when millions of people who were 
new to the scene came in at once.  Especially Microsoft Outlook and Outlook 
Express users, which software is all but completely impossible to use to 
format a message correctly.  It's not impossible, but you have to do 
everything by hand, and even I'm not that anal about message formatting, so I 
post broken messages with that junk too, when I'm forced to use it, which is 
thankfully very rare.

But anyway, this is all a lost cause, like Coke vs. Pepsi.  It will never be 
settled, and there's no point trying to change anybody else. I just lead by 
example, and do what I think is right.  If other people disagree about what 
is right, I don't care.  I just do it my way anyway; the way I've been 
writing messages since the mid '80s.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre