View 389 November 22 - 28, 2005 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The days just keep being eaten by locusts. I continue to work on learning podcasting. And there's always more mail. Do see thenew phishing warnings.
For your amusement:
RMS accosted by UN security for wearing a tin-foil hat.
No permalink (odd, Perens should know better); it's currently at the
top:
Roland Dobbins
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On Mail:
I get over a hundred non-spam emails a day. When we have a hot topic that can double. Because I only print those I find interesting or relevant, most of them languish, often unacknowledged. Given the time I have available there's little I can do about that.
If we were to double the number of subscribers I could delegate some of the mail to a reader, but that would also require some changes in headers and rules so that private and personal mail would never be forwarded (I don't give anyone access to my mail and wouldn't even if we do change to some kind of reader system). If we had a system with explicit headers (OK FOR READER or something like that) it would save some time, but I fear not a lot, because one of the toughest jobs I have is deciding which of many messages on the same subject I ought to print and answer. Most of my mail is well done and thoughtful, probably because I don't bother to read anything that is merely trivial or flames, and seldom print any of that (except as horrible examples).
So: if you wrote me on a popular subject and saw another letter much like it, that's why. I prefer to publish entire letters rather than snippets (well, I will remove asides and irrelevancies), and given my time limits, letters that need little editing are preferable to those that I have to pound into shape. And if I find a good letter on a subject, I may get it up before seeing a better one. In which case I can either put up both, leaving the overlap and redundancy; edit the second one, which is usually not a good thing to do; or just figure the first one is Good Enough. The latter course it the more usual. So if you thought you had a good contribution and saw one that wasn't as good, that's probably what happened. Apologies, but there is little I can do about it.
And, of course, I look at subscriber mail first, then to reliable contributors whose names I recognize, and finally to the general mail. And some days I don't have a lot of time for the last category, and have to read that in big batches, by which time it may not longer be relevant.
This site takes a lot of work. I fear it is getting to the point where I will need more subscribers so that I can pay one of the Associates to handle some of the details. Be assured, I will never send mail off to anyone else to read unless it is clearly marked as OK FOR READER.
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