[mythtv-users] Who is VCRAddict - and who appointed him sheriff of Mythville?

[Darrin]

Inline post, because I'm responding to points made individually:

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 12:53 PM, David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote:

> To make an analogy, let's say you're visiting somewhere where people
> habitually walk on the left side of the sidewalk.  Maybe you prefer to
> walk on the right, but if you walk on the right there, you'll be
> constantly surprising people, bumping into them, and inconveniencing them.
>  The polite thing to do is follow the local convention and walk on the
> left.  Walking on the left isn't inherently superior to walking on the
> right, but it's the local custom.

I'm quite amused by this.  Funny anecdote:  I was taught, believe it
or not, to walk on the right side of the hallway in high school.
There were so many students having to get to class within 3 minutes
via narrow hallways, that it actually made sense.

Fast forward to today and I still don't understand why some people
insist on walking on the left side of a hallway, sidewalk, or other
pathway.  At least here in the US, we all drive on the right side of
the road, so it would seem natural to use the right hand side of the
hallway. I guess old habits die hard.  :-)

> Similarly, on a list where the convention is to bottom- or inline-post,
> top-posting throws people off.  It's not that it's somehow inherently
> worse, but it's not what people are expecting.  A thread with mixed top-
> and bottom-posting is particularly hard to read, so it's polite to follow
> the same convention as everyone else.

In a business setting, top posting is much more efficient.  Most of
the time, a conversation between a group of people usually starts out
with the To: and CC: lists completely defined.  Adding people to the
conversation after the fact is rare enough that only a relative few
would need to actually read the entire message.  Even then, due to how
job positions are defined, most people can get the context of the
email from only the first reply they read.  (and this has little to do
with M$ in my opinion.  I think top posting in business would have
come about regardless of Outlook's default settings).

I guess both top and bottom posting have their merits, at least to me
anyway.  On my local Linux user group mailing list, we eventually
decided that the first person to reply to a message sets the standard
for all further replies.  If there are multiple replies included in a
message, they would need to all be either top postings or all bottom
postings and the two should never be mixed.  At the least the
resulting message would be readable without having to jump back and
forth to figure out  who was responding to who.

--Darrin