another nice one

Blair P. Houghton bph at buengc.BU.EDU
Sun Nov 12 06:17:58 AEST 1989


In article <20540 at unix.cis.pitt.edu> you write:
>In article <11576 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>>In article <20519 at unix.cis.pitt.edu> yahoo at unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore) writes:
>I can't believe that four lines causes any significant problems.  Does
>anyone know how much is paid to recieve my .sig? .000000001 cents?

Hardly.  The current cost of transmission alone is approximately
0.25 cents per kilobyte _per_site_.  Your .sig is about 0.3 kB.
Multiply that by 70,000 sites.  Comes out to $52.50.

Add in the cpu time and cost of storage, and it's considerably
more.

Feel important?

>Sounds like a mountain out of a mole hill to me. 

That's 52.5 dollars every time you post it.  85% of it is useless
repetition.  It's you who made the ersatz mountain out of your
lightweight molehill.

Feel creative?

>Also, I don't consider it useless garbage. It allows someone to easily
>identify me. That was its purpose and it seems to serve it pretty well.

Identify you as a self-serving computer services thief.  Keep it up.

Further, it is an insult to the intelligence of tens of thousands of
computer-using professionals that you assume we are not capable of
remembering your name so that you find that you must resort to
banal advertising gimmicks in order to produce your petty brand-loyalty.

If you were _worth_ remembering, it would be for the quality and value
of your postings, not for your fashion design.

Feel successful?

>I still don't know how .sig relates to bandwidth. 

This machine (buengc) has more than once been the victim of unnecessary
news blackouts due to an overfull news partition.  Considering that
almost all computer systems allocate space in blocks, your signature
is often the straw that pokes a single byte into the next block.  Your
300 bytes are responsible for a 2k disk block, and without any informational
content whatsoever having been stored.

Feel intelligent?

>                   yahoo at unix.cis.pitt.edu (Kenneth L Moore)
[79 @'s deleted] 
>[35 @'s deleted] Ken [35 @'s deleted]
[79 @'s deleted]

Or do you just feel like an idiot?

				--Blair
				  "It's not even very attractive."



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