Re: The Ninth Wave - The Screenplay

[btd@carina.cray.com (Bryan Dongray)]

Dennis, Dennis, Dennis,

You were supposed to wait for the "how big is too big" survey
results for at least a week or so, no good waiting just a day,
the propogation delays on the network of newgroups can be quite
long, I am four days away from someone posting something sometimes.
I guess a reply could take as long to get back. Your total posting,
including reposting was 1821076 bytes, even a little over the 1Mb I
suggested, but obviously I can take more, as I did not have much
problems, once I realised you had troubles, and the final reposting
was your intended message, pity about the subject line length, I had
to go out of my way to see the part numbers.

Hey everyone, I know there are some of you out there with instant
reply capability, how come no one replied on the maximum size
survey I suggested?

Point two.
The format (of the reposting) was a multipart split of a single uuencoded
file (size 937637 bytes), which is good, but once uudecoded I got another
uuencoded file (635297 bytes), which is bad. Once that was decoded I then
got the PDF file (size 461063 bytes), which is binary. I would have hoped
for just one pass of the uuencoding, making the posting 300k less.

Point three.
I now have the PDF file, but do not know what on earth format this
is, I can see through the UNIX strings command lots of text formating
and font setting things, but do not see any plain text, I guess it's
all encoded for a word processor, which I don't have!

Is it possible to write an ASCII format file, some call it DOS TEXT,
some call it PLAIN TEXT, I think you know what I mean. I know all the
headers/footers/lines/fonts maybe possibly lost, but it is the content
I am interested in.

PLEASE tell us the size of this plain ASCII text document, it would
be nice to know what the pkzip'd/uuencoded size is too, tell us
number of lines as well as number of bytes, if you can.
NOTE zip is VERY common, and available on virtually EVERY platform,
including PC, UNIXs, MAC, AMIGA, ATARI, VMS, plus lots more, and generally
compresses ASCII text by about 70% compression, ie file is less than one
third of the original size. Once we all see those numbers, we will all
tell you if it's too big! It could be that the plain text is just 50k
long, that would be about 8000 words, about 20 pages (depending on page
size). Once zipped, and uuencoded, that would be about 400 uuencoded
lines, which does not seem too bad (to me), and everyone can see or just
delete. A 2400 baud modem would take about 100s at full speed, a 28.8k
modem would take just 9 seconds, not too bad for pay per minute services.
Unfortunately, a 2400 baud modem at full speed would take over 2 hours
to download your 1.8M postings!

Once you do have a plain ASCII text version, feel free to email it to
just me, or anyone else who asks for it directly, no need to zip/uuencode,
if you do not have the software, I handled the 1.8M posting (I receive
rec.music.gaffa by email anyway).

Despite a "down" tone on what you did, you MUST have learned a good lesson
from this event (I hope), mainly it is patience, wait for replies on
acceptance on what you intend to do, but it is also knowing what to
do to minimize network traffic while maximizing your audience,
ie no need for reposts, no uuencoding uuencoded files, and chosing a
format that is processable by most recipients. Also remember to keep
subject lines short and to the point (especially on multipart postings).
Hopefully, others reading this will not flame you and will be mature
unlike much a the Internet flame wars that go on.

			Bryan Dongray

PS If you cannot see my email above use "btd@cray.com" for the ASCII.