Re: [csail-related] gsb: tonight at 5:30pm in 9G

[Gregory Marton <gremio@>]

Hi Richard,

While I admire Mike's humor and Dan's skillful goading (strings... that's 
just wicked), I think it's time someone let you in on the joke.  Mike was 
originally making fun of the people who were sending the list unsubscribe 
messages by insinuating that perhaps the only way they could make them more 
pointless and annoying would be to send them as a word attachments.

Mike was not creating an incentive for people to use M$ products, but 
rather the opposite.  Dan, incidentally, is right: using unix strings (or 
more, less, cat, etc.) would have revealed the contents of the attachment, 
though not the gigantic font that Mike used for extra effect.

The message said, "USUBSCRIBE ME TOO!  (but come to gsb anyway)"  Note the 
misspelling of "unsubscribe".  This poked fun at those who can be extra 
annoying by using proprietary formats, while Dan was, I believe, poking fun 
at the extent of M$'s "embrace and extend" philosophy.  Your messages were, 
in this sense, flaming at the choir.

This has been extremely entertaining -- several of us have had 
side-splitting rolling-on-floor laughs about the whole thing -- but I 
didn't feel right letting the goading continue without an explanation.

Best wishes,
Grem

p.s. Noah, what would you think of putting csail-related temporarily into
     emergency-moderation mode so this can quiet down a bit?


On Sun, 17 Dec 2006, Dan Aguayo wrote:

> you should download and install this helpful utility, "Strings"
> (version 2.3):
>
>  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/Strings.mspx
>
> On Sun, Dec 17, 2006 at 08:11:43PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> >    > But above all, sending people Word documents puts pressure on them to
> >    > use Microsoft software and helps to deny them any other choice.
> >
> >     Even worse, it might lead a few people to miss the joke completely.
> >
> > If there was a joke, it must have been hidden inside the Word file
> > where I could not see it.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Csail-related mailing list
> Csail-related@
> https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/csail-related

--
-------- __@   Gregory A. Marton            http://csail.mit.edu/~gremio/
----- _`\<,_ 
---- (*)/ (*)  One good turn deserves another.
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