The NEW Drill Press

[Upscale]

I've always wondered why most manufacturers don't include a little additional engineering in their products ~ engineering in their packaging I'm talking about. I remember buying a colour Xerox printer some five or six years ago. The box with printer was over 80 lbs and far to bulky for me to handle from my chair. But, it didn't matter in the least.

Once the box was placed where you wanted it, several clips were released at the base of the box and you lifted the sides away. Removing the rest of the heavily reinforced cardboard base involved raising each corner of the printer a half inch or so and sliding that corner away. Since that time, I've yet to come across any other packaging so well engineered and easy to use. And even better, once the printer was fully unpackaged and ready to use, I found the printer itself to be equally as well engineered when it came to form and function. I don't impress very easily, but this packaging did it with ease.

Of course, heavy iron is in a different category, but the situation is similar.

[Maxwell Lol]

You suck! :-)

Some people are reading this on a netbook......

[Maxwell Lol]

[Stephen Quinn]

It has to do with the early computer (TTY) consoles/telex machines only being able to display/print 80 characters per line.

CYA Steve

[Steve Turner]

Yes, I used those myself when I was a "computer operator" back in the days before Apples and IBM PCs. I understand all the reasons why one might want to restrict line lengths to 80 characters (I still do it myself in my C source code), but NNTP doesn't impose such a restriction and there is little reason to manually do so in this day and age. I would argue that introducing explicit line endings into otherwise free-flowing paragraphs of text creates as many problems as it solves.

[Steve Turner]

Ah; Jack, you're talking about line feeds in different places than Pat was. You're simply asking Leon to use multiple paragraphs in place of one big one.

[Jack Stein]

Line feeds separate paragraphs or sentences. You need two of them at the end of a paragraph in order to get some white space, breaking up long posts making them easier to read. Like this:

There is no compelling reason I can see to worry too much about when to make these separations either, just that too much typing without space makes it harder to follow along on long posts, and spacing like this makes it easier to edit replies. Often, if I get too wordy I'll go back and stick in some line feeds (white space).

Your post was long and with no white space my first impulse is to skip the whole thing. Once I started reading it, it was a good read and well written, but the white space makes it more inviting (too me, anyway) than a page[s] of text with no white space...

[Leon]

THERE WERE "2" paragraphs. LOL

[Pat Barber]

I was simply trying to make his a "wee bit" more readable. Mine are short because I use a very wide screen that many folks do not have.

Just for the record, most people outside the computer world have no idea what a LF is.

Jack Ste> At any rate, looking at your message, the line lengths are perfect for

[Jack Stein]

Not sure what Pat was speaking of? He added white space double line feeds between paragraphs, to which I'm speaking, but he also put explicit line feeds to minimize line lengths as well. I think your reader should manage the line lengths rather than force others to read your line lengths.

At any rate, looking at your message, the line lengths are perfect for me, Pats are too short, and I think mine are too long... when I read my own posts. Messing with all this stuff always gives me a headache:-)

I know I always try to edit my messages for readability. I doubt I'm always successful, and don't mind constructive criticism giving or getting:-)

My biggest complaint about newsgroups are it's readers. 20 years ago, in Fidonet, the readers were super nice. I used to use one written by Nick Night, can't remember the name of it, but it worked better than the rest of this stuff. I use Thunderbird now, it's ok at best, but nothing like the one Nick wrote.

[Swingman]

I remember when "Blue Wave" first came out it was the cat's meow!

Next you'll start talking about ZMH and tossers. :)

[Jack Stein]

You mean I should have used Carriage Return:-)

[Jack Stein]

Yes, Zone Mail Hour... I ran Opus, and it had one message one file format for mail. Other BBS systems had a database method for mail. Opus would create havoc with the archaic DOS file system because of a zillion files being created and deleted every day. Even with the data base method, DOS disk fragmentation was a big issue. When I started running OS/2 and the HPFS file system, fragmentation was non-existent. A large number of sysops had no clue...