Subject: Re: Newest realtime draft

From: Tony Kimball <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 12:39:19 -0500 (CDT)

Quoth Tony Skjellum on Thu, 29 August:
: ... express your concerns directly to
: the entire MPI Forum body...

I presume the CC list is appropriate.  I must confess some reluctance
to address such a large audience without a offer of proposal, but you are
most *encouraging* on this point;-).

My own concerns would be met by splitting the various lists into
discussion and draft-distribution groups.  Thus, I would request this,
were it not that others may find the measure inadequate, and the
issue, a procedural annoyance, rather than substantive and germane,
may be raised again -- which we would all prefer to avoid, yes?
Specifically:

: ...connected to us by cellular modem, and reads his
: e-mail by downloading while flying cross country...

In consideration of such recipients, the obvious suggestion is to
establish a repository for submission of drafts, accessible by http
and ftp (and, by implication, ftp-mail), and adopt the convention that
announcements of draft submissions, and not the drafts themselves,
should be broadcast.  Absent the volunteer of such a repository, this
preferred solution fails, however.  Were it to exist, the slight
elaboration of using it as an archive for submissions to the
previously mention draft-distribution lists would serve the interests
of *all* readers.  I cannot volunteer a site, for everything which I
manage personally is in experimental/developmental use, and subject to
random downtime.

: I clearly explained these things to you before.  

My apologies: I must have somehow overlooked that explanation.
Regardless, I should prefer that personal criticisms -- and
"atavistic" is rather pejorative, you must admit -- pardon me while I
struggle to walk erect -- should be expressed in private
correspondence when possible, for otherwise there is a strong
temptation to defend oneself to an entirely uninterested audience.
Atavistic though I may be, not to mention curmudgeonly, I bear no
doubt that my concerns, however atavistically inflated, are shared by
less vocal recipients.

---

From: Tony Skjellum <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 11:34:47 -0500 (CDT)

Mr. Kimball:

I cannot thank you enough for reiterating your concern, but I remind you
that your subscription is voluntary, but the method of sharing information
is the convention of the Forum, of which I am but one voice among many.
Once again, I have propagated your concern to the Forum.  I cannot stop
doing transmission in this way until the MPI Forum changes its policy. 
Please address comments to those bodies, and unsubscribe in the meantime
to control bandwidth to your desktop.  You will find periodic updates at
the URLs below, and you can poll for them. 

If you were subscribing to other lists, you would get their postscript
too.  Perhaps you do, and are haranging others than me.  If so, I feel
that you are missing the opportunity to express your concerns directly to
the entire MPI Forum body, which might listen to you.  

I clearly explained these things to you before.  If you do not agree with
the terms of our voluntary organization's activities, please complain to
the group at large, not to one of those following its procedures.  I
personally am time writing this letter, because you are from a company
that might contribute to the standard; not because i have not explained
this before.  To be frank, if you were a random lurker, I would have blown
you off already, after having responded clearly twice before.

However, I do find all of this tiresome and atavistic.  Your employer
would be better served by your contributing a technical response to the
documents, rather than pursuing a crusade.   The only other person who
complained about this is connected to us by cellular modem, and reads his
e-mail by downloading while flying cross country...

Tony Skjellum

On Thu, 29 Aug 1996, Tony Kimball wrote:

> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 11:09:32 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Tony Kimball <[email-masked]>
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Newest realtime draft
> 
> Quoth Tony Skjellum on Wed, 28 August:
> : See also anonymous ftp
> : as ftp://aurora.cs.msstate.edu/pub/mpi/rt-2-28aug96.ps
> : or ftp://aurora.cs.msstate.edu/pub/mpi/rt-2-28aug96.ps.Z
> : 
> 
> I very much appreciate the urls, and thank you for them
> most enthusiastically; however, I must strenuously protest
> the redudant inclusion of 203 kilobytes of uuencoded
> binary data.
> 

Anthony Skjellum, PhD, Associate Professor of Computer Science; 
Mississippi State University, Department of Computer Science & NSF ERC       
Butler, Rm 300, PO Box 9637, Corner of Perry&Barr, Mississippi State,MS 39762 
(601)325-8435 FAX: (601)325-8997;  http://www.erc.msstate.edu/~tony; Quote:
"What a rain of ashes falls on him that sees the new and cannot leave the
old."-Shakespeare  ; e-mail: [email-masked];  Try MPI!