Re: "Test Driving Linux" Released by O'Reilly

From: Ed Hew (eah_at_enigma.xenitec.on.ca)
Date: 05/25/05 

Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 21:46:44 GMT

In article <02ea01c55fbc$a62af290$6b00000a@venti>,
Brian K. White <brian@aljex.com> wrote:
>
>OK I hate to be a party pooper but think I'm kinda tired of the ads if they
>are going to be this frequent.

Ads? Ads aren't permitted in the comp.unix.sco.announce newsgroup;
announcements consistant with the newsgroup charter however are.
Ads and announcements aren't at all the same thing.

>I don't mind, actually I appreciate, the occasional advertizement showing up
>here if the product is on topic and not otherwise well known, or
>_infrequent_ informative updates about products even if they are well known
>as long as they are topical.

As you're surely aware, the comp.unix.sco.announce newsgroup charter is:
   comp.unix.sco.announce (Moderated by Ed Hew <edhew@xenitec.on.ca>)
     Product, service, and business announcements of reasonable interest
     to the SCO community of developers, distributors, resellers,
     consultants, administrators and end-users, submitted by:
        - SCO,
        - third party software and hardware developers, SCO-specific
          service providers, and authors of freely available software.
     This explicitly includes SCO supplement information (SLS, TLS, EFS, etc.)
     Blatant and/or irrelevant commercial "ads" will continue to be rejected.
     Articles should be emailed to the moderator at: scoannmod@xenitec.on.ca

>While many of the O'Reilly books are topical here, and these ads could be
>called informative updates, they are apparently not going to be infrequent
>and I think everyone knows for a long time by now that the O'Reilly books
>exist, where to find them, that new ones are always coming out, and what
>their average usefulness is.

If I wasn't the moderator, I'd still as a reader want to know when a
good book comes out on, say, "Apache security", or "IPV6 Network
Administration" or "Knoppix" or anything I can learn from to help me
work with SCO and yes, these days also closely related environments.
As old and stodgy as I might be these days, even I know that I can't
ignore everything that I need to deal with if I have SCO environments
past-present_and_future to deal with.

You'll recall that SCO *did* have a Linux product, and thus a posting
about a Linux book that SCO users, administrators, etc might be
interested in, is reasonable in the newsgroup, for the precise same
reason that if someone was to announce a book on SCO Xenix that would
also be posted to comp.unix.sco.announce. As moderator I consider
O'Reilly a "service provider", and their books are historically known
to be a service appreciated by many long-time c.u.s.announce subscribers.
When a publisher, software author, or other submittor submits an
announcment reasonably consistant with the charter, or which within
my reasonable discretion as newsgroup moderator I deem likely be of
sufficient interest to the newsgroup subscribers, then I approve and
post it. Otherwise I don't, and return it to the submittor with a
polite suggestion that they should post it to a more topical newsgroup
instead. It's been that way in the comp.unix.sco.announce newsgroup
(and it's precursor) for about 15 years now.

The bottom line to this is that the posting _was_ sufficiently
on-charter for comp.unix.sco.announce, or I wouldn't have approved it.

As for volume ...
You undoubtedly noticed that the xenitec news server was inoperable
for about 1/2 a year while being repaired (long story!), and thus I
have quite a backlog of announcements (yes, including a lot from
O'Reilly) to chug through. A quick look shows that I'll be rejecting
more of the backlogged O'Reilly announcements than you'll see posted
in c.u.s.announce, for the very reasons explained above. Topical
announcments will however be posted and that includes those from
O'Reilly and any other publishers who care to submit. Ditto for
sfw submittors, etc. I'd surely like to see a lot more from SCO
itself too, but that's up to SCO.

You are of course welcome to solicit sufficient support and spearhead
a new RFD|CFV procedure to change the charter to exclude topical books
if you really feel that's the right thing to do and the majority will
agree with you all the way to and through an eventual vote.

Alternatively, you can easily locally killfile announcements by any
set of regex() entries you might care to make for the .announce
newsgroup if you don't want to even be bothered to know certain
submittors exist; all modern (last 20+ years) newsreaders support
that facility.

Regards,
                --ed (moderator: comp.unix.sco.announce)

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