Re: ANNOUNCING: CROSSPOSTED SPAM SPAM SPAM

In article <LGuzenda-2712960748560001_at_sjx-ca19-15.ix.netcom.com> LGuzenda_at_ix.netcom.com (Leon Guzenda) writes:
>> I wonder if others in this newsgroup
>> feel the same?
>>
>> /mr/
 

> [...] The item which drew criticism
>was a bit long for my liking, but all of us from the commercial side of
>the picture walk a fine line between being informative, collaborative and
>over-enthusiastic (product-wise).

Yes, and since I too am on the vendor as well as the user side of the fence, I should acknowledge that perhaps I've become over-sensitive to the issue. But still the bottom line for me is that commercial postings are a legitimate topic, if they are (a) brief, (b) relevant to the newsgroup, and (c) have value outside of their content as a broadsheet.

This is because, knowing about and buying the right commercial offering, and hearing the pros and cons from people who have done the same (for better or for worse) can be the most valuable benefit from the Internet of them all. It does not particularly matter to me if someone who has solved a problem and has done it well wants to charge money for their wares. It does matter to me that I'm not spinning my wheels trying to solve a problem a second time, or wrestling with an inferior tool, simply because I do not know that a better tool exists.

A case in point here is the infamous FLIMPORT vs. Kallista. I spent months trying to optimize a process that was bogged down for more than three hours while an FLIMPORT job step ran. I did not know, at the time, that Kallista had a lightyears-better product on the market that could accomplish the same task in two and a half minutes. In this particular instance I learned about the tool from a co-worker. But the key thing is that I needed to know about it and that once I did, it solved my problem admirably and I was thrilled to pay for it.

Would I have objected to a "hey, here's a better mousetrap... interested?" posting from Kallista? Not in the slightest. A hundred bezillion of them, yes. "Sex sex sex!" yes. But "commercial content," the litmus paper that Daniel uses -- I simply think is wrong.

Frankly... the "commercial free" nature of this newsgroup, partly no doubt due to such ferocious "policing," makes this newsgroup one of the -least- useful that I presently follow. There's a lot more going on, and a lot more freedom of speech, next door in comp.lang.pascal.delphi.databases. But this is not how it should be.

Having said my piece, I'll be quiet now. Flames to /dev/null.

/mr/ Received on Fri Dec 27 1996 - 00:00:00 CET