Re: Bradframers Revisited

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My detailed, documented response below shows that, in the 168-hour period
from the evening of Friday November 5 to the evening of Friday November 12,
the Bradlist was out of service 74% of the time.
============================================================================
At 03:52 PM 11/14/99 +1100, Marcus Carr wrote:
>----------------Snip
>
>When my mail piles up I need to cull it brutally, usually only skimming
>messages related to the eight or so groups that I subscribe to. Your
>obsessive persistence with topics such as this have elevated the journal
>version of this list to number 1 for the bullet.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
At 09:19 PM 11/13/99 -0500, Loren R. Needles wrote:
>I just don't think the speed of FMkr mail delivery is a very high 
>priority for 99.9% of those on the list. If you are going to force a 
>quibble about all potholes regardless of size or traffic density, you 
>will greatly dilute the impact of those few significant 
>considerations on which you properly focus our attention.
===============================================================
Get real both of you. The fact of the matter is that 95% of the postings on
BradFramers are of interest to one person--the one asking for help. And a
large majority of those requests for help relate to problems that come up
over and over again, ad nauseum. I venture to say most of us hit the trash
button after 3-5 seconds of skimming on the vast majority of postings. So
what? The fact is that all of us are weeding through a blizzard of chaff to
find a relatively small number of interesting nuggets that stir our
combative or altruistic juices, or which reveal some new wrinkle worth
thinking about or saving for future reference.

And, like any other information resource, a concern we all share is the
quality and reliability of the mechanism by which that information is
delivered to us. In the case of email, we're never sure whether the problem
is with our ISP, our local mail server, or somewhere else. Thus, when
someone else offers information about the same problem we're experiencing,
we're interested.    

Now, I think more than a few people are puzzled about the way in which the
BradList delivers mail. That means the subject is relevant to many more
people than the typical posting to the list. Why, some might ask, is it that
at the beginning of almost every week, there's a dearth (or total absence)
of postings until mid-afternoon on Monday or Tuesday, even though
subscribers in Europe have already left work well before that time? You
can't ask these kind of questions off-list to Brad. He either refuses to
respond, or denies that there is any problem. And If you post a complaint to
the entire list, Brad tells you to take it off-list (is that a Catch-22 or
what?).

In the week from the evening of Friday November 5 to the evening of Friday
November 12, I have documented three major outages of 73, 34, and 17 hours
in which no email was distributed.

        Outage 1 (73 hours) was between 5:26 PM on Friday 11/5 and 2:17 PM
        on Monday 11/8.

        Outage 2 (34 hours) was between 5:23 PM on Monday 11/8 and 2:47 AM
        on Wednesday 11/10.

        Outage 3 (17 hours) was between 10:54 PM on Thursday 11/11 and
        4:26 PM on Friday 11/12.

The total number of hours between the beginning of the first outage and the
end of the last outage is 168, and within that period, the total number of
hours the list was down was 124, or 74% of the time.

Now, Suppose you're willing to accept a minimum service level in which the
list is up from, say, 6AM EST to 6 PM EST each day. That would require that
the list be up only 84 hours a week. But in the week in question, the list
was up during that 6AM to 6PM time period for a total of 18 hours, or only
21% of the time required for minimum acceptable service.

Anyone who doubts the validity of these data can go to
www.egroups.com/list/framers
and check the time intervals between messages 21151 and 21152 (outage 1),
between messages 21167 and 21168 (outage 2), and between messages 21313 and
21314 (outage 3).
     ====================
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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