patrick wrote On 10/19/07 04:47,:
Thanks for the respones.
1. I will multipost when i think it is sensible to do so.
Fine; there are few enforceable rules here. There are,
however, widely-accepted norms of "good conduct," and you
do yourself no favors by departing from them too vigorously.
After all, you're looking for help -- and if you make the
potential helpers angry at you, what effect do you suppose
that has on the quantity and quality of help you'll receive?
After 4 hours there was no response on com.lang.java.help (and still no
response today) so I then posted here.
Usenet is not a chat room. Not only is the propagation
irregular, but the participants are on no particular schedule
either. We read when we feel like it, we read only the posts
we feel like reading, and we respond to only a tiny fraction
of those posts. (Yes, "tiny" -- otherwise, the entire Net
would sink under the weight of replies to just one post.)
My own reasons for not answering? Simple: I didn't have
the data you asked for. I suspect *nobody* has the data you
asked for, and that it would take several man-years and a
substantial outlay of money to get the data -- which would
be out of date before you got it. With the question as you
asked it, you could only expect to get anecdotes and/or
silence, the latter being more informative.
You need to ask better questions. Oh, and to exercise
more patience.
On those rare occasions when you feel the need to re-
issue a query that has languished (and the occasions had
better be rare, in view of the first point above), at least
preface the re-posting with an explanation: "I asked this
a few days ago on alt.swedish.chef but the only replies I
got were meatball recipes, so I'm trying here." This gives
the reader two useful pieces of information: First, that
he's not being suckered into posting to an already-bifurcated
thread, and second, that a question he may have skipped a
few days ago is still pending and may warrant a second look.
(Or not; as I said earlier, it's all voluntary.)
It makes sense to post somewhere
there is a likelyhood of responses such as here.
If all you want is response volume, post to porn groups,
music-piracy groups, conspiracy-theory groups, and so on.
You'll get all the volume you could possibly want, including
some really lucrative investment advice to help defray the
cost of all those "enhancement" pills.
2. I am inclined to go with Arnes advice and stick with jre1.5 I will lose
a lot of potential users if I force them to download an extra 13MB .They may
abandon or get confused in the process.
... and you will lose a lot of potential helpers if you
get into their killfiles. If four hours of silence disturbed
you so, how would you react to being ignored altogether?
