AATSEEL Program

[Gerald McCausland]

On Tue, 24 Oct 1995, Don wrote:

> Dear SEELANGS:
>
>    In the spirit of electronic information dissemination, what would
> be the problem with posting updated conference programs, such as Chicago's
> AATSEEL, to this list? Non-"surfers" will get what they want, and at least

George Fowler's earlier posting on this subject included a copy of the
ftp.pitt.edu/dept/slavic/aatseel directory, revealing, among other things,
that the conference program is over 82 Kb. large.  Now, I am no expert,
but I do know that if I were to receive an e-mail message that large, my
computer account would immediately and automatically be shut off by the
computer accounts system for having exceeded my disk quota and I would, at
the very least, have to go through a tedious process of application to get
the account restored.  My understanding is that transmitting files that
large via e-mail has the ability to crash entire systems and is really
tabu on the internet.

As wonderful as e-mail seemed to us all when it was a novelty, it really
is not adequate to access the kind of information now commonly available
electronically.  Christina Kramer's report about her situation amazed me.
Here at the University of Pittsburgh all graduate students must pay over
$200 per academic year in computer fees and a considerable portion of the
university's resources are devoted to computing.  If this is the situation
at most universities, as I assume it must be, surely we have the right to
expect and demand that the support staff of academic computing will indeed
be happy to show us how to access the web, and any other on-line resources
we need.  N'est pas?

Jerry.

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Jerry McCausland                                       I never make misteaks.
University of Pittsburgh
gmmst11+ at pitt.edu