<http://pages.uoregon.edu/ftepfer/SchlFacilities/TireSwingTable.html>

[Shmuel Metz]

I'm a student at an organization targeted to students, and last year I
suggested an SF class in a category I'm interested in. Finegal smiled,
and I was drafted as the instructor. Being somewhat disorganized, I
decided to put together several documents on the course contents, some
for the students, some for the office and some for myself. I wanted
all of the documents available to those students who were interested,
and the organization has a document storage system for providing
documents to the students.

Simple, you say, just FTP the documents to the document store. No, you
have to e-mail the documents to someone who will vet them for
copyright compliance. By itself a minor nuisance not worthy of a rant,
but there's more.

Upon examining the document store to see what directory the files for
my course were in, I saw that all classes were in the same directory
and that a prefix was added to the file names, with a web page
displaying courses and links to the associated files. Still no big
deal, except.

Two of my files had names of the form A.B.extension; they renamed them
to A-B.extension. They also decided to create PDF versions of the
ODP[1] and ODT files. They also provided descriptive labels that
didn't describe.

When I asked whether it was their policy to rename files with multiple
periods and whether it was their policy to provide PDF versions, the
man in charge said that mine was the most time consuming request he
had ever had; that's when if did a giggle search for the swing, which
I vaguely remember as having been first published in Datamation.

In the reply giving the URL for the swing, I attached a HTML file
containing what I considered to be reasonable descriptive labels.
Well, the used the text of my <A> tags but keyed in the href
themselves, managing to link to the wrong file in one case. They aslo
dropped the ODP files, giving only the PDF.

How hard is it to store a set of files, not changing the names except
to add a prefix, and to provide links to them with appropriate
descriptions[3]?

[1] No I don't have or want m$ orifice on my desktop, but orifice
supports[2] those formats.

[2] That can't be UI this late in the game.

[3] And how many times must I list the files and explain
what each one is?

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

[The Horny Goat]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2015 06:28:53 -0400, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
<spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote:

>When I asked whether it was their policy to rename files with multiple
>periods and whether it was their policy to provide PDF versions, the
>man in charge said that mine was the most time consuming request he
>had ever had; that's when if did a giggle search for the swing, which
>I vaguely remember as having been first published in Datamation.
>
>In the reply giving the URL for the swing, I attached a HTML file
>containing what I considered to be reasonable descriptive labels.
>Well, the used the text of my <A> tags but keyed in the href
>themselves, managing to link to the wrong file in one case. They aslo
>dropped the ODP files, giving only the PDF.
>
>How hard is it to store a set of files, not changing the names except
>to add a prefix, and to provide links to them with appropriate
>descriptions[3]?

All I can say is 'I feel your pain'. As my kids would say on Skype
(headbang)

I well remember the swing cartoon which had to have been photocopied
in every IT shop I worked in some 30 years ago ... and found in 5
seconds after I typed 'cartoon swing Datamation' into Tbbtyr Vzntrf

[Wojciech Derechowski]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2015 10:28:53 +0000, Shmuel Metz wrote:
>
> How hard is it to store a set of files, not changing the names except
> to add a prefix, and to provide links to them with appropriate
> descriptions[3]?
>

[...]

>
> [3] And how many times must I list the files and explain
> what each one is?
>

That depends on how *long* you have been doing it up till now. You can expect
t_{now} to be located randomly in the interval from t_{begin} to t_{end}, if
there is nothing special about t_{now}. The estimate

t_{future} = (t_{end} - t_{now}) = t_{past} = (t_{now} - t_{begin})

is off either way half of the time. If

r = (t_{now} - t_{begin})/(t_{end} - t_{begin})

is a random number uniformly distributed between 0 and 1, then the probability
that 0.025 < r < 0.975 is P = 0.95. Thus

(1/39)t_{past} < t_{future} < 39t_{past}

at 95% confidence level. You'll be doing it for 39t_{past} time at most. Now
check to see how many times you had to do what you had to do up till t_{now}.
Assuming there is nothing special about that number either the answer is less
than 39 times that number. BTW the answer to the first question is very hard.

--
WD

Who is Entscheidungs and what is his problem?

[Steve VanDevender]

Oddly enough, not only is pages.uoregon.edu one of the systems I manage,
but I also happen to know the person who made the web page that you
cite.

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes