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Re: Tale and the SRH-reorg (Was: Re: Charter changes?)
In article <4sfgkl$jte@babbage.ece.uc.edu>,
Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian <rbalasub@ecn.purdue.edu> wrote:
>Vivek Sadananda Pai wrote:
>
>> In conclusion, I stand by the correctness of the SRH Stats page, and
>> if anyone still wishes to make the claim that the stats are "skewed",
>> the burden of proof is now upon them.
>
>The claim seems to be that the stats were taken in the _beginning_ months of
>srh. How about the latest stats? You haven't addressed that claim.
I _have_ addressed that claim, repeatedly. In fact, the supporting
information for that answer is even explained in the section you
snipped.
All of the archives this year have been _mail_ archives, not _news_
archives. In fact, I downloaded them all last night just to prove it.
Here's a sample of what the date information in the "new" archives
look like:
<em>Date</em>: 18 Mar 1996 02:28:37 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 18 Mar 1996 03:58:20 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 18 Mar 1996 11:45:15 -0500
<em>Date</em>: 18 Mar 1996 12:10:41 -0600
<em>Date</em>: 18 Mar 1996 18:48:32 GMT
Notice that there are at least 3 different formats for a single day,
and notice that the times aren't in any sort of batched order. It's
clear that this is because the archive is a _mail_ archive, as the
alt.hindu archives used to be.
Compare this to a sample taken from the 1995 SRH archives:
<em>Date</em>: 6 Nov 1995 01:37:27 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 6 Nov 1995 01:37:29 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 6 Nov 1995 01:37:29 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 6 Nov 1995 01:37:30 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 6 Nov 1995 01:37:31 GMT
<em>Date</em>: 6 Nov 1995 01:37:32 GMT
Notice that the articles have dates within seconds of each other. This
is from the batch posting style, and could not have been generated
from mail archives. In other words, these are _news_ archives.
The article I had posted explained the difference.
It should be obvious why the new 1996 archives don't lend themselves
to extraction of the same information. In fact, those archives were
unavailable to us mere mortals for a very long time, despite my
repeatedly pointing out this fact. Why did you not speak up then?
-Vivek
