🚀 go-pugleaf

shaver@convex.com (Dave Shaver) writes:

> The question: If your management questioned the value of your news,
> what would you say?  What if they said they wanted to turn the whole
> thing off or eliminate 90% of it?  (The "non-business" newsgroups.)
> What arguments would you use to maintain your feed?

- It's a cheap way to get education to people who need it; especially info
  on leading edge stuff that hasn't made it into texts yet, and can only
  otherwise be discovered by hiring someone who's already experienced in
  it, or going to pricy seminars or conferences.

- It's a perk.  It's like having company-provided coffee, or bottled water.
  It's like having "minesweeper" on your PC, but more educational.

- It's nearly free, because it fits in the bandwidth and CPU cycles that we
  need anyway (we do most news processing in the evenings).  The total cost
  is for about 600 MB of disk on various systems.  There's some admin
  overhead that doesn't really amount to anything because if I weren't
  taking care of the news (and reading it), I'd just leave earlier.

- It gives us a bit more name recognition.  (No, we haven't gone out of
  business.)  Occasionally, people even post questions about our stuff.

- It's a great way to find pointers to tools, free software, documentation,
  or whatever.  Half the software we run is from the net in one way or
  another.... even stuff we can ftp, we probably wouldn't find out about
  except for the news.

- It's a good place to ask stupid questions and get them answered by people
  who really know the subject.  (You'll also get answers from people who
  don't know squat, but figuring out which is which will teach you a bit
  more about the subject than you would have learned with only the right
  answer.  Some wrong answers are wrong for interesting reasons.)

-- 
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs       fitz@wang.com   "I went to the universe today;
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA                   It was closed...."