At 06:33 PM 1/22/97 EST, you wrote:
>>It would be nice to be able to run a list of subscribers by date of
>>subscription with out having to query each individual address.  Is
>>there a way to do this?
>
>   That  would be  very useful  ...  How  about it  Eric?  Both  date of
>subscription and last change would be nice.
>
   I'm not opposed to such a thing, but I'm also missing the usefulness of
it.  I know on a number of my lists people choose to unsub and resub
instead of setting nomail and mail.  I don't know or care why.  Some of
them have been around for six or seven years, despite many subs and unsubs.

   I guess I feel the same way about the countries option under stats.  It
is interesting, but certainly not overly accurate (many multinational corps
have people overseas under .com, some foreign universities are .edu, most
.net aren't really "unknown location", and many foreign companies get
"american" .com addresses to keep from scaring off the the vast majority of
Americans who compose the majority of netizens to this day, and you know
nothing about the location of many aol.com and other major online service
providers.

Again, no complaint on the countries stats, but it is an analogous
situation to the date of sub.  After over thirty years in higher education
in the USA, I've been asked many times for statistical reports on things
some boss is "interested in", but are actually worthless and meaningless
data.  One boss couldn't even present a supposedly valid reason for his
request as to whether there is a difference in numbers of books circulated
when you crosstab colors of books with days of the week.  He just thought
it would be nice to know which days red books went out the most on, etc.
Fortunately, since he was VERY insistent, I convinced him that the computer
really did NOT know what color the books were.  o-)

So....the basic question....what is the data useful for, and if it is
potentially useful will the data be accurate enough to mean anything.

dan




Dan Lester
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In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.