In <8062 at alvin.mcnc.org> ruggles at mcnc.org (Gary A. Ruggles) writes:
> There is a new resource available to the biotech community from the North
> Carolina Biotechnology Center which should be of interest to many bio-
> netter's. They recently announced the completion of the "Biotechnology
> Research Faculty Profile" It is available in electonic form for importing
> into personal computer based databases. Also the Bureau of National Affairs
> should be publishing a book version in September. I have seen a copy ofi
> this database, and they have done a really nice job. (It is huge, approx.
> 2.3 Mbyte as an ASCII file).
>> ........
>> Formats: IBM and compatible Macintosh
> 3.5" 5.25"
> ASCII Tab-delimited ASCII comma-delimited
> Price: $1,200.00 postpaid
Is this a commercial? Is NCBC a commercial outfit? Because they're
certainly charging commercial prices. 2.3 megs is less that 2 floppies.
And they want twelve hundred bucks for it? Obviously only for folks spending
Other People's Money. Anyone who spends public funds on a pair of six
hundred dollar floppies containing nothing more remarkable than an address
list clearly has more money than he needs, and that fact could usefully be
noted by the funding agencies when grant renewal time rolls around.
It strikes me that the poster crossposted his endorsement of the NCBC
database to a remarkably large number of newsgroups --
> Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.seqnet,bionet.molbio.swiss-prot,bionet.molbio.
> yeast, bionet.politics,bionet.population-bio,bionet.software,bionet.
> software.contrib,bionet.software.pc,bionet.software.pc.comm,bionet.
> technology.conversion
most of which don't exist, and included "Followup To:" lines directing follow-
up messages to bionet.followup and bionet.molbio.seqnet which also do not
exist. One might bear in mind this evidence of (ahem) computer expertise when
judging the value of a computer-related endorsement.
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