Subscribe to the newsgroup for your tutorial group:
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut1
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut2
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut3
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut4
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut5
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut6
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut7
tu-graz.lv.inm.tut8
These newsgroups are to be used for Ex 1 and Ex 2 only. They are not for asking questions about the course or the exercises. Always post questions about the course or the exercises to the main INM newsgroup tu-graz.lv.inm.
Compose a posting of at between 100 and 200 words about a topic of general interest:
Choose a topic of a general nature, to which most typical computer science students can express an opinion.
Make sure the topic (or a very similar topic) has not already been posted in your tutorial newsgroup.
You may post either in English or in German.
Write in your own words. Do not simply copy passages of text from somewhere else. Copying the words of others and making out they are your own is called plagiarism. Plagiarism is strictly forbidden and will be punished where discovered.
The university has a code of conduct and a set of guidelines regarding scientific integrity and ethics.
Provide background information and context, stating any sources you have used.
According to Wikipedia [1], plagiarism is "...the practice of (dishonestly) claiming or implying original authorship of material which one has not actually created...". Plagiarism is considered a grave breach of academic integrity. ... In Austria, copying the words (or other work) of others and handing them in as your own seems to be quite widespread [2]. Do you consider it acceptable practice to copy and paste the words of others? How should plagiarists be punished when caught? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism [2] http://oesterreich.orf.at/kaernten/stories/151383/
You must cite at least two external sources to back up your argument. Give your citations as numbers (starting at 1) in square brackets at the appropriate places in your flowing text, like this [1]. See the example above.
List all your cited references at the bottom of your posting, as shown in the example above. Each reference must have a corresponding citation in the flowing text.
Give the full URL of each reference. Just stating
"Wikipedia" is not sufficient. Manually shorten the URL to the
shortest form that still works. Do not use URL
shortening services such as
tinyurl.com,
goo.gl, etc., since
there is no guarantee as to how long they will exist.
A good strategy is to compose your posting as a plain text file (.txt) first:
Use a plain text editor such as PSPad (Win), Crimson Editor (Win), Notepad++ (Win), UltraEdit (Win, not free), Sublime Text (Win, Mac, Linux, not free), RText (multi-platform, Java), Emacs (multi-platform), Smultron (Mac), or BBedit (Mac, not free).
When you are ready, copy and paste the posting into your newsreader for sending.
Microsoft Word is a word processor, not a plain text editor. If you compose your posting in Microsoft Word and then paste it into your newsreader, you may introduce unwanted special characters.
Express your own opinion on the subject.
Ask at least two questions concerning the topic which are designed to encourage discussion.
Read the lecture notes about newsgroups and netiquette before you post.
Practice posting in the test newsgroup:
Check your postings and make sure everything is fine by looking at the message source (in Thunderbird under View - Message Source or Control-u).
Do not post test messages to any of the INM newsgroups or to any other (non-test) newsgroup! Ever.
Post your message to your tutorial newsgroup. Your posting should start a new thread and should not be a followup. If you do not know what this means, read the lecture notes.
To gain credit for this exercise, you must contribute a meaningful topic for discussion to your tutorial newsgroup.
If you make a mistake and would like to correct your posting:
If there are already followups to your posting, do not cancel it (that would leave the followups orphaned), but instead post again with a new topic.
Yes, a new topic, not the same topic again, nor a slightly edited version of the same topic.
We will grade the (chronologically) last new thread posting you make before the deadline.
Use a proper newsreader (a client installed on your local computer). Thunderbird is a good newsreader. Do not use a web news interface or a mobile newsreader app for the INM exercises.
Outlook Express and Opera are not good newsreaders. Some of their "bugs" can be reconfigured, some can not. If you use one of these as your newsreader, you are likely to lose points in this exercise.
You must post using your real name, composed of your first name plus your surname, for example "Keith Andrews". Your real name should be written only using characters from 7-bit US-ASCII (no umlauts), for example "Juergen Weiss".
So that we can identify you uniquely, you must post either:
From field,
Reply-To field
and a secondary email address in the From field, or
From field or
Reply-To field, which you have previously disclosed
to your tutor by email from your TU Graz email account.
In any case, you should always use working email addresses, not masked addresses which have to be hand-edited to reply to.
Only use the Reply-To field if replies should go to
a different email address than the one given in
the From field. Specifying exactly the same email
address in both the From and the Reply-To
fields is redundant and is considered to be bad practice.
Your posting should have a meaningful subject line using only characters from 7-bit US-ASCII.
The body of your posting should be in UTF-8. Make sure your newsreader
is set up to use UTF-8 as the character encoding. Check by sending a
test posting to the newsgroup
tu-graz.test.
Your posting should be in your own words.
Your posting should be in plain text only.
Do not use lines longer than 72 characters.
The only exception is for URLs which are longer than 72 characters. If you have such a URL, try and find the shortest URL from the same original source which still works (do not use a URL shortening service). If this URL is still more than 72 chars, that is OK.
Your posting should have a valid signature.
For the purposes of this course, do not sign your messages with a cryptographic signature such as PGP or GnuPG. They add unnecessary clutter and many newsreaders do not handle cryptographic signatures properly.
Your posting should start a new thread and not be a followup.
Be aware that if you repeatedly post slightly different versions of the same posting from the same IP address (say, while testing), the TU Graz Cancelbot may think you are spamming and delete your postings automatically. If that happens to you, try posting from a different IP address, or wait half a day or so for the Cancelbot's working set to be filled with newer postings.
Remember that the TU Graz newsgroups are public. Anyone can read them and they are publicly archived and indexed. You should not post anything that you would not want your parents (or the authorities, etc.) to read. Also, do not include personal information in your signature which you do not want publicly known. For example, I would not want to publish my MatrNr or personal telephone number by including them in my .sig in a newsgroup posting.
And all of the other relevant points in the lecture notes.
I know that it is possible both to forge postings to make them appear to be from someone else and to cancel other people's postings. Let's just say that I would take a dim view of that kind of behaviour...