minor list changes

[Jim Brain]

John Foust wrote:

>I'm baffled by those who would gladly spend months searching for the 
>right NOS replacement part for a 20-year-old computer, and who would 
>cheerfully build their own computer out of sand and bamboo on a desert 
>island given a proper vacation, or who've memorized the arcana of all 
>mechanical and electrical technology in the last 100 years, or whom
>I regard as minor gods because they generally know how to do dozens 
>of things I can't fathom, yet these same folk claim to be unable and 
>unwilling to locate and revive a cast-off PC with sufficient power 
>to run a contemporary web browser and/or connect to the net faster 
>than dialup.  All because they're dead-certain that it's not better than 
>TECO and their VT-100?  Lordy!
>  
>
Ah, stereotyping is alive and well.

>A few thoughts ran through my mind while I wrote this.  One, the
>phrase "Techno-Amish".  Hurry, the domain name hasn't been registered.
>Two, "They worship old technology, but they're scared of new technology."
>  
>
I fail to see how the list you summarized indicates the users are 
scared.  I agree some (no room for another machine) might not hold up 
under severe scrutiny (Honey, no room for a PC/104 IBM, but I just took 
deilvery of a PDP-11), but the others seem quite pragmatic. 

I am a web developer.  I'm also an applications architect.  I use web 
forums, I use SMTP and IMAP and POP3. I have plenty of web-capable boxen 
here.  I love Firefox.  I still agree with the sentiment that web forums 
are not the best fit for discussions.  They do have the advantage of 
zero-client footprint, but that creates drawbacks as well.  I'm not sure 
Jay would lose me if he went to a web forum (Yes, I already saw his post 
about it not happening, but still), but I do know that I am on a half 
dozen Commodore web forums.  They are cute, they have relevant 
information.  But, when time gets scarce, the aggregated flow of 
information via pseudo-push that SMTP/IMAP/POP3 provides makes it easier 
to stay up on this list, while the web forums get neglected. 

At some point, web forums will grow up and get a RSS-like two way 
protocol.  When that happens, and I can aggregate forums and use an 
alternative app to read them, and that app can dload the forum content 
in batches, I'm a happy man.  Web forums today are much like the Web in 
1994, before WWWW, Altavista, and Google.  Of the 1000s of web pages of 
note, it was hard to research information.  When search engines came 
along, suddenly, there was an aggregated way to obtain information, and 
the web became much more useful for research.  Time will create a killer 
web forum aggregator, and I'll be happy to see it come, but until it 
does arrive (and I do not have time to work on such a thing), email is 
the platform of choice for this Techno-Liberal.

One can't help but wonder if the web forum thread is half-serious, half 
troll.  Especially considering the list makeup.  I probably should feed 
the troll, but the stereotyping thing seemed a bit overkill.

In other news, I could many screenfuls of this thread, and the poor XP 
user has been beaten into submission.  Can I ask that we kill the 
threads and move onto new (and hopefully more on-topic) discussions (via 
email, of course)?  Or, is there some shread of trivial information that 
the list has not yet bludgened to death?

Jim

-- 
Jim Brain, Brain Innovations
brain at jbrain.com                                http://www.jbrain.com
Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times!