28 Aug
2006
28 Aug
'06
10:09 a.m.
Evan Koblentz wrote:
I find it a little odd that an advocate of healthy debate and
discussion would start the discussion in such a vehement way.
It also looks to me as if completely irrelevant threads die a natural
death unless we start the on-topic/off-topic skirmish. The ones that
don't, Jay smacks down reasonably quickly.
There is absolutely no way any topic guideline is going to cover even
a reasonable subset of possible submissions.
A good example is this thread. While the hardware is pretty blah,
it's turning into a fairly interesting comparison of older OS possibilities.
Another is one of my Pentiums that started life as a P75 w/16MB is
one of my primary tools for dealing with my older computers. Disk
transcription, disk/tape emulation, and a host of other functions that
*can* be replaced by a computer that meets your definition of on-topic,
but with no functional difference whatsoever. There have been a number
of threads dealing with using Windows 9x/NT/2k/XP in that sort of
supportive capacity.
As far as I'm concerned, those are both far more on-topic than
worrying to the list about online plagiarism.
Doc
>>>We
could exclude certain CPUs, but that doesn't address the issue that
anything that runs on an older CPU will probably run on a newer CPU of the
same family, so one might as well include the newer ones. I don't know what
the answer is. <<<<
I do. The answer is to define what's on-topic using carefully chosen words,
not dumbed-down years. LOL, I'm not saying I know what those words might
be. But in general I think there should be healthy debate and discussion
(not necessarily here and now) rather than the usual "you're an idiot" vs.
"no you are" that spawns here every six months.