4 Aug
1998
4 Aug
'98
5:12 a.m.
At 10:17 PM 8/3/98 -0400, Ward Donald Griffiths III wrote:
I believe it was in Greg Benford's (?) book review of Tom Disch's (?)
overview of the SF field, in this month's Reason magazine.
- John
Remember that Jerry's column used to be called "The User's Column".
not "The Engineer's Column". His perspective is on "using" the
damned stuff, and the stuff that doesn't die in infancy due to
hardware failure or simple unusability he will try for several
months.
If I wanted to hear the travails of clueless users, I'd get a job
in tech support. JP's "experience" with new products (as in the
parody, having unlimited amounts of support, from the techs to the
president of said company) was entirely out-of-this-world and
arguably not useful to Byte's readers. It's hard enough to
pick the right bleeding-edge products when you get opinions from
smart people. But our exchange here perhaps shows why the editors
loved him as a columnist - he stated strong opinions, and he caused
strong reactions.
I recently saw
a summary of the mindset of the Pournellian branch
of science fiction as "Space is like Texas, only bigger."
What other writers are in that branch? Reply privately unless it
means old computers. Or at least send me a pointer to that summary,