7 Mar
2005
7 Mar
'05
6:21 p.m.
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!