Subject: Re: [lojban] [WWWW] Big update!

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 14:56:04 EST

In a message dated 12/7/2001 11:35:12 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Not so. Windows and all its works are made by geeks who have sold 
> themselves
> to marketeers. 

As opposed to geeks who will have nothing to do with marketeers so sit around 
criticizing the marketed stuff but not making improvements available (and not 
even wanting to, apparently). On the whole, I find the latter group more 
reprehensible, since they can't even claim an original idealism (as many 
microsofties do -- machines for the masses! And they actually did it!).

<Windows is a Yugo at Cadillac prices. What is more, the Windows
culture is a tyranny, which like all such is supported by the meekness of
its victims. >
The analogy only works beyond a limited technical sense, if applied to a 
field where there are actual Cadillacs and Toyotas and... available in the 
same block as Yugos. There aren't in the computer software world; there is 
only the little Citroen of a Macintosh -- pricey, maybe worth it, repairable 
only by two guys in Lyon. The tyrrany analogy escapes me -- unless you mean 
exactly that there are o choices. And that is, of course, just my point -- 
runners complain about MS but do nothing significant about offering an 
alternative, not even something worth fiddling with, like early MSDOS, 
because it showed promise.

<The Yugo failed because people felt more confident rejecting a
piece-of-crap car; Windows has not yet failed because people were
subject to FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).>

And they felt that confidence because they had alternatives that they knew 
would work -- better at least. And whence comes the FUD we users suufer from 
-- largely from the constant runner nattering about how bad Windows is. Sure 
Windows crashes from time to time and takes your files with it -- so does the 
phone in the middle of an important call, the television in the middle of the 
Big Game, and so on; that's modern life (not that ancient life was even 
approximately as good or reliable). But most of the time it does what it 
ought with no more (rather less usually) trouble than your father's office 
machines, which did considerably less and much less efficiently (I remember 
having to retype a whole chapter of my dissertation to correct one line near 
the beginning -- and that was on an advanced typewriter with some memory 
even). If there were genuine alternatives that crashed less or did more or 
did the same even better -- Chevrolets at Chevrolet prices, say -- they would 
wipe the Yugos out -- eventually; it might take a few years. But essentially 
no one is inclined to do it: the marketeers either have a product they can 
continue to sell as long as they refurbish it occasionally (bigger, clunkier, 
pricier) or have a lock on selling repairs for the aforementioned. The 
runners hold the whole idea of letting everyone in on their hobby in deep 
contempt, justified by tossing out an ill-designed bone and using its failure 
to demonstrate that the great unwashed are not capable or worthy of anything 
better.
Lojban is, I think, a better thing that should be made availalbe to all and 
thus needs runner who can overcome that contempt and reach out to users ... 
and even beyond.
Robin does a good job of actually trying to do a bit of the reach and, did he 
just keep quiet about his feelings and method of working, would stand as a 
paradigm of what is needed. With the others thrown in, however, he looks 
unreliable, since his effectiveness is seen to be merely happenstantial, not 
a part of his guiding plan.