Subject: [lojban] RE: emacs, etc.

From: "Lex Spoon" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 10:53:56 -400

[email-masked] wrote:
> I think the real difference between "normal people" and "geeks" (not terms I 
> thought I used -- but if the shoe fits,...) is not preparation but goal. As 
> an academic, I know perhaps a half-dozen people who need and use emacs; I 
> know at least an equal number who have it because it is cute or powerful or 
> chic and who play with it but never use more than an electric typewriter's 
> worth of it for doing their work. 

Well, I was trying to talk about people who actually use their tools
well and try to get something done, not just those who fiddle with
computers for the, er, art of it. :) The point is that you don't
need any special traits to use things like emacs or LaTeX. It's more a
matter of how much time a person is willing to put in to getting better
with their tools.

It really bugs me to stuff people into these categories. You absolutely
did use the term "real people", which implies at least one other kind of
person. It's not a good way to think of the situation, though. For
example, I would be both a "normal person" regarding drawing tools and a
"geek" regarding email tools. But it would be much more accurate to
just say, I spend a lot of time fixing up and training with my email
tools, but very little time training with any drawing tools.

> As for the cost of Windows, they are excessive in some sense, though in the 
> US, Windows tends to come with the computer .

As an aside, if people were aware of how much they were paying for their
software, then the market would surely be different. Just imagine if your
neighbors actually had to go to the store and consider $75 for Windows
versus $50 for BeOs versus $10 for Linux (with a printed manual). And
how many people would *really* pay hundreds of dollars for a word
processor?!

-Lex