Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

[shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)]

The thread is back...
Tim wrote:

>I deeply resent--but will try not to take it personally, so no
>animosity to Perry or Jim or others is intended--the insinuation
>through sarcasm or through direct statements that I am hopelessly
>wedded to a past of ASR-33 terminals and good old-fashioned
>typewriters. Like a lot of folks here, I use stuff that's far beyond
>simple ASCII. I think I've adequately covered this point.

After reading many of your posts on the MIME issue, I have come to the
conclusion that you _are_ wedded to a past long gone. I have not give up
the hope that we will one day convice you stop accessing the net via the
worst possible interface, a terminal server. The way you are using the net
is through 1950's technology with 1950's results.

You say that you use stuff that is far beyond ASCII and I believe you.
However, one wouldn't know from hearing what tools you are using to access
the net. You are competent, a computer person, but still you don't seem to
understand that reading mail via a terminal server and elm is like having
an oxen pull your car.

>Eric Hughes wrote a nice piece several weeks back about adoption of
>new technology, new tools all being a matter of _return on
>investment_.

>For example, I could spend some number of hours switching from my
>current mail progam (elm) to some other editor which perhaps
>better-supported the MIME messages seen here. But if all I got for
>several hours of using, learning, and becoming comfortable with, say,
>"pine," was the ability to see an _italicized_ word, or a word in
>Cyrillic, then I would consider this a poor ROI.

You got Eudora. Setting up tia ($25) on your account and downloading
Newswatcher, etc. takes less than an hour. In fact, I will gladly do it for
you. After the clients are set up on your own machine, there is no reason
to go back to using the shell. I have used the shell *two* times in the
last three months. -- To change my password.

You wouldn't have to change your workhabits. You could still read news,
answer email, and surf the web all at the same time. In fact, you could do
it better and easier than you do it now.

>And nobody has yet said there's anything worth doing this for in any
>of the MIME messages I've yet seen. Sure, Amanda W. exercised the
>process by including a GIF....a process which several people saw
>errors with, and no doubt many others skipped completely.
>
>Does this make me backward? No. It's all ROI.

I have AppleScript droplets on my desktop for all the people I work with.
Drag the spreadsheet icon on it. Hit "Queue". They double click on it on
their desktop. Happens every day.

>Like it or not, we are now in a mostly-ASCII Net environment. This
>shows up when people fail to convert special characters (apostrophes,
>left and right quotes, em dashes, bullets, etc.) into the "straight
>ASCII" characters (such as ', ", --, *) that most of the rest of us
>can display easily. People right complain about posts and messages
>filled with "^H" and other oddball symbols.

This list is email and, yes, it is in ASCII. There is little reason to
change that. But that doesn't mean that most of the net is in ASCII. I
spend less than half the time that I am on the net in a pure ASCII
environment. And it is getting less every month.

>(And it certainly doesn't mean that people like me don't have the
>capability of displaying extended character sets....I clearly can,
>given the right tools, effort, etc. Many can't, and many won't. The
>"Display Postscript" standard was an attempt to bootstrap the world to
>a new standard for document display, and it failed. Maybe the "Andrew
>Message System" is another such fix. Maybe it's even better designed.
>All well and good. But it ain't available to most of us. Nor would I
>even install it if all I got was em dashes and the like displayed
>correctly. ROI, again.)

I hate to break it to you, but it is no longer "most of us" who don't use
these tools. And of the ones that don't use them, only very, very, few
don't have them available.

>Please don't characterize my views as Luddite wishes for a simpler
>world.

I don't think that you are wishing for a "simpler world". I believe that
you haven't realized that the "simpler world" has long vanished in the dust
of history and that you are one of the last hold outs living in an era
past. Please don't be the last to leave.

-- Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.