On 7/6/02 7:01 AM, "Tom Neff" <tneff@grassyhill.net> wrote:
> I find this counterargument perhaps unintentionally revealing, because in
> fact we DO allow people to drive Corvairs, and lots of them take great
> delight in doing so:
My first car was a corvair, in fact, and I spent many years driving one.
Just because Nader whined about them doesn't make it so, by the way. But
that's a different rant.
> This kind of triumph of what ordinary people want over what some
> self-appointed czars THINK they should want, is A Good Thing. And so it is
> with the Internet.
Exactly. And if you look at how the government has handled highway safety,
it hasn't been through banning unsafe cars, it's been primarily through
finding ways to make highways safer, and working with (through regulation
and legislation) car makers to make new cars safer.
So by that very model, it seems the solution here is to make better and more
bulletproof servers, because that's the part WE control, and convincing
client developers to improve their tools, because as they improve, users
will "trade in" their old models to the improved ones.
> Well, you go ahead and tilt at the windmills of convincing every
> listmember's employer to change its IT infrastructure so as not to offend
> the administrator of a hobby list that some employee is browsing on company
> time...
And then when it doesn't work, you can go home satisified you tried, but
"they" are all idiots anyway... And down that road we get back into the
exclusionary "if you aren't smart enough to use my list, I don't want you"
attitude... Which, I guess, is okay for some, not for me.
> What we should be focusing on instead is "hardening" our own tools and
> software so as to present excellent lists in a world where broken new mail
> clients appear several times a year.
Exactly.
> Every list should be MIME checked, virus checked, and spam checked. That
> should be our goal, not trying to convince the world not to use Outlook
> Express.
Yup. And since that's what I do, I can say it works quite well.
> Therefore, if we make it our mission to wean users from the most vulnerable
> clients, THE QUEST WILL NEVER END. Not that this would be a bad thing for
> the professional crusading business.
Depends. How long will the sponsor and endorsement money go on?
>> Thought experiment: what would happen if tomorrow every mailing list
>> manager on the planet banned messages generated with O/OE?
>
> That's easy: the number of lists (or Yahoo groups etc) would double in a
> month, as offended members voted with their feet. It is way too easy to
> start a list these days for anybody to pretend they can enforce such things.
Yahoo groups would thank all of us, and do what it damn well wanted
accepting all of the users who ran there to replace the lists that shot
themselves in the leg.
>> [2] I certainly care as an individual. Use of Microsoft products is
>> both unprofessional and unethical.
>
> They still make great mice! :)
You know, I'm no great fan of Microsoft, but I still use some of their
stuff. When it makes sense.
Rants like this remind me a lot of the kind of rants the environmentalists
toss out, the ones that have caused so many environmental groups to be
marginalized out of any useful purpose. Like, oh, this:
<http://www.chuqui.com/cgi-bin/mwf/topic_show.pl?tid=356>
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties
are largely ceremonial.
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