laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/20/85)
From: Les Earnest <LES@SU-AI.ARPA> [In reply to Bob McKay message of 19 May 85 1848 PDT & Brian Reid message of 19 May 1985 1905-PDT (Sunday)] Bob, I wish to thank you for exposing Brian Reid's hypocrisy, even though it was apparently inadvertent. I believe that it *is* true, as Brian claims, that he has not been told either what printer produced the second sample or which of the two was preferred by the group. Contrary to his current assertion, he *did* know that one of them was the Laserwriter -- I disclosed that in my Friday message to Laser-Lovers that was dispatched just as the Lunch Bunch gathered. How then does Brian infer that the second sample came from Imagen? Well, that was a plausible guess given that I had privately offered Brian such samples a couple of weeks ago. (Brian didn't accept them because, he said, he had already received them from another source.) A harder question is "How did Brian conclude that Imagen won the competition?" Brian's explanation doesn't make sense: he says about my incomplete report of results that "given the fact that he is continuing to talk about the results, I was fairly sure that his own brand did best in the tests, but that is all just speculation." But given that I had announced the tasting before it happened, how could I have suddenly stopped talking about it? I didn't because I couldn't. A much more plausible explanation of Brian's conclusion is that he used his own eyes. We know that he had samples of the Times Roman fonts from both the Laserwiter and Imagen 8/300. It seems reasonable to assume that he had already looked at them and reached a conclusion about which looked better. In effect, he has now disclosed his preferance. How will Brian feel if it is subsequently disclosed that the group consensus favored the Laserwriter? I should think that he would feel acute embarassment. In fact he may feel embarassed already, given his stance as a Laserwriter zealot. Cheers, Les Earnest