doug@eris (Doug Merritt) (04/30/88)
In article <208@toylnd.UUCP> dca@toylnd.UUCP (David C. Albrecht) writes: >That fF is not perfect and that de-lacing can be done better is something >the Amiga community wants to know. The world, however, is full of engineering >tradeoffs. As it seems that better solutions would be more expensive [...] Well, sure. I agree with what you say. Recall, however, that the issues were not clear initially. It's not like those of us who carried on the discussion said "hey, let's argue pointlessly and fill the group with messages for a few weeks!" What happened was just that it was a subtle issue (there are still kibitzers who apparently don't understand the bug, but are belittling the discussion; I'm following up via *email*), and it took a while to figure out the details. And as usual with such discussions, there were lots of digressions, and the occasional regression when somebody joined in and asked for points to be explained again. I've gotten a fair amount of flames, both public and private over this, which is silly. Never mind the heated part, but some of the issues raised: One person told me that the discussion didn't belong in the .tech group. Disagree; it was a very technical subject; Hedley even mentioned he wished it had come up last year. Another said we talked too much. Well, there's a "k" key, if you don't care for a particular discussion. Another said, "use email". There was, believe it or not, a *group* discussion, not just two of us. If you want shorter discussions, accept the existing group concensus rather than adding new fuel to the fire. If the issue had been well understood to start with, there wouldn't have been any need for the group analysis that occurred. Yet you and some others seem to think the discussion should never have happened, or should have been shorter, or that it should have taken a different tone, or something. If that was the case, we wouldn't have figured out that it DID have any kind of bug! What if we hadn't responded to incorrect rebuttals? They still happened long after I thought it was all resolved; I was tempted to just give it up. People would have said, "oh, I guess it's not flawed after all." My *postings* may have been flawed, but my intentions were good. Considering the flak aimed at me, I'm not sure I see the point in doing this in the future. Perhaps I should just reach my own conclusions and not bother to try and explain them for the benefit of others. It's pretty time consuming to do this, and I get the strong feeling that it wasn't appreciated by more than about 5 people. Or is it the minority that's giving me/us a hard time? Who knows about the silent majority (note subscription versus posting ratios from arbitron)... What do you think? Doug P.S. Inevitably someone will point out that *THIS* posting isn't technical. Yeah, but the audience of .tech is the only one of the two that this posting would make sense to. And it's premature to suggest a comp.sys.amiga.tech.d group, which in any case would piss off the news.groups people who're currently trying to fight off a suggestion of about *fifteen* additional IBM PC specialty groups. Doug Merritt doug@mica.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!mica!doug) or doug@eris.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!eris!doug) or ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug or sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt