From: Bill Miranda (bill.miranda_at_gmail.com)
Date: Sun Sep 19 2004 - 09:53:02 PDT
Rich and others,
I hope you couldn't bring yourself to actually unsubscribe or that if
you did in fact unsubscribe, you are at least logging on to the
website and reading the archives for awhile. I also hope that given
some time you will come to realize that this is a community, even if
it's not the same community it was a few years ago. In some ways,
it's like the small town that is growing up into a larger city. Some
of the same people are there, but there's all these new people and I
don't know them. Some of them are even rude.
Still, there is lots of evidence that the community is alive, well,
and even growing. Consider Jon in Poland, whom the "community"
insisted not abandon the Newton platform after his went surfing off a
rooftop into traffic. All the offers he got to replace his Newton and
the accessories that he lost. (How he turned down the Grateful Dead
newt is a mystery to me...I digress). Consider the passionate debate
these threads have seen in recent weeks over the future of tne Newton
platform (the Dallas Cowboys have a hard time generating that much
interest). Consider Jim Witte, offering to look over my failed
attempt to program lesson #1 on Paul Guyot's tutorial. I'm a long way
from contributing anything useful to the Newton community in programs,
and a lot of you can and may be thinking, "If he can't even code
Lesson #1 properly, he's never going to be any value to me!". But
that's not the reaction I got (at least publicly). Also consider the
contributions that many have made to repair, troubleshoot, acquire
gear for others. I'm leaving out a lot of really good acts that a
review of the recent archives will no doubt support.
We all say things we don't mean or at least we sometimes say things
that others interpret differently than the way we intended. E-mail
makes that so much easier. Also, we aren't all in the same place
regarding the degree of off-topicness we are willing to tolerate.
Some of us have broadband and it's really easy to receive and
accumulate lots of OT messages and delete them if they aren't
relevant. Some of you are on dial-up and maybe even slow dialup
downloading messages to your Newton even. This may be "work" email
for some of you Newton professionals where to others it is "play"
email. We all have different standards and we all come to Newtontalk
to take away and give back something different. I can definitely
"feel the community" even today and I would feel like one of my
favorite "stores at the mall" had closed down if www.thisoldnewt.com
faded from the scene. Thanks to everyone! I'm returning to lurking
mode and trying to learn how to expand "Hello World" to include a
pop-up window. I'll be ready to write code for the Einstein project
in about 20 years. :)
Bill
> This list just isnt what it was a few years ago.
> It once felt like a community.
> It has degraded into a group of strangers who have little respect for
> each other.
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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