R.S. wrote:
Since I noticed that vast majority (or even all) of Shmuel's mails
contains only "no, you're wrong" or "USS is not unix" I stopped
responding him. I put his e-mail in kill-file, so his mails are
filtered. That's good: no more badgering. I don't loose anything
valuable, cause usually Shmuel's mails does not contain any help, rather
malice and badgering instead.
Soemtimes, when browsing archives through web interface (no filter on
Shmuel) I read his mails - that convices me it was good decision to
make a filter.
While Seymour/Shmuel doesn't need an apologist, I would like to comment
on this. I first met him in the mid sixties, when my employer (Applied
Data Research) bought out his (ComPass?). Since then we have worked
together at several employers, and even when we didn't, met once or
twice a week for dinner and discussion. If I had a dollar for every time
he has been wrong about published information, I wouldn't be able to buy
a cup of coffee. We sometimes disagreed on practical applications, where
I tend to be more pragmatic at solving issues, but we both found rapidly
that we were approached by coworkers for answers to their problems.
This rapidly led him to adopt the attitude that he would help with real
problems, but we would not do people's work for them; this explains his
"you are wrong" statements where you expect detailed information on what
the error or misunderstanding is. While his approach may seem
unreasonable, cold, and hurtful, it's better in the long run, as you're
actually forced to go to the manuals to understand the problem, and
possible solutions, and thus giving you better preparation when a
similar problem occurs.
As to the USS issue, we both believe that acronyms should be unique, and
that IBM should avoid duplication at all costs. To me RAMAC is still the
tall, spindly arrangement of parallel horizontal platters with a juke
box style arm that passed for an early IBM DASD device of the fifties,
rather than the modern one. All the arguments have been presented
repeatedly, and we see no reason to repeat them each time. If you
haven't found anything useful in his responses, then you haven't read
enough of them, yet.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, VT
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