"Day Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [...] > We have a nomenclature problem Bob. In the economics I was > taught, 'diminishing returns' is not down hill, it is just not > going up as fast. I believe your characterization of my position > is called a 'strawman'.
Perhaps so. What you refer to as "diminishing returns" the rest of the world (including dear old Howard) asserts has been a series of SIGNIFICANT increases. The Internet seems to be a big deal to some folks. Go figure. > Maybe you did not work in offices before the pc; I did, and it > seems like Howard had some knowledge of that era. the quantum > leap in productivity brought by the pc had a much more important > effect than what has been done since the pc moved from a focus > on processing data, text, and accounting, to a focus on the GUI > and the attractiveness of graphic images. Yes, Howard seems to have knowledge of the era, and to answer your question, I was one of the guys who was replacing IBM Selectrics with XTs back in the 1980's (US Army, Berlin). I was responsible for training technical staff and end-users alike. And although we may have seen ourselves as great innovators at the time, everyone still kept an old typewriter hidden to get forms and labels done. Oh, and don't forget the box of letterhead that you kept handy, separate from blank paper. Today, we can even make the IRS happy with hi-res printouts of forms almost indistinguishable from the original, except they tend to be neater. You buy a box of paper, and put whatever on it you need. And far more cheaply today than ever before. The problem is, the whole point that you're making that little has happened in terms of productivity isn't the one that the author was making. You jumped on the WordStar mailmerge bit without taking the rest in context. He was saying that accesibility is key, and that access to many things is still cumbersome. However, he repeatedly notes that SIGNIFICANT strides have been made. Not to beat a dead horse, but he specifically cites the INTERNET as one of HISTORY's most significant developments. WHEN did it develop? The reference to PS/2 and MCA was regarding open standards and ACCESS to those standards, and the fact that the open standard that was "good enough" prevailed over the closed standard. > It is not the same as 'no progress' it is less, and in fact less > than it could be if real structural problems were taken care of, > such as virus risks, and if the bandwidth of the networks were > increased faster than the glut of glitz being flushed thru them. You seem to thing nothing moves across networks except porn, senseless graphics and spam. Are you serious? > I am not saying the GUI is a bad thing so much as it is more of > a distraction to the things that need to be done. The article wasn't about GUIs, nor was my response to yours. It was about your insistence that productivity hasn't gone anywhere in recent years (a point that you make while benefitting from the very increases in capabilities that you insist are barely keeping pace.) > Nor is it a > matter of the os; any of them can be programmed to handle the > numeric and text data business needs, and even dos could run the > usual gamut of business graphics- scanner, printer, webpages.... Don't forget human languages. What runs the Internet, Day? What allows you to post your "literature" world-wide within minutes? What's allowing us to ping-pong responses in minutes? How much more/less does it cost us to do this today than it did back in the BBS era? > But the _advertising_ to promote sales, like on a graphic medium > like the TV, tends to focus on the graphic tasks, inhibiting the > less visually appealing real _work_ that must be done on books > or 'three up mail lists'. this is not a function of technology > per se, but a sociological characteristic of what will sell. There's a comemrcial aspect to graphics, but there's also a fairly broad segment that feels that graphical information can be quite compelling. I think they've even worked up a clever Madison Avenue slogan, something about "a picture is worth a thousand words." I won't get hung up on the 3-up mailing list either, as I think it's a hell of a lot easier to do on modern systems than on WordStar 3. Again, I TRAINED end-users on WordStar 3 software, and those dot commands were a pain in the ass. The fact that you couldn't SEE anything that looked remotely like a label made it all the worse. Mail-merge is a hassle, no matter what you do to it. So's most drudge-work. That's one of the benefits of the recent increases in productivity -- you can often send e-mail and forget 3-up labels altogether. The labels are the symptom of the wasteful habit of sticking paper in envelope to deliver printed materials. Day, you're insisting that things are barely improving while taking advantage of the dramatic improvements yourself every day. You insist that the world doesn't need anything more than we had in 1982, while the world at large is screaming for more daily, even to the point of wanting to surpass what we may have. Not for access to advertising or dirty pictures, but to take advantages of what is available that we take for granted. The US or west in general may not get affordable, ubiquitous wireless networks going, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world has to wait for us either. And they're going to do it with systems that present THEIR languages in whatever representation they choose, whether graphical or roman text. - Bob To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
