[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 05:43 PM 2/13/99 +0000, I personally witnessed Mik Clarke jumping up to say:
>
>Well, prehaps cluless isn't the right word. 

Actually I think the problem here is that people are equating clueless with
stupid. I generally draw a line there, since I know a lot of smart people
who can't code for crap. These people, from a code standpoint, are
clueless. Likewise, I know squat about acupuncture, and am clueless from
that standpoint. 

>I find that, on occasions, someone with little or no coding skill,
>will ask for a feature or funtion that I either would never have thought
>of or had filed under difficult/impossible.  

Exactly. Most of what we are doing on our PCs today was impossible ten
years ago. If you had told me in 1990 that by the year 2000, anyone could
put a 300dpi flatbed color scanner on his desk *and* install it himself for
under $50, I would have laughed very hard indeed -- "Why, sure, someone
probably COULD do that. But who's going to install the SCSI card to hook
the scanner to?"

Well, there's an awful big assumption. Why do you need a SCSI card? Use the
parallel port. Most PCs only have one parallel port? No problem! Put them
on the same port. What about device conflicts? Trivial! It's meaningless to
get input from a printer, right? Well, it's meaningless to send output to a
scanner. Where's the conflict?

Whoever came up with that idea had to cut through the existing wisdom of
ONE PORT TAKES ONE DEVICE and point out that a bidirectional port actually
has two devices, an input device and an output device. They just generally
happen to be the same device. Some people think that guy was a genius. I
think he more likely took credit for a clueless guy's idea. 

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| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
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