Universal access to threaded news readers, NOT (was): periodicity

["Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com>]

"David Starner" <dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu> wrote in message
news:a78nip$8q61@news.cis.okstate.edu...

> On Tue, 19 Mar 2002 20:26:49 +0000 (UTC), Kent Paul Dolan <xanthian@well.com> wrote:
> > Ah, yes, the old "I've got great technology, so the devil take the
> > hindmost" argument.
> 
> Um, yeah. slrn is a half megabyte binary, that can probably be run on a
> 386 running Minix. It handles this newsgroup just fine. If you can't
> find a newsbrowser capable of handling this newsgroup, you need to look
> harder.


And if you are marginally competent in English, using a computer you
inherited from a defunct international aid foundation, your technology
is, oh, say readnews(), because that's what came in the box, and you are
just getting into computers for the  first time, so the idea of
downloading and upgrading software is completely foreign to you, all
this availability of threaded newsreaders helps you exactly how?

xanthian.

Trust me, the world is _not_ what you see on your desktop.  One of my
former friends refurbishes "closet clutter" computers for the
handicapped (he designs, constructs, and fits prostheses as his day job,
it was a natural hobby/volunteer effort choice for him); again, on a
zero budget, he isn't going to be going out and getting spiffy new
software for his 8086-class computers, and his  beneficiaries are very
likely stuck with what they find in the box.  The Clovis, California
Senior Citizens' Center, behind which I sleep on the sidewalk, is still
running computers with Microsoft Project Manager as their operating
system for their publically accessible computers used by seniors there.

Whenever you assume that a high tech capability exists everywhere, 1)
you are lying to yourself, and 2) you are thereby excluding _someone_
with the choices you make based on an unrealistic model of the universe.

As a separate issue, many places even in the first world, people pay for
their computer access by the kilobyte, and download newsgroups in off
hours, making them extremely volume sensitive.  Splitting a newsgroup is
also of great benefit to these people.  At least half of comp.lang.ada
would go in an advocacy group in most of the other language groups (I
take a bow for having invented the *.advocacy concept with
comp.sys.amiga.advocacy back in the early 1990's) and for these volume
sensitive readers, being able to exclude that one group would cut their
usage charges to read this group in half.


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