From: foax@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Are you people right about Jeff?
Date: 17 Aug 92 07:55:31 EDT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Cornell University

In article <1992Aug15.193839.18798@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>,
jyoung@nyx.cs.du.edu (Jeff Young) writes: 
> In article <1992Aug15.055450.24320@uwm.edu>
> gblock@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block) writes:
>>jyoung@nyx.cs.du.edu (Jeff Young) writes:
>>: Ides of September?? In dictionary ides mean day fifteen of March, May
>>: July, October.  You mean TIDES of September? Iowa has ocean?!?

It probably did once, but that was about 100 million years ago or so.
Of course, you do get tides in solid rock too. :)

(Sorry, but I felt an urge for some geology-geek humor.)

>>First, if you knew any Latin, you'd get the gist.
>>
>>Second, if you knew anything about C=, you'd know why he says it.
>>
> 
> Maybe when I starting high school I will try Latin!  WHAT is
> meaning of IDES of September if you know it??!

I am assuming that the last remark about starting high school was not meant
as a joke.  If it was, I apologize in advance for the statements to follow.

Look people, if Jeff indeed is about to start high school, that makes him
thirteen or fourteen years old.  This explains a lot.  He apparently uses
a public-access UNIX facility provided by the CS department at a Colorado
university (I can't read the header now and forget which one), and I'll
bet they charge for time.  So he literally reels of his posts as fast as
he can type to save time--this is especially important considering the
volume of his posting.  (Quite a few people here might take him more
seriously if he posted fewer, more carefully checked articles, but that's
another story...)  If he is about to start high school, it would also
explain his apparent ignorance in certain areas.

You know, when I first started reading this group, I assumed (perhaps
naively) that most of the people posting to it were computer professionals.
This is clearly true in some cases, but I now realize that many of them
are technically-oriented college undergrads.  It's easy to make wrong
assumptions about the type of person represented by the characters on
your screen, and to draw really bad conclusions from those assumptions.
Probably most people here assumed that Jeff was also an undergrad,
and were therefore shocked by the nature of his postings.

Well, if Jeff Young is just about to start high school, I can identify
with him a bit.  I wasn't really exposed to computers until I was fifteen
or so, but it didn't take too long for me to become a bit of an Apple II
fanatic.  I'd get into arguments with advocates of other machines; I
especially remember having heated ones with another student who was an
ardent defender of the C-64.  At the time I thought he was foolish, but
as I matured I realized that the C-64 had some good features and that
Apple was not the wonder company that I (and quite a few other people)
once believed.

My advice to you, Jeff (and this goes regardless of whether you are really
about to start high school or whether you're way off base) is to be a little
less vocal and to think a little about what you're posting and about what
other people are saying.  Perhaps you could check and edit your postings
before you actually log on to the machine.  In any case, unmitigated loyalty
to a firm or a machine is unwise.  Machines are built by fallible people
and are mostly a collection of (sometimes dumb) compromises.  Companies
are collections of fallible people and are sometimes known to do callous
things for reasons of survival or greed, and even stupid things because of
mismanagement.  Neither are worthy of adulation.

As I said before, if you were only joking about starting high school soon,
then I strongly apologize.

>>You sure you're not Slu Aspiks with a lobotomy?
> 
> WHO is Slu Aspiks??

Slu Aspiks was a fake personality dreamed up by Skip Sauls (read Slu Aspiks
backwards to see the connection) several months ago to poke fun at some more
fanatical Atari fans.
-- 

--Colin Howell			email to howell@astrosun.tn.cornell.edu
--Cornell Astronomy Dept.	(hopefully switching to computer science)