RE: us

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

At 10:22 AM 8/26/98 +0900, you wrote:
>
>I thought it was a cute article, but she'd lost it at the end --
>this nonsense about not installing it because her computer doesn't
>have a 5 inch drive, come on. Seems she was fumbling for a neat
>ending and then picked one for its cuteness although it made no
>sense. Not even "legally accurate" it was. :-)
>
>--Rene von Rentzell, Tokyo 
>--"In China, the President continues to coddle aging rulers with a
>--dangerous contempt for democracy and a desire for nuclear weapons"
>--William Jefferson Clinton, 1992
>
And what about the contradiction between:

1. the majority are, in fact, tech-savvy types
  running it on Pentiums or even, like devotee Wendell Cochran, a
  home-built Linux box.

AND

2. Nancy Friedman of Banana Republic had so much trouble getting hers to
  run on her new Pentium that she finally had to downgrade her chip from
  a 166 to a 133. "It won't install on a fast chip," she says (an
  assertion others deny).

You could say, well, maybe she's saying it runs on 133 Pentia but
not faster ones (which is a preposterous idea, for anyone who
knows anything about what a computer is). You could say that,
except that my email to the author when she asked for our input began:
In response to your inquiry:

>I run Xy on a 266 MHz AMD K6 machine in a DOS box under Windows
95. I consider myself a power user.

The theme of her piece was that using XyWrite means you are stuck
in the past. Which makes the article wrong and destructive in
terms of essentials, however nice certain isolated passages might
be. The overall impression given to a naive reader would be: *I*
certainly wouldn't want to investigate this antiquated product. I
think we should be up in arms about it. Except that it doesn't
really matter, compared to the possibility, pace Leslie Bialler,
that SmartWords may actually exist and be desirable. Let's have
the scoop, Leslie!


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx