Re: Labels and other "Panel" formats

[MCSWAIN@xxxxxxxx]

Leslie et al: Sorry to be a bigmouth, but I watched this same process
over my father's shoulder in amateur radio; first, equipment had vacuum
tubes and relatively simple circuits so that one could build and
experiment at home for a small amount of money, or scrounge up surplus
parts from a tv repair shop or the local university's maintenance facility.
Then, microprocessors came in, and the projects in the magazines got more
and more complicated, and expensive, to the point that most HAMS could not
understand the circuitry of their transceivers much less repair them;
repairs often had to be done at the factory; you learned very little
from what happened, negating the whole purpose of AMATEUR radio, that you
could serve society and government by being knowledgeable in a field of
communications in times of natural disaster or war. So, many new Hams
were people who could not pass the lowest license test; instead they
paid someone else to take the test for them, or took it over and over
until by sheer force of chance, they passed; in short, technology
overshot the normal psychological and social needs for a hobbie, something
you could do in a group, something you could do to serve others and your
government in times of crisis. Wayne Green took on the ARRL and tried to
show that it had lost touch with Hams, but he failed to address the
issue of accelerating technology; it is not being addressed in computer
magazines, because they are compromised by having to lay off advertisers;
what happens then, is the PC field becomes driven by corporate cycles of
buying equipment, using it through a short fiscal/tax life, discarding it
and writing off the tax break, purchasing new equipment to keep up with
the competition, which might somehow be able to function faster than you.
Meanwhile, those of us outside the corporate revenue, allocation, spend,
use, discard, buy new cycle cannot possibly keep up, and must whine
because very good software becomes obsolete, or new software comes only
in versions for equipment we do not have and cannot afford. James McSwain
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