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From: lange@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Trent Lange)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Stupid question to Amiga Users...
Message-ID: <40715@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 29 Oct 90 06:40:40 GMT
References: <1990Oct29.034623.9028@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
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Organization: UCLA Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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In article <1990Oct29.034623.9028@nntp-server.caltech.edu> woody@tybalt.caltech.edu (William Edward Woody) writes:
>
>Why are you posting here?
>
>[Letter telling people to never post about the Amiga here.]
>
>To be honist, I could not give a shit about who runs what out there; if you've
>got an Amiga, fine; a Macintosh, I'm happy for you.  A NeXT box?  Good.
>I'm running a Macintosh.  So what?

I am not interested in the Amiga, but I must thoroughly disagree.

I think that occasional postings comparing the Mac to the Amiga and other
machines out there are "a good thing" (tm).  Even if the postings make
the claim that the Amiga or machine X is better than the Mac.  In fact,
they are good *especially* if they claim the other machine is better
than the Mac, and tell us why it is.

Why?  Well, everybody out there thinks that Apple and the Mac are perfect,
please raise your hands.  (You in the back row, quit your laughing!)

Seriously, it's one thing to point out the shortcomings of the Mac (as we
are all perfectly capable of doing), but it's quite another to point them
out and show that another machine does it right.  If those features are
important enough, then letting enough Mac people know that the Amiga or
machine X has them is helpful, because then perhaps some of those Mac
people will start bitching to Apple to fix it.  And if enough people
bitch to Apple about it, maybe they'll do something about it.  (Well,
maybe that's a pipedream.)

>But with the price/performance ratio of the NeXT machine, I may buy one of
>'em as soon as it makes sense for me to do so (which could be never...)

And this is another reason comparative postings are helpful.  At some
point, it is very possible that the comparisons are going to show that
Apple's offerings are so far out of line compared to machine X that it
will actually be worth it to take off our Apple blinders and switch
machines.  Perhaps you found out about the price/performance ratio of
the NeXT independently, but many people might not have, and would only
find out about it in detail by comparative postings here.  After all, Mac
people (like myself) don't usually keep up on the newest offerings of other
machines.  A haughty posting from an Amiga owner if Amiga comes out with
a 68040 Amiga for $3000 that can emulate a IIfx, for example, might open
some ears over here -- ears that might never hear about it, or might
shrug it off as "just another Amiga".

Now, if Amiga owners or machine X owners were making hundreds of
different postings all under different subject headings, *then* it
would be a problem.  But they're not.  They're pretty much keeping
it under one or two subject headings, all with the word "Amiga" in
them.

So if you're not interested in hearing about it, and want to close your
ears to the rest of the world, then put the word "Amiga" in your kill
file.  If people make religious Amiga postings under subject headings that
don't have "Amiga" in it, then you can scream at them.  But otherwise, let them
post, and maybe some of us can learn something about machines other than
the Mac.

Besides, those postings are a heck of a lot more interesting than most of
the dreck in this newsgroup!

- Trent Lange

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