Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site unm-la.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!mcnc!philabs!cmcl2!lanl!dspo!unm-la!jay
From: jay@unm-la.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: The quality of public domain software and other points
Message-ID: <274@unm-la.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Apr-85 13:06:53 EST
Article-I.D.: unm-la.274
Posted: Fri Apr  5 13:06:53 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 7-Apr-85 03:43:20 EST
References: <1620@watcgl.UUCP> <259@looking.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of New Mexico, Los Alamos
Lines: 33

> Thanks to all those who sent me the names of their favourite PD programs.
> I was aware of most of them.  The fact remains that quality PD software
> is the exception, and not the rule.  You should all keep this in mind.
> -- 
> Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473

Quoted (without permission) from the lead article in this week's
(1 April 1985) _New_Yorker_:

        A harlem schoolteacher told us once that, given crayons and paper,
        an inner-city boy or girl will often draw a house -- not a
        boarded-over row house with a drunk in the doorway but a red house
        with a front door and four windows and a tree in the yard and smoke
        curling from the chimney.  Never mind that in such children's
        neighborhoods smoke mostly means arson; their impression of what a
        house is like somehow overwhelms the examples all around them.  In
        somewhat the same way, a bigot can never be convinced he is wrong,
        though obviously he is.  Examples can't dislodge the reality in his
        head; they only confirm it. ... George Orwell, in "Down and Out in
        Paris and London," writes of a "rather superior tramp" who finds
        himself, for want of the few tools he needs to practice his trade,
        reduced to living in the shelters for the homeless.  Paupers, this
        superior tramp continues to maintain, are lazy good-for-nothings:
        "You don't want to have any pity on these here tramps -- scum, they
        are: You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like
        you and me.  They're scum, just scum."

	The point of all this is not that the schoolchild or the bigot or
	the tramp is right or wrong; it is that impressions are tenacious,
	even when you live with counter-examples.
-- 
	Jay Plett
	{{ucbvax,gatech}!unmvax, lanl}!unm-la!jay