On Sat, 11 Mar 2006 Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:

michael said:

...

This is all just nitpicking and progress is being made, that's all that counts, not now many think ENUF progress.

um, it's certainly not "nitpicking".

perhaps the fact that "progress is being made" might be "all that counts" to _you_, michael, but maybe something else counts to someone else...

i certainly think the _methods_ that people are using to "make progress" is an interesting topic.

It's not the means to the end that count, it's arriving at the end that counts. Methodologies are continually being upset by those who find some other way to do an expensive [time or money] function for an infinitessimal amount of the original. Just try going coast to coast without it. Of course, if the Wright Brothers were in the current copyright scenario, we should only just now have their blueprints in an ancient and mummified public domain.

moreover, i think it's quite fascinating that those people whose methods failed to make progress localize the cause of that failure in some inherent "difficulty of the task" rather than in their methods.

This is true enough to all failures to be meaningless in this particular specification, don't you have some remarkable insight for THIS specific application? If not, then why talk in such generalities that these non-specifics apply to everything in general and thus to nothing in specific.

they then go on to lambast anyone else who thinks that progress could be made with another method.

Time to look in the mirror, my friend. Try everything, go which what succeeds. "Nothing succeeds like success."

and yes, there is much precedent for this on this list.

Speak for yourself, John.

for the past few years, a number of people have been telling me that "a plain-text format cannot represent the range of features in paper-books" simply because they could not imagine one that could. but i _can_...

It only matters when you get to the point of ending the debating and actually doing something the outside world can see and work with. Until then, as S. I. Hawakawa told me was the best thing he could teach me, it remains in your asylum with you. Get out into the real world! Until, it makes no difference to anyone else.

and even when i told you, repeatedly, that i could do it, they insisted -- just as vehemently -- that i could not...

There is only one way to prove them wrong.

well, in case you haven't noticed, people, i have begun the process of giving you unequivocal proof that i can.

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating." "Alice, Pudding. Pudding, Alice." Until your product is introduced to the public, it's just a Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

and, just as i've known and predicted all along, you will suddenly become silent with your "that can't be done" song and dance, and will pretend you never said it at all.

"You" who? Yoohoo! "Is there anybody OUT there?" THAT is the ONLY question that matters OUTSIDE the laboratory. This is why Doug Englebart with never be credited with eBooks, they were never released into the wild, as ours are. Until yours make it in the wild, we'll just never know. . . .

...

"Those doing the impossible should not be interrupted by those who say impossible." Ancient Chinese Proverb

but the ones who say it is impossible will keep on trying to interrupt them...

"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!" You have had the power all along. "There's no place like home, "There's no place like home, "There's no place like home, "There's no place like home." Until your work finds a home, it may as well be in Oz.

because otherwise, their smug picture of themselves as "invited experts" will vanish in a puff of their own vapor...

Only if reality becomes part of the equation.

-bowerbird

Thanks!!! Give the world eBooks in 2006!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg