John Chambers
Wed, 01 Dec 2004 13:35:20 -0800
Toby Rider wrote: | | > Apart from that, I've spent the last year studying for an MSc in | > Computing in Archaeology which has kept me fairly busy. For an idea | > of what I've been up to have a look at - | > http://www.bryancreer.com/Castle.html | | You're an academic Bryan? And to think that I respected you up until | this point! :-) Hmmm ... I see conflicting evidence here. If he's an academic, he should be completely at home with no-holds-barred discussions. Things like misattribution of quotes, quoting out of context, and blatant misrepresentation of others' ideas are the order of the day in most of academia, and especially in fields such as archaeology. So why would Bryan be bothered when relative amateurs as musicians and software geeks do the same sort of thing? You'd think he wouldn't even notice such things, familiar as he must be with them from his academic life. After getting some Math and Comp Sci degrees, I hung around in academia for a decade working on a couple of interesting projects. Then I decided to join the Real World. It took several years to learn how to deal with the easily-bruised egos in that you find there. I still tend to think of business folks as utter wimps compared to the folks in academia. I've come to appreciate this as one of the reasons that we have such crappy commercial software. It was all developed in an environment where even the most carefully-phrased criticism or warning causes panic and a desire to quiet the complainer, rather than arguing back. They'd never survive a week in academia. ;-) Then there's the way that musicians normally treat each other ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html