On Feb 23, 2011, at 8:39 AM, Fabian Fang wrote: > Until Lion is released in the coming months, Leopard and Snow Leopard are the > current and latest Mac OS. It makes good sense for members of the G-Group to > join our Leopard Group to seek or provide assistance.
Sorry to continue the meta-discussion, but I'd really like to add my 2 cents. No it does not. Looking at the posting rates and subscriber numbers of all these myriad LEM lists, it's very clear that almost all of the actual action is in just a handful of lists. Continual splitting of groups into finer and finer-grained buckets merely serves to dilute possible support and makes it very hard to find answers; I cannot count how many times I've seen someone ask a question on one list that was JUST ANSWERED, in great and satisfactory detail, on another list. I like to analogize the current state of the LEM lists to the 'Performa' years at Apple "I have a perfoma 624a!" "Well I have a Performa 634...and it's a completely different machine!" When Steve Jobs came back to Apple he reduced the model count to 4: PowerMac and PowerBook, iMac and iBook. That was the beginning of the resurgence, and for a good reason...it instantly clarified and simplified the choices. If I were king of the forest, all these myriad LEM lists would be reduced to a handful: 68K Macs (both laptop and desktops, because these are waaay obsolete by now.) OldWorld Macs (PowerPC old world machines, both laptops and desktops as above.) PowerPC desktops (covering pci-based PowerMacs from the iMac and beige 60x and G3 models up through the G5 models, both PowerMac and iMac.) PowerPC laptops (covering all New World Powerbooks and iBooks) Intel desktops (covering all intel-based desktop systems Mac Pros and iMacs) Intel laptops (covering all models of MacBook.) LEMSwap (of course!) There is NO REASON to ghettoize OS discussion into it's own groups; particularly as there are often hardware-specific issues along with the question, and as often as not there are questions like 'I need a web cam, what's a good suggestion?' That's not really tied to any hardware or software; so you would ask it on the list for your particular Mac. With fewer groups, we'd get more subscribers, and more eyeballs, on the problems. We'd have less duplication, and better answers for everyone. In practice, this really is happening already, the G3-5 group is the main generalist group now, as the PCIPowerMacs group used to be long ago, along with MacIntel and possibly the iMac group (which imo irrationally mixes cpu platforms.) I think that it would be far simpler to manage from the list nanny standpoint (you could have more nannies on each list) and make it a lot easier for folks to find the correct groups to join. (note, this is also a major reason many web forums are failing at this kind of support because there are so damn many of them at any given site. Even Apple's own support forums are probne to this problem.) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
