On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, you wrote:
> Robin Szemeti [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
> *>
> *>no one ever said the buying public were intelligent ...
>
> Well, people rise to meet expectations too. There is precious little in
> the way of good CGI books with a practical slant to them out there so out
> of the lot of them, this is probably one of the best. The same principle
> applies to Matt's famous archive...lots of people bitching and not much
> else.
err .. nope. people take the easiest route possible, people rarely rise
to my expectations .. but there are exceptions.
> *>in fact it has been said (by some famoose newspaper tycoon ISTR) that no
> *>one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of their
> *>readership.
>
> That would have been Mr. Hearst whose empire is but a mere shadow of what
> it once was. If you treat people like idiots, that's all you get are
> idiots.
his personal empire may have crumbled but there are many more who are
making plenty of $$ (and pounds) by catering to a buying public whose
major feature is stupidity. trust me, we have a major genre of newspaper
here in the UK that caters to a readership that sees earthworms as a
superior being.
i think we get a slanted view on what a 'normal level of intelligence'
is, because in general, we work with exceptional people. I spent the last
14 years working for the BBC, I thought I worked with some good people,
and some clueballs. Then I did jury service. 12 'good men (or women) and
true' ... a random sample of the great unwashed. I doubt any of them
would have known a reasoned argument if one ran up to them in the street
and bit them. About then I reallised that I worked with a small slice of
the top of the pile (except journalists, who are pond life) and really I
should begin to worry about the future of the planet. Maybe I'm elitist,
maybe I have a overly inflated view of my own (and indeed all of our)
position in the food chain, but somehow I don't think I'm wrong on this
one.
> On the plus side, Addison-Wesley has a new CGI Perl book coming out in
> early February that should be a major improvement in this particular
> genre.
goodo ... time to buy a bigger bookcase. :)
--
Robin Szemeti
The box said "requires windows 95 or better"
So I installed Linux!
