Why I am not going to buy a computer (1987) [pdf]

Post by microtherion » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:09 AM UTC

iRomain wrote: post #27

I laughed so hard at Gordon Inkeles' response. Wendell Berry: My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. Gordon Inkeles: Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife - a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwri…

  I have often been asked why I don't use [Word Processors], and my honest answer has always been that there is for me so much to write that I cannot afford the use of these time-saving devices.

Post by arvinsim » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #55

_carbyau_ wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother doesn't have a computer or mobile phone of any kind. Landline phone, TV and snailmail is her contact with the world from home. I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right? But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her"…

Proper UI/UX design is tremendously difficult, which is why software engineers should never attempt it in a user-facing product. When it comes to on-screen text, you must choose your words very carefully, because someone out there will read them the wrong way. Example: in the 90s, Windows, arguably one of the easiest commercial operating systems and certainly the most familiar, used to routinely frighten its users by…

Post by lisper » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:18 AM UTC

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #62

lisper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Berry is coming from the worldview that God created a world of great abundance and that if we share, there is enough for all. Sure, but he/they are simply wrong about that. The natural state of living systems is to propagate until they reach a natural limit imposed by some resource constraint or other. Our current technological civilization is an anomaly produced by the sudden release, over a period of a few hundre…

Alternatively, the anomaly is no anomaly at all. Its origins were fortuitous, but rather than a reversion to the baseline of misery it was an unlocking of a new normal though a series of irreversible (or very unlikely reversible) inventions, much like agriculture was. We used one source of energy to power our leap forward, we'll use a different one to sustain a baseline of plenty, or maybe unlock a new level soon. I…

Post by wolpoli » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #32

jimhi wrote: post #3

Holy cow - this guy still does not own a computer. From: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/g... "Berry, who is now eighty-four, does not own a computer or a cell phone, and his landline is not connected to an answering machine. We corresponded by mail for a year"

My mother doesn't have a computer or mobile phone of any kind. Landline phone, TV and snailmail is her contact with the world from home. I did give her an old laptop but when the link to "her email" webpage was moved by the ISP she got the error message "It looks like your page has been moved." Innocuous enough error message right? But this caused her to freak out as clearly "someone" was watching and knew what "her"…

Post by richiebful1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #53

iRomain wrote: post #27

I laughed so hard at Gordon Inkeles' response. Wendell Berry: My wife types my work on a Royal standard typewriter bought new in 1956 and as good now as it was then. As she types, she sees things that are wrong and marks them with small checks in the margins. Gordon Inkeles: Wendell Berry provides writers enslaved by the computer with a handy alternative: Wife - a low-tech energy-saving device. Drop a pile of handwri…

Sometimes it does come in handy, case in point, Sophia Tolstaya ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Tolstaya ): “ Sophia acted as copyist of War and Peace, copying and editing the manuscript seven times from beginning to end at home at night by candlelight after the children and servants had gone to bed, using an inkwell pen and sometimes requiring a magnifying glass to read her husband's notes.” Stop and think…