Ray,
I don't think this list has ever had a ban on attachments. When they
appear, it's either a case of thoughtlessness (usually by tyros) or sheer
bad manners. Sensible people never open attachments unless they know
precisely what's in them. When I had a new hard disc a week or two ago my
consultant took away my old one and found two viruses there which were
waiting to be activated. But there was no possibility that I'd ever open
the attachments that contained them.
At 21:44 11/10/99 -0400, you wrote:
>I believe this list has ban on attachments.
>
>As for web sites, I rarely look since I find the
>content is often more out of context than a dialogue on
>list.
Oh, what a pity, Haven't you looked at mine?
An attachment is to me, a footnote which may or
>may not be opened. I often do not open it if the
>person has convinced me that they are doctrinaire or
>predictable in their answers. I make a distinction
>between repetition and predictable because repetition
>can be quite surprising and interesting as the minimal
>soho composers like Reich and Glass have shown.
Ah! I happen to think that they and many more like them are tricksters --
the Emperor's new clothes and all that. They're not intentional tricksters,
of course, just misguided and befuddled people. They've been carried away
by their own disciplinary verbosity and snobbery like a very considerable
part of the musical, artistic and literature professions. These professions
have largely had their day. As self-conscious artforms, they've risen and
fallen in bell-shape fashion between about 1000 and 1850. Huge quantities
of music, art and literature will continue to be produced, of course, for
all sorts of occasions and consumer fashions, and there'll be many a
best-seller among them as they touch on something really sensitive in the
public domain, but there'll be nothing new in a technical sense. All the
great discoveries in their respective trades have already been discovered
(and surprisingly few of them -- as in economics, see below).
>I also find that web sites often take so much energy that
>others don't converse much about their work. I don't even
>give out my web site since I think it is doctrinaire and is
>just plain unsuccessful. It just sits there like a lump with
>a couple of innocuous graphics.
Well, why don't you make it interesting? If it's got something to offer,
people will find their way to it and news will also spread by word of
mouth. But I agree about Web sites in the main. Most of the Internet is
over-rated and most of it is a complete mess. Even now we haven't a decent
indexing system by which we can make our way dependably to any destination.
I don't think it will ever happen -- at least not for a very long time --
because sales of the PC are now topping out in mature societies and will be
rapidly overtaken by the mobile phone in the next few years and, although
mobilers will be using the Internet, the devices will be of an easy-to-use,
programmable sort to be able to go to a small number of Web sites such as
shopping for groceries, job vacancies, ticket buying, video films, share
buying, and a few more specific uses, which is what the vast majority of
the public want.
And, talking of mobile phones -- which, unlike music, is a field where lots
of develoments will occur in the coming years -- the evidence from the
Scandinavian countries is that almost everybody will buy one (Sweden
already has 93% adult coverage) and it's likely that most people will have
several specialist ones (my own business is loss-making now because we sell
only one score to each choir but is aiming towards the time when choral
singers will have hand-held music readers into which they'll be able to
download any music they want -- and then we'll be selling to individuals
again).
Ray might well ask me: "Well, if you think music has finished developing,
what are you doing publishing music?". To which I reply: "Ah, but choral
and community music will live on because our social instincts are far
deeper than what passes for music today -- the snobberies and artificial
social cachets of the concert hall or the opera house or the youthful
fashions of open-air raves. We have become individualised so much in the
course of this last half-century that there is bound to be a reversion to
community -- of which choral singing will be a part.
Actually (I think I'd better return to the main purpose of this List or
else Sally or Arthur will tell me off), I think the mobile phone will
probably do more for jobs than anything else. Forget recent economic
theories (often self-contradictory), government policies and other
panaceas. What will do more for jobs than anything else will be accessible
databases of job vacancies.
I'm tempted to go on to say that the main planks of economic theory have
already been laid by Smith, Ricardo, etc (e.g. specialisation, comparative
advantage, etc -- a very small number of radical discoveries just as in the
arts). What's necessary now is getting rid of protective practices in
education/skill training on the one hand, and the knowledge of job
vacancies on the other. The mobile phone will take care of the latter,
though the former, like trade protection generally, will still take
generations to reform, I'm afraid.
Keith
>
>Just a thought,
>
>Ray Evans Harrell
>
>
>Christoph Reuss wrote:
>
>> > So I would say make more and better attachments!
>>
>> REH, no point in argueing about this: Sending attachments to a list
>> violates the official Netiquette, is a waste of bandwidth and
>> clutters up the harddisks of hundreds of users, many of which
>> can't decode the attachment anyway and/or don't even have a
>> clue how to locate/delete the clutter from their harddisk.
>>
>> If someone *needs* to visualize content, then put it on a website and
>> send the URL to the list.
>>
>> Chris
>
>
>
>
>
________________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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