Re: [rp-ml] Rapid Prototyping Community

Am 03.10.2008 um 00:09 schrieb Ron Hollis, President and CEO,
Quickparts:

> it is important that we are willing to change so that we can exist
> in a web 2.0 world.

Well, I hope the rp-ml continues to exist, independently of wether
others prefer to wade through many pages of web content to find out
wether there's something new.

To get a round hole into something, the most convenient thing to do
is still to use a drill. Like it was 100 years ago. To get something
flat, you still use a mill or a grinder, just like 100 years ago. I'm
sure everyone can easily find dozens more similar examples.

New technology isn't always better just because it's newer. Often new
technologies are more in fashion, yet the older ones are more
convenient for a specific purpose.

My personal reception of the current "Web 2.0" fashion is, it gets
more complex day by day without adding noticeable value. Web sites
are full of spiffy, animated (and distracting) graphics, getting me
away from what I really want (reading and answering incoming
messages). Forum text input boxes get complex formatting options, yet
people still prefer to write plain text. Some people even move their
entire desktop to some remote computer, doing what they could do
without the web for 20 years (word processing, spreadsheets).
Worldwide access to files was invented long before the WWW came
along. There might be reasons for Web 2.0/cloud computing, but
obviously, they're not added functionality.

> An important part of the communities is that they are owned by the
> users, so the value of the community is directly proportional to
> the participation of the users.

As is the Rapid Prototyping Mailing List.

I might sound a bit old-fashioned here. Yet, the rp-ml is a perfect
example of not the newest, but sufficiently recent technology just
doing the job. Many thanks to those making it possible.

MarKus

P.S.: If you want to do something for the RP community, how about
crafting a nice search engine for the list's archives?

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/
Received on Fri Oct 03 11:29:15 2008