RE: "the ladies' auxilliary" [WAS: questions (about x21)]

[Jeff Fox <Jfox@xxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: vic plichota [mailto:atsvap@cgo.wave.ca]

>My questions to Jeff and Chuck are:
>
>- How receptive are you to constructive crticism?  Harsh words can
>often conceal excellent intentions...  Can you accept the risk and
>ego-blow of editorialization and correction of what others [who are
>not part of your privileged inner-circle] find to be deficiencies in
>your documentation?

I am receptive to constructive criticism.  I think I covered the
problem in my last post.  If I post a document it is too technical
for some people, and not technical enough for others.  If I make
two new copies I just get exactly the same criticism.

I have read all the essays and documents at my site many many
times.  Yet when I make a copy of one of Chuck's presentations
or review a document in detail I notice stuff that eluded me the
first hundred times.  

First read everything for a historical perspective.  make notes as
to what documents contained technical information that you might want
to index later and make your own index.  Go back and look again and
you may find that things are documented.

As I has have said the hardware and software together make sense if
you followed the whole 30 years in the history of Forth.  For most
people they come in with a fifteen or twenty year gap and try to 
may these chips to what they knew twenty years ago.

This required background compounds the problem.  People complain that
they simply get lost in the megabytes of documenation that I have
provided.  

There is also the issue that I work part time for UltraTechnology.  I have
about 30 different jobs at UltraTechnology that I must prioritize and deal
with pressing issues first.  Editing web pages has never been a high
priority.  I am actually amazed that I ever even get around to it.

>- How prepared are you to establish clear boundaries wrt what you
>consider to be your intellectual property?  Keep any proprietary
>secrets as you wish/must, but evading *crucial* 'newbie'-type
>questions (like mine) results in the perception that you are either:

When I first began documenting Chuck's and Ting's work on P21 I got
an enourmous amount of mail.  Everyone was a newbie and pretty much asked
the same set of questions.  I was writing over a megabyte of email each
month, mostly repeating myself hundreds of times.  Penio set up the MISC
mail list so that I could answer the questions once rather than a hundred
times separately.

Over the years we got a group of knowledgable people who had worked with
P21 and could answer these questions very well.  About once a month someone
new to the group will usually ask the same questions that have been asked
and answered hundreds of times in the mail list.

>A) full of shit, or  B) establishing a new elite priesthood --
>neither of which is in accord with the FORTH / MISC philosophy, and
>neither of which I think  to be true!

This is the thing I find most difficult about donating all the information
to the public that I have.  I felt that it might do the public some good
to have a deeper understanding of what Chuck Moore has done with Forth and
with Forth chips.  If I have erred it was on being too generous and
revealing
too much.

I never anticipated that people with no access to any technical information
on our projects would post information that they made up and call me and
Chuck liars.  I never anticipated that for the most part FIG would be
hostile
to Chuck's developments in Forth.  I never anticipated that numberous
members
of the ANS Forth committee would make an effort to dismiss the information 
that I provided about Chuck's work as some sort of cultism.

I do not consider being described as full of shit or some sort of cultist
as constructive criticism.  It is an example of someone who has nothing
of substance behind their arguments and must attempt to simply discredit
the information that they don't understand and can't accept.  When people
resort to using the most emotionally charged insults that they can muster
they have run out of logic.

Jeff Fox