From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Feb 08 2003 - 17:33:00 MST
spike66 wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote:
>> ...and this is a new sensation for you?
>>
>> Devil's advocate: it's not reliable. Not all the answers are out there,
>> and even if they are, finding them can be impossible if you don't know
>> the proper terms. At best, it's an assitant to classical learning and
>> knowledge - albeit a potentially very powerful one when it works.
>
> Perhaps my young friend Adrian has forgotten how
> information was gathered in the old days. Our best
> analog to the net was a large building where the
> information was printed on paper. This information
> was sometimes unreliable, often incomplete and
> nearly always outdated. Our best analog to google
> was a big wooden cabinet with paper cards that
> might or might not help one find the info one
> needed.
Oh, I remember - barely. But these libraries were also assistants in
the same way that Google is. If you did not know the proper way to find
the information, your chances of finding the information were virtually
nil even if the library had it. Google is somewhat of an improvement on
the former part, and a tremendous improvement on the latter part - but
it still does not index everything. (Even everything on the Web: there
have been times when I was unable to find my own Web site. Granted,
it's an *extremely* small Web site that I don't really use for anything,
but one would think it would at least exist somewhere in Google's
cache when searching for the title. The only such reference Google has
is to a link I posted to the site in a mailing list.)
> Living in the 21st century waaay doesn't suck.
Agreed. ^_^
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Feb 08 2003 - 17:36:17 MST