Where Tunes is going.

[Brian Rice]

At 10:21 AM 10/26/99 -0400, shapj@us.ibm.com wrote:
>Brian:
>
>I take strong objection to your remark to Laurent:
>
>> It's still a language, you idiot, even if it is reflective.
>
>There was absolutely no cause for you to engage in name-calling of this form.
>You owe Laurent a public apology, and you owe yourself a commitment not to
>engage in such behavior in the future.  You will be more effective if you
don't.
>
>Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph. D.
>IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
>Email: shapj@us.ibm.com
>Phone: +1 914 784 7085  (Tieline: 863)
>Fax: +1 914 784 7595

Sorry for not replying sooner.  I had to work on the ship for a few days.

At the same time that I do apologize for the insult, I at the same time
must re-iterate my frustrations.  I firmly believe that the direction of
discussions here is exactly why Tunes has very little to show for its long
existence.  I furthermore believe that the lack of response to my e-mails
indicates that you are not taking my suggestions seriously at all.  The
fact that I cannot get someone on this list to actively engage in
discussing my ideas *does* prove that I am not willing to respect people
who don't understand my ideas after I describe them over and over, but at
the same time I know from IRC discussions that several people *do*
understand the ideas, and yet add nothing to the mlist discussion.  To name
a few, I know that Tril, Pat Wendorf, Fare, and some others understand many
aspects of tunes and my ideas, yet have not actively participate in Tunes
development, management, or discussion in quite some time.  Other people
who understand the ideas for the most part are not Tunes members, and do
not intend to become so, though I may be wrong.

It's not my fault that I am so frustrated.  I have appealed to many
different groups and professors for feedback on my ideas, and have turned
up nothing.  It IS of course my fault that I have no way to shield my
frustration from Tunes members who have been listening (or not) to my posts
for the last year, claiming that because my ideas are so arcane that they
have no merit.  I assume that you, Prof. Shapiro, believe the same thing
since I am not going the route of the usual academic researcher.  I have
had many people from the cs community blatantly claim that i'm foolish for
pursuing such an impossible goal, yet I have never found formal proof
otherwise (let alone any formal work in the same genre).

At the same time, please don't hold me to professional standards when we
all know that such standards were dropped long ago as important Tunes
issues were discussed for a time and then dropped without any sort of
formal resolution.  When I started noticing problems like that with
frequent regularity, I realized that Tunes has not progressed for quite a
while in any helpful way.

Hoping that we will change this situation,
	-Brian