[Buddha-l] Eudora

[Richard Hayes]

On May 12, 2010, at 3:13 PM, Jim Peavler wrote:

> Eudora was probably the best mail application I ever used back when it was free. When Qualcom bought out the developers they made it expensive, complicated, and full of bugs. 

There must be some Sutta devoted to the topic of how improvements in software usually result in what we in the philosophy industry call by the technical term "crap." Just about the best editing software I ever used was Final Word, first produced by Mark of the Unicorn. It was a powerful, inexpensive and easy to use knock-off of emacs. Eventually Final Word was bought out by Borland and marketed as Sprint. It was still inexpensive, but it became harder to use and less powerful. Borland supported the product for a couple of years and then abandoned it. I became embittered and was driven by the experience to several years of Marxist ranting and raving, until Dan Lusthaus pointed out that Marxism was probably incompatible with Quaker pacifism and my other hippie Buddhist predilections. Once I had been straightened out by Lusthaus, I reasoned (with the help of Dharmakīrtian logic) that Final Word had been an imitation of emacs in the first place, so I might do well to go to the achetype itself. I've been using emacs ever since and still regard it with a reverence that most people reserve for the three jewels.

Richard