I'm glad the
Free Software Foundation is standing with
Richard Stallman. You don't get to destroy someone's life because you don't like him, or the questions he asks, or the things he says. This really is a question of freedom.
#Braintrust query: Is there a way to post to WordPress from an external app? If it has an API, I'd like to get support in the first release of
Drummer. It's an important connection. For years they had an XML-RPC interface. I think that's gone now. Has something replaced it yet?
#
Earlier this month I wrote a piece called
The Lost Apps of the 80s, wondering where the depth of early PC writing tools went. Also spreadsheets, databases, graphics programs. There were huge numbers of them. The reason imho is Microsoft and not just the
Browser Wars which threw all of software into chaos for a number of years. There's another reason, and it might have happened even if the web hadn't come along.
Microsoft Office. So quickly I forgot. It used to be that a word processor cost $495 as did a database, spreadsheet, and various other software. When you added up the retail prices it could easily come to $2000. Then one day, Microsoft bundled
Word and
Excel and a few other apps, for the price of a single productivity app. And over the years, they added more software to the bundle. This alone might have reduced the productiving software business to one vendor. The competitors couldn't afford to do what Microsoft did, they didn't have the royalties from the OS to support their price-cutting in apps. So that's another theory on where the apps went. Today, that's no excuse. Writing tools would have a different purpose today, writing for the network, rather than for printing. Different requirements.
#Why doesn't Georgia get rid of the lines for voters? Isn't this the obvious question. Has anyone asked Gov Kemp? Is that something he can help with?
#Someday users of network services, having been burned by lock-in, will only choose a service when they’re sure there’s a way out.
#
We need a coach to get us through the pandemic. Whether or not you like him, Cuomo was doing that. That’s why I say Fauci should have a podcast. The interviews he does with various people isn’t enough.
#
I just found a 1991 piece by Steven Levy at MacWorld about Frontier, which was still in development at the time. Really interesting read because now, only 30 years later (heh), I'm doing a smaller version of the same idea, not on the Mac but on the open web, once again using standard protocols to connect apps. It starts on page 51 of
this PDF of the August 1991 MacWorld. Here's a
screen shot of the first page.
#What neither Levy or I understood, at the same time in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee was working on the world wide web. Frontier's importance in bootstrapping the web as a content management platform, via blogging, RSS and podcasting, was where the real growth would come. It would require a pivot, of course. The Mac
was entering middle age, as Levy postulated. But a new shiny thing that worked really well with the Mac was coming along and would soon change everything. The same vacuum that existed on the Mac at the time, now exists on the web. There is no simple-enough scripting language designed for power users to integrate the functionality of many and disparate apps. Why do I like this so much? I guess I'm just a pipes and wires kind of guy. And I think lots of new media will emerge from the ecosystem we'll create here.
#I know this is just math, but 1980 is to 1940 as 2020 is to 1980.
#Tweeted in 2014. "We are just beginning to come to grips with how over-reliant we've been on the imagined ethics of tech companies."
#
Embarrassing mistake. Yesterday, in a
longish piece about bingewatching, I gave Kazuo Ishiguro credit for writing the novel Howard’s End. He actually wrote
Remains of the Day. There is a connection. Both were made into movies starring
Emma Thompson and
Anthony Hopkins. I corrected the piece, but here's a
screen shot of the error. BTW, interestingly, I received an
email from Netflix last night suggesting I watch Howard's End. Is it a coincidence, or does their algorithm read my blog? That would be amazing if it did. (I'm sure it doesn't but it's an incredible source about my interests.)
#
I find the resurgence of
outliners inspiring, I wonder about all the addons, and I’d like to see them support import and export standards, and most importantly, APIs.
#
BTW, for people who are trying outliners for the first time, may I suggest my own
Little Outliner. It's browser-based, easy to use, has lots of features, isn't world-encompassing, just a way to make lists, plan stuff, think into your computer screen. It's free to use, no gotchas, and the outlines are in a standard format, and there's a command to download all your work to your local system, for backup or to use in another outliner. So there's absolutely no lock-in.
🚀#TimeShifter for vaccinators has a simple purpose. Instead of writing on someone's tag 30 Minutes or 15 minutes, you write the time at which they can leave if there are no complications from the vaccine.
#
I don’t understand why CNN reports on what Fox says. Isn’t there a risk of too many mirrors reflecting only on each other. News about news about news about news, etc.
#
- A thread from my Twitter account..#
- I was having a discussion with Taylor Lorenz about the difference between online media brought to us by the tech industry, and the world of the NYT and other journalism orgs. Here's a concise version.#
- The NYT et al present packaged stories and opinion. The presenters are vetted, conform to standards that are understood, but not well documented. (This is all my opinion btw.)#
- The online tech media presents largely unpackaged stories, with little or no vetting, and the standards are hard to implement because the systems are so vast.#
- They're opposites. Night and day. And in conflict, but imho they need not be. #
- I've long felt we need hybrids. Probably unknown to most people at the NYT, there was a time, between 2002 and 2005, or so -- when I personally worked with them on this stuff. So I had a strong opinion about what they should do. They did half of what I asked, and that was pretty bold, and very successful. #
- The other half they didn't do. It would have brought a lot more voices into the NYT, but they would have been vetted, by the reporters of the NYT, simply by quoting them in a NYT piece. So they couldn't avoid the vetting if their stories had sources. And the thought was that anyone who is a source for the NYT is worth listening to and could use a platform. #
- What would have come out of it is something like what Substack is today. #
- It's hard to know how that experiment would have turned out, but I believed in the idea. Unfortunately it was immediately turned down. #
- My main contact at the NYT at the time was Martin Nisenholtz, so you can confirm this with him if you like. The first half of the deal resulted in the RSS standard for distributing news. Another little-known fact, imho RSS would have failed without the support from the NYT. Their trust in my small company was amazing, and we took good care of their brand and rep in the wild world of the web. This was in 2002. #
- PS: There's also the story of how we found the cache of NYT syndicated content. That's what led to the deal we made a year later for RSS. #
- About a year ago I decided to cut the cord and turn off the TV service from my cable provider, Spectrum. I returned my settop box, which I had never actually installed, because I used their Roku app instead. #
- I subscribed to YouTube TV so I could watch news and some sports. It concerned me that they didn't have MSG or SNY for the Knicks and Mets, but there wasn't much sports last year anyway, with the pandemic and lockdowns. #
- I went without HBO because I was getting that from Spectrum, and I binged on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and a few other services from time to time, but those were the main ones. #
- Then the Knicks season started. I could see from the highlights and news that this season they were actually an exciting team, very unusual, I wanted to watch, so I set out on a lengthy search, because the information out there is so poor, only to learn that there is literally no way to get MSG and SNY, the broadcasters of Knicks and Mets games, without Spectrum. The local sports teams are not available to cable-cutters, at least not where I live. #
- As I wrote about this on my blog, I got lots of emails saying that this service or that would give me what I wanted. I even tried using Spectrum's "streaming" service, which you can order online, but none of them had the Knicks. #
- So I decided to undo the grand cable-cutting experiment, called Spectrum and got back on board with the cable TV service, got a new settop box, which will never be unpacked and will stay in a closet, and happily watched the Knicks during this very interesting, exciting and fun season. #
- But this piece is about HBO, not the Knicks. #
- Now as a Spectrum user, I can use the HBO Max app. I've paid to access it. And at the same time, HBO appears in the Listings in the Spectrum app. So I added them to my favorites. So now when I have to choose between something to watch, HBO is one of the choices. And the big difference here is that they pick what to offer me, just like the old days. They have a schedule. And guess what, I watch a lot more HBO this way than I did when I have full choice over what to watch through the streaming app. This is the point of the story. #
- An example. Last night just before Ari Melber comes on at 6PM, I got bored with the usual stuff on CNN and MSNBC, so I looked around, and saw that The Godfather had just started. I switched to it, and there's Don Corleone sitting behind his desk with the cat in his lap, listening to Bonasera, the undertaker, completely blowing his pitch to the Don. It's a riveting scene. So much to watch. The performance of it. Comparing it to the boring plays they act out on CNN, for months, is ridiculous. One is a masterpiece, the other is completely lost, worthless, not even good for passing the time while playing games on my iPad.#
- BTW, I watched The Godfather all the way to the end. I didn't get up once. It was the best couple of hours I had spent on entertainment in years. #
- Browsing on HBO Max, I would never think to click on The Godfather as I'm bored looking for something to watch. I think other people have observed this too. Most of my time on these apps is spent looking for something to watch, as opposed to watching.#
- The idea of scheduled broadcasts is actually very appealing, to my surprise! I thought for sure the revolution was permanent, that we would always be programming our TV-watching experience for ourselves once we had the chance. But there are real problems with that approach. #
- How do I know if something is good? I have no idea. And to find out, I have to search for the title on Metacritic, see the total score, and then skim the reviews. A lot of typing and waiting and reading, so I don't do it very often. Much faster just to go on to the next one. #
- I might have heard of a show or movie I want to watch, but I have no idea if it's playing somewhere I can access. For example, I was looking for Remains of the Day, because the story was written by the author of a book I had just read and loved. Amazon has a big advantage here, you can get almost everything, but mostly they are not included in the video bundle, so you have to pay extra. I figure I'm already paying enough to all the streaming services, I should watch something that's included, and eventually Howard's End will show up.#
- On the other hand, I guess I'll pretty much always watch The Godfather, Babe or Kill Bill 2 when given a chance to. There are actually a lot of movies like that. And now, unlike the past, there are no commercials, and they leave the sex and violence in. And the Knicks, which I watched instead of Maddow, oy! What a game. The ups and downs, tragedy and heroic play, the back-stories, the history -- all in just an hour. MSNBC, comparitively, is transparently nothing. The best they have is a powerless Congressperson who is ridiculously and obviously corrupt and popular (maybe) on Fox who has been caught. Nothing is at stake. They can't explain why anyone should care. They need a new purpose.#
Journalism is not accountable. We can’t impeach the NYT, or remove them from office in the next election. Yet they pretty much determine what we talk about, so much so that
Wolf Blitzer on CNN actually negotiates with politicians we do elect, who are accountable.
#If Congress wants to get the attention of tech companies, make them liable for
lock-in.
#I've been catching up on the
Chauvin trial every night on the news. The testimony is damning. He is obviously guilty of murder. But, the defense isn't trying to win all the votes of the jurors, they only have to convince one juror, and I'm pretty sure they'll do that.
#One reason
Manchin might want to vote to cancel the filibuster is that it would maintain his power to veto non-budget Democratic legislation. With the filibuster in place the only power he has is to keep the filibuster. If he sticks with that he might as well switch parties now. However, if Biden and the Dems sold the voting plan that the Repubs will certainly block, if 90 percent of West Virginians supported the reforms, I would imagine that Manchin
could change his mind. It all comes back to the same thing.
The campaign never stops.
#
- Just for fun I wrote a Drummer script that lists the earlierst Twitter users in an outline. #
- Here's the script:#
- var flfirst = true;#
- op.insert ("Early Twitter signups", down);#
- for (var i = 12; i < 25; i++) {#
- var name = twitter.getScreenname (i);#
- op.insert (name, (flfirst) ? "right" : "down");#
- flfirst = false;#
- }#
- op.go (left, 1);#
- The list it generates#
- How the script works#
- It inserts a headline in the current outline, down from the bar cursor headline, with the text "Early Twitter signups." #
- Then it loops of users whose ids are 12 to 24. I picked 12 because I had figured out from an earlier script that it was the first-listed user. And 24 is a random value I picked out of thin air. ;-)#
- For each user, it calls the Drummer verb twitter.getScreenname, which takes one parameter, the id of the user whose name you want. Then it inserts the name either to the right or down from the cursor depending on whether this is the first user we're inserting. That's how op.insert, an old friend from Frontier, works. #
- When it's done looping, it moves the cursor to the left, onto the "Early Twitter signups" headline we created. #
- It leaves the list expanded. #
- The killer feature#
- It's so humble you might actually miss it. #
- Even though the script makes a dozen asynchronous calls to Twitter, it's written as if it were synchronous. No weird code structures, you just write it as you think of it, and the system translates it into the complicated stuff, for you. Do I have to explain why this is good? Any time you can let the computer do the complex stuff for you is time you save, and errors you don't make. #
Twitter thread: "These days I see twitter as an essential utility. Largely because the API is so good."
#
BTW,
Drummer will have a collection of built-in Twitter verbs.
#twitter.getScreenname (twitter.getUserProfile ("jack").id) //example#
"Use the product for its intended purpose." This is something I say to myself and people I work with, a lot. A steady drumbeat, to stay on track.
#I watched the beginning of President Biden's press conference today. Both VP Harris and the president gave very good talks. Sometimes their cadence is wrong, they speak in typos, and other times (like today) I say YEAH that's right, that's how you do it.
#It would be amazing if all software developers used compatible back-end databases.
#
Poll: When Trump says Matt Gaetz never asked for a pardon, what percent chance is it he's telling the truth?
#
If you use
Little Outliner you should
download your files regularly, as a backup. It's saved my ass more than once. The
Download My Files command is in the Tools menu. You quickly get a zip archive of all your files.
#
After watching
The Making of Sgt Pepper, I've listened to the album a few times, from beginning to end. They said it's a concept album, but it isn't really. There are four songs that are in keeping with the Sgt Pepper theme, but the rest are Beatles songs. A few that could have been from the pre-Pepper Beatles. But the album made another statement that did mark a turning point: We're going to try new ideas. We're really going to do it, not just talk about it. We're going to use the remarkable place we're in to innovate. Further, this isn't about fame or wealth, it's about creativity, human expression. For the rest of their careers, as a group and individuals, they continued to try new ideas. And they inspired a generation of us to believe in our own ingenuity as much as any tech hero did, more I think (though I wasn't inspired by them, I was of them). The beauty of Pepper is the lives of the people who created it and their ability to influence.
#I wish there was a way in video conferences on a pc for your eye to be focused on the image of the other person talking. The camera is in the wrong place, in other words.
#
- If we want the Dems to stay in power, and we do -- they have to get a very simple idea. #
- The. Campaign. Never. Stops.#
- It used to be that fund-raising never stops, but now more is required. Keep the connection between leadership and voters going all the time.#
- The good thing -- our current president gets this. Biden is doing a fantastic job. Maybe his experience has something to do with it. Or maybe, as Nixon could open China, after being a rabid anti-communist, maybe Biden is uniquely capable of being a new LBJ or FDR, because he is known as a moderate. (As was LBJ, btw.)#
- BTW, add to this thread -- why has Lincoln Project stopped running ads? This happened the the HRC campaign in 2016. The election is over, that does not mean that campaigning is over. The support of the people is essential to governing and maintaining power.#
- Dave's intro#
- We used to have systems in blogging that better-enabled discourse like what's going on between John Naughton and myself. Primitive stuff like permalinks, which nowadays would seem like a huge innovation. Interestingly, we're talking about making the web a better communication system for writers. #
- Back in the day, when blogging was new, when we had an idea like this, I could just write the software and post an upgrade. Even if JN wasn't using my software, the people who made the software he used would hear about it, and fairly quickly would match the feature. Who knows why, but I'd bet it was mostly the competitive impulse. There's Dave adding a feature for a user, we'd better add it too. But the writers' web doesn't work like that any more. We have to try to get the attention of young companies with billion dollar valuations, running a rocket ship three feet off the ground. Even a small bump could blow them up. Believe me I know what it's like, somewhat. Been there. #
- Anyway, JN responded to my post with a post on his blog, and I wish I could point to it, but his software doesn't have permalinks, so I'll just reproduce it here. #
- Email from John Naughton#
- Many thanks for writing. Funny coincidence: I was about to write to you about the email exchange you’ve embarked on with Ray Ozzie, but that can wait for another day. For now, I just wanted to say that I’m with you all the way in your view that the formulaic editing tools offered by platforms like Blogger, WordPress, Medium, Substack et al are, clumsy and restrictive to use. And I wholeheartedly agree that writers should be able to use whatever tool they find best for them, and that publishing platforms should make it easy to upload text and implement whatever formatting is needed.#
- My own journey has taken me about 90% of the way towards that. I decided years ago that from henceforth everything I wrote would be composed as ASCII text rather than in a proprietary format (e.g. Microsoft Word) and stored as such. So I started doing that, relying on Pandoc to transform my text into pdf, Word, LaTex or whatever. (In doing that, I was of course harking back to when I first started writing on a Unix time-shared machine, producing plain marked-up text which was then fed into troff to produce beautifully typeset copy.) When John Gruber and Aaron Swartz (RIP) came up with Markdown in 2004 as a lightweight way of marking-up text, I adopted that. And eventually, thanks to Quentin I found a writing app that worked for me — Ulysses — and have used that ever since. Once WordPress started to accept Markdown text, all my blog posts (except the daily Substack version of the blog) have been written that way. Ulysses will also spit out a version of any text I write in a variety of proprietary formats and so looks like being the only writing tool I will need from now until I keel over.#
- Now, to your point that “Basically, it should be possible to hook your writing tool directly to both WordPress and Substack”… It turns out that Ulysses eventually cracked the WordPress route, and so I can now hit a button and have it immediately uploaded to, and formatted on, Memex 1.1. The HTML looks a bit verbose and clunky, but it renders just fine. And it’s efficient and quick. So getting Substack to create an API that enables Ulysses to upload as easily would that I would be nearly there.#
- Nearly, but not quite — which is why I really appreciate your feature request to Substack to also enable paragraph-level permalinks.#
- Keep well.#
- John#
- FInal notes from Dave#
- Also, note to self, I have to make it so that when people copy the text of my posts, the # permalinks don't get copied. Every time JN quotes me I see them there, and it makes me cry because I work so hard on the words and the pound signs just do not belong there! Oy.#
- Also, to John, I'd love to hear what you say re my conversation with Ray. We'll figure out how to make this work. Hosting a salon with great minds such as yourself and Ray is something I love to do. #
Don't wait for people to see things from your point of view, it'll never happen.
#Bernie Sanders on MSNBC last night talked about new Repub voter suppression. He never said the thing I hoped he would. Repubs know they can't win a fair election, so they cheat.
#
I was asked if I know that tech companies hate the web, and asking them to help the web is stupid. I can't defend that, it might be stupid, who knows. But it isn't taking a lot of time, and in talking about wanting to rekindle the writing tools category, I'm not just talking to the platform devs, I'm also talking to users, who may not have realized that they don't have to become copypaste machines just to have a newsletter, or cross-post to Facebook. There's no technical barrier. And if they wanted to use their favorite editor to write blog posts or newsletters, because they now understand that it's possible, that would create pressure for tech companies to do it. Now the big ones wouldn't, at first, but one of the also-rans might, as a way to get users to use their service. And if the feature is as sexy as I believe it is, they
will get more users, and in doing so might attract the other, bigger companies, to do it too. Also there are some idealists around, believe it or not, some tech founders who believe in the web, and even read this blog, and might respond to a friendly nudge. Anyway, what's the difference. It gives me pleasure to stand up for the web, and hope. I think the world can work better, and if I can help, you bet I'm going to say something.
#This story isn't really about George O'Connor (a made-up name), it's about something else. Here's the story. Many years ago I was at a party at CES, only people with connections were invited. So you could walk around this big ballroom and every few minutes you'd run into someone you know from a long time ago. In this case I ran into George, a person I knew from the early Mac days because he worked at Anderson (also a made-up name), one of the networking hardware companies of the Mac. A respected company, and George was well-thought-of. But I had another connection to him, his sister had worked for my company, a few years before, and I wanted to ask how she was doing and to say hi for me. George started talking after I said hello, and he said he couldn't help get me into TED. He was a producer there, and presumably everyone in the room was hitting him up for tickets, I guess he was tired of it. I didn't want to go to TED, and I also didn't hold this against George. I think I see this all the time, but rarely is it so open as it was at that party. People assume you want something from them, when you just wanted to say hi because you have good memories of them. It's the flipside of a
story I wrote in 2013 about a clerk at a gas station having a bad day.
#With the Repubs openly threatening corporations, the question is who do they think they rep?
#
- I started writing this email to John Naughton re his recent Memex daily posts, but I thought both of us being public writers, I should just post it here and send a pointer. So here goes. #
- John, I've been following the story of the strange URLs from your Substack newsletter. I also appreciated your telling how you produce your newsletter by copy/pasting from WordPress into Substack. I bet 90 percent of Substack's text comes in this way. And that's what this letter is about. #
- I've been asking them to automate that part for you via an API or RSS, or whatever they specify, to remove the copy/paste step from your publication workflow. I am deliberately being a squeaky wheel, hoping that writers who use Substack will join in.#
- Basically, it should be possible to hook your writing tool directly to both WordPress and Substack.#
- I would have used Substack myself if it weren't for this limit. As a writer, I want to eliminate steps, to make my writing more effortless. Publishing an idea takes too many steps, as a result, a lot of ideas don't get out. #
- I want to have a better flow on the web as a writer, and I think if other writers knew what was possible they'd want it too, and hopefully they would write about it. You wrote about it yesterday! ;-)#
- JN, writers have a lot more power imho than they think. Esp in the early days of a service like Substack. They are listening to you. They know they depend on you. If enough writers wanted a feature, they would implement it. That's how development works. #
- Please consider writing something yourself about eliminating copy/paste-to-publish step. There's a lot of power trapped in that limit. #
- Dave#
- PS: A feature request for permalinks in Substack.#
Definition: An API makes it possible to do things with a piece of software from another piece of software.
#
Why is it interesting to think about what became of the
Apps of the 80s -- because imho we still need what they do. I want to use one writing tool, the perfect one for me, and flow the text through various services. We know how to. Rather than just accept more and more editors, let's build interfaces that allow choice. APIs. We know how to do it. We just need one or two products to demo the concept and define the interfaces. Any blogging tool or newsletter mailer could take the next step.
#
I heard about
Chia today. Sounds like it's a crypto currency, but what makes it interesting is that
Bram Cohen is involved, and he's the guy who brought us
BitTorrent, and that works pretty well, and seemed really wild when it first came out.
#Unless you're really sure the other person will get your humor, or appreciate it, it's usually better to say what you mean instead of trying to be funny.
#
As you know I've been asking a question pretty persistently -- where did the apps go? Specifically where did the writing tools go? Before the web, there was a deep market for software writing tools, all kinds of word processors, text editors, desktop publishing tools, even spreadsheets and database software were used to write. Yet few of those tools transitioned to the web. #- In the early years of the web, we thought it was very innovative for browser-based apps to create and write for public websites, which eventually became blogs, entirely through web forms in the browers. It was such a miracle, look at how easy it is! -- that we overlooked that as a writing tool, the web browser is pretty awful. We know how to do it so much better! Why didn't we? Why don't we do it now?#
- Introducing Ray Ozzie...#
- I've been having an email conversation with Ray Ozzie, a fellow productivity tools developer from the 80s. We never worked together but we worked with people who worked together. He did several products you might be familiar with. Lotus Symphony which was the height of the "integrated software" period in the mid-80s, and the corporate groupware product, Lotus Notes. Since then he has been CTO of Microsoft, and has founded several successful startups. He was recently honored as a fellow of the Computer History Museum. I asked if I could include some of his comments in a blog post here, and he agreed. I didn't do any editing, his words appear exactly as he typed them.#
- Dave (me) kicks it off...#
- There used to be, as you know, a deep market for tools for writers. Highly customizable products, or products with UIs with character, people had something they don't have now -- choice. And that made it competitive.#
- Now, we don't have choice. If I want to write on Facebook, I have to use their awful buggy editor. If I want a Substack newsletter or a Medium blog, or whatever -- I have to use their editors, which vary in quality, but none of them would have stood a chance in the 80s software market.#
- We could argue how this happened, but there's no question that it did happen.#
- Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there.#
- That's the starting point. I'm not saying we should fix it, I don't want to take that on, but I want to focus the tech world on the fact that this happened. #
- Now Ray opines on the lost apps of the 80s...#
- I agree wholeheartedly that there are things that we were incredibly fortunate to have experienced, and they seem to be gone. Seemingly forever.#
- ThinkTank and outliners in general is one of them. I don’t understand this because I think there are many outliner-type people out there who would enjoy them, but because they never became mainstream they aren’t being given a chance to be mainstream once again.#
- I also think that there were calendar-centric PIM-centric extensions to the outlining concept that were in Agenda that were worth saving; they’re gone.#
- Pito Salas’s spreadsheet Improv had incredible things – far more than just the pivot table – and yet the world is now deprived because the world seems comfortable with a simpler concept of a spreadsheet. And yes, networked spreadsheets of one form or another would be amazing – especially given that many real-world spreadsheet scenarios involve periodic consolidation/roll-up involving multiple people and processes.#
- A VC friend told me several years ago that it was incredible that even though there is now a wave of “low code” tools such as Airtable, that there is nothing out there with the power and usability that Lotus Notes had back-in-the-day. And so we cobble together many tools, ignoring the fact that there was a better answer that we’ve chosen to discard.#
- As you said, I can’t fix it. I can’t even explain it. I’ve put an incredible amount of energy and love into products that have commercially failed, and it has made me a bit more cautious. I’m fortunate that I don’t tend to descend into cynicism, but it remains perplexing.#
- As a writer and an analyst, I do think this would be a great topic to explore: why have so many great ideas been discarded? Even if their initial implementation was destined never to withstand the test of time, why do we choose to ignore those aspects that were good? In an internet that was supposed to allow us to have ‘bubbles’ of special interest groups, why haven’t we created a thriving environment that might support the creation and maintenance of bespoke power tools for creativity and productivity?#
- That's where I'd like to leave it for now, there will be more. #
- PS: I wrote my side of the conversation in GMail. A pretty standard browser-based text browser and editor. In Chrome on my Mac. I don't know what email app Ray used. ;-)#
- PPS: There's a thread about this piece on Hacker News.#
A BYTE magazine cover from 1981.
#
- Journalism is a thing, a whole, it makes sense to talk about in the way I talk about it. I don't need a lecture at this level, although people often do it for some reason.#
- I read a piece recently somewhere, I forget where, that said people who think rapid universal change can't take place -- they aren't paying attention. The example they cited was that not too long ago people were smoking everywhere. Now there are severe limits on where you can smoke, and people seem to respect the limits. We made a decision as a society to change our behavior and it happened quickly. And you could have made the same kinds of arguments, that there is no such thing as a "smoker" -- but there was. #
- It also happened with same-sex marriage. Hard to believe it first became legal in the US in 2015! Had you asked me in 2014 if that was possible I would have said no. Then it changed, just like that. #
- Covid is another one. Who would have thought that people could hibernate for more than a year in the US. I recorded a podcast in March last year, just to mark how ludicrous I thought it was yet at the same time inevitable. We do go through real transitions. I expect there will be plenty more. #
- And at some point some journalism org will trip over the idea that repping the people's interest makes their art work as a business like nothing else before. Sometimes I think that's all we're arguing about in the US. The elites talk to the elites and ignore the rest of us. So remind me, why are we supporting this?#
Ruth: "Explain APIs to me like I’m 45 (and new to tech)."
#
President Biden does something I thought Democrats forgot how to do. He goes around the obstruction in DC, bringing his ideas to the people. Journalism could learn from this. If they understood and took the side of the people more, they'd have more support from the people.
#
I've thought more about
Making of Sgt Pepper. It's amazing to hear the Beatles' perspective on the
album, I had never really thought how it was created, yet as a creative person myself, I’m often surprised and even offended that people don’t consider my point of view about the things I created. But at one time, Sgt Pepper was their thing, their secret. That's why the
final quote was so strong for me. "You just wait," says McCartney -- echoing the feeling in 1967 when he knew he had something great, that was going to shake the world (as it did) and no one but he and a few others knew what it was. And the lesson of the Making of Sgt Pepper is that you and I will never know Sgt Pepper the way McCartney does. And one more thought, if only John Lennon could have been there, what would we have learned.
#
I wear a lot of hats. One of them is as a developer of scripting systems. I did a big one, Frontier, developed mostly in the late 80s and 90s. People seem to refer to it in the past tense, but I use Frontier as do others. it does things no other product can. It works. #- As you may know, Drummer is my new outliner-based scripting system for the web. It's still at least a few months from shipping, maybe more. But I'm making big decisions about how it works right now. #
- The same way Frontier was designed around an object database and the Mac filesystem (and later Windows), Drummer works with public and private files on a server.#
- Frontier is a very broad and deep product, but it wasn't originally designed to be so big. The initial idea was to integrate it with the Finder, add a Scripts menu, and have it do things with the file system, and provide a way to program and connect scriptable apps. That was it. Simple. I offered it to Apple. At the time, the early 90s, I knew all the decision-makers there, but I asked for too much money, they thought they could do it for less. So now I had tipped my hand, showed them my product, I figured to be competitive I'd have to add more stuff, which I did have available to me, since I always try out ideas that don't make it into the final product. The product got deeper, but it also got more complicated.#
- I always wondered if it would have worked better if we had started with the small product. We could have shipped sooner. It would have been more approachable, more immediately useful. I think there is a good chance it would have worked better, but it didn't go that way. #
- This time, I'm trying to keep Drummer small, focus on a few innovations, and make a lot of the parts replaceable. #
- I am creating a product, but as with Radio UserLand, I also want to try to create a new use for our computers. With Radio it was blogging and RSS. This time it's a richer, better connected working environment on the net for power users and devs. #
- PS: Power users is a concept that has fallen into disuse, but they still exist, and you can design for them. Some users are very skilled with the technology.#
- PPS: The key innovation in Drummer is JavaScript without the callbacks.#
- PPPS: I posted something about Drummer on Twitter. #
A gathering for 50 people? Oy.
#
The best part of
The Making of Sgt Pepper is the very last line, with Paul McCartney. "The musical papers which you used to read, started to slag us off because we hadn't done anything, because it took five months to record. And I remember with great glee seeing in one of the papers 'ohh the Beatles have dried up, there's nothing going on, they've been in the studio, can't think, what are they doing. And I was sort of sitting rubbing my hands just saying Oh you just wait."
#A famous John Lennon quote. He was asked if Ringo was the best drummer he knew. “Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in the world," Lennon is said to have said. "Let’s face it, he wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.” Ringo complains about that in the video. He says all the other Beatles wish they were drummers. I think we were having our legs pulled.
#Sgt Pepper: "You're such a lovely audience, we'd like to take you home with us."
#
The best platforms are ones with lots of users. For example, the Finder on the Mac needs a simple scripting language. Starting with Lotus 1-2-3, spreadsheets had macro languages. Programmable editors are popular because writers love to get their writing environment just-so. The theory of Frontier was to pour lots of attention into the scripting language, and make it work across all apps. We did a pretty fair job. It didn't get as much attention as it deserved because Apple got in the way. We shouldn't give up on this ideal. It's still possible.
#Today is the first time I've lived in a place where
weed became legal, on the day
it happened. I've been to places where it is legal (Calif, WA, Colorado, Mass to name a few). It's one of those "did you ever think you'd live to see it" days. Weird that tomorrow is April 1.
#Highly recommend
The Making of Sgt Pepper. Interviews with George Martin, the three surviving Beatles (in the early 90s). Many others. This album was the turning point from the Beatles being a touring phenom, to pioneering a new creative direction for pop music. It's inspiring, we need a similar turn in software. (It's also available
on Facebook if that works better.)
#Someone
has built a drone big enough to
carry a human.
#OMG there's
another. Much more ambitious.
#
I could live off Granny Smith apples.
#Has
anyone built a drone big enough to carry a human?
#
At UserLand, a company I founded a long time ago, we had a rule called Rule 1. It said simply: No breakage. It meant you couldn't change the environment such that apps that ran in version N did not run in version N+1. It meant you took longer to release a new version because once released, you had to live with it forever. This rule came from bad experiences when we did things that broke users and developers. Since we were both the developers of the platform and users of the platform we had a realistic perspective of this. #- I was once having a discussion with someone who wanted to implement a successor to Frontier, intending it to be compatible with Frontier, in some way, but right at the beginning said he was going to make it case-sensitive where Frontier is not case-sensitive. #
- I'd be happy to debate anyone who thinks this is anything but insane. I'd win the argument re Frontier for two reasons: #
- 1. Frontier is not case-sensitive, and #
- 2. Rule 1, no breakage. #
- As we were originally developing the environment in the early 90s, we didn't give this much thought, but at the last minute a beta user it pleaded that it would be a tragic mistake to make it case-sensitive, so we changed. Never regretted the decision. #
- To programming neophytes, a language is case-sensitive if HelloGoodbye is a different name from helloGoodbye. #
- Rule 1 was not a joke, it was dead serious. I was sick of programmers who choose to break users and developers. I had worked with a deprecator, for years, and learned the hard way that a development process that permitted user breakage was not much of a process. Eventually the users will go somewhere where they aren't always having to start over because a programmer changed their mind about how something should work. Sometimes breakage happens, all rules have exceptions, but you have to work really hard to avoid those situations, and usually there's a way to do it. #
- When a language goes out of its way to say Rule 1 demands no breakage, not Rule 27, or Rule 18b, but Rule 1, the first, the one that all other rules follow, well you can't break that rule and still say you're doing the thing you say you're doing. #
- Jake Savin, a UserLander and friend, explained Rule 1 in the context of Firefox, which most definitely is not a Rule 1 product.#
- Rule 1 was mentioned in the document announcing Frontier's release as open source in 2004. #
- I mentioned Rule 1 in re arguments about whether it mattered if RSS broke publishers and aggregator developers. I insisted on Rule 1 there too. #
- Rule 1 came up in a piece about Really Simple JavaScript. #
Cuomo: Legal cannabis in New York, soon come.
#
I've known
Nick Arnett for a long time. He used to be a tech journalist, but in recent years, he's become a public service person. He has been on the front lines of fighting fires in California. Most he's recently has been working in Oakland, helping people get their Covid vaccinations at the Coliseum. This morning he asked for help on Facebook. They needed a simple app that could tell them when 15 minutes and 30 minutes were. These are the amounts of time people have to wait before leaving, to be sure that if they have a bad reaction to the vaccine, that they can be helped by medics. Makes sense that in the middle of everything else they have to do, adding 15 and 30 to the current time is a bit much to ask. I said I would be happy to do it. Just a small JavaScript project. I was glad to help. The result is this site:
timeshifter.scripting.com. It's possible other vaccinators could use it, if so please pass it on.
#
From the Something-Users-Don't-Understand-But-Could Department. Developing software is a
bootstrap. It's analogous to building a bridge. Start by pulling a wire across the river. Use it to pull up another wire. When you have enough wires, bundle them to create a thicker wire, and use it to pull up something bigger. Eventually you have two thick cables going across the body of water. Use the cables to pull up a roadway. Build on-ramps and off-ramps and toll booths. But you can't build things out of order, and sometimes things are added earlier for features that won't be added until later in the bootstrap process. People who have evolved products know about this. And you never see it more clearly than when you're building your second or fifteenth or 200th bridge. By that point, you figure, if the users really wanted to understand they could, because they're teaching classes about it in universities.
#We should dream about what if the tech companies wanted to build a more customizable network, one that works better for users, not advertisers. The answer to every one of these ideas is:
They'll never do it. That's what makes it fun.
#As I'm developing a
Frontier-like product, I'm remembering how much I didn't like some of the developers we attracted. We used to believe in the goodness of everyone, but forgot the humanity, and that as a community grows, eventually you attract
people who try to make your life miserable. The pressure of dealing with these people literally made me sick. I got better as soon as I stopped. We've learned a lot about moderating community systems since then. So I'm going to keep my promise to myself, this project is mainly for me, because I want it, and I love the idea of other people using it, and helping each other, and that includes me, but when they start abusing me, I'm turning them off without a second thought.
#
If I could make everyone listen to one episode of one podcast it would be
this one. It's from 2017 and explains how Ukraine dealt with Russian fake news attacks. Everything Putin is doing in the US, he did first in Ukraine. Ukraine, like us, had high ideals about free speech and censorship. Eventually they came to the correct conclusion. At the first sign of trolling, shut them down. In the US today we should have no misgivings about having deprived Trump of his global platform. Let him build his own. It'll work much better. People will only have to hear from him if they want to.
#
- Scott is touring Brooklyn. This is not my grandparents' Brooklyn. :-) #
- People keep forgetting we know why the Repubs are trying to destroy American democracy. They sold out to Putin. So when the Repubs do something hostile to the US, remember it's not their idea, it's Putin's.#
Repub Senators
spend July 4, 2018 in Moscow.
#
One reason I ask questions about the process by which people want to deprive a person of their life, is that it's come to the point where they want to erase an accomplished person because they don't like his ideas, or the questions he asks. When I read the accusations, I cross out all of those, give them no weight at all. It's fine if you don't like his ideas, now mind your own business. Why do I care? A couple of reasons. Offensive questions and foreign ideas help me think through my own values, and sometimes I find a way to compromise, and sometimes I even change my mind. I don't mind discomfort. I check to see if I'm in any danger, or if anyone else is, and if the answer is no, then
live and let live. The second reason is that some people find
my ideas offensive. I write every day. I don't know why but this has great value to me. I can imagine a mob of internet
assholes people deciding that my ideas are too offensive to be permitted. If I can imagine that then I have to question it when it's happening to someone else. It's called empathy.
#When I lived in California people would always ask "Why is he like that?" The answer may simply be that I'm from New York. NYers are just as likely to tell you to fuck off as to say good morning or have a nice day. They mean basically the same thing. It's like "namaste" -- the divinity in my being acknowledges the divinity in yours. When you're in California you have to tone it down, a lot, or they'll kill you with passive aggressiveness. NYers are more transparent. You don't have to guess how they feel about something as much.
#It's spooky how accurate weather forecasts are these days.
#It's really cool to watch the Democrats in Georgia rip the Repubs to pieces.
#We can't impeach the NYT no matter how much they betray our trust.
#It’s time for a new Georgia tradition, handing friendly strangers a bottle of water and a tasty snack, but only if they’re not Republicans.
#
I regret turning off the
Knicks game last night with two minutes left in the 4th quarter. They were behind by too many points, and they weren't playing well. I figured this game is gone. I was surprised the starters were still playing. Much later I saw fan exclamations on Twitter, that seemed to say the Knicks had won. They did. I've learned my lesson. This season's Knicks are special. They win games they have no right winning. The roll over Russell Westbrook and Bradley Beale like they were the rookies and the Knicks were the team packed with franchise players. It's like the 2015 Mets, perhaps. I honestly don't care if the Knicks make the playoffs. They have such heart, such love for themselves and each other. It's pure joy to watch them play.
#Spectrum isn't finished with me. Yesterday they turned off my TV service. Not clear why. But after a long day's work I had to have four separate phone conversations with their reps, over three hours, to get it working again. I paid my bill, etc. They just have no idea what they're doing imho. Anyway, Spectrum is making me buy an AppleTV in order to watch the Knicks. The AppleTV will stay in its box and go into a closet, where I will pay a monthly fee for it. I already have two AppleTVs, and I don't use either one. Too many remotes, too many different UIs. Once i get over the sheer waste of it, the price is actually competitive. YouTubeTV costs about the same, w/o the AppleTV. And YTTV does not have the Knicks. Where I live there is no other way to get the Knicks. I actually think this is true for the entire NY area. And before you tell me about Fubo, they don't have the Knicks either.
#
- A truth that comes home regularly, every generation, no matter how smart they think they are, has their share of idiots. #
- Every generation thinks they know what's really going on, when they're young, only to realize in a few years that they have absolutely no idea what is going on. #
- The maturing process all the way to the end is about steadily realizing this truth, more and more.#
- I don't really know about the end yet -- I'm just extrapolating. It could be that the actual end is a revelation and at that point you really do know what's going on.#
- And now a special treat. 😄#
I’ve been reading everything about writers’ concerns
about Medium and Substack. One thing writers should be concerned about, is what happens to the writing if the platforms fail as businesses.
#I
asked on Twitter last night for a clear statement of the case against Stallman. Not much came back, certainly not the dispassionate point by point statement with links to actual evidence that should be required minimally, to destroy someone's life. This routine destruction, without any process, that's the greater sickness imho.
#I had heard that Stallman is
autistic, but never had a reason to look into it. A
comment on a Hacker News thread from October 2019 puts in perspective.
#
- The nicest thing about the Apple credit card is how incredibly easy it is to pay your bill.#
- Pick up iPhone.#
- Log in (with my thumb).#
- Open wallet app.#
- Click the pay button.#
- Thumb thing again.#
- That's it. #
I have arrived at an interesting place. Every day of every week feels like a weekend day.
#
- Following up on yesterday's news about Drummer, its key innovation is that you can write JavaScript code that's much simpler because it does not need to use callbacks. #
- An example: #
dns.getDomainName (dns.getDottedId ("bullmancuso.com"))#- This works even though both DNS operations do I/O.#
- We are using JavaScript's threading, we are not blocking the CPU. #
- A programmer in any other language will be scratching their head wondering what's the big deal. I know. I've been saying that for years. If Python can do this, I don't see why JavaScript shouldn't. #
- Note: JavaScript as spec'd can't do this. But we were able to make this work with a very simple pre-processor.#
- I looked around for a decent explanation of JavaScript callbacks, but they take too long to get to the point, or they never explain what they are. Maybe it's too hard to explain? I've been writing a lot of docs lately, so let me try! :-)#
- Callbacks are used when an operation is going to take a long time and your program wants to do other things while it's waiting. So you create a function to run when the operation is done, and provide that function to the slow operation you're calling with the intent that it will call this function when it's done. Thus it is a callback function. #
- An example:#
- fs.readFile ("notes.txt", function (err, filetext) {#
- if (err) {#
- console.log (err.message);#
- }#
- else {#
- console.log ("The file contains " + filetext.length + " characters.");#
- }#
- });#
- console.log ("Hi mom!")#
- If you look in the console, you'll see:#
- Hi mom!#
- The file contains 28 characters.#
- #
- An example of a real world callback. #
- After you upload a video to Facebook, you'll get a dialog when the upload is done saying this is going to take a bit of time to process, so we'll let you know when it's done. In the meantime you can read stuff. When the video is ready, you get a message saying you can watch the video now. That's the basic flow of a callback. #
- Medium has been around since 2011, getting pretty close to ten years, and in that time, they have switched business strategies many times. The appear to have done it again yesterday. So here's another opportunity to take stock of writing on the web, and where we have been and what could change.#
- First, I got a nice note from Jay Rosen thanking me for pushing him to keep his own web presence, to not depend on any of the platforms. It's gratifying to see a longtime friend doing so well with this approach.#
- Jay then sent me a link to an article by Kevin Drum asking why blogging has declined in the past decade. I think there's more to it than what Drum says, that the disappearance of Google Reader, while it certainly hurt the cause, is only part of the puzzle. The problem is that I can't write on my blog and share it with the popular publishing platforms without limiting what I can do with my blog. If you add up all the limits of Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and Medium, then you can't blog at all because their requirements are contradictory. #
- One requires titles and two don't allow titles. #
- Facebook doesn't support the basics of blogging, links, simple styles, podcast enclosures and (again) titles. #
- Medium supports most of what you would want them to support but doesn't allow updating, so if you make a change you have to do it by hand. #
- None of them want to peer with blogs. They all insist you do your writing with their tools of greatly varying quality, and some are reallllly bad. Even the new hope of writers everywhere, Substack, requires you to use their editor. #
- So, trying to keep this short as possible, in 2017 I gave up trying to peer with any of those services, and went back to writing my blog the way I like to write, and the lights came back on. It works again. So the moral of the story imho is to forget about peering, and just blog the way you want to, and I think we can all be happy.#
- Now I mentioned Google Reader in the list of limiting environments. Oddly, even though it's long gone, it is still controlling how we blog. They didn't support the full RSS spec, they don't handle posts without titles. And all the replacements for Reader copied their limits, so even though it's gone, it's influence is still strong, contributing limits to blogging that weren't here before they came and went. #
- Is Twitter's character limit protecting Medium? If so, please now would be a good time to change course. Twitter is only increasing in importance. I would love to seem them make a deliberate effort to do all that RSS can do in transporting web writing, so we can start building again, from a sane base. As much as I love Twitter, its constraints are still unbearable. #
- One more thing. We're still waiting for independent writers to take the lead here, as I wrote last week. "Until the writers lead here, you're going to keep having your hearts broken and the tech for writing on the web will continue to go nowhere."#
I've been doing a lot of work on web scripting for the last few months. Put everything else aside. I think I'm ready to create a small subset of
Frontier that runs in the cloud. Basic components are outlining of course, twitter and a cloud-based file system. Scripts run from a user-editable menu as they did in Frontier. Still major things to work out, it's probably months away. But I might start sharing little bits of the work I'm doing, to get discussions going, esp with Frontier alums. The language is JavaScript, but here's the thing -- we don't need callbacks for asynchronous operations, it flows just like any other language.
Andrew Shell figured out the escape from callbacks, that was what convinced me that you could make a scripting system based on JavaScript. BTW, the codename for the project is Drummer.
#Drummer is to Frontier as Little Outliner is to MORE.
#In the Roam
world, which I am following, they document their workflows. Come up with best practices. This is really eye-opening for me. Inspired me to do a
quick writeup of how I manage my development projects using an outliner.
#One curious thing from working on Drummer: I like working on verb docs. I find it relaxing, satisfying, rewarding. I just realized why. I'm writing a book. At the top level the structure is rigid. I like working within such a structure. By verb docs, I mean docs like what you
see on
DocServer from Frontier, which is still running, btw. The difference is this time I'm writing the docs. Last time I didn't have the energy to do it, but now it's the structure for my review of various aspects of the system. Reading the verb docs you'll know I went through that verb's functionality before release. Of course I'm also documenting the bugs.
#
Poll: Why did you switch to Chrome from MSIE?
#
Doc Searls overheard: "Trump was cocaine for news sellers. They binged, and now they've crashed. Question: was what they wrote and said while high actually journalism? Or even news? Serious questions."
#
In my experience, most programmers don't care how things came to be the way they are. I'm different, I always want to know the story. I find this the most fascinating thing about us humans, how do we synthesize ideas, build on other people's work. More common is people try to ignore the past, esp if it interferes with their success.
#
- I don't care for the money in NFTs, I don't really believe it's there, but what I do want is an alternative to patents to get people credit for their innovations. #
- Patents have really screwed things up, but no one has ever picked up on the idea that we could have something like patents, but without the tarriff. I want people to know whose work they're using. #
- Once I made enough money, I stopped trying to put barriers on where my ideas could flow. But as a result, I rarely have been able to finish an idea before a big company comes along and takes it over. #
- It's a bad system, no way to win. If you have to join a big company to be creative, well you can see from that how little creativity there would be. #
- What great musician or artist worked for a company like Google or Microsoft? #
- The potential of NFTs is it could document how ideas entered the world. I'd be fine if we took the money out of it, also the blockchain. #
An idea for a
pilot program connecting the daily flow from Scripting News with one of the new knowledge databases.
#So all the kids are
down in Florida distributing the newest variants of the virus to each other so they can go home and deliver it to their friends and family, esp states with no mask mandate, and 100% re-opened. Just in time for the virus to go exponential for a second summer.
#As a long-suffering
Knicks fan, I have say it
looks like the drought just might be over.
#Here's another thing people don't get, imho. The Republicans are over. Look forward. It doesn't matter who did what in the past, our two-party democracy has become something else. What it is, I don't know.
#
- Enoch Choi has appeared on this blog many times, he's a heroic doctor, natural-born blogger, he works to save lives, always, and now, is caring for Covid patients in the Santa Clara Valley in California. #
- He's also an advocate for Asian-Americans, and now his son Aidan, who I watched grow up on Facebook, is an artist, and has a couple of pieces about an assault on a Chinese-American grandmother, who fought back and sent her attacker to the hospital, in San Francisco last week. #
- Everything should be great in America, but it isn't. Why?#
- FIrst watch this video from a 60 Minutes interview with Fed chairman Lewis Powell on how he creates money. #
- One of the biggest misperceptions about how money works, even among educated people, is that we have to pay for projects by raising taxes. The fact they're missing is that the Federal Reserve creates money. So we don't have to raise taxes to provide relief to victims of disasters. #
- When they say the debt is something our children and grandchildren will have to pay off, that's not true either. We can pay the debt by printing money. If we owe you $100 who's to say if we got that money by taxing Americans or simply by giving you new money we created for that purpose?#
- Money has to start somewhere, and unlike a household budget, the US government has an infinite supply of it. Basically the only country with the power to create new money that can be spent everywhere is the United States. #
- The United States is unique because our dollar is the reserve currency for the world. So if say Egypt owes money to India, they pay them in dollars. If a small country is reserving some money for a future project, they store it in dollars. Our currency, unlike all others, is in demand all around the world. Which means we can give them dollars we just printed and they will send us goods that cost real money, because of course when we printed the money, it was real, simply because we printed it. #
- We are the richest country there is, it's not hyperbole. And yet we have one of the worst benefit systems for our people in the world. If people really understood how this works (just re-read this piece) they would be enraged about how health, education, infrastructure, everything basically, in the US, is shit. You see this when you travel to Europe. A sense that everything is first class. And they don't have the economic advantage that we do. #
- So, why is it this way, such a rich country that lives so poorly? Some of it is the rich self-dealing, grift, the 1%, inequality, etc -- but a lot of is the dysfunction of Congress. #
- The quality of life for Americans hasn't been a priority in Washington, at least not until very recently. There is cause for hope of that changing. Just don't believe the politicians when they say something good for the people has to be "paid for." Tell them you understand how it works, and the exact opposite is true, it does not ever have to be paid for. We, the United States, can buy whatever we want. And we need to start doing that. #
There's a
long thread on Twitter today where people from Microsoft are reminiscing about the days when they put Netscape down, and then got in trouble with the DoJ. I remember those times differently, and very well. Microsoft was in no danger. They could have let Netscape grow, it never would have hurt them. For all of Netscape's bluster about
device drivers, they had a really bad codebase, and a chaotic team that while blessed with a product that the web was growing around, had a long way to go before they could compete with Microsoft.
#Microsoft could played a senior role, and
helped the rest of us add all kinds of editors and databases to the web, and at least try to bring across some of the GUI innovations of the 80s. Instead all that was lost. Today, decades later, because of the chaos Microsoft brought us then, the editors on the web still suck. They are really inferior. Far less useful than the editors we had before the web. What if Microsoft had chilled and brought together the best minds from the PC era and asked some basic questions like how are we going to make the web better for everyone, at least as good as what we had before. What a time that would have been to do just that. But they acted like spoiled children. Andreessen et al could be excused, they really were basically children then. Gates had a dream of world domination forever, or at least until he was tired of it. So selfish, narcissistic, and so wrong. And the gloating and self-importance today, they still don't, even in retirement, understand that they held all of us back, that's why they failed to continue to dominate. Holding back progress is not ultimately a good strategy for world domination, esp at the leading edge of technology.
#BTW, I think Microsoft knew very well that
Netscape was falling apart all on its own, but they used the device drivers crap to convince reporters that they were terrified of Netscape. Maybe they even sort of psyched themselves up for it, probably because they were bored. Who knows, but what could have been, and how much time we wasted, for their vanity.
#BTW, in yesterday's
demo, I didn't mean that it was literally for Roam devs, that's just how I got started on this thread. I'm beginning to understand that Roam is a world unto itself, and that other products such as Obsidion and others are outgoing. Obviously it's the latter group that we'll be able to integrate with.
#I've been talking about
Frontier a lot lately, the usual stuff, outliner, object database, verb set, threading, integration, etc. But I realized I leave out the most important thing about Frontier when I recite the features. Whenever we saw a protocol we could support, we did. And we even created new ones when there was a void, as with XML-RPC, OPML and RSS. The best part is we extended the language to make inter-app communication use exactly the same language syntax as local procedure calls. Factoring was also a very big part of the process. So it is kind of a central station, and always getting more high level through factoring. Our software is all about communication, and making it as effortless as possible. It still is, very much.
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