RE: SEE YOU IN THE MARKET
RE: SEE YOU IN THE MARKET
Sent: 5/25/96; 2:19:16 AM
From: lmd@tiac.net (Laurens Dorsey)
Much more than his ever-springing hope, I value Dave's troughs. Don't you? It's what keeps me reading. In a sentence or two (or twenty-five, whatever), blam! on the head.
As I understand it, the story this far can be reduced to a couple of questions: How does it go on from here? and Can it be fun? This incessant digging.
Well, hm.
Does seem like the party's over. The crazed seizing after the excitement of http in an attempt to wring cash from the fun seems the surest sign. (And it's _not_ fun anymore (another sign). The initial buzz gave way pretty quickly to been there done that and barely stifled yawns. If you want to get something _done_, use lynx, pipe it to a perl script, etc. If you want to _see_ something, turn on the tv.).
On one hand, it's just the same ol' stampede to make money. Fine. But they're all trying so _hard_. Which is pretty impressive. When security snafus are a running joke (thank God for those folks at Princeton for lightening a whole bunch of afternoons) and when all the "interface" you can get from java amounts to little more than dreary games of go-fish, and _still_ the hysteria continues to _mount_, it is possible to infer that one reason for this craze is that the thrill is on the ebb in the dt market. When they're trying grind out to lemonade hand over fist, we can be excused, I think, for realizing that somewhere there must be a warehouse or two just brimming with lemons.
(And, yes, too, there's the persistent buzz that the browsers are eventually going to become gateways to (the grail) of global multimedia communications. Yeah, right, like they've been laying coax and really beefing up the isdn support in my neighborhood. Or companies that fired any number of systems programmers in favor of shrink-wrapped binaries and adapted to the peculiarities to those beasts are about to hire a bunch of geeks to code maintainable, responsive sites. Like the idea of maintenance has even crossed their minds. Like the possibility that web sites are software has ever occurred to them.)
My biggest thrill lately was writing a little code on emacs in X in the new MkLinux. Really zippy. _Really_. But does MkLinux have a snowball's chance? And even if it did would I buy another mac for it? Doubt it.
It _is_ about the digging, not the gold (tho a little more of the latter would sure come in handy). But WinDig/MacDig? Win95, Copland, OD? I can report no discernable hardon for any of it. Rather the contrary, in fact.
Cheers.
____l__a__u__r__e__n__s_____d__o__r__s__e__y____
Boston, Massachusetts lmd@tiac.net Oblivion
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