Let it not be forget that Andresson left Champaign-Urbana without the source code for Mosaic (unless Jim Barksdale sent him off for intensive memory training, maybe) and clean roomed it into the Netscape Browser, creating the first unicorn 🦄 of the Internet Age and getting his grubstake. So, it wasn’t intellectual property theft, rather just an ordinary ripoff. Of a land grant university funded by the State of Illinois and support by the US government. By one of its graduate students. Who might have had a stipend that supported him when he was working on Mosaic. Reminds me of the joke about the libertarian complaining that he couldn’t jump the triage queue at the ER by just using his Platinum card.
Little known fact: the magnus.conf file for http/https servers is named for the UI server that hosted the backend that Mosaic sent its requests to.
Interesting how Champaign-Urbana was the birthplace of some really significant software. Mosaic, yes, but before that, PLATO. Which, if you have not yet read Brian Dear's excellent book The Friendly Orange Glow, you really should do so, soonest.
I first learned about C-U when they were building the Illiac which was sort of the ur-graphics processing engine as a SIMD engine. They're still something of a powerhouse, but quieter or with less press-power than Stanford, MIT or CMU. I wrote a piece of PC software in the early 1980s. Some guys at C-U bought it when the company I wrote it for went broke. They are still selling it. They are still updating it. It's even internet ready. Forty years - weird.
I've never understood anyone in the computer industry becoming a libertarian. You can trace modern computers to the British government wanting better artillery tables and the US government wanting its decennial census result in less than ten years. The entire industry can be seen as a government boondoggle. (In fact, the very word "boondoggle" was given its modern meaning in a Congressional hearing by an opponent of the WPA angry that the US government was paying someone to collect clever hacks which is what boondoggles used to be.) I get the impression that libertarians think they were cauldron born, and that no one had to dice up some carrots and onions and put them in the cauldron.
I think you're right about the essential narcissism of the libertarian world view. It's not merely selfishness, it's more limiting than that. It's an inability to imagine their ever being wrong about anything. I once witnessed a panel discussion during which some libertarians were talking about how their ideal society would deal with the problems of freeloaders and gangs who used violence to take what wasn't theirs. They tied themselves into absolute knots to avoid using words like "police" and "taxes". That was the moment when my attitude changed from "these people have some interesting ideas, but a lot of them are kind of know-it-all and obnoxious" to "these people are ridiculous, every one of them".
There was a big libertarian movement at my university back in the 1970s. For some people I knew, it seemed to be another step towards growing up. For example, one acquaintance had suddenly discovered the idea of human dignity, essentially a liberal value, but he could only do so through a libertarian framework. I have no idea where this took him. Most libertarians seemed to be stuck, trapped by their own world view. In contrast, the firebrand Marxists tended to become New Deal liberals which amused my father who saw the same thing in the 1930s at CCNY.
P.S. I was a friend of a libertarian woman for a while. Women are much less likely to be libertarians because, at some point, they realize that they are the same sex as their mother. I'm sure that's sobering. My friend was running for the US Senate on the libertarian ticket. She lost. I lost track of her. I gather she was an expert in concrete form construction, worked in Nigeria for a while and had a reputation for having the forms ready for pouring on the day specified. No one knew what to make of her.
I have heard many good things about this new translation, but I have not read it.
One day a few years ago I read the first chapter of her translation of The Odyssey while sitting in the Vineyard Haven Public Library waiting for my wife to get out of work. It was great, I recall, but I didn't check it out at the time because I already had 12 books on my TBR pile at home.
"And now, following a well-trod path, Marc Andreessen has become the newest version of that tired cliché, the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian who has found all the answers to everything and now feels compelled to share them with us."
I hope you're getting some royalties from Andreessen's Monty Meekman turn!
Not every day, but most days he venmo's me $10,000 or $15. It may not sound like much but when you add in the $7 or $8k every day from Peter Thiel and a grand or two from Elon, it starts to add up. Heck, even Bill Gates and Scott McNealy pony up a few hundred bucks every now & then just for old time's sake.
But not Larry Ellison. Not a penny from him. That guy is one cheap-ass mother-head!
Well, yknow, Rev, it's been 45 years since I took that linear algebra class in grad school, and I remember that my brain was much boggled by it despite its being considerably younger & more flexible at the time, and despite my being highly motivated to do well in that class, inasmuch as it was a pre-req for every course I had lined up for the next semester, and I really didn't want to get booted out of that program. As for set theory, doesn't that have something to do with tennis?
I read an introduction to category theory by a rather enthusiastic mathematician. I gather it lets one deal with all sorts of structural problems. There's a lot of terminology, he said, but all you have to do is translate a few words and, if you know what sets and functions are, you can figure out what is going on. It's like watching a farce in a language you don't know. You can't understand a word, but you know you should laugh when someone gets trapped in the closet or has his pants falls down. I was intrigued, but the book is $65, so I'll pass.
Category Theory is what wannabe code jocks invoke when their programs fail to compile. The use it to illustrate that it’s the fault of the crappy language that they are forced to work with.
That's as may be, but I know a bit about the person on whose shelf that book appears and he is a legit expert programmer. A legit expert I sez, not 'a wannabe code jock.' Which doesn't invalidate your point, about which I have no opinion. But I just don't want anybody to get the wrong idea.
Category Theory is the most recent (and, perhaps, most successful) response to the challenge that Russel's Paradox (and, perhaps, Godels Theorem) pose to the foundations of Mathematics. When I was studying Math, Intuitionism was kinda the thing. Intuitionism isn't really relevant to crappy coding languages, at all.
A book has a beginning and an end, in the sense that the text has a first page and a last page, but there is no requirement whatsoever that the STORY so embodied must be so linear.
Let it not be forget that Andresson left Champaign-Urbana without the source code for Mosaic (unless Jim Barksdale sent him off for intensive memory training, maybe) and clean roomed it into the Netscape Browser, creating the first unicorn 🦄 of the Internet Age and getting his grubstake. So, it wasn’t intellectual property theft, rather just an ordinary ripoff. Of a land grant university funded by the State of Illinois and support by the US government. By one of its graduate students. Who might have had a stipend that supported him when he was working on Mosaic. Reminds me of the joke about the libertarian complaining that he couldn’t jump the triage queue at the ER by just using his Platinum card.
Little known fact: the magnus.conf file for http/https servers is named for the UI server that hosted the backend that Mosaic sent its requests to.
Interesting how Champaign-Urbana was the birthplace of some really significant software. Mosaic, yes, but before that, PLATO. Which, if you have not yet read Brian Dear's excellent book The Friendly Orange Glow, you really should do so, soonest.
I first learned about C-U when they were building the Illiac which was sort of the ur-graphics processing engine as a SIMD engine. They're still something of a powerhouse, but quieter or with less press-power than Stanford, MIT or CMU. I wrote a piece of PC software in the early 1980s. Some guys at C-U bought it when the company I wrote it for went broke. They are still selling it. They are still updating it. It's even internet ready. Forty years - weird.
I've never understood anyone in the computer industry becoming a libertarian. You can trace modern computers to the British government wanting better artillery tables and the US government wanting its decennial census result in less than ten years. The entire industry can be seen as a government boondoggle. (In fact, the very word "boondoggle" was given its modern meaning in a Congressional hearing by an opponent of the WPA angry that the US government was paying someone to collect clever hacks which is what boondoggles used to be.) I get the impression that libertarians think they were cauldron born, and that no one had to dice up some carrots and onions and put them in the cauldron.
I think you're right about the essential narcissism of the libertarian world view. It's not merely selfishness, it's more limiting than that. It's an inability to imagine their ever being wrong about anything. I once witnessed a panel discussion during which some libertarians were talking about how their ideal society would deal with the problems of freeloaders and gangs who used violence to take what wasn't theirs. They tied themselves into absolute knots to avoid using words like "police" and "taxes". That was the moment when my attitude changed from "these people have some interesting ideas, but a lot of them are kind of know-it-all and obnoxious" to "these people are ridiculous, every one of them".
There was a big libertarian movement at my university back in the 1970s. For some people I knew, it seemed to be another step towards growing up. For example, one acquaintance had suddenly discovered the idea of human dignity, essentially a liberal value, but he could only do so through a libertarian framework. I have no idea where this took him. Most libertarians seemed to be stuck, trapped by their own world view. In contrast, the firebrand Marxists tended to become New Deal liberals which amused my father who saw the same thing in the 1930s at CCNY.
P.S. I was a friend of a libertarian woman for a while. Women are much less likely to be libertarians because, at some point, they realize that they are the same sex as their mother. I'm sure that's sobering. My friend was running for the US Senate on the libertarian ticket. She lost. I lost track of her. I gather she was an expert in concrete form construction, worked in Nigeria for a while and had a reputation for having the forms ready for pouring on the day specified. No one knew what to make of her.
Also the Odyssey quote is from the excellent Emily Wilson vernacular blank verse translation:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
I have heard many good things about this new translation, but I have not read it.
One day a few years ago I read the first chapter of her translation of The Odyssey while sitting in the Vineyard Haven Public Library waiting for my wife to get out of work. It was great, I recall, but I didn't check it out at the time because I already had 12 books on my TBR pile at home.
"And now, following a well-trod path, Marc Andreessen has become the newest version of that tired cliché, the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian who has found all the answers to everything and now feels compelled to share them with us."
I hope you're getting some royalties from Andreessen's Monty Meekman turn!
Not every day, but most days he venmo's me $10,000 or $15. It may not sound like much but when you add in the $7 or $8k every day from Peter Thiel and a grand or two from Elon, it starts to add up. Heck, even Bill Gates and Scott McNealy pony up a few hundred bucks every now & then just for old time's sake.
But not Larry Ellison. Not a penny from him. That guy is one cheap-ass mother-head!
Of course you have no idea what they’re talking about: you haven’t read the book. Read the book!
Well, yknow, Rev, it's been 45 years since I took that linear algebra class in grad school, and I remember that my brain was much boggled by it despite its being considerably younger & more flexible at the time, and despite my being highly motivated to do well in that class, inasmuch as it was a pre-req for every course I had lined up for the next semester, and I really didn't want to get booted out of that program. As for set theory, doesn't that have something to do with tennis?
I read an introduction to category theory by a rather enthusiastic mathematician. I gather it lets one deal with all sorts of structural problems. There's a lot of terminology, he said, but all you have to do is translate a few words and, if you know what sets and functions are, you can figure out what is going on. It's like watching a farce in a language you don't know. You can't understand a word, but you know you should laugh when someone gets trapped in the closet or has his pants falls down. I was intrigued, but the book is $65, so I'll pass.
Category Theory is what wannabe code jocks invoke when their programs fail to compile. The use it to illustrate that it’s the fault of the crappy language that they are forced to work with.
That's as may be, but I know a bit about the person on whose shelf that book appears and he is a legit expert programmer. A legit expert I sez, not 'a wannabe code jock.' Which doesn't invalidate your point, about which I have no opinion. But I just don't want anybody to get the wrong idea.
Category Theory is the most recent (and, perhaps, most successful) response to the challenge that Russel's Paradox (and, perhaps, Godels Theorem) pose to the foundations of Mathematics. When I was studying Math, Intuitionism was kinda the thing. Intuitionism isn't really relevant to crappy coding languages, at all.
I love the repurposing of quotes. Such great fun.
This is the best I've got. Maybe someone can improve it:
A screaming comes acros the sky. Votes have happened before,
but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The vote still proceeds, but it's all
theatre. There are no hopes inside the room. No light anywhere. Above
them lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above
that would let the light of day through. But it's night. They're afraid of
the way the republic will fall -- soon -- it will be a spectacle: the fall of a
crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint
of light, only great invisible crashing.
That's great. Only problem is you've nudged me to move that book a little higher up on my TB(re)R list, which is already Tower-of-Babel tall.
My only suggestion is perhaps change the first sentence to 'A streaming comes across the telescreen.'
A book has a beginning and an end, in the sense that the text has a first page and a last page, but there is no requirement whatsoever that the STORY so embodied must be so linear.
We will take up this proposition in due time.