To me, Ted Nelson's Zigzag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) - is a similiar view to Neuromancer's virtual reality. It's a shame it's not more popular. Gzz is an excellent version of it.
If only he hadn’t copyrighted/patented it, we might be using it.
I find it interesting how frequently “just ok” software is picked up and reaches a critical mass just because it is open. There are many good software projects that won’t grow because of licensing because they are more useful with network effects.
I have lots of colleagues who use R for data analysis. It wasn’t that great in the beginning but was widely used because of openness. 5 years ago, SAS and IBM would describe how superior they were, but it kind of missed the point.
For most of my software uses, I just need good enough.
"I find it interesting how frequently "just ok" software is picked up and reaches a critical mass just because it is open. There are many good software projects that won’t grow because of licensing because they are more useful with network effects."
UNIX itself is a great example of this. Look at the graveyard of excellent UNIX flavors that fell by the wayside when free, open Linux came around.
With more open licensing and a different business model, any of them (instead of Linux) might have been the dominant UNIX flavor today.
And they would have been a bit player in the OS marketplace compared to Windows NT.
Assuming that in this alternate timeline, the Apple-NeXT merger still happens, the dominant Unix flavor would likely be macOS. As it is, it's still alive and kicking and enjoying a comfortable number two spot (number one if you're talking desktop installs).
Sun used to dominate there, and they might have continued to do so had they switched to open licensing, made the OS free, and maybe adopted a business model like RedHat's.
Ted Nelson is the Nikola Tesla of computing. He came up with so much brilliant stuff that we will be kicking ourselves for not adopting wholeheartedly later on.
What's the economic value of the World Wide Web? How tiny a portion of that should we really allocate to the innovators who create the concepts our economy is built on?
So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people?
Your rhetorical question provides no value. I want to know how we should decide who should be rewarded, how we can obtain the money to reward them and what benefit does rewarding them in this fashion provide to society.
Also, one does not reward someone to provide a benefit to oneself. THAT is thinking that creates the greatest inequality in our system if you ask me.
Oh, let me pay this employee... but wait! That money goes right into a retirement account, that invests in an index fund, that supports me and my business partners...
A reward is something given at a COST to another in recognition of their accomplishment. You give it without thought of a return, because what they have done is made your life better.
The fact no one in economics wants to think through the money trail thoroughly doesn't change that the corporation is no longer a provider of services as it's primary goal... It is an enricher of the few who jump on the equity train.
>So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people?
Sure.
An innovation tax, and a group of cross industry and academic people (e.g. a mix of successful founders, engineers, great researchers, Nobel winners, plus a jury of common folk etc) that decides, every e.g. 5-10 years, who gets to share the money among a shortlist of potential benefactors.
"Hmm, looks like this Turing person did good work in retrospect that hugely helped our society. Let him have $100 million of the $1 billion innovation fund".
That seems like an amazingly gameable system. In particular, it would reward the ones who are best at taking credit, which are not necessarily the same ones that did the actual innovating. Further, it requires the deciding group to be reasonably free of prejudice. As little as a few decades back it would have completely ignored any contributions by women, for example. Finally, I would not be surprised if an outsized amount of the 'prize money' went to friends/family/acquintances of the people in the decider group.
And this innovation tax takes priority over all of the other things that need to be funded? What about the millions without healthcare? Also are we really going to trust some bureaucratic institution to dispense billions of dollars in a fair manner?
>And this innovation tax takes priority over all of the other things that need to be funded?
Who said that? For one, we can tax people more. For another, we could do a better job on spending the tax money (e.g. stop trillions going to tax cuts or military spending or BS projects).
>Also are we really going to trust some bureaucratic institution to dispense billions of dollars in a fair manner?
I mentioned a panel of non-government successful people, on academy and the market, who votes, not an "institution", much less a "bureaucratic" one.
Good, and thanks for correcting, but he poor compared to Zuckerberg. All the latter did was riff successfully on the already established social media concept and then sell out his user base more brazenly than competitors.
It's my fault (not the IA), I thought I'd got all newsgroups but must have missed some. I just checked the main newsgroup list and it's incomplete, for some reason.
My plan though, is to dust off the old code, get a complete list of groups, get them, and then make it searchable.
Sorry about that, I didn't check. This was all done in 2013. Basically, I wanted to build a search engine but indexing the newsgroup posts (for header and text body search) would take too long. I abandoned it, then in 2016 I sent it to the IA.
So, I only just found out it's lacking a bunch of groups, 5 years on...
This is much appreciated....:-)
I should like to note that in the case of the comp.sys.amiga.* news groups, that these were first established Jan 8, 1991. The first posts in the mbox archive for comp.sys.amiga.programmer, however, are from May 31, 1994. It looks like the first three years might be missing, at least for this group. I haven't yet checked the other amiga groups yet.
No apologies necessary: creating the archive in the first place was awesome! Like I said, this just shows how massive and complex Usenet is (or maybe, was), and how it's not easy at all to create a comprehensive archive. It's far better to have some of it than none of it!
From what I can gather, I downloaded one tenth of Usenet - 11,000 groups. This means if I'd done all 110,000 groups it would have taken me about a year to download them, and an 8TB drive to store them (in 2013!). That wasn't really feasible...
