Netscape to cease being supported tomorrow

i remember using the internet in 1991-1993 (freshman through junior years in college).
gopher, archie, telnet, ftp, pine for email. [1]
then late in my junior year all of a sudden there was this World Wide Web thing.
yes,
it was around before that.
but the launch of Mosaic made it available to we the burgeoning cyber elite.

my friends and i were devouring Gibson, Stephenson, Sterling, P.K. Dick...
we were doing art installations, happenings, Cornell found object archives...
we were trying to live out the cyber punk noir drenched ethos.
skinny black jeans over simple boots.
rip-stop black nylon pull overs.
big, black wrap around shades.
part para-military, part street gang, part neo-goth/industrial, part power geeks.
we'd go to the CS lab in the basement of the math and science building to "punch deck".

in our text-only terminal window world,
we had to envision purely by imagination Gibon's "communal, consensual hallucination".
massive geometric constructions of data
and the tron-line laser thin lines that connected them.

this "World Wide Web" and this Graphical User Interface changed everything.
we weren't even the real pioneers.
we were first generation end users.
and even we could tell that this was going to change the world.
long before it occurred to anyone to market online, to sell online, to buy online.
long before it occurred to anyone the true scope of what it could do,
we knew we had just experienced a shift akin to Man's First Flight or the Atom Bomb.
nothing would ever be the same again.

but it also took away a bit of the magic.
the lab began to fill with more and more people.
by the end of my senior year there was often a wait for a console.
one lab was connected to the 'net via a satellite link.
punching deck was no longer our dirty little secret.
hell,
you couldn't even spoof emails off unprotected port 25's anymore
unless you found a server run by the truly clueless.

it was the end of the beginning and the beginning of forever.

Mosaic became Mozilla and Mozilla became Netscape.

truth be told i haven't used Netscape since the horrible half-aborted mess that was version 4.
probably closer to 10 years now.
so,
this kind of good-bye is a bit like a distant uncle,
or that grandparent to whom you were never particularly close. [2]

but i think it is an occasion that bears marking,
if nothing else,
with this over-wrought prose.


[1] actually,
i'd used the internet a few times before that with friends
on old 3600 baud modems where you actually put the phone receiver on a separate cradle.
this was in the very very early years of software cracking
and some friends of mine and i were trading C-64 games.
they had all the fu and all the hardware.
i just had games to trade - paid for games.

[2] speaking of which, my mother will likely soon lose her one remaining parent, and while i have a deep respect and fondness for the man, i hardly know him. it is difficult to know what it means to say i love him. i will cry when i see others crying. i will cry for their pain, not because a man who is nearly 100, who has outlived his wife by nearly 10 years, is no longer struggling to make use of a body that only the horror of medical science is keeping animated. inside i will be joyful that he has gone on to a well deserved rest to be re-united with friends and loved ones.

The West has a PR problem (deserved or not is tangential) with The Muslim World.
The Muslim World has a PR problem (deserved or not is tangential) with The West.

The West is currently trying to solve this problem with militarily imposed political reform.
this solution is failing
and was destined to fail from its inception.
recent studies show that "most" Muslims want democracy ("western-style" even)
but that they refuse to accept it if it is imposed upon them.
fair enough.

The Muslim World thinks it can solve its PR problem
through outrage, righteous indignation and protest.
this solution is also failing
and was destined to fail from its inception.
here's why:
in a western-style democracy,
the freedom of speech gives artists and political commentators
the right to say things that piss you off and upset you.
you, of course, have the right to protest and complain,
but resorting to threats of violence is anti-social.
it takes you outside the realm of western-style democracy
in terms of conflict resolution.

which is why The West's attempt to use force is failing.
this too is anti-social and falls outside the realm of western-style democracy.
you cannot force people to vote in a freely elected government at the barrel of a gun.


i am glad that some of Europe has decided that peaceful protest
against the Muslim world's demand for political immunity from critique
is the best and most effective solution.
i am glad that in the face of violence they continue.
but,
it saddens me that the Muslim world just isn't getting it.
if they want to freely embrace and accept western-style democracy,
they are going to need to grow a thicker skin
and learn about how to laugh at oneself
and to learn to laugh at those to whom you are associated by label
with whom you do not actually agree.

aka "life isn't fair. life is tough. buy a helmet and get over it."

my twitters for today were

• 07:45 meeting from 8:30-10:30. meeting from 10:30-11:30. phone calls. enough! #
• 15:30 someone brought in fresh cookies from some ethnic bakery. i got one that tastes like donut. #
• 15:54 @jcallina that tweet alert sounds like an amazing idea. #

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