Once upon a time (aka the early '90s), Gopher and WWW were both simple systems for publishing hypertext. Neither one was appreciably more complex or ambitious than the other.
WWW eventually pulled out into the lead, due largely to licensing considerations; WWW had been developed at CERN, which explicitly disclaimed any ownership over it, while Gopher had been developed at the University of Minnesota, which preferred to leave its ownership claims ambiguous. People gravitated towards WWW for the simple reason that they knew no one would sue them for using it.
As WWW's userbase grew, demand grew as well to add features to it. Mosaic added images and image maps; Netscape added JavaScript; and on and on and on. Eventually WWW grew to the ginormous, do-it-all system we know and (ahem) love today. Because Gopher had been left behind in adoption, it didn't have those pressures to extend its capabilities; it was free to remain the simple hypertext system it was in the early '90s.
I see a lot of people today point to Gopher as an example of what the Web should be. But this misses the point; the Web isn't what it is because of some design decision it made that Gopher did not, the Web is what it is because it had users. The more users there were, the more things people wanted to do with it; and the more things people wanted to do with it, the more features got tacked on.
If Gopher had been the one with the permissive licensing back in the '90s, it's very possible that it would have been the hypertext system everybody used, and today we'd be complaining about how complex Gopher has become and asking "hey, whatever happened to that toy Tim Berners-Lee was hacking on back in the day? Remember how simple that was?"
That’s not why the web won over gopher. This is why:
“Both Gopher and the Web embraced the idea of hypertext. Both allowed users to follow a conceptual path through a virtual space by following links, with little need to understand the structure that existed underneath. They differed considerably, however, in the information architecture that they established for laying out hyperlinked information. The main difference between the two is that the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) of the Web was built up around documents in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This markup language allowed document creators to place links within documents, whereas Gopher provided pointers to documents through menu files, which existed separate from the documents themselves. The indexing component of the two information architectures -- i.e. the part that enumerated what items existed within the information space and where they could be found -- thus differed considerably.” From https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
I was using Gopher and WAIS (nobody seems to remember that), both improved versions of FTP, when the web appeared. It immediately captured my imagination, and I and everyone around me forgot about the other protocols (except FTP, which hung on for ever). It had nothing to do with licensing. It was hypertext.
One reason it can't happen today is because it never ends well. Ion Storm was a huge disaster; it produced Deus Ex, but it also produced Daikatana, one of the truly legendary bad games. The studio mismanaged itself so badly that by 2001 the whole thing had collapsed except for Warren Spector's team in Austin, who soldiered on for a few more years before giving up.
Webpack's general design philosophy is to dump a bag of tools on your head and tell you to use them to assemble a build system. So anytime the bag gets larger, I cringe.
I don't disagree, but if you don't need the entire bag of tools, you can get by for quite some time (possibly indefinitely) using just `create-react-app` and friends. The issue with webpack is that the learning curve for going from CRA to manual tuning is incredibly steep, but what that buys you is full control over the entire build process.
I do wish there was a middle ground where you could use 90% sane defaults and customize the other 10% without taking on a huge amount of tool-specific baggage. Parcel is great for simple projects, but is not (in my very limited experience over a year ago) anywhere near customizable enough for more advanced use cases.
As with most things Apple, it is a joy as long as you restrict yourself to only plugging the device into official Apple peripherals, preferably ones that are available to buy right now. It’s when you start hooking your Mac up to old hardware or random commodity hardware that the problems surface.
> The Times can claim that a harsh tone and a small factual error in Senator Tom Cotton’s recent op-ed was the reason the entire paper had a meltdown, but the staffers who revolted initially claimed that Cotton’s argument for bringing the National Guard into cities put black lives in “danger.”
Cotton’s entire argument was that the military should be sent into the cities to crack protesters’ heads, which is something significantly more aggressive than “a harsh tone.”
If I were to take to the op-ed page of the Times with the argument that national stability requires that we send the military to crack the heads of everybody who writes for the National Review, I suspect they would waver somewhat in their commitment to unlimited free speech.
The op-ed draws a distinction between those who are peacefully protesting and those who were rioting and looting. Dropping that context seems unfair and misleading.
This paragraph - which is probably the source of the criticism - is clearly in the context of how to deal with rioters who are breaking the law by causing substantial damage.
"One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law."
The problem is that a significant majority of Americans, including almost half of Democrats, agreed in polls at the time that the situation was so bad the military needed to be sent in. It's hard to seriously argue that representing such a mainstream view is so offensive the New York Times shouldn't do it.
I used the title the author of the article gave it. I generally try to do that when submitting, unless there is a very very good reason not to -- e.g. it's something completely incomprehensible to someone who isn't a regular reader of that specific site.
We've had forty years for people to build features like this on top of IMAP, and nobody has done so. This would seem to be a decent indication that the Unix philosophy is not going to produce much innovation in this market.
In every company, no matter how obscene the margins they're making on a given product, there is someone arguing that those margins could be even larger if they just cut a few corners.
Eventually someone listens to that person, and decades of painstakingly built-up brand value gets thrown out the window in order to bring home six nickels tomorrow instead of five.
