clara.vrx.palo-alto.ca.us
ARTICLES | bespoke web | design | editor | works
readings | SNIPPETS | technology | toronto
biochem | cancer | canna | n n | net | other | plants | politics | social medicine | tech | TRUTHS | pollution | biology
01
truths

----browser languages-----

By 2005 js was stable. You don't need any of that other stuff.
By now poeple should have CSS widgets, you don't even need js to do screen stuff any more you can do most of it in CSS. That's why the frameworks went away and jquery (spit) went away.
Don't worry, css is no worse than OS/360 assembler except where it is. It's fucking terrible frankly, but it is faster than js (compare onmouseover to :hover for example, ok look the hover happens first lone before onmouse) Plus you don't need to drag in the js engine to do css events.
If you can mimic a windows screen and have be be as fast as windows, you're doing good.
If you use that react shit it'll be as "good" as Facebook code.
js is the only language since C worth using. you'll use css because you have to. We should have done postscript instead, html never worked out, is a bad idea, and should be deprecated asap. It still can't do things ps did out of the box in 85.
arial findfont 100 setfont stoke showpage.

Node is what enabled JS to work on the server side, because of implicit asynchronous I/O, it's faster than C. Node was created when a 17 year old kid took Google's newly open sourced V8 Javascript engine and made it work under unix.
Javascript is easy and sensible. Just watch all of Doug Crockford's videos, in order and you'll understand the elegance of it and why it's better than C in some cases. I saw that as a C programmed since 1975 who has never found another language with using and having written a few).
CSS and HTML are the work of incompetent dangerous lunatics and their use can not be deprecated fast enough. Anything real is a pdf and there's a reason for that.
Keep in mind html and css wee realy just en extension of roff which was just to print man pages. By 1987 postscript and the gui from NeXT had already won and even now they're still trying to make this work on the web a sthey outperform html/css by a large fator never mind the fact you can't do stuff in html/css that ps could do out of the box in the 80s. It's the only thing worse than x86 smiles and an otter atrocity.
You can replace it all with js and ps and it's only a matter of time until this happens.
If people try home.ps enough as well or as instead of home.html or their index.html/htm equivalent, then browser writers will have the metric they need to advance this. So do it. You might be surprised as to what works. Is there anybody in the world that understands CSS really? All of it? Anybody know anyone that claims so? It's become the tower of babel for digital publishing. Fortunately typesetters still to PS and not anything else. I'm still trying to figure out whose shinde Sir Tim was on frankly. What he did was not the way the world was going.

There were two languages developed at Bell post C. C++ was not the good one. Fleming bought the rights to the other one.
He sent me a compiler once written in itself. The source fit in a small email message.

ratfor begat watford, watfiv and watfiv-s which was c with marticies. Uniwat ran with it. meanwhile, in a different office on the second floor of the math building at Waterloo this guy was writing C for rsx, which became decus C which became gcc. jon says it was a clean rewrite but I had a login on his machine ans saw dgc's comments there. He was paid to write it by a Canadian company called Teklogix, OI worked there in summers while going to Waterloo. It seems I was the beta tester and first user. Back then we'd take the assembly output, see it it was ok, modify the source if it wasn't and bob's yer uncle. This was 76 or so. dgc went to dec, then ms, far as I know he's still there in the research department which is as clever as the marketing department is dumb.
David G., Conroy, summer of 1977. He has the light blue T shirt.
http://rs79.vrx.palo-alto.ca.us/.../2011/Feb/09/rjsdgc.jpg
(I'm the idiot in the bike togs, I rode 30 miles there, bald guy on the right is the guy who hired us. Beaded guy is Gord something, EE type.)

-----icann, domains, protocols-----

Barry was on the net8 years before I for there but I was at ground zero of the ICANN stuff Barry was nowhere to be seen in that era. Which was probably smart. It sorta started when Barry and I and the bind people started chatting about well domains fees, levels and so on.
Crawled out of the belly of the beast around 2000 or so, and It's good to see Barry and Brian showing up. Let's not forget our initial conversation though.
One of the guys who was there and a lot is Tony Rutkowski; go find Malamud's "Exploring the Internet", it introduced both Tony and Ramblin' Robert Shaw, a guy so interesting there should be a book about him. Tony founded ISOC. It was supposed to be technical.
Tony left ISOC. After the 1974 IAB debacle it had become clear ISOC was not a trade show to sell V4 addressed and later find a way to monetize domain names.
This came to a head at an OECD meeting in Ottawa when Albert Tromposch now disgraced WIPO chief Robert Shaw from he ITU and Don Heath from ISOC and the domain name thing fell into place. They declared themselves in charge, Vint single handedly caused a fee to happen when the FNCAC (really him) suggested ot the NSF it have it's constructor NSI charge fees. That was it. No discussion just lke when Postel announced he fist 7 tlds on the MSGGRUOP list Stef ran. Other systems of names and numbers were then declared informally to be criminal and it was "my way or the highway" by administrative fiat bt a couple of yanks. How the rest of the world was suppose do accept this I do not undrant. ISOC has done well in this ecosystem but they really should be honest and just roll the ISOC into ICANN and IETF. It's really one company and ISOC is jus the marketing part.
"It's all just marketing" - Dave Crocker.
I get asked all the time what to do next and never know. Now I do. Somebody should give Putin a fish tank with some Blue Gularis, and te rest will sort itself out just fine I think.
But that's what ISOC is for. Have you seen the stuff they post? ISOC chapter lke to say "whoaaaaaa, we distance ourselves from that mothership stuff" and to a large extent they do. And they put on good events. But that's above and beyond the primary purpose, to have bunch of followers that agree v6 uber alles, icann and arin and good and god bless jon postel. At what point did it ever look like anything different? It's also a good retirement fund. The I990's are online.
That's what ISOC does from my observations. Nice people. Terrible organization.

(to bary shien) Sure. You wrote the textbook on TCP. Optics baby. Do it by email? Silly Barry! It' not like you could manage or build a network that way. Other than than the UUCP and TCP networks that is. I guess my point is too, ISC has the list of usenet newsgroup names, it's realy not ay different than the root zone, they're both just files kicking around a server there someplace and they've always been there. They were born there. Look at the differnce in changing those two files. Why because people that have nothing to do wiht the net say so for personal gain.
I'm still not sure why we put up with this. I thought taxation without representation as a big deal in the US.
"You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different."
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
--
" help connect developing countries"
To do what? Prepare a new market for ISOC brand services? This excuses has been used before.
And even it it were true (it isn't) how does that justify ISOC barging in ans saying they're in charge of things other people built?
You know what dictators say when they take over a contry? "It's for the stability of the nation. They realy say that, check yourself.
Let's Keep The Internet On For Everyone | Internet Society
https://www. internetsociety .org/lets-keep-internet-everyone/
The Internet Society calls on all governments to stop Internet shutdowns. ... and regional economies, the Internet's stability and, ultimately, the country itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6R7bCSUhjI
--
Everybody in Africa has a phone now. It's electricity they don't have. What is it you think ISOC is doing in Africa exactly?

Marc Stephan Nkouly, quick yes or no question, have you heard of ISOC? Also, four decades of this, this was the NSF's justification "oh but they help impoverished countries". That doesn't make the bad things alright.
1
Richard Sexton Also what a great way to spy on poeple.
---
"ISOC was created when it was realized, c. 1989, that the IAB and IETF and IANA were making defacto standards without any legal structure around them -"
Because that worked.
The 1974 IAB debacle in Montreal cused Sean Doran to write a great screen "ISOC - it seeks overall control" Let me hear you say that again;
" IAB and IETF and IANA were making defacto standards without any legal structure around them"
So? You think a bunch of lawyers will make this better?? Can youshow where that's worked before?
Remember when we did that on Usenet? That must be why it's in at least one Guinness book as the biggest thing man ever built. Oh wait we never did. j/k. But it's in there.
"making the various participants liable to civil suits from companies/vendors/individuals "
That's theur problem. You don't tax everyone to solve big business' problems.
" So Vint went off to create ISOC"
Funny, Tony said he did it. Whatever.
"you should read "we're the organization to sue"."
Why would anybody want to sue ISOC? They don't do anything.
The counter point here is ISOC wasn't asked for help.
They showed up and said they were in charge. Check for yourself.
You Show me where on NANOG or NEWDOM or anywhere like that people said "oh crap, all we need is ISOC to throw some lawyers in here that'll fix everything"
I was there. It never happened. If you can show it did, please do so now.
Let me add, is this voluntary?ISOC wasn't invited, can we ask the to go away and let the intake it's organic course? If so, please do that now in the name of all decency.
But its not an option.
Can you explain how this is different from a dictatorship?
This was not one of Clinton's better moves but it was cool to get a call fro the White House.Embarrassingly I thought it was a prank and called the back after they suggested I do that. Oopsie. I think what I said was "fuck off who are you did Tom put you up to this?" Awkward.
ICANN was not born in the spirit of *cooperation* used to build and run the net. Too many shadows.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/.../becky-burr-associate...
The spirit of cooperation implied in this note from Becky that enabled icann was something there were no signs of after the fact. They'd offer ideas, we'd point out why they were bad, and they'd just spin it differently avoid the appearance f what they were trying to do and do it away. After a few years we stopped as it was pointless. Note the Boston Working Group disbanded after ICANN was formed. They were mostly lawyers anyway.
Nice "spin" Craig but I'm afraid it's just that and complete nonsense.

Becky Burr, Associate Administrator of NTIA for International Affairs sends letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers | National Telecommunications and Information Administration
NTIA.DOC.GOV
-- So you agree this wasn't asked for.
Thank you for confirming that. I don't know if you're new here or not and to be honest I don't recall seeing your name but usually things that affect THE ENTIRE NETWORK are discussed before one guy decides to tell us all how it's going to be.
Let's not forget that there was no actual legal threat, that was imaginary . The only actual threat came from Ambler in 98 and if you're telling me ISOC exists because Vint couldn't talk to Ambler that's still not justification. You still haven't answered the question if the uninvited guest can be asked to leave. It if can't it's not a guest is it?
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize"

--
Bob Frankston I too have work with ISOC but their meaning of "Internet" is fuzzy and is more about the social consequences than the underlying concepts. Attempts to form a Boston Chapter have gotten nowhere because it's not clear why one would exist. As for ICANN ... a rent extraction agency that has unleashed 404's upon the world ... but that's another conversion, Still, other than ISOC how does one attempt to coalesce ....

Richard Sexton How do you know it didn't just start? You only ever know after the fact. But, to answer the question make a list called dns coalescence and gateway to a group here and administer the rules of civil discourse and it'll probably pop out the other end. There always were lots of good ideas and poeple willing to do things the problem was interference done not for reasons stated.
--
I did find one example where telcos and lawyers aren't always what they seem. Oddly, I worked for the Telautograph corporation that used to be called the Gray Telephone and Telegraph company.
This is why Elisha Gray is the second first guy to invent the telephone: Lawyers. 1876 to 1878[edit]

11 February 1876: Elisha Gray invents a liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but he did not make one.
14 February 1876, about 9:30 am: Gray or his lawyer brings Gray's patent caveat for the telephone to the Washington, D.C. Patent Office (a caveat was a notice of intention to file a patent application. It was like a patent application, but without a request for examination, for the purpose of notifying the patent office of a possible invention in process).
14 February 1876, about 11:30 am: Bell's lawyer brings to the same patent office Bell's patent application for the telephone. Bell's lawyer requests that it be registered immediately in the cash receipts blotter. 14 February 1876, about 1:30 pm: Approximately two hours later Elisha Gray's patent caveat is registered in the cash blotter. Although his caveat was not a full application, Gray could have converted it into a patent application and contested Bell's priority, but did not do so because of advice from his lawyer and his involvement with acoustic telegraphy. The result was that the patent was awarded to Bell.[5] AT&T: you will.

Richard Sexton Well isn't this a trip down memory lane? Here's how it went on the Bell side of things, the newspaper article from what happened is online. I used to work for the paper as a kid running their computers. It's like old home week for me it is.
"In order to facilitate his regular chess game, Hugh Cossart Baker Jr. leased four telephones so that he and his friends could contact each other directly about their chess moves. Melville Bell (Alexander's father) came to Hamilton and installed three telephones on Baker's private telegraph line, and in the house of his friend C.D. Cory's sister, J. R. Thompson."
https://www.thespec.com/.../6868602-june-20-1877-first.../
June 20, 1877: First telephone exchange opens in Hamilton

---SUN---

Let's not lose sight of the fact the founding of Sun (and Cisco) was based on the commission of a felony crime.
They litrally stile the Stanford University Network ("SUN"). Bill Joy, one of them, wrote vi, which one of the reasons the people that built the SUN use emacs.
I know one of the people that worked on the SUN at Stanford. He teaches there now and also invented the firewall, the Apple laserwriter, and the search engine, Scribe, the basis for HTML ans is one of the 7 founded of Adobe.
If you think I'm worng, how about we make a substantial wager? Any size you like. The biggr the better. I'm sure I can get him to email you in case you're not prepared to look it up. So, who is so sure they'll put their money where their mouth is?. How much are you prepared to lose?
--
Ralph W Optional Chris Fisher If he's referring to Brian Reid - I believe he did invent Scribe while at CMU.
Any early Search engine (spider) was Lycos, invented by CMU PhD student "fuzzy" (Michael L. Mauldin) HTML is a dialect of GML/SGML, which existed in the 80s alongside Scribe. Scribe's syntax could not be more different. - "Reid presented a paper describing Scribe in the same conference session in 1981 in which Charles Goldfarb presented Generalized Markup Language (GML), the immediate predecessor of SGML."
Richard Sexton Goldfarb did it too. Keep digging. Scribe begat sgml which begat html. There's an article on this somewhere.
Lycs didn't really work. Altavista did.
Richard Sexton Oh and CSS. Chapter 2 and 3). Combined with structured documents, style sheets offered late binding [Reid 1989] of content and presentation where the content and the presentation are combined after the authoring is complete.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download...
--- Why don't ou answer three questions: 1) what does "SUN" stand for? 2) Where were the Sun Microsystems computers developed? 3) What was the development cost?
Richard SextonCan you patent what you didn't create? Sun Microsystem's somewhat crooked startup by Lester Earnest 2017.06.20 http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/spin/sunup.html
Richard Sextonhttp://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html
A start-up's true tale (12/01/2001) PDP10.NOCREW.ORG
A start-up's true tale (12/01/2001)
Richard Sexton"Their business plan called for commercializing a workstation that an electrical engineering whiz named Andy Bechtolsheim had built for Stanford's computer network. They called their box the SUN--for Stanford University Network--workstation. The investor was intrigued; within a month, Sun Microsystems was born."
https://money.cnn.com/.../for.../1997/10/13/232510/index.htm
JAVAMAN THE ADVENTURES OF SCOTT MCNEALY TODAY'S EPISODE HIS FIGHT TO SAVE THE WORLD WIDE WEB FROM THE EVIL EMPIRE - October 13, 1997
MONEY.CNN.COM

Richard SextonHappens all the time: "At Stanford they had beg, borrowed, and almost quite literally stolen the computers they needed to keep Google running." http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/.../the-history-of.../
The History of Google
------ UNIX ---- unix is in phones. windows is on desktop. ther are more phones than computers. Unix is the most widely used operating system on this planet and nearby space. ----

--- C -----

Ken De Vries "Beginning Programmin with C." LOL! C isn't a language for beginners. 😉

Richard Sexton It was for me. Once you know assembler all higher level languages are trivial, they're just shorthand. I'd suggest C is the perfect beginner language. Not C++, that deserves to die in fire, plain C.
There is less stuff to remember than any other language and youcan do anything with it.
In the 50 years since it was invented the only thing better to come along is Javascript, wichis C with some additions of stuff from other languages made for the web.
It's funny really because Unix was invented because the thing that was supposed to do this- multics, was an unholy disaster and died made by committee.
Javascript was invented became the thing thatr was supposed to do this in the browser - Java - was an unholy disaster and died, made by committee. Node happened when a 17 yer old kid made JS run on a server. It replaced Java. Two guys at Bell did C and unix, one guy at Netscape did javascript. One guy at Opera did CSS. html was from sgml whuch was from Scribe which one guy wrote.
No software product from a commute ever succeeded.


--- web----

Have you noticed that everything you do you don in program now, the web browser? And only the most recent one "works" despite the fact standards stopped changing in 2005?
A web browser reads html files. Acrobat reads pdf files. They both can do all the things you do here but anything except a) a browser and b) the latest one wil not work
Combine this with the fact html is a joke and the postscript imagine model was the way to go (ref: the guy responsible for html) and still is, really makes me question just what the hell is going on. This is not tech this is a fucking omnishambles.
Reimagine all this with a pdf, not html reader and none of the bullshit with icann and the US intelligence interests that took over the day the NSF stopped funding this stiff. I ws there an saw it happen. I was there in Berlin when the US government signed away the internet to quote Don Telage. Who was also there.

---sir tim----

I wrote a postscript print formatter and released it on the net. I got a snippy nore it crashed their server and suggested a fix which worked.
So if it's late, it's probably my fault. I'm so good I can make a project late without even being on it! I know he's a sir and all but all he did was take somebody else's MIME spec, somebody else's html spec, somebody else's hyperlinks and made them work together so he could find the page he needed in the Microsoft manuals for Windows 3.11
Gopher already existed and did the same thing. This really wasn't much work and the poeple that invented the parts he used also invented things like the firewall, the mailing list, DNS and the laser writer. Tim learned windows. Cooooool.

---fonts ---

I disagree I think IBM set back the evolution of typography immensely.
Look at the EBCDIC character set. Now look at ASCII. Other than a-z, A-Z and 0-9 you get a handful of characters. About 30.
Because this set existed because of word size in computer at some point we made a new table that has what the world thinks is the minimal set to write what they need. This is about 45,000 characters now.
So no I don't think IBM helped, quote the opposite, by constraining the expression of character to a homeopathic subset. Lets face it IBM had become so lazy with 360 junk by then that they were dragged into dot matrix and bitmapped screens the sort of things they're nominally on the leading edge of.
It didn't merely wrankle the aesthetic, we know from studies constraint on language yields poor brain development. a couple of teams looked at this phenomenon: ryps worldview were aksed what color an orange was and hoe many shades their language has for that color.
In every case the poeple that had the most words for the color orange were able to most accurately differentiate shades of the color. The less words they have the less shades. In the west we tend to think of light-orange orange and dark-orange which we also call brown although brown usually as more green in it than this). One group had no word for orange and referred to it either yellow or red about half each. They were not able to pick out an orange from a box of red, orange and yellow balls.
You wouldn't believe some of the characters that are in the html5 character table. It's pretty freaky.

---icann--

what does isoc do? TCP fan club. They organize trade shows for internet protocols.
They are to the net what cheerleaders are to football teams. They do this with thinly disguised trade shows. Recall is was the holy triumvirate of ISOC (Don Heath), ITU (Bob Shaw) and WIPO (Albert Tramposch) that met at an Ottawa OECD meeting that started the whole IAHC/ICANN mess.
Rutkowski started it. Then they kicked him out.He was general counsel for the ITU at the time. This is well documented.Or you can jsut ask him. Vint worked on the last 3/4 of TCP. Bob Kahn wrote the rest. Vint didn't do anywhere near as many things as you'd think, he's just really good at self promotion.

--- icann root zone

In theory of evrybody primaried the root zone for themselves, icann would be irrelevant
-- There is no authority though. It's mere convention. We can do anything. Nobody will though, there's an institutional laziness about this. Plus it's the most corrupt part of the internet. The guy that invented the spreadsheet pointed out ICANN is a "rent extraction scheme that's 404'd haf the net". 1
--Richard Sexton Worth repeating: Barry Shein: It's an interesting, I suppose, paradox. PIR organizes as a public-spirited organization rather than for-profit. One advantage is you have no shareholders (ok, one, ISOC), so avoid pressure to maximize value for its own sake and otherwise have to answer to shareholders (ok, one, ISOC.) Then you use exactly that, no shareholders (ok, one, ISOC) to sell yourself to a private, for-profit equity firm without any need to answer to shareholders (ok, one, ISOC), or to risk various shareholder protection laws. It really is a bit like killing your parents and then taking advantage of the fact that you're an orphan.

----https---

https is too slow to be usable and unnecessary unless you're typing in a credit card number. DNS over HTTP works just as well. Encrypt the page, not the site, https is not as safe as they say and has slowed down everything to the point of near unusability. The domain rackjet and cert racket are both just exactly that. Besides, any way to route around icann works.

---#25





Remember me, buy my shirts!
pop art MBZ