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DMR RIP: From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com
10/13/11(Thu)01:17 No.20548610To the contributers to this book:
I
have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do
write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memo- ries.
The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp
Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are
fertilizing it from below.
Your judgments are not keen, they are
intoxicated by metaphor. In the Preface you suffer first from heat,
lice, and malnourishment, then become prisoners in a Gulag. In Chapter 1
you are in turn infected by a virus, racked by drug addiction, and
addled by puffiness of the genome.
Yet your prison without
coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no
strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates
order from chaos: instead, collec- tives like the FSF vindicate their
jailers by building cells almost com-
patible with the existing ones,
albeit with more features. The journalist with three undergraduate
degrees from MIT, the researcher at Microsoft, and the senior scientist
at Apple might volunteer a few words about the regulations of the
prisons to which they have been transferred.
Your sense of the
possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you
have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want
something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes
one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with
Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual
tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to
seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining.
Here is my
metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations,
many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested
nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty
pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.
Bon appetit! |
