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Salon on JWZ/Emacs/Mozilla/AOL and Nightclubs
genehckr writes "Salon has an article about how JWZ has been spending his time since leaving Netscape/AOL/Mozilla -- he's working on buying a nightclub in San Francisco. The article also delves into JWZ's personality, and some of the history behind the JWZ/RMS Lucid Emacs/emacs split -- an interesting read. " Ok, I put it under the Mozilla icon because I don't have a 'San Francisco Nightclub Icon'. Interesting article covering stuff that we don't usually see around here.
Given jwz's goth/industrial/angstcore leanings musicwise, a bat may be a good icon.
On the other hand, I'd love to know if the dance floor is Java 2 compatiable and supports XML.
Personally, I think we might start to see more of this - people just getting fundamentally fed up and choosing whole new careers. I don't know any of the reasons JWZ has made the switch, beyond those reasons he's chosen to give, but I do know that if I had the resources, I'd get out of the politics, back-stabbing and paranoia that makes up so many companies.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I had half expected that he might do something like buying Harlequin, and "open sourcing" Liquid Common Lisp. (Which would have been rather interesting...) Or perhaps seeking to build a Lisp Machine environment to run atop Linux. Or perhaps something more quixotic like building such atop FreeBSD.
It's very interesting that he has instead proceeded to do "political system" hacking. I expect he'll get back to the computer variety at some point.
After all, he appears to be a significant participant here; any time major discussions of Motif or Mozilla come up, he's quite visible in the discussions!
I'm no "clubber," and I'm not entirely convinced he's after something that's unambiguously a good thing, but it's sort of nice to see some action oriented to a local community taking place.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Works nice and fast here. Oh whoops, I'm using IE5 :P
Anyway, can't you just disable java in netscape?
Perhaps it's the malleability of code that makes some programmers, especially free software programmers, so optimistic that they can fix things, that problems are solvable, that a solution is always waiting to be found. Software can be fixed. Programmers live in a world where reality can be shaped according to their will -- all they have to do is write another line of code.
A fairly interesting insite into why hackers are so powerful. Now only do they think they can fix things... in many instances they actually do. All the hub-bub about the freedom on information, ie the state of "the net" is all about hackers knowing they can change things. Shows like Triumph of the Nerds attempts to document this phenomenon. It also seems to celebrate the power and influence of nerddom as if nerds have something to prove.
That will definitely be something to check out in San Fran when they transfer ownership and do whatever it is they're going to do to it. I picture an exploratorium on lsd with a bar.
How have other clubs integrated technology into the environment to make it fun for hacker/tech types?
Talk about the only thing constant is change...
This is really so 60s. Suddenly the young, rising rebels discover the changes they're fighting for are so easily done within the system. The ability to fight the establishment, USING the establishment becomes an accepted method and then suddenly they wake up and discover...
My god, I've turned into my parents!
What about the spinning-compass easter egg Netscape showed when pointed at jwz's page? Should be nicely obscure.
The article was good readage. Nothing that I didn't already know from visiting jwz home page though.
:)
BUT, anyone else notice the little blurb about a PBS documentary "Code Rush"? Seems like it's going to air March 30th according to the link.
"The specific time period captured on film covers a crucial moment in the history of the "free-software movement" -- that frantic couple of months during which Netscape programmers scrambled to clean up the hitherto proprietary source code to the Navigator Web browser so that it could be released as publicly accessible open-source software."
Hmmm....sounds pretty interesting. I wonder who's going to portray jwz
[WARNING: THIS SLASHDOT POST WENT UP WITH LUDICROUSLY BAD TIMING FOR ME. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY BITTER RANT. I WILL REGRET POSTING THIS LATER. YA KNOW WHAT? FUCK IT AND ANYONE WHO DOESN'T LIKE IT.]
Dear Willie:
Damnit! Are you guys ever going to let guys like me have a life?
I'm tired of fighting, Mr. Mayor. I grew up in The City. I sat there at age 14, imagining that when 16 rolled around, gee, I'd finally have to stop asking for rides and start <i>going places</i>. But, whoops, 16 wasn't enough, everything was 18 and over. Fine. I waited. 18 rolled around...whoops again! Can't drink, can't party! Better wait 'til 21. Now I'm 21 and live in Santa Clara, and what do I hear but half the clubs in San Francisco are under attack.
What the hell? Do you own Prozac futures or something? Have you ever stopped for a moment and considered exactly happens when the event economy can support fewer and fewer individuals?
No, Willie, I bet you haven't. I've heard about your parties--you've thrown kinkfests that put a good chunk of the Castro parties to shame, if only because of the straight laced people you've dragged to them--and I've gotta say, I respect your cojones. But guess what--you go ahead and harass and subject and isolate as many people as possible...
And you eliminate me, and people like me.
Take a college town, or take a city spiting its culture to win some votes, and start cracking down. People like me, who used to be more fodder for the party, who might actually turn out to be decently cool, become risk, pure and simple.
Don't invite the geeks. They'll call attention. Watch who you bring; too many and we'll get busted. Leave them to their toys; screw 'em if they want to look back at their youth without regret.
And School Administrators wonder aloud where all these cliques are coming from, and why nobody has any school spirit anymore, and how it is that so many students just don't know eachother.
Man cannot live on bread alone, and geeks cannot survive on mere technology. There's something called a well balanced life, and the systematic limitation of just how many people can enjoy theirs must end.
If residents are complaining, then the failure is the City's and the Zoning Commissions, not people like me who don't Know Everyone like you do. I want to have fun, Mr. Mayor. Yes, I admit it. I want to look back at a month and say, wow, I met some great people. I let myself go. I stopped being stressed about...everything.
I don't want drugs. I don't want pot. And I certainly don't want more f*cking technology. Give me loud music, new people, and an edge of unpredicatability without the constant and truly ridiculous fear and loathing of the police and the government and the city councils and the Self Appointed Fun Police and I'll be happy!
I'll live in your city!
I'll come home!
You ruin my hometown as I just turn 21, and while your Prozac futures might skyrocket, I ain't ever going home, save maybe to campaign against your ass.
Capiche?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Get over it, man! Seek professional help if you must, but don't let Stallman ruin you're life. It's not worth it. You accuse him of being obsessive about the GNU thing, but you appear far more obsessed with him. Maybe you should think of staying off line for a while and maybe getting a new hobby to keep your mind him.
Here's a couple of links that may help you on your way to recovery:
http://ocd.mentalhelp.net/
http://www.ocfoundation.org/ocf1030a.htm
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
...I wonder if he could get it open by June when the next JavaOne rolls around and 20,000+ geeks roll into town? Would they all attempt to show up at jwz's place simultaneously? Talk about a /. effect. ;)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Does there exist a good, non-judgmental (I should be so lucky) article about what really happened, focussing on the operational differences between emacs & Xemacs?
I doubt if you can find an unbiased account of what happened back in those days; anyone who remembers those events clearly is probably a resident of one camp or another. I liked the other poster's suggestion of "read the accounts and decide for yourself." Unfortunately, I tried following the link and got an authorization failure.
My camp was the Lucid/XEmacs camp. I had been using the vanilla "FSF Emacs 18", but when I discovered Lucid Emacs 19 I found I liked it much better for many reasons.
Just one example was "font-lock": its ability to display a file using different typefaces -- like bold for keywords, italics for comments, etc. I seem to remember that this feature was in the works for FSF Emacs 19, but that Lucid Emacs 19 came out first.
Stallman's version of Emacs 19 eventually caught up with XEmacs and added the font-lock ability, but the underlying mechanism for how to describe when and where the typeface changed was very different. JWZ had done it (correctly, in my opinion) so that typeface was an attribute of the text, so when you cut and pasted a region of text, the font attributes went with it. RMS had a different implementation, so that the text attributes were a feature of the buffer, and didn't get cut and pasted with the text.
Or maybe it was the other way around, but the point is that the two implementations had different APIs, which made it difficult for any code written on the one Emacs to work on the other. I know, because at the time, I was working on a piece of code called ps-print that would take a fontified buffer and spit out PostScript code so I could pretty-print my code and the printout would look pretty much like it did in Emacs. I eventually worked out a means of supporting both Emacsen and ps-print is now a standard elisp package delivered with each.
Would life have been a little easier if JWZ and RMS had been able to agree? Undoubtedly. Would I have JWZ back down, given that RMS was never going to agree with him? No way. What Jamie and the Lucid/XEmacs minions produced was simply better for my purposes, and I'd hate to have been without it all these years. Note that I'm not alone in this opinion, at least judging by the fact that XEmacs still has a significant following. Check it out at xemacs.org.
--Jim
Harlequin went into receivership late last year and has been bought out by a firm called Global Graphics, who wanted the Scriptworks Postscript RIP (which I used to work on). GG aren't really interested in selling programming languages, so IIRC that arm of the company has been sold off as a different firm, whose name I forget.
However, the really interesting story is Dylan. Harlequin put huge amounts of work into a high-quality Dylan implementation; it's one of the things that sunk the company. When GG took over, they decided that they'd have an impossible task selling the product either to end users or to a company - so they made a *gift* of the source to the developers. They've now set up a company, Functional Objects, to develop it further.
It seems they don't currently plan to open source their implementation; personally I think they're doomed unless they do...
--
Xenu loves you!
Abuse had at least the game sequencing written in Lisp.
And a "bloated" Common Lisp implementation looks positively svelte when put beside either a Java or a C++ "IDE" environment.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I feel a little silly getting in the middle of a 7-year-old flame war... I was able to read the discussions from the other poster, so I'd like to comment.
The issue did not seem to be whether or not lucid/xemacs was "better". Rather, the battle seemed to be over who was harder to work with. RMS accused lucid of not listening and causing delays while lucid accused RMS of not wanting to "let go" of development and making unreasonable demands.
So there's two camps:
RMS claimed that emacs 19 was delayed *because* of lucid. If lucid/xemacs was better, it may have been because of troubles they caused at the FSF.
---OR---
emacs 19 was going nowhere because RMS was difficult to work with and lucid/xemacs was better because they stopped working with RMS.
It's worth noting that they did attempt to work together to merge the two but, by that time, it was too late because of early design decisions made at lucid (specifically the use of an X toolkit).
Finally, RMS told everyone that it was OK by him if people continue to work and develop on lucid/xemacs because it was free software.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Netscape 4.7 navigator, on a rh-based box. NP here. Still, I don't like them either. First time I say them I thought: Cool. Second and later times: Argh.
Don't miss this - according to the story there's an upcoming documentary on the the who inside Netscape Mozilla coding scene from '98....
PBS documentary
The issue did not seem to be whether or not lucid/xemacs was "better". Rather, the battle seemed to be over who was harder to work with.
I seem to remember all sorts of technical issues too, including design, usability, appearance and even key bindings. But the issue of getting the two camps to work together was always present. It's worth noting that eventually the two did reconcile somewhat and produced a merged set of elisp code that would work in either Emacs.
The point about one Emacs being better than the other is purely a personal observation, but it's important because a lot of people felt the same way. Enough people to continue to make XEmacs viable as a separate code base. Forking the code isn't always bad; if it provides enough benefit to enough people, then it not only should happen, it must happen.
But I'm not trying to pour new fuel on old flames. I didn't get into the flaming then, and I won't now. Just a few observations from the nostalgia department.
C-g
--Jim
I think jwz buying this club is one of the first of what I believe will be a lot of now rich geeks doing a lot of Big weird things with their money. There's only so many cars and houses you can buy before doing something Big becomes the only thing to do with all the money.
:)
Well, you could always save it but who wants to do that?
I'm not what you'd call a club maven, but of all the SOMA clubs I've been to, DNA Lounge was one of the nicest. I was there for Club Slick one year, and was very favorably impressed.
Frankly, I have very limited sympathy for the new area residents. There was a reason their precious, quaint SF loft was (relatively) affordable. They knew there was an all-hours club nearby when they bought the place; why are they suddenly acting all surprised?
I've had the same dream as JWZ, except with me, it was a coffee shop up in Marin. I lacked the money and business acumen to realize it. So I'm pleased to see JWZ pursuing the same goal: Preserving what he thinks is important.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The real tragedy is that actual working artists, especially young ones, simply can't afford to live here. To sustain a true art scene, you need cheap rent paired with some sort of public space for artists to meet and work. End of story. And the growing wage inequities in the Bay Area make it impossible to find cheap rent in any area metropolitan enough to support an art community.
The situation is escalating, fueled by the "irrational exuberance" and the loss of public funding for the arts, there are no mechanisms for changing it. Artists in the US now work primarily in design and advertising: the invisible hand of the marketplace won't sustain fine arts.
I like it. I have Java off, so I don't have to see the banner ads anymore. The page looks so much cleaner without an ad sitting on top of it.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
The board of supervisor's on the other hand, they need to worry. They're coming up for re-election, and San Francisco has switched back to district elections, which is to say that neighborhoods in SF now choose their representation on the board much in the same way that States choose their representation in the US house & senate. It's expected that this will cause a shift in power from the downtown/big money crowd out into the neighborhoods, and sucking up to the housing developers isn't likely to play as well as it has in the past.
Gosling might have been the original author of a particular variant of Emacs, but he did not write the original Emacs.
Richard M. Stallman wrote the original Emacs, in MIT TECO, for use on MIT's ITS operating system. I know, because I was probably one of the first few people to try it out. (Happened to be hacking in the AI building one night when I saw his "post" about this new set of Editor MACroS. Tried it, thought it was cute, but stuck with TECO.)
It's possible, from a historical point of view, that you're right. But I'd like to see a more definitive account from someone I trust -- someone who doesn't think Gosling wrote the original Emacs, for example.
I recall hearing about some important rewriting of a disputed module (or set thereof) back in the late '80s or early '90s. The dispute might have been over whether RMS had actually copied from UniPress Emacs vs. an earlier (free?) Gosling Emacs version, the latter having been claimed to be "free" by some. (Perhaps Gosling once told, or was believed to have told, RMS or someone that it was okay for RMS to copy from his Emacs, since RMS invented it, after all, and this "tale" didn't get properly communicated through the UniPress aquisition. I'm really just speculating here, based on some probably-shaky memories of third-plus-hand info. I don't recall ever actually discussing these issues with RMS myself, because it's never seemed important enough to do so.)
So I disagree entirely with your implicit assertion that RMS and Project GNU got started by illegally copying a proprietary product and then rewriting it to avoid legal hassles, even though some aspects of your story might have elements of truth to it.
I've found RMS to be many things, but unprincipled about copying other peoples' software without permission is not one of them. And the sort of dispute I think occurred vis-a-vis Gosling's Emacs is exactly the sort of thing that one could reasonably agree could occur without either Gosling or RMS having knowingly done anything wrong, given the ad-hoc nature of communications over such matters (like copying software) back in those days.
One thing for sure: without RMS, there'd have been no Gosling Emacs and no UniPress Emacs. But without Gosling Emacs and without UniPress Emacs, there'd have still been a GNU Emacs, for the same reason GNU CC was created: because it was so important to have one, it had to be done ASAP, one way or the other.
(FWIW, ISTR that UniPress Emacs was pretty decent, in terms of speed on a VAX/VMS system, back when I demoed it circa 1986, compared to some other commercial variant -- CCA Emacs? -- and I think we chose UniPress as a result, despite what I recall was a non-full-featured extension facility. It was the second Emacs environment with which I became fairly familiar, the first being Pr1me's Emacs. I haven't yet gotten familiar with GNU Emacs to the same degree, despite having used it for some 10 years now.)
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
I don't know about you, but if I was to go to a nightclub I'd rather the gender ratios didn't resemble those of slashdot.
Tgg--
Half of me wants to sent it to the mayor; half of me is just wayyyyy too cynical right now to do so.
A large part of fighting the system is the feeling that it'd matter. I've read what politicians think of e-mail. I'd probably think that same damn thing.
You want a bottom line? Fun has no value to government. Only taxes.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I don't know about the rest of you, but even though times are good for unix gurus and even though I like my job and salary...
I'd like to retire as soon as possible and maintain my current lifestyle or better
I don't want to work 16 hour days 5 days a week when I have kids in highschool. I don't think I can.
People don't complain about the high salaries that sports figures make, so I think **GOOD** IT people are *STILL* seriously undervalued. (NOTE: underqualified lackeys are IMHO currently waay OVERPAID)
when I can afford to retire (which is the GOAL), I won't be working on computers anymore... I'll be doing what I choose to do.. I'll have an Aquarium shop that breeds endangered fish. I'll be racing cars at the local racetrack. I'll be diving in Palau.
Computers are nice, but at some point, I'm going to want my life back!
I don't have a sense of what politicians in general, or even city politicians in particular, think of email, but something I've learned recently is that you can approach these people. I mean, you can just call up a city supervisor, make an appointment, and talk to them. That's their job!
If there's something about your city that you don't like, it is possible for you to go and do something about it. It can be a pain in the ass, but lots of things are.
If you care about late night culture in particular, join the San Francisco Late Night Coalition. In this case ``join'' means ``come to the monthly meetings.'' There is strength in numbers, and this group has a lot of members who have been doing this for a while and know the things you need to do to get yourself heard.
``Government'' is made up of people, specifically politicians and bureaucrats. To politicians, votes and image are also important. Those are the buttons you need to learn to push.
So, I've got lots of ideas for what I want to do with the club, but I'm always looking for more. And I could certainly use some help!
If you or your company have expertise in audio and/or video webcasting, dealing with ASCAP/BMI, micro-radio, installing networks and computer systems in public places, computer-controlled video mixing and light shows, or anything along those lines, then send me mail! I'm at the stage of the game where I've got a lot of ideas, but I'm still trying to work out which ones are practical, which ones I can afford, and which ones I should do first.
I want to blur the line between real-world and web communities: I want the physical space to be hooked in to the net in a way that hasn't been done before. Most nightclubs, even those that do webcasts, are still just a room, a bar, and a sound system. I want to go beyond that, and make something new.
If you're interested in helping out, or even if you just have suggestions, let me know! What would you like to see? What do you think would move the concept of ``nightclub'' to a new level?
Please don't think of this as an ``internet cafe'' kind of deal: in my experience internet cafes aren't even cafes, what they are is terminal rooms or photocopy stores that happen to sell espresso. What I'm building will definitely be a nightclub, with a lot of live music. But it will also be a web radio station, a web music zine, and a heavily wired physical space.
Help me build it! I think it's going to be a lot of fun...