I don't understand. E-mail gateways to Gopher and the WWW have been around for a very long time now. What is so special about this? Perhaps the article is incomplete.
In anycase. There are still many applications for Gopher. The factors that made Gopher so appealing 10 years ago are still real-world factors today amongst third world countries - and cell phone users.
In the early days of the WWW a lot of effort was spent making sure Gopherspace was available to WWW users. It sounds like the opposite needs to happen.
E-mail is a tempting way to solve this problem - but what are you going to do? Send HTML pages via email? What does that save? Not to mention the 24 hour wait.
This was always the case with Netscrape!
Mosaic was paid for by tax-payers (for the most part). That source code started Netscrape, and 2 other companies.
So why be pissed off now? You should have been mad 4 years ago. Stop supporting AOL.
BTW: 42 links back to Netscrape? Damn!!!
I think that if you work for a University, and you write some code for them as part of your job the code should belong to the University.
They are paying you to write code for them after all. They don't need to do that. It should belong to them.
But what if they make bizillions of dollars off of it? Well, there is this notion (that I agree with) that Universities should earn money from their employess and in return build a better University for the good of the community at large.
When I worked at the UofMn we gave Gopher away for free, essentially. We did charge corporations a little bit (I don't remember $250?) to run our server code. But back then the Internet was a lot different, it was the only way to help fund the development of the code and to buy some servers (NeXT slabs and MacIIci's). So the University never made any money from it it, but what we did get we could have used.
Some other projects after Gopher we gave away to some Universities when they asked for it.
But the U owned all of my code. And I've never had a problem for that. Gopher put the UofMn on "the map" so to speak and that attracted other funding, students, and profs to the school. So the school became better.
The academic world *is* different than a corporation, and I think it works well for itself. You just have to hold to the belief that Universities should prosper in order to educate more students and to allow for research that can not find funding via grants.
Now, profs stealing their students code and papers...that is way different...I won't get started on that track.
When I worked at the UofMn as part of the Gopher team I helped write GopherVR. Apple did a lot of useability testing for us. They were interested in the idea of 3D info-space.
The Yahoo "project" failed because it took *some* of the ideas of GopherVR (but not all of them). The only reason to use another dimension (a third in this case) is because there is information that doesn't translate well into two dimensions.
As it turns out certain info-spaces can benefit from this a great deal, library "card-catalogs" being one of them and there are many others. The Yahoo project provided no compelling reasons why someone would want to cruise the web in a very slow way when a much faster way existed.
VRML, I think, is a good idea in theory because it provides a solution for the cases when 3 dimensions really helps. However VRML is bad solution that was founded on a lot of bad principles.
VRML was suppose to be an open solution but when it came time to actually put a spec together people like Mark Pesce(sp?) had no clue what to do, so SGI came in and an announcement was made to the VRML mailing list that said "thanks for trying to help but we just met behind closed doors with SGI and we are letting them write the spec". Well, that has both positives and negatives but now everyone had to implement a rendering engine that could handle OpenInventor - which turned out to be very hard, hence a lot of dog slow VRML clients - even on today's computers.
Not to mention the difficulty of generating these scenes.
The other problem is that VRML 1.0 came to be months before it was suppose to be done. Why did the work finish so fast? Because we distributed GopherVR alphas on a number of platforms (and they ran kick-ass fast even back then). VRML 1.0 needed a lot more thought but politics and greed got in the way, so they (SGI et al.) announced that they were done. Stupid pride got in the way.
What is even more stupid is that we were willing to help the VRML group but they didn't want it. We weren't even doing the same thing!! It was just hubris on their part.
None of this stuff is a secret, check out the VRML mailing list archives to find out what happened.
I like the idea of Web3D...I just wish they started over and threw VRML away and started over on the right foot. It really can be done better, it can be done a lot better. And with people who know what the hell they are doing it could succeed and help the people who need 3D on the Web.
Slashdot Mirror
does the creator of alt.sex.pictures get us close?
I don't understand. E-mail gateways to Gopher and the WWW have been around for a very long time now. What is so special about this? Perhaps the article is incomplete.
In anycase. There are still many applications for Gopher. The factors that made Gopher so appealing 10 years ago are still real-world factors today amongst third world countries - and cell phone users.
In the early days of the WWW a lot of effort was spent making sure Gopherspace was available to WWW users. It sounds like the opposite needs to happen.
E-mail is a tempting way to solve this problem - but what are you going to do? Send HTML pages via email? What does that save? Not to mention the 24 hour wait.
gopherd can be configed to spew out HTML if the browser connects via port 80 instead of port 70.
This was always the case with Netscrape!
Mosaic was paid for by tax-payers (for the most part). That source code started Netscrape, and 2 other companies.
So why be pissed off now? You should have been mad 4 years ago. Stop supporting AOL.
BTW: 42 links back to Netscrape? Damn!!!
I think that if you work for a University, and you write some code for them as part of your job the code should belong to the University. They are paying you to write code for them after all. They don't need to do that. It should belong to them. But what if they make bizillions of dollars off of it? Well, there is this notion (that I agree with) that Universities should earn money from their employess and in return build a better University for the good of the community at large. When I worked at the UofMn we gave Gopher away for free, essentially. We did charge corporations a little bit (I don't remember $250?) to run our server code. But back then the Internet was a lot different, it was the only way to help fund the development of the code and to buy some servers (NeXT slabs and MacIIci's). So the University never made any money from it it, but what we did get we could have used. Some other projects after Gopher we gave away to some Universities when they asked for it. But the U owned all of my code. And I've never had a problem for that. Gopher put the UofMn on "the map" so to speak and that attracted other funding, students, and profs to the school. So the school became better. The academic world *is* different than a corporation, and I think it works well for itself. You just have to hold to the belief that Universities should prosper in order to educate more students and to allow for research that can not find funding via grants. Now, profs stealing their students code and papers...that is way different...I won't get started on that track.
When I worked at the UofMn as part of the Gopher team I helped write GopherVR. Apple did a lot of useability testing for us. They were interested in the idea of 3D info-space.
The Yahoo "project" failed because it took *some* of the ideas of GopherVR (but not all of them). The only reason to use another dimension (a third in this case) is because there is information that doesn't translate well into two dimensions. As it turns out certain info-spaces can benefit from this a great deal, library "card-catalogs" being one of them and there are many others. The Yahoo project provided no compelling reasons why someone would want to cruise the web in a very slow way when a much faster way existed.
VRML, I think, is a good idea in theory because it provides a solution for the cases when 3 dimensions really helps. However VRML is bad solution that was founded on a lot of bad principles.
VRML was suppose to be an open solution but when it came time to actually put a spec together people like Mark Pesce(sp?) had no clue what to do, so SGI came in and an announcement was made to the VRML mailing list that said "thanks for trying to help but we just met behind closed doors with SGI and we are letting them write the spec". Well, that has both positives and negatives but now everyone had to implement a rendering engine that could handle OpenInventor - which turned out to be very hard, hence a lot of dog slow VRML clients - even on today's computers. Not to mention the difficulty of generating these scenes.
The other problem is that VRML 1.0 came to be months before it was suppose to be done. Why did the work finish so fast? Because we distributed GopherVR alphas on a number of platforms (and they ran kick-ass fast even back then). VRML 1.0 needed a lot more thought but politics and greed got in the way, so they (SGI et al.) announced that they were done. Stupid pride got in the way.
What is even more stupid is that we were willing to help the VRML group but they didn't want it. We weren't even doing the same thing!! It was just hubris on their part.
None of this stuff is a secret, check out the VRML mailing list archives to find out what happened.
I like the idea of Web3D...I just wish they started over and threw VRML away and started over on the right foot. It really can be done better, it can be done a lot better. And with people who know what the hell they are doing it could succeed and help the people who need 3D on the Web.