The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond <comment><USER2> Seems like it is reaching. Core postmodern concepts like the hyperreal and simulacra are more relevant and true than they have ever been.

Furthermore, the article claims that postmodern is characterized by an ironic self awareness, and never has this idea been more prominent in culture. In recent years I have noticed that TV commercials have become more and more self-aware. Take for example a recent commercial by what I believe was Verizon. It says something like "More coverage, more data." and then another actor comes into screen saying "and more people saying more." If this isn't ironic self awareness, I'm not sure what is.

Those are postmodern concepts about culture. But the postmodern metaphysical and epistemological nihilism are, as another commenter said, basically bedrock in terms of philosophy.

<comment><USER3> >Furthermore, the article claims that postmodern is characterized by an ironic self awareness, and never has this idea been more prominent in culture. In recent years I have noticed that TV commercials have become more and more self-aware. Take for example a recent commercial by what I believe was Verizon. It says something like "More coverage, more data." and then another actor comes into screen saying "and more people saying more." If this isn't ironic self awareness, I'm not sure what is.

I think that perfectly proves the author's point, though. The "self awareness" of postmodernism has filtered to even the most banal of sources and been left in the dust by the avant garde of today. Irony and sarcasm as critical devices are dead for anyone but the hacks.

From the article:

>"people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park – but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children's cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights."

<comment><USER4> > _I think that perfectly proves the author 's point, though. The "self > awareness" of postmodernism has filtered to even the most banal of sources > and been left in the dust by the avant garde of today. Irony and sarcasm as > critical devices are dead for anyone but the hacks._

Only today there are only hacks. And everybody still uses irony and sarcasm.

Besides, the parent is right. Postmodernism is not a theory to inform cultural production (how people make stuff), although its confusingly referred to as such sometimes.

Postmodernism is a condition of a whole culture (or a whole society) and the inventions that appeared later on (the internet, mobile apps, interactive shows etc) that the author speaks about, only serve to make the world even more postmodern.

The core of postmodernism is that we have exhausted modernity -- and indeed there are no trends that are "new under the sun anymore", not just because everything has been done before (which is almost true), but because society doesn't care about following this or that form en masse anymore and then proceeding to another (e.g. how baroque turned romantic, turned 12-tone, etc. or similarly in any other sphere).

Instead, everything is fragmented, and everybody (artist or not) can do whatever they please and have an audience/followers. There is no canon and no single "normative" culture the way it was 80 or 100 or 150 years ago.

Plus, nothing is able to baffle anyone anymore -- in the way that each generation before could shock some part of the established culture (up to perhaps punk, but probably not even that, and not even 50s rock n' roll -- it only shocked the most conservative parts of society, and had no problem being marketed, sold, and dominating the airwaves in record time).

Postmodernism is also about having access to all the cultural production and modes of the past, and the internet and co made that even more so. Artists, politicians, marketeers, etc can borrow from any period, and repackage and resell everything, combine it, etc.

All of these things are what are described as the "postmodern condition" by the now dead French theorists of the postmodernism.

And none of those things is going away.

Even a total return to modernism or classicism across all artists for example, would still be postmodern -- because before post-modernism art didn't regress to previous periods, it invented new modes.

<comment><USER5> > Plus, nothing is able to baffle anyone anymore -- in the way that each > generation before could shock some part of the established culture (up to > perhaps punk, ...

This whole paragraph made me think of Black Mirror.

 _> Instead, everything is fragmented,_

Isn't there a new form of art (the likes of BM) that takes all these fragment and puts them back together in novel ways that help us reconnect them with the human condition and what that means in a post-modernist society.

Not so much trying to go back in time but trying to reach back for things that were important and give them new prominence?

As I write this, I'm considering the Jordan Peterson as performance art .. he certainly shocks and discomfits many people and as much as you might like him or disagree with him is position is pretty much unassailable.

Even Trump and Brexit look more sensible through this lense.

Indeed, isn't one of Putin's most senior advisors some kind of professor of post-modernism or something?

As PM becomes more and more mainstream surely it makes sense that society find new and unusual ways to continue cultural progress ...

EDIT some other modern media that pops to mind: Mr Robot with it's non-linear narrative and skewed perspective on modernity. The Handmaids tale which, though a few decades old, actually seems more relevant nowadays. I want to say "Ex Machina" but I kind of feel the narrative style doesn't serve the subject matter at all.

<comment><USER4> > _Isn 't there a new form of art (the likes of BM) that takes all these > fragment and puts them back together in novel ways that help us reconnect > them with the human condition and what that means in a post-modernist > society._

Well, that's the very definition of post-modernist art: putting fragments together in novel ways (only the sole novelty is in the arrangement, and not some inherent quality -- in the sense that two conjured random numbers are different, but they're nonetheless still numbers, not something else, like e.g. Stravinsky was still categorically different than Bach. Now we're all collage makers, and the only difference is what we chose to stuck together).

> _As I write this, I 'm considering the Jordan Peterson as performance art .. > he certainly shocks and discomfits many people_

Many people are mock-shocked these days (what with PC norms and all), but few or none are actually shocked.

In the end Jordan Peterson is just another public speaker/figure one hates or disagrees with, not "the end of civilization as we know it" which is how e.g. norm-breaking figures were perceived back in the day.

> _Even Trump and Brexit look more sensible through this lense._

I think Trump and Brexit look more sensible under this interpretation: rich/power elites had lost contact with the people, and pushed their own interests (anti-middle/worker class laws and conditions) under the pretext of "globalization".

The "unwashed masses" then took revenge in the polls, and could care less if the new President is uncultivated or incompetent (they had an idiot president under Bush anyway, and the sky hasn't fallen), or if Britain is separated from EU (they didn't see much improvement in their everyday lives under EU anyway, and they prefer their autonomy to the German-driven collective harmonious pipedream that is EU).

<comment><USER5> _> one hates or disagrees with, not "the end of civilization as we know it" _

Perhaps that's what characterises this new paradigm. The durability of reality. That our much vaunted social norms have far less impact than we think.

Peterson makes absolute sense to me as performance art. (EDIT now so too does 50 shades of grey)

Black Mirror so is postmodernism in a yet-relevant format. Postmodernism may still be relevant but it's the interpretation of post-modernism as _dogma_ (itself antithetical to PM) which is not.

It's the priests and priestesses of postmodernism that gets people's backs up isn't it, not so much the concept(s) itself.

<comment><USER4> > _It 's the priests and priestesses of postmodernism that gets people's backs > up isn't it, not so much the concept(s) itself._

Yes, that. Especially since the concept itself was never meant to be something one can opt to follow or not follow -- just a description of the reality we're in.

It's not that we're "postmodernists" that is, but that we live in a "postmodern" world -- and so we can't be anything aside from that.

As for Peterson, I see him as something orthogonal from postmodernism.

He is someone that talks from a traditional values standpoint in an era where different norms are becoming the mainstream. He doesn't say anything outrageous, in the sense that what he says would be common acceptable wisdom 30 or 50 years ago (and for tons of people still is).

The whole outrage is not because he's saying something inherently outrageous, but because he dares to publicly stray from the mainstream while still being mainstream.

Somebody could say the same things in a 1950 classroom or the president could say them in 1970s and nobody would bat an eyelash -- even among the leftist and more progressives. Heck, the Monty Python made fun of "gender identities" for example in the late 70s, and those bunch was and is as progressive as they come: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c)

<comment><USER5> But haven't a lot of good things happened in those 30 or 50 years in terms of refining the social model? I feel he comes across as an apologist for regression.

That's why people are shocked by him, and worse still for people who uncritically swallow this stuff he's often right.

That's what makes him "post modern" in a post-modern world, and very much a spectacle.

I see Monty Python as questioning these ideas as a way of advancing the discussion. They're comedy though. They're not claiming "truth" status.

<comment><USER4> > _But haven 't a lot of good things happened in those 30 or 50 years in terms > of refining the social model? I feel he comes across as an apologist for > regression._

Not necessarily. A lot of good things, but perhaps a lot of excess as well.

(e.g. in my opinion end of segregation and women and gay rights obviously great. Non-binary bathrooms, "gender-neutral pronouns", "Safe zones" and other absurdities not so much).

Peterson plays between those two (condemns the bad developments but often some good developments too). But nowhere near the caricature he's made to look but those who he'd rather uncritically embrace everything.

It's like with the French revolution: a lot of good things, but a lot of zeal to cut heads and change things to absurdity. It's just the bias of the current advocates that make any change from the older norms seem great. In retrospect a different generation would laugh at some of our excesses. (Like the 80s and still on to day laugh with hippies, whereas in the sixties and early 70s those ideas -- heck, even those clothes -- where de rigueur for young people).

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with safe zones? I honestly don't see anything wrong with participation medals either ...

Non-binary bathrooms? I don't see why anyone would legislate for bathrooms at all.

I'll draw the line at gender-neutral pronouns since "they/their" is perfectly adequate and means I don't have to change how I use language overnight to accommodate a fringe group.

Excess, sure. I'm happy to see some exuberance among communities once oppressed.

I don't share the fear of some that these communities are becoming the oppressors, although clearly (as with the whole C-16 thing) some are getting carried away.

If you take Peterson seriously, I kind of feel like he's just throwing away everything that's happened in the last few years and acting like it didn't happen. It's as though his whole didactic is tone-deaf.

An enlightened approach would be to integrate the new ideas with the old.

<comment><USER6> > _I kind of feel like he 's just throwing away everything that's happened in > the last few years and acting like it didn't happen._

What are you referring to by "everything"?

<comment><USER5> Did you even read the thread dude

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Postmodernism has run its course. It's become clear that while it provides a deconstructive lens for academics, it provides a destructive one to society.

<comment><USER8> It's not our fault that society can't bear to look at itself in a mirror.

Postmodernism broadly consists of only two tools. The first, as you mentioned, is the deconstructive POV, the ability to look at an object as-is and to understand its origin, its design, its footguns, its flawed narrative, its social excuses, its secret hatreds. But there's more.

We _also_ get the curse of relativity, the understanding that all epistemic sources are relative and that we ultimately choose to believe what we believe. This was definitely frustrating, coming on the heels of modernism, and that's why postmodernism has its name: modernism is clearly wrong and serves only to mislead and enslave via narrative control.

But in return, we get something good: Concepts can become relativized too, and so we get many simple metaphysical statements as ways to understand what things are. What is a proof? Well, it's whatever convinces you that something is true. We lose absolute proof, but each of us gain a deeper understanding of what it means to prove something _to somebody_. What is art? Well, it's an expression in some medium. We lose art galleries, but now we can be artistic just by expressing ourselves any time we find new media, such as video games or graffiti or atomic layer deposition or selfies.

We get another good thing: A more precise understanding of how the various pieces of knowledge fit together. By talking of _theories_ and _evidence_ and _logic_ as objects in their own rights, rather than as absolute facets of the universe, we can _connect_ the various sciences and reunify the entire philosophical endeavor under a single umbrella, just like Quine always wanted with his semantic web of science. Maths is logic is metaphysics. [0]

Edit: Formatting, examples.

[0] [https://philpapers.org/archive/ALVLIM-3.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ALVLIM-3.pdf)

<comment><USER9> It's not that we can't bear to look at ourselves in a mirror. It's that objective reality, truth and all of that do exist, good art is better than bad art in ways that aren't purely relative, and so on. Postmodernism loses you more than you gain.

<comment><USER10> Just saying they exist doesn't make them exist. Good art vs. bad art isn't an argument against postmodernism.

Whenever I meet people who claim there is an objective truth I always ask them to give any examples. So far I have not met anyone who can come up with an objective claim that isn't merely basing that on a frame of reference which can be deconstructed or shown to be based on a set of apriori assumptions itself.

<comment><USER11> I am reminded of the "brick in the face" argument against solopsism.

Tell me _whack_ more about your _whack_ frame of reference...

I see postmodernism and extreme relativism as a sort of awesome stage of society where we get to make up reality because we are freed from mundane concerns like knowing where our water comes from or where our sh%t gets flushed to. It is quite wonderful that many many people get the luxury of _never even being curious_ about these things.

Meanwhile, the engineers, doctors, carers, labourers (I am missing a lot out here) who ultimately keep people alive tend to have quite definite opinions about critical aspects of reality.

Granted these are still not objective truths because all experience is subjective. All I can say is that a sophist who believes that rent is not an objective truth is nonetheless likely to find themselves (subjectively) on the streets if they don't pay it.

<comment><USER10> Buddhist philosophy reached some of the same conclusions as postmodernism have.

But don't forget that the fact most of our early engineering advanced were done by philosophers who had the time to ponder and tinker.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I tried to argue over several edits that people seem less objective about their own pain or hunger but realised I backed myself into a corner :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my favorite pieces of deconstructive criticism:

[http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html](http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html)

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything

My Postmodern Adventure

By Chip Morningstar, June 1993.

"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." \-- Donald Norman

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been mourning postmodernism and wondering at the cause of death and at what has or will replace it. I think postmodernism has the answers to much of what plagues society today, and in fact I wonder if the plague may be due to its loss.

In a world of overwhelming information and especially fake information, a strong belief in the "elusiveness of meaning and knowledge" and of doubt in anyone possessing an ultimate truth, and the high degree of skepticism that results, would seem essential - a pre-Internet philosophy that seems tailor- made for the Internet era. Instead, people seem to be embracing ideology (ultimate truths), self-importance (another ultimate truth, rather than 'ironic self-awareness') and whatever claims can be insisted upon rather than supported through reason and fact; they are abandoning skepticism and reason, and the project of the Enlightenment entirely. I would ask what they see as the solution to this flood of lies and deception, but I'm afraid their answer will be that they don't care.[0]

I was at a lunch with someone I hadn't spoken to in years, an English lit academic whose PhD was about a post-modern author; one of their co-workers sat between us. I mentioned reading something related to their dissertation; to my surprise, my friend was clearly embarrassed; they said 'I don't read those things any more'. Other PhDs I know have abandoned intellectualism as fervently as the 'psuedo-modernists'; they buy into the ideology and fake news du jour too. If not them, then who? (When I mentioned this to a sympathetic academic, they said 'they aren't intellectuals; they're just a medieval guild'.)

I want to ask: Why did academics and intellectuals abandon post-modernism? Why has everyone else? How can they knowingly lie to themselves and accept the misinformation as truth? What do they think will replace it? How do they intend to solve these problems without it?

[0] To avoid redundancy: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361122)

<comment><USER14> I generally know what you're talking about; it meets with my experiences with fellow academic refugees. I quite a Lit PhD well into my dissertation and writers like Lyotard figured heavily in my MA thesis.

But there's not a lot of use in talking about anything like this stuff in general conversation. Groups of people get exposed to something a little bit, someone smugly tells them that the emperor has no clothes, and it quickly becomes more enjoyable for them to use that tiny bit of smugness to dismiss rich and useful lines of thought. At a certain point, there isn't much to say to people who have developed an allergy to certain kinds of terms, analysis, and lines of thought.

<comment><USER13> > Groups of people get exposed to something a little bit, someone smugly tells > them that the emperor has no clothes, and it quickly becomes more enjoyable > for them to use that tiny bit of smugness to dismiss rich and useful lines > of thought.

Sure, you can see it on HN. But I expect more from experts in their own domain. Perhaps that's why I'm disappointed.

> At a certain point, there isn't much to say to people who have developed an > allergy to certain kinds of terms, analysis, and lines of thought.

I do disagree with this. In that scenario, people are following the herd like sheep; it's not a result of strong beliefs. Among sheep, one leader can change the direction of things, at least to an extent.

<comment><USER14> "Among sheep, one leader can change the direction of things, at least to an extent."

Well, I am skeptical that people are that easily led... I feel that it's more the case that they respond to what they need and so if what you're providing doesn't line up with their (possibly dysfunctional) view of the world your ideas will fall on deaf ears. It's not like these ideas in their functional forms have ever been widespread beyond artists using them as a post hoc justification for why their work resonates with the popular mood.

As to your first point about "experts in their own domain"...

I believe that most of the folks who care about these ideas are probably neither in academia nor have much access to popular discourse.

There are plenty of threads to pickup in this world where the intellectual work is still ongoing, but the people in academia mostly don't consider these ideas useful because (among many reasons) they destabilize their already unstable position in the economy.

My dissertation director was way more interested in a very conservative approach to history than in unpacking language, and he was, I think, fairly representative of the people in the field: if you're interested in theoretical concerns, then you're almost definitely going to be either unemployed or become unemployable as an academic or an intellectual.

It's really tough for my cohort to afford to write while paying off student loans working at Barnes and Nobles or adjuncting a 5/5 at some JC. At the same time, I personally have the time to write, but I'd rather focus on playing music because it's a lot more relatable for most people.

You might consider someone like Mark Fisher (kpunk) to be the kind of person I am thinking of when I say that theory in the university is a rough endevor. I'm in the middle of reading his "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?" and I think it addresses this, so maybe pull the PDF and take a skim. His personal mode of addressing the issue (he eventually killed himself) is probably not super healthy, but at the same time I am not sure that there really is much else that is actionable here.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for a valuable comment worth reading a couple times or thrice. The insights into academia are depressing, though I already know well the plight of the adjunct. Unionize!

> Well, I am skeptical that people are that easily led... I feel that it's > more the case that they respond to what they need and so if what you're > providing doesn't line up with their (possibly dysfunctional) view of the > world your ideas will fall on deaf ears.

I'll add a couple points, hopefully without belaboring the question: First, governments, corporations, and political organizations spend a lot of time and money trying to influence opinion, especially online (even on HN); they must believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can lead people. Second, I agree that your ideas can't conflict with their worldview, and in fact the way to lead people (in this sense) is to target their worldview; frame that, program their assumptions and their conclusions are second nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a long article from Larry Wall (Perl's inventor) on Perl being Postmodern. It was probably the first time I saw it explained as such. An interesting talk even if you don't like Perl much:

[http://wall.org/~larry/pm.html](http://wall.org/~larry/pm.html)

<comment> 52-6F-62 This is a great talk. I started reading it on the bus on the way into work. It actually made me look at Perl differently. I kind of understand the reasoning behind the syntax I hated so much for so long. Now I kind of _want_ to learn it...

funny thing.

<comment><USER15> I'm in a similar boat. I hated it too until I learned it was supposed to be the Unix language of choice that sits between needing Bash/Awk/Sed & C/C++. At that point the odd conventions and philosophy make more sense. I still use Python most of the time for my scripting needs, but am glad I can switch to Perl every now and then when I need it. The one liners are great too for terminal work.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I can see that. Especially the image of the girders and ductwork showing really resonated. I would have been more suspicious of him just being a good salesperson if he wasn't a great programmer. It's on my todo list, now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This says it all..

"Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.

The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I've hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema's technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert."

</comment><comment><USER17> I've always found the term "postmodern" amusing, it's kind of like the way we refer to spandex, tinfoil spacesuits, blinkenlights computers and cardboard- box robots as "futuristic".

<comment><USER18> In a similar vein, I'm against calling things neo-something or "New Something".

There's too many old cities still called some variant of "New City" like Novgorod (founded 882 years ago), Naples (founded as Neapolis in the 7th century BC), and Carthage (founded in the 13th or 9th century BC).

<comment><USER19> The trick is to name your cities after saints, to ward off the additional prefix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Postmodernism is a variation on Plato's allegory of the cave. The idea is that everyone is living in a world of total illusion, but the philosopher will, though a very unconventional intellectual process, discover the really real, and then use his understanding to bring about a utopia.

For postmodernist, the intellectual process is deconstruction and critical thought, and the utopia is sort of multicultural but radically individualistic world, and the replacement of capitalism with some sort of vague socialism.

However, postmodernists don't really believe in their claimed radical perspectivism. So for instance, when there is a dispute between peasants claim they are starving and beaten down, and the wealthy landholders claim the peasants are doing just great, they think the peasants are objectively correct and the landholders are just plain wrong.

Postmodernism came about because Marxism had come to a political dead end, and so leftist types in France decided to try to use Nietzschean relativism as a way to undermine liberal realism, in hopes it would somehow lead to their desired utopia.

This doesn't make much philosophical sense, since Nietzsche was militantly anti-socialist, and as a political strategy it has been an utter failure.

<comment><USER21> I don't think so, platos point was that the shadows were poor representations of real objective things. By moving beyond the cave, you can see the real objective thing.

post modernsim says, nah, your objective things aren't objective, you just found some "shadows" that look prettier to you.

I think pseduo modernisim is a bit more more like the cave, a sort of acknowledgement that there are real objective things but the shadows are things in and of themselves. Except these are special shadows that can produce brilliant colorful holograms, and these fancy shadows are also interesting things, in fact they can make life super interesting. But somehere in these shadows there is some kind of objective reality.

<comment><USER20> >I don't think so, platos point was that the shadows were poor representations of real objective things. By moving beyond the cave, you can see the real objective thing.

post modernsim says, nah, your objective things aren't objective, you just found some "shadows" that look prettier to you.

I agree, that is why I said it is a variation on Plato's cave, not a simple repetition. What they have in common is the belief that what seems real in experience is in fact not, and that to arrive at an understanding of the true state of affairs requires a complex intellectual process that is radically different from ordinary thinking. Contrast all this with, for instance, Aristotle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unconvincing, from start to finish--and what a poor start! Yes, the obvious texts in courses on postmodernism are a few decades old; it takes time for things to filter into the academy. It would be easy to argue for more recent authors like Bolano, David Foster Wallace, Eugenides, or Zadie Smith as examples of postmodern fiction. Step outside literature and it's even more blatant. Kanye West, the high-grossing Marvel movies, prestige TV--these can be, and often are, read as postmodern.

But rather than pick apart at cultural examples, I want to take issue with a more central claim: "The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception." This is not an uncontroversial claim. Theorists like Fredric Jameson describe postmodernism as precisely a change in material conditions.

I don't have space to describe all of Jameson's arguments here, but I'd encourage anyone curious about the shift from modernism to postmodernism to look into them. They're more robust and convincing than this article, for sure.

</comment><comment><USER23> While I agree with most of their analysis, I acknowledge that this reads basically like a "Grumpy Old Postmodernist"

Something the OP doesn't dive into much but I found myself wondering is that the "pseudo-modern" label is artificial. It seems like an important aspect of the post-post-modern culture/philosophy is that it's uncoalesced -- no one starts/joins a successful movement of self conscious difference (haha or differance) from post modernism.

So it's left to the grumpy olds to start making names

</comment><comment><USER5> _" Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble."_

Frighteningly prescient.

</comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps people began seeing postmodernism's deconstruction of beauty, love, soul, and truth as too stark to endure.

</comment><comment><USER10> Postmodernism is the final philosophical analysis You cant dig deeper than the very language we use to philosophize with. Every attempt at undoing postmodernism will get you right back at the postmodern realization. So very much alive at least philosophically but we are also starting to realize this in other areas.

<comment><USER25> Or you can stop making philosophy an exercise in linguistic analysis. Language is the tool we use to ask questions with, not the things we are asking about.

<comment><USER10> But asking those questions bring you right back at defining them. We can ignore it just like we can ignore quantum physics talking about classical physics but that just mean we are ignoring them and reducing the discussion into a frame of reference which is exactly the point of postmodernism.

<comment><USER25> I don't think any interesting questions boil down to agreeing on a dictionary definition. Say you could get everyone to agree on the same definition for free will or consciousness. You're still left with the same questions about to what extent do we have defined free will and subjective experiences, which people will still disagree and debate on.

Unless you get people to agree on definitions that define the problem away, but then you're just going to be using a different definition to pose the question that came up, because it will keep coming up.

Language is just a tool to express ourselves. It's not the fabric of existence.

<comment><USER26> It's not about agreeing on some dictionary definition.

The exercise is semantic in the sense that it seeks to describe and then connect sets of concepts to sets of beliefs in certain contexts.

So in that sense, it's analytically deep. However what tends to happen is that most casual students get to a certain depth in PM, say undergraduate level, give up on the complexity and then throw their hands up and say "nothing is real so I can create my won world that you need to conform to." That's the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of abstract concepts degrade as they age.

My take on it is that they start as a sort of art. Name things. Get big abstract points across. Shift attention from one thing to another. Use a different perspective lens. Enlightenment era "rationalism," for example. When it's an eye opening perspective, we will adopt the whole system of thought.

Then, leaks in the abstraction start to become obvious. Does Hegelian reasoning (to get meta) _really_ have three distinct phases. What about these examples over here, that seem to have four or two.

If the abstraction/ideology has been built upon, and those ideas are now important to the integrity of subsequent ideas then, most likely, we'll try to fix the underlying theory. Generally, what we do is keep the labels, but change/augment their meaning. "Workers State" has an increasingly nuanced & technical meaning, depending on how long it's been since Marx said it. So does net neutrality. So does liberal democracy, rule of law, Agile... " _From now on, we 're doing Agile"_" has the exact opposite implications in 2018 then it did in 2003.

Postmodernism, as a word, has been at that stage for while. It's too much work patching the damn thing. It obscures more than it informs. Generally, instead of describing something using the word postmodernism (or one of its many associated terms) it will be easier and better to just explain things directly.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of > programmes, all 'texts', whose content and dynamics are invented or directed > by the participating viewer or listener

So, it's essentially gaming, right?

<comment><USER29> Good observation, gaming is absolutely a post-modern phenomenon. Any creative works with which audience actively engage and interact (rather than just observe)--and especially those that by necessity _require_ the audience's engagement, or blur the line between the creator and the audience--are by nature post-modern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden > age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity.

Gotta be kidding me.

Is there a clickbait algorithm that is luring writers to mythologize Derrida et al as titans of a bygone era in academia? Seriously-- other than the Wachowskis, name one important figure who was influenced by Baudrillard...

</comment><comment><USER31> "Modernity died at the gates of Auschwitz", which is the Lyotard quote that I usually bust out when trying to explain Postmodernism to undergrads. Even though it isn't entirely true. It probably died at Verdun and the Somme.

But the point is that the end result of the project of modernity had resulted in the development of the means of atrocity, of automatic mass death and holocaust, and the only sane move in that instance was to put it aside and move past it. Hence: "post".

Coupled with the burgeoning theories from physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty, and the rest, and the idea that perhaps we not on as solid a foundation as we thought, and the time was ripe for moving on to new ways of thinking about the world.</comment>


In North Dakota, Boom, Bust and Oil - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/travel/north-dakota-oil-boom.html

<comment><USER2> Nice article. The photos filled me with longing for my home state.

Whenever I read accounts of cross country trips people take to see America, a lot of times their only experience with the great plains is speeding across them on I-80 or I-90. This is too bad. I'd strongly recommend anyone embarking on a trip to find some interesting sounding landmarks or parks in the region, get off the beaten path, and go see them. The landmarks themselves may not be that impressive, but you'll get to experience an openness and seclusion that I've come to realize, as I've lived in bigger cities, very few people ever experience. The quaint little small towns dotting the prairie are interesting too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even if the oil and gas boom continues, it won't involve many people. Oil and gas wells, once producing, are unattended.

<comment><USER4> These are fracking sites, not traditional oil wells. They don't have water pipelines to them nor oil / gas pipelines away. They have quite a bit of traffic to and from.</comment></comment>


What ever happened to Wordstar? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-wordstar-2/ <comment><USER2> George R. R. Martin said he still uses it and one of the reasons he cited was that he types all his novels on a computer not connected to the Internet so he doesn't have to worry about hackers leaking his material and also because of all the names, places, etc. in the book being made up, it doesn't have spell check to keep interfering with his writing.(0)

(0) [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_r_martin_writes_on_dos_based_wordstar_4_0_software_from_the_1980s.html)

<comment><USER3> WordStar is popular with science fiction writers for more fundamental reasons. (Not because it doesn't have spell check or isn't connected to the internet.)

Wordstar treats the text like a long-hand manuscript. You can add notes to yourself like "fix this!" and deal with the edits later. Or, you can block copy large sections of text and have the computer keep a reference to it without having to "copy and paste" it immediately. I've seen George RR Martin write that he likes how easy it is to move large sections of text around in WordStar.

Here's how the SF writer Robert J. Sawyer describes it:

"... as a creative writer, I am convinced that the long-hand page is the better metaphor.

Consider: On a long-hand page, you can jump back and forth in your document with ease. You can put in bookmarks, either actual paper ones, or just fingers slipped into the middle of the manuscript stack. You can annotate the manuscript for yourself with comments like "Fix this!" or "Don't forget to check these facts" without there being any possibility of you missing them when you next work on the document. And you can mark a block, either by circling it with your pen, or by physically cutting it out, without necessarily having to do anything with it right away. The entire document is your workspace...

WordStar's ^Q (Quick cursor movement) and ^K (block) commands give me more of what I used to have when I wrote in longhand than any other product does. WordStar's powerful suite of cursor commands lets me fly all over my manuscript, without ever getting lost. That's because WordStar is constantly keeping track of where I've been and where I'm likely to want to go. ^QB will take me to the beginning of the marked block; ^QK will take me to the end; ^QV will take me to where the marked block was moved from; ^QP will take me to my previous cursor position. And, just as I used to juggle up to ten fingers inserted into various places in my paper manuscript, WordStar provides me with ten bookmarks, set with ^K0 through ^K9, and ten commands to jump to them, ^Q0 to ^Q9...

WordStar, with its long-hand-page metaphor, says, hey, do whatever you want whenever you want to. This is a good spot to mark the beginning of a block? Fine. What would you like to do next? Deal with the block? Continue writing? Use the thesaurus?

After another half hour of writing, I can say, ah hah!, this is where I want to end that block. And two hours later I can say, and this is where that block should go. I'm in control, not the program. That's clearly more powerful, more intuitive, and more flexible than any other method of text manipulation I've yet seen implemented in a word processor. That WordStar lets me have separate marked blocks in each of its editing windows multiplies that power substantially: imagine doing a cut and paste job between two versions of a paper document, but being told that you could only have one piece cut out at a time. Madness! Yet that's what WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and others would force you to do. (In WordStar 7.0, you can even, in essence, have two marked blocks per window, toggling between them with the "mark previous block" command, ^KU.)"

[http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm](http://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm)

<comment><USER4> Wow, it kind of sounds insane that we don't have multiple-copy paste by default now. Come to think, I can think of a bunch of times where I open up notepad to store a copy-paste.

<comment><USER5> I seem to remember that Windows had at one point something called "clipbook". I was under the impression at the time that it was about multi copy-paste, but I never figured out how it worked. Probably few people did.

<comment><USER6> MacOS back in the System 7 era (1990s) had a clipbook utility that shipped with the OS. MacOS had generally better copy and paste support in general though, since it could handle virtually any file format the computer could handle. Text, audio, pictures, even video were all valid in the cut buffer.

<comment><USER7> Windows has had clipboard format negotiation since the beginning. When an application copies data into the clipboard, it can do so in multiple formats. Each format can be rendered either eagerly or lazily by the application putting data into the clipboard.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms649051\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

Applications that wish to get data from the clipboard can then enumerate the available formats and select the format that matches what they can use.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms649051\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[http://www.mschaef.com/blog/tech/excel/what_is_in_your_clipb...](http://www.mschaef.com/blog/tech/excel/what_is_in_your_clipboard.txt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wordstar was good stuff! Between Wordstar and MultiWrite we sold hundreds of Kaypro machines bundled with loud as hell daisy wheel printers to my fellow college classmates. Unless they lived alone almost everyone returned a day or two later for the sound proofed printer enclosure. Why daisy wheel printers? At the time our professors refused to take dot matrix printouts for class assignments or papers; it took a couple of years for Epson's higher print density heads to appear and produce "good enough" output.

More amusingly - WordStar inspired a slew of -star knockoffs including one for farm management called DirtStar. Urban Dictionary has a very different definition for that word today.

At least when I was selling personal computers out of a MicroAge what slowly strangled WordStar sales was IBM DisplayWrite and Word Perfect both of which served the legal community much better. Microsoft Word and Apple's MacWrite didn't help either. And to a much lesser degree IBM's choice of swapping the control and shift keys made WordStar's navigation unnatural. You either had to adapt or order a special keyboard with CTRL back where it belonged. I've never forgiven them for that change. (Damn you, IBM! :shakes fist:)

<comment><USER9> I had to suffer through DisplayWrite at one job. What a horror. Word Perfect was .. nearly perfect. If only they had made the transition to Windows faster/better they'd still be a major force in the market.

<comment><USER8> DisplayWrite had a lot of traction because of IBM systems that came before it. The idea of running it on an IBM PC and later a clone was very appealing to people leasing IBM gear. I guess it's all relative.

Word Perfect's tutorials were so good my non-computer-literate wife taught herself to use it in the space of a couple of days. It was pretty darn good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The WordStar mailing list at YahooGroups is still (occasionally) active, but shrinking, as many members are getting rather elderly...

A recurrent topic is how to keep the software working on the latest versions of Windows. Science fiction author Robert Sawyer recently posted definitive instructions: [http://sfwriter.com/ws-vdos.htm](http://sfwriter.com/ws- vdos.htm)

</comment><comment><USER11> There is a chapter on WordStar in "In Search of Stupidity" by Merrill Chapman.

In it Chapman says that this was due to internal and external confusion and competition between WordStar and Wordstar2000.

The book is a great read by the way.

<comment><USER12> Ditto, I really recommend this book. Made me understand 80's software world a lot more, and especially not see Microsoft as being as evil as I liked to believe it was; merely the one who survived among a lot of companies doing really shady stuff.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't make ms less evil. It should clue you in that all (big) companies are evil.

<comment><USER14> I'm convinced "bigness" in any form, is evil. Big government, big corporation, big lobbying groups, big egos.

<comment><USER7> IMO, it's probably more accurate to say that big entities are often a more effective tool for evil than small entities. Of course, it's also probably accurate to say that big entities are often a more effective tool for good than small entities.

<comment><USER15> This is probably too much of a tangent on which to take this discussion, but the fact that big entities are a tool for evil might give rise to the further question: so why are there invariably people in big institutions who will try to use them as such tools? I would suspect that it such people exist in all institutions, almost regardless of size, but that there will simply be more of them in a bigger institution, and that they are more likely to be able to hide their wrongdoing from the sight of those who would promote a more idealistic mission (or else that they gain sufficient control of the culture that they have no need to hide).

<comment><USER7> You're right... this is a tangent, and I've been debating whether or not to respond for that reason. That said, a couple thoughts.

First: you focused on the 'evil' part of my statement at the exclusion of the 'good'. Is this intentional? I don't think it's possible to have a reasonable discussion if you exclude half of the 'domain'.

I don't really think that people within large corporations have a higher likelihood of intent to do evil than people within small corporations. However, given that a larger entity is a more effective way to effect change, I do think that both evil-doers and good-doers can be more evident in large organizations. There's also more of a network effect, etc. An evil-doer in a large corporation is more likely to have a spectacular impact and in a small. (ie: the collapse of Enron vs the collapse of the local propane shop.)

Coming back around to the good, I also think that modern civilization owes its continued existence to entities that are larger than we might be comfortable with. Providing energy, etc. for 7B people is just too big a problem to leave in the hands of something like a vast number of local propane shops, even if a bunch of local propane shops are somehow 'safer'. It's a lack of effectiveness that makes those shops safer and it's the same lack of effectiveness that makes those shops less likely to be able to address large-scale problems.

<comment><USER15> > You're right... this is a tangent, and I've been debating whether or not to > respond for that reason. That said, a couple thoughts.

Hmm. You bring up good points, which I don't want to ignore, but I also don't want to be responsible for prolonging the tangent indefinitely. Let's say that I'll say my piece, and then you say yours if you like, and then we'll leave it at that, no matter how good your response is. :-)

> First: you focused on the 'evil' part of my statement at the exclusion of > the 'good'. Is this intentional? I don't think it's possible to have a > reasonable discussion if you exclude half of the 'domain'.

No, it was not intentional _per se_ ; it's just that the discussion prior to your post had been about evil, and that's what was on my mind.

> I don't really think that people within large corporations have a higher > likelihood of intent to do evil than people within small corporations.

I _think_ that this is pretty close to what I was trying to say here:

> I would suspect that it such people exist in all institutions, almost > regardless of size, but that there will simply be more of them in a bigger > institution ….

I meant to, but did not clearly, emphasise that I was _not_ imputing a higher likelihood of evil to members of a bigger organisation; rather, it is just that the same probability in a larger sample space will produce more hits (of evildoers as well as "gooddoers").

> An evil-doer in a large corporation is more likely to have a spectacular > impact [than] in a small.

I thought that I'd said something like this, but I find on reading my post that the closest I got was this:

> they are more likely to be able to hide their wrongdoing from the sight of > those who would promote a more idealistic mission ….

Your way of putting it is better.

> Coming back around to the good, I also think that modern civilization owes > its continued existence to entities that are larger than we might be > comfortable with.

This is an interesting point, and probably true, although (largely out of inherent bias) I have a problem thinking of a large organisation as 'good'. I guess my belief is that people are basically selfish (evil is too strong), and that this selfishness in a large organisation is likely to act against me (at least if I don't belong to the organisation); and that the only principle that I give a chance against basic selfishness is personal ties and bonds, which are more likely to inform the actions of a small than of a large organisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Offtopic, I know one person who still uses Wordstar heavily. And I hope he keeps using it :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg)

<comment><USER17> I know someone who still uses LocoScript. Thankfully the PC version rather than the Amstrad PCW version. Old word processors take a long time to die.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoScript)

<comment><USER18> Most authors I've met, once they get on a roll in writing they stick with whatever is working with them from manual typewriter, Commodore 64, or DOS box - if its making em selling books - why risk change.

<comment><USER19> You see this across all the creative fields… tools that are superior to Photoshop and Illustrator have cropped up countless times, but I've never met a photographer or graphic designer who could move beyond whatever it was he used in college. It's a miracle that InDesign even managed to usurp Quark X-Press…

<comment><USER20> A lot of this is that these "superior" tools usually try to implement about 50% of the dinosaur's features. For people who don't use that last arcane 50% they're fine - but for people who do, they're useless.

That said the past few releases of Illustrator have been a mess and I've been getting really tempted to try and see if the latest version of Affinity Design can do all the Illustrator things that I've shaped my workflow around for the last decade. But I feel like if I'm going to spend the time to learn a new tool I'd really rather learn one that's going to open up new places, rather than just take me to the same place in a different way. Which is why I have Blender open in another window right now.

InDesign usurped Quark for a couple of reasons: everyone hated Quark, even people who used it on a daily basis, and Quark took forever to move from MacOS to OSX. That gap offered people a huge excuse to spend some time learning a new tool that held out a hope of sucking less.

<comment><USER21> Don't forget that Quark was also copy-protection mad and insisted on things like stupid hardware dongles if you wanted to actually use the software you bought from them. Forcing paying customers to jump through flaming hoops to use your products is a great way to turn them into ex-customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This program was fantastic, given the limitations of the computers at the time.

         WordStar ran well
         on a 4 MHz Z80 computer
         with 64K bytes of memory.

Go ahead, read that sentence again!

WordStar would try to update its (sort of WYSIWYG) screen display while you were typing, but it would often lag. That was because many computers were connected not to an internal video display card, but to an external terminal via an RS-232 serial interface running at 19,200 baud (1,920 characters per second). Fortunately the display output was as ASCII characters, not bitmapped, so that lessened the processing requirements quite a bit.

Whenever WordStar detected that its screen rendering was lagging behind the input typing, it would very cleverly "skip ahead" in the rendering. The result was that the computer felt quite responsive at all times.

<comment><USER23> 64K! Pah!

I've got stylesheets larger than that. :|

(oh god where have we gone wrong)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Note that those looking for a WordStar/TurboC-like experience these days can find solace in JOE: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor)

<comment><USER25> Well, that brings back memories.

Before I learned vim, JOE was my preferred editor. Back in the day, vim intimidated me too much for me to try to learn it, but nano felt horribly primitive and featureless. JOE struck the perfect balance for me. Of course, eventually I sucked it up and learned vim, and now it's my preferred editor, but JOE will always have a special place in my heart.

I'd recommend JOE to anyone who wants something that's easy to use but doesn't want something totally primitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Wordstar was the product that invented the "what you see is what you get" > notion later to be dubbed WYSIWYG

TECO Emacs was already as WYSIWYG than WordStar years previously, to say nothing of Bravo and other such PARC work from the early 1970s.

> It invented numerous features including overlays, later to develop into > DLL's.

Overlays date from at least the 1960s; Fred Brooks (I think? Unless it was Plauger?) famously lamented that the OS/360 linker had history's best overlay support, at exactly the moment that the advent of paged virtual memory made overlays obsolete.

WordStar's UI certainly was very influential.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for mentioning Xerox PARC's Bravo editor. This 1974 editor was the first WYSIWYG editor and supported multiple, proportionally-spaced fonts. If you look at the screenshots, Wordstar (1979) was character-based so I don't see how it could be called WYSIWYG.

The article says: "All modern word processors owe their existence to Wordstar". That's just nonsense, since the Bravo editor was written by Charles Simonyi, who then wrote Word. It would be more accurate to say that all modern word processors owe their existence to Bravo.

<comment><USER26> If you were printing on a fixed-pitch character-based printer (like most dot- matrix and daisy-wheel or golf-ball "letter-quality" printers of the time) then what you saw on the screen in WordStar was very much like what you would get on the printer, although WS did support bold and underline, which typical terminals didn't. Also the terminals were usually white (or green, or amber) on black, while the printers were invariably black on white.

Do you know how far back screen editing (WordStar-style "WYSIWYG") in TECO goes? I'm pretty sure DEC TECO didn't have screen editing even in the late 1970s, and CP/M ED certainly didn't, which I am guessing means MIT TECO didn't have it at the point that DEC forked it. But it wouldn't be very surprising to me if MIT TECO had screen editing before 1974.

[http://multicians.org/mepap.html](http://multicians.org/mepap.html) seems to suggest that MIT TECO had screen editing by 1971:

> An implementation of TECO (a version of which is the standard DEC editor) > was built on Multics in 1971. This version was derived from the original > TECO implementation, on the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10 [TECDOC]. Unlike the latter, > Multics TECO has no display support, and does not have the complex control- > structure constructs of the AI Lab editor.

You will note, though, that even with screen editing support, TECO remained shamelessly command-oriented and modeful until the adoption of "Control R mode" in the late 1970s, presumably inspired by Bravo's less-modal interface. (I hesitate to say "modeless," though it was close.)

I think "the Bravo editor was written by Charles Simonyi" is at best oversimplified. One version of the Bravo manual says, "Bravo was designed by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, and implemented mainly by Tom Malloy, with substantial contributions from Carol Hankins, Greg Kusnick, Kate Rosenbloom, and Bob Shur." I don't think Simonyi wrote much of Word either, except in the sense that Reagan "wrote" Peggy Noonan's speeches; in _Programmers at Work_ he talked about his process and about Tom Malloy: [https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at- work-...](https://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/programmers-at-work-charles- simonyi/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm thinking I don't have all my facts straight with this question, but:

A really successful bookstore in my town has been using a networked DOS POS system since as long as they've had POS software. I asked about it once, liking the look of the old monitors and antiquated user interface, and I thought they called it Wordstar. They gave me some more details like how there is still one support company that will actually help them from time to time when they need something looked into. Mostly saying that they've never moved on because it does (almost) exactly what they need.

But now I'm thinking I either a) misheard them, or b) I'm just confusing myself right now because the wording was similar.

Has Wordstar been used in addition to word processing for custom solutions/software?

edit: giving it some more thought, I'm now wondering if they were using Wordstar or otherwise for inventory purposes only, and using ANOTHER piece of software for the actual sales.

edit: looks like I am very possibly thinking of [http://www.wordstock.com/o_view.html](http://www.wordstock.com/o_view.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> I remember sitting with John Dvorak at his private party in the Sands at Comdex in Vegas. John was buying and we got very very drunk. The occasion was a wake for the obvious demise of Wordstar, which we both preferred. Word Perfect basically out marketed Wordstar by giving away tens of thousands of demo copies at Comdex and Soft-Sell. Word Perfect had a half-assed WYSIWYG but John called it WISHYWYG (you wish what what you see is what you get). The doomed Wordstar was a better product in almost all respects, but Word Perfect was able to market them out of business.

</comment><comment><USER30> >In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby's output as 42-man years.*

That effectively makes Barnaby 42*3 or 126 times more productive than a normal programmer!

<comment><USER31> IF HR departments find this out, they will now stop looking for 10x programmers and start looking for 126x programmers.

<comment><USER32> Too bad most HR people are 0.003x recruiters and at maximum 0.9x standard form emailers, otherwise they might actually find what they're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One thing this article doesn't mention is "executive word processors".

These were cut down versions of full word processors, because executives were not expected to have spent time learning the full package.

Here's an article from 1988 comparing a bunch of different PC word processors: [http://jvlone.com/computerpub/InfoWorld/IW_1988-09-26_x- x_Ex...](http://jvlone.com/computerpub/InfoWorld/IW_1988-09-26_x- x_ExecutiveWordProcessors.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER33> I can imagine adding "undo" to a 137,000 line assembly application was not easy.

<comment><USER34> I've often been at the start of a project and campaigned to have undo support baked in at the start. To me, it's not one of those features you should leave until when it's needed, as it affects the design of the entire system.

I've never managed to persuade product owners to bake it in, though - and so far every time I've pleaded to do so, they've ended up asking for it later (after swearing they'd never do so at project start).

I've considered picking designs that support undo without getting explicit approval to do so, but there's an additional complexity involved that means juniors will raise questions about the design and eventually you would have to admit 'so we can support undo', so that's not wise!

<comment> david-given I added Undo support to WordGrinder after the fact (<plug> [http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/](http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/) </plug>). Wasn't easy.

WordGrinder's data model is that a document is a Lua table (== array) of paragraphs; each paragraph is a table of words; each word is a string. This means that the data structures are all reasonably small in most common use so I can get away with O(n) insertion within them.

What I did for undo support was that I made paragraphs and words immutable; adding a word to a paragraph actually copied the paragraph, with the new one referring to the same words that were in the old one, plus the new word. Again, all quite cheap because the structures were small. But this means that I can now copy the entire _document_ for each level in the undo stack, because I since paragraphs are immutable I can share them across multiple levels in the undo stack.

Surprisingly, it worked.

The tl;dr here is: immutable data structures are awesome, and I should totally have designed in undo right at the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Site HN'ed. Here's the cached version - [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L7tvlsg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L7tvlsgf8EsJ:www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever- happened-to-wordstar-2/+&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de)

</comment><comment><USER36> "Eventually Word Perfect rose to the top based on its superior support program"

Wordstar 2000 wasn't bad, and was far more accessible than Wordperfect that had a distinctly unfriendly learning curve for non techies. Many never took to Wordperfect as you had to learn its codes and it wasn't even WYSIWYG. Even when it became so it was grudgingly and only sort-of.

Wordstar floundered around for a decade seemingly with no idea where they were going. That they survived at all through that period is surprising and speaks of the success of the earlier product.

</comment><comment><USER37> Keyboards got cursor keys and mice, so the Wordstar diamond wasn't as great/needed anymore for the general user.

It has its fanbase, but then again, a lot of dead word processors do. Especially amongst journalists, where Amiga word processors and XyWrite still are being kept alive artificially...

<comment><USER38> Amiga word processors? Why and which ones?

Given that the Amiga never got a strong hold in media outlets unless it was video related, the statement "especially amongst journalists" needs some backing.

Back in the day, even Amiga magazine weren't done on the Amiga. AFAIK, most used what the industry used (that is, Macs).

<comment><USER37> I was mostly using it as an example for something quite rare and seemingly weird, even compared to WordStar or WordPerfect. If your newspaper, magazine or website uses some kind of CMS that's based on text files, any old editor or word processor would do. It's not like they'd accept the native formats of WordStar/XyWrite, so once you're down to .txt, anything goes (if UTF-8 is mandatory, some more tech savviness might be required).

I think that an Amiga was explicitly mentioned in an old article about Germany's heise publishing house (mostly known for tech publications, so maybe a bit more accepting in that regard). Germany also had a pretty large Amiga fanbase, so that might bias things. (And I remember Ataris being quite popular in publishing, too)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It was murdered by VC's and Microsoft Word ate the remains.

<comment><USER6> Also, the followup product had some pain in the ass DRM system and above reasonable price point. The exact kind of innovations you start to see when the company stops caring about making the best product possible and instead wastes a lot of time and energy fighting pirates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Wordstar 2000 was made by Edward Jong, who has since moved on to create his own graph programming language, Beads:

[http://www.e-dejong.com/the-beads-project/](http://www.e-dejong.com/the- beads-project/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I used to use Wordstar a lot in young age. There was another software I used to use, which would let you create tables by hand, and let you fill data in it. For the life of me, I can't recall the name of that software. Unlike today's HTML tables, things were really WYSIWYG back then, between your monitor and the dot matrix printer.

<comment><USER42> I think I used that software too. I don't remember the name either. It was sold as a database program (those were early days for relational) and they tried to present a database as tables in WYSIWYG. So everything was filling-in graphical tables and then defining operations on them (in some customized BASIC.) Actually, I remember that program as being very popular at the time. I seem to remember that they eventually abandoned the "graphical relational database" and became more focused on the graphical creation of the reports produced.

<comment><USER43> Was it Reflex? Originally sold by Analytica and later aquired by Borland.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Reflex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Reflex)

<comment><USER42> I don't think it was Reflex...I think I was still on CPM. It seems like an early precursor to that program though. Honestly, my memory is pretty fuzzy - it wasn't much of a database program, it mostly just reorganized the tables in some simple ways (I remember wondering if the program's authors really understood relational. They seemed to be mostly just creating tables and doing a few operations. Jumping on the relational buzzword.) It was impressive to see it build boxes though - in those days, that was an accomplishment.

<comment><USER41> Yes, agree. Do you recall orange colored interface? That's the only thing I recall, beyond creating tables/boxes and filling in the data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checking: was the orange interface a monochrome, amber, screen?

It's surprisingly hard to search for this kind of stuff.

I had a go, but not successfully.

I did find this list of software, which might trigger a memory?

Cardfile,

pfs:file,

QuickFile,

PC File[1],

4th Dimension,

Paradox,

dBase,

Filemaker,

foxpro,

Nutshell,

Vulcan,

[http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/allan/eBook13.pdf](http://www.retrocomputing.net/info/allan/eBook13.pdf)

[http://jeanne-sewell.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/history-of- datab...](http://jeanne-sewell.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/history-of-database- software.html)

<comment><USER42> None of those names sound right to me. Back in those days someone could write some software, put it on a floppy, xerox some instructions and put it all into a big plastic sandwich bag. Our computer store would then put it on a shelf to sell. That was how it was done back then. I remember calling a couple of companies and talking directly to the developer. Most of the products you mention came much later. It wouldn't surprise me if there isn't any information about those early products - except among a few old timers on blogs like this one. And some products were strictly regional - depending on which computer stores were visited by the developer. But I appreciate your effort to help the OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I learnt it in high school on a counterfeit Apple ][ with an 80-column display card. (Maybe it ran CP/M? My memory is hazy.) I had to type up the school's Prize-Giving Day program. When I got to college (late 1980s) and got my first programming job on campus, I copped a grad student's .emacs file which made Emacs behave like WordStar. I used it all the way through to my postdoc, modifying the necessary major modes to not conflict with WS bindings. I ran into the author of that .emacs file, but he had moved on to Jove, by then.

The upside of using WordStar bindings was that, as a de facto sysadmin in various academic departments and labs, I could never answer peoples' questions about Emacs.

A more complete history is here: [http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar- history](http://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history)

<comment><USER45> Apple ][s could run CP/M if outfitted with an expansion card sold by Microsoft: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-80_SoftCard)

A friend of mine had that card specifically so he could run WordStar on his Apple; I'm certain he was not alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Dvorak's comment on piracy stands out -- it was a _useful_ marketing model:

 _And despite complaints by the company and others, people wanted software they could copy and use on more than one machine. During this era piracy sold software and created market share. People would use a bootleg copy of Wordstar and eventually buy a copy. Wordstar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies don't like to admit to this as a possibility.)_

Bill Gates somewhat famously _did_ admit this talking of piracy of Windows especially in East Asia -- he'd much rather a pirated copy of Windows was running than a legal copy of GNU/Linux.

</comment><comment><USER47> "It invented numerous features including overlays, later to develop into DLL's. It was the first product with dynamic pagination and even help levels among other new features. All modern word processors owe their existence to Wordstar — perhaps one of the greatest single software efforts in the history of computing."

I imagine he never saw the word processors developed at Xerox PARC, nor their OSes dynamic loading capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER48> I have a lot to thank the humble and useful Wordstar for.

In college, I worked at a law firm and they were still using wordstar as well as wordperfect. Wordstar had this interesting markup that I quickly learned, and it was faster to use than moving around the screen with a mouse. Later on when I first viewed source on a web page, the markup looked quite familiar.

My new career as a web developer had begun.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wordstar had a sort of vim-like quality to it, where you could type your way with ease and power without using a mouse.

</comment><comment><USER50> In today's startup culture, Rob Barnaby would probably have been a co-founder instead of a technical lead. With an ownership stake in the company, perhaps he would have taken the initiative and re-written Wordstar in a high-level language.

</comment><comment><USER51> I was more interested in the Barnaby fellow than the businessman's boring story.

</comment><comment><USER52> It sounds like the underlying problem was that the original, elegant software implementation quickly turned into a ball of mud when other programmers started working on it. Wouldn't happen nowadays, of course.

</comment><comment><USER53> Talk about productivity

"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby's output as 42-man years."

</comment><comment><USER54> My Apple II had a CP/M coprocessor card (manufactured by Microsoft) just so we could run Wordstar.

</comment><comment><USER55> Whatever happened to Rob Barnaby?

<comment><USER56> A few interviews here: [http://www.digibarn.com/stories/wordstar-rob- barnaby/](http://www.digibarn.com/stories/wordstar-rob-barnaby/)

<comment><USER55> Thanks. Another source seems to be his linked in page. He started investing in real estate and married his partner. Good for him!

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob- barnaby-01680389](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-barnaby-01680389)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> IIRC, Word Perfect was a peer/competitor to Word Star back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER58> Anybody remember ChiWriter? :)

<comment><USER59> Oh yes. Wrote my diploma thesis in it, on a Schneider/Amstrad PC with an EGA greyscale screen. At the time no other word processor had comparable WYSIWYG formula editing support. Almost three decades have passed but I can still hear the sweet sound of the matrix printer at 4 am the night before the deadline. Those were the days...

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> ^KD

</comment><comment><USER61> We changed the syntax and now it's called Markdown.

<comment><USER62> For all people are downvoting, I think you're right, the workflow of editing in Markdown and rendering to text is pretty similar. Something like Pandoc that extends raw Markdown gives you control codes that easily match and exceed what WordStar could do. Well, except comments, those are a bit annoying. But you can add them as inline footnotes which does simplify checking whether you've missed any.

<comment><USER63> You can use html comments to leave them

<!-- -->

<comment><USER62> Except those get transplanted into the output for all to read if they can view source.

<comment><USER46> Pre-pass through a sed, awk, perl, etc., filter to remove them. Make that part of your document build.

If you're concerned.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The SIM Hijackers - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqax3/hackers-sim-swapping-steal-phone-numbers-instagram-bitcoin <comment><USER2> Please everyone: Stop allowing sms as 2 factor authentication. The normal readers of Hacker News are in a special position to prevent this.

Please promote U2F with TOTP backup.

<comment><USER3> Having helped people set up 2-factor auth, I find that SMS is a reasonable mitigation for people may find U2F and other measures to be intimidating enough to not try. That is, the vulnerability introduced via SMS is at least a magnitude less compared to 1-factor-auth of email/password. The pragmatic optimist in me thinks that it's more likely that we'll see phone companies meaningfully harden their customer auth processes, because it's easiest to focus public blame/scrutiny on them for the time being.

<comment><USER4> The same way you'd think they'd be interested in securing basebands from intelligence agencies.

Buuuut, they don't. My suspicion? The Kingmakers at the tres letras don't allow it.

Hell, they steal SIM encryption keys, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel impervious to these hacks since my phone operator doesn't have an English support line, and even if you used a real-time translation service, their toll-free number doesn't work from VoIP or international phones. The one time poor support is actually a good thing?

<comment><USER3> Seems too much like security through obscurity? If their customer service is bad, it may also be untested -- e.g. the company may have not even thought of having policies and training that mitigate social engineering.</comment></comment>


Twitter Adds Warning Label for Offensive Political Tweets - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/736668003/twitter-adds-warning-label-for-offensive-political-tweets <comment><USER2> I'm not in favor of Twitter "policing and protecting" us. If politicians say or do stupid things, it should affect their credibility and long-term electability. We don't need an arbitrator to hide it or make it disappear so it doesn't "hurt" our feelings.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Defining public interest on Twitter" from the company itself on this coming change:

[https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicinterest.html)</comment>


CUPS License Change Coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.cups.org/blog/2017-11-07-cups-license-change.html <comment><USER2> The OpenStreetMap project changed the licence of the data a few years ago (for Complicated Reasons™). People had to be contacted and ask to relicence their data, and eventually some data had to be deleted.

There is now a Contributor Terms¹ which governs how the licence can be changed. It requires a two thirds majority of active contributors (at least one change in at least 3 of the last 12 months, a working email address and replies to an email within 3 weeks) to approve a change to an "other free and open licence".

That's a good way to change licences like that.

[1] [https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Term...](https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Terms)

<comment><USER3> Good, but IMO far from watertight. They do not define what "free" and "open" mean. Presumably this refers to Free Software and Open Source licenses, but data isn't software, so it cannot fully mean that. Also, I'm not sure all contributors would be happy if they moved to a license analogous to the GPL (that would mean users combining openStreetMap data with their own data would have to release their data under a similar license)

As it stands, worst-case, the data can, in theory, get locked up in two steps. Step one would move to a "free and open" license that doesn't include the requirement to keep the license "free and open", step two would take it commercial.

Also, reading that license for corner cases, what is the legal meaning of "worldwide"? Would it be legal to use OpenStreetMap data from orbit? From a moon observatory? From Mars?

<comment><USER4> 1\. Open Definition, [http://opendefinition.org/](http://opendefinition.org/)

2\. OSM already has a sharealike licence, albeit more akin to LGPL than GPL

3\. No, you misunderstand entirely. The Contributor Terms and the current choice of licence (the Open Database Licence) are separate. Even if OSM changes licence, the same Contributor Terms still apply, and those continue to mandate a free and open licence. There is no way to move to a non-open licence without breaking the terms under which every mapper has agreed to contribute their data.

(Even if you did: why? The OSM Foundation is intentionally light - it's a million miles away from the Wikimedia Foundation. Its assets are the domain name and trademark, a very small amount of hardware, and one part-time staff member. You could fork OSM trivially if the Foundation decided to "close the dataset", i.e. hosted a non-open dataset on openstreetmap.org.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another day, another reason to never sign a CLA unless it _explicitly_ states what licenses your code can be relicensed as. I really wish more people used the FSF CLA, which effectively states that they will not relicense your code under a license that isn't copyleft[1].

[1]: [https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/29160.html?thread=1094632](https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/29160.html?thread=1094632)

<comment><USER6> Or just never sign a CLA. Can't relicense my code? That's a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER5> There are valid reasons to sign a CLA, though they are vary rare. I believe the FSF CLA is the only one I would ever feel confident signing (because it very strongly restricts what they can do) -- mainly because it means that the FSF has a much stronger case (legally speaking) if it decides to file a copyright suit against an alleged infringement of the work. From my (not-an- American-and-definitely-not-a-lawyer) understanding, American copyright suits are much stronger if you hold a majority copyright over a work rather than only having a very small set of contributions you own.

But really, licensing things under GPLvX-or-later is the best way of handling licensing updates with many contributors.

<comment><USER7> For example, one possible reason to sign a CLA is if you want to contribute, and the repository owner will not allow you to do so otherwise. It may be that you value contributing more highly than what license later versions of the code use. At least for me, that would typically be the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those of you that are surprised that this is possible, "In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code." (from Wikipedia)

<comment><USER9> Not only that. If I remember correctly, contributors also had to sign a contributor agreement which gave ownership of the code to the project.

If they didn't, I guess they would have had to ask every contributor if they were ok with a license change.

<comment><USER10> or throw out their code i guess.

<comment><USER11> Which is a tough dilemma when you work on something for the love of it. Your work on code for it to be used, but if someone bullies you with something like : change your license or get lost, well, it's a tough decision.

Now, in this case, CUPS on Apple product is not the only use of CUPS, but being able to claim your software runs in Apple product is certainly a nice to have.

<comment><USER12> If I own something and I want to control the term of how it's used, that's not bullying. Isn't that exactly what licensing is all about in the first place? If that's 'bullying' then every OSS project with a license is also bullying...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title here suggests the license was GPLv2 previously. It was GPLv2 and proprietary relicensing.

That is, printer vendors were already able to not comply with the GPL when a proprietary license from Apple applied.

<comment><USER14> Indeed, the old license [1] was not pure GPLv2, but a variant of GPLv2 with additional exceptions for Apple operating systems, allowing others to develop proprietary printer drivers for Apple operating systems. It even covered the use of the example code for this purpose without the need to release the source code of the resulting driver based on that.

[1] [https://github.com/apple/cups/blob/branch-2.2/LICENSE.txt](https://github.com/apple/cups/blob/branch-2.2/LICENSE.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm just glad Apple still uses CUPS. The CUPS web interface provides a bit more power over System Preferences

<comment><USER16> There's a web interface?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, it's great for setting stuff like printing defaults so you don't have to set the print quality or page size over and over again (unless I'm missing an obvious way to do it in System Preferences?).

<comment><USER18> I have my printer added multiple times with different default configurations; eg b&w-draft-printer, colour-photo-printer; it's much easier than messing with settings all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the Apache license, and I'm sure some projects such as the BSDs will be happy about the change, but is there an explanation of why this change came to be, and why now?

</comment><comment><USER20> I just hope they will not start to have an _internal_ branch and slowly stop pushing improvements back into the mainline. This is the only point where the Apache license change could negatively affect all the users.

<comment><USER21> I don't see any difference between GPL or Apache in this case.

Since they apparently have the full copyright on the code (otherwise they wouldn't be able to make the license change in the first place), they can do whatever they want with the code, no matter which license they offer to others.

Moreover, even if they don't have the full copyright, the GPL already allows for having an "internal" branch - as long as it is really internal. Also you, privately, can use and change the code as you want, without any obligation to publish anything. The GPL rules are designed to only apply once you give the modified code (source or binary) to others.

<comment><USER9> > Moreover, even if they don't have the full copyright, the GPL already allows > for having an "internal" branch - as long as it is really internal. Also > you, privately, can use and change the code as you want, without any > obligation to publish anything. The GPL rules are designed to only apply > once you give the modified code (source or binary) to others.

Since Apple actually _does_ redistribute the binaries this second point is moot. But the first part is spot on. It's their code, they can do whatever they want. I have to admit I'm not even sure why they did change licence.

<comment><USER22> > I have to admit I'm not even sure why they did change licence.

See previous discussion on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721) , Apple has a history of it.

I think a lot of companies view it as a liability regardless of whether or not it actually is due to a lot of the legality of copy-left licenses being pretty untested in court, as well as just generally a liability with little advantage (Apple probably doesn't care about external contributions to CUPS). I don't feel like switching CUPS to Apache has any real advantage to Apple practically, apart from the GPL makes them nervous. I guess I could see why they wouldn't want it in other places, but surely CUPS doesn't have much in the way of secret sauce IP.

<comment><USER23> I thought Apple also dislikes the GPL because it forced them to open source the original implementation of Objective-C. (I don't remember where I heard this... something about the origins of llvm probably.)

<comment><USER24> Here's Stallman's recollection of what happened:

>The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

>What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.

>So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL.

>The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free.

[http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...](http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why- CLISP-is-under-GPL)

I think this highlights a few important things:

1) there's significant room for interpretation of what a license means

2) what lawyers and courts think words mean can be quite different from what technologists think

Also, a lot of interactions are mediated by chances of a lawsuit. So if you're a party that is generally disliked by the Free Software folks, like Apple, there's significantly more risk, for identical uses, than a company like Google, which is more popular. There's room for interpretation of what actions mean, and if somebody is more likely to think that you're a nefarious actor, there's a high risk.

I don't blame Apple for switching from GPL to licenses that I consider to be more "free" than the "Free" software licenses. When I read the philosophy pages of the FSF, I come away disagreeing vehemently with their arguments, and often simply unable to understand why people find those documents convincing for anything.

<comment><USER22> > When I read the philosophy pages of the FSF, I come away disagreeing > vehemently with their arguments, and often simply unable to understand why > people find those documents convincing for anything.

I mean, there's one thing that is obviously appealing (to a developer, benefits to a user are distinct) - "you can't use my code without giving back." Apple probably doesn't care whether or not you give back, but on the other hand a small developer (like me) often does.

From a developer's point of view I think of GPL not in terms of freedom to do whatever you want, but instead of protecting the developer's wishes about what people do with their software (roughly). When I choose to license something with GPL it's not because I want people to take it and do whatever, it's because I only want people to use it if they are going to be a good citizen.

<comment><USER24> As a developer, I care a _lot_ more about getting improvements back. GPL is massively beneficial from that orientation. That's why some commercial companies prefer GPL, because the developer of code gets stuff back.

As a user, I care a _lot_ less for GPL, because now I have to publish my changes if I choose to distribute binaries. If I'm a user and I have MIT or BSD code, as a user I have a lot more freedom to do what I want with MIT code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've always wanted to pull code out of this project to make a simple utility or script that would print a PDF from the command line without needing to set up printers or run a daemon. If I have access to an IP address or a USB port as a user, I want to be able to print using a self contained utility. Does anything exist like this, and if not, is this now the right time (as I typically develop everything with Apache/BSD/MIT licenses.)

<comment><USER26> You should be able to do it with foomatic: [https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openprinting/database/nospo...](https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/openprinting/database/nospoolerdocumentation)

(The prologue talks about non-network printing, but an example below uses nc to talk to a remote printer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Since the Apache 2.0 license is incompatible with GPLv2 [1], will that cause problems in projects depending on CUPS?

[1] [https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL- compatibility.html](https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html)

<comment><USER28> Apache-licensed code can be used in GPL projects. Just not the other way around (as noted in your link).

[ADDED: WRT GPLv2 specifically, the quote from the link is: "the FSF has never considered the Apache License to be compatible with GPL version 2, citing the patent termination and indemnification provisions as restrictions not present in the older GPL license." However, note that the quote specifically says that it's the FSF's opinion.]

<comment><USER29> GPLv3 code can incorporate Apache 2.0 code, but GPLv2 code cannot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15655581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15655581)

<comment><USER31> Two URLs one CUPS

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's the commit:

[https://github.com/apple/cups/commit/e310189747c161ac6e737ee...](https://github.com/apple/cups/commit/e310189747c161ac6e737eedadf8f45d11bf2253)

</comment><comment><USER33> Does this mean that the *BSDs can adopt CUPS now?

<comment><USER9> Couldn't they before? I'm pretty sure there's plenty of GPL code in the *BSDs (I'm sure there's emacs in FreeBSD's ports). Am I missing something obvious?

<comment><USER34> They strongly prefer to avoid GPL code as much as possible in the core system, and have on occasion gone to great lengths to use a non-GPL alternative. I haven't used FreeBSD in a long time, but as I recall ports are considered extra software, not part of the FreeBSD OS.

<comment><USER35> CUPS will stay in ports anyway, I really doubt anyone even wants it in base

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be worthwhile for Apple to reconsider their strategy regarding the GPL and open-sourcing only a part of their system. If they decided to be more open about macOS development, they might have spared their users a lot of unpleasant experiences and avoided many recent complaints.

<comment><USER37> macOS has much less unpleasant experiences than e.g. each new Ubuntu version brings, with its incompatibilities, changed subsystems, major bugs, and what have you...

Not to mention that a lot of majorly used open source stuff have even less developers (despite being nominally open to all to give a hand/debug/etc) than a typical macOS component.

To the point that the GTK+ maintainer lamented that it was just him, a single person, doing most of the work, a few years ago -- and begging for others to come help.

<comment><USER38> GNOME and KDE destroyed their former community, such stupid decisions over and over again. Changing directions, etc. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were great, then both went downhill.

Ubuntu w Unity 7 and Ubuntu MATE are great, but standard GNOME3 is garbage - too many stupid UI warts.

<comment><USER39> Unity is getting ditched in favour of GNOME3 as of 18.04, which probably means it's going to die...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It looks like Apple pay for the majority of work too, assuming @michaelrsweet is paid by Apple to work on cups.

[https://github.com/apple/cups/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/apple/cups/graphs/contributors)

<comment><USER41> He is the original developer of CUPS. Apple bought the source, and hired him back in 2007, and have employed him since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish someone gets ghostscript-like tools for processing PS to be license under a license other than GPL2 (older) and new releases under AGPL

</comment><comment><USER43> Can a mod please fix the typo in the title with the word 'changing'?

Current: Apple announces CUPS changeing from GPLv2 to Apache licensing

Fixed: Apple announces CUPS changing from GPLv2 to Apache licensing

<comment><USER44> They prefer emails for this sort of thing; address is in the footer somewhere, IIRC.

<comment><USER45> email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I always hated cups and now I hate it more.

<comment><USER47> CUPS is great when you have a printer with a weird driver that you can only get from the manufacturers website. A few minutes setting up a CUPS VM, install the printer driver, and now I can print from my phone.

<comment><USER46> Oh I know, (sysadmin here) but it has a host of other problems. For example security wise, distro specific quirks etc. I do have to acknowledge it has worked when nothing else has sometimes, and I liked how easy it was to use with samba. Also I prefer IPP these days, at least when stuck dealing with windows clients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Now, if it didn't suck so bad with usb printers, it would be amazing.

<comment><USER49> USB printers are still a thing ? Even the €79 color laser printer I got the other day has ethernet.

<comment><USER50> I've seen many cases first hand where a non technical user was able to buy a new printer, plug it into usb, wait 10 seconds and literally print their document without any further setup.

Don't believe I can say the same for Ethernet. Let alone WiFi, God help us.

<comment><USER51> The last two printers I bought (sub $100 each) had WiFi and just required being unpackaged and plugged in before Linux found and used them over the network. This was probably via CUPS, but as a user I clicked on something like "Print" -> "Add a Printer" -> "Network" -> "Scan" and then hit "Next" a couple times. I use gnome3 and either Fedora or Ubuntu. Basic printing without driver preinstall has been solved for a decade at least.</comment></comment></comment></comment>