Chris Boese's Weblog

10 years ago Mosaic was getting ready to rock my world

It freaks me out to think about it, that it has been 10 years. Worth remembering for posterity, what I was doing when Mosaic was first coming out. I had already written a whole bit, then accidently closed the window and lost it, but I will try to remember what I wrote just 15 minutes ago, below the excerpt here.

Wired News: Mosaic Blows Out 10 Candles

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,58658,00.html

02:00 AM Apr. 29, 2003 PT

1993 was a very good year for computer geeks.

Grunge was fashionable. Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was about ready to make its debut. Intel's snappy new 66-MHz Pentium processor had just been introduced.

Bands of space marines were happily stalking and killing vile spawn from hell on their own computers, compliments of the groundbreaking PC game, Doom, which had just been released. The Internet was nearing its 25th anniversary. The economy was slowly staggering back to its feet again after a two-year recession.

And everyone was going to be making a whole lot of money real soon -- businesses were just starting to take notice of the Internet, sparked by the April 1993 release of a Web browser named Mosaic.

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina led the Mosaic team at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA released beta copies of Mosaic in February of 1993. Version 1.0 was released a month later, on April 23.

To mark the occasion, NCSA is throwing a birthday bash for Mosaic Tuesday night at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Illustrious guests including Dan Reed, director of NCSA; Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks; Vinton Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols on which the Internet is based; and Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft, will discuss the past and probable future of the Internet.

The public is invited to attend "The Future Frontier: Computing on NCSA Mosaic's 10th Anniversary," or watch the webcast.

CNN Headline News goes where MTV is too chicken

Or, sometimes I like my employer just fine.

Adbusters: TV Turnoff Week

TV Turnoff Week 2003 (April 21-27)

After hitting the corporate wall at MTV, we went after CNN Headline News with our 15-second "TV-Head" uncommercial.

MTV saw our simple, quarter-minute clip and gave us a flat out "No." How's that for free speech from a station with attitude? It's time to take action and jam MTV.

Meanwhile, CNN aired our spot on CNN Headline News, 6:06 pm, Sunday, April 20. Thank you for your contributions to make it happen.

Plagiarism just doesn't cut it

This article takes on the Agonist lifting stuff wholesale off Strategic Armchair Command blog. The Washington Post in the article below (2 articles actually) takes on the issue and says bloggers are sort of winking at it.

Ethics of War Blogging (TechNews.com)

Anyway, I gotta go home, so I'll add more thoughts about copyright and plagiarism and the difference between fighting for fair use against copyright nazis and passing off someone else's work as your own (which is bad bad bad!) after I get home.

That is, if my DSL decides to be working tonight. Come on Earthlink! Let's get all the parts working, eh?

What Hath Changes in War Reporting Technology Wrought?

I'm loving this column by Cory Bergman, altho I've been collecting a TON of links today that I'm going to post up, just because they are too good of pointers not to share.

Chris

OJR article: Technology Brings the Battle Home

[...]

When you combine a huge story with cutting-edge technology, expect journalists to make the most of it. What we’ve seen in the first six days of the second Gulf War is nothing short of a media revolution: live combat on TV, reporters blogging from the front lines and computerized simulations that almost look like the real thing. While it’s amazing to witness, this proliferation of technology has opened a Pandora’s Box of pressing new issues, from the ethics of live coverage to an explosion of alternative media voices. After all, this technology isn’t going away after the war. It is tried and tested, and it will soon be heading home.

Cool column at Virginian-Pilot on Media War Coverage

This fellow, Dave Addis, has a great sense of irony. We need more of this.

Chris

Rivera and Arnett both scripted their own demise (Pilot Online/HamptonRoads.com)

[...]

You had to wonder how long Connie Chung would last, once war broke out, when she kept saying ``calvary'' when she was supposed to say ``cavalry.'' (Anybody who's spent much time either at war or at church should know the difference.)

Geraldo Rivera and Peter Arnett, meanwhile, fell to the oldest enemy known to mankind and its scribes -- hubris. Once a journalist believes that he's as large as the story he's covering, he is doomed.

Arnett went on Iraqi state TV and popped off about how the valiant Iraqi defense and civilian Iraqi casualties were giving strength to the anti-war forces back home, and how the coalition war plan was falling apart and had to be revamped -- as if he, from his hotel bunker in Baghdad, had been privy to the generals' innermost thoughts.

[...]

True to form, Geraldo blamed somebody else -- in this case, the ``rats'' among his ``pathetic'' former employers, NBC -- for getting him yanked. Also true to form -- sort of a Geraldo trademark -- he provided no factual basis whatsoever for what he'd just said.

In Geraldo's mind, this is not a war among the United States, Britain and Iraq. It's a rating-points war among CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Network. All those tanks and ships and troops are little more than a convenient, compelling backdrop for his Geraldo-ness.

[...]

Thus, the first two weeks of war have yielded a weird irony among the all-news cable networks: The staunchly conservative Fox Network had a star-power correspondent yanked for giving aid and comfort to the enemy, while CNN, long derided by conservatives as being too left-leaning, had its entire Baghdad corps kicked out of Iraq for being too pro-American.

(emphasis mine)

All this while the staunchly mediocre MSNBC's star correspondent is doing an on-air huggy-poo with the Iraqi Ministry of Information.

Sir Winston Churchill once said, ``War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.'' And he didn't even have cable.