The Boston Diaries

Friday, February 23, 2001

Why haven't I heard of this?

I mention the problems Mark is having displaying the journal to JV, my fellow cow-orker, and he mentions that it should be possible to get the screen resolution of the browser since he's heard it's possible.

Why has everyone who doesn't do web work heard of this but me?

I will definitely have to investigate this.

“We're the phone company, we don't have to care about DSL … ”

This is at the heart of why Verizon cancelled its purchase of Northpoint. It is why Northpoint is suing Verizon, and why some Verizon customers are suing over delayed DSL deployments. The ILECs actually WANT to delay DSL deployment. They don't want the technology to succeed too quickly because that would mean massive upgrades to field gear and cuts into profits. The only reason why any ILEC built out a DSL product line was because of competitive pressure from CLECs and that darned Telecommunications Act of 1996, which they wanted so much at the time but now hate.

Via Robot Wisdom, Why Your Phone Company Hates DSL

Now that he mentions it …

I was happy with ISDN when I had it, even if the price was outrageous (although I wasn't paying for it). When BellSouth first offered ISDN, it was at a flat rate, but that didn't last when they had to provide universal ISDN service. So metered service came in to cover the installation costs to places like (need to find a remote Florida city).

But I lost my ISDN connection. Or rather, the party that was paying for it decided to pay for it no longer and the hours I keep on the Internet, I couldn't afford to pay those bills. So out it went.

I just hope my IDSL service stays up …

New Jersey Syle

About a year later we hired a young kid from Pittsburgh named Jamie Zawinski. He was not much more than 20 years old and came highly recommended by Scott Fahlman. We called him “The Kid.” He was a lot of fun to have around: not a bad hacker and definitely in a demographic we didn't have much of at Lucid. He wanted to find out about the people at the company, particularly me since I had been the one to take a risk on him, including moving him to the West Coast. His way of finding out was to look through my computer directories - none of them were protected. He found the EuroPAL paper, and found the part about worse is better. He connected these ideas to those of Richard Stallman, whom I knew fairly well since I had been a spokesman for the League for Programming Freedom for a number of years. JWZ excerpted the worse-is-better sections and sent them to his friends at CMU, who sent them to their friends at Bell Labs, who sent them to their friends everywhere.

Worse is Better

This is the history of the rather famous Computer Science paper “Worse is Better” and the context in which it was oringally intended.

And yes, it's that Jamie Zawinski.