4 ms·
Not-so-tounge-in-cheek corollary: software with a sufficiently rich and desirable attack surface will evolve to become indistinguishable from an OS.
by saidajigumi 8y ago
Not-so-tounge-in-cheek corollary: software with a sufficiently rich and desirable attack surface will evolve to become indistinguishable from an OS.
- bigiain 8y ago"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." -- jwz
- drb91 8y agoI don’t get this quote. Why is mail reading considered an obvious forward step for a program? That fad seemed to die with the browser Mozilla (or SeaMonkey these days, if it still exists).
- bigiain 8y agoHeh - for the record, that quote is from the guy who's responsible for open-sourcing Netscape into Mozilla, and is from around about that time/era... These days I wonder if the functional equivalent is expanding to include a Slack-bot?
- sneak 8y agoFacebook expanded until it could send and receive facebook walled garden mail (fb messages). iOS has iMessage. Instagram and tinder and snapchat all support the basic concept of “mail”. In fact, I wonder how many apps I have installed that don’t have some concept of an “inbox” or “messages”. Taskrabbit, Uber, GrubHub - all do “mail” in the modern, unfederated sense of the term. (email started out unfederated, then we got uucp and smtp, now we are back to unfederated, centralized messaging.)
- justinator 8y agoHe also wrote an email client for Netscape.
- bigiain 8y agoEmail and usenet client - which was the only client that ever got message threading right...
- earenndil 8y agoConsider firefox hello -- it died, but it was something they tried to implement/popularize.
- Rjevski 8y agoI guess it's back from the days when "internet suites" (a huge monolithic app with browser, email, IRC, etc) were still a thing. Seems like at least one of them is still going: https://www.seamonkey-project.org https://www.seamonkey-project.org