Adam wrote:
>
>> My my - these piracy issues are real.
>
>Aye, matey.
Thievery is one thing, falsification quite another. That was privacy
not piracy. You're dethpicable. That '>>' means quote - change
the text on that line and you're damned to eternal 1812 flaming by
Last First - we Canadians stick together,didn't you know?
>
>> This is actually why I think we have to start conditioning ourselves
>> for fishbowl existence, since no WoT is ever going to be sufficient.
>
>You don't trust me that those bits were ready for primetime?
You? Oh sure. I trust you to tell me to buy and hold Intel forever.
I'd trust you on any number of OTC penny stock trades , swampland
deals, or get rich quick pyramid schemes - where do I sign?
I'd trust you enough to vote for you in a bid for public office.
I'd trust you to go to the potty by yourself. I'd trust you to lift the seat
before, and put it down after, and wipe up any mess. I'd trust you to
never tell a lie -well, maybe just a little white one now and then.
I'd trust you with my life. But I wouldn't
trust you with my wife. Or a knife. I'd trust you to give honest
change. I'd trust you to take only one cookie from the cookie jar.
I'd trust you not to expose yourself on the subway, unless you really
couldn't resist the urge.
I'd trust you to give really bad advice. I'd even trust
you to occasionally give good advice.
But I don't yet trust your judgement on when my bits
are ready for primetime - not that. My life - that's nothing. My bits?
Now that's a different story. Adam, really, I hardly know you!
Why don't we just be friends, you know? That Commitment thing -
oh, I'm not ready for it yet. Let's keep our bits to ourselves for a while
before shacking them up, ok?
>> With all the best encryption technology in the world, and
>> with strict policies to release access only to known & trusted agents,
>> once you start to ship bits you can't stop the hemmorage - they'll
>> spread as far as they like.
>
>But Ron, information *wants* to be free.
>
Umm, isn't that what I just said?
>> Time to start considering every private exchange a public one, for
>> better or worse.
>
>Already started doing this. Ever since a few years ago when Rohit
>accidentally forwarded an insulting email back to the person the email
>was insulting.
That fuckin Yankee Karma guy- gonna whup his ass in the War of 1812
rematch. That Kalifornia dweeb webfreak ain't gonna know what hit
him when the beans come pouring down on his sorry xml ass....
>> >Going to Israel would be cool. Oy! Eve would be proud of me.
>> So would your Bubby. But frankly it's quite overrated.
>
>I hear the falafel is to die for. I'm getting chatchkas in my
>schinectigazoint. Aw, now I'm getting a little verklemmt....
Yeah, whatever.
Actually the 'overstated' part had more to do with notions of nation-states
with arbitrary historical/geographical boundaries. As in "why would
a netizen bother picking up his sorry carcass from one (lat,long)
location in Toronto just to dump it in another in Haifa. Doesn't he
realize that all locations are equally good with sufficient net access,
and equally hellish without it?" Well, sure I realize that. But let's
just say I'm one netizen in a family of 4, and I'm outnumbered :-).
As Mark has put it, "home is where you hang your hat". I guess that
has me an awful long way from home....
>That's definitely not true. I don't pay attention to anyone's posts on
>this list except my own and Joe Barrera's.
This is a deliberate attempt at Zeno's paradox, I take it? Or are you
not generally clever enough to consciously bury a paradox in this
way. As in "If this statement is true, it must be false since it's written
in response to a post by neither Adam or Joe. But if it's false
it must be true since...". Hence it's neither true nor false, meaning
it's just indeterminate-state bits, meaning it's a waste of bandwidth. Mu.
>
>Bobby, actually. Watch out, boy, he'll chew you up.
Hall and Oates? With that impressive CD collection you boast of, the
best you can do is quote decade-and-a-half leftovers from top 40
Hall and Oates? Shit, *I* can quote better music and the only thing
I listen to is Bruce Springsteen and AM radio.
>Luckily, sessions have changed somewhat since then.
>
>http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/papers/framework/
>
>has a more accurate description of sessions. But obviously we still
>have quite a ways to go.
I'll get to this one too, at some point. Remember I do this purely
on personal time.
>Because you want a revolution. You don't care about entrenched market
>forces; you just want to attack, to bring death to the infidels. We're
>talking rivers of blood here. We're talking martyrs.
>
>Whereas I think in terms of an evolution. A new system, whatever it is,
>must evolve out of currently existing standards. It must take today's
>technology and bring it to the next level. As the Web did for the
>Internet, so should documents==objects do it for the Web. But you have
>to bootstrap. The dustbins of history are filled with Xanadus that
>steered clear of the existing technologies, and as a result got swept
>away...
Amazingly enough, we concur far more than you might imagine on this.
Yes, I do cry revolution in terms of the change to the world order.
But so do you on that scale - tell me munchkins is gonna come in
and make-nice to the RBOCs. More like a sledgehammer to the right
temple, followed by a baseball bat to the left.
In terms of the technology, I too believe 'the market will choose'. I'm
ready to see it go any which way - Beans, ActiveX, whatever. If
you karmakids are right, I can live with that too - we've been through
this before, haven't we?
However I'm currently pursuing the 100% Pure approach because
(a) it's cool and the Java t-shirts look neat
(b) technologically comparing
Java and the W3C stuff is (flamebait! flamebait!) like comparing
homo sapiens and homo erectus - not even in the same geological
epoch. So long as we don't have a clear winner, what's wrong with
backing the more evolved species? I'll switch when I see 'writing on
the wall' for Java, as I saw it about a year ago for CORBA. Haven't
seen it yet. Put me in that 97% class, I guess.
Now as to:
>A new system, whatever it is,
>must evolve out of currently existing standards. It must take today's
>technology and bring it to the next level. As the Web did for the
>Internet, so should documents==objects do it for the Web. But you have
>to bootstrap.
Right! Agreed. Completely. Interestingly, we can agree on these words,
and yet still come to very different conclusions.
Because there's a large installed base of html out there today, it's
inconceivable to you that the next generation cannot somehow
emerge from that base. Yet html only built its base in the last
4 or so years! You don't call that a 'revolution' - supplanting all that
came before? Prior to that, a 'net-centric' approach would have
tried to get everything to converge to what - to nntp? to ftp? to
gopher? wais? That's precisely the point - the moment something
unifying shows up, it can in very short order suck up a diverse
installed base that till that point seemed non-unifiable. HTML/HTTP has
done that for the set of internet technologies. And that was revolution-
no one planned in an orderly way to convert all gopher and ftp sites
to http sites. This was no IPV6 planned in committee
with backwards compatible modes to
IPV4. The web is not 'gopher revised' - rather, it is The Web. Sic.
So there is precedent for 'the right thing' very quickly gobbling
up everybody else. HTML did it. It could do it again. Or something
else could do it next time (Java, perhaps).
But 'next time' we're after a much larger prize - we want
to unify all the installed bases of everybody: net stuff, private network
protocols, Lotus like groupware, network management SNMP/CMIP
stuff, file servers, and all the various standards-based and proprietary
client/server apps, plus ultimately all the bits, everywhere. Every damned
legacy thisorthat. Every embedded board in every smart toaster
(and diaper -gotta throw that in :-).
All on one network, all exhibiting universally meaningful interfaces.
All anarchically forming ad hoc sessions and then disbanding them.
Now look at the installed base for all that stuff to be integrated. And
remember that most of the folks who own all that stuff have no idea
what we have in store for them. They're still sure that their Notes apps
and SNMP apps etc. will last forever and not have to tow the line like
everyone else. They're gonna fight kicking and screaming to stay
out of the big componentware party. Legacy managers just love their
legacy systems - it's job security after all. Hey, my day job is building
legacy - I know whereof I speak.
But when they realize it's inevitable, they'll each choose the path of
least resistance to join. They'll pick the component model that seems
most familiar to them. Let's assume the contenders are basically 'objects'
or 'documents' - representing the folks who like to write programs, and
the folks who like to create 'content' - whatever that means, respectively.
You and I know these are ultimately equivalent, and will converge.
But in terms of technology base today, they still are different camps.
So let's rank the contenders:
Consider all the html created in the last 4
years, including all of it that front ends legacies and is database driven,
what percentage does that stack up to the totality of all digital bit systems
ever devised in the last 50 odd years of computing? Versus - how much
of that 50 year installed base is programming language code -
COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG,
C, C++, Visual Basic, Perl, etc.
Using this line of reasoning, I think
the way to 'evolve out of current standards' is to start from the software
side of the house, and make nice to the programmers. They (we) ultimately
carry much more deadweight around than the webjockeys :-).
For html to conquer the net was a relatively 'easy' battle compared to
the fight it would have to take on the traditional domain of real software.
You
may be right and it may do it. But right now for every IT manager
that has to convert a C app or a VBasic app to make it a 'network
component', I'd guess they'd go to a computing-centric approach
rather than a document-centric approach. It's what they know, what
they're used to. Plus, if they do it in Java, they think they're doing
something way cool, whereas I don't think most IT managers think
HTML or XML is 'like, rad , man'.
It's an opinion. Trust me :-).
>----
>adam@cs.caltech.edu
>
Ron.