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Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Learning Groove


<seriously-and-playfully>
On Friday, April 12, 2002, at 12:17 PM, John Maloney wrote:
> Why would any responsible designer deliberately abrogate Moore's Law and
> leave all this bandwidth on the table just so access is available to a 6
> year old desktop
Let's upgrade!
>  or some arcane workstation
Non Microsoft!
>  in the data center or print
> shop? It just doesn't make any sense...
>
The Moore's Law and bandwidth issues, as well as those of fat/thin 
clients, are red herrings: everyone will consume the max possible MHz, 
megabits/second, and fast handy functionality (Tim Bray, for example, 
has been vociferously asking for smarter, more capable clients, and you 
can look at Radio Userland as an example of a fat client that works with 
a browser and with standards (XML, RSS, ...)).    (01)

What is a real question is whether you will be able to read your 
information 2 years, 6 years, a dozen years, a hundred years from now, 
and whether you will be able to read anybody else's (any other node's) 
information in any of those time periods.    (02)

Trying to take a big view, how can fundamental infrastructure be 
anything but open (open source, with open interoperability standards)? 
How could you trust anything fundamental (such as the standards of the 
world's living information weaving) to the mercies of a single, 
privately-held company? This isn't to say that you can't or shouldn't 
have proprietary implementations, but the _standards_ they play to must 
be truly open. Bill Gates understands only too well that if you own the 
standard, you own the business: that's been his explicitly stated modus 
operandi. .NET is an attempt to own the net-as-a-platform standard 
("you're either with .NET or against us"). However, the world is bigger 
than Bill's view, more subtle than his vast but shallow ambition, and 
there is much air fresher than Microsoft's. Where do you want to live?    (03)

Groove has quickly become a part of .NET, which is not by itself "bad", 
but it is outright hostile to other technologies, such as Java, which is 
"bad". Too bad!    (04)

Ciao,
Mark
</seriously-and-playfully>    (05)