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Funny
to hear Microsoft get accused of over-intellectualizing for
once. Does this mean that it will now be Microsoft
desperately
trying
to hang on to the purist ivory tower ideals while everyone
else
just acts pragmatic and solves problems, regardless of
how
offensive the solutions are to the academics in Redmond?
I'm
somewhat puzzled about what Joey was saying, though.
Does
he mean to say that the whitepaper does a poor job
of
explaining .NET to him (reasonable)? Or is he saying
that
he has
concluded that .NET has no substance, simply from
reading a single whitepaper? From where I stand,
.NET
seems
very clear, coherent, uncompromisingly pragmatic,
and
backed up by lots of product and code. But I never
read
that
whitepaper, so obviously Joey knows more about it
than
me. Of course, I don't see any evidence that he
examined
a
variety of sources of information or attempted to look
beyond
his
own POV, so I am guessing he just intended to say that
he
found the .NET whitepaper difficult to grasp.
I'm
not too surprised to hear Napster lauded as a revolutionary
invention, though. I remember back when IBM was the
evil
establishment and Microsoft was the scrappy upstart, all
of
us
would gleefuly point out that IBM "didn't get it" because
their
architecture was heirarchical, where Microsoft WFW
allowed
peer-to-peer file sharing and instant messaging. I
remember
dire
warnings from the establishment at that time that the
idea
of computers talking directly to one another was
inefficient and would lead to disastrous results. Then
Trumpet
Winsock was released and central control has never been
the
same
since. IRC-DCC and MAPS RBL both had some
elements of Napster. I remember a very popular music
exchange
network centered around ftp.luth.se in
the days before NCSA
even
wrote the first HTML terminal emulator (does anyone
else
remember that?) I also remember a very popular and
open
protocol that people used to exchange files of all sorts.
It was
called NNTP and there were a wide variety of clients
available for it. At any time, you could log in and
find
software, pictures, and music. Anyone could publish
their
own
files, and control was decentralized. Of course, in
those
days, it was far more expensive to keep your personal
machine logged onto the network constantly, so people
would
usually share a mchine hooked up to NNTPster that was
up
constantly. Sure there are differences, mainly that
network
bandwidth is cheaper and more reliable today ... but
revolutionary?
The NNTP RFC would be very easy to revise to allow
point-to-point
file sharing without requiring file copies at all
locations. And since
NNTP is an open RFC, it is less vulnerable to RIAA
pressures.
I'm pretty dumb about these things, though, so I am
sure others
have even more examples of other Napster-like
technolgies
in use. And no matter what anybody says, the
"killer application"
responsible for Napster's success is free music.
With
billions
of dollars of lawyer-bait in the bank, would a company
like Microsoft
*ever* release a Napster, regardless of how many people
internally
had the idea years ago? By the same token, the
growth of NNTP
exploded when it became a porn and warez distribution
network.
What corporation in their right mind would want to
claim credit for
that, regardless of the other good side-effects it
had?
-Joshua
---
[Disclaimer: All thoughts expressed here are mine, and do not necessarily
represent my employer's official position. The place that I have chosen to
work can be considered an expression of my individual beliefs; my individual
beliefs should not be considered to be supplied by or sponsored by my
employer.]
Please read this essay, written by Joel
Spolsky:
"If you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run
out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they
create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe
that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at
all."
This is what I was trying to say to anyone who
would listen at WWW9. (And on the Syndication mail list, and everywhere XML
comes up.)
Dave
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