Re: [xml-dev] RE: Encoding charset of HTTP Basic Authentication

[cbullard@hiwaay.net]

Quoting Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>:

> On 02/02/2012 22:16, cbullard@hiwaay.net wrote:
> I assume domestic should be read as "American" here?

Context matters.

> And I'm not sure what you mean by "soft". Less competitive? Less profitable?

Smaller and less profitable.  It's a matter of what is needed to sell  
into a market and is that as lucrative short term as other  
opportunities.  A significant change was the fall of the Wall.  At GE  
I talked about what was needed to put SGML into the newly-non  
Communist bloc countries.  Joan Smith's reply to me was "But, Len,  
they have no money."  As we discover, globalization is not a single  
issue.

> Smaller? Certainly in many areas of software, it's very hard to  
> penetrate overseas markets because you need such a deep knowledge of  
> local requirements, and that's true whether you're exporting from  
> the US to Europe or vice versa. (Just look at the form I'm trying to  
> complete for a current US government procurement, which demands to  
> know stuff about my policy on employing disabled Vietnam-war  
> veterans, and whether the University that I attended was  
> "historically black". Some of the questions are so invasive I'm not  
> allowed to answer them under UK privacy law).

True and getting worse.  We overregulate and I say that as a  
"progressive".  There is some truth to the "nation of the offended"  
but we aren't unique in that.  As for their policy, tell them that you  
employ a half dozen Vietnamese in Ho Chi Mihn city.  They'll like  
that.  As for the other, tell them you attended the University of  
Dublin.

Every culture has it's sins.  There is a time for remediation then  
there is a time to move on.

>> It took the consolidation of a lot of different companies around  
>> Microsoft products to change the vertical stacks into horizontal  
>> ones.
> Actually, in Europe it was Unix that caused that change, not Microsoft.

We did the Unix phase too right after VMS.   What I am referring to is  
the penetration of the desktop into the home market.  Until that  
happened, global hypermedia was a lot of lab experiments in a lot of  
labs around the world and the Internet was a bulletin board with  
email.  Microsoft made it possible to have a non-laughable web.

>>  No one plays what's mine is mine and what's your's is mine as well  
>> as Apple plays it and others such as Amazon and Facebook are  
>> shuttering the web blinds to plays from companies that rely on  
>> openness such as Google even as some free ride on Google openness  
>> and sharing in technologies such as Android.
>>
> Yes, the ebb and flow between open and closed is fascinating to  
> watch; depressing at times, but certainly interesting. Particularly  
> depressing is that the regulators seem to be about 10 years behind,  
> still fighting the browser wars. The way they are allowing Apple and  
> Amazon to tie content to hardware amazes me: I thought that had all  
> been made illegal 20 years ago.

I thought we had posse commitatus and habeas corpus forever.  Then  
they signed those away too.  Very depressing.  I think anyone who  
can't see the class struggle at hand is blind but that's not a good  
topic for this forum. Just my own frustration...  Meanwhile Neil Young  
is lamenting the death of Steve Jobs because Apple is no longer  
pursuring high fidelity downloads.  The American music industry in  
particular has been eager to make any deal that will return power of  
that market to the small cadres that had it and the computer science  
industry is eager to make those deals to get exclusive distributions  
and half the profits.  From my perspective, this was inevitable and  
what I meant over the years of watching the sea changes since the web  
and muttering "welcome to the music industry".  Selling digital  
anything has a common core of opportunities for this kind of  
consolidation and controlling the entry of new resources.   Again,  
YouTube is the indie's best friend and YouTube is the radio.  That is  
where Neil Young doesn't get it.

> Not that I find the Google business model - pay for everything  
> through advertising, and collect as much private data as you can in  
> order to target the advertising - particularly appealing either.

If they were invading privacy, I would agree but it seems we are all  
willing to give that up to get to the free services and toys.   
Predictable but not a popular sentiment.  As I said a long time ago,  
we are forging our own chains.  To be fair, I am a real user of  
YouTube for finding works and for publishing my own and the 'free'  
part of that makes a difference.   The trends worry me because they  
tend to be like a nuclear arms race:  if one does it, there is a rush  
for all the near neighbors.   Apple has set a stunning example and I  
expect others to follow unless someone can prove why that's a bad idea.

Anyway, I'm way way off topic.  Apologies to the list.

len