Couple repeaters does not seem like such a big deal. Hell, I'd wager the amateur radio kids could put up two or three in lunar orbit for dead cheap. You said it yourself, "extremely expensive project"... satellites would be extremely marginal cost.
The advantage is no transmission loss with really simple transformers to convert it to DC.
I'd think power factor would be far bigger issue. I cant imagine many instruments which would be senstive to 100 khz. On the other hand, any non-resistive loads onboard present a serious challenge.
Sometimes I think I should stop reading slashot. Every now and then I stumble upon a post like this. I just gained more valuable knowledge about NASA than I could have hoped to know. Thats some quintessential history, something that most documentaries in the world really fail to find. Thanks, many thanks.
Wasnt it not all that long ago the UK was charging per-minute? It seemed unlimited use dialup was always very rare. Something in the back of my mind buzzes about phone use & taxes or something, but I dunno.
Congradz though, that sounds truly excellent. I'm glad to see someone going above 768k upstream. Thats the barrier I thought would never be crossed.
Dont get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of "the network is the computer" and all that jib-jab. But if web services is the great extent of it, count me out. Web services is fine for checking your email, but theres a world of real work which needs to be done at a near-OS level to create a distributed computing environment. Plan9, IBM's SoulPad, Synergy, these are the few and the brave willing to go out and fsck around with the traditional concept of a computer, to unweave the ideas of one computer, one monitor, one mouse, one system. To reduce network is the computer to WS-* is just a wretchingly awful idea.
The human-computer-I/O needs to be made network capable. I'll get back to you on it.
I'll repeat it again; Way to legislate special interest!
What fuck-asses. I cant wait to see the nepharious two-fisted bullshit these content-holder hitmen are going to try to pull on the rest of the world. Once you get past the sickening reality, it should be downright fucking hilarious. They wont exactly have all that much leverage, they're just some random joe show shows up claiming to be defending some other nations interests. Surreee, we'll listen to you.
The US remains the only place in the world where law enforcement considers 100% enforcement their duty. Less barberic civilization seems to have realized that the purpose of laws is for the general goodwill and fortune of the populous, and laws should be enforced or not enforced as such. Its called humanity you nincompoops.
Its kind of scary to think nations might willingly forfeit the sovereignty of letting someone else come in and demand that they start enforcing their laws better. There's cases of defunct government where such aid is needed, but its pathetic that hte only place the US is going to start leveraging such direct extra-national influence is to the cock-sucking lobbyists that've completely monopolized the entertainment sector. Its even more terrifying to think that any self respecting international body would let agents of a single nation impose this policy.
Little more ire than usual, but whatever. "Sometimes you know, I get so pissed off," Myren
Funny, I dont see how his replies really corresponded to the questions. Who needs good questions when you can answer another question altogether.
> What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3 that > every admin should learn to exploit to the > fullest?
>Terpstra: Samba-3.0.0 supported unicode >characters, secure channel communication and >digital sign-n-seal support. It included a new >password back-end capability, as well as new >group handling.
Erm, right. I'll go update my password back-ends immediately. I would've made a joke about sign-n-seal, but I ahvent the fainest fuck what it is or such a seemingly cryptographic line item could've slipped into my file serve.
To the man's credit, he does excellent PR work. I'd hire him.
One of my neighbors got the plague. He's like one of the three people on the planet that somehow managed to catch the bubonic plague that year. What shitty luck.
Evidently the good news for him is that he's now immune.
Please stop mentioning LUFS, its dead.;) FUSE is great, has good libraries including SULF for C#/mono. Fuse is really fscking cool, I cant understand why there was any resistance to putting it in kernel. Userland is definately the way to go for many many FS. I will resist the DragonflyBSD rant here, but look into it if you are interested.
However, I think ReiserFS is the other side of the coin. Blazing fast extensible FS. One built for semantic extension. Very necessary.
if your not smart enough to remember how you file things, how are you going to be smart enough to remember the metadata needed to extract the files out of a database?
His problem was that he couldnt remember which of the many possible classification schemes he chose for a particular peice fo media. The media inherently has multiple indexes, as to the author, genre, and media format (poem, music, what). If its a conventional heirarchy, he cant remember which index he chose for the particualr piece. After you finish reading the fucking comment, try understanding what the man is saying before you spew unto the world your ignorant-ass reply: When I try to classify Joaquín Sabina's (a spanish musician who writes good lyrics) poems book, I don't know if I must save it under "~/musica/Joaquín_Sabina" or "~/docs" or what. What I really want is to have it in *both* sides, and while symlinks are nice, what I really want is a database query.
Second people complain of Resier4's system overhead. What your proposing is every one needs three different computers so they have enough CPU power to play a game. Because that game is going to need to make a few thousand database queries in a short order to load up a map.
Further, your game example is utter rubbish. You'd have to be a pretty crappy game designer to store your level such that you'd have to be doing a multitude of unoptimized multidimensional lookups. Learn something before you open your mouth; Reiser4 uses much of the same high performance infrastuctrue is Reiser3. Supposedly even faster! (cite: the fscking-article) Conventional FS access has no need to go through the semantic plugins. They're called plugins because they're just that, thoroughly non integral.
Well, what I want to know is: How do I get to this metadata? Some extra tool? Some right-click option that I have to select every time I create a file? Will all File dialog boxes have to be rewritten, and will I have to manually input all this info?
Its called the command line.
The idea is basically to turn the FS into a big REST system, pretty much. Any old file will have what appear to be directories and files within them that perform functions by their plugins. So nothing changes for the FS. For some reason... (as paralleled to . and..) has become the popular item i've seen for accessing files "metadata" (this "meta" distinction is bullshit, IMO. is it still metadata if the plugin transforms data in the actual file?). Anyways, that lets you do stuff like/var/music/.../blues to fetch a directory full of all your blues./var/music/.../blues+year=1960- to get blues before 1960, or other wacky stuff like that. Google desktop with its amazing astounding grep and grep -c (aka PageLink) capabilities could be accessed with/home/gothmolly/docs/.../keyword=foo+sort=referenc es. Presto! Multi-dimensional drilling through your file system.
The idea is that/nothing/ changes. Apps can utilize this infrastructure to do the stupid GUI based crap you talk about, but ultimately it is merely the combined inherent godliness and flexibility of heirachy and the command line which will save us all.
Figuring out how to dumb down the infinite possibility of the command line into a GUI is a job for whatever poor bastard gets slapped the unsightly task by whatever HCI department feeling spiteful enough to do so. The real point is that people dont have to learn the command line to access this new power, they just have to be able to construct and label file names. Sure, google proved to us all that eliminating AND, OR, NOT, and braces wins you gold medals for usability, but I have yet to see a user interface - graphical or textual - simpler OR more powerful than the command line which allows users to construct simple multi-dimensional database queries. Which is what we need, which is what users want to do now. A UI which provides anything simpler is inherently not powerful enough for the future. People think multi-dimensionally, its what makes them better than computers.
And yes, there will be tools. Every plugin needs some kind of way to build the metadata. So maybe we'll all have our own copy of del.icio.us running on our computer to do tagging. We'll probably have command line tools: tag./thismusicfile blues. But these tools are ancillary to the fact.
The point is dead fucking simple. Everything else is a search system, is a method of finding. This is just a metamethod. Its the method that all other methods can use. The net aggregate is a flexible semantically empowered filesystem. Its hard to elaborate further, by now your either wetting your pant or you'll just have to wait until after the Revolution has happened.
-Lord "+1 for Flamebait This Time" Myren
Keep in mind that I basically just made up these semantics. But thats part of the system, you can just start making semantics up (if you dnt mind coding a plugin).
Normally you have to release something before it can mature. OTherwise its called development...
Still waiting on that plugin system, thanks. Should be good though. No hurry, but if you could even begin to release some info on/how/ its structured, how devels will be able to use it, how we'll be architecting solutions with Reiser4 plugins, it'd be much appreciated.
-Lord "I hope I havent missed anything in all these years waiting" Myren
You're right, the p1120 is an astoundingly durable extremely small heat resistant wonder of a laptop. Its also fanless which is also a benefit (reports of one 20mm fan for the PCMCIA card...?). However, I'd be a little hestitant about recommending it for use in a desert. I've dropped mine from all sorts of heights, accrued many "dramatic wounds" all over the case. Once I dropped it off the bunk bed and it fell onto some rebar I had sticking up... I call that wound Posiedon. Very strongly built, although the hinges do make me slightly nervous sometimes.
But sand? Whew... thats a tall order of buisness.
Great laptop. Its proven itself over a hundred fold to some of the cruelest abuse. But sand is serious buisness. And this laptop isnt exactly watertight.
Glad to hear it worked well for you though. I wonder howt he new P1510 compares durability wise.
PostgreSQL will hopefully some day have Postgres-R integrated into it; a distributed lazy replication update scheme. (Multicast to ensure ordered group communication to derive seriazability, v. 2pc) This should allow it to scale out to a couple hundred if not couple thousand boxen quite easily with rather stunning performance.
I dont think its necessarily so winner take all. Parituclarly in cases like this; the only real difference for implementors is which perl engine to glue on the front of their CMS. If you're actually doing real XML syndication, you'll probably be using Atom anyways.
Stepping out on a ledge here, but I'd wager most developers havent had very intimate encounters with XML, far fewer data distribution. But future informational and database systems will be built around these cores. Here's where the difference becomes razor apparent: RSS is basically a cute tool for article syndication, but Atom is designed to syndicate most any XML data.
I fear the tool developers will be victim to the buzz here: they'll WANT to use Atom, just as Google refused to offer anything else for a while, but the market will demand RSS because its a cool acronym. Still, I've some hope that eventualyl when the XML really starts flowing, RSS will become a footnote joke and Atom v10.2 will have all the XML^2 goodness our solar system needs.
So really, its much worse: the actual industry building the technologies are slave to the PR machines consuming them. Fuck that noise.:/
Perhaps you missed the subtitle: "news for NERDS. Stuff that matters".
Syndication technologies are excellent tools for developers. Existing code to build servers from, existing code for clients. Well built durable standards, &c &c. The whole web services thing, yada yada, open access to data, free information, blah blah.
The GOAL is that through careful coding eventually we can boil it all down to "who cares", but we're a long way off having developed the proper environment for our information for that to be the case. Infrastructure, infrastructure infrastructure.
You crack rock smoking monkey, only like.5% of the web denziens actually use some form of syndication. Most people havent the foggiest idea what RSS even is. So, MS puts RSS into IE: suddenly RSS is going to overrun atom? Somehow I think not.
IMO, atom is a far better protocol. The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards, v. RSS which basically gets as far as tag>. Its far more clear about its payload and is way better suited towards XML delivery. But, decide for yourself.
I see no problem with the current duality. I do wish Atom were available more places, but I can still live with RSS where I need to.
"Ajax hasn't even been big a year yet and already open source development tools by the dozen are pouring out."
*gag* *choke* *vomit* A year?
What a load of crap. I hate how someone gives the blasted thing a name, google releases a web app and suddenly the shunned hated upon bastard child is the new golden boy for the web and everything modern. What fresh new technology! *spite* *snear*
I've been screaming at opera to include XmlHttpRequest for years now and basically been completely ignored. The only responses I ever got where `who gives a damn? -- no one uses that for real`.
But really,
All these AJAX tool kits are going to really fuck things up. XmlHttpRequest is just an asyncronous way to pull data off an HTTP server. Smart people realized the true value: not that you can make 50% of web browsers dance like puppets on strings, but that suddenly data exposed via HTTP can be accessed very immediately by anyone. Smart people who realized this built cool webapps around very very smart servers: that was the world of XmlHttpRequest.
Ajax on the other hand is pretty much synonymous with fancy web page that dont have to reload. IDE's to build flashy web pages for us are only going to further obfuscate and destroy the fact that XmlHttpRequest is simply a way to exchange data. Well designed asyncronous architecture was what made XmlHttpRequest so amazing, but its about to be burried under a mudslide of syncronous commands being sent back and forth to make the browser dance in some asnine way. Wake me when the buzz has died down some, I cant hear with all this racket going on.
[On the other hand, toolkits can be very handy. I was massively impressed with the Dojo toolkit when I scoped it out a while back. What other toolkits are people using these days?]
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. $3000 really aint bad at all. Spit in the bucket for people who actually hope to manufacture something based off this.
As for shitty resolution or no, the answer is an unequivocal absolute no. 800x600 on a 6 inch display is better DPI than all but the best laptops.
Myren
Couple repeaters does not seem like such a big deal. Hell, I'd wager the amateur radio kids could put up two or three in lunar orbit for dead cheap. You said it yourself, "extremely expensive project"... satellites would be extremely marginal cost.
-Myren
The advantage is no transmission loss with really simple transformers to convert it to DC.
I'd think power factor would be far bigger issue. I cant imagine many instruments which would be senstive to 100 khz. On the other hand, any non-resistive loads onboard present a serious challenge.
Myren
Sometimes I think I should stop reading slashot. Every now and then I stumble upon a post like this. I just gained more valuable knowledge about NASA than I could have hoped to know. Thats some quintessential history, something that most documentaries in the world really fail to find. Thanks, many thanks.
and you're being moved from place to place by people who want to make sure who we meet.
...The computer world needs better networkign skills.
Is that a hollywood phenomena? Who are these people, where do they come from?
(Hrm, i thought I would've had more)
-Myren
Wasnt it not all that long ago the UK was charging per-minute? It seemed unlimited use dialup was always very rare. Something in the back of my mind buzzes about phone use & taxes or something, but I dunno.
Congradz though, that sounds truly excellent. I'm glad to see someone going above 768k upstream. Thats the barrier I thought would never be crossed.
-Myren
Dont get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of "the network is the computer" and all that jib-jab. But if web services is the great extent of it, count me out. Web services is fine for checking your email, but theres a world of real work which needs to be done at a near-OS level to create a distributed computing environment. Plan9, IBM's SoulPad, Synergy, these are the few and the brave willing to go out and fsck around with the traditional concept of a computer, to unweave the ideas of one computer, one monitor, one mouse, one system. To reduce network is the computer to WS-* is just a wretchingly awful idea.
The human-computer-I/O needs to be made network capable. I'll get back to you on it.
Myren
I'll repeat it again;
Way to legislate special interest!
What fuck-asses. I cant wait to see the nepharious two-fisted bullshit these content-holder hitmen are going to try to pull on the rest of the world. Once you get past the sickening reality, it should be downright fucking hilarious. They wont exactly have all that much leverage, they're just some random joe show shows up claiming to be defending some other nations interests. Surreee, we'll listen to you.
The US remains the only place in the world where law enforcement considers 100% enforcement their duty. Less barberic civilization seems to have realized that the purpose of laws is for the general goodwill and fortune of the populous, and laws should be enforced or not enforced as such. Its called humanity you nincompoops.
Its kind of scary to think nations might willingly forfeit the sovereignty of letting someone else come in and demand that they start enforcing their laws better. There's cases of defunct government where such aid is needed, but its pathetic that hte only place the US is going to start leveraging such direct extra-national influence is to the cock-sucking lobbyists that've completely monopolized the entertainment sector. Its even more terrifying to think that any self respecting international body would let agents of a single nation impose this policy.
Little more ire than usual, but whatever. "Sometimes you know, I get so pissed off,"
Myren
Myren
Funny, I dont see how his replies really corresponded to the questions. Who needs good questions when you can answer another question altogether.
> What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3 that
> every admin should learn to exploit to the
> fullest?
>Terpstra: Samba-3.0.0 supported unicode
>characters, secure channel communication and
>digital sign-n-seal support. It included a new
>password back-end capability, as well as new
>group handling.
Erm, right. I'll go update my password back-ends immediately. I would've made a joke about sign-n-seal, but I ahvent the fainest fuck what it is or such a seemingly cryptographic line item could've slipped into my file serve.
To the man's credit, he does excellent PR work. I'd hire him.
Myren.
I laugh at you!! There IS NO SOLUTION... sucker! Just a pile of code you're welcome to string together yourself.
F/OSS you are truly pathetic.
Love,
Myren
One of my neighbors got the plague. He's like one of the three people on the planet that somehow managed to catch the bubonic plague that year. What shitty luck.
Evidently the good news for him is that he's now immune.
Please stop mentioning LUFS, its dead. ;) FUSE is great, has good libraries including SULF for C#/mono. Fuse is really fscking cool, I cant understand why there was any resistance to putting it in kernel. Userland is definately the way to go for many many FS. I will resist the DragonflyBSD rant here, but look into it if you are interested.
However, I think ReiserFS is the other side of the coin. Blazing fast extensible FS. One built for semantic extension. Very necessary.
Myren
This is going to be one of the most important Apples to Oranges comparison of the 21st century.
Filesystem or no, both systems are attempting to serve much teh same niche.
Myren
if your not smart enough to remember how you file things, how are you going to be smart enough to remember the metadata needed to extract the files out of a database?
His problem was that he couldnt remember which of the many possible classification schemes he chose for a particular peice fo media. The media inherently has multiple indexes, as to the author, genre, and media format (poem, music, what). If its a conventional heirarchy, he cant remember which index he chose for the particualr piece. After you finish reading the fucking comment, try understanding what the man is saying before you spew unto the world your ignorant-ass reply: When I try to classify Joaquín Sabina's (a spanish musician who writes good lyrics) poems book, I don't know if I must save it under "~/musica/Joaquín_Sabina" or "~/docs" or what. What I really want is to have it in *both* sides, and while symlinks are nice, what I really want is a database query.
Second people complain of Resier4's system overhead. What your proposing is every one needs three different computers so they have enough CPU power to play a game. Because that game is going to need to make a few thousand database queries in a short order to load up a map.
Further, your game example is utter rubbish. You'd have to be a pretty crappy game designer to store your level such that you'd have to be doing a multitude of unoptimized multidimensional lookups. Learn something before you open your mouth; Reiser4 uses much of the same high performance infrastuctrue is Reiser3. Supposedly even faster! (cite: the fscking-article) Conventional FS access has no need to go through the semantic plugins. They're called plugins because they're just that, thoroughly non integral.
-Myren
Well, what I want to know is: How do I get to this metadata? Some extra tool? Some right-click option that I have to select every time I create a file? Will all File dialog boxes have to be rewritten, and will I have to manually input all this info?
... (as paralleled to . and ..) has become the popular item i've seen for accessing files "metadata" (this "meta" distinction is bullshit, IMO. is it still metadata if the plugin transforms data in the actual file?). Anyways, that lets you do stuff like /var/music/.../blues to fetch a directory full of all your blues. /var/music/.../blues+year=1960- to get blues before 1960, or other wacky stuff like that. Google desktop with its amazing astounding grep and grep -c (aka PageLink) capabilities could be accessed with /home/gothmolly/docs/.../keyword=foo+sort=referenc es. Presto! Multi-dimensional drilling through your file system.
/nothing/ changes. Apps can utilize this infrastructure to do the stupid GUI based crap you talk about, but ultimately it is merely the combined inherent godliness and flexibility of heirachy and the command line which will save us all.
./thismusicfile blues. But these tools are ancillary to the fact.
Its called the command line.
The idea is basically to turn the FS into a big REST system, pretty much. Any old file will have what appear to be directories and files within them that perform functions by their plugins. So nothing changes for the FS. For some reason
The idea is that
Figuring out how to dumb down the infinite possibility of the command line into a GUI is a job for whatever poor bastard gets slapped the unsightly task by whatever HCI department feeling spiteful enough to do so. The real point is that people dont have to learn the command line to access this new power, they just have to be able to construct and label file names. Sure, google proved to us all that eliminating AND, OR, NOT, and braces wins you gold medals for usability, but I have yet to see a user interface - graphical or textual - simpler OR more powerful than the command line which allows users to construct simple multi-dimensional database queries. Which is what we need, which is what users want to do now. A UI which provides anything simpler is inherently not powerful enough for the future. People think multi-dimensionally, its what makes them better than computers.
And yes, there will be tools. Every plugin needs some kind of way to build the metadata. So maybe we'll all have our own copy of del.icio.us running on our computer to do tagging. We'll probably have command line tools: tag
The point is dead fucking simple. Everything else is a search system, is a method of finding. This is just a metamethod. Its the method that all other methods can use. The net aggregate is a flexible semantically empowered filesystem. Its hard to elaborate further, by now your either wetting your pant or you'll just have to wait until after the Revolution has happened.
-Lord "+1 for Flamebait This Time" Myren
Keep in mind that I basically just made up these semantics. But thats part of the system, you can just start making semantics up (if you dnt mind coding a plugin).
Normally you have to release something before it can mature. OTherwise its called development...
/how/ its structured, how devels will be able to use it, how we'll be architecting solutions with Reiser4 plugins, it'd be much appreciated.
Still waiting on that plugin system, thanks. Should be good though. No hurry, but if you could even begin to release some info on
-Lord "I hope I havent missed anything in all these years waiting" Myren
You're right, the p1120 is an astoundingly durable extremely small heat resistant wonder of a laptop. Its also fanless which is also a benefit (reports of one 20mm fan for the PCMCIA card...?). However, I'd be a little hestitant about recommending it for use in a desert. I've dropped mine from all sorts of heights, accrued many "dramatic wounds" all over the case. Once I dropped it off the bunk bed and it fell onto some rebar I had sticking up... I call that wound Posiedon. Very strongly built, although the hinges do make me slightly nervous sometimes.
But sand? Whew... thats a tall order of buisness.
Great laptop. Its proven itself over a hundred fold to some of the cruelest abuse. But sand is serious buisness. And this laptop isnt exactly watertight.
Glad to hear it worked well for you though. I wonder howt he new P1510 compares durability wise.
Myren
Oh god, its going to be some terrible partition+heirarchy scheme isnt it. Bollox to that.
PostgreSQL will hopefully some day have Postgres-R integrated into it; a distributed lazy replication update scheme. (Multicast to ensure ordered group communication to derive seriazability, v. 2pc) This should allow it to scale out to a couple hundred if not couple thousand boxen quite easily with rather stunning performance.
Some more info here
Way of the future kiddies, look sharp.
Myren
what will/would Xgl run under? For example, how will it do xlib?
I presume the whole input system will just be ported to xgl in some fashion, instead of being rebuilt?
Myren
I dont think its necessarily so winner take all. Parituclarly in cases like this; the only real difference for implementors is which perl engine to glue on the front of their CMS. If you're actually doing real XML syndication, you'll probably be using Atom anyways.
:/
Stepping out on a ledge here, but I'd wager most developers havent had very intimate encounters with XML, far fewer data distribution. But future informational and database systems will be built around these cores. Here's where the difference becomes razor apparent: RSS is basically a cute tool for article syndication, but Atom is designed to syndicate most any XML data.
I fear the tool developers will be victim to the buzz here: they'll WANT to use Atom, just as Google refused to offer anything else for a while, but the market will demand RSS because its a cool acronym. Still, I've some hope that eventualyl when the XML really starts flowing, RSS will become a footnote joke and Atom v10.2 will have all the XML^2 goodness our solar system needs.
So really, its much worse: the actual industry building the technologies are slave to the PR machines consuming them. Fuck that noise.
Myren
Perhaps you missed the subtitle: "news for NERDS. Stuff that matters".
Syndication technologies are excellent tools for developers. Existing code to build servers from, existing code for clients. Well built durable standards, &c &c. The whole web services thing, yada yada, open access to data, free information, blah blah.
The GOAL is that through careful coding eventually we can boil it all down to "who cares", but we're a long way off having developed the proper environment for our information for that to be the case. Infrastructure, infrastructure infrastructure.
I maintain my original stance.
- Myren
You crack rock smoking monkey, only like .5% of the web denziens actually use some form of syndication. Most people havent the foggiest idea what RSS even is. So, MS puts RSS into IE: suddenly RSS is going to overrun atom? Somehow I think not.
IMO, atom is a far better protocol. The creators obviously tried to integrate the protocol with existing XML standards, v. RSS which basically gets as far as tag>. Its far more clear about its payload and is way better suited towards XML delivery. But, decide for yourself.
I see no problem with the current duality. I do wish Atom were available more places, but I can still live with RSS where I need to.
Myren
I've heard terrible terrible things about GPS based clocks. Generally, just dont do it...
"Ajax hasn't even been big a year yet and already open source development tools by the dozen are pouring out."
*gag* *choke* *vomit* A year?
What a load of crap. I hate how someone gives the blasted thing a name, google releases a web app and suddenly the shunned hated upon bastard child is the new golden boy for the web and everything modern. What fresh new technology! *spite* *snear*
I've been screaming at opera to include XmlHttpRequest for years now and basically been completely ignored. The only responses I ever got where `who gives a damn? -- no one uses that for real`.
But really,
All these AJAX tool kits are going to really fuck things up. XmlHttpRequest is just an asyncronous way to pull data off an HTTP server. Smart people realized the true value: not that you can make 50% of web browsers dance like puppets on strings, but that suddenly data exposed via HTTP can be accessed very immediately by anyone. Smart people who realized this built cool webapps around very very smart servers: that was the world of XmlHttpRequest.
Ajax on the other hand is pretty much synonymous with fancy web page that dont have to reload. IDE's to build flashy web pages for us are only going to further obfuscate and destroy the fact that XmlHttpRequest is simply a way to exchange data. Well designed asyncronous architecture was what made XmlHttpRequest so amazing, but its about to be burried under a mudslide of syncronous commands being sent back and forth to make the browser dance in some asnine way. Wake me when the buzz has died down some, I cant hear with all this racket going on.
[On the other hand, toolkits can be very handy. I was massively impressed with the Dojo toolkit when I scoped it out a while back. What other toolkits are people using these days?]
Myren