>> Douglas Adams was, once again, an incredible visionary (even if he didn't intend to be one). Actually, he wasn't. His ludicrous "telephone sanitizers" weren't made up. It's a normal part of British culture. Don't believe me? Get your telephone sanitizers here, here and here. All.co.uk addresses, natually.
>Yes, it did blow my mind when I moved to the UK and discovered that this wasn't Douglas Adams fiction, it was sitting on every desk.
Douglas Adams was, once again, an incredible visionary (even if he didn't intend to be one).
Re:Remember when they bought the Dejanews archive?
on
Google Turns 5
·
· Score: 1
For those who didn't notice the irony in the parent post, the final sentence of the 1984 is "He loved the Big Brother".
Danila, sorry to disappoint you, but there was NO intention from my part to point to 1984 here. I like Google because it's earned my respect thru a useful service, not thru brainwashing.
Remember when they bought the Dejanews archive?
on
Google Turns 5
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Man, we've come a long way. Back when they bought the Dejanews Usenet archive, all comments I saw were of the "Who are these guys?"-"What do they want with our beloved archive?"-"Will they keep it public or they'll make it a paid service?"-"Is their search engine any good?" kind.
Now we take its groups search feature for granted, we think nothing of other search engines (Yahoo!, anyone?) and we use Google to search for images (back in MY day, those were the hardest to search, having to search and download lots of stuff from ftp sites and then discard the junk).
Besides computers, my other hobbies are science fiction, progressive rock [*] and... landscape photography. What I did was making enlargements of my favorite landscape/scenery pictures, framing them, and then hanging them in the walls. I did about six months ago, and I'm pleased with the results.
[*] For a time, the only "dressing" was the sonic dressing the music provided, and that was nice, too.
Guidelines for world building?
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I came up with an interesting (and, dare I say, slightly original) concept for an alien world. I'm toying with different ideas for short stories within it. So far, my two biggest problems are
1) Finding a good enough story, and
2) Worldbuilding.
The latter problem is the one I actually care the most - I don't want all of my aliens to be "disguised humans", so I've done big efforts into figuring out how do they behave, what their culture is like, how their physical differences affect their way of thinking AND language, and all that. However, I can't shake the feeling I am missing aspects I shouldn't. This process is tedious and takes long, but I consider it very important.
Are there any guidelines you'd suggest to do it properly?
Don't you hate when there's several people with the same name as yours? I know more than 10 different "Miguel Farah" besides myself, and that's only within my family.
That's why most spanish-speaking countries keep using the two names + two surnames (the father's and the mother's) method for the full name of a person. That way, my full name is "Miguel Braxton Farah Fugate", which decreases dramatically the probabilty of a name collision (even more for people with relatively uncommon surnames, like myself).
This practice was started somewhere in the Middle ages, and while it's not as good as a unique number or ID, the cases of people with two identical full names are very rare.
Keep a lot of tape available.
on
Moving Strategies?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Besides what everyone's said already:
keep lots of packing tapes. They're dirt cheap, and you can't afford to run out of tape when you're packing! Also, if N persons are packing, be sure to have at least N+3 tapes available. This way, people won't waste time waiting for the "tape resource" to be available. The cost of these items, as I said, is negligible.
Get several cardboard markers(/ scripto pens / whatever) for marking the packed boxes. They're also cheap, and you can't afford to not have several available, for the same reasons stated above.
START PACKING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. That way you can take the time to pack properly, to check out the stuff you're packing (this way you can also get rid of the stuff you want to get rid of) AND you'll be able to pack with more care.
Keep a big box labeled "JUNK", clearly separate from everything else. All the stuff you want/have to get rid of must go there.
Keep an inventory of every box, and keep it on PAPER. If you have a lot of time, and are as anal as I am, the inventory for each box should contain every single item contained in it. This worked marvels with my books - I have some many I haven't been able to take them off the boxes yet, and this way I know where any book is.
LABEL THE BOXES. Determine a numbering system and adhere to it. If possible, determine where the box should be located at in the new place (for example, kitchen boxes: K1, K2,...; garage boxes: G1, G2,...).
And remember that it will take MONTHS to unpack everything!
If I earned the money I have now, without working, I'd chase my hobbies full time: I'd read all the books in my "read pending" list; I'd dedicate mornings to photography; I'd listen to the music I like. I'd code. I'd play Civilization II/Freeciv all the time and
Oh, my... my last wish has just blown up my time. I'd play Civ II/Freeciv all the time, do nothing else and THEN I'd complain of lack of time.
OTOH, if I had infinite money to spend, I'd mount my own FM radio and play the music I like (which you can't hear on radio anymore), free of commercials, free of "radio friendly format" and all that.
It's FAST, VERY light (my executable is 150K), full with features, configurable pretty much for everything, contains a macro language that lets you create new commands, and has EVERYTHING without becoming bloated.
The only downside is that it's a commercial non-free program. But it's worth every single penny, I say.
Go to Semware, and download the trial version. I can't speak for others, but I love it a lot. When using Windows*, TSE-Pro and 4DOS/4NT are the two programs I use most.
By the way: Notepad is HIDEOUS. It might be standard, yes, but it's so primitive it becomes heavily restrictive. I carry around with me a diskette with my personal vital tools, text editor included, so I can skip the pain of using notepad on other people's computers.
You can ALL participate in Freeciv development
on
Freeciv-1.13.0 Stable
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I first met Freeciv back in version 1.11.4. I loved for its superior user interface, and wasn't really bothered by the inferior (compared to Civ II) graphics.
But the one thing that REALLY annoyed me about Civ 1/2 was the SHORT city lists for each nation. What did I do? I took the time to do a really long list of cities for my favorite nation (you guess which one it was) and submitted it. Now my 200-names list is PART of the game. I extended/made better some other nation's city lists, and now they're part of the game. Then I created a map of my favorite country in the world, and was incorporated, too.
I can proudly say that even though I have NEVER touched one line of Freeciv source code, I can call myself a developer of the game. And I love it.
I'm currently developing a project where I have to modify existing source code developed by someone else. I spend most of the time trying to figure out WHY the previous programmer did something the way he did it, and what the hell he was thinking. Write these into your comments. Also, write down in comments small tips for the programmers that might come after you. Comments in the style of:
/* This function expects an object that has been fully filled and checked for errors before. Be sure to never send it a NULL one! */
or
/* We're invoking the call to the database with the "mode" flag set to zero because currently it won't use it - but it COULD be used in the future. */
help a lot.
I also have to modify Java source, where I have generic classes that inherit from previous ones a lot of attributes. For example:
public class A {
public String s;
public double d;
public long l; }
and
public class B extends A {
public String ss; }
I prefer to write class B like this:
public class B extends A { // public String s; : A // public double d; : A // public long l; : A
public String ss; }
That way I can see quickly all of the attributes class B contains.
My colleagues at work think *I* am nuts because I refuse to use notepad or Visual Café's builtin-text editor to edit.java source files, preferring instead a much more powerful older DOS-based text editor (TSE). They're gonna suffer a heart attack when they see this.
Actually, Extremadura is an autonomous community (formerly a region under the older division of the country). It's composed of TWO provinces: Cáceres and Badajoz.
About 40 of the large mummy bundles are topped with false heads, known to archaeologists as falsas cabezas.
Well, no wonder... after all, that's exactly what "falsa cabeza" means.
Anyway, it's GREAT news that this site has been found in time... but I can already see the logistical trouble in keeping in good shape thousands of mummies, let alone all their artifacts.
... because one of the secondary actresses is Leonor Varela, Chilean.
The TV news programs are hyping the movie because of that and that alone: "The chilean actress that's becoming a star in Hollywood!", "Leonor Varela stars among the great actor Wesley Snipes", and more hollow phrases like that.
Unsurprisingly, other than stating this is a "horror" movie, they have mentioned pretty much nothing about the film itself.
This proves once again what an unimportant remote little country Chile is... and the worst thing this happened less than four months ago, when _Driven_ (with Cristián De la fuente, another "great" chilean actor) was premiered in USA... fortunately, around here it was a total flop.
I had this teacher in high school that force-fed us the "secrets" of high-speed reading. According to him, you only had to skim thru a page and capture the keywords in order to "comprehend" it.
Of course, this totally ignores the fact that a book doesn't have the keywords marked in bold so your eyes can fetch them quickly without actually reading the page (maybe this guy sped-read comics?).
It also ignores the fact that the teachers that assigned a book asked about the details in it, which you totally lose when you skim rapidly through it, even if you manage to understand what the book is about (extreme exercise: speed-read Beowulf, then tell us what did you understand).
The class-mates that tried this flopped miserably in the following midterm and whined to no end, rightly so (I do acknowledge they didn't have much experience speed-reading, but I still think it shows how much the method sucks).
There are some technical books where you can read the first two paragraphs of a section and skip the rest, but that isn't really "speed-reading".
It will be at least two years before carbon nanotubes can be used in lithium-ion batteries, Zhou said. "We show the potential but there are many practical issues that need to be solved," he said.
I can't help but think that manufacturing these batteries will cost more than twice than current ones, making them economically unviable.
In my country (Chile), some ten years ago, one of the then fragmented socialist-marxist left wing sectors formed the "Partido Amplio de Izquierda Socialista" (meaning roughly "Ample Left-Wing Socialist Party"; "PAIS" means "country"). They had to add the "amplio" ("ample") word, because the initial name "Partido de Izquierda Socialista" didn't have a good acronym ("PIS" means "urine").
They were, of course, the butt of jokes for this (after all, the inclusion of "Amplio" was notoriously forced). It was said that they handled other alternative names, like "Partido de la Izquierda CHilena Independiente" or "Partido de la Izquierda Popular Independiente" (more acronyms meaning urine).
I hate it when people say stuff like this. You make it sound as if hackers like software that's hard to install and use.
Sorry, the context wasn't clear: what I mean is that the interfaces hackers create for themselves are usually very powerful, and hard to use by a typical low-power user. It's not that the hackers actually like obscurity, rather that they (hell, WE) don't have a problem with it - we can learn a difficult interface quickly and grok it without too much trouble. A user like, say, my grandmother couldn't even think of understanding it.
Examples? Look at vi - the interface is hideous, yet many many hackers love it because it's extremely powerful once you've learned it.
Of all computer users, the Linux crowd is the least qualified to comment about design. Oh sure, there are exceptions, both among Linux users and among Slashdot readers, but just read the comments that have already been posted. The common thread is that people wouldn't want to sacrifice content for a flashy web site, and that just shows their ignorance. These people don't realize that good design does not involve compromizes. Good design is about presenting the content in such a manner that the appearance enhances the content presentation, not distracts from it.
Actually, you are wrong, too. The compromise here isn't content versus design, but rather USABILITY versus design, and speed-of-access versus design.
A barroque flashy page that makes difficult to find the information the user wants fails in usability.
A barroque flashy page that takes more than, say, 30 seconds to load fails in speed-of-access. This, of course, depends of the user's bandwidth - where I work at, we have 100 Mb/s (so pretty much everything is almost instantaneous), but at home I still use my good old 28,8 Kb/s modem, and non-simple pages take a lot more to download.
Besides, look at the state of 99% of Linux software, especially the open source stuff. User interfaces are the last concern of the developers. It's obvious to me that the majority of Linux developers and users really don't care, or just don't know anything about, good design. But, I guess I should cut them some slack, since it's very hard to be a good programmer and a good designer. Yet I'm disappointed that most developers don't try to get good design ideas from others.
While "pretty" design isn't a typical hacker's strongest skill, efficient design is. Many open source apps have interfaces that are hard to use by a regular guy, but that's because the typical open source app is done by hackers for hackers.
Now wait a minute... so you're saying that if MS developed "a brand new protocol that supports all of HTTP's capabilities, and lacks its limitations," you'd scoff at it? Or do you only feel this way because we're talking about the evil empire here...
I was doing an impression of what they'd say in their propaganda, not that it'd be true. Remember they claim Windows NT is more reliable than Unix/Linux, etcetera.
I have a VERY hard time believing they would be able to come with a significant improvement in network software - in other areas, it's a different song.
Box likes to think of HTTP as the "cockroach of the Internet" because "after the holocaust it will be the only protocol left standing."
Gee, I wonder WHAT shape will that holocaust take. Maybe it'll be a killer protocol that pursues and assasinates other protocols? Damn, Mr. Box, use the proper words, will you?
This works for small transactions asking for Web pages, but when Web services start running transactions that take some time to complete over the protocol, the model fails. "If it takes three minutes for a response, it is not really HTTP any more," Box said.
Well, of course it isn't. Is it, then, HTTP's fault that it doesn't work perfectly when used for stuff it wasn't designed to do? Hell, I'd love to see telnet-over-HTTP done while we're at this.
"We have to do something to make it (HTTP) less important," said Box. "If we rely on HTTP we will melt the Internet. We at least have to raise the level of abstraction, so that we have an industry-wide way to do long-running requests--I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days."
Maybe if we get back to use the proper protocols (say, why don't we rely on ftp for transferring files, for example?), we wouldn't have the current "problem".
Another problem with HTTP, said Box, is that it is asymmetric. "Only one entity can initiate an exchange over HTTP, the other entity is passive, and can only respond. For peer-to-peer applications this is not really suitable," he said.
Of course it isn't, HTTP is designed with a client-server model in mind.
In my humble opinion, this is just the first step from Microsoft for a new FUD campaign against HTTP: "First, we show everyone how HTTP isn't any good, then we roll over our brand new protocol that supports all of HTTP's capabilities, and lacks its limitations. Buy it from us, your beloved Microsoft!".
"Microsoft has some ideas (on how to break the independence on HTTP), IBM has some ideas, and others have ideas. We'll see," he said. But, he added, "if one vendor does it on their own, it will simply not be worth the trouble."
This, of course, implies that Microsoft won't control the new protocol on its own... not at first. They'll just "embrace and extend" it later.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Douglas Adams was, once again, an incredible visionary (even if he didn't intend to be one).
Actually, he wasn't. His ludicrous "telephone sanitizers" weren't made up. It's a normal part of British culture. Don't believe me? Get your telephone sanitizers here, here and here. All
>Yes, it did blow my mind when I moved to the UK and discovered that this wasn't Douglas Adams fiction, it was sitting on every desk.
Wow. Brits can be incredibly odd sometimes.
Douglas Adams was, once again, an incredible visionary (even if he didn't intend to be one).
Danila, sorry to disappoint you, but there was NO intention from my part to point to 1984 here. I like Google because it's earned my respect thru a useful service, not thru brainwashing.
Man, we've come a long way. Back when they bought the Dejanews Usenet archive, all comments I saw were of the "Who are these guys?"-"What do they want with our beloved archive?"-"Will they keep it public or they'll make it a paid service?"-"Is their search engine any good?" kind.
Now we take its groups search feature for granted, we think nothing of other search engines (Yahoo!, anyone?) and we use Google to search for images (back in MY day, those were the hardest to search, having to search and download lots of stuff from ftp sites and then discard the junk).
I love Google.
Besides computers, my other hobbies are science fiction, progressive rock [*] and... landscape photography. What I did was making enlargements of my favorite landscape/scenery pictures, framing them, and then hanging them in the walls. I did about six months ago, and I'm pleased with the results.
[*] For a time, the only "dressing" was the sonic dressing the music provided, and that was nice, too.
I came up with an interesting (and, dare I say, slightly original) concept for an alien world. I'm toying with different ideas for short stories within it. So far, my two biggest problems are
1) Finding a good enough story, and
2) Worldbuilding.
The latter problem is the one I actually care the most - I don't want all of my aliens to be "disguised humans", so I've done big efforts into figuring out how do they behave, what their culture is like, how their physical differences affect their way of thinking AND language, and all that. However, I can't shake the feeling I am missing aspects I shouldn't. This process is tedious and takes long, but I consider it very important.
Are there any guidelines you'd suggest to do it properly?
Don't you hate when there's several people with the same name as yours? I know more than 10 different "Miguel Farah" besides myself, and that's only within my family.
That's why most spanish-speaking countries keep using the two names + two surnames (the father's and the mother's) method for the full name of a person. That way, my full name is "Miguel Braxton Farah Fugate", which decreases dramatically the probabilty of a name collision (even more for people with relatively uncommon surnames, like myself).
This practice was started somewhere in the Middle ages, and while it's not as good as a unique number or ID, the cases of people with two identical full names are very rare.
And remember that it will take MONTHS to unpack everything!
Oh, my... my last wish has just blown up my time. I'd play Civ II/Freeciv all the time, do nothing else and THEN I'd complain of lack of time.
OTOH, if I had infinite money to spend, I'd mount my own FM radio and play the music I like (which you can't hear on radio anymore), free of commercials, free of "radio friendly format" and all that.
in my opinion.
It's FAST, VERY light (my executable is 150K), full with features, configurable pretty much for everything, contains a macro language that lets you create new commands, and has EVERYTHING without becoming bloated.
The only downside is that it's a commercial non-free program. But it's worth every single penny, I say.
Go to Semware, and download the trial version. I can't speak for others, but I love it a lot. When using Windows*, TSE-Pro and 4DOS/4NT are the two programs I use most.
By the way: Notepad is HIDEOUS. It might be standard, yes, but it's so primitive it becomes heavily restrictive. I carry around with me a diskette with my personal vital tools, text editor included, so I can skip the pain of using notepad on other people's computers.
I first met Freeciv back in version 1.11.4. I loved for its superior user interface, and wasn't really bothered by the inferior (compared to Civ II) graphics.
But the one thing that REALLY annoyed me about Civ 1/2 was the SHORT city lists for each nation. What did I do? I took the time to do a really long list of cities for my favorite nation (you guess which one it was) and submitted it. Now my 200-names list is PART of the game. I extended/made better some other nation's city lists, and now they're part of the game. Then I created a map of my favorite country in the world, and was incorporated, too.
I can proudly say that even though I have NEVER touched one line of Freeciv source code, I can call myself a developer of the game. And I love it.
I haven't read that book, so I can't recommend it. It IS on my "to-read" queue [I have a copy], though.
I recommend:
Be sure to take a look at the The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List for more recommendations
I'm currently developing a project where I have to modify existing source code developed by someone else. I spend most of the time trying to figure out WHY the previous programmer did something the way he did it, and what the hell he was thinking. Write these into your comments. Also, write down in comments small tips for the programmers that might come after you. Comments in the style of:
/* This function expects an object that has been fully filled and checked for errors before. Be sure to never send it a NULL one! */
/* We're invoking the call to the database with the "mode" flag set to zero because currently it won't use it - but it COULD be used in the future. */
or
help a lot.
I also have to modify Java source, where I have generic classes that inherit from previous ones a lot of attributes. For example:
public class A {
public String s;
public double d;
public long l;
}
and
public class B extends A {
public String ss;
}
I prefer to write class B like this:
public class B extends A {
// public String s; : A
// public double d; : A
// public long l; : A
public String ss;
}
That way I can see quickly all of the attributes class B contains.
My colleagues at work think *I* am nuts because I refuse to use notepad or Visual Café's builtin-text editor to edit .java source files, preferring instead a much more powerful older DOS-based text editor (TSE). They're gonna suffer a heart attack when they see this.
The Spanish province of Extremadura has[...]
Actually, Extremadura is an autonomous community (formerly a region under the older division of the country). It's composed of TWO provinces: Cáceres and Badajoz.
There. Mod me down as redundant if you will.
About 40 of the large mummy bundles are topped with false heads, known to archaeologists as falsas cabezas.
Well, no wonder... after all, that's exactly what "falsa cabeza" means.
Anyway, it's GREAT news that this site has been found in time... but I can already see the logistical trouble in keeping in good shape thousands of mummies, let alone all their artifacts.
... because one of the secondary actresses is Leonor Varela, Chilean.
The TV news programs are hyping the movie because of that and that alone: "The chilean actress that's becoming a star in Hollywood!", "Leonor Varela stars among the great actor Wesley Snipes", and more hollow phrases like that.
Unsurprisingly, other than stating this is a "horror" movie, they have mentioned pretty much nothing about the film itself.
This proves once again what an unimportant remote little country Chile is... and the worst thing this happened less than four months ago, when _Driven_ (with Cristián De la fuente, another "great" chilean actor) was premiered in USA... fortunately, around here it was a total flop.
I had this teacher in high school that force-fed us the "secrets" of high-speed reading. According to him, you only had to skim thru a page and capture the keywords in order to "comprehend" it.
Of course, this totally ignores the fact that a book doesn't have the keywords marked in bold so your eyes can fetch them quickly without actually reading the page (maybe this guy sped-read comics?).
It also ignores the fact that the teachers that assigned a book asked about the details in it, which you totally lose when you skim rapidly through it, even if you manage to understand what the book is about (extreme exercise: speed-read Beowulf, then tell us what did you understand).
The class-mates that tried this flopped miserably in the following midterm and whined to no end, rightly so (I do acknowledge they didn't have much experience speed-reading, but I still think it shows how much the method sucks).
There are some technical books where you can read the first two paragraphs of a section and skip the rest, but that isn't really "speed-reading".
I can't help but think that manufacturing these batteries will cost more than twice than current ones, making them economically unviable.
In my country (Chile), some ten years ago, one of the then fragmented socialist-marxist left wing sectors formed the "Partido Amplio de Izquierda Socialista" (meaning roughly "Ample Left-Wing Socialist Party"; "PAIS" means "country"). They had to add the "amplio" ("ample") word, because the initial name "Partido de Izquierda Socialista" didn't have a good acronym ("PIS" means "urine").
They were, of course, the butt of jokes for this (after all, the inclusion of "Amplio" was notoriously forced). It was said that they handled other alternative names, like "Partido de la Izquierda CHilena Independiente" or "Partido de la Izquierda Popular Independiente" (more acronyms meaning urine).
Thank God that party didn't last long...
I hate it when people say stuff like this. You make it sound as if hackers like software that's hard to install and use.
Sorry, the context wasn't clear: what I mean is that the interfaces hackers create for themselves are usually very powerful, and hard to use by a typical low-power user. It's not that the hackers actually like obscurity, rather that they (hell, WE) don't have a problem with it - we can learn a difficult interface quickly and grok it without too much trouble. A user like, say, my grandmother couldn't even think of understanding it.
Examples? Look at vi - the interface is hideous, yet many many hackers love it because it's extremely powerful once you've learned it.
Actually, you are wrong, too. The compromise here isn't content versus design, but rather USABILITY versus design, and speed-of-access versus design.
A barroque flashy page that makes difficult to find the information the user wants fails in usability.
A barroque flashy page that takes more than, say, 30 seconds to load fails in speed-of-access. This, of course, depends of the user's bandwidth - where I work at, we have 100 Mb/s (so pretty much everything is almost instantaneous), but at home I still use my good old 28,8 Kb/s modem, and non-simple pages take a lot more to download.
Besides, look at the state of 99% of Linux software, especially the open source stuff. User interfaces are the last concern of the developers. It's obvious to me that the majority of Linux developers and users really don't care, or just don't know anything about, good design. But, I guess I should cut them some slack, since it's very hard to be a good programmer and a good designer. Yet I'm disappointed that most developers don't try to get good design ideas from others.
While "pretty" design isn't a typical hacker's strongest skill, efficient design is. Many open source apps have interfaces that are hard to use by a regular guy, but that's because the typical open source app is done by hackers for hackers.
Now wait a minute... so you're saying that if MS developed "a brand new protocol that supports all of HTTP's capabilities, and lacks its limitations," you'd scoff at it? Or do you only feel this way because we're talking about the evil empire here...
I was doing an impression of what they'd say in their propaganda, not that it'd be true. Remember they claim Windows NT is more reliable than Unix/Linux, etcetera.
I have a VERY hard time believing they would be able to come with a significant improvement in network software - in other areas, it's a different song.
Gee, I wonder WHAT shape will that holocaust take. Maybe it'll be a killer protocol that pursues and assasinates other protocols? Damn, Mr. Box, use the proper words, will you?
This works for small transactions asking for Web pages, but when Web services start running transactions that take some time to complete over the protocol, the model fails. "If it takes three minutes for a response, it is not really HTTP any more," Box said.
Well, of course it isn't. Is it, then, HTTP's fault that it doesn't work perfectly when used for stuff it wasn't designed to do? Hell, I'd love to see telnet-over-HTTP done while we're at this.
"We have to do something to make it (HTTP) less important," said Box. "If we rely on HTTP we will melt the Internet. We at least have to raise the level of abstraction, so that we have an industry-wide way to do long-running requests--I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days."
Maybe if we get back to use the proper protocols (say, why don't we rely on ftp for transferring files, for example?), we wouldn't have the current "problem".
Another problem with HTTP, said Box, is that it is asymmetric. "Only one entity can initiate an exchange over HTTP, the other entity is passive, and can only respond. For peer-to-peer applications this is not really suitable," he said.
Of course it isn't, HTTP is designed with a client-server model in mind.
In my humble opinion, this is just the first step from Microsoft for a new FUD campaign against HTTP: "First, we show everyone how HTTP isn't any good, then we roll over our brand new protocol that supports all of HTTP's capabilities, and lacks its limitations. Buy it from us, your beloved Microsoft!".
"Microsoft has some ideas (on how to break the independence on HTTP), IBM has some ideas, and others have ideas. We'll see," he said. But, he added, "if one vendor does it on their own, it will simply not be worth the trouble."
This, of course, implies that Microsoft won't control the new protocol on its own... not at first. They'll just "embrace and extend" it later.