Funnily enough, Annan used *exactly the same quote* when addressing Davos in 2001. If he cared about rate, don't you think he'd have updated his figures?
-clay
Re:Web services ARE client/server
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 1
I didn't mean to suggest that WS are going to be outmoded by P2P -- in fact, I think I said that P2P was going to go away as a term while Web Services will become more important.
The client/server issue is not one of whether C/S architectures are good -- they obviously are -- but about whether 'client' and 'server' are permanent or temporary designations. On the web, browsers and clients and servers are servers, while in Napster or OpenCOLA or Groove, the nodes are both.
So all I am saying about Web Services is that there are a lot of things we can do when both halves of a client/server relationship can get and parse XML, and that models for this kind of two-way communication are closer to P2P than to the classic Web.
-clay
Web Services: How different from the Web?
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This is a really important debate right now, and there are no good answers. The debate comes down to how much do we need to do to the Web as we have it today to be able to create an environment where programs can be as interoperable as web browsers and servers are today?
There are growing criticisms of the consensus vision of web services -- http / SOAP / WSDL / UDDI -- largely on the grounds that its complexity is un-web-like, and that there are uninvented and possibly uninventable layers required above UDDI for any two arbitrary applications to be able to find each other in the dark.
Dave Winer of Userland, inventor of XML-RPC and co-designer of the SOAP spec, advocates an embrace of these two protocols by the Open Source movement as a lightweight way to advance the battle for interoperability. (Dave's ideas in many ways answer the Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web? article form earlier this month.)
Another group, in line with your "Apache is all we need" idea, has taken Roy Fielding's idea of the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture as a way to extend existing web semantics furhter into the domain of applications. They have started a RESTWiki to expand on those ideas.
This is all a big mess right now, with no obvious clarity coming any time soon, but two things we can be certain of are that experiments with application-to-application traffic is going to increase dramatically in the next 12 months, whatever the framework, and that with MSFT driving this idea as part of.NET, even if a lot of it is hype, it will affect our world a great deal.
Pictures are still separate files, but they were not included directly in Web pages as clickable objects until the invention of the IMG tag. Which Andreeson did. First. In Mosaic.
"Mosaic was much more sophisticated graphically than other browsers of the time. Like other browsers it was designed to display HTML documents, but new formatting tags like "center" were included. Especially important was the inclusion of the "image" tag which allowed for inclusion of images on Web pages. Earlier browsers allowed the viewing of pictures, but only as separate files. Mosaic made it possible for images and text to appear on the same page. Mosaic also sported a more user-friendly interface, with clickable buttons that let users navigate easily and controls that let users scroll through text with ease. Another innovative feature was the hyper-link. In earlier browsers hypertext links had reference numbers that the user typed in to navigate to the linked document. Hyper-links allowed the user to simply click on a link to retrieve a document."
Thanks, but rather than the, uh, bulls and virgins, I'd rather you just make it a point hit me upside the head when I say stuff that makes no sense -- 'swhat all my friends do.
I am a very regular/. reader, but in truth, the thing I like best about the posts is that they are a well-tuned zeitgeist meter, so I usually use them as a check for my own thinking.
When you read Highest First, the 5's are often incredibly astute.
If the public is so good at sorting out the good from the bad, then why are tabloids the best selling newspapers in the world?
Because they're entertaining. Duh. This is like asking why, when there are all those serious documentaries on the Serious Documentary Channel, do they keep watching Friends?
Remember that even when Matt Drudge was riding high, a majority of the public thought Clinton should not be impeached, behavior much less sheep-like than they are often accused of.
Its fun to think other people are making stupid decisions when they are making decisions you disagree with, but in my line of work -- being an analyst, not a cop -- I have consistently found that people's self-interest, especially as filtered through a group, is too serious a force to write off.
Yeah, evolution is not the perferct word, especially as the biological discipline of evolution is so much more rigourous and specific than my use of it here.
So its a metaphor, sure, but when it comes to systems being adapted by experimentation in all directions meeting with variable success or failure, its a pretty good metaphor.
I go back and forth between three metaphors when thinking about the net: evolution, economics (selfish individuals optimizing their preferences when expending limited resources, money but also time, processor speed, etc) and politics (legal systems for creating some structure that can make decisions for the whole).
Different situations call for different ways of thinking (and on the net, any given situaiton usually calls for at least two [g/]), but I could have done a better job of pointing out that I don't mean that the network is literally alive.
The "incredible" 90%+ figure is in fact incredible. I've seen this particular piece of misdirection ove and over, where "media" is redefined as "mass media", and then "mass media" is redefined as "national TV".
And then, once run through this particular two-step, its "Oh my god, media contraction!" Well sure.
If you leave out all the non-corporate sources of media, then the media looks awfully corporate, just like if you leave out all the days when it rains, we're having a drought.
Note, by the way, that my argument is not that there is *not* corporate news. Note that my argument is not even that the Bix 6 are a result of contraction. My argument is simply that expansion of media is outstripping the contraction.
In the average American town, There used to be 3 sources of TV. Now there are 50-150 TV channels, and *tens of thousands* of print outlets via the Web. Where's the contraction?
Starbucks Corp. said earlier this month that it will build 802.11b networks in 3,000 of its coffeehouses so customers can sip their lattes while they browse the Net using their own wireless notebooks, smart phones, or Pocket PC PDAs.
Oh my god, I'm *so* glad someone else remembers that ped nightmare! I wrote a bunch of stuff for Urban Desires about that, including the fact that he came out and said "It was stupid, it should never have happened, it was my fault" on alt.culture.internet, but all Time readers got was a manby-pamby half-retraction of the patented "WE mustent let this blind us to the larger details of..." form.
Didn't know about IPG, but I'll check it out, thanks for the heads up.
Its not an answer I like giving -- one of my best friends was the editor-in-chief of word.com for years, RIP -- and I've been sad to see oldmanmurray.com run into hard times, but I still think its the answer.
No one gets free beer because there is a minimum cost in producing and distributing each beer. In a commodiuty market, price approaches cost, but the marginal cost of beer prevents the unit price from ever falling to zero.
On the net, though, the marginal price of serving up one more page is zero, so price can approach cost, and the residue of the up-front costs can (in theory) be borne by subsidy, whether advertising subsidy or the labor of love.
So we get free/. but not free beer because of the (often brutal) economics of digital data.
I think it is not because the phrase "peer-to-peer" came *after* the applications it was meant to describe, so it is more a lable than a definition.
I refuse to be one of those peerier-than-thou people who wants to define Napster out of the club after the fact -- call Napster "Client server wiht redirect" or whatever you like, P2P was the label that got put on it (and a lot of other things besides), and while I think decentralization would have been a better name, I'm not dumb enough to swim upstream against the meme-flow.
Now that I am a parent-to-be, I obviously feel that the net is a terrible evil danger and must be stopped at all costs.
I would much rather have my child in the loving hands of ABC tv (a wholly owned subsidiary of Procter and Gamble ) than confrinting the mind-polluting filth that is/.
True, but they can also save on multi-cpu boxes, paying less than $1000 for a chassis, and running a bok for more than 20K hours, so the nickel an hour is more a back of the envelope calculation designed to illustrate the gap between what they'd pay and what you'd take.
Fair cop, and I actually had a couple of paras in there to go a little further down that road, but I stopped because I was really doing 'order of magnitude' calculations.
For starters, the numbers were chosen to make the math come out nicely -- the average box less monitor is actually less than a grand, and the average machine is in service longer than 20,000 hours, which makes the nickel figure high.
Furthermore, if PopPower et al wanted to build a cycle farm, they'd use multi-CPU boxen, so the calculations get even more complicated. Finally, as we've seen in Cali, power requirements differ between consumer and business regimes.
So there are a lot of variables pulling the number this way and that, wiht an increasing degree of speculation, but sinece the real point I was trying to make -- your use of your PC has variable value to you between the hours you are and aren't using it, and that if you're using it, no pro-rate fee will induce you to stop -- would have been accurate even if the nickel number is low by a factor of 5, I left the back of the envelope calculation and went on.
No matter what your take on certification in general is, this is a weak test. I (== casual Linux/Solaris user) just took it and scored above 50%. Amusingly, the section I scored worst on (4 of 10 for "Insallation") was the section with the most propaganda about the GPL and free software and the fewest questions about actual Installation and Configuration.
*I* wouldn't hire me to do any serious network/admin work, much less security. If the test is intentionally watered down to encourage more people to flash their SAIR Cert on their resumes, I can see that backfiring in short order.
Napster will not be replaced by another p2p system if the deal Napster cuts with BMG satisfies the majority of current Napster users, users who are not committed to Napster for ideology but for convenience.
During Prohibition, as today, it was illegal to do something the public wanted to do badly enough to be willing to break the law. Furthermore, the process the Government wanted to forbid (fermentation then; file copying now) was something that individual citizens could do in the privacy of their own homes.
Ultimately, the failure of Prohibition spoke to the fact that all the law in the world won't help if enforcing it requires targeting tens of millions of otherwise law abiding citizens for intrusive examination and possible arrest.
The flip side of the Prohibition argument, though, works in the music industry's favor. Despite the fact that it is still possible to make gin in your bathtub, no one does it anymore, because alcohol is now available at a price and with restrictions the population generally approves of. To take a more recent example, the civil disobedience against the 55 mph speed limit did not mean that drivers wanted no speed limits, it simply meant they wanted a speed limit they could live with.
Techno-anarchists have often imagined a future where the state vanishes as people flock to anonymous digital cash and impregnable fortresses of data, and Napster is seen in some quarters as an anti-authoritarian move in just this direction.
But the lesson of Prohibition and 55 mph is that when a population rebels against a particular regulation, they are not agitating to throw off the chains of government interference, they are merely agitating for more comfortable chains.
Napster is not a revolution against the commercial music industry, it is a revolution within it.
I can't speak to #1, but as for #2, you work on the net for several years, found and sell a business, and then teach Web design and internet theory in a college that uses slightly outmoded jargon.
In any case, I am on leave from Hunter, but the New Media program goes on apace.
Supposedly one of the great advantages of Open Source and/or free software is that you can release it as/when you please, instead of following a schedule laid down by a marketing department or other "outside" influence.
I really couldn't disagree more -- the system you're describing is essentially 'lazyware'. The OS community is starting to suffer from a weird kind of political correctness, where anything which seems to be unlike ordinary software and travels under the label Open Source is beyond critique. Though I've criticized ESR plenty in print, what he was describing in CatB was not some set of abstract principles, he was describing how Linux actually came to be the success that it is, and the core of that thinking is that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. This in turn means that an OS project stands or falls on its willingness to release early and release often.
I am a writer too, and one of those writers who agrees with Tim O'Reilly in thinking that because writing is often something better done in solitude, and without releasing early, releasing often, that most writing is not amenable to Open Source methods. I am not suggesting that Phillip should rush his answers -- I really don't care what he says or doesn't say. I do however think its too bad that/. is becoming a home for mushy thinking about open source.
Open Source projects of any sort don't appear "When they're ready" -- that violates the "Release early; release often" dictum from CatB. If something is Open Source, it necessarily appears before its ready, because that is the only way to leverage the "Many eyeballs make bugs shallow" effect of Open Source.
I'm not objecting to Phillip producing his answers when they're ready -- they are after all his answers. I'm objecting to the mischaracterization of the way Open Source works.
Summary: streaming media is an *extremely* young technology. Of the 10% or so of the population with net access, probably only 5% (the DSL/Cable/University crowd) or so of those can even use streaming media effectively.
Be careful with generalizations like this -- according to the Computer Industry Almanac, the real figure for the US population with net access is 43% (http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geogra phics/article/0,1323,5911_234841,0 0.html), so the net is a much more mature market than your figures would suggest. This in turn means that we are much closer to playing for keeps for things like user-annointed standards than we were a couple of years ago.
It makes you wonder, have the VRML guys ever actually SEEN Quake?
Playfulness in 3D spaces - Why Quake, written to scratch an itch, is so much better than VRML, a solution in search of a problem, and what to do about i
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough, Annan used *exactly the same quote* when addressing Davos in 2001. If he cared about rate, don't you think he'd have updated his figures?
-clay
I didn't mean to suggest that WS are going to be outmoded by P2P -- in fact, I think I said that P2P was going to go away as a term while Web Services will become more important.
The client/server issue is not one of whether C/S architectures are good -- they obviously are -- but about whether 'client' and 'server' are permanent or temporary designations. On the web, browsers and clients and servers are servers, while in Napster or OpenCOLA or Groove, the nodes are both.
So all I am saying about Web Services is that there are a lot of things we can do when both halves of a client/server relationship can get and parse XML, and that models for this kind of two-way communication are closer to P2P than to the classic Web.
-clay
This is a really important debate right now, and there are no good answers. The debate comes down to how much do we need to do to the Web as we have it today to be able to create an environment where programs can be as interoperable as web browsers and servers are today?
.NET, even if a lot of it is hype, it will affect our world a great deal.
There are growing criticisms of the consensus vision of web services -- http / SOAP / WSDL / UDDI -- largely on the grounds that its complexity is un-web-like, and that there are uninvented and possibly uninventable layers required above UDDI for any two arbitrary applications to be able to find each other in the dark.
Dave Winer of Userland, inventor of XML-RPC and co-designer of the SOAP spec, advocates an embrace of these two protocols by the Open Source movement as a lightweight way to advance the battle for interoperability. (Dave's ideas in many ways answer the Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web? article form earlier this month.)
Another group, in line with your "Apache is all we need" idea, has taken Roy Fielding's idea of the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture as a way to extend existing web semantics furhter into the domain of applications. They have started a RESTWiki to expand on those ideas.
This is all a big mess right now, with no obvious clarity coming any time soon, but two things we can be certain of are that experiments with application-to-application traffic is going to increase dramatically in the next 12 months, whatever the framework, and that with MSFT driving this idea as part of
-clay
-clay
Its was in fact Mosaic that created "Web interface as GUI", by making clickable pictures.
-clay
Thanks, but rather than the, uh, bulls and virgins, I'd rather you just make it a point hit me upside the head when I say stuff that makes no sense -- 'swhat all my friends do.
-c
I am a very regular /. reader, but in truth, the thing I like best about the posts is that they are a well-tuned zeitgeist meter, so I usually use them as a check for my own thinking.
When you read Highest First, the 5's are often incredibly astute.
-clay
If the public is so good at sorting out the good from the bad, then why are tabloids the best selling newspapers in the world?
Because they're entertaining. Duh. This is like asking why, when there are all those serious documentaries on the Serious Documentary Channel, do they keep watching Friends?
Remember that even when Matt Drudge was riding high, a majority of the public thought Clinton should not be impeached, behavior much less sheep-like than they are often accused of.
Its fun to think other people are making stupid decisions when they are making decisions you disagree with, but in my line of work -- being an analyst, not a cop -- I have consistently found that people's self-interest, especially as filtered through a group, is too serious a force to write off.
-clay
*sigh*
/]), but I could have done a better job of pointing out that I don't mean that the network is literally alive.
Yeah, evolution is not the perferct word, especially as the biological discipline of evolution is so much more rigourous and specific than my use of it here.
So its a metaphor, sure, but when it comes to systems being adapted by experimentation in all directions meeting with variable success or failure, its a pretty good metaphor.
I go back and forth between three metaphors when thinking about the net: evolution, economics (selfish individuals optimizing their preferences when expending limited resources, money but also time, processor speed, etc) and politics (legal systems for creating some structure that can make decisions for the whole).
Different situations call for different ways of thinking (and on the net, any given situaiton usually calls for at least two [g
-clay
The "incredible" 90%+ figure is in fact incredible. I've seen this particular piece of misdirection ove and over, where "media" is redefined as "mass media", and then "mass media" is redefined as "national TV".
And then, once run through this particular two-step, its "Oh my god, media contraction!" Well sure.
If you leave out all the non-corporate sources of media, then the media looks awfully corporate, just like if you leave out all the days when it rains, we're having a drought.
Note, by the way, that my argument is not that there is *not* corporate news. Note that my argument is not even that the Bix 6 are a result of contraction. My argument is simply that expansion of media is outstripping the contraction.
In the average American town, There used to be 3 sources of TV. Now there are 50-150 TV channels, and *tens of thousands* of print outlets via the Web. Where's the contraction?
-clay
Is this true?
Starbucks Corp. said earlier this month that it will build 802.11b networks in 3,000 of its coffeehouses so customers can sip their lattes while they browse the Net using their own wireless notebooks, smart phones, or Pocket PC PDAs.
http://www.informationweek.com/820/network.htm
-clay
Oh my god, I'm *so* glad someone else remembers that ped nightmare! I wrote a bunch of stuff for Urban Desires about that, including the fact that he came out and said "It was stupid, it should never have happened, it was my fault" on alt.culture.internet, but all Time readers got was a manby-pamby half-retraction of the patented "WE mustent let this blind us to the larger details of..." form.
Didn't know about IPG, but I'll check it out, thanks for the heads up.
-clay
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
You're welcome, you're welcome, you're welcome.
I'd have sent you mail saying same, but no@e.mail suggested that would be futile...
-clay
Its not an answer I like giving -- one of my best friends was the editor-in-chief of word.com for years, RIP -- and I've been sad to see oldmanmurray.com run into hard times, but I still think its the answer.
/. but not free beer because of the (often brutal) economics of digital data.
No one gets free beer because there is a minimum cost in producing and distributing each beer. In a commodiuty market, price approaches cost, but the marginal cost of beer prevents the unit price from ever falling to zero.
On the net, though, the marginal price of serving up one more page is zero, so price can approach cost, and the residue of the up-front costs can (in theory) be borne by subsidy, whether advertising subsidy or the labor of love.
So we get free
-clay
Clay seems to think it's not.
I think it is not because the phrase "peer-to-peer" came *after* the applications it was meant to describe, so it is more a lable than a definition.
I refuse to be one of those peerier-than-thou people who wants to define Napster out of the club after the fact -- call Napster "Client server wiht redirect" or whatever you like, P2P was the label that got put on it (and a lot of other things besides), and while I think decentralization would have been a better name, I'm not dumb enough to swim upstream against the meme-flow.
-clay
Not *thats* a question I can sink my teeth into!
/.
Now that I am a parent-to-be, I obviously feel that the net is a terrible evil danger and must be stopped at all costs.
I would much rather have my child in the loving hands of ABC tv (a wholly owned subsidiary of Procter and Gamble ) than confrinting the mind-polluting filth that is
-clay
True, but they can also save on multi-cpu boxes, paying less than $1000 for a chassis, and running a bok for more than 20K hours, so the nickel an hour is more a back of the envelope calculation designed to illustrate the gap between what they'd pay and what you'd take.
I made a similar point in another thread on this topic.
-clay
Fair cop, and I actually had a couple of paras in there to go a little further down that road, but I stopped because I was really doing 'order of magnitude' calculations.
For starters, the numbers were chosen to make the math come out nicely -- the average box less monitor is actually less than a grand, and the average machine is in service longer than 20,000 hours, which makes the nickel figure high.
Furthermore, if PopPower et al wanted to build a cycle farm, they'd use multi-CPU boxen, so the calculations get even more complicated. Finally, as we've seen in Cali, power requirements differ between consumer and business regimes.
So there are a lot of variables pulling the number this way and that, wiht an increasing degree of speculation, but sinece the real point I was trying to make -- your use of your PC has variable value to you between the hours you are and aren't using it, and that if you're using it, no pro-rate fee will induce you to stop -- would have been accurate even if the nickel number is low by a factor of 5, I left the back of the envelope calculation and went on.
-clay
No matter what your take on certification in general is, this is a weak test. I (== casual Linux/Solaris user) just took it and scored above 50%. Amusingly, the section I scored worst on (4 of 10 for "Insallation") was the section with the most propaganda about the GPL and free software and the fewest questions about actual Installation and Configuration.
*I* wouldn't hire me to do any serious network/admin work, much less security. If the test is intentionally watered down to encourage more people to flash their SAIR Cert on their resumes, I can see that backfiring in short order.
-clay
Napster will not be replaced by another p2p system if the deal Napster cuts with BMG satisfies the majority of current Napster users, users who are not committed to Napster for ideology but for convenience.
During Prohibition, as today, it was illegal to do something the public wanted to do badly enough to be willing to break the law. Furthermore, the process the Government wanted to forbid (fermentation then; file copying now) was something that individual citizens could do in the privacy of their own homes.
Ultimately, the failure of Prohibition spoke to the fact that all the law in the world won't help if enforcing it requires targeting tens of millions of otherwise law abiding citizens for intrusive examination and possible arrest.
The flip side of the Prohibition argument, though, works in the music industry's favor. Despite the fact that it is still possible to make gin in your bathtub, no one does it anymore, because alcohol is now available at a price and with restrictions the population generally approves of. To take a more recent example, the civil disobedience against the 55 mph speed limit did not mean that drivers wanted no speed limits, it simply meant they wanted a speed limit they could live with.
Techno-anarchists have often imagined a future where the state vanishes as people flock to anonymous digital cash and impregnable fortresses of data, and Napster is seen in some quarters as an anti-authoritarian move in just this direction.
But the lesson of Prohibition and 55 mph is that when a population rebels against a particular regulation, they are not agitating to throw off the chains of government interference, they are merely agitating for more comfortable chains.
Napster is not a revolution against the commercial music industry, it is a revolution within it.
-cla
I can't speak to #1, but as for #2, you work on the net for several years, found and sell a business, and then teach Web design and internet theory in a college that uses slightly outmoded jargon.
In any case, I am on leave from Hunter, but the New Media program goes on apace.
-clay
I really couldn't disagree more -- the system you're describing is essentially 'lazyware'. The OS community is starting to suffer from a weird kind of political correctness, where anything which seems to be unlike ordinary software and travels under the label Open Source is beyond critique. Though I've criticized ESR plenty in print, what he was describing in CatB was not some set of abstract principles, he was describing how Linux actually came to be the success that it is, and the core of that thinking is that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. This in turn means that an OS project stands or falls on its willingness to release early and release often.
I am a writer too, and one of those writers who agrees with Tim O'Reilly in thinking that because writing is often something better done in solitude, and without releasing early, releasing often, that most writing is not amenable to Open Source methods. I am not suggesting that Phillip should rush his answers -- I really don't care what he says or doesn't say. I do however think its too bad that /. is becoming a home for mushy thinking about open source.
I'm not objecting to Phillip producing his answers when they're ready -- they are after all his answers. I'm objecting to the mischaracterization of the way Open Source works.
-clay
Be careful with generalizations like this -- according to the Computer Industry Almanac, the real figure for the US population with net access is 43% (http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/geogra phics/article/0,1323,5911_234841,0 0.html), so the net is a much more mature market than your figures would suggest. This in turn means that we are much closer to playing for keeps for things like user-annointed standards than we were a couple of years ago.
-clay
Playfulness in 3D spaces - Why Quake, written to scratch an itch, is so much better than VRML, a solution in search of a problem, and what to do about i