Month: January 2003

Classic Kenneth Hunt:

Agonize over the graphics card, but don’t pick bleeding edge. $400 is always to much. $75 is too little unless you are adding multiple cards for multi-headed use.

[…]

The idea is to relish the assembly, why should Dell get all the fun?

OSNews pointed to a ZDNet article about old software.  It made me miss MultiMate [Dan’s 20th Century Abandonware] again.

Wow.  802.11g is going to take over the world.  Just look at the prices Amazon is offering on Linksys stuff.  $130 for an access point and $70 for pci/pcmcia cards that go 54Mbit is well worth it.  Plus it’s backwards-compatible with all of your 802.11b stuff.

This stuff has the specs and is priced right.  You’ll see me and a million other people going 802.11g.

Doug Kaye says that loose coupling is like pornography.  He also posted a table from his upcoming book: Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services.  It is supposed to come out in March.  I think I’ll have to read it, because when Doug posts about web services, I listen.

Greg Klebus sure knows how to cool a Shuttle SV 25.  For the record, I still haven’t managed to put my VIA Mini-ITX in a case.

Ken Coar:

We could drown in metadata, flounder in a morass of connexions so voluminous that determining relevance could be more daunting than when we did it ourselves.

WebServices.Org notes that the W3C Web Services Choreography Working Group has been formed:

Existing specifications for Web services describe the indivisible units of interactions. It has become clear that taking the next step in the development of Web services will require the ability to compose and describe the relationships between lower-level services. Although differing terminology is used in the industry, such as orchestration, collaboration, coordination, conversations, etc., the terms all share a common characteristic of describing linkages and usage patterns between Web services.

Does the web services world need yet another spec from yet another working group?  Are we looking at a future WS-Choreography spec?

All of this complexity is making things worse, not better.  I predict that the really simple REST-like things that Sam Ruby and others have been exploring is the future of web services.  It needs to just work without complexity.

We’re already seeing a backlash of simplicity.

Yes.  I know that sometimes you need authentication, added security, reliability contracts and all that goblygook.  Other times you just want to connect your stuff, accomplish a goal, or add functionality to something.

I just want it to work.

One more thing: The WS-* specs need to talk to each other and play nice together.  From what Clemens observes, they don’t always:

Because WS-Reliability is unaware of and not integrated with WS-Routing, it is only useful as a point to point mechanism.

Clemens Vasters weighs in on the WS-Reliability spec.  I trust his opinions on the subject after seeing the wicked cool things he did with web services in .NET.

Slashdot:

hondo77 writes “In a 7-2 decision, The Supreme Court gave Disney what they wanted. Story just broke, no details yet.” They’re talking about the Eldred case, recently argued before the Supreme Court and mentioned on Slashdot many times. The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920’s will ever go out of copyright. Opinions: Majority opinion, Stevens’ dissent, Breyer’s dissent.

From what I hear, Lessig did all that he could, though he is down on himself about the case.  I don’t think anyone out there could have done any better:

So I’ve got to go get onto a plane to go to my least favorite city (DC). My inbox is filling with kind emails from friends. Also with a few of a different flavor. It’s my nature to identify most closely with those of the different flavor. David Gossett at the law firm of Mayer Brown wrote Declan, “Larry lost Eldred, 7-2.” Yes, no matter what is said, that is how I will always view this case. The constitutional question is not even close. To have failed to get the Court to see it is my failing.

Rael notes that O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference page has been updated with a list of speakers and talks.  It looks like a good mix of topics.  I don’t think that I’ll be able to afford to go (even with the student discount), but I’m there in an instant if I win the lottery or something.

Congrats to Sam Ruby who will be speaking there.  The speaker list is top shelf.

xmlhack covers recent SVG happenings at the W3C:

The W3C has released the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Specification and Mobile SVG Profiles: SVG Tiny and SVG Basic as Recommendations, along with some much more exciting demos than is typical for the XML world.