For solving a host of vexing problems with quiet competence, and for doing it in ways that invite others to stand on their shoulders, I salute them all.
The idea that an application wears its state information on its sleeve, readily available for users to bookmark, modify, and trade, is an underappreciated strength of Web-based software. As the RIA bandwagon picks up steam, let's honor that idea and find a way to move it forward.
The way forward, Geer suggests, is not to abandon ACLs but rather to augment them with aggressive monitoring that holds people accountable for behaviors that can’t economically be permitted or denied.
A few months ago, key Microsoft architects were telling me that it would be impossible to decouple the Avalon presentation subsystem from the Longhorn OS.
...collaborative systems for building a shared database of items, developing a metadata vocabulary about the items, performing metadata-driven queries, and monitoring change in areas of interest.
Discussions about open source and innovation tend to cluster around two opposing memes. One says that open source can't innovate; the other that only open source can innovate. Both are wrong.
Bosworth's hunch is that a Web-style thin client, driven by a rich data model intelligently synchronized with the services cloud, could do most of what we really need -- both offline and online.
Here's a challenge: Let's improve the various functions performed by e-mail without multiplying the interfaces people must learn in order to use those functions.
Fault tolerance, service-level agreements, access control, and business activity monitoring are among the many things enabled by intermediaries that watch (and sometimes transform XML) message flows.
We need HCI (human/computer interface) guidelines more than ever. And we need them not only for Windows, OS X, GNOME, and Flash, but for the uber-platform that subsumes them all.
Clemens Vasters is cofounder and chief technology officer of newtelligence AG, a developer services company focusing on XML Web services and .NET enterprise technologies.
"His current technical interests include alternative transaction models, aspect-oriented programming, statistical modeling of distributed applications, and streaming XML"
"I'm short and I have the remnants of a southern accent," Paul says in a recent interview. Co-founder of Digital Creations, now Zope Corporation, Paul evangelizes the powerful Zope/Python combo.
CTO of Propylon, and previously co-founder of Digotome, Sean has served as an invited expert on W3C committees, and is a widely respected authority on XML.
I made a donation to Amazon's Red Cross donation page yesterday, as I had done previously after the tsunami. The numbers don't look huge yet, but they are growing rapidly, and any such donations are a good way to support the volunteers who are traveling to the Gulf Coast to lend a hand.
Dave Winer points today to MoveOn.org's housing match-up site, a great idea. How the needy will access the site is, of course, a problem, and Cisco says it'll help out by deploying mobile communication kits:
These briefcase-size kits contain a packaged set of Cisco technologies designed to be easily transportable and provide mobile Internet Protocol (IP)-based wired or wireless data and voice connectivity for areas that have lost or do not have a communications infrastructure. This allows rapid communications in disaster or remote locations that can be set up within minutes of arrival.
Good. This makes me wonder, though, about those DARPA-funded ad-hoc wireless networking scenarios I keep hearing about, from homeland security strategist W. David Stephenson among others. Presumably I've donated many tax dollars to these efforts. What have those dollars bought?
Fortifying levees, and all sorts preventative measures elsewhere, are necessary point solutions. But when natural or manmade disasters do happen, as they always will, our ability to respond depends increasingly on the first thing that they disrupt: communications infrastructure. In all such cases we'll need to be able to lay down a carpet of connectivity almost immediately, and we are clearly in no position to do that.
 
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