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.
Back in April I griped about how the Channel 9 content is available only as downloadable video. I noted that much of this stuff would be quite useful as downloadable audio too, and in that format I'd be able to consume a lot more of it -- while walking, jogging, or driving. I felt the same way about Sun's JavaOne conference. It's great to offer streaming videos, but if they're not accompanied by separately-downloadable audio, I'm not going to be able to tune in nearly as much as I'd like. These days I absorb an amazing amount of high-tech media content, but mostly from ITConversations and very little from Microsoft or Sun events. The format really does matter!
I now have a solution to this problem, but I'd rather not have to use it. The solution is mplayer, an open source media player. Among its protean capabilities, it can save a stream while playing any of its supported audio and video formats, which include progressively-downloadable WMV (e.g., Channel 9) and streaming RealVideo (e.g., JavaOne). It can extract the audio channel from these video streams to an uncompressed WAV file, which can then be encoded to MP3 using lame. So now I can both media-shift and time-shift these videos, and listen to them at my leisure.
There are two problems here. First, I hesitate to recommend this solution because I don't understand the legal issues swirling around the codecs that mplayer uses. And second, legality aside, it just seems silly for everybody who'd like to do this media-shifting/time-shifting dance to have to process gigabytes of data. If I can run a bunch of WMV and RealVideo files through an automated process to produce MP3s, so can the folks who created those files in the first place. And I sure wish they would.
 
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