Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: OpenCulture.org

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:9/26/2000; 10:28:51 AM
Topic:OpenCulture.org
Msg #:21725 (In response to 21698)
Prev/Next:21724 / 21726

Joshua Allen: Even in the BruceS protocol, there is no mention as to what happens if the performer fails to adopt the protocol.

Of course; it's outside the scope of a protocol (that is, the definition of a protocol can only describe what happens during and after the first step, during all the intermediate steps, and before and during the last step; see Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid for an amusing dialog that describes what happens when you attempt to subsume all of your axioms into a protocol). What happens if a performer fails to adopt the protocol? The performer might not make any money, or they might make their money some other way. It's hardly an indictment of a protocol to observe that it's only useful if it's used!

The most we can hope for in a protocol is that, once all concerned parties have reached a step where some subset of the parties is at risk, that risk is acceptable to all parties. In pragmatic terms, this means, e.g. that once I'm involved in a protocol where I've committed value to an entity that I may or may not trust, there had better already have been steps in the protocol where I learned, e.g. the identity of that entity with enough certainty that I can take remedial action if my risk of loss comes to fruition (better still, a truly good protocol will guarantee that I will receive the identity of that entity if and only if my loss comes to pass; see any decent digital cash protocol for examples of this).

Joshua: Yesterday Dave talked about how "software is hard", and how it can be a humbling experience for someone to shift from talking about something to actually making it happen. This is something I wish all of these folks would heed.

I would argue that addressing most non-trivial real-world problems in software is hard at both the conceptual/design level and the implementation level. I would also observe that both those who choose to focus on concepts and those who choose to focus on implementation unnecessarily and even ignorantly denigrate those in the other camp.

I agree with Clay Shirky that XML is a TLA used to invent other TLAs.

Of course it is; XML stands for "eXtensible Markup Language." It never claimed to be anything other than a metalanguage!

Joshua: It seems these days that everyone wants to write a spec or a standard, and the ratio of practitioners to politicians is frightenengly low. In this new world, we have thrown aside the old-economy saddle of hard-knocks. Experience writing real software that real people use? Fuck that! Actual domain experience in the field that you are trying to standardise? Fuck that! You've written a book? Good! You speak at conferences? Great! Can you get other book-writers and conference speakers to endorse you? Fantastic! Is your standard about something that makes a good story and revolutionizes some entrenched goliath? You have a deal!!

I lay most of the blame for this at the feet of the trade press who have a bad habit of passing along corporate press releases as if they constituted journalism.

Joshua: Any fool can write a standard.

Any fool can also write a half-assed piece of software that does half a job half well.

Joshua: Any fool can have an idea.

And any fool can implement a half-baked idea or a half-baked implementation of a great idea.

Joshua: The world is full of good ideas that never got implemented...

And bad ones that did...

Joshua: and if anyone ever thinks that whatever they are implementing is truly innovative, they need only post somewhere like XML-Dev to find out how many times the idea was attempted in the past.

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done, is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun."—Ecclesiastes 1:9

Joshua: I've found that no matter who claims to have invented something, there will probably be someone else who can make a convincing claim for having done it before them (and so on). The really newsworthy thing, IMO, is when something stops being an intellectual or activist exercise and actually becomes a reality. That is what's hard.

Getting it right is also hard.

As usual, Joshua, it's not that I disagree with you. I don't. The only thing I perceive in your discourse is a lack of balance. I hear a lot of worship of just-get-stuff-out-the-door and not a lot of recognition of all the crap that's gotten out the door, or all the stuff that was pretty good but not good enough to succeed in the marketplace, or that was 99.9% but that missing .1% was absolutely fatal. Getting stuff out the door is no more a silver bullet than sitting on your hands daydreaming about the nifty new DTDs you can create is.



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