 |
 |
 |
|
Re: Sunday, March 9, 2003
If Russell Beattie's blog post is the "best criticism so far," it ain't sayin' much. Instead of thoughtful criticism, it's just a bunch of nitpicky missing-the-point points. I posted this in response on his blog: Boy, I'll bet anything you're a programmer. I can see the coder-think going on here, mistaking large points for tiny nits. 1: The internet as a *concept* is not complicated. Doc doesn't mean the details of how it works; he means that at a high level, the arrangement of how it works is very simple. (Contrast that to video-on-demand schemes.) 2: Ok, the internet is a thing. You're picking on semantics here, and missing the point. It's not a thing = it's not a thing a marketing guy can control or manipulate. It's not a product. 3: The internet is very stupid. Again, you're trying to make this a much finer point than intended. It does not care packets going from A to B are video, audio, email, whatever. Its awareness ends at protocols. Again, you have to imagine that Doc is talking about what might have been had corporations designed the internet. 4: No, the net doesn't need to be generic to be useful -- unless by "generic" you mean "fair to all traffic". It gives no one type of traffic priority by nature. That's what he means. Also, "it's" = "it is", while "its" is possessive. 6: He doesn't mean "suburbs" literally. Cripes. He means internet endpoints. 7: Ok, some ends are bigger than others. So? 8: What the essay is trying to say is that a) no ONE entity owns it, b) how fast is not relevant since using it at all is what counts, and c) anyone can add new uses for it without asking permission. No one's thinking "like it's 1999." The point isn't whether IM is united under inter-operability; it's that I could build the ultimate chat client/server combo and have thousands of people using it *without asking permission from anyone*.
|
