4 ms·

It's good old "worse is better" all over again. Of course we should design our protocols and our software as The Right Thing. Of course, it will take much longe

by jsn 18y ago

It's good old "worse is better" all over again. Of course we should design our protocols and our software as The Right Thing. Of course, it will take much longer to design and implement; or, worse, it might just fail because it's hard to find all the necessary smart people (like qualified security experts and whatnot). Meanwhile, someone not so scrupulous just ships some ugly ad-hoc bug-ridden 80% solution now, and gets 80% market penetration. That's how we get MTA landscape dominated by sendmail, DNS landscape dominated by bind, etc, etc. Heck, that's how we get unix boxes instead of lisp machines, and windows pcs instead of unix boxes.

ars 18y ago
The rest of what you wrote might be right, but lisp machines failed because they were impossible to create efficiently in hardware.
- jsn 18y ago
  Not really impossible, just much harder, much more expensive, took much longer, etc. The usual story with The Right Thing. And that's exactly the point i was trying to make. The Right Thing is hard, that's why it fails. What Schneier suggests won't work.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    Also the The Right Thing is always at a disadvantage - the other products out there are more then aware that they are Not The Right Thing hence work harder at marketing (if applicable) or user penetration to make up for the fact that they are not perfect.
YuriNiyazov 18y ago
There are a couple of problems at play here really. I don't think ALL your protocols and software need to be designed as The Right Thing, for the reasons that you already outline - time to implement, brains required, market penetration, etc. What needs to be designed as The Right Thing are protocols that implement important infrastructure for the society as a whole. Sure, SMTP and DNS are important infrastructure for everyone now, but at the time of design they were far from it, and I don't think the original RFC writers can be blamed with going the "Worse Is Better" route.

by jsn 18y ago

ars 18y ago

The rest of what you wrote might be right, but lisp machines failed because they were impossible to create efficiently in hardware.

jsn 18y ago
Not really impossible, just much harder, much more expensive, took much longer, etc. The usual story with The Right Thing. And that's exactly the point i was trying to make. The Right Thing is hard, that's why it fails. What Schneier suggests won't work.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  Also the The Right Thing is always at a disadvantage - the other products out there are more then aware that they are Not The Right Thing hence work harder at marketing (if applicable) or user penetration to make up for the fact that they are not perfect.

YuriNiyazov 18y ago

There are a couple of problems at play here really. I don't think ALL your protocols and software need to be designed as The Right Thing, for the reasons that you already outline - time to implement, brains required, market penetration, etc. What needs to be designed as The Right Thing are protocols that implement important infrastructure for the society as a whole. Sure, SMTP and DNS are important infrastructure for everyone now, but at the time of design they were far from it, and I don't think the original RFC writers can be blamed with going the "Worse Is Better" route.