7 ms·
As usual, /usr/games/fortune provides some insightful commentary: "On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases.
by npsimons 13y ago
As usual, /usr/games/fortune provides some insightful commentary:
"On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' -- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and make that the standard.
The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once.
So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it after it's an international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which."
-- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI"
- blue1 13y agoDoesn't this description of the OSI way look similar to how the W3C works?
- angersock 13y agosssssh youll give away the joke
- 9h1d9j809s 13y agoNot anymore. It used to work like that, which is why things like XHTML 2.0 never got traction.
- dragonwriter 13y agoIsn't the W3C working that way, at least at a certain point in the past, the reason why WHATWG exists outside of W3C?
- jamessb 13y agoLucasian professor of physics at Oxford Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, surely?
- jerf 13y agoYour question intrigued me. You are literally correct, but as it turns out the position since 1849 has been held by a physicist (at least, if we include one 10-year term of someone specializing in what Wikipedia called a "fluid mechanics" specialty "physics"), so as an imprecise conversational term it's not entirely wrong. I was unable to turn up the original source of the quote in Google, but odds are quite good it was written prior to 2009 (and almost certainly post-1979, as the timeline theoretically works for that but it would be amazing prescient in that time :) ), in which case the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge was Stephen Hawking.
- nknighthb 13y agoThis is why every time Mozilla starts whining about Google playing with new things without consulting everybody else first (e.g. Dart, NaCl), I lose more respect for them (actually, at this point, they've pretty well exhausted it all). Basic advancement comes from somebody deciding to try something new, not from getting everybody to agree on what comes next.
- aidenn0 13y agoIt's slightly different because Google is in a relatively unique position of being able to unilaterally deploy new technology, as they both serve a large fraction of the traffic on the internet, and have a very popular browser. Mozilla is understandably wary about new technologies from Google, because it would be very easy for them to make it so that the best youtube experience can only happen in chrome, which would be quite detrimental to Mozilla.
- nknighthb 13y agoSo, invent new things, just don't get anyone else to use them. Got it. Please surrender your lightbulbs immediately.
- aidenn0 13y agoThanks for replying to a strawman version of what I said.
- nknighthb 13y agoHardly. Your argument is a caricature of itself. Success and the mere capability to engage in purely hypothetical anti-competitive behaviors suddenly means ordinary innovation practices are evil. Presumably at this point Mozilla would like to join Microsoft in one of its various anti-trust complaints against Google for having dared to offer users better products.
- bandushrew 13y ago
- npsimons 13y agoTo sum up my reply to replies to my OP: the biggest thing I take away from this quote, personally, is that you should have a good, practical knowledge of something before you go about making a standard, and input from the real world is also a very good idea. Some upfront design is necessary, yes, but when politics dominates technical concerns, failure is bound to follow.
- rodgerd 13y agoBecause, of course, TCP/IP doesn't have any bloody stupid, boneheaded decisions that it continues to perpetuate through multiple revisions (hey, isn't it great we have to read a whole header to work out the address information!)