At 12:52 am -0400 on 7/20/97, sar wrote: Just to be clear, when I talk about geodesic software, I'm not talking about linux, as much as I like the idea of linux personally. In fact, if the Mac ever dies, I'll probably end up on linux someday. Certainly, once you put any machine on the internet, its software becomes more geodesic than it was sitting on a desktop or in a rack, and, for the sake of argument, I'm willing to agree that because of increasing availablity of cool free net.stuff in linux, it may more geodesic than Microsoft or Apple operating systems. I could be wrong, but the cycle from not having what you need to do something new, to installing it and running it, is too slow for modern operating systems like linux to call them geodesic software in the sense that I was using the phrase. Java the brand-name claims to do this in "market"space, but Java as running software ain't there yet in cyberspace, and may never be. I'm beginning to think that until it's possible for a given processor to autonomously buy the software it needs for cash in an auction market, and then download and install that software, all at run time, the superscalibility of an environment where software is dispersed through the network (again, "surfacted" is not a bad word to describe this), and run in the smallest possible bits at the processor level just won't happen. Nonetheless, I do think that the linux gang is going in the right direction, especially since most most of the cash-settlement technology we on this list have all come to know and love is more likely to be used in linux than anywhere else. Finally, there's the issue of Mhyrvold's software-as-a-gas idea. That is, that bloatware is a direct result of Moore's Law. Or, more properly, Parkinson's Law of bureaucracy ("an organization will expand to fit it's available resources") come to microprocessing. In an absolute sense, of course, more processing power is more software waste. My Mac wastes more cycles than I can physically count in a lifetime waiting for my next keystroke, and, after more than half a lifetime at the keyboard, I am a pretty fast typist. However, at some point, I think that the added "waste" of profit-and-loss responsibility at the processor level, effectively a cash-settled auction market for cycle-time, will yield much more efficiency in allocating processor time than piling on yet another feature and compiling it in with the rest of some vertically integrated application behemouth. Waiting for everybody else's requested features to creep by before the application can let us have the one we need to use will be a thing of the past when that happens. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/