The Register - There are still crypto reg's...

[Ray Dillinger]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:


>Apple is a pretty computer and everything, but there's so much to be desired
>from their os programmers (not saying microsoft is the best, just saying the
>mac os really stinks.)

There's kind of a feedback loop here; Windows achieved critical 
mass and Apple didn't.  Hence, MS can afford to hire lots more 
engineers to work on their CRAPPY os than Apple can hire to work 
on their mediocre os.  So, after a while, Windows got better than 
the MacOS.  

I remember how hard Win3.11 sucked compared to MacOS 5.  But once 
true multitasking was under WinNT3.51, it was about Neck-and-neck 
for quality with MacOS 7.  And like Mr. Zakas, I'm pretty convinced 
that even though MacOS 10 has true multitasking, it has definitely 
fallen behind WinNT 4. 

ObCryptoStuff; this same kind of "critical mass" phenomenon 
affects lots and lots of the stuff we're looking at.  Freenet, 
Mojo Nation, Napster, Gnutella, Digital Cash, etc, even PGP and 
GPG - All have a value that depends directly on how many other 
people are using them. If they don't grow beyond a certain 
threshold size, they remain less useful than the disk space they 
occupy.  But where is the threshold and when is it passed? 

And how do you get there?  

If P2P agents were distributed with a couple of the major linux 
distributions (say Red Hat and SuSE) they'd probably achieve 
critical mass fairly fast (especially if they were set up and 
configured during install, the way Apache increasingly is).  
And if they were opensource, they'd probably get into ALL linux 
distributions within a few years. 

But so far most of the people doing P2P are trying to make a buck 
off of it, so with the exception of gnutella, there aren't open-
source agents.  

				Bear