Monday, June 17, 2002

Scientists Grow Human Thymus From Stem Cells [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] 5:02:40 PM    comment []

Wired.  George Gilder is bankrupt.  Good article.  George was right about the technology, but wrong about the time to roll it out.  The problem he didn't anticipate?  That the baby bells and the cable companies wouldn't install fiber.  That meant that the rapid technological innovation in bandwidth that was going on at the core of the Internet wouldn't benefit most Americans (fiber bandwidth price/performance doubles ever 9-12 months -- coaxial and twisted pair do not).   The decision of these last mile players not to adopt the right technology was a monsterous blunder based on greed, a lack of vision, and a cozy oligopoly.  This would the be equivalent in the PC world of having 2 GHz processors doubling every 12-18 months in price/performance in combination with 320x200 screens with 10 Mb of hard-drives doubling every 5 years .  Of course, that couldn't happen because there is real competition in the magnetic storage and display world.  Once fiber is installed into the home, doubling rates for home bandwidth could be fierce.  What will it take to get this done?  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 12:51:33 PM    comment []

This morning Dave Winer points to the NY Times Article on how Sun is going to "Extend its Lead" by providing an alternative to .Net. This is very confusing as .Net is not a "thing" but a collection of things. A framework, a runtime (The Common Language Runtime [CLR]), and services. These services are both sub-services--XML Web Services--and application services. Exactly where is Sun "extending" its lead? The article then jumps off into the fact that "Java" is the choice of cell phone vendors in the US and Europe. The rest of the article is about cell phone technology and has nothing to do with .Net or Sun's alternative to it. It assumes that since cell phones are running "Java" that Sun has a big lead in web services? Here is the problem. Like .Net, Java isn't "a thing" either. It is a runtime (Java Runtime), a Framework (J2EE), a set of services, and a programming language (Java). This lack of clarity from both vendors makes it very difficult to understand what is happening. I think what a cell phone vendor means when it says it support "Java" is that it has a Java Runtime in the phone so that Java applets can execute in the phone. Of course these applets would have to be phone specific. So I am not sure how much it buys the cell phone industry to have a unified voice for the java runtime. I can't translate lots of cell phone runtimes into a web services "lead". Here are my points: .Net and Java terminology make it extremely difficult to understand what is happening in the news. Both Microsoft and Sun have done a terrible job of clarifying this terminology. This will take time to repair. The reason the terminology is such a mess is because it was largely created on the fly in reaction to each other rather than planned out in advance.  Java already is a partial alternative to .Net. It is unclear exactly what Sun is going to do to be more competitive. Perhaps clear up its lexicon? Perhaps actually helping its partners with Java? Who knows? Plus, how does JUXTA fit in here? And what about Sun's Open Network Environment (ONE)? How does that fit in? Finally, the Java Runtime on lots of cell phones does not translate into a web services lead for Sun. [Craig Burton: logs, links, life, and lexicon] 7:04:05 AM    comment []