RE: Magic

Hi Mark,

No you don't! ;-)  I'm not going to!

But I do want to say one thing, and that is a sincere thanks.  You are right, you have challenged me and taught me (and probably many others) a lot of what you've learned.  Thanks also for the kind words about transactions.  

As you acknowledged to Chris, though, many of us have understood by now.  So I think it may be time to stop the lessons, and all of us get back to working on the document.  Perhaps we can resume once we have completed at least a "V1" draft.

Thanks again,

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Baker, Mark 
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2003 2:33 PM
To: Newcomer, Eric
Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: Re: Magic


I guess I have to respond to this ...

On Sun, May 18, 2003 at 08:27:22AM -0400, Newcomer, Eric wrote:
> Mark,
> 
> This is a very interesting response.  You do not allow for the possibility that I (and presumably others) might understand but still disagree.  

Well, what can I say to that?

Most people here are experts in Intranet scale software systems, as I
was at one time too.  I've since spent about 7 years studying Internet
scale systems, and I now recognize how much harder they are to build
than Intranet scale ones (like, by at least an order of magnitude or
so - I learned CORBA inside-out in about a year, but I'm still learning
about the Web).

You are all here, it seems to me, because you don't see anything on the
Internet which resembles what you know a powerful distributed system to
look like.  There's a good reason for that; the Internet is a very
different place than an Intranet due primarily to one factor; there are
no trust boundaries on an Intranet, but an unbounded number on the
Internet (see Peter Deutsch's Fallacies).  I'm here, as an expert in
Internet scale systems, to say two things;

- "open interfaces" don't work here; never have, never will
- the Web can solve the problems that you're trying to solve

I'm sure everybody here has something to teach me, and indeed I have
learned things from yourself, Eric, about transactions.  I also learned
quite a few things while in the XML Protocol WG from folks like Henrik
Frystyk Nielsen, Noah Mendelsohn, and Stuart Williams (and others).  But
by that same measure, I too have things to teach, and I refuse to
apologize for that.

Thank you.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
  Actively seeking contract work or employment

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2003 11:02:39 UTC