Subject: Re: [arch-d] Valid and Invalid Internet architectures and approaches

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 19:36:11 -0500 (EST)

> From: Tony Li <[email-masked]>

    > The usual situation is that we have conflicting technologies to
    > achieve some goal and we choose to "let a thousand flowers bloom" or
    > "let the market decide".

Tony, this does not necessarily lead to architectural decay, any more than
having two different editors or C compilers for an operating system harms
the architecture of that operating system.

	Noel

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From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:59:55 -0800

>     > achieve some goal and we choose to "let a thousand flowers bloom" or

Like when IEEE approved two competing - and interfering - technologies
for 802.11? (DS, FH)

What results is fun if you like market competition, and horrible if you
like interoperability (the cornerstone of the _Inter_net).

All that means is we'll all have to wait _until_ the market decides,
which delays everybody just so a few capitalists can have fun. ;-)

Sometimes it's more productive to declare some mutations "bugs" rather
than "new uses", and move on.

Joe

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From: Tony Li <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 18:58:54 -0800

> the architecture of that operating system.

A fine and fair point.  If indecision is restricted to upper layers,  
then there is
certainly no issue.  I just don't think that we exercised that amount  
of careful
discretion.

Tony

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From: "william(at)elan.net" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 2005 19:08:10 -0800 (PST)

> the architecture of that operating system.

I don't agree that its valid comparison. The reason why having two C 
compilers works is because there is a standard C language.

Two editors is is more of a correct comparison if we're talking about 
editors that save their data and produce output in different formats,
i.e. editors provide comparable functionality to "edit" a text, but
are not inter-operatable otherwise (and personally I DO NOT like this 
situation at all, while I'm ok with different editors I'm advocate for
common format i.e. OpenDoc).

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
[email-masked]