O'Reilly as Tito
This stuff at the Reg just kills me.
First there are the truly laughable statements like:
if the long term goal is to turn the network from a series of tubes connecting clients and servers into a distributed computing environment then we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need.
Yes, XML doesn't offer these things. I guess the whole ws-* movement is just completely off base, because XML can't be used as a starting point for discovery and can't be made scalable or stable. And JavaScript is just inherently flawed. Unless we run Ruby of VB on the client... What the fuck are you talking about dude? I understand you can make that argument about the current state of play, but making statements about a language and a data format is kind of stupid.
This whole thing is rather amusing, but the level of curmudgeonly cognitive dissonance is pretty much summarize by putting one of the opening and one of the summation graphs next to each other:
Ten years ago we were faced with a choice between the controlled homogeneity of the �information superhighway� or the many and various delights of the unsupervised Internet, and we chose wisely.
vs
If we can unlearn the lessons of the old Web and transcend its stateless protocols to achieve real distributed processing over a managed, trustworthy network then the possibilities truly are remarkable.
The fact of the matter is statelessness is what makes the web work in the first place. It is what makes it scalable and distributable. While I am not going to say that the "Ajaxified snakeoil" is the end all be all right now, it took us a long time to get from HTML to HTML+Forms to commodity web application servers. In the face of all of this, though, was it could be done because we have a stupid, unmanaged, untrustworthy network.
Engineering intelligence into your network is a recipe for boxing yourself in to a fixed model forever. That is part of the importance of the Net Neutrality argument -- dumb networks push the innovation to the nodes, where it is most free.
If Mr. Thompson wants someone to agree with him that Tim O'Reilly's level of asshatry has skyrocketed in the last few years, sure! Tim is revving the motorcycle to jump that proverbial shark louder every day, but to somehow confuse a misguided self appointed evangelist with the "real world" is rather like assuming that everything RMS and ESR say is really to be taken seriously.
