XML Was Invented By The Losers: Part II

Point is, XML was a coup, Mike, over fish and bigger fish. ... and it was the right thing to do, implicature and inference. I don't want to reel off the names because that is an assessment based on the sales I saw at the time and who they were selling too. SGML systems were very expensive.

The bigger fish don't always win. It doesn't mean they are evil. Some are being eaten/herded by even bigger fish. But put enough losers on the street and they figure out how to beat the winning fish to the bigger fish. No legacy. Nothing to lose. Everything to win and software requires no more than household costs to develop to prototypes.

Were I The Evil Coyote at the Evil Empire:

Cut the loss leaders off into open source. Spread the risk and cost of development out. As the hardware costs come down, software is a bundled component and it is shipped that way. To reduce costs, reduce non-standard bundling of software and hardware. See Macintosh 1986.

A standard bundling of hardware/software collapses the licensing costs, sales costs and dilutes the threats of patents and patent trolls without removing the competitive edge of quality.

Solve the problems of versioning and identity management. The problems of the second are social in that they are the history of systems like those based on SSN beating against the new web based systems that are quick to grant rights and slow to revoke them.

The application of identity tokens such as Social Security numbers, that is, tokens which are printed and therefore easily lost are insufficient for a digital society. Because the rate of interconnection, relations, and types in the system have increased, the speed and size of damage is fast and hard to undo with current mixed human/machine schedules (eg, what user can contract with the server and what a human has to review/approve). Not relaxing the constraints on registration of transaction where the business logic is adequate to approve a transaction is costly and paranoid.

Portals must integrate notification services based on legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy.

Identity theft is discovered only when the first collection agency calls. That is too late.

Services to stop all transactions on the lost id are closed on weekends. That is too slow.

Services can be insensitive. That is rude.

This lack of orchestration/choreography/event systems for building implicature and inference from events over data increases costs and reduces reliability. BI systems ARE the next hot emergence zone.

Reliability is a problem of undercertified systems. Undercertified systems require tests and tests must be transparent. Mapping specifications to open testing is still the best means to certify.

This requires all the big fish to put down their guns and see the desktop market equilibrium for what it can be: a cost cutting system that doesn't sacrifice the quality of the product to increase the rate of sales. Make sure this piece is a rock-solid indisputably patent neutral system.

Any time a component rises to commodity status, buy the rights and put it in the standard system. Buy the patents and put them in the public domain. Innovate and standardize by providing profits to the owner from the profits made of selling the system to public domain. Let the market economy do the rest.

Pretty much what The Losers do. Lose the least profitable risks by sharing the costs of the most profitable ones. In that way, economic gains are sustained by social benefits.

Then it's norms and affordances, or culture and rights. With these come national interests. We speak of society as if it were homogenous and that is observably not so. But given the power of nations, culture is where our standard systems and marketplaces interlock, where social benefits and economic gains are made uncertain by the unreliability of those relationships in the human context. Cultural interfaces mean system filters. System filters mean autonomy.

The conflict is here between human and virtual systems.That is the hard problem of the emerging generation of digital systems designers and strategists: to couple social benefits to economic needs through the dimensions of legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy of the virtual systems with respect to the norms and affordances of the human systems. Where we cannot, we risk the nationalist agenda oscillating against our global conversations. But the rule of autonomy says that we cannot continue simply by system fiat: we must desire this. That is the crucible sensitivity over autonomy in the rights of the human over the virtual, and the virtual over the human, and by representation, human over human.

I have hope.

Last week I received an email from a fan who shares my music with his friends in China. My wife warns me people in China have a thriving business duplicating western music and selling it and might steal mine. I told her, "I hope so."

A bit of memory from my generation: the music of Motown made for peace in an integrating racist Southern America. If there is to be peace, it is to be found in our shared languages, and of these, music speaks to the heart. When we hear this, we listen. Then no one loses.

"Leave gentle fingerprints on the Soul of another for the Angels to read"..- Proverb

What Do You Do Here?

What do you do here?

Pick any two.

2. Resume Version: Senior Technical Consultant. The duties are to make sure Process Requests get answered promptly..

2. Email Signature Version:

Wyle E Coyote Society : Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.

2. Blog Version:

I herd fish for the other predators.

A day without scaring a senior manager is a day without perspiration.

Being bad is easy; being evil takes practice, study, and planning.

2. Podcast Version:

"Speak of the Devil!"
"It's not my turn to be the Devil."
"Oh right.... it's my turn, but I've studied."

2. Zen version:

They ask you to move a mountain but will not buy you equipment or explosives. You notice a stream runs past the base of the mountain, buy a small house, and spend your mornings picking up sand off the bottom of the stream and dropping it back in the water to watch it flow toward the mountain. You grow old but you attain your goal and the water does all the heavy lifting.