[cap-talk] top-to-bottom (What sustained interest in capabilities)

[Steve Witham]

>From: "Stiegler, Marc D" <marc.d.stiegler at hp.com>
>
>This would be a project equivalent to combining the Linux open 
>source effort, the GNOME open source effort, a bunch of the separate 
>device driver open source efforts, the Xwindows open source effort, 
>and (since the browser is now a part of the trusted computing base) 
>the Firefox open source effort.

The new Palm Pre's UI is reportedly...HTML/CSS/Javascript, using the
Webkit browser.  So, scratch GNOME and X off anyway.  Well, not really--
you do need some sort of UI discipline, but some redundancy is withering away.

& The Pre is from a company who everybody thought couldn't afford any
software engineers anymore.

A lot of UI work is about putting a nice face on the stuff everybody's
used to.  If the idea is a groundshaking paradigm shift where a lot of the
things we're used to doing are declared dangerous nonsense, then maybe that
simplifies away a lot.  Leaving us with the problem of useable security
of course!

Back around 2000, wasn't Sun going to produce diskless workstations based
on the Java Virtual Machine?  I kinda wondered at the time why someone
didn't recode Unix in Java.  Another potential shrinkage although I don't
know whether people are thoroughly happy with the JVM these days.  Of
course by Java I mean E the way people say C when they mean C++.

Also I keep thinking people should settle on an interactive PDF  for the
low-level screen stuff (don't know Quartz well enough to say whether
that's a good model).

In the 1980s there was a paper called "My Accordion is Full of Paper,"
saying that as a project progresses, there's a phase where you add more
and more details, until some sort of synergizing or clarification sets in,
whereupon the amount of detail starts to shrink again.  So, it's like an
accordion filling up, then emptying out.  I haven't been able to find
that paper or remember the authors.  Maybe that model applies to tech
progress overall.

Not really contradicting your point about the current state of the art,
or the difficulty of squeezing that accordion, Marc.

  --Steve