Re: Will Monolithic Apps Dominate?

[sar <sar@cynicism.com>]

At 08:10 PM 7/19/97 -0400, you wrote:
>On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>
>> At 1:33 pm -0400 on 7/18/97, Tim May wrote:
>> 
>> <an excellent description of the industrial strength software bloat which
>> now afflicts the browser market>
>> 
>> "The Geodesic Network, OpendDoc, and CyberDog"
>> http://www.shipwright.com/rants/rant_03.html is the first rant I wrote on
>> <ducking> geodesic </d> software. It ended up in a much(!) shorter form as
>> a full-page opinion piece in InfoWorld two years ago this October.
>> Actually, it's about what happened to me at MacWorld almost exactly two
>> years ago.
>...
>> The software those computers use will not be hard-wired, it will be
>> flexible and upgradable. It will be 'out of control'. It will be geodesic,
>> like the network itself.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Bob Hettinga
>
>I think that depends on what people start adopting.  If you want
>"geodesic" software, use Linux.  Pieces are there from every continent,
>and all any business needs to do to have a driver and applications written
>for any hardware is to release the spec.  It is flexible and upgradable
>and 'out of control', and is developed on the internet.  Interestingly
>enough, the only stego-crypto "device" I know of is the linux loop device.
>
>There are some crypto plugins for MS, but nothing I know of will bury your
>info encrypted with DES or IDEA in the lsbs of a .wav file.


take a look at  http://members.iquest.net/~mrmil/stego.html it has
steganography programs for win95,dos,mac and amiga. as well as links to
other stego pages and a paper on " covert channels in the tcp/ip suite" 

 



>
>The other interesting thing is that the bloatware is only possible BECAUSE
>of Moore's law.  Windows really needs 16Mb, a big hard drive, and a fast
>pentium, and it is nice that the price point (around $2k) of the new
>machines are about right for each release of a new MS product.  But even
>if cpu-memory power (and price per bit sent over the internet) keeps
>doubling, the complexity of code is growing exponentially too.  Or was
>growing - I think it has past the point where they can add code to the
>blob and have it work.
>
>If you are right, then there should be a shift from MS to Linux or
>FreeBSD.  Especially if the Wabi32 or Wine projects succeed :).
>
>--- reply to tzeruch - at - ceddec - dot - com ---
>