Day: 9 May 2007

Hugh pointed me at William Hurley’s post Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source. I don’t agree with many of the reasons, but that is not the point of this post. Maybe some other day.

I agree vehemently with one thing William says. In reason 6, he makes the point

Microsoft doesn’t fear open source; it fears what the competition can do with it.

This is true for all companies, and for all Because Effect infrastructure. By itself not to be feared (the With); yet feared for what your competitors can do with with (the Because Of).

The moral of the story is: As infrastructure moves from the With state to the Because Of state, make sure you move with it. Because if you don’t and your competitors do, you’re on the road to Toast.

You’re right, this is not something people regularly associate with me; at school, my precis used to start three times the length of the original.

John Howard set a new record for comments on this blog by posting a wikipedia link as his comment. I loved the comment and the link.

It brought a number of other examples of brevity to mind, examples I savour and enjoy. So I thought I’d share them with you.

1. Peccavi: “I have sinned”, Charles Napier’s legendary one-word message signalling the conquest of Sindh province. I believe it to have been a hand-carried message rather than a telegram.

2.  Adam/Had ’em : Ogden Nash’s delightful couplet On The Antiquity of Microbes.

3. On the Advantages of Sleeping Alone: Groucho Marx’s opening chapter in his book Beds, consisting of the chapter heading, a blank page, and a footnote from the editor indicating that the author had refrained from submitting any material for the chapter.

4. Quite right is all right, all right is quite right, but quite all right is all quite wrong: HW Fowler showing his scorn for the phrase Quite All Right.

5. The inane goddess (6): The ultimate cryptic crossword clue. Closely followed by Australian orgy (10). I first read them in Anthony Grey’s Crosswords From Peking, but I’m not sure whether they were of his making. He may have illustrated his points with the clues.

6. Satisfactory: Nero Wolfe at his best.

Any other brevity favourites out there?

[Admit it, you were just about to accuse me of not knowing how to spell his name. But before you do that….]

This post is about a different Steven King, and about a film he produced in 1972, called Computer Networks, the Heralds of Resource Sharing. I’d heard of the film many years ago, in the early 1980s, but for the life of me I couldn’t find anyone who had a copy. And I’d forgotten all about it. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, John Howard (thanks! John) commented very briefly on a post I’d written on information filtering; all he did was leave me with a link to the wikipedia article on Postie. As he would expect me to, I read it again, and the relevance of Postel’s Law (or the Robustness Principle) to the discussion became clear.

And, as happens with these things, I read on. And wandered aimlessly around the article and its environs, in a way that one could not do with the physical construct of the information. And while wandering aimlessly I came across the precise video I’d been looking for, which features Jon Postel very briefly.

Unintended consequences of the blogosphere.

I’ve loaded it on to my VodPod, visible on my sidebar, and also left you a link to the Google video here. If you want to get a contemporaneous idea of what people expected to do with the ARPANET and early internet, it’s definitely worth watching. I found it spellbinding. But then I’m weird that way.

By the way, the video is around 26 minutes long, there appears to be about four minutes of “nothing” at the end. You have been warned.