Re: Personal Firewall Day?

[David Lang <david.lang () digitalinsight com>]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:

> Gary Flynn wrote:
> > I think we're addicted to general purpose computing because of its versatility,
> > freedom, and associated potential to innovate
>
> Gary has put his finger on the one big outstanding flaw in my
> argument. :( Innovation. The kind of computing environment I
> think we actually need would dramatically stifle the ability to
> innovate. But --- AOL users can't innovate within their AOL-sphere
> and don't appear to miss it. But that's probably because they
> can apply customizations via the surrounding underlying O/S.
>
> The desire to customize is amazingly powerful and cannot be
> discounted. I think it's the main reason we won't shift to the
> kind of environment I think we could build that would solve
> a lot of our computing problems. :(  Hey - I didn't say I had
> all the answers!! Actually, I think I have all the questions! :)

the key to this is to avoid the software being completely different in the
two enviroments. if people can use the same program on a stand-alone
machine as on the central network server the innovation can continue, you
just won't have every joe and jane in the call center experimenting with
the companies data (and this is a very good thing, joe and jane in the
call center probably don't know what's good for the company as a whole,
but they are free to experiment at home)

however in the past the centralized apps have been unavailable to the
local/remote user, useually either becouse they wouldn't run on the local
machine (*nix software that couldn't be used on a PC) or was drasticly
overpriced (a few years ago I looked at the server version of wordperfect,
$600 per seat while the stand-alone version was selling for $79 before
discounts) so everyone ends up doing their own thing and trying to merge
the results.

the problem then becomes useing this new software in the centralized
environment.

the X-term (microsoft terminal server/citrix/vnc/etc) approach can be used
for apps if all else fails, but as the software matures it should also
grow to take advantage of the type of infrastructure that you described in
another post to operate more efficiantly.

David Lang

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
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