What’s wrong with XML APIs
Bill Venners: What’s Wrong with XML APIs:
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Elliotte Rusty Harold talks with Bill Venners about the five styles of XML APIs, and the problems with data-binding APIs.
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Archive for the ‘LINKS’ Category.
Trend Micro quarantines the letter P
CRN: Daily Archives:
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Rule #915, released Tuesday, contained a routine that quarantined all incoming e-mail containing the letter P. Trend Micro discovered the bug soon after releasing Rule #915 and issued Rule #916 to fix it an hour and a half later.
The eManager product is unrelated to Trend Micro’s antivirus software or its Spam Prevention Service (SPS), which was released in March, the spokesman said.
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Lumber jack joke
E-BUSINESS IN THE ENTERPRISE – Web services: IT churn or IT revolution?:
I will leave you this week with a joke that illustrates the risks inherent in treating a new technology (Web Services) as an old technology revisited (RPC).
A lumberjack walks into a hardware shop and explains that his manual saw method limits him to felling four trees a day. He expresses an interest in one of those new chain-saws he has heard so much about and read about in the trade magazines.
The shop sells a chain-saw to the delighted lumberjack and promises him a five-fold increase in productivity. A week later, a very tired looking lumberjack comes back into the shop looking for his money back. He claims that with the chain-saw, he cannot fell more than six trees a day.
The shop assistant takes the chain-saw and starts it up to examine it.
The lumberjack steps back in amazement and exclaims: “What’s that noise?”
Sometimes, the real value in a new technology lies in looking at things differently. Bear this in mind the next time you hear a developer waxing lyrical about the benefits of putting a web services wrapper on an existing application or on an existing integration architecture.
Yooster v.01: Ustr, Unicode-correct string processing in Java
Tim Bray:
Yooster, v0.1:
« The design goals are correct Unicode semantics, support for as much of the Java String API as reasonable, and support for the familiar, efficient null-terminated byte array machinery from C. »
Pentagon defends TIA program
Wired News: Pentagon Defends Data Search Plan: « The Pentagon submitted a report to Congress on Tuesday that said the Total Information Awareness program is not the centralized spying database its critics say it is. »
Shirky on Grid Computing
Shirky: Grid Supercomputing: The Next Push:
We have historically overestimated the value of connecting machines to one another, and underestimated the value of connecting people, and by emphasizing supercomputing on tap, the proponents of Grids are making that classic mistake anew. During the last great age of batch processing, the ARPAnet’s designers imagined that the nascent network would be useful as a way of providing researchers access to batch processing at remote locations. This was wrong, for two reasons: first, it turned out researchers were far more interested in getting their own institutions to buy computers they could use locally than in using remote batch processing, and Moore’s Law made that possible as time passed. Next, once email was ported to the network, it became a far more important part of the ARPAnet backbone than batch processing was. Then as now, access to computing power mattered less to the average network user than access to one another.
